Stop In The NameOf The Lord!

I still don't get what he was doing wrong.

A teenager carrying a Bible and shouting "I want Jesus" was shot twice with a police stun gun and later died at a St. Louis hospital, authorities said. In a statement obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press, police in Jerseyville, about 40 miles north of St. Louis, said 17-year-old Roger Holyfield would not acknowledge officers who approached him and he continued yelling, "I want Jesus." Police tried to calm the teen, but Holyfield became combative, according to the statement. Officers fired the stun gun at him after he ignored their warnings, then fired again when he continued struggling, police said. Holyfield was flown to St. Louis' Cardinal Glennon Hospital after the confrontation Saturday; he died there Sunday, police said. An autopsy was planned for Tuesday. The statement expressed sympathy to Holyfield's family but said city and police officials would not discuss the matter further.

Would That He Could

I don't even want to mention the "big fat idiot's" name in this post but only someone from the pits of hell would make the comments that he did. Further, it defies all logic and common sense that a person who has a disease which hampers control of one's body movements could "fake" said movements.

Actor Michael J. Fox on Thursday defended political ads he filmed for candidates who support stem cell research ahead of tight congressional elections, saying he did not want to be pitied because he suffers from Parkinson's disease.


Stark campaign ads in which Fox's body jerked uncontrollably were criticized by conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh, who accused Fox of acting or deliberately not taking his medication.


Fox responded to Limbaugh in an interview with CBS, saying: "He used the word victim and on another occasion used the word pitiable. Understand that nobody in this position wants pity.


"We don't want pity. I could give a damn about Rush Limbaugh's pity or anyone else's pity. I'm not a victim," said Fox, who twitched and rocked throughout the interview.


The 45-year-old actor, best known for his roles in "Back to the Future" films and "Family Ties" sitcom, dismissed the claim that he exaggerated his symptoms.


"The notion that you could calculate for effect ... People out there with Parkinson's are going, would that we could."


Fox, who was diagnosed with the debilitating disease in 1991, said the tremors could result from a lack of, or too much of, the medication many Parkinson's sufferers take to allow them greater mobility.

I Think I'll Pass

Truly pass!

Update: More on this ridiculous site.

Wow!

I don't know what to say.

A pee-wee football game between Hudson and Shaker Heights turned into a lesson on racism.

Shaker parents say that Hudson fans, took their team spirit too far. They say those fans became offensive, even racist, because they wore black face and afro wigs.

The parents also claim the Hudson fans beat on frying pans on the sidelines.

Some of the kids on the Shaker team even say they used racial slurs.

It was supposed to be about fun building skills and teamwork. To the seven eight and nine year olds on the Shaker team, the game ended up being about our country's racist past.

"They were calling us "n”s -- the "n" word," is what one nine year old said.

"They shouldn't say that to other people because they don't know what it means to us,” another player said.

The racial slur was enough to bother these kids but it wasn't all they faced on the field. There were Hudson fans dressed in black face.

“I can't really imagine any analysis that would allow them to say it's OK to dress kids in black face and put black wigs on and bang frying pans," coach Jeffrey Saffold said.

“For them to expose their opponents to fans with afros and black face, that's not what we bought into,” another coach, Gregory Alexander said. "One of the things that makes it so bad is it was allowed to continue."

Little kids cannot even play ball without this kind of ignorance?

Mind Your Babies

I don't even know what to say. This is in the UK but we have tasteless types here in America. I don't understand who would think this was a good idea.

Tesco has been forced to remove a pole-dancing kit from the toys and games section of its website after it was accused of "destroying children's innocence".

The Tesco Direct site advertises the kit with the words, "Unleash the sex kitten inside...simply extend the Peekaboo pole inside the tube, slip on the sexy tunes and away you go!

"Soon you'll be flaunting it to the world and earning a fortune in Peekaboo Dance Dollars".

The £49.97 kit comprises a chrome pole extendible to 8ft 6ins, a 'sexy dance garter' and a DVD demonstrating suggestive dance moves.

The kit, condemned as 'extremely dangerous' by family campaigners yesterday, was discovered by mother of two Karen Gallimore who was searching for Christmas gifts for her two daughters, Laura 10, and Sarah, 11.

