From hotprojects at nyc.rr.com  Wed Mar  1 03:01:16 2006
From: hotprojects at nyc.rr.com (richard haase)
Date: Wed, 1 Mar 2006 06:01:16 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Bush in India:  Ghandhi
References: <BAY107-F28A4EB87747CB9D70BF542B8F40@phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <002401c63d1f$76c46220$f1476c42@hotprojects>

isnt that obscene mary louise?
the antithesis of ghandi laying flowers at his grave
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mary Louise smn" <marylouiseparis at hotmail.com>
To: <ean at sbcglobal.net>; <mb-civic at islandlists.com>
Sent: Wednesday, March 01, 2006 2:45 AM
Subject: Re: [Mb-civic] Bush in India: Ghandhi


>
> Ghandi's Memorial         I have placed flowers on Ghandi's memorial in
> Rajghat many times.  It is an oasis of calm, peace and reverence.   To
quote
> Ghandhi      "The moment there is suspicion of a person's motives,
> everything he does, become tainted."     I agree with the Indian people
who
> are objecting to Mr. Bush's planned visit to  the Rajghat memorial.
>       "What differance does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the
> homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of
> totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and  democracy."      Ghandhi
>
>
> >From: ean at sbcglobal.net
> >Reply-To: ean at sbcglobal.net, mb-civic at islandlists.com
> >To: ean at sbcglobal.net
> >Subject: [Mb-civic] Bush in India: Just Not Welcome & poll of soldiers:
> >"GetUs OUT"
> >Date: Tue, 28 Feb 2006 16:32:01 -0800
> >
> >Bush in India: Just Not Welcome
> >
> >By Arundhati Roy
> >
> >February 27, 2006, The Nation
> >
> >http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060313/roy
> >
> >On his triumphalist tour of India and Pakistan, where he
> >hopes to wave imperiously at people he considers potential
> >subjects, President Bush has an itinerary that's getting
> >curiouser and curiouser.
> >
> >For Bush's March 2 pit stop in New Delhi, the Indian
> >government tried very hard to have him address our
> >parliament. A not inconsequential number of MPs threatened to
> >heckle him, so Plan One was hastily shelved. Plan Two was to
> >have Bush address the masses from the ramparts of the
> >magnificent Red Fort, where the Indian prime minister
> >traditionally delivers his Independence Day address. But the
> >Red Fort, surrounded as it is by the predominantly Muslim
> >population of Old Delhi, was considered a security nightmare.
> >So now we're into Plan Three: President George Bush speaks
> >from Purana Qila, the Old Fort.
> >
> >Ironic, isn't it, that the only safe public space for a man
> >who has recently been so enthusiastic about India's modernity
> >should be a crumbling medieval fort?
> >
> >Since the Purana Qila also houses the Delhi zoo, George
> >Bush's audience will be a few hundred caged animals and an
> >approved list of caged human beings, who in India go under
> >the category of "eminent persons." They're mostly rich folk
> >who live in our poor country like captive animals,
> >incarcerated by their own wealth, locked and barred in their
> >gilded cages, protecting themselves from the threat of the
> >vulgar and unruly multitudes whom they have systematically
> >dispossessed over the centuries.
> >
> >So what's going to happen to George W. Bush? Will the
> >gorillas cheer him on? Will the gibbons curl their lips? Will
> >the brow-antlered deer sneer? Will the chimps make rude
> >noises? Will the owls hoot? Will the lions yawn and the
> >giraffes bat their beautiful eyelashes? Will the crocs
> >recognize a kindred soul? Will the quails give thanks that
> >Bush isn't traveling with Dick Cheney, his hunting partner
> >with the notoriously bad aim? Will the CEOs agree?
> >
> >Oh, and on March 2, Bush will be taken to visit Gandhi's
> >memorial in Rajghat. He's by no means the only war criminal
> >who has been invited by the Indian government to lay flowers
> >at Rajghat. (Only recently we had the Burmese dictator
> >General Than Shwe, no shrinking violet himself.) But when
> >Bush places flowers on that famous slab of highly polished
> >stone, millions of Indians will wince. It will be as though
> >he has poured a pint of blood on the memory of Gandhi.
> >
> >We really would prefer that he didn't.
> >
> >It is not in our power to stop Bush's visit. It is in our
> >power to protest it, and we will. The government, the police
> >and the corporate press will do everything they can to
> >minimize the extent of our outrage. Nothing the happy
> >newspapers say can change the fact that all over India, from
> >the biggest cities to the smallest villages, in public places
> >and private homes, George W. Bush, the President of the
> >United States of America, world nightmare incarnate, is just
> >not welcome.
> >
> >[Arundhati Roy, the Booker Prize-winning author of 'The God of
> >Small Things' and 'The Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire',
> >lives in New Delhi, India.]
> >
> >? 2006 The Nation
> >
> >-------
> >
>
>http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/20060228/cm_huffpost/016497;_ylt=A86.I17t
> >fQRElUIBaxH9wxIF;_ylu=X3oDMTBjMHVqMTQ4BHNlYwN5bnN1YmNhd
> >A--
> >
> >John Zogby: On a New Poll Of U.S. Soldiers During Their
> >Service in Iraq
> >
> >John Zogby
> >
> >Tue Feb 28, 11:03 AM ET
> >
> >In wars of America's century just past, we have sent our soldiers to
> >far-off fields of battle and were left to wonder about their opinions of
> >the life-and-death conflicts in which they were involved.
> >
> >Letters home, and more recently telephone calls and emails, would give us
> >a peek into their states of mind. Some who returned would regale friends
> >and family with tales from the front lines.
> >
> >Times have now changed. A first-ever survey of U.S. troops on the ground
> >fighting a war overseas has revealed surprising findings, not the least
of
> >which is that an overwhelming majority of 72% of American troops in Iraq
> >think the U.S. should exit the country within the next year.
> >
> >Further, a new Le Moyne College/Zogby International survey shows that
more
> >than one in four (29%) thought the U.S. should pull its troops
> >immediately.
> >
> >The poll, conducted in conjunction with Le Moyne College's Center for
> >Peace and Global Studies, also showed that another 22% of the
respondents,
> >serving in various branches of the armed forces, said the U.S. should
> >leave Iraq in the next six months. One in every five troops - 21% - said
> >troops should be out between six and 12 months. Nearly a quarter - 23% -
> >said they should stay "as long as they are needed."
> >
> >The troops have drawn different conclusions about fellow citizens back
> >home. Asked why they think some Americans favor rapid U.S. troop
> >withdrawal from Iraq, 37% of troops serving there said those Americans
are
> >unpatriotic, while 20% believe people back home don't believe a continued
> >occupation will work. Another 16% said they believe those favoring a
quick
> >withdrawal do so because they oppose the use of the military in a
> >pre-emptive war, while 15% said they do not believe those Americans
> >understand the need for the U.S. troops in Iraq.
> >
> >At 55%, reservists serving in Iraq were most likely to see those back
home
> >as unpatriotic for wanting a rapid withdrawal, while 45% of Marines and
> >33% of members of the regular Army agreed.
> >
> >The wide-ranging poll also shows that 58% of those serving in country say
> >the U.S. mission in Iraq is clear in their minds, while 42% said it is
> >either somewhat or very unclear to them, that they have no understanding
> >of it at all, or are unsure. Nearly nine of every 10 - 85% - said the
U.S.
> >mission is "to retaliate for Saddam's role in the 9-11 attacks," while
77%
> >said they believe the main or a major reason for the war was "to stop
> >Saddam from protecting al Qaeda in Iraq."
> >
> >Ninety-three percent said that removing weapons of mass destruction is
not
> >a reason for U.S. troops being there. Instead, that initial rationale
went
> >by the wayside and, in the minds of 68% of the troops, the real mission
> >became to remove Saddam Hussein.
> >
> >Just 24% said that "establishing a democracy that can be a model for the
> >Arab World" was the main or a major reason for the war. Only small
> >percentages see the mission there as securing oil supplies (11%) or to
> >provide long-term bases for US troops in the region (6%).
> >
> >More than 80% of the troops said they did not hold a negative view of
> >Iraqis because of continuing insurgent attacks against them. Only about
> >two in five see the insurgency as being comprised of discontented Sunnis
> >with very few non-Iraqi helpers.
> >
> >On this question there appears to be some confusion among the troops, but
> >two in every three do not agree that if non-Iraqi terrorists could be
> >prevented from crossing the border into Iraq, the insurgency would end.
> >
> >To control the insurgency, a majority of respondents (53%) said the U.S.
> >should double both the number of troops and bombing missions, an option
> >absolutely no one back in Washington is considering.
> >
> >Reservists were most enthusiastic about using bombing runs and a doubling
> >of ground troops to counter the enemy, with 70% agreeing that would work
> >to control the insurgency. Among regular Army respondents, 48% favored
> >more troops and bombing, and 47% of Marines agreed. However, 36% of
> >Marines said they were uncertain that strategy would work, compared to
> >just 9% of regular Army, 6% of National Guard respondents, and 2% of
> >reservists who said they were not sure.
> >
> >Those in Iraq on their first tour of duty were less optimistic that more
> >troops and bombing runs would work. While 38% of first-timers agreed, 62%
> >of those on their second tour and 53% in Iraq at least three times
favored
> >more U.S. troops and firepower.
> >
> >As new photos of prisoner abuse in Iraq surface, a majority of troops
> >serving there said they oppose harsh interrogation methods. A majority -
> >55% - said it is not appropriate or standard military conduct to use
harsh
> >and threatening methods on possible insurgent prisoners to information of
> >military value.
> >
> >Among all respondents, 26% said they were on their first tour of duty in
> >Iraq, while 45% said they were on their second tour, and 29% said they
> >were in Iraq for a third time, or more. Three of every four were male
> >respondents, with 63% under the age of 30.
> >
> >The survey included 944 military respondents interviewed at several
> >undisclosed locations throughout Iraq. The names of the specific
locations
> >and specific personnel who conducted the survey are being withheld for
> >security purposes. Surveys were conducted face-to-face using random
> >sampling techniques. The margin of error for the survey, conducted Jan.
18
> >through Feb. 14, 2006, is +/- 3.3 percentage points.
> >
> >In other words, the poll is a sound, solid measurement of what is going
> >through the minds of our front-line warriors. It's no letter home, but
> >it's still good to hear from them.
> >
> >
> >--
> >You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, option
> >D (up to 3 emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options (option A -
> >1x/week, option B - 3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option D - up to
3x/day)
> >please reply and let us know!  If someone forwarded you this email and
> >you want to be on our list, send an email to ean at sbcglobal.net and tell
> >us which option you'd like.
> >
> >
> >"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert
> >Jackson,
> >  former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor
> >
>
>
> >_______________________________________________
> >Mb-civic mailing list
> >Mb-civic at islandlists.com
> >http://www.islandlists.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mb-civic
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> Express yourself instantly with MSN Messenger! Download today it's FREE!
> http://messenger.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200471ave/direct/01/
>
>


----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----


> _______________________________________________
> Mb-civic mailing list
> Mb-civic at islandlists.com
> http://www.islandlists.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mb-civic
>


From marylouiseparis at hotmail.com  Wed Mar  1 04:10:14 2006
From: marylouiseparis at hotmail.com (Mary Louise smn)
Date: Wed, 01 Mar 2006 12:10:14 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] Bush in India: Ghandhi
In-Reply-To: <002401c63d1f$76c46220$f1476c42@hotprojects>
Message-ID: <BAY107-F247D195A1EE47586D4EEA3B8F40@phx.gbl>


       Yes, Richard,    obscene.      Ghandhi was a charismatic leader.  His 
views on society and freedom changed the history of India.   He said, "As 
soon as we lose the moral basis, we cease to be religious.   There is no 
such thing as religion over-riding morality.  Man, for instance, cannot be 
untruthful, cruel, or incontinent and claim to have God on his side."     
The visitation is a mockery of Ghandi's teaching of  Truth  Love  Peace  
Freedom.

   Not only you, but all men of moral excellence, reading of this visit to 
Rajghat,  will feel revulsion.

marylouise
>From: "richard haase" <hotprojects at nyc.rr.com>
>Reply-To: mb-civic at islandlists.com
>To: <mb-civic at islandlists.com>
>Subject: Re: [Mb-civic] Bush in India:  Ghandhi
>Date: Wed, 1 Mar 2006 06:01:16 -0500
>
>isnt that obscene mary louise?
>the antithesis of ghandi laying flowers at his grave
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Mary Louise smn" <marylouiseparis at hotmail.com>
>To: <ean at sbcglobal.net>; <mb-civic at islandlists.com>
>Sent: Wednesday, March 01, 2006 2:45 AM
>Subject: Re: [Mb-civic] Bush in India: Ghandhi
>
>
> >
> > Ghandi's Memorial         I have placed flowers on Ghandi's memorial in
> > Rajghat many times.  It is an oasis of calm, peace and reverence.   To
>quote
> > Ghandhi      "The moment there is suspicion of a person's motives,
> > everything he does, become tainted."     I agree with the Indian people
>who
> > are objecting to Mr. Bush's planned visit to  the Rajghat memorial.
> >       "What differance does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the
> > homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of
> > totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and  democracy."      
>Ghandhi
> >
> >
> > >From: ean at sbcglobal.net
> > >Reply-To: ean at sbcglobal.net, mb-civic at islandlists.com
> > >To: ean at sbcglobal.net
> > >Subject: [Mb-civic] Bush in India: Just Not Welcome & poll of soldiers:
> > >"GetUs OUT"
> > >Date: Tue, 28 Feb 2006 16:32:01 -0800
> > >
> > >Bush in India: Just Not Welcome
> > >
> > >By Arundhati Roy
> > >
> > >February 27, 2006, The Nation
> > >
> > >http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060313/roy
> > >
> > >On his triumphalist tour of India and Pakistan, where he
> > >hopes to wave imperiously at people he considers potential
> > >subjects, President Bush has an itinerary that's getting
> > >curiouser and curiouser.
> > >
> > >For Bush's March 2 pit stop in New Delhi, the Indian
> > >government tried very hard to have him address our
> > >parliament. A not inconsequential number of MPs threatened to
> > >heckle him, so Plan One was hastily shelved. Plan Two was to
> > >have Bush address the masses from the ramparts of the
> > >magnificent Red Fort, where the Indian prime minister
> > >traditionally delivers his Independence Day address. But the
> > >Red Fort, surrounded as it is by the predominantly Muslim
> > >population of Old Delhi, was considered a security nightmare.
> > >So now we're into Plan Three: President George Bush speaks
> > >from Purana Qila, the Old Fort.
> > >
> > >Ironic, isn't it, that the only safe public space for a man
> > >who has recently been so enthusiastic about India's modernity
> > >should be a crumbling medieval fort?
> > >
> > >Since the Purana Qila also houses the Delhi zoo, George
> > >Bush's audience will be a few hundred caged animals and an
> > >approved list of caged human beings, who in India go under
> > >the category of "eminent persons." They're mostly rich folk
> > >who live in our poor country like captive animals,
> > >incarcerated by their own wealth, locked and barred in their
> > >gilded cages, protecting themselves from the threat of the
> > >vulgar and unruly multitudes whom they have systematically
> > >dispossessed over the centuries.
> > >
> > >So what's going to happen to George W. Bush? Will the
> > >gorillas cheer him on? Will the gibbons curl their lips? Will
> > >the brow-antlered deer sneer? Will the chimps make rude
> > >noises? Will the owls hoot? Will the lions yawn and the
> > >giraffes bat their beautiful eyelashes? Will the crocs
> > >recognize a kindred soul? Will the quails give thanks that
> > >Bush isn't traveling with Dick Cheney, his hunting partner
> > >with the notoriously bad aim? Will the CEOs agree?
> > >
> > >Oh, and on March 2, Bush will be taken to visit Gandhi's
> > >memorial in Rajghat. He's by no means the only war criminal
> > >who has been invited by the Indian government to lay flowers
> > >at Rajghat. (Only recently we had the Burmese dictator
> > >General Than Shwe, no shrinking violet himself.) But when
> > >Bush places flowers on that famous slab of highly polished
> > >stone, millions of Indians will wince. It will be as though
> > >he has poured a pint of blood on the memory of Gandhi.
> > >
> > >We really would prefer that he didn't.
> > >
> > >It is not in our power to stop Bush's visit. It is in our
> > >power to protest it, and we will. The government, the police
> > >and the corporate press will do everything they can to
> > >minimize the extent of our outrage. Nothing the happy
> > >newspapers say can change the fact that all over India, from
> > >the biggest cities to the smallest villages, in public places
> > >and private homes, George W. Bush, the President of the
> > >United States of America, world nightmare incarnate, is just
> > >not welcome.
> > >
> > >[Arundhati Roy, the Booker Prize-winning author of 'The God of
> > >Small Things' and 'The Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire',
> > >lives in New Delhi, India.]
> > >
> > >? 2006 The Nation
> > >
> > >-------
> > >
> >
> >http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/20060228/cm_huffpost/016497;_ylt=A86.I17t
> > >fQRElUIBaxH9wxIF;_ylu=X3oDMTBjMHVqMTQ4BHNlYwN5bnN1YmNhd
> > >A--
> > >
> > >John Zogby: On a New Poll Of U.S. Soldiers During Their
> > >Service in Iraq
> > >
> > >John Zogby
> > >
> > >Tue Feb 28, 11:03 AM ET
> > >
> > >In wars of America's century just past, we have sent our soldiers to
> > >far-off fields of battle and were left to wonder about their opinions 
>of
> > >the life-and-death conflicts in which they were involved.
> > >
> > >Letters home, and more recently telephone calls and emails, would give 
>us
> > >a peek into their states of mind. Some who returned would regale 
>friends
> > >and family with tales from the front lines.
> > >
> > >Times have now changed. A first-ever survey of U.S. troops on the 
>ground
> > >fighting a war overseas has revealed surprising findings, not the least
>of
> > >which is that an overwhelming majority of 72% of American troops in 
>Iraq
> > >think the U.S. should exit the country within the next year.
> > >
> > >Further, a new Le Moyne College/Zogby International survey shows that
>more
> > >than one in four (29%) thought the U.S. should pull its troops
> > >immediately.
> > >
> > >The poll, conducted in conjunction with Le Moyne College's Center for
> > >Peace and Global Studies, also showed that another 22% of the
>respondents,
> > >serving in various branches of the armed forces, said the U.S. should
> > >leave Iraq in the next six months. One in every five troops - 21% - 
>said
> > >troops should be out between six and 12 months. Nearly a quarter - 23% 
>-
> > >said they should stay "as long as they are needed."
> > >
> > >The troops have drawn different conclusions about fellow citizens back
> > >home. Asked why they think some Americans favor rapid U.S. troop
> > >withdrawal from Iraq, 37% of troops serving there said those Americans
>are
> > >unpatriotic, while 20% believe people back home don't believe a 
>continued
> > >occupation will work. Another 16% said they believe those favoring a
>quick
> > >withdrawal do so because they oppose the use of the military in a
> > >pre-emptive war, while 15% said they do not believe those Americans
> > >understand the need for the U.S. troops in Iraq.
> > >
> > >At 55%, reservists serving in Iraq were most likely to see those back
>home
> > >as unpatriotic for wanting a rapid withdrawal, while 45% of Marines and
> > >33% of members of the regular Army agreed.
> > >
> > >The wide-ranging poll also shows that 58% of those serving in country 
>say
> > >the U.S. mission in Iraq is clear in their minds, while 42% said it is
> > >either somewhat or very unclear to them, that they have no 
>understanding
> > >of it at all, or are unsure. Nearly nine of every 10 - 85% - said the
>U.S.
> > >mission is "to retaliate for Saddam's role in the 9-11 attacks," while
>77%
> > >said they believe the main or a major reason for the war was "to stop
> > >Saddam from protecting al Qaeda in Iraq."
> > >
> > >Ninety-three percent said that removing weapons of mass destruction is
>not
> > >a reason for U.S. troops being there. Instead, that initial rationale
>went
> > >by the wayside and, in the minds of 68% of the troops, the real mission
> > >became to remove Saddam Hussein.
> > >
> > >Just 24% said that "establishing a democracy that can be a model for 
>the
> > >Arab World" was the main or a major reason for the war. Only small
> > >percentages see the mission there as securing oil supplies (11%) or to
> > >provide long-term bases for US troops in the region (6%).
> > >
> > >More than 80% of the troops said they did not hold a negative view of
> > >Iraqis because of continuing insurgent attacks against them. Only about
> > >two in five see the insurgency as being comprised of discontented 
>Sunnis
> > >with very few non-Iraqi helpers.
> > >
> > >On this question there appears to be some confusion among the troops, 
>but
> > >two in every three do not agree that if non-Iraqi terrorists could be
> > >prevented from crossing the border into Iraq, the insurgency would end.
> > >
> > >To control the insurgency, a majority of respondents (53%) said the 
>U.S.
> > >should double both the number of troops and bombing missions, an option
> > >absolutely no one back in Washington is considering.
> > >
> > >Reservists were most enthusiastic about using bombing runs and a 
>doubling
> > >of ground troops to counter the enemy, with 70% agreeing that would 
>work
> > >to control the insurgency. Among regular Army respondents, 48% favored
> > >more troops and bombing, and 47% of Marines agreed. However, 36% of
> > >Marines said they were uncertain that strategy would work, compared to
> > >just 9% of regular Army, 6% of National Guard respondents, and 2% of
> > >reservists who said they were not sure.
> > >
> > >Those in Iraq on their first tour of duty were less optimistic that 
>more
> > >troops and bombing runs would work. While 38% of first-timers agreed, 
>62%
> > >of those on their second tour and 53% in Iraq at least three times
>favored
> > >more U.S. troops and firepower.
> > >
> > >As new photos of prisoner abuse in Iraq surface, a majority of troops
> > >serving there said they oppose harsh interrogation methods. A majority 
>-
> > >55% - said it is not appropriate or standard military conduct to use
>harsh
> > >and threatening methods on possible insurgent prisoners to information 
>of
> > >military value.
> > >
> > >Among all respondents, 26% said they were on their first tour of duty 
>in
> > >Iraq, while 45% said they were on their second tour, and 29% said they
> > >were in Iraq for a third time, or more. Three of every four were male
> > >respondents, with 63% under the age of 30.
> > >
> > >The survey included 944 military respondents interviewed at several
> > >undisclosed locations throughout Iraq. The names of the specific
>locations
> > >and specific personnel who conducted the survey are being withheld for
> > >security purposes. Surveys were conducted face-to-face using random
> > >sampling techniques. The margin of error for the survey, conducted Jan.
>18
> > >through Feb. 14, 2006, is +/- 3.3 percentage points.
> > >
> > >In other words, the poll is a sound, solid measurement of what is going
> > >through the minds of our front-line warriors. It's no letter home, but
> > >it's still good to hear from them.
> > >
> > >
> > >--
> > >You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, option
> > >D (up to 3 emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options (option A 
>-
> > >1x/week, option B - 3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option D - up to
>3x/day)
> > >please reply and let us know!  If someone forwarded you this email and
> > >you want to be on our list, send an email to ean at sbcglobal.net and tell
> > >us which option you'd like.
> > >
> > >
> > >"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert
> > >Jackson,
> > >  former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor
> > >
> >
> >
> > >_______________________________________________
> > >Mb-civic mailing list
> > >Mb-civic at islandlists.com
> > >http://www.islandlists.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mb-civic
> >
> > _________________________________________________________________
> > Express yourself instantly with MSN Messenger! Download today it's FREE!
> > http://messenger.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200471ave/direct/01/
> >
> >
>
>
>----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>----
>
>
> > _______________________________________________
> > Mb-civic mailing list
> > Mb-civic at islandlists.com
> > http://www.islandlists.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mb-civic
> >
>
>_______________________________________________
>Mb-civic mailing list
>Mb-civic at islandlists.com
>http://www.islandlists.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mb-civic

_________________________________________________________________
FREE pop-up blocking with the new MSN Toolbar - get it now! 
http://toolbar.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200415ave/direct/01/


From hotprojects at nyc.rr.com  Wed Mar  1 04:28:05 2006
From: hotprojects at nyc.rr.com (richard haase)
Date: Wed, 1 Mar 2006 07:28:05 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Bush in India: Ghandhi
References: <BAY107-F247D195A1EE47586D4EEA3B8F40@phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <001c01c63d2b$979c2a80$f1476c42@hotprojects>

EVEN MEN OF MORAL ALL RIGHTNESS LET ALONE EXCELLENCE
will want to spew
all love mary louise
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mary Louise smn" <marylouiseparis at hotmail.com>
To: <mb-civic at islandlists.com>
Sent: Wednesday, March 01, 2006 7:10 AM
Subject: Re: [Mb-civic] Bush in India: Ghandhi


>
>        Yes, Richard,    obscene.      Ghandhi was a charismatic leader.
His
> views on society and freedom changed the history of India.   He said, "As
> soon as we lose the moral basis, we cease to be religious.   There is no
> such thing as religion over-riding morality.  Man, for instance, cannot be
> untruthful, cruel, or incontinent and claim to have God on his side."
> The visitation is a mockery of Ghandi's teaching of  Truth  Love  Peace
> Freedom.
>
>    Not only you, but all men of moral excellence, reading of this visit to
> Rajghat,  will feel revulsion.
>
> marylouise
> >From: "richard haase" <hotprojects at nyc.rr.com>
> >Reply-To: mb-civic at islandlists.com
> >To: <mb-civic at islandlists.com>
> >Subject: Re: [Mb-civic] Bush in India:  Ghandhi
> >Date: Wed, 1 Mar 2006 06:01:16 -0500
> >
> >isnt that obscene mary louise?
> >the antithesis of ghandi laying flowers at his grave
> >----- Original Message -----
> >From: "Mary Louise smn" <marylouiseparis at hotmail.com>
> >To: <ean at sbcglobal.net>; <mb-civic at islandlists.com>
> >Sent: Wednesday, March 01, 2006 2:45 AM
> >Subject: Re: [Mb-civic] Bush in India: Ghandhi
> >
> >
> > >
> > > Ghandi's Memorial         I have placed flowers on Ghandi's memorial
in
> > > Rajghat many times.  It is an oasis of calm, peace and reverence.   To
> >quote
> > > Ghandhi      "The moment there is suspicion of a person's motives,
> > > everything he does, become tainted."     I agree with the Indian
people
> >who
> > > are objecting to Mr. Bush's planned visit to  the Rajghat memorial.
> > >       "What differance does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the
> > > homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of
> > > totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and  democracy."
> >Ghandhi
> > >
> > >
> > > >From: ean at sbcglobal.net
> > > >Reply-To: ean at sbcglobal.net, mb-civic at islandlists.com
> > > >To: ean at sbcglobal.net
> > > >Subject: [Mb-civic] Bush in India: Just Not Welcome & poll of
soldiers:
> > > >"GetUs OUT"
> > > >Date: Tue, 28 Feb 2006 16:32:01 -0800
> > > >
> > > >Bush in India: Just Not Welcome
> > > >
> > > >By Arundhati Roy
> > > >
> > > >February 27, 2006, The Nation
> > > >
> > > >http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060313/roy
> > > >
> > > >On his triumphalist tour of India and Pakistan, where he
> > > >hopes to wave imperiously at people he considers potential
> > > >subjects, President Bush has an itinerary that's getting
> > > >curiouser and curiouser.
> > > >
> > > >For Bush's March 2 pit stop in New Delhi, the Indian
> > > >government tried very hard to have him address our
> > > >parliament. A not inconsequential number of MPs threatened to
> > > >heckle him, so Plan One was hastily shelved. Plan Two was to
> > > >have Bush address the masses from the ramparts of the
> > > >magnificent Red Fort, where the Indian prime minister
> > > >traditionally delivers his Independence Day address. But the
> > > >Red Fort, surrounded as it is by the predominantly Muslim
> > > >population of Old Delhi, was considered a security nightmare.
> > > >So now we're into Plan Three: President George Bush speaks
> > > >from Purana Qila, the Old Fort.
> > > >
> > > >Ironic, isn't it, that the only safe public space for a man
> > > >who has recently been so enthusiastic about India's modernity
> > > >should be a crumbling medieval fort?
> > > >
> > > >Since the Purana Qila also houses the Delhi zoo, George
> > > >Bush's audience will be a few hundred caged animals and an
> > > >approved list of caged human beings, who in India go under
> > > >the category of "eminent persons." They're mostly rich folk
> > > >who live in our poor country like captive animals,
> > > >incarcerated by their own wealth, locked and barred in their
> > > >gilded cages, protecting themselves from the threat of the
> > > >vulgar and unruly multitudes whom they have systematically
> > > >dispossessed over the centuries.
> > > >
> > > >So what's going to happen to George W. Bush? Will the
> > > >gorillas cheer him on? Will the gibbons curl their lips? Will
> > > >the brow-antlered deer sneer? Will the chimps make rude
> > > >noises? Will the owls hoot? Will the lions yawn and the
> > > >giraffes bat their beautiful eyelashes? Will the crocs
> > > >recognize a kindred soul? Will the quails give thanks that
> > > >Bush isn't traveling with Dick Cheney, his hunting partner
> > > >with the notoriously bad aim? Will the CEOs agree?
> > > >
> > > >Oh, and on March 2, Bush will be taken to visit Gandhi's
> > > >memorial in Rajghat. He's by no means the only war criminal
> > > >who has been invited by the Indian government to lay flowers
> > > >at Rajghat. (Only recently we had the Burmese dictator
> > > >General Than Shwe, no shrinking violet himself.) But when
> > > >Bush places flowers on that famous slab of highly polished
> > > >stone, millions of Indians will wince. It will be as though
> > > >he has poured a pint of blood on the memory of Gandhi.
> > > >
> > > >We really would prefer that he didn't.
> > > >
> > > >It is not in our power to stop Bush's visit. It is in our
> > > >power to protest it, and we will. The government, the police
> > > >and the corporate press will do everything they can to
> > > >minimize the extent of our outrage. Nothing the happy
> > > >newspapers say can change the fact that all over India, from
> > > >the biggest cities to the smallest villages, in public places
> > > >and private homes, George W. Bush, the President of the
> > > >United States of America, world nightmare incarnate, is just
> > > >not welcome.
> > > >
> > > >[Arundhati Roy, the Booker Prize-winning author of 'The God of
> > > >Small Things' and 'The Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire',
> > > >lives in New Delhi, India.]
> > > >
> > > >? 2006 The Nation
> > > >
> > > >-------
> > > >
> > >
> >
>http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/20060228/cm_huffpost/016497;_ylt=A86.I17t
> > > >fQRElUIBaxH9wxIF;_ylu=X3oDMTBjMHVqMTQ4BHNlYwN5bnN1YmNhd
> > > >A--
> > > >
> > > >John Zogby: On a New Poll Of U.S. Soldiers During Their
> > > >Service in Iraq
> > > >
> > > >John Zogby
> > > >
> > > >Tue Feb 28, 11:03 AM ET
> > > >
> > > >In wars of America's century just past, we have sent our soldiers to
> > > >far-off fields of battle and were left to wonder about their opinions
> >of
> > > >the life-and-death conflicts in which they were involved.
> > > >
> > > >Letters home, and more recently telephone calls and emails, would
give
> >us
> > > >a peek into their states of mind. Some who returned would regale
> >friends
> > > >and family with tales from the front lines.
> > > >
> > > >Times have now changed. A first-ever survey of U.S. troops on the
> >ground
> > > >fighting a war overseas has revealed surprising findings, not the
least
> >of
> > > >which is that an overwhelming majority of 72% of American troops in
> >Iraq
> > > >think the U.S. should exit the country within the next year.
> > > >
> > > >Further, a new Le Moyne College/Zogby International survey shows that
> >more
> > > >than one in four (29%) thought the U.S. should pull its troops
> > > >immediately.
> > > >
> > > >The poll, conducted in conjunction with Le Moyne College's Center for
> > > >Peace and Global Studies, also showed that another 22% of the
> >respondents,
> > > >serving in various branches of the armed forces, said the U.S. should
> > > >leave Iraq in the next six months. One in every five troops - 21% -
> >said
> > > >troops should be out between six and 12 months. Nearly a quarter -
23%
> >-
> > > >said they should stay "as long as they are needed."
> > > >
> > > >The troops have drawn different conclusions about fellow citizens
back
> > > >home. Asked why they think some Americans favor rapid U.S. troop
> > > >withdrawal from Iraq, 37% of troops serving there said those
Americans
> >are
> > > >unpatriotic, while 20% believe people back home don't believe a
> >continued
> > > >occupation will work. Another 16% said they believe those favoring a
> >quick
> > > >withdrawal do so because they oppose the use of the military in a
> > > >pre-emptive war, while 15% said they do not believe those Americans
> > > >understand the need for the U.S. troops in Iraq.
> > > >
> > > >At 55%, reservists serving in Iraq were most likely to see those back
> >home
> > > >as unpatriotic for wanting a rapid withdrawal, while 45% of Marines
and
> > > >33% of members of the regular Army agreed.
> > > >
> > > >The wide-ranging poll also shows that 58% of those serving in country
> >say
> > > >the U.S. mission in Iraq is clear in their minds, while 42% said it
is
> > > >either somewhat or very unclear to them, that they have no
> >understanding
> > > >of it at all, or are unsure. Nearly nine of every 10 - 85% - said the
> >U.S.
> > > >mission is "to retaliate for Saddam's role in the 9-11 attacks,"
while
> >77%
> > > >said they believe the main or a major reason for the war was "to stop
> > > >Saddam from protecting al Qaeda in Iraq."
> > > >
> > > >Ninety-three percent said that removing weapons of mass destruction
is
> >not
> > > >a reason for U.S. troops being there. Instead, that initial rationale
> >went
> > > >by the wayside and, in the minds of 68% of the troops, the real
mission
> > > >became to remove Saddam Hussein.
> > > >
> > > >Just 24% said that "establishing a democracy that can be a model for
> >the
> > > >Arab World" was the main or a major reason for the war. Only small
> > > >percentages see the mission there as securing oil supplies (11%) or
to
> > > >provide long-term bases for US troops in the region (6%).
> > > >
> > > >More than 80% of the troops said they did not hold a negative view of
> > > >Iraqis because of continuing insurgent attacks against them. Only
about
> > > >two in five see the insurgency as being comprised of discontented
> >Sunnis
> > > >with very few non-Iraqi helpers.
> > > >
> > > >On this question there appears to be some confusion among the troops,
> >but
> > > >two in every three do not agree that if non-Iraqi terrorists could be
> > > >prevented from crossing the border into Iraq, the insurgency would
end.
> > > >
> > > >To control the insurgency, a majority of respondents (53%) said the
> >U.S.
> > > >should double both the number of troops and bombing missions, an
option
> > > >absolutely no one back in Washington is considering.
> > > >
> > > >Reservists were most enthusiastic about using bombing runs and a
> >doubling
> > > >of ground troops to counter the enemy, with 70% agreeing that would
> >work
> > > >to control the insurgency. Among regular Army respondents, 48%
favored
> > > >more troops and bombing, and 47% of Marines agreed. However, 36% of
> > > >Marines said they were uncertain that strategy would work, compared
to
> > > >just 9% of regular Army, 6% of National Guard respondents, and 2% of
> > > >reservists who said they were not sure.
> > > >
> > > >Those in Iraq on their first tour of duty were less optimistic that
> >more
> > > >troops and bombing runs would work. While 38% of first-timers agreed,
> >62%
> > > >of those on their second tour and 53% in Iraq at least three times
> >favored
> > > >more U.S. troops and firepower.
> > > >
> > > >As new photos of prisoner abuse in Iraq surface, a majority of troops
> > > >serving there said they oppose harsh interrogation methods. A
majority
> >-
> > > >55% - said it is not appropriate or standard military conduct to use
> >harsh
> > > >and threatening methods on possible insurgent prisoners to
information
> >of
> > > >military value.
> > > >
> > > >Among all respondents, 26% said they were on their first tour of duty
> >in
> > > >Iraq, while 45% said they were on their second tour, and 29% said
they
> > > >were in Iraq for a third time, or more. Three of every four were male
> > > >respondents, with 63% under the age of 30.
> > > >
> > > >The survey included 944 military respondents interviewed at several
> > > >undisclosed locations throughout Iraq. The names of the specific
> >locations
> > > >and specific personnel who conducted the survey are being withheld
for
> > > >security purposes. Surveys were conducted face-to-face using random
> > > >sampling techniques. The margin of error for the survey, conducted
Jan.
> >18
> > > >through Feb. 14, 2006, is +/- 3.3 percentage points.
> > > >
> > > >In other words, the poll is a sound, solid measurement of what is
going
> > > >through the minds of our front-line warriors. It's no letter home,
but
> > > >it's still good to hear from them.
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >--
> > > >You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list,
option
> > > >D (up to 3 emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options (option
A
> >-
> > > >1x/week, option B - 3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option D - up to
> >3x/day)
> > > >please reply and let us know!  If someone forwarded you this email
and
> > > >you want to be on our list, send an email to ean at sbcglobal.net and
tell
> > > >us which option you'd like.
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert
> > > >Jackson,
> > > >  former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor
> > > >
> > >
> > >
> > > >_______________________________________________
> > > >Mb-civic mailing list
> > > >Mb-civic at islandlists.com
> > > >http://www.islandlists.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mb-civic
> > >
> > > _________________________________________________________________
> > > Express yourself instantly with MSN Messenger! Download today it's
FREE!
> > > http://messenger.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200471ave/direct/01/
> > >
> > >
> >
> >
>
>---------------------------------------------------------------------------
-
> >----
> >
> >
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Mb-civic mailing list
> > > Mb-civic at islandlists.com
> > > http://www.islandlists.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mb-civic
> > >
> >
> >_______________________________________________
> >Mb-civic mailing list
> >Mb-civic at islandlists.com
> >http://www.islandlists.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mb-civic
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> FREE pop-up blocking with the new MSN Toolbar - get it now!
> http://toolbar.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200415ave/direct/01/
>
>


----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----


> _______________________________________________
> Mb-civic mailing list
> Mb-civic at islandlists.com
> http://www.islandlists.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mb-civic
>


From swiggard at comcast.net  Wed Mar  1 04:59:54 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Wed, 01 Mar 2006 07:59:54 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] GOP Unease Spreads to Security Issues - Washington Post
Message-ID: <44059ACA.3080508@comcast.net>

GOP Unease Spreads to Security Issues
Port Deal Among Challenges to What Has Been Bush's Strength

By Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 1, 2006; A01

The first heading on the issues page of Rep. Mark Foley's Web site brags 
that he is "one of President Bush's strongest supporters in Congress." 
The Florida Republican voted for the president's legislation 90 percent 
of the time, according to the Web site, "the 3rd highest ranking among 
the Florida delegation."

