They Lie Like They Breathe

No wonder Gonzales kept making those "I'm so stupid" faces during his confirmation hearings. He was sitting there LYING!

Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) charged yesterday that Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales misled the Senate during his confirmation hearing a year ago when he appeared to try to avoid answering a question about whether the president could authorize warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens.

In a letter to the attorney general yesterday, Feingold demanded to know why Gonzales dismissed the senator's question about warrantless eavesdropping as a 'hypothetical situation' during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in January 2005. At the hearing, Feingold asked Gonzales where the president's authority ends and whether Gonzales believed the president could, for example, act in contravention of existing criminal laws and spy on U.S. citizens without a warrant.

Gonzales said that it was impossible to answer such a hypothetical question but that it was 'not the policy or the agenda of this president' to authorize actions that conflict with existing law. He added that he would hope to alert Congress if the president ever chose to authorize warrantless surveillance, according to a transcript of the hearing.

In fact, the president did secretly authorize the National Security Agency to begin warrantless monitoring of calls and e-mails between the United States and other nations soon after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The program, publicly revealed in media reports last month, was unknown to Feingold and his staff at the time Feingold questioned Gonzales, according to a staff member. Feingold's aides developed the 2005 questions based on privacy advocates' concerns about broad interpretations of executive power.

Gonzales was White House counsel at the time the program began and has since acknowledged his role in affirming the president's authority to launch the surveillance effort. Gonzales is scheduled to testify Monday before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the program's legal rationale.

'It now appears that the Attorney General was not being straight with the Judiciary Committee and he has some explaining to do,' Feingold said in a statement yesterday.

A Justice Department spokesman said yesterday the department had not yet reviewed the Feingold letter and could not comment.

Tales From The Absurd

What? This guy thinks he is a boxer or an athlete who cannot have sex before a match? Being sent directly to the file cabinet under who the hell cares is this mess!

In a show of political absurdity, Italy's conservative prime minister, singer of love songs and media magnate, Silvio Berlusconi, has pledged not to have sex until the country's April 9 elections.

"I'll try not to let you down," the self-professed ladies man told a television preacher at a rally. "I promise you two-and-a-half months of complete sexual abstinence."

What this has to do with fighting corruption, strengthening the economy and answering to a country weary of war, I have no idea. But for Berlusconi -- the notoriously sexist, antigay, pro-war minister -- it’s about being "pure." Christian conservatives, who (surprise) make up a large part of his base, applauded his oath and thanked him for opposing gay marriage and upholding family values.

Whatever Berlusconi is hoping to score by not scoring, let’s hope the Italian masses see through this strange stragegy and give him the boot.

Eeee-uuuuu! Please get over your old, nasty self!

RIP Coretta Scott King -- 1927-2006

Though we know that death is part of the normal course of life, it is still sad when people from a critical era begin to die off.

Coretta Scott King, who turned a life shattered by her husband's assassination into one devoted to enshrining his legacy of human rights and equality, has died, former mayor Andrew Young told NBC Tuesday morning. She was 78.

Young, who was a former civil rights activist and was close to the King family, broke the news during a phone call he made to the NBC "Today" show.

Asked how he found out about her death, Young said, "I understand she was asleep last night and her daughter tried to wake her up."

King had been recovering at home since suffering a stroke and heart attack in August.

She was last seen in public when she made a surprise appearance at a fundraiser on what would have been her husband's 77th birthday earlier this month.

She smiled from her wheelchair as she was greeted with a standing ovation and thunderous applause from a crowd of 15-hundred at the Salute to Greatness Dinner at the King Center.

Coretta King was a supportive lieutenant to her husband during the most tumultuous days of the American civil rights movement.

The Kings were married in 1953 and had four children, Martin Luther III, Yolanda, Dexter and Bernice. After her husband’s assassination in Memphis, Tenn., on April 4, 1968, King kept his dream alive by starting the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, based in Atlanta.

Christiane Amanpour Sets It Off!

Drudge posted a hint of this earlier. Tonight, Larry King had a panel of journalists discussing Iraq in the aftermath of ABC anchor Bob Woodruff being injured. No wonder there were rumors that Bush was wiretapping her. The woman was "tellin' it!"

As soon as the transcript goes up, I will update this with some of her key quotes.

---

Update: They've got the transcripts up so here are some things that she said:

... But I just think it is so sad. I mean, by an indicator Iraq is a black hole.

Yes, they have had elections. What kind of a government are they going to come up with. Will it be a national unity government? Or will it be the one that sows the seeds of civil war?

Yes, the U.S. has promised reconstruction, but the United States inspector general for reconstruction is about to come out with a report that is saying that it is just not going at pace and that it is difficult to see, according to this report, how they are ever going to get what they promised done.

Which means, according to a new poll that is coming out today, that most of the Iraqi people are now losing hope that the promised reconstruction is going to happen and that the quality of their lives is going to increase. This is a big drama because hope is the only thing they have in the middle of this spiraling security disaster. And by any indication whether you take the number of journalists killed or wounded, whether you take the number of American soldiers killed or wounded, whether you take the number of Iraqi soldiers killed and wounded, contractors, people working there, it just gets worse and worse."

