Armed with Gore's utility bills for the last two years, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research charged Monday that the gas and electric bills for the former vice president's 20-room home and pool house devoured nearly 221,000 kilowatt-hours in 2006, more than 20 times the national average of 10,656 kilowatt-hours.
A state legislator whose district is home to thousands of Caribbean immigrants wants to ban the term "illegal alien" from the state's official documents.
"I personally find the word 'alien' offensive when applied to individuals, especially to children," said Sen. Frederica Wilson, D-Miami. "An alien to me is someone from out of space."
She has introduced a bill providing that: "A state agency or official may not use the term 'illegal alien' in an official document of the state." There would be no penalty for using the words.
In Miami-Dade County, Wilson said, "we don't say 'alien,' we say 'immigrant.'"
If looking back is uncomfortable, there's one question about race that's even more prickly: what are we going to do about it? What do we owe African-Americans for generations of slavery and torture? What's the bill for rights, education -- and in all too many cases, life -- denied? Are the weak programs in place really the best we can do? Is stamping "renewed" on legislation passed decades ago the limit of what we can accomplish?
What the Democratic Congress, and particularly the Democratic leadership, needs to realize is that the American people are a few steps ahead of them on this one. That, as far as the voting public is concerned, getting us out is the major priority. They support Murtha's general plan, and would probably support a Wu/Ackerman plan as well, as long as it was getting us out. These plans don't endanger the troops--they reassert Congress's critical role in governing this country and forcing executive accountability.
Doggone socialists have all of the choices while the free market US economy has only two options. Sounds a lot like the old Soviet days when the Lada offered either with or without a radio. So where are all of the so-called free market Republicans? Oh that's right, they've been on the "let industry dictate policy" bandwagon and made sure they were lending a helping hand with the Soviet-ization of Big Auto, ridding them of any need to offer fuel efficiency. Who could ever forget Reagan starting the removal of fuel efficiency standards and then the Gingrich Congress implementing the final blow to any hope of minimum standards? Once again, witness Republican economics at work and try hard to figure out how it differs with Soviet style economics.
Plenty of mixed messages in the Asian markets with most of the trading down and China slightly up. The question today is whether this is a correction or the start of a downward trend. All of that said, we use the word "bubble" for a reason and bubbles do not last forever. As for the US market, the economics of funding a war with tax cuts and selling the debt to a bubble economy is certainly a novel idea and one that will no doubt be a case study in econ classes in the future.
So who owns this economy? What brain trust thought that Guns & Butter II would somehow work better than the original which sunk the US into an economic quagmire for years? Let's remember that there have been voices out there who have criticized this administration for waging war while handing out tax cuts to the wealthiest and just running a tab on China's expense account so now that China is stumbling and the war debt is increasing, this most recent fiasco falls squarely in the hands of the Bush administration. When the other shoe drops and the real estate bubble bottoms out, it will be another fine mess these clowns got us into. Republican economics in action, also known as the perfect storm.
While I agree that we should be jittery by how closely tied our economy is to China, it's frustrating to see how little we look at the root causes of that. Since we have gone from the biggest creditor to the biggest debtor nation, what will happen if the Asian market continues its instability?
Sy jumps into the Situation Room after appearing with Wolf on Sunday to discuss his New Yorker article and the Pentagon's response to him. Isn't it interesting that they always put out statements trying to debunk Hersh's articles….I'm just saying….
Obviously, challenging authority is a problem for a show which is trying to be funny while defending the agenda and worldview of the regime currently in power. "The 1/2 Hour News Hour" exists only in order to help the authorities consolidate their power, and the target audience for this show--hard-core FOX viewers--can be assumed to have a pretty strong authoritarian bent. So they're not going to want to see the show attack authority anyway.
One of the great things about a healthy democracy is that it has error-correcting mechanisms which prevent it from veering too far off course. They're not infallible or instantaneous, but if a politician or policy is really terrible, the odds are that he, she, or it won't be around for very long. Unfortunately, the Republican party has dedicated itself to sabotaging and co-opting these mechanisms, and over the last six years our government has been straying farther and farther from the ideals that this country was founded on.
As some of you may perhaps have noticed, the media's errors or omissions hardly ever seem to favor Democrats, in clear defiance of all the laws of probability. I see a lot of exasperated liberal bloggers appealing to the media to show some pride in their work and start living up to their journalistic principles, or berating them for their addiction to cocktail weenies, but I think they miss the point. Lazy, incompetent, shallow reporters and pundits are merely a symptom, not the underlying problem.