Mrs Gallimore, 33, of Ellesmere Port, Cheshire, said yesterday: "I'm no prude, but any children can go on there and see it. It's just not on."

Dr Adrian Rogers, of family campaigning group Family Focus said yesterday that the kit would "destroy children's lives".

All Of The Freedom We Are Spreading

Women aren't faring well.

Women are facing increasing violence in Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia, especially when they speak out publicly to defend women's rights, a senior U.N. official told the U.N. Security Council.

Noeleen Heyzer, executive director of the U.N. Development Fund for Women, called on for fresh efforts to ensure the safety of women in countries emerging from conflicts, to provide them with jobs, and ensure that they receive justice, including compensation for rape.

"What UNIFEM is seeing on the ground - in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia - is that public space for women in these situations is shrinking," Heyzer said Thursday. "Women are becoming assassination targets when they dare defend women's rights in public decision-making."

Heyzer spoke at a daylong open council meeting on implementation of a 2000 resolution that called for women to be included in decision-making positions at every level of striking and building on peace deals. It also called for the prosecution of crimes against women and increased protection of women and girls during war.

Why Partitioning Iraq Would Be A Bad Idea

This is why. No matter what the region, too many of the cities are mixed. If the signs of ethnic cleansing are appearing now, think of what would happen if they split up Iraq.

The place was empty when U.S. soldiers burst in, raiding a house in Baghdad's violent Washash neighborhood in the hopes of finding killers involved in sectarian murders. By the look of things, no one had been there for some time, even though neighbors in the area reported seeing people dragged inside in recent weeks. But apparently someone involved in the area's sectarian violence had been there recently: left behind was a leather-bound day planner that gave a disturbing picture of the systematic nature of Baghdad's bloodshed.

Though the book was largely blank, inside were several sheets of loose paper covered in Arabic writing. Back at Camp Taji, a massive U.S. Army base north of Baghdad, translators sifted through the papers and found evidence backing up what some U.S.troops who patrol Washash have come to suspect — that Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army are conducting what amounts to an ethnic cleansing campaign in Washash, a predominantly Shi'ite area with pockets of Sunni residents.

Sadr's militia, the document suggests, are systematically driving Sunni families from their homes around Washash, which some U.S. troops who patrol there have taken to calling Little Sadr City. Among the papers found in the raid is a list of 65 houses around Washash where Shi'ite families have replaced Sunni families. On other pages were drafts of threat letters clearly intended for delivery to Sunni homes. And there was a roster of "virtuous families" in the Washash area with house numbers written next to their names, so the militia relocation agents could keep track of people deemed fit to stay.

"They're very well organized," said Capt. Johnny Sutton, whose tro

Saddam didn't have these kinds of problems!

No You Back Off!

... and stop lying!

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Thursday that anyone demanding deadlines for progress in Iraq should "just back off," because it is too difficult to predict when Iraqis will resume control of their country.

During an often-combative Pentagon news conference, Rumsfeld said that while benchmarks for security, political and economic progress are valuable, "it's difficult. We're looking out into the future. No one can predict the future with absolute certainty."

He said the goals have no specific deadlines or consequences if they are not met by specific dates.

"You're looking for some sort of a guillotine to come falling down if some date isn't met," Rumsfeld told reporters. "That is not what this is about."

And The Bunny Ain't Even Cute

Some people think the ad is racist. Some think it is funny. More than anything, I think it is just plain cheesy.

With their majority in the Senate potentially hanging in the balance, Republicans were bickering among themselves over an advertisement in the particularly nasty campaign in Tennessee that even some Republicans have denounced as racist.

The dispute pitted former Chattanooga Mayor Bob Corker, the GOP candidate for the seat held by Senate Republican leader Bill Frist, against his own party leadership Tuesday after it rebuffed his call to pull the ad, which lampoons Democratic Rep. Harold Ford Jr.’s reputation as a man about town.

In the ad, a young white actress playing the stereotype of a “dumb blonde” talks about meeting Ford, a 36-year-old bachelor who is black, “at the Playboy party.” At the end of the ad, she winks and says to the camera, “Harold — call me.”

The ad brought immediate criticism from the Ford campaign and the NAACP, whose Washington office called it “a powerful innuendo that plays to pre-existing prejudices about African-American men and white women.”