---

CALLER: Yes, my question is, why hasn't there been more outrage on the part of the American people and the U.S. media, government, on the recent bombing in Pakistan, killing all those women and children? Ignoring sovereignty and international law?

I mean, I haven't seen anything in the American media that has really claimed how awful it was and the anger, the legitimate anger on the part of the Pakistani people. It just floors me that there's no outrage.

KING: Christiane?

AMANPOUR: Larry?

KING: Go ahead. Do you want to take that?

AMANPOUR: You know, I think -- well, certainly there's been a lot of reporting about it. Perhaps not enough for that view of it. As you know, there's not enough international reporting on American television anyway.

But I think to the bigger point, why are we there? We're there because if we're not, whose word are we going to take for it? For instance, over the bombing in Pakistan, and for instance, over the constant atrocities in Iraq.

Are we going to take the Pentagon paid Lincoln Group who are paying positive stories to be written in the Iraqi press? Are we going to take what the administration tells us? Do you remember at the beginning of this war, Donald Rumsfeld, secretary of defense, told us that these insurgents were just a bunch of dead enders who amounted to absolutely nothing.

Well, that was three years ago. You remember on your own show, not so long ago, the vice president of the United States said that the insurgency was in its death throes, in its last throes.

Well, we're there to report what's actually going on and we pay a heavy price for trying to get to the truth. And the truth is what our business is all about. And that's why we're out there, despite the enormous, enormous personal cost to us, to our families, and to our networks.

---

CALLER: That's correct. It seems to me that the civilian media reporters are given more attention than the average, everyday American soldier.

[...]

AMANPOUR: Well, I think it's an incredibly good question. The caller is absolutely right. And, as Bob Schieffer has just said, of course we focus on very well known people and members of our own community.

But the reason that the deaths and injuries of the American soldiers don't get as much publicity is because we are by and large banned from seeing it.

The United States government has made a decision that we are not allowed to see the coffins, that we're not allowed to see the burials, that we're generally not allowed to go to any of the areas where there are wounded, U.S. military hospitals.

Perhaps you can see a little bit more in Landstuhl in Germany. Perhaps when we go to the hospitals in the United States. But it's very, very difficult to get close to that kind of real tragedy that the American servicemen and women are going through as well.

The other panelists on the show also said similar things. Most of them had been there/seen that! Yet, there are still Americans who still have their heads in the sand and will bend over backwards to claim that somehow these reporters, who are risking life and limb to bring them the truth, are somehow exaggerating to make their King Bush look bad.

Yes, I believe that Bush probably was eavesdropping on Ms. Amanpour. She's seen the truth and she was telling the truth. I'm glad that she and the other journalists, who are suffering over seeing one of their colleagues taking a hit, spoke up! Iraq is not going well! It is not going to go well. It's been almost exactly three years and we are still losing people almost everyday.

Avian Flu In Iraq

Lord Jeebus. This is all we need! Granted this is northern Iraq but if it made it there, it can creep into other areas and, possibly, throughout the country.

A 15-year-old Iraqi girl has died of the H5N1 bird flu virus, Iraqi and international health officials confirmed Monday, indicating the arrival of disease in yet another country - one that, in its current war-torn state, may be ill prepared to control spread of the disease.

More alarming still, officials said, the finding suggests that the disease may be spreading widely - and undetected - among birds in countries of Central Asia that are poorly equipped to pick up or report infections. Bird flu has never been reported in animals in Iraq.

As in Turkey earlier this month, the spread of bird flu to a new part of the world was heralded by a human death, a death that was most likely avoidable. Bird flu only rarely infects humans, late in the course of an animal outbreak, and then only after intense contact with sick birds.

'We shouldn't be seeing human cases first, and this points to serious gaps in surveillance,' said Maria Cheng, a spokeswoman for the World Health Organization in Geneva. 'But given the situation in Turkey, I don't think we'd be surprised to see isolated humans cases in surrounding areas.'

The girl, Shengeen Abdul Qadr, died earlier this month in Sulaimaniya, in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, three days after touching dead birds infected with the virus, the Iraqi health minister said Monday. Her uncle, who died last week, is also presumed to have succumbed to the disease, although test results are pending.

A serious bird flu outbreak has killed four people and hundreds of thousands of birds in the Kurdish part of neighboring Turkey over the past six weeks. Trade routes, traversed by trucks and mules, crisscross national borders in a large ethnic Kurdish area, which includes portions of several different countries.

I'll hold off on hitting the panic button but can you imagine? As occupiers of Iraq, we are sooo not prepared to tackle that.

I Take It Back

Okay I take back what I said about the treachery of rampant rapes in other countries. Rape is an issue in America and among Americans no matter where they live:

In a startling revelation, the former commander of Abu Ghraib prison testified that Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, former senior US military commander in Iraq, gave orders to cover up the cause of death for some female American soldiers serving in Iraq.