Now the Florida delegation's third-strongest Bush supporter is on the 
front lines of the Republican revolt against the president on the deal 
to turn over key operations at six U.S. ports to a United Arab Emirates 
company. Republicans who once marched in lock step behind their 
president on national security are increasingly willing to challenge him 
in an area considered his political strength.

The signs of GOP discontent have been building in the past few months. 
Dissident Republicans in Congress forced Bush to sign a measure banning 
torture of detainees despite his initial veto threat, blocked renewal of 
the USA Patriot Act until their civil liberties concerns were addressed 
and pressured the White House into accepting legislation on its secret 
eavesdropping program. By the time the port deal came to light, the 
uprising was no longer limited to dissidents.

"We simply want to participate and aren't going to be PR flacks when 
they need us," Foley said. "We all have roles. We have oversight. When 
you can't answer your constituents when they have legitimate questions . 
. . we can't simply do it on trust."

The breakdown of the Republican consensus on national security both 
reflects and exacerbates Bush's political weakness heading toward the 
midterm elections, according to party strategists. Even as Republicans 
abandoned him last year on domestic issues such as Social Security, 
Hurricane Katrina relief and Harriet Miers's Supreme Court nomination, 
they had largely stuck by him on terrorism and other security issues.

Karl Rove, the president's political guru and deputy chief of staff, has 
already signaled that he intends to use national security as the 
defining issue for the fall congressional campaigns, just as he did to 
great effect in 2002 and 2004. But with Bush's numbers still falling, 
the Republicans who will be on the ballot have decided to define the 
security issue in their own way rather than defer to the president's 
interpretation.

The release of a new CBS News poll showing Bush's approval rating 
dropping to 34 percent, a low for him in that survey, sent tremors 
through Republican circles in Washington. Scott Reed, who managed Robert 
J. Dole's presidential campaign in 1996, called the results "pretty 
shattering." Most distressing to GOP strategists was that Bush's support 
among Republicans fell from 83 percent to 72 percent.

"The repetition of the news coming out of Iraq is wearing folks down," 
Reed said. "It started with women and it's spreading. It's just bad news 
after bad news after bad news, without any light at the end of the tunnel."

Bush shrugged off the poll numbers in an interview with ABC News 
yesterday. "If I worried about polls, I would be -- I wouldn't be doing 
my job," he said before leaving Washington for a trip to India and 
Pakistan. "And, look, I fully understand that when you do hard things, 
it creates consternation at times. And, you know, I've been up in the 
polls and I've been down in the polls. You know, it's just part of life 
in the modern era."

Yet at the White House, aides were decidedly downbeat, making dark jokes 
about the latest political trajectory and the Murphy's Law quality of 
life in the West Wing these days -- what can go wrong will go wrong. At 
least, some consoled themselves, Bush beat out Vice President Cheney, 
who was viewed favorably by just 18 percent in the CBS survey.

Others held on to the hope that this, too, shall pass.

"We've got a period of time when the news that's dominating the 
headlines is not good and some Republicans are going to feel free to 
distance themselves from the president," said a senior White House 
official who was not authorized to speak on the record. "But at the end 
of the day, I don't think the breach is deep or lasting because this is 
the president's strong suit. I think it's about this moment in time. I 
don't think it's fundamental."

If so, the moment may still last a while longer. Much of the dialogue in 
Washington right now centers on security disputes pitting Republicans 
against Republicans.

The Senate voted yesterday to clear the way for final passage today of a 
compromise version of the Patriot Act after a handful of Republicans in 
recent months insisted on changes to the law. But Judiciary Chairman 
Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) said he was still dissatisfied with the additional 
checks on law enforcement and introduced a new bill to set further 
restrictions on the collection of certain information in terrorism 
investigations without court orders.

Specter's committee also held another hearing yesterday into the 
National Security Agency's warrantless surveillance authorized by Bush. 
Specter and other Republicans are drafting legislation to establish 
congressional or court oversight of the eavesdropping.

And it was clear yesterday that a fresh 45-day review of the ports deal 
might not satisfy GOP critics. Two Senate committees grilled 
administration officials and the chief operating officer of the Dubai 
company at the center of the dispute. A bipartisan group of senators, 
including Republicans Norm Coleman (Minn.), Olympia J. Snowe (Maine) and 
Tom Coburn (Okla.), is scheduled to meet today to discuss legislation 
giving Congress final say over the deal.

Beyond the politics, several of the disputes are about institutional 
prerogatives, the sort of natural executive-legislative tension that was 
subsumed in Bush's first term after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when 
Republican lawmakers deferred to the president.

James B. Steinberg, who was President Bill Clinton's deputy national 
security adviser, said Bush "just overstepped" and alienated allies by 
not involving Congress in the matter.

"Even if you're a Republican member of Congress, you don't buy the 
exaggerated view of the unified executive theory, in which the only part 
of the Constitution that matters is Article II," on presidential power, 
said Steinberg, now dean of the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public 
Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. "If you want them to be in 
on the landing, you have to have people there for the takeoff."

Rep. Heather A. Wilson (N.M.), who has emerged as one of the most active 
players on the NSA issue, noted that she has taken on the administration 
on a number of national security issues over the past few years but is 
now joined by more fellow Republicans. She said that owes more to 
administration mishandling than to a changing mood on Capitol Hill.

"We all agree that there has to be a single leader from the White House 
leading the armed forces," Wilson said. But "Congress has the 
responsibility to exercise oversight and ask questions," she said, "and 
I think you're seeing more members of Congress willing to do that."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/28/AR2006022801607.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060301/9720f289/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Wed Mar  1 05:02:03 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Wed, 01 Mar 2006 08:02:03 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Every Inlet an Outlet for Anger Over Ports - Washington
	Post
Message-ID: <44059B4B.8090909@comcast.net>

Every Inlet an Outlet for Anger Over Ports

By Dana Milbank
Wednesday, March 1, 2006; A02

Is there no safe harbor from the Dubai port imbroglio?

Wherever they went yesterday, and whatever they spoke about, Bush 
administration officials could find no shelter. The controversy intruded 
on President Bush when he tried talk about NATO and Afghanistan with the 
Italian prime minister. It stalked Director of National Intelligence 
John D. Negroponte at the Senate Armed Services Committee, followed 
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to the Senate 
Appropriations Committee, and harassed Chertoff deputy Michael P. 
Jackson at the Senate Commerce Committee.

Even the U.S.S. Ken Mehlman, an agile vessel, could not successfully 
navigate the port deal's shoals. Appearing before the Jewish Council for 
Public Affairs, the Republican National Committee chairman tucked a 
one-sentence, indirect reference to the fuss nearly 20 minutes into his 
speech -- "We have a military presence in the United Arab Emirates that 
is vital to stability" -- then left before he could be questioned about 
the deal.

Mehlman's Democratic counterpart, Howard Dean, wasn't about to let 
Mehlman off the hook with that. Next on the JCPA stage, Dean reordered 
his speech, which usually starts with a jeremiad about Republican 
corruption. "I want first to speak about defense," Dean said, pivoting 
to the ports.

"Today we see the specter, as reported in the Jerusalem Post, of a 
company who is about to take over American ports, which actively 
continues today to boycott Israel," the Democratic National Committee 
chairman declared. "Foreign governments of any kind ought not to be 
controlling American ports, especially when the Coast Guard already 
recommended that they could not guarantee the security of the ports."

The crowd loved it. "Isn't xenophobia wonderful?" a delegate at the New 
Jersey table wondered aloud.

No matter what the ostensible subject matter, virtually every political 
gathering yesterday eventually listed toward ports. Sen. Patrick J. 
Leahy (D-Vt.) started talking about it at a Senate Judiciary Committee 
hearing on the NSA's National Security Agency's eavesdropping program. 
Former president Bill Clinton, giving a news conference about health 
care at the National Governors Association meeting, fielded a battery of 
questions about the ports. "This has shocked us into facing the fact 
that we have repeatedly failed to secure our ports in a proper way," he 
scolded.

The incessant talk about ports drove the Associated Press to 
distraction. The wire agency, issuing the seventh version of its port 
security story at 2:30 p.m., suddenly and without warning turned 
Chertoff into a cigar and Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.) into an 
Eskimo moccasin. "Homeland Security Secretary Michael Cheroot called the 
Coast Guard documents 'an early report,' " the AP reported. "Pressed by 
Sen. Barbara Mukluks, D-Md., Cheroot said he saw the Coast Guard memo 
'about a week ago.' "

Only Vice President Cheney found a way to avoid any discussion of the 
port deal. He gave a 24-minute speech to the American Legion without 
even a peep about Dubai Ports World -- and he left without taking questions.

Mehlman, at the Jewish group, attempted the same strategy, at first 
telling the audience he wouldn't take questions. When organizers 
resisted, he agreed to take questions on index cards screened by a 
moderator. The gambit worked: Mehlman's four questions were soft, 
including one asking him about "the leadership the president has shown" 
on Sudan.

His boss was not so lucky. In the Oval Office photo op with Italy's 
Silvio Berlusconi, the president spoke about Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, 
the Olympics -- anything but the ports. But, inevitably, a reporter 
floated a port question.

"My position hasn't changed," Bush snapped, suggesting to members of 
Congress to "please look at the facts."

When he finished his answer, he turned to the interpreter. "You don't 
need to interpret," the president said. "That's a U.S. question."

There was good cause for the presidential prickliness. A new CBS 
News-New York Times poll found Bush's support at 34 percent -- only 18 
percent rated Cheney favorably -- with just 21 percent favoring the 
United Arab Emirates deal.

Republican lawmakers continued to drift from Bush on the port deal.

Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (Maine) signed a letter to the administration 
demanding more answers. Sen. Judd Gregg (N.H.) used a subcommittee 
hearing he chaired to accuse the administration of adding "further 
confusion" with its explanation of the Coast Guard memo questioning the 
deal.

At another hearing, Sen. James M. Inhofe (Okla.) said he had no security 
worries about the deal, but he still criticized the administration for 
"allowing people to demagogue this thing."

And Rep. John A. Boehner (Ohio), giving his first sit-down session with 
reporters since becoming House majority leader, said he remained "a bit 
surprised no one on the political level is part of this process."

It was becoming clear that the president was not going to bid this issue 
Dubai anytime soon. The White House tried, gamely, to move on. The press 
office issued a presidential proclamation announcing "Save Your Vision 
Week, 2006." A few hours later, Bush boarded Air Force One for a trip to 
the relative tranquility of India.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/28/AR2006022801433.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060301/f9bf6271/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Wed Mar  1 05:06:37 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Wed, 01 Mar 2006 08:06:37 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Tolerating the Intolerable - Anne Applebaum - Washington
	Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <44059C5D.7060206@comcast.net>

Tolerating the Intolerable

By Anne Applebaum
Wednesday, March 1, 2006; A17

It was unusual -- tape recorders not being de rigueur in Britain -- but 
this time there was a transcript of what was said. Just as unusual: It 
all began politely. The journalist, Oliver Finegold of the Evening 
Standard, asked Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, "How did tonight 
go?" Not so unusually, the mayor, who was emerging from a reception, 
responded with an insult: "What did you do before? Were you a German war 
criminal?"

"No, I'm Jewish, I wasn't a German war criminal and actually I'm quite 
offended by that. So, how did tonight go?"

"All right, well you might be Jewish, but actually you are just like a 
concentration camp guard, you are just doing it because you are paid to, 
aren't you?"

It was all downhill from there. The mayor called the Evening Standard "a 
load of scumbags and reactionary bigots." The journalist published the 
interview. Other city politicians asked Livingstone to apologize. 
Knowing Livingstone -- which I do, slightly; I once spent an evening 
listening to him defend Stalinism -- no one should have been surprised 
when he refused. Which he did: "The form of words I have used are 
right," the mayor said. "I have nothing to apologize for." Whereupon, 
incredibly, something called the Adjudication Panel for England 
suspended the mayor from his job for four weeks.

So revelatory -- so rich with lessons about modern Britain -- is this 
incident that I hardly know where to begin. Here we have, in a nutshell, 
evidence of the breakdown in relations between the British media and 
British politicians; the increasing incivility of British public life; 
the nasty strain of anti-Semitism on the far side of the British left 
(Livingstone has just called Ariel Sharon a war criminal, clearly a 
favorite insult, as well); and, to top it all off, the growth in the 
power of undemocratic, unelected "quangos" -- quasi-autonomous 
nongovernmental organizations -- of which there are now hundreds in Britain.

We also have evidence of something that, in the wake of the cartoon 
fracas across the Muslim world, should interest us all: the Western 
world's growing inability to deal with its own offensive, insulting and 
racially or ethnically controversial debates. We don't, for the most 
part, burn flags, storm embassies or hang foreign prime ministers in 
effigy when someone offends the general public's sensibilities, which is 
an extremely good thing. But neither does it seem right that an 
unelected committee should prevent the elected mayor of London from 
doing his job, just because that mayor is unpleasant and offensive (and 
I can personally testify that he is both). Surely it's the voters' job 
to weigh Livingstone's behavior against the fact, conceded by all, that 
he has improved the flow of London traffic.

It is not directly analogous, but the recent imprisonment of historian 
David Irving is troubling in some of the same ways. In a Vienna court 
last month, Irving pleaded guilty to Holocaust denial -- a crime in 
Austria -- and received a three-year jail sentence. There is no question 
that Irving, too, is an unpleasant man. Irving, an extremely 
knowledgeable historian and the author of more than two dozen books on 
Nazi Germany, is nevertheless willing to twist that knowledge when the 
mood takes him, largely to create outrage and direct attention to 
himself. He has claimed, at times, that the Holocaust never took place; 
that it did take place but Hitler knew nothing about it; that millions 
died, but not at Auschwitz, and so on. He enjoys lecturing to Austrian 
and German neo-Nazis. He once joked -- prepare to be really, really 
offended -- that more people had died in the back of Ted Kennedy's car 
than in Nazi gas chambers.

Still, I'm with Deborah Lipstadt, the historian whom Irving 
unsuccessfully sued for libel several years ago and who proved in the 
course of that trial, that he had altered facts and massaged documents 
to make his pro-Nazi case. "The way of fighting Holocaust deniers is 
with history and truth," she said -- not jail sentences.

Maybe it's no coincidence that both of these stories somehow involve 
World War II, a tragedy from which Europe, and indeed all of the West, 
has never recovered. Maybe it's no coincidence that they both involve 
political mavericks, far left and far right, who aren't influenced by 
normal political constraints. Or maybe they're just a sign of the times. 
In a world in which a Jewish man can be found tortured and murdered 
outside Paris, as one was last week, in which imams issue fatwas against 
cartoonists, in which the golden domes of mosques explode and in which 
religious intolerance seems to be exploding too -- it's becoming far 
harder for everyone else to see the value of uninhibited, unrestrained 
and deeply offensive free speech.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/28/AR2006022801004.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060301/3879c11e/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Wed Mar  1 05:09:34 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Wed, 01 Mar 2006 08:09:34 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] When Politics Defeats Science - Susan F. Wood -
	Washington Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <44059D0E.3080106@comcast.net>

When Politics Defeats Science

By Susan F. Wood
Wednesday, March 1, 2006; A17

Since my resignation six months ago as assistant commissioner of women's 
health at the Food and Drug Administration, I have been traveling around 
the country meeting with men and women, fellow scientists and health 
care professionals. I have shared my concerns that our federal health 
agencies seem increasingly unable to operate independently and that this 
lack of independence compromises their mission of promoting public 
health and welfare.

At every stop I am reminded that whether it is the environment, energy 
policy, science education or public health, the American public expects 
our government to make the best decisions based on the best available 
evidence.

Yet, at a recent hearing of the House Appropriations subcommittee on 
labor, health and human services, we saw once again that this is not 
happening. Reps. Sam Farr (D-Calif.) and Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) 
questioned FDA acting commissioner Andrew C. von Eschenbach about the 
delay in approving the application to make Plan B emergency 
contraception available over the counter to women 17 and older. Von 
Eschenbach responded that the agency was carefully reviewing the 
thousands of comments received in response to last-minute concerns 
raised about the feasibility of making the same product available over 
the counter for most women but keeping it on prescription for young 
teens. This exchange confirmed my suspicion that, like his predecessor, 
von Eschenbach is unable or unwilling to let the science and the 
scientists guide FDA policy and decisions, and that the real answer as 
to whether the FDA will allow Plan B over the counter for those 17 and 
older is no.

Time and again in my travels I am asked, "What happened to derail Plan 
B?" I have to answer honestly that I don't know. The manufacturer agreed 
to take the "controversial" issue of young teens' access to emergency 
contraception off the table in 2004; now we are talking only about adult 
access to safe and effective contraception. Over 98 percent of adult 
women have used some form of contraception. So what is the objection?

Perhaps it is that posed by a small but vocal political minority that 
insists on labeling emergency contraception as abortion, or at least 
confusing the two. One of the main questions I hear is, "Does this pill 
cause an abortion?" In fact, the only connection this pill has with 
abortion is that it has the potential to prevent the need for one. 
Emergency contraceptive pills work exactly the same way as other birth 
control pills, and they do not interfere with or harm an existing 
pregnancy. Emergency contraception is simply a higher dose of daily 
birth control pills; it is not RU-486, the "abortion pill." Indeed, 
emergency contraception has been used as a method to prevent unintended 
pregnancies for decades by women who had physicians advise them on how 
many pills in their regular pill pack to take. So people who are 
comfortable with oral contraceptives as methods of contraception should 
be just as comfortable with emergency contraception.

Having spent 15 years working for the federal government, nearly five of 
which were at the FDA, I care deeply about what's happening in the 
federal agencies, particularly our health agencies. Nearly 25 cents of 
every consumer dollar is spent on products regulated by the Food and 
Drug Administration. We count on the FDA for the safety and 
effectiveness of our medicines, vaccines and medical devices, and for 
the safety of the blood and food supply. The American public does not 
want to -- nor should it -- have to think twice about the quality and 
reliability of information it is getting from the FDA. Its reputation as 
the international gold standard for regulatory agencies, and as a body 
that sets the bar very high when it comes to scientific evidence and 
integrity, is being put at risk over adult access to contraception. Why 
would the administration risk such a reputation over this?

Von Eschenbach could demonstrate his commitment to the FDA's 
independence and scientific integrity and help restore staff morale and 
waning public credibility by stopping the rulemaking process and 
approving access to Plan B for women 17 and older. Instead, he continues 
to hide behind a wasteful and pointless bureaucratic process. Congress 
needs to step in and restore the FDA's independence and its ability to 
make decisions based on the evidence.

It's been nearly three years since the first application came in to make 
Plan B emergency contraception available over the counter, so that 
women, including rape victims, could have a second chance to prevent an 
unintended pregnancy and the need for an abortion. How many chances have 
we missed? I still can't explain what is going on here, and why women 17 
and older are still denied this product in a timely way. When did adult 
access to contraception become controversial? And why have we allowed it 
to happen?

The writer is a former assistant commissioner of the Food and Drug 
Administration and is a senior policy adviser to the Reproductive Health 
Technologies Project.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/28/AR2006022801027.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060301/b74b2a37/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Wed Mar  1 05:10:45 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Wed, 01 Mar 2006 08:10:45 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Good Nukes,
	Bad Nukes - David Ignatius - Washington Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <44059D55.6060400@comcast.net>

Good Nukes, Bad Nukes

By David Ignatius
Wednesday, March 1, 2006; A17

Juxtaposed this week are the two poles of the emerging world: India and 
Iran. They are alpha and omega, the dream and the nightmare. One 
symbolizes the promise of globalization, the other the threat of global 
disorder.

What they share, unfortunately, is a passion to be members of the 
nuclear club. India has nuclear weapons; Iran wants them. Between them 
stands the United States, trying to set rules that will apply to both -- 
rewarding the good boy while maintaining an ability to punish the bad one.

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously observed that intelligence "is the ability 
to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time." That has always 
seemed to me like an argument for enlightened hypocrisy. And maybe it's 
the best explanation for why we should say yes to India's nukes and no 
to Iran's. The two cases are different because -- they're different. The 
same rules don't apply to both; one has shown that it is benign and the 
other behaves like a global outlaw.

President Bush's trip to India this week sets the nuclear issue in all 
its hypocritical glory. The centerpiece of the visit, it is hoped, will 
be an agreement that, in effect, validates India's accession as a 
nuclear weapons state in exchange for its acceptance of new safeguards 
on its civilian nuclear program. An Iranian observing Bush's visit might 
conclude that the lesson is that if you can somehow manage to build a 
nuclear bomb despite the West's antiproliferation efforts, you will 
eventually get away with it.

Iran would be dangerously mistaken if it made that assumption. The real 
lesson may be that rules are sometimes less important than behavior. The 
world is ready to accept India as a nuclear power because its actions 
have given other nations confidence that it seeks to play a stabilizing 
role. A world where behavior matters gets the incentives right: It 
forces Iran to demonstrate its reliability so that, over time, it can be 
seen in the same league as India and Pakistan.

One common thread in U.S. policy toward India and Iran is the insistence 
that enrichment and reprocessing of nuclear fuel be under some form of 
international supervision. The agreement Bush is seeking during his trip 
-- to separate India's civilian and military nuclear programs -- 
embodies that idea. So does Russia's proposal to provide enrichment for 
Iran's nuclear program. Iran suggested last weekend that it might accept 
this plan. Most observers remain dubious, but if Iran is really willing 
to outsource its civilian nuclear fuel, that might be a breakthrough.

The Bush administration is weighing a more ambitious idea that all 
nuclear enrichment and reprocessing should be capped -- so that no new 
country can join the club. Sen. Richard Lugar has submitted such a 
proposal, based on suggestions from Ashton B. Carter, a Harvard 
University expert in nuclear policy. Under the Lugar plan, countries 
that forgo their enrichment and reprocessing programs would have 
guaranteed access to nuclear fuel at reasonable prices. Mohamed 
ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, proposes 
to take internationalization of fuel supplies a step further -- so that 
all enrichment and reprocessing would be under the IAEA's control.

How can the world foster civilian nuclear power without further 
proliferation of weapons? That conundrum was the starting point for the 
drafters of the Non-Proliferation Treaty in the 1960s, and it has become 
more urgent today. There's an emerging consensus that nuclear power is 
the best way for China and India to modernize without adding 
disastrously to global warming. John Ritch, head of the World Nuclear 
Association in London, argues that the world will need 10,000 civilian 
nuclear reactors by the end of the century, compared with 440 today. How 
can we manage this explosion of nuclear power while avoiding a mushroom 
cloud? That's the backdrop to our debate about India and Iran.

Harvard's Graham Allison tells his students that the Iranian nuclear 
issue is a "slow-motion Cuban missile crisis." By that, he means that 
miscalculation on either side could have catastrophic consequences for 
the world. Allison's famous study of the missile crisis, "Essence of 
Decision," explained how both firmness and flexibility allowed President 
Kennedy to avoid war. One of Kennedy's secrets, it could be argued, was 
a policy of strategic hypocrisy -- responding to a constructive Soviet 
message that could resolve the crisis and ignoring a subsequent 
belligerent one.

The West is still waiting for the constructive message from Tehran. In 
the meantime, we should all learn to live with a policy that says yes to 
India and no to Iran.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/28/AR2006022801010.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060301/f697ac1a/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Wed Mar  1 05:15:40 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Wed, 01 Mar 2006 08:15:40 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Halliburton strikes again - Derrick Z. Jackson - Boston
	Globe Op-Ed
Message-ID: <44059E7C.9020106@comcast.net>


  Halliburton strikes again

By Derrick Z. Jackson  |  March 1, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

HALLIBURTON'S LATEST outrageous withdrawal from its ATM (American 
Taxpayer Machine) cries out for the Great Communicator. Back in 1976 
when Ronald Reagan first ran for president, he stoked the anger of 
largely white audiences with brutal exaggerations of the undeserving 
black and brown poor.

He talked of a ''welfare queen" in Chicago who collected $150,000 under 
80 different names. It turned out that she collected only $8,000 under 
four names. In a Florida campaign stop, Reagan bemoaned how hardworking 
people wait in line at grocery stores while a ''strapping black buck" 
purchased T-bone steaks with food stamps. It was code language in 
Florida, where Reagan's Republican state campaign manager told The New 
York Times, ''We are wasting our time to get black people registered."

Reagan said of a housing development in East Harlem, ''If you are a slum 
dweller, you can get an apartment with 11-foot ceilings, with a 20-foot 
balcony, a swimming pool and gymnasium, laundry room and play room, and 
the rent begins at $113.20 and that includes utilities." Less than 
one-sixth of the 656 units had a kitchen or living room with a high 
ceiling, the rent would have been four times more, and the pool and gym 
were a community center for 200,000 area residents, mostly Latino and 
African-American.

Reagan won the presidency in 1980 partially on that attack on the poor. 
His lasting imagery led to sweeping cutbacks in welfare under President 
Clinton, a Democrat, and in the current budget cuts to the poor by 
Republican President Bush. But Halliburton, one of our greatest cheats 
of the last quarter-century, continues to skip to the head of the 
grocery line for tax bones as the poor continue to be axed to bare bones.

Even though an Army audit determined that $263 million of charges by 
Halliburton were exaggerated or unjustified on its $2.41 billion no-bid 
contract for fuel deliveries and oil equipment repair in Iraq, the Army 
said it will pay all but $10.1 million of it. The Times reported Monday 
that the decision to withhold only 3.8 percent of the charges in 
question is far below the average of questionable charges that are 
withheld. That average has ranged between 56.4 percent and 75.2 percent 
over the last three years.

Audits and averages rarely matter with Halliburton. While Reagan 
galvanized the middle class against laundry rooms for the poor, 
Halliburton is the company whose subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown & Root, 
charged you and me $100 for a bag of laundry and $45 for a case of soda 
in Iraq.

During Reagan's tenure, Halliburton and KBR agreed to pay $750 million 
to settle a lawsuit over letting costs of a nuclear power plant in Texas 
skyrocket five times to $5.5 billion. Halliburton exported oil-field 
equipment to Libya despite a US trade ban. It ended up paying $3.8 
million in fines. The government said some of the equipment Halliburton 
shipped could have been for nuclear weapons.

It is the company that had to pay $7.5 million in fines to settle with 
the Securities and Exchange Commission over accounting practices in the 
late 1990s that boosted its bottom line. Vice President Dick Cheney was 
Halliburton's CEO at the time but was not charged with any wrongdoing. 
It is the company that had to pay back the government on separate 
occasions $6.3 million, $11.4 million, and $16 million for kickbacks and 
overcharges on fuel deliveries and meals for troops in Kuwait and Iraq.

Halliburton has admitted to $2.4 million in bribes to the Nigerian 
government in exchange for favorable tax treatment. None of this matters 
with a company that spent $1.4 million over the last decade, according 
to the Center for Responsive Politics, to get friendly key Republicans 
into office and has its former CEO as vice president. The reason the 
Army capitulated on its own audit is that everyone knows -- without 
anyone having to say it -- the cost of criticizing Cheney's former company.

Bunnatine Greenhouse, the Army Corps' top contracting officer, was 
demoted last year after saying the no-bid, multi-billion-dollar 
contracts to Halliburton represented ''the most blatant and improper 
contract abuse I have witnessed during the course of my professional 
career."

It is no small accident that Greenhouse happens to be a black woman. A 
quarter-century of presidents and the media made black women the face of 
welfare queens. When a black woman blew the whistle on some of the worst 
of our white welfare kings, it was still the black woman who was treated 
like a fraud.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/01/halliburton_strikes_again/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060301/ea3cd449/attachment-0001.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Wed Mar  1 05:18:25 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Wed, 01 Mar 2006 08:18:25 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Freedom of hate speech - Jeff Jacoby - Boston Globe Op-Ed
Message-ID: <44059F21.3030902@comcast.net>


  Freedom of hate speech

By Jeff Jacoby  |  March 1, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

FUNNY PEOPLE, the Austrians. If you're Kurt Waldheim -- a former Nazi 
military officer linked to a genocidal massacre during World War II -- 
they elect you president. But if you're David Irving -- a British author 
who claimed that there never was a Nazi genocide during World War II -- 
they throw you in the slammer.

On second thought, not funny at all. Austria disgraced itself when it 
elected Waldheim president in 1986, apparently unconcerned by the 
revelation that he had served in a German military unit responsible for 
mass murder in the Balkans and been listed after the war as a wanted 
criminal by the UN War Crimes Commission. In a very different way it 
disgraced itself again last week, when a Vienna court sentenced Irving, 
a racist and an anti-Semite, to three years in prison for denying that 
the Nazis annihilated 6 million European Jews.

Irving is a man of great intellectual gifts who devoted his life to a 
grotesque and evil project: rehabilitating the reputation of Hitler and 
the Third Reich. Necessarily, that meant denying the Holocaust and 
ridiculing those who suffered in it, and Irving has long done so with 
relish. ''I don't see any reason to be tasteful about Auschwitz. It's 
baloney, it's a legend," he told a Canadian audience in September 1991. 
''There are so many Auschwitz survivors going around -- in fact the 
number increases as the years go past, which is biologically very odd to 
say the least -- I'm going to form an association of Auschwitz 
Survivors, Survivors of the Holocaust, and Other Liars, or A-S-S-H-O-L-S."

Presumably Irving had in mind people like my father, whose arm bears to 
this day the number A-10502, tattooed there in blue ink on May 28, 1944, 
the day he and his family were transported to Auschwitz. My father's 
parents, David and Leah Jakubovic, and his youngest brother and sister, 
Alice, 8, and Yrvin, 10, were not tattooed; Jews deemed too old or too 
young to work were sent immediately to the gas chambers. His teenage 
siblings, Zoltan and Franceska, were tattooed and, like him, put to work 
as slave laborers. Zoltan was killed within days; Franceska lasted a few 
months longer. Of the seven members of the Jakubovic family sent to 
Auschwitz in the spring of 1944, only my father was alive in the spring 
of 1945.

So on a personal level, the prospect of David Irving spending his next 
three years in a prison cell is something over which I will lose no 
sleep. He is a repugnant, hate-filled liar, who even as a child was 
enamored of the Nazis and had a pronounced cruel streak.

But as a matter of law and public policy, Irving's sentence is 
deplorable. The opinions he expressed are vile, and his arguments about 
the Holocaust are ludicrous. But governments have no business 
criminalizing opinions and arguments, not even those that are vile or 
ludicrous. To be sure, freedom of speech is not absolute; laws against 
libel, death threats, and falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater are 
both reasonable and necessary. But free societies do not throw people in 
prison for giving offensive speeches or spouting historical lies.

Austria, the nation that produced Hitler and cheered the Anschluss, may 
well believe that its poisoned history requires a strong antidote. 
Punishing anyone who ''denies, grossly trivializes, approves, or seeks 
to justify" the Holocaust or other Nazi crimes may seem a small price to 
pay to keep would-be totalitarians and hatemongers at bay. But a 
government that can make the expression of Holocaust denial a crime 
today can make the expression of other offensive opinions a crime tomorrow.

Americans, for whom the First Amendment is a birthright, should 
understand this instinctively. ''If there is any principle of the 
Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other 
it is the principle of free thought," wrote Supreme Court Justice Oliver 
Wendell Holmes Jr. in 1928. ''Not free thought for those who agree with 
us, but freedom for the thought that we hate."

It is popular in some circles to argue that the United States should do 
certain things -- adopt single-payer health insurance, abolish capital 
punishment, etc. -- to conform to the practice in other democracies. 
Those who find that a persuasive argument might consider that Irving is 
behind bars today because Austria doesn't have a First Amendment. 
Neither do Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Israel, 
Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, or Switzerland -- all of which 
have made Holocaust denial a crime.

''Freedom for the thought we hate" is never an easy sell, but without it 
there can be no true liberty. David Irving is a scurrilous creep, but he 
doesn't belong in prison. Austria should let him go free -- not for his 
sake, but for Austria's.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/01/freedom_of_hate_speech/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060301/2dca30d4/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Wed Mar  1 08:08:18 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Wed,  1 Mar 2006 16:08:18 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: In Medicare Maze,
	Some Find They're Tangled in Two Drug Plans
Message-ID: <20060301160818.401012370B1@lax-gw01.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

NATIONAL | March 1, 2006
In Medicare Maze, Some Find They're Tangled in Two Drug Plans
By ROBERT PEAR
A result of "computer glitches," the situation leaves patients at risk of being charged two premiums or incorrect co-payments.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/01/national/01medicare.html?ex=1141880400&en=f88f4f7920ebec86&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060301/7a449f97/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Wed Mar  1 08:10:37 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Wed,  1 Mar 2006 16:10:37 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Mixed Section of Iraqis Sees Hope Dashed
Message-ID: <20060301161037.C522B24AFA9@lax-gw02.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

INTERNATIONAL / MIDDLE EAST | March 1, 2006
Mixed Section of Iraqis Sees Hope Dashed
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
Sunnis, Shiites and Christians live side by side in Zayuna. They felt immune to sectarian violence until the neighborhood exploded.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/01/international/middleeast/01neighborhood.html?ex=1141880400&en=215d51a271d4bfd8&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060301/3d20353d/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Wed Mar  1 08:11:49 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Wed,  1 Mar 2006 16:11:49 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: For Some, the War Won't End
Message-ID: <20060301161149.0B2A883CFD@lax-gw03.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

OPINION | March 1, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor: For Some, the War Won't End
By SALLY SATEL
More rigor in diagnosing post-traumatic stress disorder will conserve resources for veterans who are truly deserving.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/01/opinion/01satel.html?ex=1141880400&en=7d69f219d823be0b&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060301/f0a21f8e/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Wed Mar  1 08:15:42 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Wed,  1 Mar 2006 16:15:42 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Vermont Campaign Limits Get Cool Reception
	at Court
Message-ID: <20060301161542.43F272370BF@lax-gw01.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

god bless Vermont


WASHINGTON / WASHINGTON SPECIAL | March 1, 2006
Vermont Campaign Limits Get Cool Reception at Court
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
Vermont's aggressive effort to drive much private money out of politics appeared unlikely to withstand the Supreme Court's scrutiny.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/01/politics/politicsspecial1/01campaign.html?ex=1141880400&en=b3f892f4a516e279&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060301/3f403d7f/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Wed Mar  1 08:17:20 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: 1 Mar 2006 16:17:20 -0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] Headlines for March 1, 2006
Message-ID: <20060301161720.13537.qmail@trinity.democracynow.org>

Mike Blaxill  ( mblaxill at yahoo.com )
sent you this story from democracynow.org




+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  Headlines for March 1, 2006
|  http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/01/1446248
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+


- Latest Iraq Violence Kills 23, Wounds 58 
- Over 100,000 Protest President Bush in India 
- Bush Makes Unannounced 5-Hour Stopover In Afghanistan 
- Islamic Jihad Commander Killed in Gaza Airstrike
- Poll: 72% of US Soldiers in Iraq Want Exit Within Year
- Study: One in Three Iraq Vets Seek Mental Health Treatment
- Ex-Intel Officials Say White House Ignored Insurgency Warnings
- Gonzales Suggests Spy Program May Be More Extensive
This story continues at: 
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/01/1446248


From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Wed Mar  1 08:18:20 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: 1 Mar 2006 16:18:20 -0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track your
	Every Move with Radio Frequency Identification
Message-ID: <20060301161820.13766.qmail@trinity.democracynow.org>

Mike Blaxill  ( mblaxill at yahoo.com )
sent you this story from democracynow.org




+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track your Every Move with Radio Frequency Identification
|  http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/01/1447202
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+


We speak with Liz McIntyre, author of "Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track your Every Move with RFID" that examines radio frequency identification - a technology that uses tiny computer chips to track items at distance. Major corporations are working right now to install RFIDs on all consumer products. What about in you arm? Or in your kids? We also speak with freelance journalist Annalee Newitz who recently had an RFID implanted in her arm.
This story continues at: 
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/01/1447202


From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Wed Mar  1 08:35:07 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Wed,  1 Mar 2006 16:35:07 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Senate Panel Approves Modest Curbs on
	Lobbyists
Message-ID: <20060301163507.27B9211F9D6@lax-gw07.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

"Modest?" "MODEST?!"


WASHINGTON | March 1, 2006
Senate Panel Approves Modest Curbs on Lobbyists
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Congress took its first step toward revamping lobbying law, but the measure did not include the tough restrictions that some lawmakers had proposed.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/01/politics/01lobby.html?ex=1141880400&en=d818553d360c7d94&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060301/caecf533/attachment-0001.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Wed Mar  1 08:35:57 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Wed,  1 Mar 2006 16:35:57 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: New Concerns on Port Deal Are Raised in
	Congress
Message-ID: <20060301163557.2DCF4237198@lax-gw01.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

WASHINGTON | March 1, 2006
New Concerns on Port Deal Are Raised in Congress
By CARL HULSE
Senate Democrats seized on a report that the parent company of state-owned Dubai Ports World honors an Arab boycott of Israel.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/01/politics/01port.html?ex=1141880400&en=6eca58afb2647307&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060301/33baefc4/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Wed Mar  1 08:36:39 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Wed,  1 Mar 2006 16:36:39 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Bill May Undo States' Rules on Safe Food
Message-ID: <20060301163639.BC0AF11FA8A@lax-gw07.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

What ever happened to this Administration's ballyhooing of "state's rights?"