I also think it was specifically designed to create racial imagery that will appeal to the lowest common denominator. Harold Ford's double high yella looks probably don't exactly have the same impact though. You'd need a much bigger, blacker "buck" for that. Besides, that "Playboy Bunny" is straight up ugly! She doesn't have "the look."

Watch the video.

Can't Eat Just One

That nasty little pervert priest who molested Congressman Mark Foley, as expected, has another accuser.

Another former altar boy says he was sexually abused in the 1970s by the same retired Catholic priest who acknowledged fondling former Rep. Mark Foley when Foley was a teenager, the man’s attorney said Wednesday. The new allegations against the Rev. Anthony Mercieca were made by a man who lived in North Miami and was an altar boy at St. James Catholic Church, where Mercieca worked, attorney Jeffrey Herman said. Herman said he planned to file a lawsuit Wednesday against the Archdiocese of Miami. His client, now 40 and identified in the lawsuit only as John Doe No. 26, says Mercieca abused him when he was about 12 years old.

There are always more ...

One For Me. One For You.

I don't know why people act like this is such a surprise.

A BLACK mother with a white husband has given birth to twin girls of different colours in a million-to-one medical miracle.

In what is believed to be an Australian first, mum Natasha Knight, 35, of Jamaican-English heritage, and father Michael Singerl, 34, of German heritage, conceived the girls, one black and one white, naturally.

The couple also has a five-year-old daughter Taylah, who is blue-eyed with blonde hair and a light olive complexion.

The twins, Alicia and Jasmin, were born in Queensland's Caboolture Hospital in May.

Experts say the chance of twins being born with such different physical characteristics is about a million to one.

Ms Knight said she was shocked when she saw how different her daughters were.

"When they were born you could see there was a colour difference straight away. We couldn't believe it,'' she said.

"Alicia's eyes were brown and her hair was dark. Jasmin's eyes were blue and her hair was white - you could hardly see her hair or her eyebrows.

"We were joking when I was pregnant about what if one baby looked like me and one looked like Michael. We joked about one light one, one dark one, so it was amazing when it actually happened.''

That Must Have Been Some Debate!

Unhinged!

Republican Representative Barbara Cubin (R-Wyoming) threatened to slap
her libertarian challenger after a debate. That candidate, Thomas
Rankin, has multiple sclerosis and uses a wheelchair.

"My aide and I were packing up to leave the debate, and Barbara walked over to me and said, 'If you weren't sitting in that chair, I'd slap you across the face.' That's quote-unquote," Rankin said.

Rankin
said several people witnessed the exchange, although he wouldn't name
them, and that he was getting phone calls about it before he got home
Sunday night. The story was first reported Monday night on the Casper
Star-Tribune's Web site.

No Girls ... And They Mean It!

The Catholic Church is no better but here is some good old Southern Baptist sexism.

A local Baptist association voted 204 to 44 to remove Hillcrest Baptist Church as a member of its body of Southern Baptist congregations because of its decision to hire a woman pastor.

The Oct. 19 vote by the Mobile Baptist Association affirmed a recommendation from two committees that urged association members to "accept Hillcrest Baptist Church's decision to differ with the guidelines for affiliation by voting for disaffiliation."

At issue was Hillcrest's move earlier this year to hire the Rev. Ellen Sims, who was ordained through the American Baptist Churches USA. Hillcrest Baptist Church has ties to the Southern Baptist Convention, the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and, until Thursday's vote, the Mobile Baptist Association.

Neither Sims, who serves as associate pastor, nor Hillcrest's pastor, Dudley Wilson, addressed the hundreds gathered for the session. Before the vote, however, a representative from Hillcrest told the delegates that the congregation would accept their decision in the matter.

While several Protestant denominations -- including some Baptist organizations -- welcome women to serve as pastors, Southern Baptists'
statement of faith stipulates that "the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture."

Not Exactly A Good Time To Visit

Why does this sound odd to me? As dangerous as Iraq is - Baghdad in particular - why would you go calling on family knowing that almost everyone is a target?

A U.S. soldier who went missing on Monday was kidnapped by masked gunmen while visiting a relative's house in Baghdad outside the heavily-fortified Green Zone compound, the U.S. military said on Tuesday.

It said the soldier, a linguist assigned to a reconstruction team, was handcuffed and forced into a vehicle.