It started yesterday on the art curator thread when Biodun noted that Dick Cheney is "stopping everywhere he can abroad, anything to delay his return to the States. I wonder what he’s afraid of back home." It continued this morning on the Condi thread when Redshift took it a step further, talking about what Cheney's scheduler might be thinking, trying to balance the jury with the Shooter's . . . ahem . . . diplomatic . . . ahem . . . travel options: “How long can they keep deliberating? I’m running out of countries!”
On June 19, 2006, Senators Carl Levin and Jack Reed introduced a resolution calling for the phased redeployment of US military from Iraq commencing in 2006.
Abdul Tawala Ibn Ali Alishtari, indicted two weeks ago for financing terrorists in Afghanistan among other charges, gave more than $35,000 to Republican campaign committees, not $15,000 as was reported earlier.
A gang of serial rapists has been prowling the North, raping Jewish women as revenge for IDF actions in the West Bank, police revealed Tuesday after arresting six suspects.
"We are raping Jews because of what the IDF is doing to the Palestinians in the territories," one of the six suspects told investigators from the Northern District Central Investigative Unit (CIU) during questioning. During their questioning and their brief appearance at the Nazareth Magistrate's Court Tuesday, none of the four main suspects indicated that they felt remorse for their actions.
Police said they were aware of four attacks carried out by the gang, but they believed there were probably other incidents that had gone unreported by the victims.
In all four cases, police said, the rapists' modus operandi were strikingly similar - all of the attacks were directed against young women who were waiting at bus stops or designated hitchhiking points in the western Galilee and the Haifa area.
This would be a tool I'd definitely want to play around with before enabling. Loss of game performance to keep grandma's cookie recipe in memory at all times doesn't seem like a very good trade-off to me.
Jeff, you need to read "Windows Internals, Fourth Edition". Task Manager in XP is a big fat liar. Windows Vista's Task Manager is not comparable.
The figure quoted as 'available' in XP is the sum of zero, free, standby and modified lists. The 'system cache' figure is the sum of the system cache working set (amount of physical memory used by the file system cache plus the physical memory used by pageable code and data in drivers, plus the kernel's paged pool) and the standby and modified lists. Your screenshot shows the double-counting: Available + System Cache is 1.5 times physical memory!
One of the key enhancements to the Windows Vista memory management system is a new feature called SuperFetch. I discussed this briefly in my blog post about ReadyBoost. SuperFetch watches how you work and then uses the RAM on your system in a new way that optimizes the system's performance to the way you work. For example, in contrast to traditional memory management systems that today use an approach to prioritizing how RAM is allocated to the various programs and services running on the system, SuperFetch can differentiate memory being used for interactive (high-priority) tasks from memory used for background (low-priority) tasks. When the user isn't interacting with the system, background tasks are allowed to run, but when they complete, SuperFetch repopulates RAM with the content that supports the interactive applications. SuperFetch is also smart enough to know which applications are used most often (over a long period of time) and pre-loads those applications into memory.
Stewart Brand has become a heretic to environmentalism, a movement he helped found, but he doesn’t plan to be isolated for long. He expects that environmentalists will soon share his affection for nuclear power. They’ll lose their fear of population growth and start appreciating sprawling megacities. They’ll stop worrying about “frankenfoods” and embrace genetic engineering.
He predicts that all this will happen in the next decade, which sounds rather improbable — or at least it would if anyone else had made the prediction. But when it comes to anticipating the zeitgeist, never underestimate Stewart Brand.
He divides environmentalists into romantics and scientists, the two cultures he’s been straddling and blending since the 1960s. He was with the Merry Pranksters and the Grateful Dead at their famous Trips Festival in San Francisco, directing a multimedia show called “America Needs Indians.” That’s somewhere in the neighborhood of romantic.
But he created the shows drawing on the cybernetic theories of Norbert Wiener, the M.I.T. mathematician who applied principles of machines and electrical networks to social institutions. Mr. Brand imagined replacing the old technocratic hierarchies with horizontal information networks — a scientific vision that seemed quaintly abstract until the Internet came along.
Mr. Brand, who is now 68 and lives on a tugboat in Sausalito, Calif., has stayed ahead of the curve for so long — as a publisher, writer, techno-guru, enviro-philosopher, supreme networker — that he’s become a cottage industry in academia.
House Democratic leaders offered a full-throated defense Tuesday night of their plans to link Iraq war spending with rigorous standards for resting, training and equipping combat troops, saying that they would hold President Bush accountable for failing to meet those readiness tests.
But after a fractious meeting of the House Democratic caucus, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Democratic members still have not united around the proposal.