Last week, Col. Janis Karpinski told a panel of judges at the Commission of Inquiry for Crimes against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration in New York that several women had died of dehydration because they refused to drink liquids late in the day. They were afraid of being assaulted or even raped by male soldiers if they had to use the women's latrine after dark.

The latrine for female soldiers at Camp Victory wasn't located near their barracks, so they had to go outside if they needed to use the bathroom. 'There were no lights near any of their facilities, so women were doubly easy targets in the dark of the night,' Karpinski told retired US Army Col. David Hackworth in a September 2004 interview. It was there that male soldiers assaulted and raped women soldiers. So the women took matters into their own hands. They didn't drink in the late afternoon so they wouldn't have to urinate at night. They didn't get raped. But some died of dehydration in the desert heat, Karpinski said.

Karpinski testified that a surgeon for the coalition's joint task force said in a briefing that 'women in fear of getting up in the hours of darkness to go out to the port-a-lets or the latrines were not drinking liquids after 3 or 4 in the afternoon, and in 120 degree heat or warmer, because there was no air-conditioning at most of the facilities, they were dying from dehydration in their sleep.'

'And rather than make everybody aware of that - because that's shocking, and as a leader if that's not shocking to you then you're not much of a leader - what they told the surgeon to do is don't brief those details anymore. And don't say specifically that they're women. You can provide that in a written report but don't brief it in the open anymore.'

For example, Maj. Gen. Walter Wojdakowski, Sanchez's top deputy in Iraq, saw 'dehydration' listed as the cause of death on the death certificate of a female master sergeant in September 2003. Under orders from Sanchez, he directed that the cause of death no longer be listed, Karpinski stated. The official explanation for this was to protect the women's privacy rights.

Sanchez's attitude was: 'The women asked to be here, so now let them take what comes with the territory,' Karpinski quoted him as saying. Karpinski told me that Sanchez, who was her boss, was very sensitive to the political ramifications of everything he did. She thinks it likely that when the information about the cause of these women's deaths was passed to the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld ordered that the details not be released. 'That's how Rumsfeld works,' she said.

'It was out of control,' Karpinski told a group of students at Thomas Jefferson School of Law last October. There was an 800 number women could use to report sexual assaults. But no one had a phone, she added. And no one answered that number, which was based in the United States. Any woman who successfully connected to it would get a recording. Even after more than 83 incidents were reported during a six-month period in Iraq and Kuwait, the 24-hour rape hot line was still answered by a machine that told callers to leave a message.

This is positively disgusting!

Oh Baby!

I just saw this on the news! Watch the video. She is so precious.

A baby girl was found floating inside a plastic bag in a lagoon on
Saturday in the city of Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais State in south east Brazil, according to a Brazilian television channel.

TV Globo on Saturday broadcast amateur video footage which appeared to show a baby being pulled alive out of a lagoon by two men.

According to the report, the men found the baby in the water after hearing a noise that sounded like 'a cat'.

The report said that around 14:00 local time, Jose da Cruz, a maintenance worker, heard the noise and called park security.

TV Globo said that an amateur cameraman decided to follow the men and record what was happening.

'I heard a sound of a cat. But, between a child and a cat, the noise is the same. Then, the noise was increasing and it caught my attention,' da
Cruz told TV Globo.

Taking on Rape From Day One

This is one of the advantages of having a female president (at least in theory). They are able to address issues that men cannot possibly have enough compassion or empathy for. I am just disgusted by the stories I hear about the quality of life in various countries throughout the world where rape is common place.

Liberia's new president, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, came to power on a huge surge of support from women voters, hopeful that a woman leader would right some of the wrongs done to them during 14 years of civil war.

One of her first pledges was to do something about the scourge of rape, using new legislation that came into force the day after her inauguration.

Rape is not a word you often hear in polite society. It is certainly not something that presidents talk about in their inaugural address.

But after being sworn in on Monday, Mrs Johnson-Sirleaf stood up and said something that galvanised her audience.

"I know of the struggle because I have been a part of it," she said.

"I recall the inhumanity of confinement, the terror of attempted rape."

Sister Barbara Brilliant, a nun and midwife who has lived in Liberia for nearly 30 years - including right through the war - was in the audience and heard the taboo being broken.

"I felt, thank God. It's about time. Even here, we had a situation. We had soldiers who got over the fence," she said.

"The first thing we did was shut off the light, we lay on the floor and we did not dare to breathe. And all we were thinking of was, 'We don't want to be raped.' This is us, at our age!

Bob Woodruff

This was such sad news to wake up to yesterday morning - particularly since he just got the World News Tonight gig. I really hope he is okay.

'Bob and Doug were both wearing helmets and body armor. They were standing up in the back hatch of the vehicle taping a standup, a video log of the patrol. That's when the vehicle hit the roadside bomb,' Martha Raddatz reported on World News Tonight. ABC senior producer Kate Felsen was quoted:

'He wanted to get out there and report the story and not be locked in and taking the information from somebody else who was experiencing it.'

Felsen spoke with both men before they were airlifted to Balad.