The soldier was reported missing on Monday and was last seen the same afternoon at the Green Zone, which houses government offices, foreign embassies and U.S. military forces.

The soldier was not named but a U.S. Army official in Washington said the man was an American citizen of Iraqi descent.

"He was reportedly at a relative's house at the time of the abduction when three cars pulled up to the residence. The men, who were described to have dark colored rags over their noses and mouths, handcuffed the soldier and forced him into one of the vehicles," the military said in a statement.

It said the kidnappers had contacted the soldier's relatives using his cellphone.

Will It Be The Bradley Effect In Tennessee?

I think Harold Ford is a slick dude from a family of Politicians. He's no Obama but that doesn't mean that I wouldn't like to see him be the first black Senator from the south since reconstruction (doesn't that sound crazy). Unfortunately, I think this assessment may be correct. Folks may lcorrect.

Is Harold Ford Jr. really doing as well as the polls suggest? Is he conceivably on his way to becoming the first black Southern senator since Reconstruction? The answer may well be yes, but Ford can hardly take that for granted. As black candidates reaching out to largely white constituencies have discovered in the past, when it comes to measuring political popularity there are lies, damned lies—and polls, on which they rest their fate at their peril.

The phenomenon was first widely noted in 1982, when Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley lost a squeaker of a race for governor after being widely projected as the winner. Douglas Wilder also came up against the "Bradley Effect" when he barely won the 1989 contest for governor of Virginia, after leading comfortably in the polls.

Ronald Walters of the University of Maryland was at Wilder's hotel as a projected easy victory turned into a nail-biter. That is a night "I'll never forget," says Walters, who thinks it "naive" to believe that things have changed very much. He believes that some percentage of whites—perhaps 5 percent or so, intent on being seen as less biased than they may be—will claim to support a nonwhite candidate when they actually do not.

Call Lies Lies

The man said call a spade a spade.

Ray McGovern has seen the inner workings of the intelligence world and believes the United States is in desperate need of rediscovering its morality.


Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern speaks at Lancaster Church of the Brethren Sunday. (Intelligencer Journal Photo/Dan Marschka)
The former CIA intelligence officer and Iraq War critic addressed the audience at Lancaster Church of the Brethren Sunday afternoon as the feature speaker at the Lancaster Interchurch Peace Witness Fall Forum.

His speech, "Prospects for a Moral U.S. Policy in the Middle East," focused on the ethical dilemmas facing the American public and lawmakers and ways to use faith to point the country's moral compass back in the right direction.

McGovern's group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, has spent the last three years lobbying the Bush administration to admit to what it calls the "lies" that led to the Iraq War.

He said the current presidential administration is in need of a "sanity check," a term he said goes back to his days at the CIA, when analysts consulted with each other to find the truth.

"Prevarication, disingenuousness, untruthfulness -- they won't do anymore," McGovern said. "We need to call lies 'lies.'"

Foley: Dirty Old Man

That's what he would be called if he was after young girls. It's creepy either way.

After interviewing some 40 former congressional pages, FBI agents have yet to turn up any evidence of direct sexual contact between underage pages and former Congressman Mark Foley.

Instead, according to law enforcement officials and several former pages, a pattern is emerging of seduction by Foley that began when the boys were 16 and 17. In cases where actual sex followed, it was not until the boys were at the legal age of 18.

"He spotted me when I was a page and set the hook while I was still in high school," one former page told ABC News. "He didn't reel me in until he showed up at my college campus on a congressional visit. We had sex," said the page, who has been interviewed by the FBI.

"As someone who wrote many of the laws, he presumably knew exactly what he could get away with," said one law enforcement official.

As the former co-chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, he helped enact laws that toughened penalties on Internet predators and resulted in more FBI agents assigned to Internet sex crimes.

Throughout the lurid instant messages Foley sent to current and former pages, there are repeated references to waiting until the young men are 18.

The Man Is Out Of Control!

As if we don't have enough on our plate, this idiot now wants to control space?

George Bush has staked out a bold claim to the final frontier, asserting vigorously America's right to deny access to space to any adversary hostile to US interests, it emerged yesterday.

In a muscular overhaul of policy, the US president outlines the importance of space to the national interest, saying its domination is as crucial to America's defences as air or sea power.