WASHINGTON | March 1, 2006
Bill May Undo States' Rules on Safe Food
By MARIAN BURROS
The House is expected to vote Thursday on a bill that would pre-empt all state food safety regulations that are more stringent than federal standards.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/01/politics/01food.html?ex=1141880400&en=5f1b54eec25c2e2d&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060301/bcf5eedc/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Wed Mar  1 08:38:36 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Wed,  1 Mar 2006 16:38:36 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: City Council to Fault 9/11 Cleanup
Message-ID: <20060301163836.DD8BE3AE824@lax-gw06.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

A "scolding?" A "SCOLDING?!" They lied, causing the unnecessary health problems - and deaths - of hundreds of people, and they get "scolded?"


NEW YORK REGION | March 1, 2006
City Council to Fault 9/11 Cleanup
By ANTHONY DEPALMA
New York's City Council will condemn the way the Environmental Protection Agency has handled environmental and health issues at the World Trade Center site.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/01/nyregion/01dust.html?ex=1141880400&en=252dd9435f2390d9&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060301/1c9abd40/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Wed Mar  1 08:38:55 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Wed,  1 Mar 2006 16:38:55 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Iraq on the Brink
Message-ID: <20060301163855.CB221249DBE@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

OPINION | March 1, 2006
Editorial: Iraq on the Brink

Iraq's elected leaders can still save their country from civil war. They must now prove that they want to.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/01/opinion/01wed1.html?ex=1141880400&en=0beb4760db14b4ce&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060301/d81611e4/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Wed Mar  1 08:39:03 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Wed,  1 Mar 2006 16:39:03 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: The Texas Gerrymander
Message-ID: <20060301163903.7B47524AFF7@lax-gw02.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

OPINION | March 1, 2006
Editorial: The Texas Gerrymander

The Supreme Court should strike down the redrawing of election districts in Texas in 2003.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/01/opinion/01wed2.html?ex=1141880400&en=e5b550af6010d740&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060301/e33633f7/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Wed Mar  1 08:39:20 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Wed,  1 Mar 2006 16:39:20 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Thinking the Unthinkable on Iran (6 Letters)
Message-ID: <20060301163920.D035224AFA9@lax-gw02.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

What we're saying...


OPINION | March 1, 2006
Thinking the Unthinkable on Iran (6 Letters)

To the Editor:.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/01/opinion/l01iran.html?ex=1141880400&en=16310b490aa2e78a&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060301/5e7288ed/attachment.htm 

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Wed Mar  1 11:48:40 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Wed, 01 Mar 2006 11:48:40 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Who's Afraid of a Gas Tax? By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Message-ID: <C02B3A98.29948%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 1, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Who's Afraid of a Gas Tax?
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

My gut told me this was the case, but it's great to see it confirmed by the
latest New York Times/CBS News poll: Americans not only know that our oil
addiction is really bad for us, but they would be willing to accept a
gasoline tax if some leader would just frame the stakes for the country the
right way.

I am sure one reason President Bush suddenly chose to build his State of the
Union address around ending our oil addiction and moving toward a
renewable-energy future was because his private polling told him the same
thing. But Mr. Bush simply occupied this ground rhetorically ? before
Democrats could get there ? without actually offering a real solution.

The only real solution is raising our gasoline tax, which is a paltry 18.4
cents a gallon and has not been increased since 1993. Only if the total
price of gasoline is brought into the $3.50-to-$4-per-gallon range ? and
kept there ? will large numbers of Americans demand plug-in hybrid cars that
run on biofuels like ethanol. When large numbers of Americans do that, U.S.
automakers will move quickly down the innovation curve.

"Impossible," campaign consultants say. "A gasoline tax is political
suicide." No, it all depends on how you frame it.

The poll reported yesterday found that 60 percent of those polled, including
one-third of Republicans, disapproved of how Mr. Bush is handling our energy
crisis. Only 27 percent approved. Most want real action ? now. In the poll,
87 percent said Washington should require car manufacturers to produce more
efficient cars.

Of course, when asked simply whether they'd favor a gasoline tax, 85 percent
said no and only 12 percent said yes. But when the gas tax was framed as
part of a national strategy to achieve energy security and climate security,
pollsters got a very different answer. When the tax was presented as
reducing U.S. dependence on foreign oil, 55 percent favored it and 37
percent said no. And when asked about a gas tax that would help reduce
global warming, even more respondents supported it ? with 59 percent in
favor and 34 percent opposed.

And that is without a single Democrat or Republican leading on this issue!
Imagine if someone actually led?

Many Americans now understand: the Energy Question is the big strategic
issue of our time, overtaking 9/11 and the war on terrorism. If a leader
from either party would correctly frame the issue ? that a gas tax is the
single most important geostrategic move we could make today ? a solid
majority would support it.

Taking on this issue is the only hope the Bush team has for producing a
legacy out of its remaining years. And it is the Democrats' only hope for
taking on the Republicans with a big idea ? rather than relying on G.O.P.
scandals to win.

Sadly, both sides fear the other will smear them if they run on this issue.
O.K., say you're running for Congress and you propose a gas tax, but your
opponent denounces you as a wimpy, tree-hugging girlie-man, a
tax-and-spender. What do you say back?

I'd say: "Oh, really? I guess you think it is smart, tough and patriotic for
us to be financing both sides in the war on terrorism ? the U.S. military
with our tax dollars, and Al Qaeda, Iran and various hostile Islamist
charities with our energy purchases.

"Now how patriotic is that? I guess you haven't noticed that today's global
economic playing field has been leveled and that three billion new players
from India, China and Russia have walked onto the field, buying new cars,
homes and refrigerators. So if we don't break our addiction to crude oil,
we're going to heat up this planet so much faster ? enough to melt the North
Pole and make Katrina look like a summer breeze.

"Now how smart is that? I guess you don't realize that because of this
climate change and the rising cost of crude, green technologies are going to
be the industry of the 21st century, and a gasoline tax is the surest way to
make certain that our industries innovate faster and dominate innovation in
green cars, homes and appliances.

"Finally, I guess you haven't noticed that the wave of democratization that
seemed unstoppable after the fall of the Berlin Wall has run into a black
counterwave of petro-authoritarianism. This black wave of oil-financed
autocrats ? Venezuela, Russia, Iran, Nigeria, Burma, Saudi Arabia ? has all
the money in the world now to turn back the democratic tide. And you think
doing nothing to reverse that is patriotic? Shame on you, you unpatriotic
wimp. Green is the new red, white and blue, pal. What color are you?"

That's what I'd say.

Maureen Dowd is on a book tour.

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From michael at michaelbutler.com  Wed Mar  1 11:50:25 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Wed, 01 Mar 2006 11:50:25 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] What the P.L.O. Has to Offer By SAEB EREKAT
Message-ID: <C02B3B01.29949%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 1, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
What the P.L.O. Has to Offer
By SAEB EREKAT

Jericho, West Bank

MANY have argued that Hamas's winning of a decisive majority in the
Palestinian Parliament provides yet another setback for peace and democracy
in the Middle East. Some have even suggested that it vindicates Israeli
unilateralism. I, however, think the opposite is true: A negotiated and
lasting peace may now be closer than many of us could have imagined just
weeks ago.

The parliamentary elections could be seen as a referendum on the leadership
of President Mahmoud Abbas, who came to office a year ago after winning
nearly two-thirds of the popular vote. Mr. Abbas ran on a platform of job
creation, internal security and a negotiated resolution of the conflict with
Israel based on two states living side by side in peace.

Many people believe that Mr. Abbas did not deliver. Today, there are fewer
jobs, not more; security for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank,
including East Jerusalem, and the occupied Gaza Strip is worse, not better;
and negotiations, like the two-state solution, are stalled.

Mr. Abbas, however, is not ultimately to blame. When he called on Israel to
lift restrictions on Palestinian movement and trade within and between
Palestinian areas, Israel refused ? despite similar calls from the World
Bank, the United Nations, the European Union and Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice. The restrictions translated not just into more poverty but
also into less security, for Mr. Abbas could not even move police forces
within Palestinian territory.

President Abbas did deliver, and largely maintained, a "tahdia" ? a "period
of calm" between the Palestinian factions and Israel. And he was able to do
this despite scores of Palestinian deaths and several thousand military
raids and arrests that Israel conducted in violation of its agreement not to
undertake such activities. Israel also tightened its control over key
territory, resources and markets ? primarily occupied East Jerusalem ? that
we will need to build an economically viable state.

So, President Abbas, the leader of the Fatah party, made a set of campaign
promises; the opposite came to fruition; therefore, Palestinians elected the
only alternative: Hamas.

In reality, however, the vote was neither a rejection of President Abbas and
his peace program nor an endorsement of the Hamas charter. According to
recent polls, nearly 70 percent of Palestinians still support Mr. Abbas as
president. And 84 percent of Palestinians still want a negotiated peace
agreement with Israel. Even among Hamas voters, more than 60 percent of
those polled support an "immediate" resumption of negotiations.

The apparent contradiction between Palestinian support for peace and Hamas's
electoral victory is most easily explained by popular anger at the perceived
corruption of the never-before-challenged Fatah. Whereas Hamas will now have
to accept that the majority of its own voters reject its core ideology,
Fatah must now undertake a long-overdue housecleaning to eradicate
corruption and regain the trust of the electorate.

While most Palestinians remain committed to peace, they have become
disenchanted with a process that has brought them no closer than they were
in 1993 to their dream of freedom and independence. In the 12 years since
the Oslo process was initiated, Israel has become more entrenched in
Palestinian land than ever before. And the international community
acquiesced all the while. The electorate punished us all for allowing
conditions to deteriorate to this level.

Israel's accelerated colonization of the occupied West Bank ? through which
it has routed 80 percent of its wall ? isn't helping. Christian and Muslim
Palestinian communities are being destroyed to the absolute detriment of any
prospect of a two-state solution.

Recently, Israel's acting prime minister, Ehud Olmert, announced his plan to
determine unilaterally the final borders of Israel, while keeping control of
strategic parts of the occupied West Bank: East Jerusalem, the Jordan Valley
and three major illegal settlement blocs ? a plan that would result in the
effective end of our state-building project.

Israel's disingenuous pronouncements that it has "no partner" to negotiate
peace, and that Mr. Abbas is "no longer relevant" should be seen in that
unilateralist light. The Palestine Liberation Organization, which Mr. Abbas
also leads, is the sole representative of Palestinians everywhere and
therefore the only real negotiating partner. Its mandate remains unaffected
by the parliamentary elections.

If Israel continues to exploit the Hamas victory to claim that it has "no
partner" for talks and avoid negotiations ? and if the international
community remains indifferent ? the conflict can only deteriorate.

This would be an unforgivable loss for peace. While Palestinian democracy
poses no challenge to the resolution of the conflict, Israel's "no partner"
mantra and the political cowardice of the international community do.

The Hamas victory cannot be allowed to obscure the reality: the Palestinian
people want a negotiated peace, and in Mr. Abbas they have a Palestinian
Authority president and P.L.O. chairman who shares their view, enjoys a
mandate to act and has the ability to deliver. For those committed to
reaching a two-state solution, public support on both sides of the conflict
likely provides the last opportunity to see our vision materialize. Now we
all have a duty to respond immediately to our peoples' demands for a
negotiated peace.

Saeb Erekat is the chief negotiator of the Palestine Liberation
Organization.

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From michael at intrafi.com  Wed Mar  1 11:54:13 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael butler)
Date: Wed, 1 Mar 2006 14:54:13 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] TruthDig: Dubai: Great Theater
Message-ID: <4405fbe53de52@intrafi.com>

Hi,

 I read this on Truthdig and thought you would find it interesting.

 =-=-=-=-=-=-=
Dubai: Great Theater

It?s the season?s big hit, a zany farce with pompous officials in the Bush 
administration and their hysterical courtiers in the mass media asserting 
positions that are patently absurd but hilarious to watch. 

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060228_dubai_scheer_ports/

 Copyright ? 2006 Truthdig, L.L.C. All rights reserved.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=
This is a one-time mailing from
TruthDig.com
on behalf of the sender.
Please report any misuse to editor-at-truthdig.com

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060301/fe253d91/attachment.htm 

From geomilman at milman.com  Wed Mar  1 13:35:53 2006
From: geomilman at milman.com (George R. Milman)
Date: Wed, 1 Mar 2006 13:35:53 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] RATTLING THE CAGE: Arabs killing Arabs - Larry Derfner,
	THE JERUSALEM POST
Message-ID: <003201c63d78$1e3c8390$8c00a8c0@george>

Finally, the war in Iraq has come into focus. After nearly three years of
what seemed like swirling warfare, in which you couldn't figure out who was
the ally and who the enemy, and you didn't know where this was all supposed
to be heading, things have now fallen into place. 

Last week's destruction of a major Shi'ite shrine and the maddened
Sunni-Shi'ite bloodshed that followed make it clear what the war in Iraq has
turned into: a civil war between Arab Muslims, Shi'ites vs Sunnis. 

Furthermore, this is a civil war that appears out of control, certainly
beyond the control of the hopelessly undermanned American and British armies
over there. 

I can almost hear people cheering: "Hooray! The Arabs are slaughtering each
other again! We've won! Bring the troops home!" 

Many of the people I imagine cheering loudest are those who pushed hardest
for the war in the first place, including a lot of right-wing and even
not-so-right-wing Israelis and Diaspora Jews, along with evangelical
Christians who love Israel and hate Muslims. 

But they have lots of company; "Islamophobia" runs throughout the Western
world. 

ONE PERSON I don't imagine to be cheering with this crowd is President Bush.
For all his considerable faults, I don't think he's motivated by contempt
for Arabs or Muslims at all. Instead, I think he mistakenly went to war for
what he saw as America's security, and talked himself into believing it
would end in peace, freedom and democracy for Iraqis because, as silly as
this sounded, it was the only "exit strategy" anyone could come up with for
the war. 

But now, for the first time, a real exit strategy has presented itself. If,
until now, it seemed too dangerous for the US to pull its troops out of Iraq
because this would embolden the forces out to destroy Western civilization,
this danger seems to have lifted: The anti-Western forces fighting in Iraq
have become totally preoccupied with destroying each other. 

The now-decisive Sunni-Shi'ite divide even puts the West's two most feared
enemies, Iran (Shi'ite) and al-Qaida (Sunni), on opposite, warring sides. It
likewise splits all other anti-Western belligerents in Iraq such as the
Sunni insurgents and the Shi'ite army of Moqtada al-Sadr. 

THE INFLUENTIAL hawk Daniel Pipes, in his column in The Jerusalem Post and
New York Sun this week, argued that America and its supporters needn't feel
any guilt about the turn the war has taken. 

"Fixing Iraq is neither the coalition's responsibility nor its burden," he
wrote. "Americans, Britons and others cannot be tasked with resolving
Sunni-Shi'ite difficulties." And while he allowed that the unfolding civil
war was a "humanitarian tragedy," Pipes listed several strategic benefits it
offered the West, including safety: "[W]hen Sunni terrorists target Shi'ites
and vice-versa, non-Muslims are less likely to be hurt." 

This is the "realpolitik" view of the war in Iraq, and I'm afraid it's going
to spread like a fever. People are going to start saying, "Enough with this
democracy, it's safe to get out of there now, so what are we waiting for?" 

And I'm afraid Bush, with his approval rating on the floor, with no clue of
how to salvage the situation, and with the prospect of being branded by
history as a reckless, incompetent failure, will be mighty tempted to grasp
at this solution and speed up the withdrawal of troops. He might even see
this newly arrived exit strategy as a godsend. As for the untold millions of
innocent Sunnis and Shi'ites in Iraq and elsewhere who might get caught up
in a religious war, I'm sure they would be in Bush's prayers. 

AND ALL the while, many of Bush's supporters, gentiles and Jews, would be
taking satisfaction from all this Arab misery and the promise of much more
to come. It could turn into another Iran-Iraq war, which killed hundreds of
thousands of people in the 1980s, and which was welcomed by many right-wing
and not-so-right-wing Jews as a distraction for Arab enmity that otherwise
might be aimed at Israel. They also welcomed that war just for the simple
pleasure of knowing that somewhere Arabs were killing each other en masse. 

The civil war now going on in Iraq, though, is a very different moral issue.
If some people wanted to cheer on the Iran-Iraq war, that was their
affliction, but the point is that the Iraqis and Iranians started that war
themselves; nobody else had a responsibility to stop it. 

The civil war going on now in Iraq, however, is America's and Britain's
responsibility to stop. America and Britain, backed enthusiastically by
Israel, much of Diaspora Jewry and evangelical Christianity, decided to
invade Iraq without any invitation. Regardless of George W. Bush's and Tony
Blair's intentions, they initiated a war whose direct consequence was the
current, open-ended murderousness between the Shi'ites and Sunnis. 

So America and Britain can't wash their hands of this, not if they want to
go on being decent countries. They have to send however many troops and
spend however much money it takes to contain the violence. I would also say
that Israel and anybody who endorsed the war have a responsibility to give
America and Britain at least moral support for this cause. 

As for those Jews and gentiles who cheered on the invasion and who will now
be rooting for civil war, they're exempt from responsibility because they
had no morality to begin with. America and Britain launched a war in the
name of democracy and freedom for the Iraqi people. They can't abandon it
now in the name of realpolitik, with an exit strategy that improves as the
Iraqi civil war intensifies. 

It would be too evil to contemplate.

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060301/8c28ec19/attachment.htm 

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Wed Mar  1 13:42:14 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Wed, 01 Mar 2006 13:42:14 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Buttonwood  This time, emerging markets are for real
Message-ID: <C02B5536.29956%michael@michaelbutler.com>


[-71102]

Economist.com      
    

    
Click here to find out more!
About sponsorship

Buttonwood

The third wave
Feb 28th 2006 | SEOUL

From michael at intrafi.com  Wed Mar  1 13:45:07 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Wed, 1 Mar 2006 13:45:07 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] FT.com / Middle East & Africa / Iraq - American troops
	want swift pull-out from Iraq
Message-ID: <11704303.1141249507932.JavaMail.tomcat@localhost>



*Please note, the sender's email address has not been verified.



You have received the following link from michael at intrafi.com

 
********************
 
If you are having trouble with any of the links in this message, or if the URL's are not appearing as links, please follow the instructions at the bottom of this email.
 
Title: FT.com / Middle East & Africa / Iraq - American troops want swift pull-out from Iraq
 
  
Copy and paste the following into your Web browser to access the sent link:
http://www.emailthis.clickability.com/et/emailThis?clickMap=viewThis&etMailToID=1724289183&pt=Y
 

Copy and paste the following into your Web browser to SAVE THIS link:
http://www.savethis.clickability.com/st/saveThisPopupApp?clickMap=saveFromET&partnerID=1744&etMailToID=1724289183&pt=Y

 
Copy and paste the following into your Web browser to forward this link:
http://www.emailthis.clickability.com/et/emailThis?clickMap=forward&etMailToID=1724289183&partnerID=1744&pt=Y

  
 
********************


Email pages from any Web site you visit - add the EMAIL THIS button to your browser, copy and paste the following into your Web browser:
http://www.emailthis.clickability.com/et/emailThis?clickMap=browserButtons&pt=Y"


*********************



Instructions:
-----------------------------------------
If your e-mail program doesn't recognize Web addresses:
1. With your mouse, highlight the Web Address above. Be sure to highlight the entire Web address, even if it spans more than one line in your email. 
2. Select Copy from the Edit menu at the top of your screen. 
3. Launch your Web browser.
4. Paste the address into your Web browser by selecting Paste from the Edit menu.
5. Click Go or press Enter or Return on your keyboard. 
 
********************
 
 
 
 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060301/40489696/attachment.htm 

From Reeeees at aol.com  Wed Mar  1 08:03:34 2006
From: Reeeees at aol.com (Reeeees at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 1 Mar 2006 11:03:34 EST
Subject: [Mb-civic] Cancelled: "My Name Is Rachel Corrie"
Message-ID: <E1FEZAa-0003C9-Fg@elasmtp-kukur.atl.sa.earthlink.net>

A message crushed again
By Katharine Viner
March 1, 2006  |   Los Angeles Times

THE FLIGHTS for cast and crew had been booked;  the production schedule 
delivered; there were tickets advertised on the  Internet. The Royal Court Theatre 
production of "My Name Is Rachel Corrie," the  play I co-edited with Alan 
Rickman, was transferring later this month to the New  York Theatre Workshop, home 
of the musical "Rent," following two sold-out runs  in London and several 
awards.

We always felt passionately that it was a  piece of work that needed to be 
seen in the United States. Created from the  journals and e-mails of American 
activist Rachel Corrie, telling of her journey  from her adolescence in Olympia, 
Wash., to her death under an Israeli bulldozer  in Gaza at the age of 23, we 
considered it a unique American story that would  have a particular relevance 
for audiences in Rachel's home country. After all,  she had made her journey 
to the Middle East in order "to meet the people who are  on the receiving end 
of our [American] tax dollars," and she was killed by a  U.S.-made bulldozer 
while protesting the demolition of Palestinian  homes.

But last week the New York Theatre Workshop canceled the  production ? or, in 
its words, "postponed it indefinitely." The political  climate, we were told, 
had changed dramatically since the play was booked. As  James Nicola, the 
theater's 's artistic director, said Monday, "Listening in our  communities in 
New York, what we heard was that after Ariel Sharon's illness and  the election 
of Hamas in the recent Palestinian elections, we had a very edgy  situation." 
Three years after being silenced for good, Rachel was to be censored  for 
political reasons.

I'd heard from American friends that life for  dissenters had been getting 
worse ? wiretapping scandals, arrests for wearing  antiwar T-shirts, Muslim 
professors denied visas. But it's hard to tell from  afar how bad things really 
are. Here was personal proof that the political  climate is continuing to shift 
disturbingly, narrowing the scope of free debate  and artistic expression, in 
only a matter of weeks. By its own admission the  theater's management had 
caved in to political pressure. Rickman, who also  directed the show in London, 
called it "censorship born out of fear, and the New  York Theatre Workshop, the 
Royal Court, New York audiences ? all of us are the  losers."

It makes you wonder. Rachel was a young, middle-class,  scrupulously 
fair-minded American woman, writing about ex-boyfriends,  troublesome parents and a 
journey of political and personal discovery that took  her to Gaza. She worked 
with Palestinians and protested alongside them when she  felt their rights were 
denied. But the play is not agitprop; it's a complicated  look at a woman who 
was neither a saint nor a traitor, both serious and funny,  messy and 
talented and human. Or, in her own words, "scattered and deviant and  too loud." If a 
voice like this cannot be heard on a New York stage, what hope  is there for 
anyone else? The non-American, the nonwhite, the oppressed, the  truly other?

Rachel's words from Gaza are a bridge between these two  worlds ? and now 
that bridge is being severed. After the Hamas victory, the need  for 
understanding is surely greater than ever, and I refuse to believe that most  Americans 
want to live in isolation. One night in London, an Israeli couple,  members of 
the right-wing Likud party on holiday in Britain, came up after the  show, 
impressed. "The play wasn't against Israel; it was against violence," they  told 
Cindy Corrie, Rachel's mother.

I was particularly touched by a young  Jewish New Yorker from an Orthodox 
family who said he had been nervous about  coming to see "My Name Is Rachel 
Corrie" because he had been told that both she  and the play were viciously 
anti-Israel. But he had been powerfully moved by  Rachel's words and realized that he 
had, to his alarm, been dangerously  misled.

The director of the New York theater told the New York Times on  Monday that 
it wasn't the people who actually saw the play he was concerned  about.

"I don't think we were worried about the audience," he said. "I  think we 
were more worried that those who had never encountered her writing,  never 
encountered the piece, would be using this as an opportunity to position  their 
arguments."

Since when did theater come to be about those who don't  go to see it? If the 
play itself, as Nicola clearly concedes, is not the  problem, then isn't the 
answer to get people in to watch it, rather than  exercising prior censorship? 
George Clooney's outstanding movie "Good Night, and  Good Luck" recently 
reminded us of the importance of standing up to witch hunts;  one way to carry on 
that tradition would be to insist on hearing Rachel Corrie's  words ? words 
that only two weeks ago were deemed  acceptable.

KATHARINE VINER is the features editor at the Guardian in  London and the 
editor, with Alan Rickman, of "My Name is Rachel Corrie," which  premiered at the 
Royal Court Theatre in April 2005. Because of the cancellation  of the New 
York run, the play is transferring to the Playhouse Theatre in  London's West 
End. 
 
_http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-viner1mar01,1,2229722.
story_ 
(http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-viner1mar01,1,2229722.story) 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060301/9236353d/attachment.htm 

From EAN at sbcglobal.net  Wed Mar  1 14:20:46 2006
From: EAN at sbcglobal.net (EAN at sbcglobal.net)
Date: Wed, 01 Mar 2006 17:20:46 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Mb-civic Digest, Who's Afraid of a Gas Tax?
Message-ID: <AA-F23E371E9E70A23241C1616D524CA271-ZZ@trex-int.prodigy.net>

Friedman says some VERY good stuff for a 
change....except that utter bunk about lumping 
Venezuela and Chavez--where democracy is flourishing 
and where oil money is used to help the poor--in with 
Saudi Arabia!  What a dolt!
--Mha Atma

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 1, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Who's Afraid of a Gas Tax?
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

My gut told me this was the case, but it's great to 
see it confirmed by the
latest New York Times/CBS News poll: Americans not 
only know that our oil
addiction is really bad for us, but they would be 
willing to accept a
gasoline tax if some leader would just frame the 
stakes for the country the
right way.

I am sure one reason President Bush suddenly chose to 
build his State of the
Union address around ending our oil addiction and 
moving toward a
renewable-energy future was because his private 
polling told him the same
thing. But Mr. Bush simply occupied this ground 
rhetorically ? before
Democrats could get there ? without actually offering 
a real solution.

The only real solution is raising our gasoline tax, 
which is a paltry 18.4
cents a gallon and has not been increased since 1993. 
Only if the total
price of gasoline is brought into the $3.50-to-$4-per-
gallon range ? and
kept there ? will large numbers of Americans demand 
plug-in hybrid cars that
run on biofuels like ethanol. When large numbers of 
Americans do that, U.S.
automakers will move quickly down the innovation 
curve.

"Impossible," campaign consultants say. "A gasoline 
tax is political
suicide." No, it all depends on how you frame it.

The poll reported yesterday found that 60 percent of 
those polled, including
one-third of Republicans, disapproved of how Mr. Bush 
is handling our energy
crisis. Only 27 percent approved. Most want real 
action ? now. In the poll,
87 percent said Washington should require car 
manufacturers to produce more
efficient cars.

Of course, when asked simply whether they'd favor a 
gasoline tax, 85 percent
said no and only 12 percent said yes. But when the 
gas tax was framed as
part of a national strategy to achieve energy 
security and climate security,
pollsters got a very different answer. When the tax 
was presented as
reducing U.S. dependence on foreign oil, 55 percent 
favored it and 37
percent said no. And when asked about a gas tax that 
would help reduce
global warming, even more respondents supported it ? 
with 59 percent in
favor and 34 percent opposed.

And that is without a single Democrat or Republican 
leading on this issue!
Imagine if someone actually led?

Many Americans now understand: the Energy Question is 
the big strategic
issue of our time, overtaking 9/11 and the war on 
terrorism. If a leader
from either party would correctly frame the issue ? 
that a gas tax is the
single most important geostrategic move we could make 
today ? a solid
majority would support it.

Taking on this issue is the only hope the Bush team 
has for producing a
legacy out of its remaining years. And it is the 
Democrats' only hope for
taking on the Republicans with a big idea ? rather 
than relying on G.O.P.
scandals to win.

Sadly, both sides fear the other will smear them if 
they run on this issue.
O.K., say you're running for Congress and you propose 
a gas tax, but your
opponent denounces you as a wimpy, tree-hugging 
girlie-man, a
tax-and-spender. What do you say back?

I'd say: "Oh, really? I guess you think it is smart, 
tough and patriotic for
us to be financing both sides in the war on 
terrorism ? the U.S. military
with our tax dollars, and Al Qaeda, Iran and various 
hostile Islamist
charities with our energy purchases.

"Now how patriotic is that? I guess you haven't 
noticed that today's global
economic playing field has been leveled and that 
three billion new players
from India, China and Russia have walked onto the 
field, buying new cars,
homes and refrigerators. So if we don't break our 
addiction to crude oil,
we're going to heat up this planet so much faster ? 
enough to melt the North
Pole and make Katrina look like a summer breeze.

"Now how smart is that? I guess you don't realize 
that because of this
climate change and the rising cost of crude, green 
technologies are going to
be the industry of the 21st century, and a gasoline 
tax is the surest way to
make certain that our industries innovate faster and 
dominate innovation in
green cars, homes and appliances.

"Finally, I guess you haven't noticed that the wave 
of democratization that
seemed unstoppable after the fall of the Berlin Wall 
has run into a black
counterwave of petro-authoritarianism. This black 
wave of oil-financed
autocrats ? Venezuela, Russia, Iran, Nigeria, Burma, 
Saudi Arabia ? has all
the money in the world now to turn back the 
democratic tide. And you think
doing nothing to reverse that is patriotic? Shame on 
you, you unpatriotic
wimp. Green is the new red, white and blue, pal. What 
color are you?"

That's what I'd say.

Maureen Dowd is on a book tour.

* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company



From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Wed Mar  1 15:21:35 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (harry.sifton at sympatico.ca)
Date: Wed, 01 Mar 2006 23:21:35 GMT
Subject: [Mb-civic] Guardian Unlimited: Blaming the British
Message-ID: <20060301232135.2A9EE52EF0@mullet.gul3.gnl>

Harry spotted this on the Guardian Unlimited site and thought you should see it.

-------
Note from Harry:

History can be quite interesting.
-------

To see this story with its related links on the Guardian Unlimited site, go to http://www.guardian.co.uk

Blaming the British

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Wed Mar  1 15:44:01 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (harry.sifton at sympatico.ca)
Date: Wed, 01 Mar 2006 23:44:01 GMT
Subject: [Mb-civic] Guardian Unlimited: Don't mention the monarch
Message-ID: <20060301234401.DF8C8532DA@mullet.gul3.gnl>

Harry spotted this on the Guardian Unlimited site and thought you should see it.

To see this story with its related links on the Guardian Unlimited site, go to http://www.guardian.co.uk

Don't mention the monarch
Morocco's reconciliation process shows that, for its leaders, the past really is another country - they hope, writes Giles Tremlett
Wednesday March 01 2006
The Guardian


When Bara el Ghali took the stand to tell his terrible story of torture and imprisonment it was, without doubt, a unique event: an Arabic-speaking country, in this case Morocco, had set up a truth commission to spell out exactly how bad repression had been in the country over the final decades of the 20th century.

As Morocco headed towards this week's 50th anniversary of its independence, the commission, sponsored by King Mohammed VI, was an opportunity to heal old wounds left by his father, Hassan II. It would, its backers said, let Moroccans forget the past and look to the future.

People like Bara el Ghali were free to tell their stories, and were sometimes broadcast live on television as they did so. They could be watched on television sets in restaurants and cafeterias across the land.

"Not a single member of my family escaped detention," he explained. "They arrested 22 of us, with seven dying during the 25 years in jail."

Among the dead in the el Ghali family, which was suspected of sympathising with the Polisario Front movement, which claims independence for the Western Sahara, was a baby born in jail who lived just 46 days.

Arrested in 1976, Bara was released only in 1991. "That was even worse," he said. "I had lost everything and had to live off charity."

Twenty minutes each was not always enough for the hundreds of people with similar tales to tell, but it was a cathartic experience for them.

It was an attempt, at least, at getting over the "grey years", during which the regime of King Hassan II, who died in 1999, cracked down on his mainly leftwing critics.

The hearings were run by the Equity and Reconciliation Commission, headed by Driss Benzekri, who himself spent 17 years in prison. The idea was to break an ingrained habit of silence backed by fear.

"I wondered whether it was worth it, but I decided that the young people had to be told so that it would not happen again," Maria Ezzaouni, who was locked up and tortured after going on strike as a medical student, told journalists.

With al-Jazeera and other international Arabic-language channels also giving coverage, there were hopes that the ideals behind the inquiry would spread further.

"The impact of these hearings, televised live across Morocco, will be enormous, not only in the country but throughout the region," predicted Hanny Megally, director of the Middle East and North Africa programme at the International Centre for Transitional Justice, as the process got under way.

"It is almost unheard of in this part of the world for victims to be given an official platform to relate their experiences of abuse," he added. "In this respect, Morocco should be praised for breaking new ground."

In the end, the committee recognised that 322 people had been shot dead during demonstrations and another 174 had died after being arbitrarily detained. Others had simply disappeared, and of these, the secret graves of 85 victims were identified.

The commission said that a further 9,280 victims should be paid compensation.

But this was imperfect justice: victims were not allowed to name their torturers, who have escaped punishment and, in some cases, are still employees of the state.

Critics claim the hearings hide a process of self-amnesty by some of those responsible for what happened. They also say the number of dead and disappeared is much larger.

For those who think the book has now been closed on the past, there is always the present to worry about. The commission may have shone light on past abuses, but what about those still perpetrated by a regime run in part directly from the royal palace in Rabat?

"Human rights abuses continue in Morocco. The judiciary is still strictly controlled, the security forces still employ torture, and people still go to jail for writing and saying things deemed insulting to the monarchy," the New York Times commented in a recent editorial.

When 45 people were killed in a 2003 bomb attack in Casablanca, some 1,500 people were arrested and charged with involvement or other "terrorist" activities.

"At least 16 were sentenced to death and hundreds more to prison terms," reports Amnesty International. "Dozens of those sentenced said they had been tortured or ill treated, in some cases in secret detention, but investigations were generally not carried out into the allegations."

As part of his attempts to modernise Morocco, Mohammed VI commissioned a report that concluded last month that the country had suffered "poor political management" over much of the past 50 years.

The same report deemed some 47% of the population "poor or vulnerable", and the authors called for improvements all round. 

In a country where the prime minister and the ministers of the interior, foreign affairs and justice are directly named by the monarch, and where the king indicates every year which laws parliament is to pass, much of the responsibility for making those improvements happens to lie on a single pair of royal shoulders.

Morocco, however, is a country where monarchs are deemed to be above criticism - at least, until they are dead.

The Equity and Reconciliation Commission allowed Moroccans to pass judgement, however veiled, on Hassan II; it will be a long time, however, before they are free to say whatever they want about his son.

Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited


From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Wed Mar  1 17:46:15 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Wed, 1 Mar 2006 20:46:15 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] A Taliban at Yale
Message-ID: <000f01c63d9b$1b22ab80$5d3fe440@Harold>

The Freshman

Taliban in Luce Hall

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/26/magazine/26taliban.html?ei=5087&en=5d3dc452dd9b0e7a&ex=1156741200&nl=ep&emc=ep&pagewanted=print

Later H
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060301/96f5c4f5/attachment.htm 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Wed Mar  1 17:47:22 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Wed, 1 Mar 2006 20:47:22 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] @Times: 10 Most Read Articles From February
Message-ID: <001401c63d9b$4470dbb0$5d3fe440@Harold>

@Times - Inside NYTimes.com Newsletter
-


     
     
      
           Wednesday, March 1, 2006  
           
           
           
            Here are the 10 Most Read Articles on NYTimes.com from February. 

            1. White House Knew of Levee's Failure on Night of Storm 
            By ERIC LIPTON, Published: February 10, 2006 
            The Bush administration was alerted to broken levees and flooding in New Orleans hours after their collapse, documents show. 

            2. Fellow Hunter Shot by Cheney Suffers Setback 
            By ELISABETH BUMILLER and ANNE E. KORNBLUT, Published: February 15, 2006 
            The downturn in the 78-year-old's health significantly changed the tone of the White House reaction to the hunting accident. 

            3. Low-Fat Diet Does Not Cut Health Risks, Study Finds 
            By GINA KOLATA, Published: February 8, 2006 
            A large study has found that a low-fat diet has no effect in reducing the risk of getting cancer or heart disease. 

            4. U.S. Reclassifies Many Documents in Secret Review 
            By SCOTT SHANE, Published: February 21, 2006 
            At the National Archives, intelligence agencies have been removing from public access thousands of historical documents. 

            5. To: Professor at University.edu Subject: Why It's All About Me 
            By JONATHAN D. GLATER, Published: February 21, 2006 
            E-mail has made college professors more approachable, but many say it has made them too accessible, erasing boundaries that had kept students at a healthy distance. 

            6. The Freshman 
            By CHIP BROWN, Published: February 26, 2006 
            Rahmatullah Hashemi was the Taliban's chief spokesman abroad. So how did he end up at Yale? 

            7. After Neoconservatism 
            By FRANCIS FUKUYAMA, Published: February 19, 2006 
            A former neoconservative theorist argues that with the Iraq conflict, the ideology that won the cold war has come to threaten peace. Can a movement turn away from militarism and toward a more durable use of power? 

            8. Cyberthieves Silently Copy Your Passwords as You Type 
            By TOM ZELLER Jr., Published: February 27, 2006
            Software that copies users' keystrokes and sends the information to crooks may be the next big trend in cybercrime. 

            9. No End to Questions in Cheney Hunting Accident 
            By ANNE E. KORNBLUT and RALPH BLUMENTHAL, Published: February 14, 2006 
            The White House sought to explain why it took most of a day to disclose that the vice president accidentally shot a fellow hunter. 

            10. Some Democrats Are Sensing Missed Opportunities 
            ADAM NAGOURNEY and SHERYL GAY STOLBERG, Published: February 8, 2006 
            Heading into this year's elections, senior Democrats said that they sense they had failed to exploit Republican vulnerabilities.  
      