More than a week after Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., detailed plans that he said would curtail deployments to Iraq, Pelosi and other Democratic leaders said the coming debate on war funding would be about forcing the administration to live up to existing military requirements. War funds would be redirected toward equipment, such as night-vision goggles, that some troops lack. Democrats would insist on giving combat troops a year off between deployments, and they could impose restrictions on Pentagon policies that extend combat tours.
The ejection of an 11-year-old Canadian Muslim girl from a soccer game has reignited Quebec's debate over the "reasonable accommodation" of minorities, even prompting comments from Premier Jean Charest.
Quebec's soccer federation said Asmahan Mansour of Ottawa was given the choice of taking off her hijab or not to play in a Sunday tournament in nearby Laval.
The federation says wearing the hijab - an Islamic veil or head scarf - violates a no-headgear rule set down by the sport's governing body for safety reasons.
But others have slammed the referee's decision, saying it is just another example of how Quebec is trying to get immigrants to toe a cultural line. The Quebec Soccer Federation noted the referee was also a Muslim.
Maria Mansour, the girl's mother, said she was shocked and saddened by the incident, which she said had humiliated her daughter.
She told CBC Radio that she thought the incident was racially motivated.
"Strongly, I do think so, because soccer is soccer whether it's in Ontario or Quebec or Europe and it's not right at all to not allow a Muslim girl who's proud of her religion to play soccer, a sport she loves so much," Mansour said.
"It took a lot out of me to see my daughter in the middle being humiliated in front of a lot of people."
Even though a Muslim referee made the call against Mansour, that is irrelevant to Valmie Ouellet, the co-ordinator of regional technical services for the Quebec Soccer Federation. The referee was simply enforcing the rules set down by the Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), she says.
"We're simply the ones to apply that rule put forth by FIFA," she said.
She pointed out jewellery is forbidden as well.
"That's in the same law and if I was a fervent Catholic and I wanted to wear my chain and my crucifix around my neck for the game, I wouldn't be allowed to do so for the same safety reasons."
Mexico's Congress has condemned what it says is a border violation by US workers building a controversial barrier between the two countries.
Legislators say workers and equipment building a section of the barrier have gone 10 metres (yards) into Mexico.
The alleged border violation comes ahead of a high-level meeting in the Canadian capital Ottawa.
US, Mexican and Canadian foreign ministers are to discuss border security and trade issues.
Mexican legislators said they had photographs and video, taken on Monday, of the workers and heavy-duty construction equipment that showed them about 10 metres inside Mexico near the border city of Agua Prieta and the town of Douglas, Arizona.
Former bicycle rider The Shaved Ape ended his cycling Monday, still defending himself against lingering doping suspicions.
The American, who never won any Tours, or anything, for that matter, announced his retirement eight months after discovering that watching TV was more enjoyable.
"I am ending my active career," The Shaved Ape said. "It's not easy, but you have to listen to the voice inside you that the time is right. It was a good time and I would do it the same way again, even the bad times."
He said he will stay in the sport as a consultant for neighborhood bicycle riders.
The Shaved Ape criticized the way he had been treated by cars on the highway in Germany, Switzerland, and especially Laguna Beach.
A teenage girl in southern Pakistan, whose late father lost her in a poker game when she was 2 years old, has asked authorities to save her from being handed over to a middle-aged relative.
Rasheeda, 17, said she has filed applications with the police and a local councillor asking them to prevent Lal Haider, 45, from taking her to his home.
Her mother, Nooran said her husband racked up a debt of 10,000 rupees ($151) to Haider playing cards.
"My husband didn't have money to pay, and instead he told Lal Haider that he could take Rasheeda when she grows up," she said.
Despite being paid his money last year, she said Haider still insisted the girl should be given to him because of tribal customs.
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has a new commandment for the 2008 presidential field: Thou shalt not mention anything related to the impeachment of her husband.
With a swift response to attacks from a former supporter last week, advisers to the New York Democrat offered a glimpse of their strategy for handling one of the most awkward chapters of her biography. They declared her husband's impeachment in 1998 -- or, more accurately, the embarrassing personal behavior that led to it -- taboo, putting her rivals on notice and all but daring other Democrats to mention the ordeal again.
"In the end, voters will decide what's off-limits, but I can't imagine that the public will reward the politics of personal destruction," senior Clinton adviser Howard Wolfson said Friday, when asked whether the impeachment is fair game for Clinton's opponents. Earlier in the week, Wolfson dismissed references to President Bill Clinton's conduct as "under the belt."
Speaking at an annual meeting of the Nation of Islam, Mr Farrakhan said that the US invaded Iraq because Saddam Hussein became an economic threat.