The order also opposes the establishment of arms control treaties that would restrict US access to space, or set limits on its use of space. It calls for the development of space capabilities to support US intelligence and defence initiatives.

The document, first reported in yesterday's Washington Post, amounted to the first overhaul of US space policy in nearly a decade, but it comes two years after the publication of an air force doctrine on protecting US satellites and spacecraft. The defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has also favoured the development of systems to protect satellites and space stations.

"The United States will preserve its rights, capabilities, and freedom of action in space; dissuade or deter others from either impeding those rights or developing capabilities intended to do so; take actions necessary to protect its space capabilities; respond to interference; and deny, if necessary, adversaries the use of space capabilities hostile to US national interests," the strategy says.

The Man Is A Fool!

He uses "the Google." Would that be "the Google" on "the Internets?
ROTFL!

HOST: I’m curious, have you ever googled anybody? Do you use Google?

BUSH: Occasionally. One of the things I’ve used on the Google is to pull up maps. It’s very interesting to see — I’ve forgot the name of the program — but you get the satellite, and you can — like, I kinda like to look at the ranch. It remind me of where I wanna be sometimes.

It's A Crying Shame

Truly. It's almost perverse for something to this popular.

The second season finale of VH1's wildly popular "Flavor of Love" drew a staggering 7.5 million viewers this past Sunday (October 15), making it the #1 non-sports telecast in all of basic cable for the entire year.

The finale, which was VH1's highest-rated telecast, scored an 18 rating/34 share among black adults aged 18-49, meaning one out of every three African Americans who watched TV on Sunday at 10 pm, were watching "Flavor of Love".

"Flavor Of Love," which debuted in 2005, put Public Enemy hypeman Flavor Flav in a house with 20 women to pick out his true love. On Sunday's finale, Flav picked Deelishis (born London Charles) over New York (born Tiffany Patterson), who he rejected in the show's first season.

The Company They Keep

George Allen can't catch a break!

It's nothing but tsuris for Senator Macaca-witz these days. George Allen, the newly Jewish and allegedly racist senator from Virginia, was supposed to skate to a re-election victory next month and promptly start posturing toward the White House; instead, owing to a series of colossal campaign missteps, he's locked in a dead heat with Democratic candidate Jim Webb.

And now comes word that among the conservative Allen's campaign contributors is, according to recently filed court documents, a porn-loving, adulterous, abusive drunk who likes to advertise on Craig's List for three-ways and anal sex and takes naked pictures of himself standing at attention.

The contributor in question is Craig T. Schelske, the latest sanctimonious Christian Republican to be outed as a wannabe Rick James. Schelske is the husband and former manager to Nashville singer and Dancing With the Stars contestant Sara Evans. He is also a failed Republican congressional candidate, the executive director of American Destiny, which seeks to teach children about "the role of God and Christianity in America's story," and chairman of CRAIGPAC, a vanity political action committee that gives to Republican candidates.

If They'd Listened

That seems to be a common theme with this administration. They don't listen to people who know what they are talking about.

There have been growing signs in recent days of mounting strain between Washington and the wobbly government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who felt compelled during a conversation with President Bush this week to seek his assurances that the Americans were not going to dump him.

Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari on Wednesday blamed American officials who ran Iraq before its own government took nominal control for bringing the country to the present state of chaos.

"Had our friends listened to us, we would not be where we are today," Zebari said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Asked which friends he was referring to, Zebari said:

"The Americans, the Coalition (Provision Authority), the British. OK? Because they didn't listen to us. The did exactly what they wanted to do. ... Had they listened to us, we would have been someplace else (by now), really."

Crazy Black Republicans

First Michael Steele of Maryland is running around with Mike Tyson as though it is going to buy him some black votes. Now it appears that Ken Blackwell from Ohio thinks because he stole the election for Bush he can steal his his own.

Voters in Ohio can be forgiven if they feel they have been beamed out of the Midwest and dropped into a third-world autocracy. The latest news from the state’s governor’s race is that the Republican nominee, Kenneth Blackwell, who is also the Ohio secretary of state, could rule that his opponent is ineligible to run because of a technicality. We’d like to think that his office would not ultimately do that, or that if it did, such a ruling would not be allowed to stand. But the mere fact that an elected official and political candidate has the authority to toss his opponent out of a race is further evidence of a serious flaw in our democracy.