----------------------------------------------------------------------
          THEATER
           Julia Roberts makes her Broadway debut this spring. 
          . Special Section:
          Spring Theater 2006 


----------------------------------------------------------------------
          TRAVEL  
          . Cruise vacations for foodies 
          . The unspoiled nature of St. John 
          . This year's popular spring-break destinations for college students


----------------------------------------------------------------------
          MOVIES
           . What the Oscars host Jon Stewart has planned
          . Predictions on who will win Oscars
          . Complete coverage of the Oscars


----------------------------------------------------------------------
          E-MAIL NEWSLETTERS
           Are you
          receiving all of NYTimes.com's FREE e-mail newsletters? 
          Be sure to sign up for: 
          . Today's Headlines
          . Movies Update
          . DealBook
          . Breaking News Alerts


----------------------------------------------------------------------
           
       
      

       
     
         
     
      
      About This E-Mail
      Your registration to NYTimes.com included permission to send you information about new features and services. As a member of the BBBOnline Privacy Program and the TRUSTe privacy program, we are committed to protecting your privacy. Suggestions and feedback are welcome at feedback at nytimes.com. 

      To unsubscribe from @Times - Inside NYTimes.com, click here. 

      To change delivery or format options, update your e-mail address or sign up for newsletters, go to the E-mail Preferences page in our Member Center: http://www.nytimes.com/email.  

      NYTimes.com
      500 Seventh Ave.
      New York, N.Y. 10018 


       
     Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company  |  Privacy Policy
      
     

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060301/93669527/attachment.htm 

From newsletter at villagevoice.com  Wed Mar  1 21:50:11 2006
From: newsletter at villagevoice.com (Village Voice Newsletter)
Date: Thu, 02 Mar 2006 00:50:11 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Today's 'Voice': CIA 'Black Sites'
Message-ID: <20060302055011.89228.qmail@www3.villagevoice.com>

An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060302/cd53406b/attachment-0001.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Thu Mar  2 04:04:58 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Thu, 02 Mar 2006 07:04:58 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Video Shows Bush Being Warned on Katrina - Washington
	Post
Message-ID: <4406DF6A.5020900@comcast.net>

Video Shows Bush Being Warned on Katrina
Officials Detailed a Dire Threat to New Orleans

By Spencer S. Hsu and Linton Weeks
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, March 2, 2006; A01

A newly leaked video recording of high-level government deliberations 
the day before Hurricane Katrina hit shows disaster officials 
emphatically warning President Bush that the storm posed a catastrophic 
threat to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, and a grim-faced Bush 
personally assuring state leaders that his administration was "fully 
prepared" to help.

The footage, taken of a videoconference of federal and state officials 
on Aug. 28, offered an unusually vivid glimpse of real-time decision 
making by an administration that has vigorously guarded its internal 
deliberations.

Reactions to the tape, which was obtained by the Associated Press, 
varied widely -- reflecting the intense debate that has brewed for six 
months about who should be held accountable for an initially flaccid 
government response to the catastrophe.

Democrats said the tape shows Bush being warned in urgent terms of the 
potential magnitude of the storm, making it less defensible that the 
administration did not act with more dispatch to be ready.

White House officials said the footage reinforces what they have said to 
critics: that the president, at his Texas vacation home, was fully 
engaged from the opening hours of the emergency, while leaving 
operational decisions to the agencies in charge.

Bush was dialed into the conference Sunday at noon Eastern time from a 
meeting room at his ranch in Crawford, with Deputy Chief of Staff Joseph 
Hagin at his side.

"I want to assure the folks at the state level that we are fully 
prepared to not only help you during the storm, but we will move in 
whatever resources and assets we have at our disposal after the storm," 
Bush said, gesturing with both hands for emphasis on the digital 
recording. Neither Bush nor Hagin asked questions, however.

Then-Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael D. Brown, who 
joined the call from Washington, and Max Mayfield, head of the National 
Hurricane Center in Miami, briefed participating federal and state 
officials in explicit terms.

"This is, to put it mildly, the big one," Brown said. "Everyone within 
FEMA is now virtually on call."

Brown warned that thousands of New Orleans residents were gathering in a 
shelter of last resort at the Louisiana Superdome, which he said was 
about 12 feet below sea level.

"I don't know what the heck we're going to do for that, and I also am 
concerned about that roof," Brown said. "Not to be kind of gross here, 
but I'm concerned about [medical and mortuary disaster team] assets and 
their ability to respond to a catastrophe within a catastrophe."

Mayfield cited the 1992 storm that inflicted $20 billion of damage on 
South Florida.

"This hurricane is much larger than Hurricane Andrew ever was," Mayfield 
said. "I also want to make absolutely clear to everyone that the 
greatest potential for large loss of life is still in the coastal areas 
from the storm surge."

Congressional investigators previously released transcripts of the daily 
meetings, and their substance and other warnings of the danger to New 
Orleans have been widely reported.

The fresh footage, however, was prominently aired on evening television 
news broadcasts and threatened to renew public scrutiny of the Bush 
administration, which issued a report last week containing 125 
recommendations to improve U.S. disaster readiness but little focus on 
the action of senior presidential aides.

White House spokesman Trent Duffy said yesterday the footage showed that 
Bush was heavily engaged while leaving "battlefield" decisions to his 
commanders.

"The president had multiple conversations, phone calls and briefings 
both big and small throughout this process, and his whole priority was 
making sure that the federal assets were brought to bear to help the 
people of New Orleans," Duffy said.

He added: "That's not to say the president was satisfied with the 
federal response. He wasn't. He said as much, and we just had a 
200-page-plus federal report discussing the things the president needs 
to do to make our emergency response better."

Duffy noted that a transcript of the Aug. 29 conference showed Hagin 
asking about the status of the Superdome and New Orleans levees. In the 
same conference, Brown said he spoke twice that morning with Bush, who 
he said was "very engaged" and asking those same questions and others 
about city hospitals.

Duffy also said that Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D) 
personally discounted a report of a catastrophic levee break as 
"unconfirmed" in a noon call. "I think we have not breached the levees 
at this point in time," Blanco said, but she added that city flooding 
was severe.

Brown, in an interview yesterday, agreed that Bush was engaged in the 
emergency but said the president was overconfident of FEMA's 
capabilities. He dismissed as "baloney" assertions by Homeland Security 
Secretary Michael Chertoff that "a fog of war" impaired decision making 
in Washington.

"There was this fog of bureaucracy," Brown said, repeating his call to 
restore FEMA to independent, Cabinet-level status outside the 
department. "People either didn't want to know about it, or didn't want 
to deal with it."

Brown said the video showed "I was doing everything I could," whatever 
his mistakes. "My entreaties to the White House about the problems that 
FEMA was having were falling on deaf ears," he said. "They thought I 
could always pull a rabbit out of the hat."

In New Orleans, Mayor C. Ray Nagin (D) was visibly shocked when shown 
the recording by reporters.

It "seems they were aware of everything . . . that we would need lots of 
help," Nagin said after a post-Mardi Gras news conference. "Why was the 
response so slow?"

When the video ended, Nagin turned away and said, "Oh, God."

Democrats in Washington issued statements newly critical of the 
government response.

Sen. Mary L. Landrieu (D-La.) expressed alarm at "what the president 
actually knew and when he knew it."

Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.), ranking Democrat on a Senate panel 
investigating the storm response, said the video underscored the 
committee's findings that "government at all levels was forewarned of 
the catastrophic nature of the approaching storm and did painfully 
little to be ready."

The Department of Homeland Security has provided transcripts but not 
recordings of the videoconferences to Congress, and the AP did not 
report how it obtained the footage. A congressional source, speaking on 
the condition of anonymity because investigators were seeking the tape, 
said state officials may have recorded the meetings.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/01/AR2006030101731.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060302/4a3ddb3b/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Thu Mar  2 04:06:53 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Thu, 02 Mar 2006 07:06:53 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] U.S. Reviewing 2nd Dubai Firm - Washington Post
Message-ID: <4406DFDD.9070405@comcast.net>

U.S. Reviewing 2nd Dubai Firm
Israeli Deal Also Faces Security Check

By Jonathan Weisman and Susan Schmidt
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, March 2, 2006; A01

The Bush administration, stung by the public outcry over the Dubai port 
deal, has launched a national security investigation of another 
Dubai-owned company set to take over plants in Georgia and Connecticut 
that make precision components used in engines for military aircraft and 
tanks.

The administration notified congressional committees this week that its 
secretive Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) 
is investigating the security implications of Dubai International 
Capital's $1.2 billion acquisition of London-based Doncasters Group 
Ltd., which has subsidiaries in the United States. It is also 
investigating an Israeli company's plans to buy the Maryland software 
security firm Sourcefire, which does business with Defense Department 
agencies.

Administration officials are privately briefing leaders of half a dozen 
House and Senate committees this week about the two planned 
transactions, concerned that both deals could stir controversy in a 
political climate that remains supercharged over the Dubai port deal.

Republican and Democratic lawmakers angrily protested after learning 
late last month that the administration had approved a $6.8 billion deal 
to allow a maritime company based in the United Arab Emirates to take 
over significant operations at six U.S. ports without a thorough 
investigation and without consulting members of Congress. Last weekend, 
the Dubai maritime company agreed to a 45-day investigation to stem the 
protest and allay concerns of a possible breach of U.S. port security.

In the past, the foreign investment committee rarely told Congress of 
such inquiries. Wary of another misstep, administration officials 
decided to inform lawmakers of the two other pending transactions with 
national security implications for the United States.

There have been suggestions in the trade press that the publicly traded 
Israeli firm, Check Point Software Technologies, has been subjected to 
more scrutiny than Dubai Ports World, the state-owned Arab company that 
was initially cleared to take over operations at the six major U.S. 
ports with no security investigation. That inquiry was initiated only 
after an outcry about turning over port security to a country that has 
been cited for ties to terrorism. Sources familiar with the Israeli 
investigation said cybersecurity officials at the departments of 
Defense, Justice and Homeland Security all raised serious concerns about 
the purchase before the port controversy erupted.

Dubai International Capital's acquisition of Doncasters could present 
some of the same political problems created by Dubai Ports World's 
purchase of London-based Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Co. 
Once again, a state-controlled Dubai company with deep pockets is 
purchasing a British firm with U.S. holdings. Doncasters has operations 
in nine U.S. locations and manufactures precision parts for defense 
contractors such as Boeing, Honeywell, Pratt & Whitney and General Electric.

A spokesman for Doncasters' corporate office in Connecticut said the 
company had no comment on the security investigation.

Although many foreign companies manufacture parts used in U.S. military 
equipment, in this instance CFIUS members decided to look more carefully 
at the Doncasters transaction. The CFIUS met last week and tentatively 
decided to subject that proposal to a 45-day investigation, and it 
finalized that decision in a conference call late Monday. The decision 
came on the final day of the regular 30-day review period. Aides on the 
Senate banking committee said the panel was notified late Monday that 
the CFIUS had initiated both national security inquiries.

"The CFIUS process is charged with determining if there are national 
security concerns in any transaction, and it takes that role very 
seriously," said Tony Fratto, spokesman for the Treasury Department, 
which leads the interagency committee. "It looks at each transaction on 
a case-by-case basis, and if security concerns are raised by any member 
of the committee at the end of an initial 30-day review, the case goes 
into investigation."

The 45-day investigation of the Israeli deal began in early February, 
several weeks before the controversy erupted over the Dubai port deal, 
administration officials said. The investigation of the Dubai-Doncasters 
deal began this week, at the height of the political turmoil over the 
port issue.

Yet Fratto said that neither of the new investigations were started 
"because of public reaction to some other transaction."

Of the 1,500 acquisitions that have been referred to the CFIUS, one has 
been rejected. But deals with security implications tend to fall through 
before the 45-day investigation. In 1989, 204 deals involving the 
purchase of a company with significant U.S. operations triggered a 
security investigation. Last year, only 65 went that far.

In the case of Check Point, the security questions were apparently 
raised early on, according to people familiar with the review. Check 
Point's proposed $225 million purchase of Laurel-based Sourcefire raised 
red flags with government cybersecurity officials.

Check Point was built by Gil Shwed, whom Forbes magazine has described 
as an Israeli billionaire who served in the electronic intelligence arm 
of the Israeli Defense Forces.

Sourcefire makes network defense and intrusion detection software for an 
array of customers, including the Defense Department. The company has 
deep roots in the National Security Agency. Its founder and chief 
technology officer, Martin Roesch, has served as an NSA contractor. Its 
vice president of engineering, Tom Ashoff, developed software for the 
secretive spy agency.

Last August, the Israeli government signed an agreement with the 
Pentagon to alert the United States before selling other countries 
technology related to national security. The United States asked for the 
agreement after learning that Israel had sold unmanned aerial vehicles 
to China in late 2004.

The CFIUS investigation is to be completed in mid-March.

Check Point officials declined to comment yesterday on the security 
investigation. In announcing that its deal would be investigated, the 
company released a statement pledging that "Check Point and Sourcefire 
are both committed to working cooperatively with the committee during 
the investigative period."

In the case of Dubai International Capital and Doncasters, an 
acquisition that ordinarily may have been whisked through the process 
without objection is now under security investigation, administration 
sources said. Dubai International Capital is the financial arm of Dubai 
Holding, an investment conglomerate that is the third-largest 
shareholder of DaimlerChrysler Corp. and is a major investor in Holiday 
Inn Express in the Middle East.

Doncasters' expertise is in forging, fabrication, machining and alloy 
production. The company owns a plant that makes aerospace turbine blades 
and components in Farmington, Conn.; a turbine and generator plant in 
Rincon, Ga.; a steel foundry in Springfield, Mass.; and a metal-rolling 
plant in Groton, Conn. The company's Web site says the Georgia and 
Connecticut plants manufacture "engine ready airfoils," for aircraft, 
helicopter and tank engines.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/01/AR2006030102192.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060302/a6769b2b/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Thu Mar  2 04:10:26 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Thu, 02 Mar 2006 07:10:26 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] EXCELLENT AND IMPORTANT: Face Iraq's Past - Jim Hoagland
 - Washington Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <4406E0B2.6020000@comcast.net>

Face Iraq's Past
Phony National Reconciliation Is a Bad Choice

By Jim Hoagland
Thursday, March 2, 2006; A21

Iraq has endured civil war for 30 years. It has not suited Western 
policymakers or the media to call it that, nor to face up to the 
implications of the appalling sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing 
that this long conflict has generated. That must change.

What peace there was in Iraq before the U.S. invasion of 2003 was the 
peace of the graveyard. Saddam Hussein's forces conquered Kurdistan in 
1975 and launched the genocidal campaign code-named Anfal against the 
Kurds in 1987. The Shiite south was the target of mass murder and 
environmental warfare throughout the following decade.

That may sound like ancient history to Americans rightly concerned about 
the latest casualties in the continuing mayhem that the invasion helped 
magnify and beam around the world. But that history of violence lives on 
in today's bomb blasts destroying Shiite shrines and the equally 
despicable "retaliatory" butchering of Sunni civilians.

The past reaches deep even into the defining of what is happening in 
Iraq today. When Sunnis kill Shiites on a wholesale basis, American 
front pages, news broadcasts and official policy statements call it 
insurgency. When Shiites kill Sunnis, we call it civil war or, more 
teasingly, imminent civil war.

There is an unacknowledged psychological basis for this seemingly 
irrational differentiation of massacres. Diplomats and reporters know 
that if the Shiite majority, which may make up 60 percent of the 
population, were to rise in a sustained onslaught against the 20 percent 
Sunni minority, the resulting bloodbath would be horrendous -- and could 
spark regional intervention.

The neighboring Arab states have helped shape the perception that Shiite 
violence directed at Sunnis is somehow different -- and more dangerous 
-- than the violence used at first by Hussein and now by Sunni 
guerrillas, whether they are Baathist remnants, the Wahhabist fanatics 
of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi or a combination of the two. In this view, 
Sunni-originated violence can be tolerated or even rewarded; Shiite 
violence is "civil war" that must be prevented.

The Sunni regimes of these Arab states kept quiet or actively helped in 
Hussein's long reign of terror over the Kurds and Shiites. The burning 
of thousands of Kurdish villages or the draining of the marshes in the 
south to inflict death and force huge population movements was not 
"civil war" to these regimes or to their official and corporate friends 
in Washington, London and elsewhere. No, these were unfortunate 
incidents that should now be subject to the statutes of limitations that 
Ramsey Clark and Hussein's other lawyers indirectly invoke in a Baghdad 
courtroom.

The Kurds and Shiites are determined that there will be no statute of 
limitations on these crimes and that their populations will never again 
be subjected to organized brutality from a strong central government in 
Baghdad. Their determination needs to be taken into account more 
thoroughly by the Bush administration, which pursues an unrealistic 
vision of peaceful national reconciliation in Iraq that today is out of 
reach.

The principal actors are not available for that vision. The Kurds take a 
Garbo approach: They want to be left alone. The Shiites increasingly see 
the same degree of autonomy and separation from the center as the answer 
for the south as well. A genuine decentralization of power -- a loose 
federalism that maintains Iraq as a concept for today and a real 
possibility for tomorrow -- is both inevitable and desirable at this point.

That means in turn that the United States has every interest in 
maintaining a strategic relationship with the Kurds, who will need 
American help to keep Turkey from taking them over, and a tolerable 
working relationship with the mainstream Shiite forces, whatever is 
happening in Baghdad.

To promote an enforced phony national reconciliation built on 
concessions to Sunni extremists to wean them from violence, as 
Washington has repeatedly attempted, is self-defeating.

The Bush administration has made increased Iranian influence in the 
south a self-fulfilling prophecy by misunderstanding and mishandling 
Shiite nationalism. The normally adept U.S. ambassador in Baghdad, 
Zalmay Khalilzad, continued that pattern by publicly threatening the 
Shiites directly with the halt of U.S. aid to Iraq if they do not agree 
to a "cross-sectarian" -- code word for Sunni -- interior minister in 
the new cabinet.

That was overreaching, as the turmoil ignited by the demolition of the 
Shiite Askariya shrine in Samarra last week quickly demonstrated. The 
blast was apparently carried out by professional sappers in another 
attempt to provoke the "civil war" that has thus far been avoided -- at 
least in the headlines and presidential statements, if not in fact.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/01/AR2006030101936.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060302/01f4d99a/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Thu Mar  2 04:12:21 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Thu, 02 Mar 2006 07:12:21 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] RECOMMENDED: We Can't Force Democracy - Robert D. Kaplan
 - Washington Post
Message-ID: <4406E125.9010807@comcast.net>

We Can't Force Democracy
Creating Normality Is the Real Mideast Challenge

By Robert D. Kaplan
Thursday, March 2, 2006; A21

The whiff of incipient anarchy in Iraq in recent days has provided a 
prospect so terrifying as to concentrate the minds of Republicans and 
Democrats, Iraq's sectarian political factions, and even the media. 
Staring over the abyss, only the irresponsible few appear distracted by 
partisan advantage. In that sense alone, the bombing of the golden dome 
in Samarra may serve a useful purpose. For the fundamental nightmare of 
the new century is the breakdown of order, something that the American 
experience offers precious little wisdom in dealing with.

President Bush has posited that the American experience with democracy 
is urgently useful to the wider world. True, but there is another side 
of the coin: that America basically inherited its institutions from the 
Anglo-Saxon tradition and thus its experience over 230 years has been 
about limiting despotic power rather than creating power from scratch. 
Because order is something we've taken for granted, anarchy is not 
something we've feared. But in many parts of the world, the experience 
has been the opposite, and so is the challenge: how to create 
legitimate, functioning institutions in utterly barren landscapes.

"[B]efore the names of Just and Unjust can have place, there must be 
some coercive power," Thomas Hobbes wrote in "Leviathan." Without 
something or somebody to monopolize the use of force and decide right 
from wrong, no man is safe from another and there can be no freedom for 
anyone. Physical security remains the primary human freedom. And so the 
fact that a state is despotic does not necessarily make it immoral. That 
is the essential fact of the Middle East that those intent on enforcing 
democracy abroad forget.

For the average person who just wants to walk the streets without being 
brutalized or blown up by criminal gangs, a despotic state that can 
protect him is more moral and far more useful than a democratic one that 
cannot. Monarchy was the preferred political ideal for centuries, writes 
the late University of Chicago scholar Marshall Hodgson, precisely 
because the monarch's legitimacy -- coming as it did from God -- was 
seen as so beyond reproach that he could afford to be benevolent, while 
still monopolizing the use of force. To wit, the most moderate and 
enlightened states in the Middle East in recent decades have tended to 
be those ruled by royal families whose longevity has conferred 
legitimacy: Morocco, Jordan, the Gulf emirates and even Egypt, if one 
accepts that Hosni Mubarak is merely the latest in a line of Nasserite 
pharaohs.

Imperfect these rulers clearly are, but to think that who would follow 
them would necessarily be as stable, or as enlightened, is to engage in 
the kind of speculation that leads to irresponsible foreign policy. 
Recall that those who cheered in 1979 at the demise of the shah of Iran 
got something worse in return. The Saudi Arabian royal family may be the 
most reactionary group to run that country, except for any other that 
might replace it. It is unclear what, if anything, besides the monarchy 
could hold such a geographically ill-defined country together.

In the case of Iraq, the state under Saddam Hussein was so cruel and 
oppressive it bore little relationship to all these other dictatorships. 
Because under Hussein anybody could and in fact did disappear in the 
middle of the night and was tortured in the most horrific manner, the 
Baathist state constituted a form of anarchy masquerading as tyranny. 
The decision to remove him was defensible, while not providential. The 
portrait of Iraq that has emerged since his fall reveals him as the 
Hobbesian nemesis who may have kept in check an even greater anarchy 
than the kind that obtained under his rule.

The lesson to take away is that where it involves other despotic regimes 
in the region -- none of which is nearly as despotic as Hussein's -- the 
last thing we should do is actively precipitate their demise. The more 
organically they evolve and dissolve, the less likely it is that blood 
will flow. That goes especially for Syria and Pakistan, both of which 
could be Muslim Yugoslavias in the making, with regionally based ethnic 
groups that have a history of dislike for each other. The 
neoconservative yearning to topple Bashar al-Assad, and the liberal one 
to undermine Pervez Musharraf, are equally adventurous.

Afghanistan falls into none of these categories. We toppled a movement 
in Afghanistan, the Taliban, but we did not topple a state, because none 
had really existed there. Even at the high-water mark of central control 
in Afghanistan in the mid-20th century, the state barely functioned 
beyond the major cities and the ring road connecting them. The governing 
self-sufficiency of Afghan villages has been a factor helping President 
Hamid Karzai establish a legitimate, noncoercive order.

Globalization and other dynamic forces will continue to rid the world of 
dictatorships. Political change is nothing we need to force upon people; 
it's something that will happen anyway. What we have to work toward -- 
for which peoples with historical experiences different from ours will 
be grateful -- is not democracy but normality. Stabilizing newly 
democratic regimes, and easing the development path of undemocratic 
ones, should be the goal for our military and diplomatic establishments. 
The more cautious we are in a world already in the throes of tumultuous 
upheaval, the more we'll achieve.

The writer is a national correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly and 
author of "The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/01/AR2006030101937.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060302/1c36f7e3/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Thu Mar  2 04:14:14 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Thu, 02 Mar 2006 07:14:14 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Rhetoric of Unreality - George F. Will - Washington Post
	Op-Ed
Message-ID: <4406E196.3050301@comcast.net>

Rhetoric of Unreality
Where Is Iraq After Nearly 3 Years of War?

By George F. Will
Thursday, March 2, 2006; A21

When late in the spring of 1940 people of southeastern England flocked 
across the Channel in their pleasure craft and fishing boats to evacuate 
soldiers trapped on Dunkirk beaches, euphoria swept Britain. So Prime 
Minister Winston Churchill sternly told the nation: "We must be very 
careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. 
Wars are not won by evacuations."

Or by curfews, such as the one that cooled the furies that engulfed Iraq 
after the bombing last week of a Shiite shrine. Wars are not won simply 
by facing facts, but facing them is a necessary prerequisite.

Last week, in the latest iteration of a familiar speech (the enemy is 
"brutal," "we're on the offensive," "freedom is on the march") that 
should be retired, the president said, "This is a moment of choosing for 
the Iraqi people." Meaning what? Who is to choose, and by what 
mechanism? Most Iraqis already "chose" -- meaning prefer -- peace. But 
in 1917 there were only a few thousand Bolsheviks among 150 million 
Russians -- and the Bolsheviks succeeded in hijacking the country for 
seven decades.

After Iraqis voted in December for sectarian politics, an observer said 
Iraq had conducted not an election but a census. Now America's heroic 
ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, one of two indispensable men in Iraq, has 
warned the Iraqi political class that unless the defense and interior 
ministries are nonsectarian, meaning not run as instruments of the 
Shiites, the United States will have to reconsider its support for 
Iraq's military and police. But that threat is not credible: U.S. 
strategy in Iraq by now involves little more than making the Iraqi 
military and police competent. As the president said last week: "Our 
strategy in Iraq is that the Iraqis stand up, we'll stand down."

Iraq's prime minister responded to Khalilzad's warning by accusing him 
of interfering in Iraq's "internal affairs." Think about that, and about 
the distinction drawn by the U.S. official in Iraq who, evidently 
looking on what he considers the bright side, told Eliot Cohen of Johns 
Hopkins, "This isn't a war. It's violent nation-building."

Almost three years after the invasion, it is still not certain whether, 
or in what sense, Iraq is a nation. And after two elections and a 
referendum on its constitution, Iraq barely has a government. A defining 
attribute of a government is that it has a monopoly on the legitimate 
exercise of violence. That attribute is incompatible with the existence 
of private militias of the sort that maraud in Iraq.

Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute, writing in the Wall 
Street Journal, reports that Shiite militias "have broken up coed 
picnics, executed barbers [for the sin of shaving beards] and liquor 
store owners, instituted their own courts, and posted religious guards 
in front of girls' schools to ensure Iranian-style dress." Iraq's other 
indispensable man, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, says that unless the 
government can protect religious sites, "the believers will."

When violence surges, if U.S. forces take the lead in suppressing it 
they delay the day when Iraqi forces will be competent. If U.S. forces 
hold back, they are blamed by an Iraqi population that is being 
infantilized by displacing all responsibilities onto the American 
occupation.

In the New Republic, Lawrence Kaplan, writing with a Baghdad dateline, 
says that only U.S. forces, which "have become an essential part of the 
landscape here -- their own tribe, in effect," can be "an honest broker" 
between warring factions, "more peacekeeper than belligerent." But he 
also reports:

"With U.S reconstruction aid running out, Iraq's infrastructure, never 
fully restored to begin with, decays by the hour. . . . The level of 
corruption that pervades Iraq's ministerial orbit . . . would have made 
South Vietnam's kleptocrats blush. . . . [C]orruption has helped drive 
every public service measure -- electricity, potable water, heating oil 
-- down below its prewar norm."

Kaplan tells of a student who, seeing insurgents preparing a mortar 
attack, called a government emergency number. Fortunately for him, no 
one answered. Later, friends warned him that callers' numbers appear at 
the government's emergency office and that they are sold to insurgents. 
The student took Kaplan to see a wall adorned with a picture and death 
announcement of a man whose call was answered.

Today, with all three components of the "axis of evil" -- Iraq, Iran and 
North Korea -- more dangerous than they were when that phrase was coined 
in 2002, the country would welcome, and Iraq's political class needs to 
hear, as a glimpse into the abyss, presidential words as realistic as 
those Britain heard on June 4, 1940.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/01/AR2006030101935.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060302/9e0f60af/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Thu Mar  2 04:16:15 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Thu, 02 Mar 2006 07:16:15 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] TIMELY AND GREAT: A nuclear partnership with India -
 Selig S. Harrison - Boston Globe Op-Ed
Message-ID: <4406E20F.4040507@comcast.net>


  A nuclear partnership with India

By Selig S. Harrison  |  March 2, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

ONE OF THE few bright spots on a murky US global horizon is India. After 
decades of tensions with New Delhi, the Bush administration is moving 
steadily to establish a new strategic partnership to strengthen India as 
a counterweight to China in the Asian balance of power.

The cornerstone of the administration's India initiative is an agreement 
concluded July 18 by President George W. Bush and Prime Minister 
Manmohan Singh providing for civilian nuclear cooperation. Negotiations 
on the implementation of this agreement are the focus of the president's 
visit to India today.

India urgently needs a massive expansion of its civilian nuclear power 
program to cope with an escalating energy shortage that threatens its 
economic and political stability. But congressional critics, who have 
never forgiven India for refusing to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation 
Treaty, attack the accord as a reward for bad behavior. The July 
agreement cannot be implemented without proposed changes in 1978 US law 
that are clearly justified.

The treaty does not bar the United States and other signatory nations 
from providing civilian nuclear technology under safeguards to 
nonsignatories such as India. But Congress went far beyond the treaty by 
barring nonsignatories from any civilian nuclear cooperation with the 
United States. This has had ridiculous consequences.

Washington can sell civilian nuclear reactors to China, which signed the 
treaty but has violated Article One by giving nuclear weapons technology 
to Pakistan and Iran. At the same time, the United States has barred 
such sales to India, which did not sign the treaty but has never 
transferred nuclear technology to others. The exclusion of India from 
civilian nuclear cooperation is a relic of earlier decades when the 
United States was trying to stop New Delhi from acquiring nuclear 
weapons. Now that it has joined the nuclear club, the 1978 law should be 
modified.

The agreement would require India to place all reactors under 
international safeguards if they get financing, fuel, or components from 
the United States or members of the US-led Nuclear Suppliers Group. 
Prime Minister Singh has faithfully fulfilled his commitment in the 
accord that India would ''identify and separate civilian and nuclear 
facilities in a phased manner." After bitter internal battles with 
nuclear nationalists in India, he has presented Washington with a 
credible timetable designating which of India's nuclear facilities are 
restricted to nuclear power generation, which ones will be shifted over 
to civilian purposes at specified stages, and which ones will be left 
for military use.

Sixty-five percent of India's nuclear power capacity is on the civilian 
list, much more than the nuclear hawks in New Delhi wanted. The 
administration has been pressing for a longer civilian list, hoping to 
appease its critics, who would like to put a cap on India's nuclear 
weapons potential. But the agreement gives New Delhi the right to decide 
on the civilian-military mix, and whether a compromise can be negotiated 
is uncertain.

Critics point out that the agreement gives India the freedom to build 
new military reactors and exempts key research and development 
facilities with a military potential from safeguards. They object to the 
very concept of a civilian-military separation plan that implicitly 
acknowledges the military component of the Indian nuclear program. But 
this acknowledgement was long overdue. Asia is clearly more stable now 
that India has its ''credible minimum deterrent" than it would be with 
China enjoying a nuclear monopoly. In any case, the United States, with 
its 7,000 operational nuclear weapons, is in no position to criticize 
India for a deterrent force now believed to consist of 150 to 200 warheads.

Critics also argue that the accord invites other countries to demand 
equal treatment. Treaty signatories like Brazil and Argentina that are 
in compliance with Article One, like India, should indeed be given 
comparable access to civilian nuclear technology. Iran, North Korea, and 
Pakistan, with questionable compliance records, should not.

In a recent conversation in New Delhi, Prime Minister Singh emphasized 
his belief that India's future prosperity depends on pursuing a close 
economic and technological partnership with the United States. Such a 
partnership is a natural. The United States and India have no 
geopolitical conflicts of interest and share democratic values, market 
economics, and widespread linguistic compatibility in English.

With India's growth rate now soaring past 7 percent, the United States 
clearly stands to benefit from expanding trade and investment 
opportunities in everything from computer technology to military 
aircraft, not to mention the potential benefit from cooperation in 
fighting Islamic terrorism and maritime cooperation with the Indian navy 
from the Persian Gulf to the Straits of Malacca. The July accord serves 
both nonproliferation objectives and wider US geopolitical interests and 
deserves unqualified congressional support.

Selig S. Harrison, author of ''India: The Most Dangerous Decades," is 
director of the Asia Program at the Center for International Policy.  

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/02/a_nuclear_partnership_with_india/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060302/0ba29888/attachment-0001.htm 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: dingbat_story_end_icon.gif
Type: image/gif
Size: 49 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060302/0ba29888/attachment-0001.gif 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Thu Mar  2 08:39:47 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Thu,  2 Mar 2006 16:39:47 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Europeans to Meet With Iran on Nuclear
	Impasse
Message-ID: <20060302163947.25DE324A1BD@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

INTERNATIONAL / MIDDLE EAST | March 2, 2006
Europeans to Meet With Iran on Nuclear Impasse
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
The foreign ministers of Britain, France and Germany will meet with Iran to discuss new ideas to break the impasse over its nuclear program.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/02/international/middleeast/02iran.html?ex=1141966800&en=1f313c348f721691&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060302/d5f8cb79/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Thu Mar  2 08:43:07 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Thu,  2 Mar 2006 16:43:07 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Prisons Often Shackle Pregnant Inmates in
	Labor
Message-ID: <20060302164307.F1FDE83E21@lax-gw03.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

NATIONAL | March 2, 2006
Prisons Often Shackle Pregnant Inmates in Labor
By ADAM LIPTAK
Corrections officials say they must strike a balance between security and the well-being of the pregnant woman and her child.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/02/national/02shackles.html?ex=1141966800&en=3d51901a4433e76c&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060302/d6197bba/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Thu Mar  2 08:45:51 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Thu,  2 Mar 2006 16:45:51 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Alito's Note to Evangelist Is Called Just
	Thanks
Message-ID: <20060302164551.5451783D44@lax-gw03.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

WASHINGTON / WASHINGTON SPECIAL | March 2, 2006
Alito's Note to Evangelist Is Called Just Thanks
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. note pledged that "as long as I serve on the Supreme Court, I will keep in mind the trust that has been placed in me."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/02/politics/politicsspecial1/02alito.html?ex=1141966800&en=5dc2589ba813b4dc&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060302/3cb68520/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Thu Mar  2 08:49:07 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Thu,  2 Mar 2006 16:49:07 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: A Supernova Spectacle Begins
Message-ID: <20060302164907.4882F24B01C@lax-gw02.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

SCIENCE | February 24, 2006
A Supernova Spectacle Begins
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Telescopes are being turned toward the constellation Aries in anticipation of documenting a rare supernova explosion.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/24/science/24star.html?ex=1141966800&en=c0b95489f3e2949e&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060302/4ee5bffa/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Thu Mar  2 08:51:50 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: 2 Mar 2006 16:51:50 -0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] Headlines for March 2, 2006
Message-ID: <20060302165150.26675.qmail@trinity.democracynow.org>

Mike Blaxill  ( mblaxill at yahoo.com )
sent you this story from democracynow.org




+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  Headlines for March 2, 2006
|  http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/02/148226
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+


- Video Shows Bush Receiving Dire Warnings Day Before Katrina 
- Four Dead in Bombing Near US Consulate in Karachi
- Six Kidnapped Oil Workers Released in Nigeria
- New Iraq Reconstruction Funds Devoted Solely to Prisons 
- New York Reaches Settlement With 22 Prisoners in Abuse Case
- Bush Admin. Decreased Fines, Enforcement on Mine Violations
- Council of Europe Urges Better Monitoring of CIA Rendition
- Bolton Says India and Pakistan Acquired Nukes ?Legitimately? 
This story continues at: 
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/02/148226


From Reeeees at aol.com  Wed Mar  1 18:20:10 2006
From: Reeeees at aol.com (Reeeees at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 1 Mar 2006 21:20:10 EST
Subject: [Mb-civic] Iraq: A Solution to Nothing
Message-ID: <E1FEt71-00080E-KE@smtpauth02.mail.atl.earthlink.net>

     
Published  on Wednesday, March 1, 2006 by the _Seattle Times  _ 
(http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/) 
Iraq: A Solution to Nothing  
by Scott  Ritter 
As the United States and Iraq approach the third  anniversary of the invasion 
and occupation of Iraq, it might do all  Americans well to take some time out 
and reflect on how we got where we  are, as well as where we are going in 
Iraq and the Middle East as a whole.   
Gone forever is any talk of song and flowers,  economic recoveries paid for 
by Iraqi oil, or a blooming democracy in the  cradle of civilization. The state 
of affairs between the Bush  administration and the newly elected government 
of Prime Minister Ibrahim  Jafari is strained, to say the least, with the 
United States threatening  to cut off aid to Iraq, and Iraq telling the United 
States to "butt out."   
Nearly three months have passed since the  "historic" elections of December 
2005, and the Iraqis have just now  selected a prime minister (Jafari, a Shiite 
Islamic fundamentalist closely  allied with Iran), and seemed hopelessly 
deadlocked on the issue of  forming a government that will not promote an 
immediate outbreak of  sectarian violence once formed.  
The Sunni insurgency is stronger than ever, and  Shiite death squads roam the 
street in the guise of government police and  soldiers. Torture, rape and 
murder are rampant as official tools of  government suppression. And American 
troops appear to be powerless to stop  this mindless slide into the abyss, all 
the while being killed and maimed  for a cause that has always been nebulous.  
"Duty," "honor" and "country" mean little when the  majority of the American 
citizens supposedly being served by the ongoing  occupation of Iraq are more 
interested in "American Idol" than the process  of bringing peace and stability 
to ancient Babylon, or when American  politicians seem content to continue to 
allow the men and women who honor  our nation through their service to die 
while those in power grasp for a  politically face-saving way to "solve the 
Iraqi problem." And herein lies  the problem: We continue to try to solve a 
problem we have yet to define,  meaning we are seeking a solution to nothing.  
America continues to pretend that we are building  something of value in 
Iraq. And yet, common sense dictates that when one  seeks to build on a corrupt 
foundation, whatever it is that is being  constructed is doomed eventually to 
collapse. Our nation's involvement in  Iraq is based on as corrupt a foundation 
as imaginable. We didn't go to  war for sound national-security reasons (i.e., 
a threat that manifested  itself in a form solvable only through military 
intervention), but rather  for domestic political reasons based on ideology that 
exploited the fear  and ignorance of the American people in the post-Sept. 11, 
2001, world.   
In the topsy-turvy world of domestic American  politics, this reality 
continues to fail to resonate. Those who opposed  the invasion of Iraq continue to be 
demonized and marginalized, while  those who supported it are embraced and 
applauded.  
This "through the looking glass" quality in the  American body politic not 
only hamstrings the nation collectively on the  issue of solving the Iraq 
problem, but also continues to distort reality  when dealing with other emerging 
problems confronting our country and the  world, such as the looming crisis with 
Iran over its nuclear programs.   
Even as we fail to grasp the lessons of our  unraveling failure in Iraq, we 
seem to be moving full steam ahead into a  similar catastrophe in Iran, making 
the same mistakes by embracing a  threat model (nuclear weapons) void of any 
hard evidence, and promoting a  solution (democracy) that is undefined.  
If the upcoming leather anniversary of the U.S.-led  invasion of Iraq tells 
us anything as a nation, it is that we are in  desperate need of a national 
"time out" when it comes to the issue of  Iraq, Iran and the global war on 
terror. We need to learn the lesson that  every soldier, sailor, airman and Marine 
serving oversees knows only too  well ? you don't reinforce failure.  
If our politicians, Republican and Democrat alike,  are unable or unwilling 
to engage in a rancor-free discussion about where  we as a nation are heading 
when it comes to issues of war and peace, then  perhaps we the people should 
engage in one of our own, and in the process  establish agreed-upon principles 
and standards that not only would serve  as a solid foundation upon which to 
build any future endeavors in the  Middle East and elsewhere, but also set 
forward values and ideals that  could be used to hold to account those whom we 
elect to represent us in  higher office.  
Scott Ritter is a former U.N. weapons inspector  in Iraq (1991-1998) and 
Marine Corps intelligence officer. He is the  author of "_Iraq Confidential: The 
Untold Story of the  Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the U.N. and 
Overthrow Saddam  Hussein_ 
(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1560258527/commondreams-20/ref=nosim) ," published by Nation  Books.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060301/fad78eac/attachment.htm 

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Thu Mar  2 11:29:13 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Thu, 02 Mar 2006 11:29:13 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Save Iraq One Switch at a Time By GLENN ZORPETTE
Message-ID: <C02C8789.299DB%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 2, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
Save Iraq One Switch at a Time
By GLENN ZORPETTE

LAST fall I was allowed to sit in on a high-level meeting at Iraq's
Electricity Ministry in Baghdad. The minister, Muhsin Shlash, arrived 20
minutes late. Around a big table, several small groups of officials ? from
the ministry, the American State and Defense Departments, and the British
Foreign Office ? sat in separate cliques, and gave essentially separate
reports. Toward the end of the meeting, Mr. Shlash's deputy fulminated at
the Westerners, accusing them of keeping ministry officials out of the loop:
"Always we are getting this news, this is cancelled, there is no budget for
this, the plan is changed."