"What should they do about a man who has been lying to America?" he said of Mr Bush. "If you won't impeach him, sanction him."
He also said that America had no right to deny Iran nuclear power, and urged young people not to join the military.
"I'm here to tell you, brothers and sisters, that's the worst decision you can ever make."
Lab mice with the mental retardation of Down syndrome got smarter after being fed a drug that strengthened brain circuits involved in learning and memory, researchers reported Sunday.
After receiving once-daily doses of pentylenetetrazole, or PTZ, for 17 days, the mice could recognize objects and navigate mazes as well as normal mice did, researchers said. The improvements lasted up to two months after the drug was discontinued, according to the report in the journal Nature Neuroscience.
An Indonesian ferry involved in a deadly mid-voyage fire on Thursday has sunk with several safety investigators, police and journalists on board.
Medical workers said a TV cameraman had died, two people were seriously hurt and an unknown number are missing.
Spirit merges with matter to sanctify the universe. Matter transcends to return to spirit. The interchangeability of matter and spirit means the starlit magic of the outermost life of our universe becomes the soul-light magic of the innermost life of our self. The energy of the stars becomes us. We become the energy of the stars. Stardust and spirit unite and we begin: One with the universe. Whole and holy. From one source, endless creative energy, bursting forth, kinetic, elemental. We, the earth, air, water and fire-source of nearly fifteen billion years of cosmic spiraling.
California's $1-billion investment in drug treatment for prisoners since 1989 has been "a complete waste of money," the independent Office of the Inspector General said today, doing nothing to reduce the number of inmates cycling in and out of prison.
One lengthy UCLA study of the state's two largest in-prison programs found that recidivism rates for inmates who participated were slightly higher than those of a group of convicts who did not receive treatment, Inspector General Matt Cate said.
Perhaps most distressing, Cate said, the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has been told in more than 20 reports since 1997 that the programs are failing. Yet officials have done nothing to fix them, choosing instead to expand them and fund additional studies of their results.
"Successful treatment programs could reduce the cost to society of criminal activity related to drug abuse, change lives, and help relieve the state's prison overcrowding crisis," Cate, the nonpartisan watchdog over corrections, said in a 50-page report. "But so far the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has squandered that opportunity."
Perhaps the greatest short-term threat to world peace, Edwards remarked, was the possibility that Israel would bomb Iran's nuclear facilities. As a chill descended on the gathering, the Edwards event was brought to a polite close.
The Israelis have bombed a French-built nuclear plant near Iraq's capital, Baghdad, saying they believed it was designed to make nuclear weapons to destroy Israel.
It is the world's first air strike against a nuclear plant.
An undisclosed number of F-15 interceptors and F-16 fighter bombers destroyed the Osirak reactor 18 miles south of Baghdad, on the orders of Prime Minister Menachem Begin.
The army command said all the Israeli planes returned safely.
The Israeli Government explained its reasons for the attack in a statement saying: "The atomic bombs which that reactor was capable of producing whether from enriched uranium or from plutonium, would be of the Hiroshima size. Thus a mortal danger to the people of Israel progressively arose."
It acted now because it believed the reactor would be completed shortly - either at the beginning of July or the beginning of September 1981.
The Israelis criticised the French and Italians for supplying Iraq with nuclear materials and plegded to defend their territory at all costs.
The statement said: "We again call upon them to desist from this horrifying, inhuman deed. Under no circumstances will we allow an enemy to develop weapons of mass destruction against our people."
The researchers interviewed more than 800 mothers and asked how often their kids did antisocial things such as cheat, lie, bully, deliberately break objects or act disobediently at school. Taking into account the degree of antisocial behavior that each mother said her child displayed at the beginning of the study, Straus' team concluded that spanking probably contributed to increases in bad behavior seen during the study.
Nevertheless, Straus notes, a "lucky majority" of kids who get spanked suffer no discernible harm.
Spanking "gives the message that force is a justifiable method of solving conflicts," says Daphne Bugental, a psychologist at UC Santa Barbara. "The child is learning a lesson: If you run into a conflict, use power, use force."
In a victory for President Bush in his global war on terrorism, a divided federal appeals court ruled today that the suspected enemy combatants at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba had no right to challenge their imprisonment in U.S. courts.
In a 2-to-1 vote, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia held that the detainees had no access to U.S. courts because they were taken into custody overseas and held in a facility over which U.S. courts have no authority.
"Federal courts have no jurisdiction in these cases," wrote Judge A. Raymond Randolph for himself and Judge David Sentelle.
In her dissent, Judge Judith W. Rogers said Congress had no constitutional authority to deny individuals held by the U.S. government access to the federal courts.