Ted Strickland, the Democratic nominee, is leading Mr. Blackwell by as much as 28 points, according to one recent poll. In their panic, some Blackwell supporters have hit on the idea of trying to prevent the election from occurring. One of them filed a complaint alleging that Mr. Strickland, who is a member of Congress, does not live in the apartment where he is registered to vote. Mr. Strickland owns a condominium in another part of Ohio, and the complaint alleges that he actually lives there. If Mr. Strickland was not a qualified voter, he would be prohibited from running for governor.

The complaint itself is without merit. No one disputes that Mr. Strickland lives in Ohio, or that he is registered. The only issue is which of his two homes he chose to register from, and the law gives voters with multiple homes broad discretion in choosing among them.

What is more interesting, and troubling, is the way the complaint is proceeding. The county board that heard it broke down 2 to 2, on party lines, about whether to hold a hearing. In the case of a tie vote at the county level, complaints like these get forwarded to the secretary of state’s office to be resolved. Mr. Blackwell says he has designated his assistant secretary to handle duties that could conflict with his candidacy. But passing these matters on to a subordinate who is a political ally and owes his job to the candidate hardly removes the conflict.

What's The Bigger Tragedy?

Mike Tyson saying that he wants to box a chick?

Mike Tyson said fans should not expect much of a fight when he steps back into the ring.

But the 40-year-old former heavyweight champ promised an entertaining show Friday night when he launches the "Mike Tyson's World Tour" in Youngstown.

At a news conference at an Italian restaurant, Tyson said he would likely go just four rounds and that future stops on the tour might include bouts with women, possibly professional boxer Ann Wolfe.

Wolfe, from Waco, Texas, is 21-1 with 15 knockouts.

"She's such a prominent, dominant woman in the boxing field," Tyson said.

When asked if he was joking about fighting women, Tyson said, "I'm very serious."

Or Michael Steel and company actually thinking that an endorsement by Mike Tyson would attract any sane black voters? The only blacks likely to be influenced by Mike are probably behind bars.

At the press conference, Tyson posed for photos with fans, signed autographs and campaigned for Maryland U.S. Senate candidate Michael Steele.

Tyson, wearing a white and blue Steele for U.S. Senate T-shirt, said he used to believe black Republicans were "sellouts." But Tyson said he changed his mind after researching the Maryland lieutenant governor.

"We have to open our eyes more," Tyson said, as he pointed to his T-shirt.

(A little birdie told me that Tyson's ex-wife is Michael Steele's half sister. Somebody needs to tell Steele that there are some family members that need to be kept under wraps).

OMG! No Shame and No Honesty!

This scares me. They are playing to the base and lying like nobody's tomorrow. There are a lot of stupid people out there. They listen to the Hannities and Limbaughs on radio. Bush and Cheney lie with impunity.

CHENEY: Well, I think there’s some natural level of concern out there because in fact, you know, it wasn’t over instantaneously. It’s been a little over three years now since we went into Iraq, so I don’t think it’s surprising that people are concerned.

On the other hand, this government has only been in office about five months, five or six months now. They’re off to a good start. It is difficult, no question about it, but we’ve now got over 300,000 Iraqis trained and equipped as part of their security forces. They’ve had three national elections with higher turnout than we have here in the United States. If you look at the general overall situation, they’re doing remarkably well.

It’s still very, very difficult, very tough. Nobody should underestimate the extent to which we’re engaged there with this sort of, at present, the “major front” of the war on terror. That’s what Osama bin Laden says, and he’s right.

How Did We Let This Happen?

This is not just about suspected "terrorists." This could be you!