Thus, it was hardly surprising to me when the United States special
inspector general for Iraq reconstruction told Congress how dismally efforts
to repair the country's electrical grid are going. Iraq is now producing
only about 4,000 megawatts of electricity, as opposed to 4,500 before the
war, despite huge increases in demand because of the widespread availability
of household appliances since the Baathist regime fell. Baghdad, which had
consistent power under Saddam Hussein, now gets only about four to six hours
of electricity a day. (Other areas of the country that were slighted under
the dictatorship have seen improvements in service.)

Electricity has become a main focus of the struggle to win Iraqi hearts and
minds, with the insurgents doing everything they can to damage power grids
and stop the Americans and Iraqi government forces racing to patch them up.
In the United States Government Accountability Office's hierarchy of
reconstruction financing, "electricity" is now second only to the category
called "security and justice." More than $5 billion of American funds and
about $1 billion of Iraqi money have gone into repairing the grid. Yet all
this money and effort has done little to brighten the lives of Iraqis.

The reasons are many and complicated. One of the biggest, of course, is the
insurgents, who have kidnapped, tortured and killed dozens of electrical
workers, knocked over scores of transmission towers, and bombed substations
with astoundingly effective timing and precision. If you had a few thousand
terrorists like these blowing up electrical plants in Texas or Quebec or
Austria, you'd have serious trouble with the grids in those places, too.

Nonetheless, there are plenty of problems that have nothing to do with the
violence. And there are many steps the Electricity Ministry and its Western
patrons should be taking to improve daily life for now and to prepare for
the day when the insurgency is more manageable.

First, the ministry needs to get serious about collecting revenue. It could
start by charging realistic rates. At the moment it charges residential
customers less than a tenth of a cent per kilowatt-hour, even though most
analysts agree it would have to charge at least 15 or 20 times that just to
break even ? and more if you include adequate financing to maintain and
expand production plants and distribution networks. Even Syria, hardly a
rich country, charges residential users the equivalent of nearly 2 cents per
kilowatt-hour; New Yorkers pay an average of 17.5 cents.

The ministry also needs to crack down on electricity theft and install more
electricity meters. Its own figures show that it manages to collect what it
is owed for only about 30 percent of the electricity it produces.
Reconstruction officials told me that 10 percent to 25 percent of that power
is simply siphoned off with illegal taps. And, officially, 25 percent to 30
percent of Iraqi homes and businesses wired to the grid do not have a
working electricity meter, and are therefore not being billed.

It's also likely that those figures are overly optimistic. A National Guard
officer I met in Iraq last October, who also happened to be an executive at
a Nevada electric utility, told me that in his several months of moving
about Iraq he had not seen a single meter.

The Electricity Ministry is also plagued by administrative problems. In the
absence of an adequate banking system, most workers in Iraq, including
government employees, are paid in cash. This makes it hard to do rigorous
accounting at the ministry. Since 2003, its payroll has swelled by 10,000
people, to 48,000. No one doubts that this number includes hundreds, maybe
thousands, of "ghost employees"? people invented so their pay can be taken
by somebody else.

Ghosts aren't the ministry's only serious personnel problem: some among its
ranks almost certainly collaborate with the insurgents. Attacks on
transmission networks have often taken out the specific lines that would
cause the greatest disruption to the overall electrical network, and they
have often been timed so perfectly ? for example, when the lines are
carrying their highest loads of the day ? that many conclude the insurgents
have to be getting information from within the ministry. More stringent
efforts to spot traitorous employees, including periodic lie-detector tests,
would be very unusual in an electricity bureaucracy, to be sure. But these
are unprecedented times in Iraq.

And then there is the big problem: too few megawatts. Iraq's electrical
sector is suffering to a significant extent from one bad decision made in
2003, as reconstruction was getting under way, involving the two main types
of generation systems. The American authorities chose to install only
combustion-turbine generating plants and no steam-thermal ones. Briefly,
steam plants take three to five years to build, and they are costly, but
they are easy to operate and maintain and they can burn just about any kind
of fuel. Combustion-type plants can be built in as little as 18 months, but
they are harder to maintain ? especially if you are trying to burn anything
in them other than natural gas.

Iraq has lots of natural gas, but very little of it is being captured,
pressurized and distributed. And the insurgency has made it almost
impossible to build new pipelines to get the gas from where it comes out of
the ground to the combustion turbines where it's needed. So the 30
combustion turbines put in by reconstruction officials have had a terrible
operating record. Many of them are simply sitting idle.

It is time to stop throwing good money after bad ? reconstruction officials
need to refocus their attention on steam plants to augment the combustion
fleet. An official at the American Embassy in Baghdad told me that among
Iraq's aging steam plants are a few that are operating at only 50 percent of
capacity because they need refurbishment. Renovating or replacing them could
be a start.

We should also break ground on some new steam plants. Yes, it will be costly
and it will take time. But I am reminded of something an American civilian
engineer told me last October when I asked him why his predecessors didn't
put in any steam plants to begin with. "Everybody said it would take too
long," he said. "Sure, it'll always take too long ? unless you get started.
If we'd have started then, and protected the assets during construction, we
would have had those assets coming on line now, or in the next six months."

To provide some electricity in the meantime, the ministry should take a page
from the playbook of the illegal entrepreneurs all over Iraq who are
operating thousands of portable diesel generators and selling the
electricity during the times when the ministry isn't providing it. The
government should crack down on these dirty and dangerous generators, which
have electrocuted people all over the country, as part of a coordinated
program to replace them with government machines that are cleaner and safer,
and whose output would generate additional revenue for the ministry's
coffers.

Admittedly, running a bunch of diesel generators, even comparatively clean
ones, would be an environmentalist's nightmare, and will do little over the
long run. But such concerns miss the larger point: every day average Iraqis
lack electrical power is a day the insurgents gain political power.

Glenn Zorpette is the executive editor of I.E.E.E. Spectrum, the magazine of
the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From michael at michaelbutler.com  Thu Mar  2 11:28:18 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Thu, 02 Mar 2006 11:28:18 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Always Having to Say He's Sorry By BOB HERBERT
Message-ID: <C02C8752.299DA%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 2, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Always Having to Say He's Sorry
By BOB HERBERT

If there were a trapdoor that was somehow rigged to open beneath the U.S.
senators we really don't need, Conrad Burns of Montana would surely fall
right through it.

Mr. Burns is a racially insensitive Republican whose re-election bid this
year has been jeopardized by his dealings with the G.O.P. superlobbyist Jack
Abramoff. Mr. Abramoff has pleaded guilty to charges of fraud, tax evasion
and conspiracy to bribe public officials. Among other things, he's admitted
to bilking American Indians out of millions of dollars, and he's said to be
singing louder than the fat lady to federal investigators.

Mr. Burns is reported to have received more money in the form of campaign
contributions from Mr. Abramoff and his favor-strewing friends than any
other member of Congress. This has delighted his political opponents, who
have tried to show that Mr. Burns and Mr. Abramoff were as close as a pair
of prisoners sharing a single set of handcuffs.

When The Times asked whether he or members of his staff might get caught up
in the federal investigation, Mr. Burns said he didn't know. As he put it,
"You can't say yes and you can't say no."

The Abramoff scandal is just the latest issue to raise questions about
Senator Burns's fitness to hold high public office. You've heard of
accidents waiting to happen? He's an accident that happens again and again
and again.

Back in 1994, while campaigning for a second term, Senator Burns dropped by
a local newspaper, The Bozeman Daily Chronicle, and told an editor an
anecdote about one of his constituents, a rancher who wanted to know what
life was like in Washington.

Mr. Burns said the rancher asked him, "Conrad, how can you live back there
with all those niggers?"

Senator Burns said he told the rancher it was "a hell of a challenge."

The anecdote was published, and Senator Burns apologized. When he was asked
why he hadn't expressed any disapproval when the rancher used the word
nigger, the senator said: "I don't know. I never gave it much thought."

Maybe he didn't express any disapproval because he didn't particularly
disapprove. On another occasion Senator Burns had to apologize after giving
a speech in Billings about America's dependence on foreign sources of oil.
In the speech, he referred to Arabs as "ragheads."

"I regret the use of such an inappropriate term," he said. "I hope I did not
overshadow the serious substance of my remarks."

Mr. Burns's apologies have always been undermined by the serial nature of
his offensive remarks. Last fall he upset a pair of female flight attendants
after one of them, a mother with two children, asked him about outsourcing
and the economy. She wondered what she would do if she lost her job. The
senator reportedly replied that she could stay home and take care of her
children.

A third flight attendant, after hearing the story, wrote an angry letter to
Mr. Burns, saying, "Before you sit in judgment and make such ignorant
statements, you really should stop and remember that we don't all live in a
'Leave It to Beaver' world."

It has always been this way with Conrad Burns. Back in 1991, immediately
after a civil rights bill had been passed, he invited a group of lobbyists,
some of them white and some of them black, to accompany him to an auction.

When asked what was being auctioned, he replied, "Slaves."

The Washington Post quoted one of the lobbyists as saying: "We were floored.
We couldn't believe it." Senator Burns later said he was talking about a
charitable auction in which the services of individuals are sold.

When you consider that clowns like Conrad Burns can inhabit some of the
highest offices in the land, it's no longer such a mystery why the United
States of America seems to be barreling down the wrong track at truly
hair-raising speeds.

As we've found with the war in Iraq and so many other important issues,
leadership matters. And serious leaders in the U.S. have been in dangerously
short supply.

In response to questions about the Abramoff scandal, Mr. Burns has denied
that he's done anything wrong. And he dismisses concerns about the amount of
money he received. "What's the difference between one dollar and one
thousand?" he said. "It's all dollars. Just like you rob a bank down here.
If you get a thousand you go to jail, and if you get a million you go to
jail."

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top



From michael at michaelbutler.com  Thu Mar  2 11:26:44 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Thu, 02 Mar 2006 11:26:44 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Harvard-Bound? Chin Up By DAVID BROOKS
Message-ID: <C02C86F4.299D9%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 2, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Harvard-Bound? Chin Up
By DAVID BROOKS

I've got great news! You're young and you're smart and next year you're
beginning college. Unfortunately, I've also got bad news. The only school
you got into is Harvard, where, as Peter Beinart of The New Republic notes,
students often graduate "without the kind of core knowledge that you'd
expect from a good high school student," and required courses can be "a
hodgepodge of arbitrary, esoteric classes that cohere into nothing at all."

But don't despair. I've consulted with a bevy of sages, and I've come up
with a list. If you do everything on this list, you'll get a great
education, no matter what college you attend:

Read Reinhold Niebuhr. Religion is a crucial driving force of this century,
and Niebuhr is the wisest guide. As Alan Wolfe of Boston College notes, if
everyone read Niebuhr, "The devout would learn that public piety corrupts
private faith and that faith must play a prophetic role in society. The
atheists would learn that some people who believe in God are really, really
smart. All of them would learn that good and evil really do exist ? and that
it is never as easy as it seems to know which is which. And none of them, so
long as they absorbed what they were reading, could believe that the best
way to divide opinion is between liberals on the one hand and conservatives
on the other."

Read Plato's "Gorgias." As Robert George of Princeton observes, "The
explicit point of the dialogue is to demonstrate the superiority of
philosophy (the quest for wisdom and truth) to rhetoric (the art of
persuasion in the cause of victory). At a deeper level, it teaches that the
worldly honors that one may win by being a good speaker ... can all too
easily erode one's devotion to truth ? a devotion that is critical to our
integrity as persons. So rhetorical skills are dangerous, potentially
soul-imperiling, gifts." Explains everything you need to know about politics
and punditry.

Take a course on ancient Greece. For 2,500 years, educators knew that the
core of their mission was to bring students into contact with heroes like
Pericles, Socrates and Leonidas. "No habit is so important to acquire,"
Aristotle wrote, as the ability "to delight in fine characters and noble
actions." Alfred North Whitehead agreed, saying, "Moral education is
impossible without the habitual vision of greatness."

That core educational principle was abandoned about a generation ago, during
a spasm of radical egalitarianism. And once that principle was lost, the
entire coherence of higher education was lost with it. So now you've got to
find your own ways to learn about history's heroes, the figures who will
serve as models to emulate and who will provide you with standards to use to
measure your own conduct. Remember, as the British educator Richard
Livingstone once wrote, "One is apt to think of moral failure as due to
weakness of character: more often it is due to an inadequate ideal."

Learn a foreign language. The biographer Ron Chernow observes, "My
impression is that many students have turned into cunning little careerists,
jockeying for advancement." To counteract this, he suggests taking "wildly
impractical" courses like art history and Elizabethan drama. "They should
especially try to master a foreign language as a way to annex another
culture and discover unseen sides to themselves. As we have evolved into a
matchless global power, we have simply become provincial on an ever larger
stage."

Spend a year abroad. Shibley Telhami of the University of Maryland believes
that all major universities should require a year abroad: "All evidence
suggests this, more than any other, is a transforming experience for
students that lasts a lifetime."

Take a course in neuroscience. In the next 50 years, half the explanations
you hear for human behavior are going to involve brain structure and
function. You've got to know which are serious and which are cockamamie.

Take statistics. Sorry, but you'll find later in life that it's handy to
know what a standard deviation is.

Forget about your career for once in your life. This was the core message
from everyone I contacted. Raised to be workaholics, students today have
developed a "carapace, an enveloping shell that hinders them from seeing the
full, rich variety of intellectual and practical opportunities offered by
the world," observes Charles Hill of Yale. You've got to burst out of that
narrow careerist mentality. Of course, it will be hard when you're
surrounded by so many narrow careerist professors building their little
subdisciplinary empires.

But you can do it. I have faith.

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net  Thu Mar  2 12:05:48 2006
From: grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net (Golsorkhi)
Date: Thu, 02 Mar 2006 15:05:48 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] FW: POINT OF VIEW - Iran: The French Angle
In-Reply-To: <3E89721F-B1A6-4D29-B216-FA36F586FE62@thesamiis.com>
Message-ID: <E1FEw33-0001KJ-W7@smtpauth02.mail.atl.earthlink.net>


------ Forwarded Message
From: Samii Shahla <shahla at thesamiis.com>
Date: Wed, 1 Mar 2006 23:50:58 -0500
Subject: POINT OF VIEW - Iran: The French Angle


 
 StratFor
 
 
 Iran: The French Angle
 
 Feb 16, 2006
 
 
 Summary
 
 In an uncharacteristic bout of bluntness, France has flatly labeled the
Iranian nuclear program military in nature and in need of being stopped by
the international community. The change of policy is about more than giving
in to the obvious, it is about once again repositioning France as a major
international player.
 
 Analysis
 
 French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy on Feb. 16 said, "No civilian
nuclear program can explain the Iranian nuclear program. It is a clandestine
military nuclear program. The international community has sent a very firm
message in telling the Iranians to return to reason and suspend all nuclear
activity and the enrichment and conversion of uranium, but they aren't
listening to us. Now it's up to the [U.N.] Security Council to say what it
will do, what means it will use to stop, to manage, to halt this terrible
crisis of nuclear proliferation caused by Iran."
 
 Long describing itself as the Muslim world's best friend in the West, long
an opponent of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and long desirous of
access to Iran's petroleum resources, France is making an about-face in
foreign policy with Douste-Blazy's statement.
 
 But as with so many things, the announcement is not really about Iran at
all -- it is about France. French President Jacques Chirac's rationale for
being involved in nuclear negotiations with Iran was never about Iran's
nuclear program per se. Instead it was a stopgap measure to find a new
vector for French foreign diplomacy.
 
 The core of France's de Gaullist geopolitical perception of itself, to
which Chirac subscribes, is that France holds insufficient power by itself
to affect global affairs to its satisfaction, so it must work to expand and
deepen the European Union in order to build a platform from which Paris can
project power. The fault in that plan is that Paris assumed that all of the
European members of this French platform were willing supporters of French
policy -- or at least sufficiently pliable to not cause too many problems.
 
 The Iraq war blew that theory to pieces. France, in league with Germany and
Russia, assumed that it was speaking for "Europe" when it opposed the United
States' Middle East policies. To their surprise the French found a coalition
of states including Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom,
Italy, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary,
Bulgaria and Romania leaving their "ranks" and diplomatically siding with
the United States. The Iraq war was the death knell for 50 years of French
diplomatic efforts, and left Paris groping for a replacement strategy.
 
 In the end Paris decided that it would take the lessons of its defeat to
heart, and compose a new grouping that met three criteria. First, it had to
be composed of countries powerful enough to be taken seriously. Second, it
had to be small enough to be manageable. And third, it had to be inclusive
of countries able to sabotage any strategy adopted from the outside, while
exclusive of countries that France's European partners reflexively
distrusted.
 
 That last requirement necessitated both the exclusion of Russia and the
inclusion of the United Kingdom. Russia's participation in France's
anti-Iraq efforts guaranteed the opposition of the entire swathe of Central
European states that until recently had been Russian satellites, and
bringing in the British ensured that the United States would not go out of
its way to sabotage French efforts. Chirac invited France's longtime ally,
Germany, along for the ride, and the "EU-3" was born.
 
 After a quick flirtation with Syria, the test case for the new style of
diplomacy was Iran, and herein lay the seeds of destruction for France's new
attempt to bolster its international stature: France did not care a whit
about Iran. The EU-3's engagement was not really an attempt to solve the
nuclear imbroglio. For France, it was about proving that Paris mattered on
the world stage. For Germany, it was about getting contracts for work in
Iran. For the United Kingdom, it was about keeping the United States in the
loop. Even Iran was not particularly interested in talking about nuclear
issues, but instead wanted to use its program as a card to play in ongoing
negotiations with the United States over Iraq. Chirac's concern with
France's status and image gave the Iranians the leverage to do just that.
 
 The fiction nonetheless lasted until unrelated events tore France's
attention away. In May 2005 a series of massive domestic miscalculations by
Chirac contributed to the defeat of the EU constitution in a French
referendum. Suddenly, the bedrock of France's entire economic and political
strategy was in danger. Iran took a backseat.
 
 But the deathblow to the strategy did not really come until the defeat of
German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, Chirac's long-time ally, in September
2005 elections. Schroeder's replacement is the far more pro-U.S. Angela
Merkel, a woman whose delicate government translates into far less tolerance
for mushy policy on the international scene. Her relative friendliness with
Washington and her directness with the Iranians quickly resulted in Iranian
figures labeling her a "Zionist" and a "Hitlerite" -- a mix that indicates
Iranian propaganda personnel are in dire need of a content editor.
 
 Chirac quickly realized that both of its EU-3 partners were moving quickly
away from the plodding, nonproductive negotiations of the past three years
and toward a policy that would be more in step with the United States.
Merkel and Blair quickly agreed to refer Iran to the U.N. Security Council,
leaving France in the awkward position of mumbling assent. For a country
that prides itself on being at the forefront of all things, this was
unacceptable. Yet the dissolution of France's latest diplomatic experiment
obviously would have been at hand if Paris were to disagree with its
partners.
 
 And so France not only seized the initiative, it did so in the most
provocative way it could. On Jan. 19, Chirac warned that any state that
thought it could launch or contribute to a terrorist attack against France
could face nuclear retribution from his country's 300-strong nuclear
arsenal. And on Feb. 16, Douste-Blazy flatly described Iran's nuclear
program as "clandestine" and "military" in nature.
 
 Again, remember, this is not about Iran. Chirac could not care less what
ultimately happens to Iran's nuclear program or even Iran itself. This is
about France taking back the initiative and saving face, something Chirac
has achieved with aplomb. For now the French have outflanked not just Blair
or Merkel, but to a degree even the Americans. Suddenly Chirac is center
stage again, and in a position to move to the forefront of a forming
American-Anglo-European policy.
 
 For a president who has suffered defeat after defeat of late -- at home, in
Europe and further abroad -- that is not bad at all.
 ?
 
 Copyright 2006 Strategic Forecasting Inc. All rights reserved.
 
 




------ End of Forwarded Message

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060302/1eb8f72c/attachment.htm 

From grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net  Thu Mar  2 11:26:59 2006
From: grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net (Golsorkhi)
Date: Thu, 02 Mar 2006 14:26:59 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] FW: We're winning in Iraq. Let's not lose at home.
In-Reply-To: <BAY102-F39C5C3B31638FA34C8637EC7F50@phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <E1FEw8t-0006og-VK@smtpauth02.mail.atl.earthlink.net>


------ Forwarded Message
From: "Shon Saleh" <shonsa at hotmail.com>
Date: Thu, 02 Mar 2006 05:03:51 +0000
To: pcohanim at zodax.com, jcohanim at zodax.com, peter at eliades.net,
kenfeige at aol.com, grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net
Subject: FW: We're winning in Iraq. Let's not lose at home.


>Subject: We're winning in Iraq. Let's not lose at home.
>Date: Wed, 1 Mar 2006 09:06:17 -0800
>
>http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110008030
>
>
>
>
>
>  <http://www.wsj.com/>  <http://www.wsj.com/> WSJ.com
><http://www.wsj.com/>
><http://www.wsj.com/>  <http://www.opinionjournal.com/>
><http://www.opinionjournal.com/> OpinionJournal
><http://www.opinionjournal.com/>  <http://www.opinionjournal.com/>
>
>
>
>
>DIVIDED NATION
>
>At War With Ourselves
>We're winning in Iraq. Let's not lose at home.
>
>BY VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
>Wednesday, March 1, 2006 12:01 a.m.
>
>Last week the golden dome of the Askariya shrine in Samarra was blown
>apart.
>Sectarian riots followed, and reprisals and deaths ensued. Thugs and
>criminals came out of the woodwork to foment further violence. But instead
>of the apocalypse of an ensuing civil war, a curfew was enforced. Iraqi
>security forces stepped in with some success. Shaken Sunni and Shiite
>leaders appeared on television to urge restraint, and there appeared at
>least the semblance of reconciliation that may soon presage a viable
>coalition government.
>
>But here at home you would have thought that our own capitol dome had
>exploded. Indeed, Americans more than the Iraqis needed such advice for
>calm
>to quiet our own frenzy. Almost before the golden shards of the mosque hit
>the pavement, pundits wrote off the war as lost--as we heard the tired
>metaphors of "final straw" and "camel's back" mindlessly repeated. The
>long-anticipated civil strife among Shiites and Sunnis, we were assured,
>was
>not merely imminent, but already well upon us. Then the great civil war
>sort
>of fizzled out; our own frenzy subsided; and now exhausted we await next
>week's new prescription of doom--apparently the hyped-up story of Arabs at
>our ports. That the Iraqi security forces are becoming bigger and better,
>that we have witnessed three successful elections, and that hundreds of
>brave American soldiers have died to get us to the brink of seeing an Iraqi
>government emerge was forgotten in a 24-hour news cycle.
>
>Few observers suggested that the Samarra bombing of a holy mosque by
>radical
>Muslims might be a sign of the terrorists' desperation--killers who have
>not, and cannot, defeat the U.S. military. After the furor over Danish
>cartoons, French rioting and Iranian nuclear perfidy, the entire world is
>turning on radical Islam and the terrorists feel keenly this rising tide of
>opposition on the frontline in Iraq.
>
>True, the Sunni Triangle, unlike southern Iraq and Kurdistan, is often
>inhospitable to the forces of reconstruction--but hardly lost to jihadists
>and militias as we are told. There is a disturbing sameness to our acrimony
>at home, as we recall all the links in this chain of America hysteria from
>the brouhaha over George Bush's flight suit to purported flushed Korans at
>Guantanamo Bay. Each time we are lectured that the looting, Abu Ghraib, the
>embalming of Uday and Qusay, the demeaning oral exam of Saddam, unarmored
>Humvees, inadequate body armor or the latest catastrophe has squandered our
>victory, the unimpressed U.S. military simply goes about what it does
>best--defeating the terrorists and training the Iraqi military to serve a
>democratic government. They stay focused in this long war, while our
>pundits
>prepare the next controversy.
>
>The second-guessing of 2003 still daily obsesses us: We should have had
>better intelligence; we could have kept the Iraqi military intact; we would
>have been better off deploying more troops. Had our forefathers embraced
>such a suicidal and reactionary wartime mentality, Americans would have
>still torn each other apart over Valley Forge years later on the eve of
>Yorktown--or refought Pearl Harbor even as they steamed out to Okinawa.
>
>There is a more disturbing element to these self-serving, always evolving
>pronouncements of the "my perfect war, but your disastrous peace" syndrome.
>Conservatives who insisted that we needed more initial troops are often the
>same ones who now decry that too much money has been spent in Iraq.
>Liberals
>who chant "no blood for oil" lament that we unnecessarily ratcheted up the
>global price of petroleum. Progressives who charge that we are imperialists
>also indict us for being naively idealistic in thinking democracy could
>take
>root in post-Baathist Iraq and providing aid of a magnitude not seen since
>the Marshall Plan. For many, Iraq is no longer a war whose prognosis is to
>be judged empirically. It has instead transmogrified into a powerful symbol
>that apparently must serve deeply held, but preconceived, beliefs--the
>deceptions of Mr. Bush, the folly of a neoconservative cabal, the necessary
>comeuppance of the American imperium, or the greed of an oil-hungry U.S.
>
>
>
>If many are determined to see the Iraqi war as lost without a plan, it
>hardly seems so to 130,000 U.S. soldiers still over there. They explain to
>visitors that they have always had a design: defeat the Islamic terrorists;
>train a competent Iraqi military; and provide requisite time for a
>democratic Iraqi government to garner public support away from the
>Islamists.
>
>We point fingers at each other; soldiers under fire point to their
>achievements: Largely because they fight jihadists over there, there has
>not
>been another 9/11 here. Because Saddam is gone, reform is not just confined
>to Iraq, but taking hold in Lebanon, Egypt and the Gulf. We hear the
>military is nearly ruined after conducting two wars and staying on to birth
>two democracies; its soldiers feel that they are more experienced and
>lethal, and on the verge of pulling off the nearly impossible: offering a
>people terrorized from nightmarish oppression something other than the
>false
>choice of dictatorship or theocracy--and making the U.S. safer for the
>effort.
>
>The secretary of defense, like officers in Iraq, did not welcome the war,
>but felt that it needed to be fought and will be won. Soldiers and civilian
>planners express confidence in eventual success, but with awareness of
>often
>having only difficult and more difficult choices after Sept. 11. Put too
>many troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we earn the wages of imperialism,
>or create a costly footprint that is hard to erase, or engender a
>dependency
>among the very ones in whom we wish to ensure self-reliance. Yet deploy too
>few troops, and instability arises in Kabul and Baghdad, as the Islamists
>lose their fear of American power and turn on the vulnerable we seek to
>protect.
>
>In sum, after talking to our soldiers in Iraq and our planners in
>Washington, what seems to me most inexplicable is the war over the war--not
>the purported absence of a plan, but that the more we are winning in the
>field, the more we are losing it at home.
>
>Mr. Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover
>Institution, and the author most recently of "A War Like No Other: How the
>Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War" (Random House, 2005).
>
>Copyright ? 2006 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
>
>
>

_________________________________________________________________
Express yourself instantly with MSN Messenger! Download today - it's FREE!
http://messenger.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200471ave/direct/01/


------ End of Forwarded Message

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/octet-stream
Size: 2123 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060302/3150e774/attachment.obj 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/octet-stream
Size: 4467 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060302/3150e774/attachment-0001.obj 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/octet-stream
Size: 155 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060302/3150e774/attachment-0002.obj 

From grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net  Thu Mar  2 13:01:10 2006
From: grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net (Golsorkhi)
Date: Thu, 02 Mar 2006 16:01:10 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] FW: A fascinating recount of events leading to the
	Iranian	Revolution !
In-Reply-To: <9396B937-16FB-41A6-B101-35F19CC5EC27@thesamiis.com>
Message-ID: <E1FEw6N-0004QI-RG@smtpauth02.mail.atl.earthlink.net>


------ Forwarded Message
From: Samii Shahla <shahla at thesamiis.com>
Date: Mon, 27 Feb 2006 16:22:14 -0500
Subject: A fascinating recount of events leading to the Iranian Revolution !


LETTER FROM IRAN

December 11, 1978
by Joseph Kraft
Issue of 1978-12-18

Posted 2006-02-27

This week in the magazine, Connie Bruck writes about how, as Washington
considers taking a tougher line with Iran, exiles are positioning themselves
as the country?s next rulers. In this article, from 1978, Joseph Kraft
reports on conditions that led to the Iranian revolution of 1979.

A story from the Kennedy years which has the rare quality of being true is
that once, when the President was otherwise engaged, Dave Powers? his
original guide to the poor Irish of Boston and later a combined companion
and jester at the White House, was delegated to kill a few minute? with the
Shah of Iran. Subsequently, he was asked how he liked His Imperial Majesty.
?Well,? Powers said, ?he?s our kind of Shah.
I was reminded of that story when I saw the Shah a few weeks ago here in
Teheran. At that point, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi wasn?t anybody?s kind of Shah.
He received me, as he had on several of my previous visits, in a ballroom on
the second floor of the Niavaran Palace, on the northern outskirts of
Teheran. He looked pale, spoke in subdued tones, and seemed dwarfed by the
vast expanse of the room, with its huge, ornate chandeliers and heavy Empire
furniture. He wore a double-breasted suit whose blackness suggested
mourning. He started with an apology. He was sorry to have kept me waiting.
The American and British Ambassadors had been in to see him. ?They tried to
cheer me up,? he said. ?As if there were anything to be cheerful about.?
I expressed surprise at?and, indeed, felt some suspicion about?this show of
gloom. There had been demonstrations in many parts of the country, and
strikes, but Teheran, apart from the university, seemed calm, and the Army
was in thorough control. Moreover, the opposition was headed by the Moslem
clergy, and they were clearly divided. Surely, I said, the factions could be
played off against each other.
?Possibly,? the Shah said, shrugging his shoulders in an elaborate show of
disbelief.
I pointed out that the leader of the lay opposition, Karim Sanjabi, was due
to go to Paris to see the most intransigent of the religious leaders,
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The gossip in Teheran was that a compromise
deal was in the works. Sanjabi would win Khomeini?s blessing for a coalition
government. The coalition would make reforms but maintain the monarchy.
The Shah expressed doubt that Khomeini would agree to that. ?Certainly not
with Sanjabi,? he said.
I further noted that, while there was obvious unrest in the country, the
Shah himself had lifted the lid by easing up on security and initiating
reforms. Maybe all that was required was a slower pace and more publicity
for the changes he had made. I mentioned that one of the problems was
corruption in the royal family. He had decreed a new code of conduct for
royal behavior, but it had not been published. Could I get a copy? The Shah
agreed?with a weary air.
If worst came to worst, I went on, there was always the Army. The military
was strong, and its leaders were loyal. The Shah said that force had its
limitations. ?You can?t crack down on one block and make the people on the
next block behave,? he said.
I asked him if the Army leaders realized that. ?I hope so,? he said. He went
on to mention his son and heir, Crown Prince Reza, who, at eighteen, is now
an air cadet in Lubbock, Texas. The Shah said that he might not be able to
pass all his powers on to his son, but he could at least pass on the throne.
I remarked that I had never seen him so sombre, and asked when the black
mood had begun.
?Sometime in summer,? he said.
?Any special reason??
?Events,? he said.
I intimated that maybe he was overdoing the blues to elicit sympathy and
perhaps support from the United States. ?What could America do?? he asked.
I said that that depended upon what happened, and asked him what he thought
that might be. ?I don?t know,? he said.
I asked him what his advisers thought was going to happen. ?Many things,? he
said, with a bitter laugh, and he rose, indicating that that was all he had
to say.