'I spoke with both of them, Doug was conscious and I was able to reassure them we were getting them care. I spoke to Bob also and walked them to the helicopter.'

While this is sad, when I found out that he was married with four young children, it caused me to pause. Sure, he wanted to get out there and be in the thick of things. But more journalists have been killed in Iraq in three short years than were killed in the 20 year Vietnam conflict. Is it morally okay for a spouse to put themselves in harm's way when there is a growing family at home? I'm just bothered by the sacrifice the family is expected to take so that one parent can chase war stories.

Nobody Saw It Coming?

I'm still shocked that everyone is shocked. I can't say that I was paying all that much attention to their pending vote, but the fact that this administration was totally blindsided, is kind of scary.

'I've asked why nobody saw it coming,' Ms. Rice said, speaking of her own staff. 'It does say something about us not having a good enough pulse.'

Immediately after the election, Bush administration officials said the results reflected a Palestinian desire for change and not necessarily an embrace of Hamas, which the United States, Israel and the European Union consider a terrorist organization sworn to Israel's destruction. But Ms. Rice's comments seemed to reflect a certain second-guessing over how the administration had failed to foresee, or factor into its thinking, the possibility of a Hamas victory.

Indeed, Hamas's victory has set off a debate whether the administration was so wedded to its belief in democracy that it could not see the dangers of holding elections in regions where Islamist groups were strong and democratic institutions weak.

'There is a lot of blame to go around,' said Martin Indyk, a top Middle East negotiator in the Clinton administration, referring to Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, and his Fatah party. 'But on the American side, the conceptual failure that contributed to disaster was the president's belief that democracy and elections solve everything.'

Ms. Rice pointed out that the election results surprised just about everyone. 'I don't know anyone who wasn't caught off guard by Hamas's strong showing,' she said on her way to London for meetings on the Middle East, Iran and other matters. 'Some say that Hamas itself was caught off guard by its strong showing.'

Personally, I think we ought to stop posturing and threatening this new, democratically elected government. How ridiculous is it to come out of the gate screaming about the very thing we've been promoting as part of our Middle Eastern foreign policy. I'm not sure I believe that the common, everyday Palestinian wants to participate in the destruction of Israel. Hamas was providing citizens with basic things that the other party wasn't. That is why they won. I think most citizens are tired of conflict and would just like to co-exist with some semblance of normalcy and peacefulness. However, if we come out shooting, calling them terrorists, being unwilling to meet with them, we just may contribute to a bigger problem.

More Shocking News!

I'm batting a thousand today with all of these cultural relvelations, I'm not surprised by this either.

We all know men are intimidated by smart women. Now there's proof that they're threatened by funny women, too. A study published this week in the scientific journal Evolution and Human Behavior claims that while men might appreciate witty women, they don't want long-term relationships with them. Why? Because "men see being funny as a male thing," Rod Martin, author of study, told the Independent.

The study, based on interviews with hundreds of men and women in their 20s, found that one-half of the men did not want a partner with a sense of humor.

"The idea that men are more interested in having an audience rather than sharing banter doesn't really surprise me," British comedian Meera Syal told the Independent. "Women see men with a sense of humor as dangerous and sexy, while men see it as threatening. Basically, what it comes down to is that humor is a mark of intelligence."

Not surprisingly, the study found that men were willing to put aside their prejudice against clever women for hookups and short-term flings. So funny ladies, if you're looking for more than a one-night stand, just keep your mouth shut and laugh at whatever he says.

I think men who don't want women with a sense of humor are afraid that they will become the target of the jokes. Perhaps even in bed ...

Here's Shocking News!

I never understand why they need studies to prove the obvious!

'Obviously, such research does not speak at all to the question of the prejudice level of the president,' said Banaji, 'but it does show that George W. Bush is appealing as a leader to those Americans who harbor greater anti-black prejudice.'

Vincent Hutchings, a political scientist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, said the results matched his own findings in a study he conducted ahead of the 2000 presidential election: Volunteers shown visual images of blacks in contexts that implied they were getting welfare benefits were far more receptive to Republican political ads decrying government waste than volunteers shown ads with the same message but without images of black people.

Jon Krosnick, a psychologist and political scientist at Stanford University, who independently assessed the studies, said it remains to be seen how significant the correlation is between racial bias and political affiliation.

For example, he said, the study could not tell whether racial bias was a better predictor of voting preference than, say, policy preferences on gun control or abortion. But while those issues would be addressed in subsequent studies -- Krosnick plans to get random groups of future voters to take the psychological tests and discuss their policy preferences -- he said the basic correlation was not in doubt.

'If anyone in Washington is skeptical about these findings, they are in denial,' he said. 'We have 50 years of evidence that racial prejudice predicts voting. Republicans are supported by whites with prejudice against blacks. If people say, 'This takes me aback,' they are ignoring a huge volume of research.'

He Cannot Violate The Law

I'm mad that all of the Sunday morning news programs come on at the same time. I missed Chuck Hagel on "This Week" but he is one of a growing number of Republicans who are saying "No! George Bush, you cannot break the law!"