 "The bill I sign today helps secure this country and it sends a clear message: This nation is patient and decent and fair and we will never back down from threats to our freedom," Bush said. "We are as determined today as we were on the morning of Sept. 12, 2001."
    Many Democrats opposed the legislation because they said it eliminated rights of defendants considered fundamental to American values, such as a person’s ability to go to court to protest their detention and the use of coerced testimony as evidence. Bush acknowledged that the law came amid dispute.
    "Over the past few months, the debate over this bill has been heated and the questions raised can seem complex," he said. "Yet, with the distance of history, the questions will be narrowed and few. Did this generation of Americans take the threat seriously? And did we do what it takes to defeat that threat?"
    The American Civil Liberties Union said the new law is "one of the worst civil liberties measures ever enacted in American history."
    "The president can now, with the approval of Congress, indefinitely hold people without charge, take away protections against horrific abuse, put people on trial based on hearsay evidence, authorize trials that can sentence people to death based on testimony literally beaten out of witnesses, and slam shut the courthouse door for habeas petitions," said ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero.
    "Nothing could be further from the American values we all hold in our hearts than the Military Commissions Act," he said.
    The swift implementation of the law is a rare bit of good news for Bush as casualties mount in Iraq in daily violence. Lawmakers are increasingly calling for a change of strategy and political anxieties are jeopardizing Republican’s chances of hanging onto control of Congress.
    Bush needed the legislation because the Supreme Court in June said the administration’s plan for trying detainees in military tribunals violated U.S. and international law.
    The legislation, which sets the rules for court proceedings, applies to those selected by the military for prosecution and leaves mostly unaffected the majority of the 14,000 prisoners in U.S. custody, most of whom are in Iraq.

War On Women

I am just going to post the WHOLE story here. We can point our fingers at other countries but we aren't too far removed.

“Who needs a brain when you have these?”

— message on an Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirt for young women

In the recent shootings at an Amish schoolhouse in rural Pennsylvania and a large public high school in Colorado, the killers went out of their way to separate the girls from the boys, and then deliberately attacked only the girls.

Ten girls were shot and five killed at the Amish school. One girl was killed and a number of others were molested in the Colorado attack.

In the widespread coverage that followed these crimes, very little was made of the fact that only girls were targeted. Imagine if a gunman had gone into a school, separated the kids up on the basis of race or religion, and then shot only the black kids. Or only the white kids. Or only the Jews.

There would have been thunderous outrage. The country would have first recoiled in horror, and then mobilized in an effort to eradicate that kind of murderous bigotry. There would have been calls for action and reflection. And the attack would have been seen for what it really was: a hate crime.

None of that occurred because these were just girls, and we have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that violence against females is more or less to be expected. Stories about the rape, murder and mutilation of women and girls are staples of the news, as familiar to us as weather forecasts. The startling aspect of the Pennsylvania attack was that this terrible thing happened at a school in Amish country, not that it happened to girls.

The disrespectful, degrading, contemptuous treatment of women is so pervasive and so mainstream that it has just about lost its ability to shock. Guys at sporting events and other public venues have shown no qualms about raising an insistent chant to nearby women to show their breasts. An ad for a major long-distance telephone carrier shows three apparently naked women holding a billing statement from a competitor. The text asks, “When was the last time you got screwed?”

An ad for Clinique moisturizing lotion shows a woman’s face with the lotion spattered across it to simulate the climactic shot of a porn video.

We have a problem. Staggering amounts of violence are unleashed on women every day, and there is no escaping the fact that in the most sensational stories, large segments of the population are titillated by that violence. We’ve been watching the sexualized image of the murdered 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey for 10 years. JonBenet is dead. Her mother is dead. And we’re still watching the video of this poor child prancing in lipstick and high heels.

What have we learned since then? That there’s big money to be made from thongs, spandex tops and sexy makeovers for little girls. In a misogynistic culture, it’s never too early to drill into the minds of girls that what really matters is their appearance and their ability to please men sexually.

A girl or woman is sexually assaulted every couple of minutes or so in the U.S. The number of seriously battered wives and girlfriends is far beyond the ability of any agency to count. We’re all implicated in this carnage because the relentless violence against women and girls is linked at its core to the wider society’s casual willingness to dehumanize women and girls, to see them first and foremost as sexual vessels — objects — and never, ever as the equals of men.

“Once you dehumanize somebody, everything is possible,” said Taina Bien-Aimé, executive director of the women’s advocacy group Equality Now.

That was never clearer than in some of the extreme forms of pornography that have spread like nuclear waste across mainstream America. Forget the embarrassed, inhibited raincoat crowd of the old days. Now Mr. Solid Citizen can come home, log on to this $7 billion mega-industry and get his kicks watching real women being beaten and sexually assaulted on Web sites with names like “Ravished Bride” and “Rough Sex — Where Whores Get Owned.”

Then, of course, there’s gangsta rap, and the video games where the players themselves get to maul and molest women, the rise of pimp culture (the Academy Award-winning song this year was “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp”), and on and on.