The day after seeing the Shah, I drove, with an Iranian friend who had
agreed to serve as an interpreter, to Qum, a religious center with?
population of roughly two hundred and fifty thousand, about seventy-five
miles south of Teheran. Qum is the country?s foremost training cente? for
the priests?or mullahs, as they are known in common parlance?of Shiite
Islam, the creed of ninety per cent of Iran?s thirty-six millio? people.
Shiism was made the state religion at the beginning of the sixteenth century
by a new dynasty, the Safavids, who needed to dig in agains? the Ottoman
Turks. The Shiites form the minority?and largely Persian?branch of the
Moslem religion. As distinct from the majority branch?the Sunnites (who for
centuries vested the line of authority from Mohammed in a caliphate that
followed the tides of history from Damascus t? Baghdad and thence, with the
Turks, to Constantinople)?the Shiites traced the line of descent through the
Prophet?s son-in-law, Ali. Ali? according to Shiite law, was the first of
twelve Imams, or holy leaders. The twelfth Imam withdrew from this world and
is due to return some tim? as a Mahdi, or Messiah. Ali was buried in An
Najaf, and his son, Hossein, in Karbala, and those cities, now in Iraq, are,
after Mohammed?s tom? in Mecca, the principal shrines of Shiite Islam. The
eighth Imam, Reza, died in Meshed, which is a town some five hundred miles
east of Teheran? and is the most holy shrine in Iran. Reza?s sister, Fatima,
died in Qum, so the city includes Iran?s second holiest shrine as well as
man madressahs, or seminaries.
The most renowned students of Islamic law in Qum, Meshed, and other major
cities are referred to by the title Ayatollah, which means, literally, ?Sign
of God.? For roughly the past fifty years, the Ayatollahs of Qum have been
the dominant religious leaders in Iran. Ayatollah Khomeini, though born in
eastern Iran, was educated in An Najaf, and then in Qum, and subsequently
taught in Qum. He achieved national stature between 1961 and 1963 as the
leader of the opposition to various features?including coeducation and, many
say, land reform?of what the Shah called his ?white revolution.? In 1963,
Khomeini was expelled, and moved to the shrine of An Najaf. The radical
regime in Iraq, which in 1975, after years of bickering, reached an
accommodation with the Shah, forced Khomeini out last September, when
troubles became intense in Iran, and he moved to Paris. He had been
succeeded as the dominant figure in Qum by Ayatollah Shariatmadari. For most
of the past dozen years, the madressah students have made Qum a center of
opposition to the regime. Professor Michael Fischer, of Harvard, who spent
much of 1975 in that city, described the atmosphere at the time, in a
monograph he called ?The Qum Report,? as ?one of siege and courageous
passive hostility to a state perceived to be the stronger, but morally
corrupt, opponent.? The present wave of troubles was set in motion early
this year by violent demonstrations against the Shah in Qum.
I had telephoned ahead for an appointment with Shariatmadari, and had been
connected with a Pakistani aide of his named Seyyed Rivzi, who spoke
English. Rivzi told me to be in Qum by eight in the morning, because His
Holiness, as he called Shariatmadari, went to the mosque at nine and spent
the rest of the day in prayer and meditation. My translator friend and I
arrived before eight and, with the help of directions from the local police,
found our way to Shariatmadari?s quarters. He lives in a narrow back street,
paved with white brick and lined with yellowish walls. There are doors in
the walls every ten yards or so, and, behind the doors, courtyards leading
to buildings that are used as offices and houses. We were first shown into
an office, where we were received by Rivzi, a fat, middle-aged man wearing
spectacles and a black turban; he kept pushing the turban back from his
forehead in order to scratch his scalp. Rivzi said that I was in luck, for
His Holiness was feeling ill that day. Because he was not well enough to
pray, there would be ample time for the interview. Rivzi asked me to
disclose my questions in advance. He would write them down in Farsi and then
read them off to His Holiness?that way, there would be no mistakes. I began
reading from a list of questions I had prepared. He repeated them in
English, then set them down in Farsi, and read them back to my Iranian
friend for his approval of the translation. A couple of times, the English
version of my question differed significantly from the original, and at
length I pointed out one of the discrepancies. Rivzi said, ?I was not
trained as a reporter, but in the past few months I?ve been the interpreter
for sixty-eight different interviews. I?ve become quite good at framing
questions. I hope you don?t mind a little editing.?
After the questions had been given, edited, and translated, we moved across
the street to see Shariatmadari. He is a man of seventy-six, with a white
beard, a frail frame, and a thinnish voice. He, too, wore a black turban and
glasses?in his case, thick glasses over weak but distinctly friendly eyes.
He received us in a bare, whitewashed room lit by a single electric bulb,
which dangled from the ceiling. There were some uninteresting rugs on the
floor, and a curtain hung across the window on a string. Shariatmadari was
lying down on an opened crimson bedroll, with his head and shoulders raised
on a purple pillow. Rivzi and another aide, whose function I never
discovered, sat, legs crossed, facing His Holiness. I sat parallel to him,
also cross-legged, but with my back against a wall. In the course of our
talk, which lasted several hours, various people came in to see
Shariatmadari, kissing his hand, pressing petitions on him, often with money
between the pages, and then hurrying away. A telephone by the bedroll rang
frequently, but it was answered only rarely, by the non-Pakistani aide, who
usually managed to pick it up after the caller had stopped trying to get
through.
Shariatmadari began by asking about my trip down to Qum. I said that it had
been easy but that we had noticed a lot of troops in the town and, on the
wall of his house, a scrawled sign saying ?Death to the Butcher Shah.?
His Holiness said, ?I don?t know what is happening in Iran. I never saw a
nation in such a spirit of revolt. It is erupting like a volcano, and, like
a volcano, after building up pressure for years and years it is impossible
to stop.?
My first question had to do with the revival of religion in Iran as a
political force. Shariatmadari said, ?Religion used to be considered
marginal?apart from the mainstream of events. Now it has become much
stronger than before. The reason is that religion provides answers to
problems of conscience. It provides a vantage point for fighting injustice.
In our Shiite religion, spiritual leaders are ready at all times to assert
the truth and the right.?
I asked him what injustices he had in mind. He said, ?We have never had free
elections. The elections in the past were all dominated by local magnates or
the consulates of foreign powers. The consequence has been that we now have
laws repugnant to Islam and to the public interest. For example, alcoholic
beverages are permitted. There is gambling. There is illegitimate sex?by
that I mean sexual relations between people under twenty who are not
married. The authority to marry is in the hands of civil officials. But it
should not be. Marriage is not a deal or a contract. It is something
spiritual, and so it should be performed by the religious authorities.?
At that point, there were sounds of firing in the distance, and I started.
?Don?t be afraid,? he said. ?We?re used to that kind of noise.?
I asked him to tell me about the troubles in Qum. He said, ?From the
beginning of the disturbances in Qum, we have asked people to speak their
minds, but with calm and dignity, not in a provocative way. But I remember a
few months ago a company of soldiers headed by a major general walked into
these premises and announced they were on a mission from the government.
They started breaking windows and shooting. One person was killed on the
spot and another died in the hospital. Later, the government apologized. But
I ask, ?How can you apologize for killing people?? Had it been the Prime
Minister?s house, would it have been enough merely to apologize? Such an
action alone is adequate for me to declare a holy war or a revolution. That
might have happened if I were not devoted to the cause of moderation.?
I asked him how he would rectify the many injustices and wrongs he had
cited. He said that he favored a return to the constitution of 1906?a
document that a liberal movement with support from the clergy had wrung from
the Qajar dynasty, which preceded the family of the present Shah. The 1906
constitution provided for, among other things, a supreme council of five
religious leaders who would have a veto right over all laws. ?If they found
the laws repugnant to Islam or to principles of justice or against the
interests of the majority,? Shariatmadari said, ?they could reject them.?
I asked what would happen if the five religious leaders disagreed among
themselves. He said, ?That would not be possible, for they represent the
highest spiritual authority.?
I persisted with the question about a possible disagreement. ?In that case,?
he said, ?the issue would be referred to the highest spiritual authority in
the land.?
I assumed he meant himself, and any doubts on that score were settled by
Rivzi. He said, ?His Holiness would have the final word.?
I remarked that many people in Iran, and in other parts of the world, had
different views from His Holiness on such matters as religious liberty, land
reform, and the role of women. He cut in before I could develop this theme.
?The journalistic community in the world,? he said, pointing a bony finger
at me, ?has constantly made the libellous charge that we religious leaders
are anti-progressive and reactionary and anachronistic. That is not the
case. We want science, technology, educated men and women?physicists,
surgeons, engineers. But we also want clean and honest political leaders.
Those who make the charges against us are themselves reactionary, because
their goal is to stop us from instituting a government of hope. The
government of God is the government of the people by the people.?
I said that I would still like to know where he stood on the issue of equal
rights for women?coeducation, for example.
Very smoothly, as if there were no break in the line of thought at all, he
asked me how many Presidents there had been in American history. I said that
it wasn?t altogether clear whether the figure was thirty-eight or
thirty-nine.
He said, ?You come all the way over to Iran to ask about the rights of women
here, and you don?t even know how many Presidents you have had in your own
country.?
I explained that the matter was complicated by the fact that Grover
Cleveland had been President twice but not consecutively. I said that for
the sake of argument we could assume there had been thirty-nine Presidents.
?How many of them have been women?? he asked.
I said that none had but that that seemed to me beside the point. What, for
example, did he think about coeducation?
He said, ?I?m not opposed to the education of women for all kinds of tasks.
But I do not want coeducation. I want to separate the schools of learning
from the schools of flirting. We in Islam don?t look on women as playthings,
accepted as long as they are young and beautiful, and then cast away. In
Islam, the older the woman, the higher her status. We know that in
coeducational schools there is a corruption of moral values, which is
reflected in the police records. The girls develop certain relations, and
some have illegitimate children, and others have abortions. The girl loses
her self-respect and her status in society. Either she suffers a great
personal loss or she takes up another way of life?prostitution.?
I asked him his opinion of abortion. He said, ?In Islam, abortion is
considered murder. Therefore, abortion is not permitted.?
I asked him his views on birth control. He said, ?Birth control depends on
certain circumstances. In small, overpopulated countries that have no land,
birth control is acceptable. But in our country, where the population
occupies only one-fifth of the land, there is no need for birth control.
Procreation should be free unless there is a particular problem. In our
country, that problem doesn?t exist.?
I asked him whether there was equality in Islam for people of other
religions. He said, ?In Islam, Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians are all
accepted as equal?unless they become a Fifth Column for foreign meddling in
this country. Jews are accepted as Jews but not as defenders of Zionist
aggression.? He then referred to the Baha?i sect, which began as a reform
offshoot of Shiite Islam, and has been popular in Iran, particularly among
educated people who have done well in business and politics. He said,
?Baha?i is accepted as Baha?i per se but not as a clique dividing up
government posts among themselves and working for the foreign interests.?
I asked him where he stood on the land reform that the Shah had decreed in
1963. He said, ?Land reform is a question of the past. Even if there were
some objections made at the time, there were no objections to the principle
of land reform but only to the means of implementation. The Shah could have
done the same thing in accordance with the principles of Islam. That is
typical of his regime. In order to build roads and streets, he destroys the
house of an old woman and does not give her another house.?
At that point, Shariatmadari reproached me for picking out one issue at a
time instead of dealing with the culture as a whole. ?Culture is a mixture
of many interwoven things,? he said. ?You cannot in fairness just pick on
individual matters as if they were unrelated. For example, in the West you
cannot conceive of a banking system that does not charge interest on loans.
But in Islam, for many different reasons, our view is that interest should
not be charged.?
I said that that was true; no one in the West could understand how a
government without the power to raise interest rates could control
inflation. I went on to say that his point seemed valid, and so I would
shift subjects. I asked him where he stood on the issue of meetings with
representatives of the Shah.
He had had some ?unofficial meetings,? he said, and went on, ?But we can?t
have official meetings. The religious authorities will participate in all
offers of a solution to the present problems, but only with a fair and just
government and parliament. We can co?perate fully only after free elections
have returned a popularly chosen government.?
I said, and he acknowledged, that the Shah had tried to institute some
reforms directed toward liberalization of the regime. I observed that many
Americans felt that President Carter, by his human-rights campaign, had
played a role in fostering those reforms.
Shariatmadari said, ?Carter?s human-rights policy has not been a very
important propelling force, though it has not been totally without effect in
pushing liberalization. But in Islam we have some skepticism about the
sincerity of Carter?s human-rights approach, because he doesn?t apply it to
the United Nations. In the U.N., five countries have the veto. That means we
are not equal. But the Americans don?t say anything about that.?

A couple of days later, I flew to Isfahan, with my Iranian friend again
accompanying me as an interpreter. Isfahan, as the 1966 Hachette Guide
proclaims with unwonted effusion, is ?one of the most marvellous places in
the world.? The city lies on a plateau watered by a large oasis and a lovely
stream. Shah Abbas I?the greatest Persian emperor, not excepting Xerxes and
the three Dariuses?made it his capital at the end of the sixteenth century;
at that time, it had a population of about half a million, and was among the
largest cities in the world. I remembered from a previous visit, a decade
ago, broad, tree-lined avenues; a magnificent central square, the
Maydan-e-Shah; the extraordinary Bridge of Thirty-three Arches; and a
general air of refined elegance. But even from the air, I could see
burgeoning suburbs and smoke from factories?signs that change had come to
Isfahan.
A local official, who asked not to be mentioned by name, rapidly brought me
up to date on developments in Isfahan. He said, ?Five years ago, there were
five hundred and sixty thousand people in Isfahan, and this was one of the
most beautiful cities in the world. Then the Shah decided that there was too
much administrative and economic concentration in Teheran, and that he
needed to decentralize. So he put a steel mill here. And an airbase, with a
helicopter training center. Naturally, foreign companies followed suit. Bell
Helicopter came in with the training base. Du Pont put a plant here. Now we
have more than a million people. The doubling in five years of a population
that had been stable for three hundred years has changed everything. This
used to be an educational center, with a university, many religious schools,
and lots of music. Now it is an industrial town. Over three hundred thousand
workers have come in from the countryside, most of them without their
families. They live five or six to a room in the poorer quarter of town.
They make good wages?a dollar seventy-five an hour?but they don?t have their
families, and they?re miserable. Everybody else has been affected, too. The
bazaar merchants used to be very important. Now the banks manage credit, and
the engineers are the big shots in town.
?Students have grown up under the Shah, and they don?t know what things were
like before development started. All they know is that the Shah promised
that Iran was going to be like France or Germany. That isn?t happening. The
huge surge in population means that services are spread too thin and are
constantly breaking down. There aren?t enough telephones. It?s impossible to
buy a car. The schools are jammed. Housing is scarce. During the past three
years, there has been a recession, especially in building, and many laborers
are out of work. So the students are in a mood to reject everything that has
happened. They are turning back to the old days, and pursuing an idealized
version of what things were like then. They are pushing the mullahs to go
back and re-create the wonderful past. The mullahs see a chance to regain
their prestige and power. The students provide them with a power base for
putting pressure on the government to give them the consideration and
importance they have been seeking for years. So the mullahs go along. That?s
the dynamic of trouble in Isfahan.?
I asked about the circumstances relating to the declaration of martial law
in Isfahan back in August, a month before it was declared in the other major
cities of the country.
The local official said, ?That?s a perfect example. All through the spring
and summer, after riots in Qum in January, and in Tabriz in late February,
this town was seething with unrest. The workers were demanding better
housing conditions, and more money to meet inflation. The bazaar merchants
were bitching about the loss of their old status, about price controls, and
competition from the big banks and supermarkets. The intellectuals were
complaining about the lack of freedom. The students were telling the mullahs
to do their stuff, and the mullahs were saying ?right on.? About the first
of August, a mixed group of workers and students occupied the home of the
most prominent local religious leader, Ayatollah Khademi. The
governor-general and the local Army commander went to Khademi and told him
to get them off the premises. He tried, but he couldn?t. On the contrary,
the crowds got bigger and bigger. At one point, maybe twenty thousand people
were camping there. When Khademi tried to cool them down, the students
turned ugly. They took down the posters of the Shah and put up posters of
Ayatollah Khomeini. On August 11th, the military decided to clear the place.
Troops moved in, threw tear gas, and pushed the crowd out at bayonet point.
The crowd then went on a rampage. It burned down a bank and a hotel and
fifteen other buildings. It threw a bomb into a bus for Bell Helicopter
employees. That?s when martial law was declared. The bazaaris?the bazaar
merchants?immediately went on strike and closed down their shops in protest.
The madressah students stayed in their schools, but they demonstrated every
day, always making more radical demands. On the night of August 21st, two
high-school teachers, who had built up a large following of anti-government
young people, were arrested and sent to Teheran. Next day, the kids hit the
streets, and there has been trouble of one kind or another ever since.?
I asked for and was given the names of the teachers?who had been released
after a month in custody. They had no telephones, so my Iranian friend and I
picked one?Hassan Zehtab?and drove out to see him. He lives on the outskirts
of town, in a neighborhood of narrow, twisting unpaved streets. The car
could barely squeeze between the walls, and the puddles and mud in the road
reminded me anew of the origins of the custom of removing one?s shoes before
entering a mosque. Once we were in the neighborhood, we had no trouble
finding the house; everybody we asked knew Hassan Zehtab, and where he
lived.
Mr. Zehtab turned out to be a partly bald, moonfaced middle-aged man with a
complexion slightly darker in tone than that of most Iranians. He was
carefully dressed, in a suit, white shirt, tie, and sweater. I saw only two
rooms of his home, and they were modest in size and bare of ornament. When
we arrived, Zehtab was meeting in one of the rooms with about forty
disciples. He agreed to see me, and we moved into the other room, with ten
of his disciples coming along. I asked Zehtab to tell me a little about who
he was and what he believed.
He said, ?I?m forty years old, and I have been a schoolteacher here in
Isfahan ever since I graduated from the University of Teheran, fifteen years
ago. In all this time, I haven?t seen one truly free election, or one
instance of concern on the part of those in authority for the happiness of
the people. I think the only way to bring about the happiness of the people
is through an Islamic culture. We?re given to understand that the ruling
clique is talking about religion now, and putting on a turban and the white
garments of holiness. But that is a mere pretense. Even a child can see
through that. It is like the ceramic facing on the wall of a building.
Everybody knows that beneath the facing there is a real wall, of a different
material.?
I asked him if it was not true that under the Shah the country had taken
large strides toward economic development over the past fifteen years.
He replied, ?I have to say with great sorrow that our economic growth is
based on a windfall called oil. If we consider where we are, and then where
the progressive states like Japan are, we realize how little we have
accomplished. When I think of Japan, I think of a verse:
Leila and I were fellow-travellers on the road of life;
She reached her home, and I am still a vagabond.?
I said that even if some countries had done better than Iran, Iran had done
quite well.
He said, ?What we see here is inflation?prices for food have gone way up.
What we see is the depletion of our oil reserves. At the present rate, we
have only twenty years to go. What we see is an agriculture worth zero. We
buy vegetables from Israel, wheat from the United States, onions from
Turkey, meat from Australia, oranges from six different countries. Our
industry is just an assembly line for products made in other countries. We
would be poor fools indeed if we were satisfied with that.?
I asked him what would satisfy him. He said, ?My ideal future is within the
framework of Islamic law. That is the guarantee of happiness and a good
future for society. On particular religious questions, I don?t find it in my
area of competence to make answers. I leave that to the highest religious
authorities.?
All during the interview, Zehtab, his disciples, my Iranian friend, and I
were sitting cross-legged on the floor. I was extremely uncomfortable, and
it must have been evident, for one of the disciples asked if I would like a
piece of fruit. I said yes, and he took an apple out of a bowl in the middle
of the floor. He began to peel it for me, but at the first stroke of the
knife the blade separated from its handle. He held out the broken knife.
?There you see it all,? he said in disgust. ?Our country owns twenty-five
per cent of Krupp in Germany, but in Iran we can?t even produce a knife that
cuts an apple.?
Everybody laughed, and I began questioning the disciples. All of them were
students or professional men between the ages of twenty and thirty, and had
participated actively in many demonstrations against the Shah. They all
supported Zehtab in his quest for an Islamic society. I expressed surprise
that young men with professional training should be so drawn to a religion
that seemed?to a Westerner, at least?not exactly with it. I went around the
room, asking the disciples, one by one, a single question: ?What drew you
toward Islam??
The first to answer was a mullah, in robes and turban, who had a degree in
psychology from the University of Teheran. He said, ?My love for Islam has
grown because I have studied it and compared it with other religions.? The
others?four students, two employees of the National Iranian Oil Company, an
accountant, an engineer, and a physicist?all gave nearly the same answer.
Two of them said that they had compared Islam with the teachings of a
nineteenth-century European social philosopher?that is, Marx, whose name has
been taboo in Iran?and found it preferable. Another offered the
generalization ?Islam offers a solution to the complications of our life.?
As we drove away, I remarked to my Iranian friend that the similarity of the
answers was disappointing. ?You don?t understand,? he told me. ?They all
followed the lead of the mullah. It doesn?t make for interesting answers,
but it makes them happy.?

I spent the night in Isfahan at the Shah Abbas Hotel. The clientele was
entirely foreign?a sprinkling of Japanese, Indians, Americans, an?
Europeans. Apart from the sight of a section of the hotel which had been
damaged during the riots of August, and an armed guard in the gardens? there
was no sign of trouble
Before dinner, I visited Wanda Hake, an American psychologist employed by
the United States companies working in the Isfahan region. Mrs. Hake
reported that most of the Americans in the area lived in a compound, largely
removed from contact with the Iranians. They had the problems usually found
in such communities. There was great boredom?especially among the children.
Alcoholism was common among the women, and many of the children had drug
problems. There was a good deal of contempt for the Iranians. ?Because of
their turbans, many Americans call them rag heads,? Mrs. Hake said. ?That?s
the nicest name they call them.?
Mrs. Hake had some guests, and one of them was a bazaar merchant from an old
Isfahan family. ?I could cry about what has happened here,? he told me. ?It
used to be a paradise of water and gardens and beautiful buildings. Now the
town is full of strangers. There are the people from the villages. They live
in shantytowns. There are ten thousand Americans. They drive up the price of
everything?especially houses. A house that rented for five thousand rials
per month five years ago now costs forty thousand rials per month. Many
people are unhappy. One of my interests is a building project. My workers
were Afghanis?three hundred of them. The other day, the government sent the
Afghanis home. I know why: There was a crime wave, and they did a lot of the
stealing. But nobody gave me any warning. Now what do I do?
?Lots of the young men come to see me about their problems. They don?t know
how to deal with the young women sitting next to them in their classes. In
the past, they had never seen any women, even mothers and sisters, who were
not wearing a veil. Now they see miniskirts and bare arms and bare legs.
They say to me, ?What do they want, these women? What are they trying to do
to me??
?When I go to Teheran, I feel as though I were in Hell. Somebody could die
right in front of you and nobody would do anything. Deep sadness comes over
me when I see the uses to which we have put our oil wealth. So it is not
surprising that there has been a political eruption. Five years ago,
Khomeini was nothing. Now he is held up as the equivalent of the Shah.?
At breakfast the next day, I met a professor of religion at the university
who had been educated at Harvard and Oxford. His family are members of the
Baha?i sect, and he is going back to Oxford, at least partly because of
religious persecution. He said he would like to talk about the state of
religion in Iran, but only on condition that I not mention his name. I
agreed.
He said, ?As a student of religion, I read with great interest Toynbee?s ?A
Study of History.? I always wondered why he felt that the next stage of
regeneration in the world would be religious. I felt that religion had been
on the run all over the world for centuries. In some places, there have been
adjustments, but they have been made only slowly and painfully. Christianity
accommodated itself to Darwin, but it was hard even in a tolerant country
like Britain. Islam has experienced a number of shocks and adjustments.
There have been several efforts to update the religion. But they have all
failed. By and large, the clergy remains narrow, fanatical, and ignorant.?
He went on, ?The merchants of the bazaars worked hand and glove with the
mullahs. They were the two most conservative elements in the cities. The
bazaaris usually rented land from the religious foundations, and made the
foundations big gifts. But both the bazaaris and the foundations have been
outmoded by recent developments. When I left Iran to go abroad to school, in
1960, this was still a backward country. Only a few cities in the country
had running water. There were only about ten thousand people who had been or
were at universities. Most industry was handicrafts, and about eighty per
cent of the people still lived in rural villages. In 1970, when I came back,
it was a different country. All the young people?and that is over fifty per
cent of the population?were going to school. There are a hundred thousand
university graduates now and almost two hundred thousand people in
universities. On a normal weekend, between one and two million people drive
out of Teheran in their own cars.
?The mullahs have been losing steadily through these developments. Their
base was education. Now they have to contend against state schools and
universities. They?ve lost the large landholdings they once had. Most of
their endowments have been nationalized, and are controlled by the state. No
one ever paid much attention to them until the present wave of troubles. The
bazaaris have also lost great power. The banks and big companies have taken
away their control over loans and credit. There are shops out in the
streets?across from your hotel, for example?so people don?t go to the bazaar
as much. And for a while there was price inspection as part of a campaign
against inflation. That hit the bazaaris very hard.?
After a pause, he continued, ?People now don?t remember what it was like in
the old days. As late as 1955, I remember going with my father to a village
in the countryside. The local khan?the head man?did justice the religious
way. He cut off hands for thievery, splitting people?s tongues for
talebearing. There was a peasant in the village with a beautiful wife. The
khan took her, and the peasant complained to my father. The khan went out
riding with my father, and they encountered the peasant. The khan took his
riding crop and beat the peasant senseless.
?The oil boom ended all that and put it out of mind. But it also brought
lots of trouble. Mainly inflation. There are buses now, and vegetables, but
most people can?t afford them. Moreover, a lot of the money has been spent?I
almost said wasted?on big projects and arms purchases that don?t do ordinary
people any immediate good. And it has to be said that on the cultural side
the Western world has not done well in Iran. Students coming back from
Europe and the United States present the cities there as meccas for drunks,
whores, and illegitimate children. They depict a total breakdown of morale.
So to the difficulties of local adjustment there is added a tarnishing of
the classic model. The West is seen xenophobically, as something
frightening, and the search for old values is intensified.
?It also has to be admitted that the Shah, in his enthusiasm to build the
country, ignored the people in it. The masses were left out of his
development program. The bazaaris were left out. The mullahs were left out.
He thought he could bring them along through economic progress without any
accompanying change in ways of thought. The heart of the difficulty, though,
is the new group of university students. From fifty to seventy-five per cent
of them come from poor homes. They are very disturbed when they sit next to
a girl in class. They feel a sense of guilt, a fear of being polluted?of
secularization. All this takes the form of opposition to the regime as the
bearer of Western values. The sexual drive pushes the students in the
direction of religion, and the mullahs latch on to them to maintain their
position of importance.?

Back in Teheran, I found mounting turbulence and confusion. A wave of
strikes that had started in September with employees of the centra? bank had
spread to other banks, to the telecommunications industry, and to the oil
workers. One day, there was a rumor that the gas-statio? workers would go on
strike. I saw hundreds of cars lined up at several gas stations. Angry
motorists jockeyed for position, and in one place troop? had to fire into
the air to maintain order. The university had been scheduled to reopen at
the end of September, and then at the end of October? Each time,
registration had been stopped by student strikes and demonstrations. After
the second effort, the authorities gave up, and turned th? campus, in
downtown Teheran, over to the demonstrators. There were daily protests, and
one morning I went to watch, with a visiting America? professor who spoke
Farsi. Armed soldiers in tanks and armored personnel carriers patrolled the
gates, but we were allowed in without an? demand to show our credentials.
There were two groups of demonstrators, marching back and forth. One
group?of about seventy-five students? almost all men?was clearly Marxist in
its political sentiments. The students carried placards denouncing
international imperialism, and chante? slogans calling for the unity of the
workers. The other group, obviously Islamic in orientation, bore pictures of
Ayatollah Khomeini and carrie? signs calling for an Islamic republic. There
were several hundred students in the Islamic group, including many women.
All the women wer? veiled. Some wore the chador, a garment that envelops the
body from head to foot, while others wore bluejeans, blouses, and scarves
that veiled their heads and faces. A few times, word went through the crowd
that soldiers were coming. The ranks broke and everybody rushed for cover.
But that day, at least, no soldiers came.
The professors, having no classes, were available and talkative. By far the
most interesting was Karim Pakravan, an economist trained at the University
of Chicago, whose father, a former Iranian general, had at one time been
head of the security-police apparatus, known as Savak, and was now working
at the Imperial Palace in a high administrative position. He came to visit
me at my hotel room, and talked freely of his own situation and that of his
colleagues.
?Young professional people want to escape the establishment,? he said. ?The
establishment is everybody who has real power. In one way or another, either
morally or financially, it is corrupt. We are not brave enough to join the
opposition, but by being at the university we maintain a passive opposition.
Our case against the government is lack of freedom. All creativity has been
crushed. I teach a course in economics. I?m not allowed to say that there?s
malnutrition or poverty, or that we?re underdeveloped. A doctor friend of
mine went to the countryside to look at health problems. He found all the
diseases typical of underdeveloped countries?trachoma, dysentery, that kind
of thing. He didn?t find cancer and hypertension?the diseases that go with
modern society. So he was never allowed to make a report.
?A whole generation of Iranians has been raised, educated, and given no
freedom. Young engineers, for instance, have only a minor chance to take
part in technological development. The Shah didn?t develop a technology?he
bought a blueprint of technology from the West. So there were very few major
jobs for Iranians. At least ninety per cent of our people have been left out
of development. I have a small consulting firm. I take only private clients.
Unless we were huge and foreign, we couldn?t get government contracts
anyway. I might be able to do a project for the government at a charge of,
say, ten thousand dollars for a couple of months? work. But people in the
government would rather hire foreigners at a thousand dollars a day. That
way, they get a kickback.?
He continued, ?Khomeini is merely a symbol of opposition. He is respected as
a Moslem, but he has no power. Ten years ago, no prayers were said in the
universities. Religious students were mocked. Now there is a genuine student
problem. Many of the students come from poor families in the provinces. They
have to rent rooms, and the financial burden is unbearable. There has never
been a systematic study made, so we don?t know how badly off they are. But
they don?t have enough money. They have to cluster six or seven in a room.
In the last few years, there has been an undoubted effort to reform things.
There?s real talk in the parliament. Those in Savak who were corrupt and who
tortured people have been ousted. There?s an effort to bring roads to
villages, and water. If there should he elections soon, I?d probably vote.
But I wouldn?t join the government. Next year is going to be bad. Already,
because of the strikes and the big wage settlements, it is clear that the
gross national product will be down by ten per cent. There?ll he an
incredible inflation. One good thing I can say: At last, after twenty-five
years, Iranian politics are becoming interesting.?
Pakravan put me in touch with another economist trained in the United
States, who divided his time between teaching and working for Iran?s Plan
and Budget Organization. Because of his government job, he asked me not to
mention his name. He said that economists at the Plan and Budget
Organization had repeatedly done studies showing that, while the national
wealth was increasing, many people, particularly in the countryside, were
relatively worse off. He showed me a report that indicated that the income
share of the top twenty per cent of urban Iranians had risen from 57.5 per
cent in 1972 to 63.5 per cent in 1975. The share of the middle forty per
cent dropped from 31 per cent to 25.5 per cent. The share of the bottom
forty per cent dropped from 11.5 per cent to 11 per cent. While urban
consumption per head was about two times that of the rural areas in 1959, it
had by 1972 grown to three times that of the rural areas. But these studies,
while circulated abroad, were, he said, not published in Iran.
The economist went on to talk about the religious revival. ?I was very
active in politics during my high-school years,? he said. ?At that time?the
early nineteen-fifties?there were only two important groups: the Communist,
or Tudeh, Party, and the National Front?which included the Pan-Iranians, who
wanted to take over parts of Iraq, Turkey, and Pakistan. The young had
absolutely no interest in religion. After that, the political situation
calmed down. There was a brief revival of politics in 1961 and 1962, when
Ali Amini came to office as Prime Minister. He started the land reform that
the Shah later claimed as his own. The Tudeh Party was dead then, but the
National Front was strong. The religious people didn?t count. Khomeini
became important only after he was driven into exile by the Shah. The Shah?s
father, Reza Shah, had been very successful in fighting the mullahs. He made
a direct assault on the clergy?forcing women to take off veils, riding into
the shrines and beating the mullahs. He had public sympathy, because then
the clergy were corrupt and wealthy. They were hated by everybody. Now they
have lost their lands and the religious foundations. The mullahs have been
purified. They have the power of poverty.?

The economist at the planning agency introduced me to Magid Tehranian, an
intellectual in his middle thirties who had been trained at Harvar? and then
co-opted into the Shah?s system as the head of an institute for the study of
communications. I went to see him at the institute, where h? looked every
bit the European or American intellectual in his cozy oyster shell; he had a
comfortable office with a couple of secretaries, and wor? a neat blue suit,
a silk tie, and shoes of soft Italian leather. He talked briefly about
Iranian intellectuals. He said, ?The great problem facing th? university
graduates once they are out of school is a lack of freedom. We have lots of
intellectuals and technocrats who have views, but they ar? never allowed to
express them. Everything is dictated from the top, and some of it is silly.
For instance, the government tried to build up th? television network?with
which I was involved. It was extended to the point where it reached seventy
per cent of the people in Iran. Then th? palace intervened. They insisted
that we show pictures of urban guerrillas confessing their terrorist deeds.
They made us put Parviz Sabeti, th? head of Savak?s anti-terrorist campaign,
on the screen, giving his view of history. We have an intelligentsia, but
they have no chance to participate. They?re just supposed to support the
regime. But they don?t like slavishly supporting the Shah, so they turn
against him. Yet, with all this, we have been surprised by the breadth of
the movement against the Shah. It reaches from plush Teheran to the remotest
villages.?
Tehranian was said to have been a Marxist before he joined the government,
and I had gone to see him primarily because I needed some help in
ascertaining the part that the Marxists had played in what had been
happening. Clearly, the Marxists counted for something in the movement
against the Shah, but I had been given the most diverse estimates of their
role, from the most surprising sources. The view around the palace was that
the religious movement had been totally taken over by the Marxists. That
view was shared by the economist who taught at the university as a form of
?passive resistance? to ?the establishment.? ?The resistance is run by the
Communists,? he had told me. ?If you want to buy weapons, there is a number
you can call and you get what you ask for. I don?t know exactly who supplies
the weapons?the Russians, the Cubans, or the Palestinians. But they?re the
ones who have made the country erupt.? An American official, on the other
hand, put absolutely no stock in the theory of Communist manipulation. He
remarked to me that ?the Army and the police and Savak have been combing the
country all year looking for the Communists behind the demonstrations. So
far, they haven?t found a single one. Why? Because there aren?t any. The
mullahs and the bazaaris between them have informal networks that they?ve
used for years to organize processions and festivals. That?s all it takes
now. That?s all there is.?
I told Tehranian of the confused picture I was getting, and asked if he
could put me in touch with any of his former Marxist colleagues. He said
that it would be easy, and set up an appointment for me with a friend
holding a high post in the Ministry of Information. The friend would
organize an interview with three officials in the Ministry. I was not to
talk about Marx. Instead, I should use the euphemism ?a European social
philosopher of the nineteenth century.?
At the last minute, I had to change the appointment from the morning to the
afternoon, but that was no problem. I went to see the official, and after a
few moments he took me into a room behind his office. Three men, all about
thirty, were sitting at a table with a woman?a graduate student at the
University of Michigan, who acted as translator. I asked them if they were
believers in the philosophy of a certain well-known European social
philosopher of the nineteenth century, and all three smiled and nodded. I
asked them about their education and their jobs. They were university
graduates?one from the Sorbonne, the two others from the University of
Teheran. The man from the Sorbonne helped put together public-opinion polls
for the Ministry, and the two others had jobs as engineers.
I asked what they found useful in the works of the nineteenth-century social
philosopher. One said, ?He exposes the imperialists and their rape of all
the countries of the Third World, including Iran.?
I asked how, specifically, the philosopher?s theories were relevant to Iran,
and was told about the depletion of Iran?s oil reserves and the purchase of
American weapons for open ?use against the people.? I asked about Iran?s
practice of selling natural gas to the Soviet Union, and they responded that
there was no shortage of natural gas.
I asked if they felt that the Russians had designs on Iran. All of them
thought that compared to the United States influence, which was
?all-pervasive,? the Russian influence was ?so small it doesn?t count.? I
asked what recent works by followers of the well-known nineteenth-century
social philosopher they had read. After some hesitation, the man from the
Sorbonne said, ?Jean-Paul Sartre.? No other names were forthcoming.
I asked how they felt about the religious movement against the Shah. All
said that they agreed with its objectives. I asked if there wasn?t a
contradiction somewhere. Wasn?t religion supposed to be ?the opium of the
people??
?Sometimes that is true,? I was told. ?But in developing countries it is
different. At times, religious feelings and social movements go hand in
hand. That is the way it is now in Iran. We are all of us united against the
Shah.?
I asked how they thought the government of the Soviet Union felt about the
Shah. They said they felt that they had the backing of Moscow.
I asked whether they and their leaders were working from within the
religious movement. There was a silence. Then one of them said, ?We are in
an Islamic country, and all social movements inevitably have a religious
coloring. We do not believe there will ever he Communism here as there is
Communism in Russia or China. We will have our own brand of socialism.?
Later, the official who had arranged the interview told me that I should
have asked him the same questions. ?I believe that the Communists are
manipulating the religious movement,? he said. Still later, an American
official showed me a translation of an article in Navid, a new, underground
publication of the Tudeh Party. The article, entitled ?The Tudeh Party and
the Moslem Movement,? said, ?We are ready to put at the disposal of our
friends from other political groups all our political propaganda and
technical resources for the campaign against the Shah.? I was also shown an
interview with Iraj Eskandary, the secretary-general of the Tudeh Party, now
living in exile in Moscow. Among other things, Eskandary said, ?As far as
the religious aspect of the present movement is concerned, it should be
emphasized that the Shiite clergy cannot be viewed as a force demanding a
return to the past, to the Middle Ages. The position of the clergy reflects,
to a significant extent, popular feelings. And the fact that the religious
movement is now playing an important role in the mobilization of democratic
and nationalist forces against the dictatorial, anti-nationalist, and
pro-imperialist regime of the Shah can only be welcomed. . . . We are in
favor of a union with all democratic forces, including the religious ones.?

If the role played by the Marxists in the fomenting of trouble remains
obscure, the role of the liberalization sponsored by the Shah and hi?
ministers looms larger and larger. The Shah acknowledged when I saw him that
he had begun to loosen things up ?about two years ago.? I was i? Iran in the
spring of 1977, and I remember well the widespread talk of relaxation. Jimmy
Carter?s emphasis on human rights was one of th? reasons, but only one, and
not the most important. Iranian students in the United States and Europe had
focussed attention on the repressiv? features of the regime?particularly the
practice of torture by Savak. The international press, led by Le Monde, of
Paris, had picked up the theme. Both the Red Cross and Amnesty
International, the private human-rights group based in London, were asking
questions and proposing visits. But by far the most important reason for the
relaxation was that the rapid development that followed the great oil-price
increase of 1973 proved too complicated for direct control from above.
Dislocations and shortages were universal. I recall visiting a new aluminum
plant in an industrial area outside Teheran. The plant was supposed to
accommodate several hundred workers, but they had no housing and no
transport, and there were no telephones in the offices. All over the
country, power failures were frequent, and the pursuit of scarce goods and
services drove inflation above the twenty-five-per-cent-per-year level. An
effort to hold clown inflation by fixing prices was failing in a spectacular
manner. It was clear that the economy could be made to work only if there
was some freeing up, some devolution of authority.
Signs of reform were abundant that spring. Batches of prisoners were
released, and were allowed to talk to the press. The Shah declared that
torture would cease?an admission that it had been going on. Corruption,
which had never been far below the surface?as witness the Persian origin of
the word ?baksheesh??became public in the wake of a scandal that involved
payoffs to high officials of the Iranian Navy. The National Front, the chief
opposition party, was allowed to circulate letters highly critical of the
regime. Student demonstrations went forward with only token harassment. Even
the television appearances of Parviz Sabeti, the director of Savak?s
political section, were part of an effort to prove that the organization had
a human face.
The direction of policy, to be sure, remained ambiguous. Low-level agents of
Savak continued to stage raids on opposition meetings. Investigation of
corruption at the highest levels was systematically blocked?reputedly by the
Shah?s entourage. But a key figure in the entourage, Amir Assadollah Alam,
the Minister of the Imperial Court, fell ill in 1977, and died in New York
early this year. His departure from the Court Ministry opened the way for a
political change that signalled an undoubted commitment to reform. In
August, 1977, the Shah appointed a new Court Minister, Amir Abbas Hoveida,
and a new Prime Minister, Jamshid Amouzegar. I saw both men at their homes
in Teheran in late October of this year, along with the Information Minister
in the Amouzegar government, Dariush Homayun. They all talked freely, but
not for individual attribution. What follows is my interpretation of their
accounts of what happened during the twelve months beginning in August,
1977?a period of sweeping reforms that boomeranged to injure them, and the
Shah as well.