Karl Rove wants the American public to believe only one political party disagrees with Bush’s warrantless domestic spying program. But this morning on ABC’s This Week, Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) said the program was illegal:

HAGEL: I don’t believe, from what I’ve heard, but I’m going to give the administration an opportunity to explain it, that he has the authority now to do what he’s doing. Now, maybe he can convince me otherwise, but that’s OK.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But not yet.

HAGEL: Not yet. But that’s OK. If he needs more authority, he just can’t unilaterally decide that that 1978 law is out of date and he will be the guardian of America and he will violate that law. He needs to come back, work with us, work with the courts if he has to, and we will do what we need to do to protect the civil liberties of this country and the national security of this country.

Hagel joins other prominent conservatives — including Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS) — who have questioned the legal basis of Bush’s warrantless domestic surveillance program.

Stop The Saddam Trial Hoax!

I went to bed with my television on and woke up briefly to hear this madness!

Saddam Hussein's trial quickly collapsed into chaos after resuming Sunday with one defendant dragged out of court and the defense team walking out in protest. The former Iraqi leader was then ejected after shouting ''down with traitors'' and ''down with America.''

The new chief judge in the trial, Raouf Abdel-Rahman, sought to show a tough control over the court. He was brought in a shakeup sparked when his predecessor resigned this month after complaints that he was not doing enough to rein in Saddam's frequent courtroom outbursts.

But the stormy session Sunday — the first in a month — was sure to increase doubts over the trial's fairness, already raised by the shakeup that brought in Abdel-Rahman.

After the defense lawyer was removed, the entire defense team left in protest as the judge shouted after them, ''Any lawyer who walks out will not be allowed back into this courtroom.''

Abdel-Rahman appointed four new defense lawyers. But two other defendants, Taha Yassin Ramadan and Awad Hamed al-Bandar, said they opposed the appointment and demanded to leave. They were escorted out.

I don't think they need to have trials for Saddam Hussein in Iraq anyway. At best, he should be shipped to a neutral country, placed under UN control and be tried in a world court. At worst, and I am speaking in terms of reneging what we've promised to the Iraqis who opposed Saddam, I think he should be placed in exile in any country who will take him - just like so many other "brutal dictators." I think this trial is a joke, that the US (and other Western nations)have been complicit in much of Saddam's treachery and that he is no better or worse than some of the other people we are shaking hands with now. Let's stop this farce!

So We Do Negotiate With Terrorists

I guess we learned what other colonialists in Iraq learned. You can't let them damned Shiites have all the power. So, now we're at the table with terrorists.

American officials in Iraq are in face-to-face talks with high-level Iraqi Sunni insurgents, NEWSWEEK has learned. Americans are sitting down with 'senior members of the leadership' of the Iraqi insurgency, according to Americans and Iraqis with knowledge of the talks (who did not want to be identified when discussing a sensitive and ongoing matter). The talks are taking place at U.S. military bases in Anbar province, as well as in Jordan and Syria. 'Now we have won over the Sunni political leadership,' says U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad. 'The next step is to win over the insurgents.' The groups include Baathist cells and religious Islamic factions, as well as former Special Republican Guards and intelligence agents, according to a U.S. official with knowledge of the talks. Iraq's insurgent groups are reaching back. 'We want things from the U.S. side, stopping misconduct by U.S. forces, preventing Iranian intervention,' said one prominent insurgent leader from a group called the Army of the Mujahedin, who refused to be named because of the delicacy of the discussions. 'We can't achieve that without actual meetings.

Bush is being a hard ass about not dealing with the newly elected Hamas leadership for Palestinians. So, I guess it is only a matter of time before we're at the table with them too!

Bush To Blame For Eve Of Destruction

Two major stories about the state of the global environment are in Sunday's papers.

While most Americans remain preoccupied with war, terrorism, high gas prices--or the coming Pitt-Jolie baby--an issue that may dwarf all of those concerns receives major attention in the Sunday editions of The New York Times and The Washington Post.

One story raises a nightmare scenario for the end of the world, at least as we know it, while the other suggests that the Bush administration doesn't want anyone to know about that.

But I forgot. He's supposedly an Evangelical awaiting the rapture. He'll just be wisked off to heaven if the world implodes.

I Think They Call It Narcissism

This is positively insane. This little boy is not making the grade so his dad concludes that it's because the school doesn't like boys.

At Milton High School, girls outnumber boys by almost 2 to 1 on the honor roll. In Advanced Placement classes, almost 60 percent of the students are female.

It's not that girls are smarter than boys, said Doug Anglin, a 17-year-old senior at athe high school.

Girls are outperforming boys because the school system favors them, said Anglin, who has filed a federal civil rights complaint contending that his school discriminates against boys.

Among Anglin's allegations: Girls face fewer restrictions from teachers, like being able to wander the hallways without passes, and girls are rewarded for abiding by the rules, while boys' more rebellious ways are punished.

Grading on homework, which sometimes includes points for decorating a notebook, also favor girls, according to Anglin's complaint, filed last month with the US Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights.