You’re deluded if you think this is all about fun and games. It’s all part of a devastating continuum of misogyny that at its farthest extreme touches down in places like the one-room Amish schoolhouse in normally quiet Nickel Mines, Pa.

What?

ROTFL! Please stop making me laugh!

Responding to news that the homes of Rep. Curt Weldon's daughter and a close friend have been raided by the FBI, a poster on the conservative Free Republic comments:

"It is now obvious that the FBI is an arm of the Democratic Party. It is almost as if they are attempting to disrupt the '06 elections."

Why Did It Take So Long?

It's pathetic that partisanship trumped good sense for far longer than it should have. I don't know what Bush is going to do now that so many people are speaking out against his policy on Iraq. They are starting to back him into a corner now. I wonder if he will snap.

Two leading Republican senators called Sunday for a new strategy in Iraq, saying the situation in getting worse and leaving the United States with few options.

Sens. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and John Warner of Virginia are part of the growing list of Republicans who are speaking out against President Bush's current plan for Iraq as U.S. casualties rise.

"The American people are not going to continue to support, sustain a policy that puts American troops in the middle of a civil war," Hagel said on CNN's "Late Edition."

Hagel said he agreed with Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who said after a recent visit to Iraq that Iraq was "drifting sideways." Warner has urged consideration of a change of course if the Iraq government fails to restore order over the next two months or three months.

Warner said Sunday he stands by that assessment, and even in the week since his trip to Iraq, there has been an "exponential increase in the killings and the savagery that's going on over there."

"You can see some movement forward, but a lot of movement back," Warner said on "Face the Nation" on CBS. "We have to rethink all the options, except any option which says we precipitously pull out, which would let that country fall into a certain civil war at that time, and all of the neighboring countries would be destabilized."

Bush told reporters last week that he invites a change in strategy if the plan isn't working. But he also said the U.S. will not leave until the job is done.

Hagel said it is time to change course, but "our options are limited."

"We need to find a new strategy, a way out of Iraq, because the entire Middle East is more combustible than it's been probably since 1948, and more dangerous," Hagel said. "And we're in the middle of it."

They're right. The options are limited. I really have no idea what we can do to make it better.

We Lose Again

Our International clout is all but gone.

After five days of diplomatic wrangling at the U.N., not much has changed as a result of North Korea's nuclear "test." The Security Council finally voted on Saturday to impose sanctions on North Korea for testing a nuclear weapon. But the reason it took the Security Council this long to respond to last Monday's blast is that sharp disagreements persist among the major players over the strength of those sanctions, how they should be implemented, and what should happen next.

The U.S. and Japan have taken the lead in pushing for tough measures that would squeeze North Korea by enforcing a wide-ranging embargo, requiring that shipping entering and leaving North Korean waters be subject to search under threat of force. Japan has already instituted tough measures curbing trade and travel, and Washington and Tokyo pushed for the Security Council to pass a resolution under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter, which allows for decisions to be backed by the threat or use of force in response to threats to global security.

But Russia and China pushed back hard, warning that "extreme sanctions" would only exacerbate the crisis. China's U.N. ambassador made clear that Beijing sees interdicting North Korean shipping, for example, as likely to raise the danger of a military response from Pyongyang, sending the confrontation potentially spiraling out of control.

Last Dance

I didn't know who Sara Evans was before Dancing with the Stars. She wasn't one of my favorites but this is not the way I wanted to see her make her exit.

Sara Evans filed for divorce Thursday from her husband of 13 years, Craig Schelske, in Williamson County, alleging that he had committed adultery, verbally abused her and frequently watched pornography at home. On Thursday, Evans announced that she has dropped out of the ABC show “Dancing with the Stars” to give her family her full attention.

According to the document filed in chancery court, Schelske allegedly has on his computer at least 100 photographs of himself posing in an aroused state. There are several photographs of him having sex with other women, the filings stated.


“On his computers, husband maintains ‘Craigs Lists.’ Many of them involve requests for three party sex and anal sex. Husband’s ‘Craigs Lists’ are composed of personal ads on his personal sex engine involving him and prospective sex partners,” the documents stated.

The court document included an exhibit of nine recent “Craigs Lists’’ items stored in the temporary files of his computers.

Craigslis