Hoveida, an affable and highly intelligent man, with degrees in history,
economics, and political science from the Universities of Paris an?
Brussels, came to the Court Ministry after nearly thirteen years as Prime
Minister?the longest term in modern times. He had a major hand in th? rapid
development that changed the face of Iran and soured so many of its people.
Though he was said to have been tolerant of corruption in th? past, he was
reputed never to have been on the take himself, and he certainly did not
live on the grand scale. He had realized as early as 1975 tha? the pace of
development had to be slowed down. ?We?re in orbit,? he had told me at the
time, ?and we have to come down to earth.? He brough? to the Court Ministry
a determination to achieve economic slowdown and political reform. As he saw
it, the key to both was ending corruption a? the highest levels. From the
beginning, he worked with the Shah on a code of conduct for the royal
family. That project brought him into conflic? with many members of the
family who had been active in private business affairs. In July, 1978, after
a long and bitter battle, Hoveida finally wo? the Shah?s approval for the
code of conduct
The code was not published, for fear that the spelling out of what was
henceforth prohibited would be regarded as a confession of past guilt. But
the fact that it was adopted was made known, and caused virtually every
member of the royal family to leave Iran. Here?published for the first time,
I think?is the code that the Shah approved last summer:
CODE OF CONDUCT FOR THE IMPERIAL FAMILY
In order to maintain the high status of the Imperial family, which is
respected by all Iranians, the following principles are instituted as the
Code of Conduct of the Imperial family:
1) Refraining from conduct considered distasteful by social custom.
2) Refraining from any acts or actions not in keeping with the high status
of the Imperial family.
3) Refraining from direct contact with public officials for the purpose of
handling personal business. These matters will be handled through the
Ministry of Court or His Imperial Majesty?s Special Office.
4) Refraining from contacts with foreign companies or organizations which
are parties to contracts and deals with Iranian public organizations.
5) Refraining from receiving commissions for any reason whatsoever, from
companies and organizations, foreign or Iranian, which are parties to
contracts or deals with the Iranian government.
6) Refraining from receiving valuable gifts from persons, companies, or
organizations. 
7) Refraining from deals of any kind with public organizations, be it the
government, organizations associated with the government, municipalities, or
public organizations.
8) Refraining from direct or indirect (through third person or persons)
partnership or holding shares in companies or organizations that are parties
to deals with the government or public organizations.
9) Refraining from founding or holding shares in organizations or companies
whose activities are not compatible with the high status of the members of
the Imperial family, such as restaurants, cabarets, casinos, and the like.
10) Refraining from the use of facilities and properties belonging to
government and public organizations for private use.
11) Refraining from the use?for private or commercial purposes?of the
services of the employees of the government and associated organizations who
also have responsibilities and duties in foundations associated with the
Imperial family, or related organizations.
12) Refraining from asking for special favors or making recommendations to
public officials in the interest of members of the Imperial family or
others. 
13) Refraining from the use of legal exemptions for persons outside of the
Imperial family. 
14) Refraining from the use of nationalized lands belonging to the
government or public organizations for the purpose of profiting, for
example, through construction projects or establishing commercial, service,
or industrial organizations.
15) Refraining from receiving anything from persons (natural or legal) in
lieu of influencing public officials in order to legalize acts which would
not otherwise be eligible for profit-making (such as partnership in
ownership of large pieces of land in return for registering such lands for
the purpose of making profit).
16) Refraining from the use of nationalized lands for agriculture and dairy
projects. 
17) Refraining from accepting positions on the boards of insurance, banking,
and other companies.
18) Voluntary compliance with security regulations and whatever relates to
public order. 
19) Protecting the prestige and respect of national values and beliefs
outside of the country.
20) Refraining from contacts with foreign embassies in Iran unless through
the Ministry of Court.
Amouzegar came to the office of Prime Minister with a reputation as a
brilliant public servant. He was educated at the University of Teheran, at
Cornell, and at the University of Washington, and has a Ph.D. in civil
engineering. Before becoming Prime Minister, at the age of fifty-four, he
had successively headed four Ministries?Labor, Agriculture, Finance, and
Interior?and had also served as Iran?s chief negotiator in the price-fixing
sessions of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. Though less
supple than Hoveida in political matters, Amouzegar was thought to be
equally free of corruption and far more competent in economics. As Prime
Minister, he set his sights on curtailing inflation and rooting out
corruption at the ministerial level. By squeezing hard on the money supply,
he cut inflation from thirty-five per cent in August, 1977, to ten per cent
in August, 1978. In the process, he earned the enmity of many of those
dependent on credit, including most of the bazaar merchants and the high
rollers in the construction field. As for corruption, he pushed General
Nematollah Nasseri out as the head of Savak and off into a corner as
Ambassador to Pakistan. He forced Hushang Ansari, the Minister of Finance,
to step out of the Cabinet and become head of the National Iranian Oil
Company. He obliged Mayor Gholam Reza Nikpay, of Teheran, to quit. Those
actions put him at odds with both the Shah and Hoveida, who had close ties
to several of those who had been shunted aside. In the recesses of the
Imperial Court, an intrigue was concocted which came to engulf everybody.
The starting point was the death, late in October of 1977, of Seyyed Mustafa
Khomeini, the son of the exiled Ayatollah. The son, a mullah, was forty-nine
at the time, and he died, according to supporters of the Shah, of a heart
attack. His father suspected foul play, and, during the Shiite days of
mourning for the dead, which fell in late December last year, circulated a
number of letters throwing blame on the Shah. Early in January this year,
there was sent from the office of the Court Minister, Hoveida, to the office
of the Information Minister, Homayun, the text of an article. Homayun, as
was the custom, passed the article on for publication to the editors of a
leading Teheran daily, Eta?alaat. The editors at the paper were sufficiently
disturbed by the text to check with Homayun. He told them that it came from
the Court and they should go ahead and publish it. The editors then apprised
Amouzegar of what was in the works. Amouzegar called Homayun, who repeated
the explanation that the article came from the Court and was supposed to be
published. Exactly who wrote the article is not known to me, but the
unwillingness of those involved to name the author suggests that it was
either the Shah himself or somebody acting on his orders. My impression is
that part of the motive was to embroil the Amouzegar government with the
religious opposition.
The article appeared on January 7th. It bore the title ?Iran and the Red and
Black Imperialism,? and contained a harsh personal attack on Ayatollah
Khomeini. It started obliquely, with references to the recent days of
mourning in which Ayatollah Khomeini had circulated his grievances against
the Shah. It moved on to a discussion of forces designated as Red and Black
Imperialism, meaning the Communists and the clergy. It said that co?peration
between the two had been ?rare? but that an exception was ?the close,
sincere, and honest co?peration of both vis-?-vis the Iranian revolution,
especially the progressive land reform in Iran.? The article went on to
recall the opposition to land reform back in 1963, including the ?riots of
June 5th and 6th,? which had precipitated the expulsion of Ayatollah
Khomeini. It said that the opposition to the reform had come from the
Communists grouped in the Tudeh Party and from ?the landowners who had been
robbing the peasants for many years.? These groups, the article continued,
had turned for ?succor to the clergy since the clergy enjoy great respect
among Iranians.? Most of the clergy, the article said, proved ?far too
intelligent to act against the Shah?s-people?s revolution,? so at that point
the opponents had decided to ?recruit someone from the clergy who would be
adventurous.? That ?someone? had turned out to be Ayatollah Khomeini.
According to the article, he had ?an unknown past,? but apparently had lived
for many years in India, where he had developed ?contacts with centers of
British imperialism.? The article concluded by denouncing Ayatollah Khomeini
as ?someone who had taken the initiative in carrying out the plans of Red
and Black Imperialism . . . who fought land reform, the women?s vote, the
nationalization of the forests . . . who would sincerely serve conspirators
and Fifth Columnists.?
On January 9th, two days after the article appeared, the religious students
in Qum went into the streets to protest the attack on Khomeini. A clash with
police ensued. Nine people were killed and many were injured. Forty days
later, in Tabriz, a memorial service was held for those killed in Qum.
Again, there was a clash with police. This time, thirteen people were
killed. After that, trouble came in Teheran and Isfahan and Meshed, and then
in Qum once more. August 5th marked Iran?s Constitution Day, and the eve of
Ramadan, the Moslem month of abstention. The Shah delivered a nationwide
television broadcast, pledging that he would go ahead with the
liberalization program. But all through that month, in city after city,
there were assaults on the symbols of Western modernity associated with the
Shah?s rule?banks, casinos, and cinemas. The campaign reached a horrible
climax in Abadan, the site of the country?s largest oil refinery. On August
20th, the Rex Cinema was destroyed by arson, and some four hundred and
thirty people lost their lives in the blaze.
After that, Amouzegar had had enough. He resigned as Prime Minister and was
replaced by Jaafar Sharif-Emami, a political veteran from a religious family
who had worked closely with the Shah as, among other things, head of the
Pahlavi Foundation, a multimillion-dollar semi-family enterprise, which is
the owner of most of Iran?s foreign holdings. Sharif-Emami moved swiftly and
across the board to make concessions to the troublemakers. He lifted press
censorship and arranged for live radio broadcasts from the previously dozing
Majles, the lower house of the parliament. With the wraps off, resentment
found tongue. In the parliament and in the press, there was a surge of
complaints about corruption and discrimination against the middle and
working classes. The new government met the strikes with generous
concessions on wages and pensions. In response to charges of corruption,
investigations were opened into the cases of General Nasseri (who was
recalled from Pakistan) and former Mayor Nikpay. Thirty-four leading
officials of Savak, including Parviz Sabeti, were dismissed in one day. At
every opportunity, Sharif-Emami sought to placate the mullahs. He closed
down casinos, and cinemas showing foreign films. Provincial and university
officials who had taken a strong stand against religion were replaced by
milder men. Most important of all, Sharif-Emami entered into consultations
with religious leaders, including Ayatollah Shariatmadari, and with the lay
opposition, including Karim Sanjabi, the head of the National Front, for a
broad understanding about new elections.

I went to visit Sharif-Emami in his office, just before the end of October.
I found a large, bluff, partly bald man in his sixties who exude?
confidence. He said that there were many ?dissatisfied and unhappy people in
Iran who turned to the mullahs to voice their grievances.? Hi? strategy was
?to establish a good relation with the clergy.? As he saw it, the clergy was
divided into two groups. ?One group, which follow? Ayatollah Khomeini, is
radical but very small,? he said. ?The other, which follows Shariatmadari,
is moderate and very large. A split betwee? them exists in every city and
every village.? He was negotiating with Shariatmadari for some kind of
convocation where the majority coul? prevail. ?They must do it,? he said of
his plan for forcing a decision. ?Somebody must be the head of our clergy, a
Pope.
He told me he was sure that lifting the lid on censorship and on the Majles
debates was the right thing to do. ?A free press is much better than
pressure,? he said. The economic consequences of the strikes and the high
wage settlements were, he thought, ?not serious.? There would be a cost to
the state in higher wages and pensions, but that could easily he made up by
a cutback on expensive military projects and plans for nuclear power plants.
He favored the allocation of more money to the villages, for ?by increasing
credits for machinery, electricity, and water, rural life can be made more
attractive and agriculture more effective.? He said he hoped to ?draw the
men who came to town back to the villages.? He acknowledged that inflation
might be a problem, but he hoped to keep it down by subsidies on basic
commodities?rice, bread, sugar, tea. He did not fear a military coup. ?If
they come in, there will be killing and shooting,? he said. ?Nobody wants
that.? He did sense that a test would be coming within the next six weeks,
and he hoped to put together a large political grouping that would help open
the way to free elections. Among other people, he mentioned former Prime
Ministers Hoveida and Ali Amini. ?I?m a patient man,? he said. ?I do not
intend to leave this office until there is calm in Iran.?

Sharif-Emami had begun the interview by saying that that day Teheran, at
least, was calm. But driving from his office back to my hotel I had to
detour around thc center of town. I smelled burning rubber and saw a car in
flames. Later, I learned that students had come off the university campus
and smashed shops and destroyed cars in what was considered the worst day of
rioting that month. Convinced that Sharif-Emami could not last, I went to
see the man widely tabbed as his successor?Ali Amini, a renowned liberal and
reformer, who had been Prime Minister at the time of the land-reform
legislation of the early sixties.
Mr. Amini received me at his home, a comfortable villa in the northern
section of Teheran. He had been educated in Paris, and, like most of the
older generation of the Iranian ?lite, spoke French more easily than
English. He said, ?The heart of the problem is the Shah. He doesn?t like to
hear the truth. He has allowed himself to be surrounded by flatterers who
have isolated him. He has given over the country to a class of nouveaux
riches. They show off all the time. That shocks people and turns them
against the regime. The clergy has become important only because there is a
lack of rapport between the Shah and the people.?
His solution was to form a government of national unity which would take
over the country and open the way to new elections. He would include
representatives of the National Front. ?Sanjabi isn?t much,? he said of the
Front leader, ?but his party has a great name.? The key to such a
government, however, was the Shah. ?He has to learn to reign, not rule,?
Amini said. ?He must accept the idea of a constitutional monarchy in Iran.
In fact, he must lead the way to constitutional monarchy.?
I asked Amini whether he thought the Shah was ready for such a step. He said
that he had not seen the Shah in some time, and went on, ?I?m prepared, but
I don?t think he wants to see me. That probably means he isn?t ready to
lessen his role in government. But I?m waiting.?


From michael at intrafi.com  Thu Mar  2 14:31:39 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Thu, 02 Mar 2006 22:31:39 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] BBC E-mail: Iraq government talks in disarray
Message-ID: <20060302_223139_053703.michael@intrafi.com>

Michael Butler saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you
should see it.



** Iraq government talks in disarray **
Iraqi PM Ibrahim Jaafari cancels a meeting with political leaders because of a campaign to oust him.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/4765456.stm >


** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all
in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/dailyemail/ >


** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have?been verified.

If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm


From michael at intrafi.com  Thu Mar  2 14:35:50 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Thu, 2 Mar 2006 14:35:50 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] FT.com / In depth / Hurricane impact - Democrat election
	hopes spurred by Katrina tape
Message-ID: <21643208.1141338950062.JavaMail.tomcat@localhost>



*Please note, the sender's email address has not been verified.



You have received the following link from michael at intrafi.com

 
********************
 
If you are having trouble with any of the links in this message, or if the URL's are not appearing as links, please follow the instructions at the bottom of this email.
 
Title: FT.com / In depth / Hurricane impact - Democrat election hopes spurred by Katrina tape
 
  
Copy and paste the following into your Web browser to access the sent link:
http://www.emailthis.clickability.com/et/emailThis?clickMap=viewThis&etMailToID=252103836&pt=Y
 

Copy and paste the following into your Web browser to SAVE THIS link:
http://www.savethis.clickability.com/st/saveThisPopupApp?clickMap=saveFromET&partnerID=1744&etMailToID=252103836&pt=Y

 
Copy and paste the following into your Web browser to forward this link:
http://www.emailthis.clickability.com/et/emailThis?clickMap=forward&etMailToID=252103836&partnerID=1744&pt=Y

  
 
********************


Email pages from any Web site you visit - add the EMAIL THIS button to your browser, copy and paste the following into your Web browser:
http://www.emailthis.clickability.com/et/emailThis?clickMap=browserButtons&pt=Y"


*********************



Instructions:
-----------------------------------------
If your e-mail program doesn't recognize Web addresses:
1. With your mouse, highlight the Web Address above. Be sure to highlight the entire Web address, even if it spans more than one line in your email. 
2. Select Copy from the Edit menu at the top of your screen. 
3. Launch your Web browser.
4. Paste the address into your Web browser by selecting Paste from the Edit menu.
5. Click Go or press Enter or Return on your keyboard. 
 
********************
 
 
 
 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060302/b59e1b8b/attachment.htm 

From kmarcari at optonline.net  Thu Mar  2 06:36:01 2006
From: kmarcari at optonline.net (Kevin Marcari)
Date: Thu, 02 Mar 2006 09:36:01 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] (no subject)
Message-ID: <E1FEwg3-0005iE-1W@smtpauth02.mail.atl.earthlink.net>

Bush, <http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/030106Y.shtml>  Chertoff Warned
before Katrina
 
This video of the Katrina briefing actually makes Brownie look good.  As
usual Bush lies, distorts the truth and America- lock step...
believes.and Chertoff heads to Atlanta, not New Orleans? 
 
 
 
Kevin
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060302/b031c0c2/attachment.htm 

From michael at intrafi.com  Thu Mar  2 15:35:30 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (Michael)
Date: Thu, 2 Mar 2006 18:35:30 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Article from Tom Dispatch
Message-ID: <200603022335.k22NZUgi015848@thor.thenation.com>

An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060302/91345639/attachment.htm 

From ccchaibutler at austin.rr.com  Thu Mar  2 11:52:25 2006
From: ccchaibutler at austin.rr.com (ccchaibutler)
Date: Thu, 2 Mar 2006 13:52:25 -0600
Subject: [Mb-civic] Fwd: AOL belittles Internet advocates
References: <57c550-1b2f-44074572@web01.moveon.org>
Message-ID: <E1FExWX-000797-Nl@smtpauth02.mail.atl.earthlink.net>

This is important. Please sign and forward to all.
Love & Light, Reute


Begin forwarded message:

> From: "Eli Pariser, MoveOn.org Civic Action" <moveon- 
> help at list.moveon.org>
> Date: March 2, 2006 1:20:18 PM CST
> To: Reute Butler <ccchaibutler at austin.rr.com>
> Subject: AOL belittles Internet advocates
>
>
> Are you active in local community groups that depend on email to  
> communicate?
>
> AOL's email tax threatens the ability of nonprofits, charities,  
> small businesses, and others to communicate online.
>
> This week, 50 organizations launched a diverse coalition to stop  
> AOL's email tax. We need your help to grow it to 500.
>
> Can you help us reach out to groups in your community?
>
>
> Click Here
>
> Dear MoveOn member,
>
> If you are active in a local civic or community group that depends  
> on email to communicate with members, we need your help now?as we  
> work to stop AOL's email tax.
>
> AOL's proposed email tax would give membership groups a horrible  
> choice: pay for every email sent to "guarantee" delivery, or face  
> an increasing number of legitimate emails going undelivered.
>
> This week, a diverse coalition was formed to stop AOL's email tax.  
> Our 50-member coalition representing 15 million people was reported  
> on in over 400 media outlets across the world, 100,000 people read  
> our Open Letter to AOL online, and 300,000 people have signed  
> MoveOn's petition. Our voices are being heard?now help us make them  
> louder.
>
> Let's grow our coalition against AOL's email tax from 50 member  
> organizations to 500.Can you help recruit local organizations you  
> are part of? Individuals (like you) and organizations can sign our  
> coalition's Open Letter to AOL at:
>
> http://www.dearaol.com/
>
> When AOL was confronted with your criticism of its proposed pay-to- 
> send system, AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham told the Associated  
> Press, "There is no substantive news here...some disparate groups  
> of advocates have come together for an event reminiscent of the bar  
> scene in the first 'Star Wars' movie." AOL doesn't yet realize  
> regular people can make a difference. AOL, meet MoveOn.
>
> We know many MoveOn members are small business owners or are active  
> in community groups?PTAs, local environmental groups, religious  
> groups, charities, and others. Many groups you belong to depend on  
> email to communicate and would lose their effectiveness in the  
> world AOL is proposing?where the only ones who get reliable email  
> service are giant bulk-mailers who can afford to pay for every  
> email sent.
>
> For example, after quoting AOL's attempt to marginalize our broad  
> coalition with the "bar scene" comment, the Associated Press  
> described one of our coalition partners?a free online network for  
> cancer patients which cannot afford AOL's email tax, but which also  
> cannot afford the life-and-death consequences if their emails  
> aren't reliably delivered to cancer patients.
>
> Another coalition partner is Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist.  
> Like MoveOn, Craigslist started small and never would have gotten  
> off the ground if AOL's pay-to-send policy had been in effect. The  
> magic of the Internet is that it is free and open to everybody?so  
> small ideas can become big ideas. AOL's email tax is a direct  
> threat to the free and open Internet, creating a two-tier system  
> that leaves the little guy behind.
>
> That's why we formed a big coalition?and need it to get bigger.  
> Already, it includes state organizations like the North Carolina  
> Harm Reduction Center, Marlyland League of Conservation Voters, and  
> Californians Against Waste in addition to national groups such as  
> the AFL-CIO, Gun Owners of America, the Humane Society, the  
> Association of Cancer Online Resources, the Democratic National  
> Committee, Democracy for America, the Community HIV/AIDS  
> Mobilization Project, Free Press, The Electronic Frontier  
> Foundation, Friends of the Earth, and others.
>
> Please help us save the free and open Internet by growing our  
> coalition from 50 member organizations to 500. Please reach out to  
> organizations you are a part of. Individuals and organizations can  
> sign our coalition's Open Letter to AOL at:
>
> http://www.dearaol.com/
>
> Thanks for all you do.
>
> ?Eli Pariser, Noah T. Winer, Adam Green, and the MoveOn.org Civic  
> Action team
>   Thursday, March 2nd, 2006
>
> P.S. Please be sure to sign the open letter at www.dearaol.com and  
> if you have a website or blog, please consider helping the cause by  
> posting this "Stop AOL's email tax" graphic on your site:
>
> http://www.dearaol.com/action
>
>
> Subscription Management:
> This is a message from MoveOn.org Civic Action. To change your  
> email address, update your contact info, or remove yourself (Reute  
> Butler) from this list, please visit our subscription management  
> page at:
> http://moveon.org/s?i=6959-5752144-epT.oxzDz20qhVEiQp9IoA

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060302/afb68714/attachment-0001.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Thu Mar  2 16:00:38 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Fri,  3 Mar 2006 00:00:38 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: New York Is Sued by U.S. on Delay of Vote
	System
Message-ID: <20060303000038.A26A724AED7@lax-gw02.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

The real story? The feds are trying to force NYS to use electronic voting machines made by Diebold et al, the same ones that were found to be dangerously unsecure and manipulatable.


NEW YORK REGION | March 2, 2006
New York Is Sued by U.S. on Delay of Vote System
By MICHAEL COOPER
New York State's efforts to modernize its election system have fallen behind the rest of the nation, delayed by Albany's gridlock.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/02/nyregion/02vote.html?ex=1141966800&en=9945011582f23e30&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060303/4b38dc01/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Thu Mar  2 16:01:19 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Fri,  3 Mar 2006 00:01:19 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Justices Express Concern Over Aspects of
	Some Texas Redistricting
Message-ID: <20060303000119.9C9E19FC55@lax-gw05.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

"Some" aspects?!


WASHINGTON / WASHINGTON SPECIAL | March 2, 2006
Justices Express Concern Over Aspects of Some Texas Redistricting
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
It appeared unlikely that a Supreme Court majority would overturn as unconstitutional the 2003 redistricting plan that led to the loss of five Democratic seats in Congress.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/02/politics/politicsspecial1/02scotus.html?ex=1141966800&en=732af9909cc79d08&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060303/0ac54ae6/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Thu Mar  2 16:02:00 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Fri,  3 Mar 2006 00:02:00 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: The Dubai Ports Deal
Message-ID: <20060303000200.EE76713B74B@lax-gw04.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

OPINION | March 2, 2006
Editorial: The Dubai Ports Deal

The president can't get away with his usual "trust me" mantra when it comes to the deal that would put a Dubai state-owned company in control of operations at six American ports.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/02/opinion/02thu1.html?ex=1141966800&en=09d1da6404a4253f&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060303/376f757f/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Thu Mar  2 16:02:13 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Fri,  3 Mar 2006 00:02:13 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: The Abusive New Federalism
Message-ID: <20060303000213.C8B959FC64@lax-gw05.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

OPINION | March 2, 2006
Editorial: The Abusive New Federalism

After a murky legislative process distinguished by a lack of any public hearing, the House is ready to rush to approve a special-interest measure for the food industry Thursday.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/02/opinion/02thu2.html?ex=1141966800&en=a9eaa1d22c583b9e&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060303/dca20c40/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Thu Mar  2 16:02:44 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Fri,  3 Mar 2006 00:02:44 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: The War Machine Is Consuming Us
Message-ID: <20060303000244.C08AD2370A4@lax-gw01.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

What we're saying...


OPINION | March 2, 2006
The War Machine Is Consuming Us

To the Editor:.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/02/opinion/l02herbert.html?ex=1141966800&en=6d228c10be3df329&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060303/9a5c18e6/attachment.htm 

From Reeeees at aol.com  Thu Mar  2 15:59:18 2006
From: Reeeees at aol.com (Reeeees at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 2 Mar 2006 18:59:18 EST
Subject: [Mb-civic] Shah's Son Urges Aid to Resistance
Message-ID: <E1FExvM-0000Ks-MU@smtpauth02.mail.atl.earthlink.net>

 
 
Shah's Son Urges Aid to Resistance
Reza Pahlavi says Iran won't  yield in talks and military action could 
strengthen Tehran's hand. He pushes  unity of opposition groups.
 
By Nick Timiraos, Times Staff Writer
March 2, 2006   |  Los Angeles Times

WASHINGTON ? The son of the late shah of  Iran warned Wednesday that 
diplomatic efforts over the country's nuclear  ambitions were unlikely to succeed, but 
said he opposed military action against  his estranged nation.

Instead, the former crown prince of the U.S.-backed  monarchy that was 
deposed in 1979 urged the international community to help  support and unify 
opposition groups inside and outside Iran to increase pressure  on the nation's 
ruling Islamic clerics.

Reza Pahlavi, 45, said military  strikes would only rally support for Iran's 
hard-line rulers and that continued  diplomacy and negotiations would give 
Tehran time to pursue nuclear weapons.  

"The problem with these negotiations all along was the false assumption  that 
the other side wants a solution to avert a crisis. Quite the contrary,"  
Pahlavi said in a speech at the National Press Club. "Increasingly unpopular,  the 
Islamic Republic needs an atmosphere of crisis to justify its increased  
militarization."

Pahlavi also opposes punitive measures such as economic  sanctions, instead 
urging steps such as freezing assets and restricting travel  for the ruling 
clerics.

Pahlavi is the son of the late Mohammed Reza  Pahlavi. In 1953, a CIA-backed 
coup toppled the democratically elected  government of Prime Minister Mohammed 
Mossadegh. The shah, who had fled the  country, was returned to power within 
days and ruled until the 1979 Islamic  Revolution, in which Ayatollah Ruhollah 
Khomeini set up the theocracy that runs  Iran today. 

Unpopular in much of the West, the shah accepted former  President Carter's 
offer to come to the United States for medical treatment,  prompting the 
seizure of U.S. diplomats in Tehran. The shah died in Egypt in  1980.

The younger Pahlavi, a father of three who lives in suburban  Washington, 
said his chief objective was a secular, democratic government in  Iran. 

Asked about his role in such a government, Pahlavi said, "That's  for my 
compatriots to decide." But he expressed a preference for constitutional  monarchy 
and pointed to Japan, Sweden and Spain as successful examples.  

Pahlavi spoke at the invitation of the National Press Club as  international 
pressure mounts on Tehran to clarify its nuclear ambitions.  

Iran says its atomic research is intended for peaceful purposes, but the  
Bush administration contends that Tehran is seeking to develop a nuclear bomb.  
The governing board of the International Atomic Energy Agency is scheduled to  
hold another session on the issue Monday in Vienna.

U.S. officials have  touted steps toward democracy across the Middle East as 
a way to contain the  influence of Iran. But Pahlavi said Iran's growing clout 
is in part a  consequence of the spread of democracy. "In Lebanon, if 
Hezbollah can spend more  money than the government building schools, mosques and 
hospitals ? thanks to  generous Iranian contributions ? don't be surprised if 
they win elections," he  said.

Pahlavi's call for international support of resistance groups  followed last 
month's State Department pledge of $85 million for anti-Tehran  propaganda and 
aid to Iranian opposition groups, up from $10 million last year.  He said 
more must be done to unite the "thousand circles of localized dissent  and 
opposition" inside and outside the country. 

Pahlavi said he had  "very strong" political capital within Iran, but 
analysts offered mixed  assessments of that claim. 

"There's a lot of nostalgia ? in Iran," said  Patrick Clawson, an analyst at 
the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.  "

Other analysts said that prominent exiles such as Pahlavi might have  less 
clout with the White House because of the widespread belief that U.S.  officials 
relied too heavily on Iraqi exiles to make their case for military  action 
against Saddam Hussein. 
 
_http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-shah2mar02,1,4285460.stor
y_ 
(http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-shah2mar02,1,4285460.story) 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060302/f8b7c3b6/attachment.htm 

From grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net  Thu Mar  2 06:45:47 2006
From: grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net (Golsorkhi)
Date: Thu, 02 Mar 2006 09:45:47 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] FW: A Daily Briefing on Iran National Press Club - Reza
	Pahlavi -	March 1, 2006
In-Reply-To: <000901c63c8d$9979f600$6501a8c0@2r6cx01>
Message-ID: <E1FEzKQ-0000rO-K1@smtpauth02.mail.atl.earthlink.net>


------ Forwarded Message
From: "Farhad Sepahbody" <sepa at sedona.net>
Date: Tue, 28 Feb 2006 10:37:08 -0700
To: <grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net>
Subject: A Daily Briefing on Iran National Press Club - Reza Pahlavi - March
1, 2006

 

 http://regimechangeiran.blogspot.com/2006/02/national-press-club-reza-pahla
vi-march.html

------ End of Forwarded Message

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060302/2656a7e0/attachment-0001.htm 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/octet-stream
Size: 249 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060302/2656a7e0/attachment-0001.obj 

From grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net  Thu Mar  2 06:58:05 2006
From: grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net (Golsorkhi)
Date: Thu, 02 Mar 2006 09:58:05 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] FW: Exclusive Interview: Iran's Foreign Policy Chief
	Talks with	TIME - Part II
In-Reply-To: <B1249C65-A766-44CE-9D41-3A3B348F92AA@thesamiis.com>
Message-ID: <E1FEzJy-0000V3-VY@smtpauth02.mail.atl.earthlink.net>


------ Forwarded Message
From: Samii Shahla <shahla at thesamiis.com>
Date: Tue, 28 Feb 2006 14:03:58 -0500
Subject: Exclusive Interview: Iran's Foreign Policy Chief Talks with TIME -
Part II



Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Iran's Foreign Policy Chief Talks with TIME - Part II


February 28, 2006 
Time Magazine 
Scott Macleod, Web Exclusive


Ali Larijani, head of the Supreme National Security Council, Iran's highest
foreign policy body, says that despite the break in U.S.-Iran ties after the
1979 Islamic Revolution, Tehran would now consider direct negotiations with
the Bush administration on Iran's nuclear program and other issues. Iran's
hard-line stance on Israel and Iraq as well as Iran's nuclear rights,
however, raise doubts about whether the long-standing enemies could have a
meeting of minds. 

TIME:What is Iran doing to prevent action by the U.N. Security Council?

Larijani: Certainly we are not going to take the first steps. This does not
mean that for that purpose [preventing Security Council action] we shall
abandon all our rights. But if there is a proposal that the rights of Iran
can be secured to some extent for the present time, and the other rights can
be secured through negotiations, we are open to that. In a letter that I
sent to the Europeans, I told the ministers that we are prepared to talk to
you to come up with a formula that prevents diversion from peaceful nuclear
technology [to nuclear weapons]. If there's a will, there is a way. It can
be solved even in the next few days. But if there's no will, even if you
come up with 10,000 proposals, it will not solve it.

TIME: Can Iran afford to pay the price of sanctions?

Larijani: We are not really seeking adventures in the region. We will make
our decisions with patience, not in haste. We have not taken this lightly.
We have devised different plans for different situations. We have prepared
for the worst-case scenario. They should not think for a moment that if they
impose sanctions, then we'll fall down to our knees. With sanctions, their
loss is no less than ours.

TIME: Are you referring to Iranian measures or a spike in oil prices as
well? 

Larijani: Statesmen in Europe and the West know that such actions will not
bring good consequences for themselves. Many things may happen. Certainly
it's not going to be only defensive actions for us.

TIME: What is the worst-case scenario?

Larijani: The same things that Americans are saying: for example, telling
Israel to launch a military attack on some of our positions. There's a
general rule that he who shoots first, dies in the second phase. If they
take action, the response will not be a very pleasant one for them. We shall
definitely defend. Don't doubt that for a second. We shall not stand idly by
and watch Israelis attack our installations.

TIME: You would hit their planes, or you would attack Israel?

Larijani: We should not be revealing military strategies here.

TIME: Why not talk directly to the United States?

Larijani: We have no problems in negotiating on nuclear issues, and also
issues of interest to Muslims, things that will bring calm to the region,
provided that they are honest and that Mr. Bush does not harangue us. To us,
negotiations are not the end. If the aim is clear, then this means can be
used too. It's true that U.S. is a great power. Descartes, the great French
philosopher says, "I think, therefore I am." I believe America's slogan is,
"I make trouble, therefore I am."

TIME: The U.S. says the same thing about you.

Larijani: We really are an innocent country. Our Revolution is one by the
oppressed people. After the Revolution, Americans did whatever they could
against the Revolution, and provoked Saddam to attack us. [Former
President]Khatami started a dialogue among civilizations. In Afghanistan,
Iran was really cooperating to bring security. But President Bush then
called Iran part of the "axis of evil." Now they have allocated $75 million
for regime change in Iran.

TIME: But Iran refuses to recognize Israel. Instead, it supports Hamas and
other groups fighting Israel.

Larijani: Any country can recognize another country according to its own
logic. Second point: What do Hamas and Islamic Jihad want? You know it's
their land. As Muslims, our duty is not confined to within our own walls. If
Americans do not understand this Islamic logic, then problems will continue.

TIME: You want it both ways: Iran's President says "We want to wipe Israel
off the map." Then you want the West to trust you not to build a nuclear
bomb. 

Larijani: These are two separate issues. We are not looking for a nuclear
bomb. We are looking for a peaceful nuclear program.

TIME: But the West doesn't trust you.

Larijani: You have differences of views with us. But having differences of
views doesn't mean animosity. I don't know why you are focusing on this
statement by President Ahmadinejad.

TIME: Is it usual that a president calls for another country to be wiped off
the map? 

Larijani: He said that in a speech. He qualified it and explained that we
want a democratic solution for this problem. As the secretary of the Supreme
National Security Council of Iran, I say that this is the policy of Iran.

TIME: Do you call on Hamas to negotiate or not negotiate with Israel to
solve the problem peacefully?

Larijani: I don't think Hamas is seeking such a solution. We need not give
orders to Hamas. We are only telling them to be vigilant, not to be cheated
out of their rights.

TIME: Do you think Hamas can "liberate Palestine" now?

Larijani: Little by little. People gave their answers in the elections.
People in the region are awakening.
---

URL:?http://www.iranvajahan.net/cgi-bin/news.pl?l=en&y=2006&m=02&d=28&a=3


------ End of Forwarded Message

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060302/8c0ba77f/attachment.htm 

From michael at intrafi.com  Thu Mar  2 17:38:57 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (Michael)
Date: Thu, 2 Mar 2006 20:38:57 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] 'Olympic Swagger' from The Nation
Message-ID: <200603030138.k231cvUr023636@thor.thenation.com>

If you like this article, please consider subscribing to The Nation at special
discounted rates. You can order online https://ssl.thenation.com or call our
toll-free number at 1-800-333-8536.

Thought you would be interested in this article from The Nation.

   Olympic Swagger 
   by William Greider


Am I the only one who feels creepy when the American crowds start
chanting U-S-A! U-S-A! at the Olympics? The chant has a bullying
tone that sounds like America &uuml;ber alles. The boasting
reminds me of certain newspaper columnists who keep explaining that the
rest of the world hates us because we are so good. Rich and powerful,
good-hearted and reasonable, also citizens of the world-champion
democracy. Plus, we produce a race of superhero athletes.

Americans are marinated in this self-congratulation. The Olympics have
been converted by NBC and commercial marketing into a cheap jingo melodrama.
During the build-up to the finals, the network gins up endless loops of
slo-mo video to tell sentimentalized tales of athletes who've survived
childhood hardship and overcome family strife. The flag is flourished
at the triumphant moment, the winners bathed in tears for the deceased
parent or the triumph over adversity as they claim the gold. Am I the
only American who wants to puke in embarrassment?

We might pause to reflect on why Americans evidently feel such a
desperate hunger for confirmation of national greatness (do they
perhaps harbor doubts?). But this time around, the question was mooted
by the disappointing results. No U-S-A! chanting in Turin. Lots
of "broken dreams," as the sports talkers put it. US athletes did fine,
actually, but nearly every one of the concocted melodramas went bust.

A New York Times headline described the outcome, somewhat
cheekily, as a blow to "US swagger." Yes, the United Swagger of America
is our chosen posture in the world, and once again it seems that sport
imitates life. The United States is getting the swagger knocked out of
it elsewhere in the world--it would be tasteless to mention where--and
many Americans are in a foul mood, denied their fix of symbolic
national triumph, in play and at war. Poor, pitiful America, so good
and yet so misunderstood.

Bode Miller, the
world-champion skier, embodied this failure. He enjoyed the biggest,
most swaggering pregame buildup and became the most embarrassing flop.
Appropriately enough, Nike
was among his commercial sponsors. It is the brand name for American
swagger. In the five events Miller was supposed to win, he straddled a
gate and flamed out or finished far behind. The media turned on him,
reported that he appeared overweight and out of breath, even whispered
he might have a drinking problem.

Bode Miller seemed vainglorious in defeat--waving to the crowds and
announcing, unconvincingly, that he was happy with his results. The
medals never mattered, he told the skeptical reporters. He wanted his
life instead. It occurred to me that, whatever troubles him, Miller
might very well be telling the truth. He is a brilliant skier, after
all. I began to think maybe he was trying clumsily to free himself from
the trademark of hype and swagger that enveloped him and, who knows,
just be a skier. Or maybe I am na&iuml;ve. A few minutes later, a Nike
commercial was aired with this tough-guy message: The medals didn't
matter.