'The system is designed to the disadvantage of males,' Anglin said. ''From the elementary level, they establish a philosophy that if you sit down, follow orders, and listen to what they say, you'll do well and get good grades. Men naturally rebel against this.'

This father ought to be ashamed of himself! Why doesn't he just tell his son to buckle down and do his work? How will roaming the halls without a pass increase his grade point average? Since when is sitting down, following the rules and listening to the teacher not required at all schools? I know those were the rules for everyone when I was in school. This child will never get anywhere if he is taught to use excuses like this!

This reminds me of what is going on out here (and apparently in other parts of the country too). But this time the victims aren't just white boys, they are whites period. Just as whites ran from communities when they got too black or brown, fearing property values and educational standards would go to hell, they are running from Asians because they are outperforming their children

But locally, they're also known for something else: white flight. Over the past 10 years, the proportion of white students at Lynbrook has fallen by nearly half, to 25% of the student body. At Monta Vista, white students make up less than one-third of the population, down from 45% -- this in a town that's half white. Some white Cupertino parents are instead sending their children to private schools or moving them to other, whiter public schools. More commonly, young white families in Silicon Valley say they are avoiding Cupertino altogether.

Whites aren't quitting the schools because the schools are failing academically. Quite the contrary: Many white parents say they're leaving because the schools are too academically driven and too narrowly invested in subjects such as math and science at the expense of liberal arts and extracurriculars like sports and other personal interests.

The two schools, put another way that parents rarely articulate so bluntly, are too Asian.

Cathy Gatley, co-president of Monta Vista High School's parent-teacher association, recently dissuaded a family with a young child from moving to Cupertino because there are so few young white kids left in the public schools. "This may not sound good," she confides, "but their child may be the only Caucasian kid in the class." All of Ms. Gatley's four children have attended or are currently attending Monta Vista. One son, Andrew, 17 years old, took the high-school exit exam last summer and left the school to avoid the academic pressure. He is currently working in a pet-supply store. Ms. Gatley, who is white, says she probably wouldn't have moved to Cupertino if she had anticipated how much it would change.

Now, if I thought I could be brief in responding to this after all I've been subjected to as a black woman, by white people who are suffering from either superiority or inferiority complexes, I'd say more. But I'm just going to stop now. Thank you (backing away from the podium).

(Wait a minute! Is that woman saying that her son is relegated to a pet store because he couldn't handle the pressure of going to school with Asians)?

Ouch!

The New York Times went off!

A bit over a week ago, President Bush and his men promised to provide the legal, constitutional and moral justifications for the sort of warrantless spying on Americans that has been illegal for nearly 30 years. Instead, we got the familiar mix of political spin, clumsy historical misinformation, contemptuous dismissals of civil liberties concerns, cynical attempts to paint dissents as anti-American and pro-terrorist, and a couple of big, dangerous lies.

The first was that the domestic spying program is carefully aimed only at people who are actively working with Al Qaeda, when actually it has violated the rights of countless innocent Americans. And the second was that the Bush team could have prevented the 9/11 attacks if only they had thought of eavesdropping without a warrant.

[...]

read on ...

Using Wives As Leverage

Come on people! Come on! Far from not being a good tactic to "win the hearts and minds" of the Iraqis, we can hardly get indignant and self-righteous about insurgents kidnapping Westerners. You cannot go to Iraq and round up women like they are a bunch of hood rats in the projects. If people want to play dumb about why they hate us, let me spell it out:

The U.S. Army in Iraq has at least twice seized and jailed the wives of suspected insurgents in hopes of 'leveraging' their husbands into surrender, U.S. military documents show.

In one case, a secretive task force locked up the young mother of a nursing baby, a U.S. intelligence officer reported. In the case of a second detainee, one American colonel suggested to another that they catch her husband by tacking a note to the family's door telling him 'to come get his wife.'

The issue of female detentions in Iraq has taken on a higher profile since kidnappers seized American journalist Jill Carroll on Jan. 7 and threatened to kill her unless all Iraqi women detainees are freed.

The U.S. military on Thursday freed five of what it said were 11 women among the 14,000 detainees currently held in the 2 1/2-year-old insurgency. All were accused of 'aiding terrorists or planting explosives,' but an Iraqi government commission found that evidence was lacking.

Iraqi human rights activist Hind al-Salehi contends that U.S. anti-insurgent units, coming up empty-handed in raids on suspects' houses, have at times detained wives to pressure men into turning themselves in.

Iraq's deputy justice minister, Busho Ibrahim Ali, dismissed such claims, saying hostage-holding was a tactic used under the ousted Saddam Hussein dictatorship, and 'we are not Saddam.' A U.S. command spokesman in Baghdad, Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, said only Iraqis who pose an 'imperative threat' are held in long-term U.S.-run detention facilities.

But documents describing two 2004 episodes tell a different story as far as short-term detentions by local U.S. units. The documents are among hundreds the Pentagon has released periodically under U.S. court order to meet an American Civil Liberties Union request for information on detention practices.

In one memo, a civilian Pentagon intelligence officer described what happened when he took part in a raid on an Iraqi suspect's house in Tarmiya, northwest of Baghdad, on May 9, 2004. The raid involved Task Force (TF) 6-26, a secretive military unit formed to handle high-profile targets.

'During the pre-operation brief it was recommended by TF personnel that if the wife were present, she be detained and held in order to leverage the primary target's surrender,' wrote the 14-year veteran officer.

He said he objected, but when they raided the house the team leader, a senior sergeant, seized her anyway.

'The 28-year-old woman had three young children at the house, one being as young as six months and still nursing,' the intelligence officer wrote. She was held for two days and was released after he complained, he said.

Yes, nursing mothers make good leverage alright! Brilliant!

Update: My! I guess kidnapping wives and children has been a strategy from day one! So we really have created a new generation of "terrorists." Children will have forever etched in their brains, the images of their mothers and/or siblings, being snatched up and manhandled by American soldiers. Gosh, were good!

Remembering Challenger

Yes, I remember this day. Unfortunately, and in retrospect, my memories are rather callous. I was at work when this happened and we found out when a big, goofy, unattractive co-worker(who was promoted to some fake desk job from the mail room because the VP liked his savant-like obsession with cars) either heard on the radio or received a phone call about it, burst into tears and had a total, sobbing melt down at his desk. It wasn't a pretty sight and since he was such a joke, all I could do was laugh - as did most of the rest of us. I think he got some "quiet time" in an empty office. He may have even gotten to leave early because he was so distraught.

So, honestly, my memories of this event are clouded by the antics of a weirdo and, since I worked 2 jobs/7 days a week, I missed most of the media coverage on it. Yeah, color me guilty. I laughed that day.

Coming To A State Near You

Unfortunately, Jesus' General may be on to something:

Target On Target

I support everyone's right to believe what they believe - no matter how stupid it is. But, that stupidity shouldn't have the power to forever impact someone else's life. This pharmacist can be a pro-life poster child but she wont be working at Target!

Pharmacist Heather Williams believes there’s no middle ground when it comes to the so-called “morning-after” pill known as Plan B.

Williams opposes use of that pill, or any other emergency contraception taken after unprotected sex, because they can prevent a fertilized human egg from implanting in the uterus. “For me, life begins with two cells,” Williams said Thursday.

As a part-time pharmacist at a Target store in St. Charles, Williams had refused to fill such prescriptions without incident for the past five years. But she also declined to refer physicians or patients to others who would fill
such prescriptions.

“I just can’t be a link in the chain at all,” she said.

As of Jan. 1, that stance cost Williams her job.

She and her lawyer, Ed Martin, filed a complaint this week against Target with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. A lawsuit also is being considered.

Target declined to provide comment Thursday. But Williams emphasized that she was blaming Planned Parenthood — not Target — for her predicament. She cites Planned Parenthood’s heightened national campaign to persuade major pharmacy chains such as Target to agree to fill emergency contraception.

Paula Gianino, chief executive of Planned Parenthood for the St. Louis Region, lauds Target’s commitment to fill such prescriptions, and contends that Williams is at fault because of her refusal to refer patients or physicians elsewhere.

“She could refuse to fill the prescription, but she took it to the next level,” Gianino said. “Target has done everything possible to try to fill patients’ health-care needs and accomodate individual pharmacists.” "

I definitely prefer Target over Wal-mart (I won't step foot in Wal-mart) but I had been debating if I was going to have to drop Target from my list of stores too. I think their stance is an adequate compromise so when I finally get around to getting my new kitchen rugs, I'll check them out (I need a crock pot too).

(link via pandagon)

Forgotten Posts

I was cleaning out drafts of posts that I never finished or published. I deleted most of them but here are a few old ones that I felt merited mentioning anyway.

The Katrina disaster was unlike anything I'd ever seen. Kanye West said that "George Bush doesn't care about black people." Well, I don't think George W. Bush cares about poor people or anyone who is struggling to take care of themselves. To me, this picture is the face of the hurricane's most fragile victims.

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The execution of Tookie Williams was covered the world throughout. Stanley Williams had the support of actors, scholars, clerics and rappers. But, from many discussions I had on the net during that saga, there were a lot of people - good, hardworking black people who lived in L.A. in the 70s - who wanted people to know that the legacy of the Crips had impacted them in a way that left them without much compassion for Tookie or his spawns. David over at ISOU had a poignant recollection of his experience with the Crips and their ilk.

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The title of this post was going to be "He Always Saved The Cake For Me."

I believe it was June 16 of last year that I tuned in to the Senate proceedings on C-Span2 (video streaming) just before Robert Byrd (D-WV) made his way to the mike. Though the topic at hand was Guantanamo and Senators were debating the treatment(or poor treatment) of the detainees, Robert Byrd seemed to ramble off on a tangent about fathers and sons. By the time he'd used up his allotted minutes he'd given one of the most touching soliloquies about his father (step father in fact) and some of the fond memories he had of him.

Bob Byrd got married the same year my mother was born and I believe he is the oldest man in the Senate. But his memories were vivid enough to touch and, certainly, enough to visualize. The high point was his recount of how his mother prepared lunch for his step-father everyday for his job in the mines. Each day she packed him a piece of cake. At the end of the day, when his step-father returned home, he would go into his lunch box and give the young Robert his piece of cake.

In the midst of an almost pointless debate about how well we treat/mistreat our "enemy combatants" he managed to soften the day's antics by presenting a tribute to fathers for the upcoming Fathers' Day. I sat at my computer in tears that, after all those years, an aging Robert Byrd still remembered the kindness of his step-father saving him that piece of cake. I always tell people that it is the littlest things that kids remember about their childhood and that story was a touching reminder.

Don't Watch The Show

I like Steve's response to Al Sharpton's mock outrage over the Boondocks MLK episode.

So don't watch the show.

You have BET showing uncut videos which are basically strippers, and silence from the black community. The problem is not the videos, but the network which shows them.

Then you have the absolutely useless editor of Essence who wants to tell rappers what to say.

Earth to critics: black writers and performers work under the same First Amendment as anyone else. If you don't like what people have to say, don't buy their books or watch their shows. You don't have the right to demand a retraction or to tell McGruder what to say on his show.


If you want to talk about denigrating the King legacy, get the King family on the phone and ask them why they have mismanaged their foundation. They still selling Yolanda's book there?

The fact is that McGruder is unsparing about black culture and folkways in a way which is pretty much undecipherable to white America. They may get the jokes, but not the context. It's why Diary of a Mad Black Woman escaped most reviewers while making a fist full of money.

Where were these critics when Bob Johnson attacked him viciously? Nowhere. Now they want to determine what he says.

The first episode mocked the tendency of hero worship in the black community. Another, the fake gansterism of rappers, which ends with the rapper and his former lover kissing. That is pretty fucking radical for black America. The ONLY other place you see black men kissing is Jerry Springer. But there it was, revealing something widely acknowledged in private. Another episode parodied Rumsfeld and Bush as crazy wigger gangstas, who wind up robbing a store owned by a Saddam look-alike over hunting down the 'X Box' killer.

Last week's episode 'The Itis' discussed the problem with eating tons of soul food. The grand father creates a burger with five slices of bacon, cheese and placed between two grilled Krispy Kreme dounts. Needless to say, it turns into crack, with people begging for food and hanging outside his new restaurant.

Besides the gorgeous, anime-level animation, the politcs here are much more aggressive than in the strip. The word nigga is the least reason to complain about the show. The grandfather beats a man to death over an argument, Uncle Rukus is a self-hating black man who would surpass the clowns who work for NRO. In short, there is a lot to dislike about the show.

But, the fact is that this is the first time a non-rapper, non-novelist gets to have a forum to discuss black life from someone under 50. This is a nearly unique perspective on modern African American life and it is not comfortable at times. But it is not ignorant either. It is extremely well thought out and makes points in a way which need to be made.

The King show was NOT critical of King in any way. It was, however, a brutal take on our celebrity driven culture and how trivial many black people have become. It made a point that people need to reclaim their dignity and stop worrying about Diddy's latest aquisition. In fact it lamented his absence in a very real way, an important way. In fact, McGruder showed greater fidelity to King's message than his own family has in recent years.

We have so many people making trivial messages and making millions, yet, these people want to go after McGruder for a word we all use? That's bullshit and it's wrongheaded. There's a deeper message in his work, if you want to find it.

I Am The State

I believe it was Maya Angelou who gave the sage advise: "when people tell you who the are, believe them." Well, George W. Bush did as much in 2000 when he joked: "If this were a dictatorship, it’d be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I’m the dictator." In 2006, I think it has pretty much been established that Bush thinks he is not only above the law, he is the law!

We are now learning what President Bush considers to be the limits of his power—nothing.

In public appearances this week, Bush defended his program of domestic spying without court approval, citing the inherent war powers of the presidency under the U.S. Constitution.

The president points to his status as commander-in-chief and the resolution — approved by Congress three days after the 9/11 attacks — authorizing him to use 'all necessary and appropriate force' against the terrorists.

It is an obvious overreach of presidential prerogative; thin justification for what amounts to a snooping foray against Americans and others in the U.S.

It all smacks of France's Louis XIV's famous dictum: 'L'etat, c'est moi'— 'I am the state.'

The administration is on shaky legal ground. Last week, the Justice Department issued a 42-page analysis declaring the president 'will exercise all authority available to him, consistent with the Constitution, to protect the people of the United States.'

The Justice Department brief also contended that some presidential powers are simply 'beyond congressional ability to regulate.'

But the law is the law. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 — which was enacted after in-depth congressional hearings on domestic spying — established a special court to issue warrants for electronic eavesdropping on suspected foreign agents inside the United States.

So far, that court has been basically a rubber stamp for government petitions, rarely turning down a request at crisis times. The court permits emergency wiretaps without court approval for up to 72 hours.

If court procedures tie law enforcement's hands, Congress is open to fixing it. 'I know of no member of Congress,