This article can be found on the web at:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060313/greider2



Visit The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/

Subscribe to The Nation:
https://ssl.thenation.com/

From nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca  Thu Mar  2 18:21:46 2006
From: nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca (CBC News Online)
Date: Fri, 3 Mar 2006 02:21:46 UT
Subject: [Mb-civic] CBC News - DOLLAR CLOSES AT 88.39 US AS OIL PRICES RISE
Message-ID: <20060303022146.9EA073EA7B@web02.nm.cbc.ca>

An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Url: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060303/20bc1937/attachment.diff 

From nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca  Thu Mar  2 18:24:32 2006
From: nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca (CBC News Online)
Date: Fri, 3 Mar 2006 02:24:32 UT
Subject: [Mb-civic] CBC News - SOVIETS BEHIND PAPAL ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT:
	REPORT
Message-ID: <20060303022432.4749A3EA7B@web02.nm.cbc.ca>

An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Url: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060303/fc9fa092/attachment.diff 

From nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca  Thu Mar  2 18:27:02 2006
From: nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca (CBC News Online)
Date: Fri, 3 Mar 2006 02:27:02 UT
Subject: [Mb-civic] CBC News - WASHINGTON STATE EXPRESSES REGRET OVER 1884
	LYNCHING OF CANADIAN TEEN
Message-ID: <20060303022702.2DEA53EA7B@web02.nm.cbc.ca>

An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Url: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060303/628a37f4/attachment.diff 

From nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca  Thu Mar  2 18:29:35 2006
From: nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca (CBC News Online)
Date: Fri, 3 Mar 2006 02:29:35 UT
Subject: [Mb-civic] CBC News - CHEVRON MAKES MAJOR INVESTMENT IN ALBERTA
	OILSANDS
Message-ID: <20060303022935.5BB203EA7B@web02.nm.cbc.ca>

An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Url: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060303/050969b0/attachment.diff 

From ean at sbcglobal.net  Wed Mar  1 21:39:45 2006
From: ean at sbcglobal.net (ean at sbcglobal.net)
Date: Wed, 01 Mar 2006 21:39:45 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Garrison Keillor: What to Do When the Emperor Has No
	Clothes
Message-ID: <E1FF3Vc-0005AE-4K@smtpauth01.mail.atl.earthlink.net>

Published on Wednesday, March 1, 2006 by the Chicago Tribune
 
by Garrison Keillor
 http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0301-34.htm

These are troubling times for all of us who love this country, as surely 
we all do, even the satirists. You may poke fun at your mother, but if 
she is belittled by others it burns your bacon. A blowhard French 
journalist writes a book about America that is full of arrogant stupidity, 
and you want to let the air out of him and mail him home flat. And then 
you read the paper and realize the country is led by a man who isn't 
paying attention, and you hope that somebody will poke him. Or put a 
sign on his desk that says, "Try much harder."

Do we need to impeach him to bring some focus to this man's life? 
The Feb. 27 issue of The New Yorker carries an article by Jane Mayer 
about a loyal conservative Republican and U.S. Navy lawyer, Albert 
Mora, and his resistance to the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo 
Bay. From within the Pentagon bureaucracy, he did battle against 
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and John Yoo, who then was at 
the Justice Department, and shadowy figures taking orders from Vice 
President Dick "Gunner" Cheney, arguing America had ratified the 
Geneva Convention that forbids cruel, inhumane and degrading 
treatment of prisoners, and so it has the force of law. They seemed to 
be arguing that President Bush has the right to order prisoners to be 
tortured.

One such prisoner, Mohamed al-Qahtani, was held naked in isolation 
under bright lights for months, threatened by dogs, subjected to 
unbearable noise volumes and otherwise abused, so that he begged to 
be allowed to kill himself. When the Senate approved the Torture 
Convention in 1994, it defined torture as an act "specifically intended to 
inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering."

Is the law a law or is it a piece of toast?

Wiretap surveillance of Americans without a warrant? Great. Go for it. 
How about turning over American ports to a country more closely tied 
to Sept. 11, 2001, than Saddam Hussein was? Fine by me. No 
problem. And what about the war in Iraq? Hey, you're doing a heck of a 
job. No need to tweak a thing. And your blue button-down shirt--it's 
you.

But torture is something else. Most people agree with this, and in a 
democracy that puts the torturers in a delicate position. They must 
make sure to destroy their e-mails and have subordinates who will take 
the fall. Because it is impossible to keep torture secret. It goes against 
the American grain and it eats at the conscience of even the most 
disciplined, and in the end the truth will come out. It is coming out now.

Our adventure in Iraq, at a cost of billions, has brought that country to 
the verge of civil war while earning us more enemies than ever before. 
And tax money earmarked for security is being dumped into pork-
barrel projects anywhere somebody wants their own SWAT team. 
Detonation of a nuclear bomb within our borders--pick any big city--is a 
real possibility, as much so now as five years ago. Meanwhile, many 
Democrats have conceded the very subject of security and positioned 
themselves as Guardians of Our Forests and Benefactors of Waifs 
and Owls, neglecting the most basic job of government, which is to 
defend this country. The peaceful lagoon that is the White House is 
designed for the comfort of a vulnerable man. Perfectly 
understandable, but not what is needed now. The U.S. Constitution 
provides a simple, ultimate way to hold him to account for war crimes 
and the failure to attend to the country's defense. Impeach him and let 
the Senate hear the evidence.

Garrison Keillor is an author and the radio host of "A Prairie Home 
Companion."

? 2006 Chicago Tribune

###


-- 
You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, 
option D (up to 3 emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options 
(option A - 1x/week, option B - 3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option D - 
up to 3x/day) please reply and let us know!  If someone forwarded you 
this email and you want to be on our list, send an email to 
ean at sbcglobal.net and tell us which option you'd like.


"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060301/ed9fca2b/attachment.htm 

From ean at sbcglobal.net  Wed Mar  1 21:50:54 2006
From: ean at sbcglobal.net (ean at sbcglobal.net)
Date: Wed, 01 Mar 2006 21:50:54 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] David Horowitz and the Attack on Independent Thought
Message-ID: <E1FF3dJ-0001R9-LH@smtpauth01.mail.atl.earthlink.net>

Published on Tuesday, February 28, 2006 by CommonDreams.org
David Horowitz and the Attack on Independent 
Thought
by Robert W. McChesney
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0228-21.htm 

David Horowitz?s new book, "The Professors: The 101 Most 
Dangerous Academics in America," was published in early February to 
considerable fanfare encouraged by a tidal wave of promotion from the 
right-wing echo chamber. This is the same echo chamber that made 
?swift boat? a household word in September 2004. The book itself is 
sloppy and unimpressive, an apparent rush job.

The criticism of me, for example, consisted of two out-of-context 
quotes from articles where I criticize the news media and the Bush 
Administration. This is presented as prima facie evidence that I am a 
dreadful teacher who uses the classroom to harass students to adopt 
my political views, my campus-wide, student-elected teaching award 
notwithstanding. By the same ?logic,? quotations could be taken from 
many professors in America, and nearly all conservatives, to establish 
that they propagandize in the classroom. By Horowitz?s evidentiary 
standards, Harvard?s Stephan Thernstrom, who endorses The 
Professors on its cover, should be ridden out of academia as a narrow-
minded bigot who abuses students who disagree with his pointed 
views.

In short, the book is clueless about how classroom teaching actually 
works; it would astound him to learn that many professors with strong 
political views ? of whatever stripe ? go to great lengths to provide an 
open classroom. The people Horowitz vilifies in his book know exactly 
what it is like to hold unpopular positions ? to be attacked as 
?dangerous? for going against the dominant interests of society -- and 
we tend to have considerable empathy for those who disagree with our 
political views in our own classrooms. In fact, that explains why 
Horowitz?s lengthy and much-publicized campaign to locate 
conservative students who have been harassed in the classroom by 
left-wing professors has produced few, if any, credible witnesses. But, 
as I will argue, this is a ruse, so that lack of evidence means no more 
to Horowitz than the lack of WMD did to Bush and Cheney as they 
planned the invasion of Iraq.

The entire premise of the book is flawed. If Horowitz believes, for 
example, that publicly supported universities have an obligation to 
have faculties that represent the range of U.S. political opinion, and 
that it currently tilts too far to the left, he should follow the logic to its 
obvious resting place. Generals and military officers are far more 
important to the functioning of a government ? and, as history shows in 
depressingly frequent detail, a much greater threat to democratic 
governance -- than anthropology professors. In the United States the 
military is enormous, it is entirely funded by taxpayers, and the officer 
corps is significantly right-wing Republican. There is hardly a liberal 
Democrat in the bunch, and I dare say probably not a single soul to the 
left of the Clinton-Kerry center of the Democracy party. That means 
tens of millions of Americans have no political allies directing the most 
powerful military in human history, while the hard right feels like it has 
died and gone to heaven when it visits the officers? quarters on 
Election Day. If Horowitz is going on some sort of rampage about 
getting political balance in important publicly funded professions, he 
can only be taken seriously if he starts at the Pentagon. When he has 
established how to do it there we can proceed to the campuses.

But the point of Horowitz?s book is not to make a coherent principled 
critique of academia and suggest reforms to solve the problem. Were 
that the case, Horowitz would be obsessed with the rabidly pro-market 
bias in most economics and business schools ? and more than a few 
political science departments. In these classes and departments, 
students who are pro-labor union, critical of so-called ?free trade? deals 
like NAFTA, and in favor of progressive taxation, living wage 
ordinances, strict environmental regulations and aggressive social 
spending are made to feel like their positions have little intellectual 
merit. They are ostracized. Yet Horowitz has no concern for these 
students, or for their rights. Screw them.

Horowitz?s mission is clear: to attack critical work in the academy, 
especially critical work that does not restrict itself to the classroom, but 
sees intellectuals as having a necessary public role. Visible public 
outreach is A-OK for Milton Friedman, Stephan Thernstrom, the neo-
conservative crowd, and denizens of the right, but strictly off-limits for 
liberals and the left.

For these reasons I would imagine that principled conservatives will 
run from this book faster than they would run away from a line-up for a 
voluntary IRS audit. But the book is important and requires a response 
that goes beyond pointing out its sloppiness and incoherence; we need 
to put what Horowitz is doing in a broader context. In my view, the best 
way to make sense of the book and what it represents is to see it as 
part of the broad attack on the autonomy and integrity of institutions 
and individuals who conduct independent and critical thought. It is this 
type of independent and uncorrupted inquiry ? work that is not under 
the thumb of powerful political or commercial interests -- that is 
mandatory if viable self-government is to succeed. The space for this 
type of inquiry has to be fought for and preserved, and it is always 
considered with a certain amount of suspicion by those in power, who 
prefer minimal public interference with their exercise of power.

Indeed, it is revealing that Horowitz uses the term ?dangerous? as a 
pejorative in his book?s subtitle. Dangerous professors are those with 
ideas with which Horowitz disagrees. This is a ludicrously opportunistic 
and undemocratic framing. The entire premise of a viable democratic 
public sphere is that what some perceive as ?dangerous? ideas be 
protected, even encouraged, and permitted to be thrown into debate. 
Especially, above all else, in universities.

In our society the two institutions commissioned to provide the 
substance of a democratic public sphere, as a place for critical inquiry, 
are the news media and academia.

Hence, to get a better sense of what is happening today with the attack 
on universities, consider what has happened with U.S. journalism. 
Back in the early 1970s professional journalism was at its peak. 
Journalists had relative autonomy from the demands of owners and 
advertisers and relatively lavish budgets. I do not wish to exaggerate 
the quality of professional journalism even at its peak; local news 
media tended to ignore the foibles of powerful local bigshots and all 
news media relied far too much on official sources, especially in 
coverage of foreign policy. Indeed much of my career has been spent 
documenting the limitations of professional journalism, even at its best. 
But on balance what it provided in the 1960s and 1970s looks awfully 
good through 2006 eyes.

Since the 1970s the autonomy, resources and critical wiggle room of 
professional journalism has come under attack on two fronts. First, as 
media ownership consolidated corporate owners began to think the 
idea of professional journalism made a lot less sense. After all, 
corporations aren?t charities, and why should their shareholders 
bankroll a public service? So newsrooms have faced serious cutbacks 
in resources for investigative, political and international coverage. In its 
stead far less expensive and politically trivial celebrity coverage has 
risen in prominence. Commercial values play an increasingly visible 
role in what passes for journalism today.

The second front in the war on journalism came from the political right. 
To the political right, it was mandatory to make journalism more 
sympathetic to right-wing politics if the right was going to win political 
power. A very high percentage of right-wing funding went to various 
means of pushing the news media to the right. The overarching theme 
was that the media had a strident liberal bias that required journalist to 
be softer on Republicans and tougher on Democrats if they wished to 
be fair. The campaign has been a rousing success. One need only 
look at the weak-kneed press coverage of Bush?s scandals and 
foibles, and imagine how a President Clinton or Gore or Kerry would 
have fared if he had done similar deeds, to see the effect.

While these two attacks on journalism were independent of each other 
for the most part, they had the same effect: reduce the power and 
autonomy of journalists and make journalism more fearful of 
antagonizing the political right.

Universities and news media share a certain ideological importance as 
I have already noted. But as institutions they have quite different 
traditions. News media have been the province of profit-driven firms for 
the most part, whereas universities are non-profit, often public, 
institutions. Yet the attack on universities has followed the same 
pattern as the attack on journalism. The dominant issue on campuses 
for the past two decades has been the incessant commercialization of 
universities, from marketing of classes to corporate funding for 
research and activities. Increasingly our major universities are linked to 
commercial institutions and commercial values, which work to 
undermine, even eliminate, much of the public service ethos of these 
institutions. Now the distance is further to travel with universities than 
with media, because they begin as non-profit institutions, but the 
direction is unmistakable. And the destination is nowhere anyone 
should want universities to be. It is the great crisis facing universities 
today, and about this crisis people like David Horowitz have nothing to 
say.

This brings us to Horowitz?s attack on ?dangerous? professors, those 
faculty like myself who dare to hold political opinions Horowitz 
disagrees with and which he would like to see banished. This is taken 
directly from the playbook for the right-wing attack on ?liberal? 
journalists. The point is to intimidate dissident voices, to make them 
temper their words in their classrooms, and be very careful about what 
they do when they venture off-campus. Right-wing faculty are free to 
shout their views from the mountaintop ? after all, they are the 
oppressed minority merely trying to balance the dominant left, much 
like the blowhards at Fox News ? while left-wing faculty are supposed 
to shut up and go with the flow if they wish to be regarded as legitimate 
professionals and keep their jobs. As I discussed at the outset, it is a 
thoroughly unprincipled exercise with a crude political agenda. 
Combined with the commercial restructuring of universities the goal is 
to make intellectual life as ineffectual as our journalism has become.

It is a prospect that is unacceptable and must be opposed, in both 
media and higher education. It is a battle for the soul of our nation, and 
the future of our polity.

Robert W. McChesney is the co-author, with John Nichols, of Tragedy 
& Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and 
Destroy Democracy (New Press). He is the founder of Free Press, 
www.freepress.net. 


-- 
You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, 
option D (up to 3 emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options 
(option A - 1x/week, option B - 3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option D - 
up to 3x/day) please reply and let us know!  If someone forwarded you 
this email and you want to be on our list, send an email to 
ean at sbcglobal.net and tell us which option you'd like.


"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060301/189e3c34/attachment-0001.htm 

From ean at sbcglobal.net  Thu Mar  2 18:42:19 2006
From: ean at sbcglobal.net (ean at sbcglobal.net)
Date: Thu, 02 Mar 2006 18:42:19 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] This week's enviro headlines
Message-ID: <E1FF3gX-00034C-7N@smtpauth01.mail.atl.earthlink.net>

NO TAXATION WITHOUT ALLOCATION
Americans would support gas tax in service of green goals, poll finds

Most Americans would support a higher federal gasoline tax if the proceeds
went toward ending dependence on foreign oil, reducing global warming, or
cutting energy consumption, a new nationwide telephone poll shows. Some 85
percent of adults polled opposed an increased gas tax with no
qualifications. But when the funds were to be earmarked for
energy-independence and environmental goals, support rose to 55 percent or
more. Follow-up interviews affirmed that support. "If it was a tax that
would sponsor research for fuel cells or alternative fuel sources, I could
buy that," said one Louisiana Republican. The takeaway may be that despite
opposition from politicos on both sides of the aisle, Americans are ready
to pay more to promote energy conservation -- when they know the money
will make a real difference.

straight to the source: The New York Times, Louis Uchitelle and Megan
Thee, 28 Feb 2006 <http://grist.org/cgi-bin/forward.pl?forward_id=6520>

discuss in Gristmill: Americans support a gas tax if revenues go toward
energy independence
<http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/2/27/22532/5719?source=daily>


IS THIS THE "SAFE, CLEAN" NUCLEAR POWER WE HEAR SO MUCH ABOUT?
Illinois nuke-power operator criticized for leaks and "incidents"

Quantity doesn't equal quality with Chicago-based Exelon Corp., which runs all
six nuclear plants and 11 nuclear reactors in Illinois. There were at least
four "incidents" at Exelon plants last week, including a false alarm at one
generating station that initiated the first "site-area emergency" at a U.S.
nuclear plant in 15 years. These came on the heels of disclosures that there
were eight radioactive leaks and spills at Exelon plants since 1996 that went
unreported to the public. One spill of roughly 3 million gallons of
tritium-laced water in 1998 wasn't completely cleaned up eight years later.
Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) plans to introduce legislation this week requiring
nuclear facilities to notify state and local officials of unintended or
accidental radioactive leaks -- or face possible loss of their operating
licenses. 

straight to the source: Chicago Tribune, Robert Manor, 25 Feb 2006
<http://grist.org/cgi-bin/forward.pl?forward_id=6507>

straight to the source: Time.com, Eric Ferkenhoff, 23 Feb 2006
<http://grist.org/cgi-bin/forward.pl?forward_id=6508>

straight to the source: Morris Daily Herald, Jo Ann Hustis, 23 Feb 2006
<http://grist.org/cgi-bin/forward.pl?forward_id=6509>


SHELL SHOCKED
Nigerian court orders Shell to pay $1.5 billion for pollution

A Nigerian court has ordered Royal Dutch Shell to ante up $1.5 billion in
damages to communities in the Niger Delta, citing oil spills that polluted
regional rivers, spoiled crops, and poisoned fish. The Friday ruling is a major
victory for the region's Ijaw people, who have struggled for over a decade to
get compensation for environmental damages. Shell says it will appeal. The
court ruling comes during an upsurge in violence in the Niger Delta, where
local communities live in squalor despite the region's oil riches. The militant
Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta kidnapped several employees 
of
a U.S. oil industry subcontractor nine days ago and demanded that foreign oil
firms leave the region. The group's attacks over the past two months have shut
down almost a fifth of the country's oil production.

straight to the source: The Guardian, Rory Carroll, 25 Feb 2006
<http://grist.org/cgi-bin/forward.pl?forward_id=6510>

straight to the source: The New York Times, Lydia Polgreen, 25 Feb 2006
<http://grist.org/cgi-bin/forward.pl?forward_id=6511>

BRING IN DA ILLINOIS, BRING IN DA HUNK
Obama speechifies for energy independence, chemical-plant security

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) is calling for a bipartisan effort to create a
cabinet-level national director of energy security, who would coordinate
federal policies to cut U.S. dependence on foreign oil. In a Tuesday
speech to U.S. governors, Obama touted several policies to promote
oil-free energy, among them Department of Defense investments in the best
commercial biofuel endeavors. He also suggested Big Auto put serious
effort into creating fuel-efficient vehicles, in return for the feds
picking up some health care costs for industry retirees. Obama's hot for
national security: On Monday, he said he'd introduce legislation this week
mandating minimum security requirements at chemical plants around the
country, where an attack could kill thousands and endanger millions more.
So far, only about 1,100 of the nation's 15,000 largest plants participate
in the Bush administration's voluntary security program. "Voluntary
security" -- love it. But hey, at least the United Arab Emirates isn't
running the plants.

straight to the source: Belleville News Democrat, Associated Press, Dennis
Conrad, 28 Feb 2006 <http://grist.org/cgi-bin/forward.pl?forward_id=6524>

straight to the source: Chicago Sun-Times, Abdon M. Pallasch, 28 Feb 2006
<http://grist.org/cgi-bin/forward.pl?forward_id=6525>

straight to the source: Time, Douglas Waller and Mark Thompson, 27 Feb
2006 <http://grist.org/cgi-bin/forward.pl?forward_id=6526>

read the speech transcript and discuss in Gristmill: Barack Obama on
energy independence
<http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/2/28/225014/029?source=daily>

see also, in Gristmill: "Health Care for Hybrids" -- a smart trade?
<http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/2/8/1392/77402?source=daily>


GLOBAL WARRING
Climate change a major security problem, says U.K. defense chief

U.K. Defense Secretary John Reid has echoed a growing number of analysts
by stressing that global warming is not just a weather problem, or a
health problem, or a problem for biodiversity. It's a global security
problem. In a Monday speech, Reid called on the nation's military to
prepare now for strife brought on by desertification, water shortages,
melting ice fields, and increased population. "The blunt truth is that the
lack of water and agricultural land is a significant contributory factor
to the tragic conflict we see unfolding in Darfur," said Reid. "We should
see this as a warning sign." Reid's cheery comments came on the eve of a
summit at which Prime Minister Tony Blair will discuss Great Britain's
response to global warming. They also coincided with a leak of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's next big report, which
indicates that the planet could heat up far more than previously
predicted. 

straight to the source: The Independent, Ben Russell and Nigel Morris, 28
Feb 2006 <http://grist.org/cgi-bin/forward.pl?forward_id=6528>

straight to the source: United Press International, Hannah K. Strange, 28
Feb 2006 <http://grist.org/cgi-bin/forward.pl?forward_id=6529>

straight to the source: The Guardian, David Adam, 28 Feb 2006
<http://grist.org/cgi-bin/forward.pl?forward_id=6530>


OLD DOG POOP, NEW TRICKS 
San Francisco looks to harness the power of pet poop

Renewable energy is the sh*t. No, really. San Francisco Bay Area cities
are aiming to generate no trash by 2020, and nearly 4 percent of San
Francisco's residential waste is animal excrement. What to do with the
doo? Turn it into methane and heat your home or cook your meals with it!
(Um, ew.) In the next few months, a San Francisco sanitation company will
be collecting feces at a busy dog park -- no doubt employees are jostling
for the assignment -- and sending it to be digested by hungry bacteria.
The resulting methane could theoretically be used in any natural-gas
system. Some officials hope to see methane digesters in individual homes
within a few years. While it's a relatively newfangled notion in the
United States, some European countries already process poo into energy. 

straight to the source: San Francisco Chronicle, Carolyn Jones, 21 Feb
2006 <http://grist.org/cgi-bin/forward.pl?forward_id=6497>




-- 
You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, option D (up to 3 
emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options (option A - 1x/week, option B - 
3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option D - up to 3x/day) please reply and let us know!  
If someone forwarded you this email and you want to be on our list, send an email 
to ean at sbcglobal.net and tell us which option you'd like.


"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060302/6ee374f7/attachment.htm 

From ean at sbcglobal.net  Thu Mar  2 18:46:47 2006
From: ean at sbcglobal.net (ean at sbcglobal.net)
Date: Thu, 02 Mar 2006 18:46:47 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Halliburton strikes again
Message-ID: <E1FF3lB-0005nR-Kr@smtpauth01.mail.atl.earthlink.net>

  Halliburton strikes again

By Derrick Z. Jackson  |  March 1, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

HALLIBURTON'S LATEST outrageous withdrawal from its ATM (American 
Taxpayer Machine) cries out for the Great Communicator. Back in 1976 when
Ronald Reagan first ran for president, he stoked the anger of largely
white audiences with brutal exaggerations of the undeserving black and
brown poor.

He talked of a ''welfare queen" in Chicago who collected $150,000 under 80
different names. It turned out that she collected only $8,000 under four
names. In a Florida campaign stop, Reagan bemoaned how hardworking people
wait in line at grocery stores while a ''strapping black buck" purchased
T-bone steaks with food stamps. It was code language in Florida, where
Reagan's Republican state campaign manager told The New York Times, ''We
are wasting our time to get black people registered."

Reagan said of a housing development in East Harlem, ''If you are a slum
dweller, you can get an apartment with 11-foot ceilings, with a 20-foot
balcony, a swimming pool and gymnasium, laundry room and play room, and
the rent begins at $113.20 and that includes utilities." Less than
one-sixth of the 656 units had a kitchen or living room with a high
ceiling, the rent would have been four times more, and the pool and gym
were a community center for 200,000 area residents, mostly Latino and
African-American.

Reagan won the presidency in 1980 partially on that attack on the poor.
His lasting imagery led to sweeping cutbacks in welfare under President
Clinton, a Democrat, and in the current budget cuts to the poor by
Republican President Bush. But Halliburton, one of our greatest cheats of
the last quarter-century, continues to skip to the head of the grocery
line for tax bones as the poor continue to be axed to bare bones.

Even though an Army audit determined that $263 million of charges by
Halliburton were exaggerated or unjustified on its $2.41 billion no-bid
contract for fuel deliveries and oil equipment repair in Iraq, the Army
said it will pay all but $10.1 million of it. The Times reported Monday
that the decision to withhold only 3.8 percent of the charges in question
is far below the average of questionable charges that are withheld. That
average has ranged between 56.4 percent and 75.2 percent over the last
three years.

Audits and averages rarely matter with Halliburton. While Reagan 
galvanized the middle class against laundry rooms for the poor, 
Halliburton is the company whose subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown & Root, 
charged you and me $100 for a bag of laundry and $45 for a case of soda in
Iraq.

During Reagan's tenure, Halliburton and KBR agreed to pay $750 million to
settle a lawsuit over letting costs of a nuclear power plant in Texas
skyrocket five times to $5.5 billion. Halliburton exported oil-field
equipment to Libya despite a US trade ban. It ended up paying $3.8 million
in fines. The government said some of the equipment Halliburton shipped
could have been for nuclear weapons.

It is the company that had to pay $7.5 million in fines to settle with the
Securities and Exchange Commission over accounting practices in the late
1990s that boosted its bottom line. Vice President Dick Cheney was
Halliburton's CEO at the time but was not charged with any wrongdoing. It
is the company that had to pay back the government on separate occasions
$6.3 million, $11.4 million, and $16 million for kickbacks and overcharges
on fuel deliveries and meals for troops in Kuwait and Iraq.

Halliburton has admitted to $2.4 million in bribes to the Nigerian 
government in exchange for favorable tax treatment. None of this matters
with a company that spent $1.4 million over the last decade, according to
the Center for Responsive Politics, to get friendly key Republicans into
office and has its former CEO as vice president. The reason the Army
capitulated on its own audit is that everyone knows -- without anyone
having to say it -- the cost of criticizing Cheney's former company.

Bunnatine Greenhouse, the Army Corps' top contracting officer, was 
demoted last year after saying the no-bid, multi-billion-dollar 
contracts to Halliburton represented ''the most blatant and improper
contract abuse I have witnessed during the course of my professional
career."

It is no small accident that Greenhouse happens to be a black woman. A
quarter-century of presidents and the media made black women the face of
welfare queens. When a black woman blew the whistle on some of the worst
of our white welfare kings, it was still the black woman who was treated
like a fraud.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/0
1/halliburton_strikes_again
-- 
You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, option 
D (up to 3 emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options (option A - 
1x/week, option B - 3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option D - up to 3x/day) 
please reply and let us know!  If someone forwarded you this email and 
you want to be on our list, send an email to ean at sbcglobal.net and tell 
us which option you'd like.


"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060302/aaf3ef14/attachment.htm 

From ean at sbcglobal.net  Thu Mar  2 18:47:58 2006
From: ean at sbcglobal.net (ean at sbcglobal.net)
Date: Thu, 02 Mar 2006 18:47:58 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Global warming may be even hotter
Message-ID: <E1FF3lc-000618-9D@smtpauth01.mail.atl.earthlink.net>

Global warming may be even 
hotter
The Sydney Morning Herald
SMH.com.au
By Deborah Smith Science Editor
March 1, 2006
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will warn the 
world's politicians that the Earth's temperature could rise far 
higher in response to greenhouse gas emissions than previously 
thought.
A secret draft version of the next report by the United Nation's 
influential panel of climate experts, to be given to governments 
in April, will say a reliable upper limit can no longer be put on 
how quickly the world will warm, according to the British 
newspaper The Guardian.
Australian scientists said the reported warning reflected a 
growing body of recent research showing that climate 
change was occurring more rapidly than expected.
Some computer models have now forseen temperature increases 
of as much as 11 degrees C. (20 F.) from a doubling of carbon 
dioxide levels in the atmosphere. The climate change panel had 
assumed a doubling of carbon dioxide levels would lead to a 
temperature rise of between 1.5 degrees and 4.5 degrees.
Dr Barrie Pittock, a retired CSIRO researcher and the author of 
Climate Change, Turning up the Heat, said models of climate 
change always involved a range of uncertainty, but the 
possibility of a large increase in temperature had to be taken very 
seriously. "If you're taking a risk-management approach and 
want to avoid what is disastrous you have got to [look at] the 
upper end of the range and [then] avoid that," he said.
Professor Ian Lowe, an environmental scientist and president of 
the Australian Conservation Foundation, said he hoped the 
report would convince the Australian Government of the 
seriousness of the issue because it was still listening to the last 
"10 or 12 sceptics of the world".




-- 
You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, 
option D (up to 3 emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options 
(option A - 1x/week, option B - 3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option D - 
up to 3x/day) please reply and let us know!  If someone forwarded you 
this email and you want to be on our list, send an email to 
ean at sbcglobal.net and tell us which option you'd like.


"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060302/5d9ed6de/attachment.htm 

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Thu Mar  2 22:39:12 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Thu, 02 Mar 2006 22:39:12 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] UAE Gave $1 Million to Bush Library By Wendy Benjaminson
	The Associated Press
Message-ID: <C02D2490.29A4B%michael@michaelbutler.com>

    Go to Original

    UAE Gave $1 Million to Bush Library
    By Wendy Benjaminson
    The Associated Press

    Thursday 23 February 2006

    A sheik from the United Arab Emirates contributed at least $1 million to
the Bush Library Foundation, which established the George Bush Presidential
Library at Texas A&M University in College Station.

    The UAE owns Dubai Port Co., which is taking operations from
London-based Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Co., which operates
six US ports. A political uproar has ensued over the deal, which the White
House approved without congressional oversight.

    The donations were made in the early 1990s for the library, which houses
the papers of former President George Bush, the current president's father.

    The list of donors names Sheik Zayed Bin Sultan al Nahyan and the people
of the United Arab Emirates as one donor in the $1 million or more category.

    The amount of the gift grants them recognition on the engraved donor
wall in the library entrance or on the paving bricks that line the library's
walkways, according to library documents.

    Roman Popaduik, chairman of the Bush Library Foundation that collects
donations, said he could not discuss details of the gifts except to say the
amount category and whether it was before or after 1997.

    The chief executive of the Dubai company, Ahmed bin Sulayem, did not
donate individually.

    The hundreds of large donors include longtime Bush associates, including
Vice President Dick Cheney and other administration officials as well as
business titans - such as Enron Corp. founder Kenneth Lay - and big
Republican donors.

    Other Arab donors include the state of Kuwait, the Bandar bin Sultan
family, the Sultanate of Oman, King Hassan II of Morocco and the amir of
Qatar. The former Korean prime minister and China also gave tens of
thousands of dollars to the library.

 


From Reeeees at aol.com  Wed Mar  1 18:20:10 2006
From: Reeeees at aol.com (Reeeees at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 1 Mar 2006 21:20:10 EST
Subject: [Mb-civic] Iraq: A Solution to Nothing
Message-ID: <E1FF3xZ-00028U-69@smtpauth01.mail.atl.earthlink.net>

     
Published  on Wednesday, March 1, 2006 by the _Seattle Times  _ 
(http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/) 
Iraq: A Solution to Nothing  
by Scott  Ritter 
As the United States and Iraq approach the third  anniversary of the invasion 
and occupation of Iraq, it might do all  Americans well to take some time out 
and reflect on how we got where we  are, as well as where we are going in 
Iraq and the Middle East as a whole.   
Gone forever is any talk of song and flowers,  economic recoveries paid for 
by Iraqi oil, or a blooming democracy in the  cradle of civilization. The state 
of affairs between the Bush  administration and the newly elected government 
of Prime Minister Ibrahim  Jafari is strained, to say the least, with the 
United States threatening  to cut off aid to Iraq, and Iraq telling the United 
States to "butt out."   
Nearly three months have passed since the  "historic" elections of December 
2005, and the Iraqis have just now  selected a prime minister (Jafari, a Shiite 
Islamic fundamentalist closely  allied with Iran), and seemed hopelessly 
deadlocked on the issue of  forming a government that will not promote an 
immediate outbreak of  sectarian violence once formed.  
The Sunni insurgency is stronger than ever, and  Shiite death squads roam the 
street in the guise of government police and  soldiers. Torture, rape and 
murder are rampant as official tools of  government suppression. And American 
troops appear to be powerless to stop  this mindless slide into the abyss, all 
the while being killed and maimed  for a cause that has always been nebulous.  
"Duty," "honor" and "country" mean little when the  majority of the American 
citizens supposedly being served by the ongoing  occupation of Iraq are more 
interested in "American Idol" than the process  of bringing peace and stability 
to ancient Babylon, or when American  politicians seem content to continue to 
allow the men and women who honor  our nation through their service to die 
while those in power grasp for a  politically face-saving way to "solve the 
Iraqi problem." And herein lies  the problem: We continue to try to solve a 
problem we have yet to define,  meaning we are seeking a solution to nothing.  
America continues to pretend that we are building  something of value in 
Iraq. And yet, common sense dictates that when one  seeks to build on a corrupt 
foundation, whatever it is that is being  constructed is doomed eventually to 
collapse. Our nation's involvement in  Iraq is based on as corrupt a foundation 
as imaginable. We didn't go to  war for sound national-security reasons (i.e., 
a threat that manifested  itself in a form solvable only through military 
intervention), but rather  for domestic political reasons based on ideology that 
exploited the fear  and ignorance of the American people in the post-Sept. 11, 
2001, world.   
In the topsy-turvy world of domestic American  politics, this reality 
continues to fail to resonate. Those who opposed  the invasion of Iraq continue to be 
demonized and marginalized, while  those who supported it are embraced and 
applauded.  
This "through the looking glass" quality in the  American body politic not 
only hamstrings the nation collectively on the  issue of solving the Iraq 
problem, but also continues to distort reality  when dealing with other emerging 
problems confronting our country and the  world, such as the looming crisis with 
Iran over its nuclear programs.   
Even as we fail to grasp the lessons of our  unraveling failure in Iraq, we 
seem to be moving full steam ahead into a  similar catastrophe in Iran, making 
the same mistakes by embracing a  threat model (nuclear weapons) void of any 
hard evidence, and promoting a  solution (democracy) that is undefined.  
If the upcoming leather anniversary of the U.S.-led  invasion of Iraq tells 
us anything as a nation, it is that we are in  desperate need of a national 
"time out" when it comes to the issue of  Iraq, Iran and the global war on 
terror. We need to learn the lesson that  every soldier, sailor, airman and Marine 
serving oversees knows only too  well ? you don't reinforce failure.  
If our politicians, Republican and Democrat alike,  are unable or unwilling 
to engage in a rancor-free discussion about where  we as a nation are heading 
when it comes to issues of war and peace, then  perhaps we the people should 
engage in one of our own, and in the process  establish agreed-upon principles 
and standards that not only would serve  as a solid foundation upon which to 
build any future endeavors in the  Middle East and elsewhere, but also set 
forward values and ideals that  could be used to hold to account those whom we 
elect to represent us in  higher office.  
Scott Ritter is a former U.N. weapons inspector  in Iraq (1991-1998) and 
Marine Corps intelligence officer. He is the  author of "_Iraq Confidential: The 
Untold Story of the  Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the U.N. and 
Overthrow Saddam  Hussein_ 
(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1560258527/commondreams-20/ref=nosim) ," published by Nation  Books.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060301/446365e5/attachment-0001.htm 

From michael at intrafi.com  Thu Mar  2 22:42:21 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Thu,  2 Mar 2006 22:42:21 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] Alternet: Flying is Dying
Message-ID: <20060303064221.00FD4B81A5@alternet.org>


This story has been forwarded to you from
http://www.alternet.org by michael at intrafi.com



-------------------------------------
Flying is Dying
http://www.alternet.org/story/32903

There is no way to halt global warming and continue traveling long distances at high speeds. The only solution is to stop flying in airplanes.
-------------------------------------


From michael at intrafi.com  Thu Mar  2 22:46:14 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Thu,  2 Mar 2006 22:46:14 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] Alternet: Bush's Corporate Contortionist Act
Message-ID: <20060303064614.47EA3B81A5@alternet.org>


This story has been forwarded to you from
http://www.alternet.org by michael at intrafi.com



-------------------------------------
Bush's Corporate Contortionist Act
http://www.alternet.org/story/32914

The Dubai ports controversy is only the latest example of how willing Republicans are to bend over backwards to fight for Big Business's right to make massive profits.
-------------------------------------


From michael at intrafi.com  Thu Mar  2 22:48:35 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Thu,  2 Mar 2006 22:48:35 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] Alternet: Against the Grain: The Fall of the L.A. Times?
Message-ID: <20060303064835.55971B81A5@alternet.org>


This story has been forwarded to you from
http://www.alternet.org by michael at intrafi.com



-------------------------------------
Against the Grain: The Fall of the L.A. Times?
http://www.alternet.org/story/32919

In this episode of Against the Grain, a look at the rise and fall of the L.A. Times, and how corporate interests seek to turn the Internet into a "digital retail machine."
-------------------------------------


From swiggard at comcast.net  Fri Mar  3 04:39:36 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Fri, 03 Mar 2006 07:39:36 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] U.S. Cites Exception in Torture Ban - Washington Post
Message-ID: <44083908.60108@comcast.net>

U.S. Cites Exception in Torture Ban
McCain Law May Not Apply to Cuba Prison

By Josh White and Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, March 3, 2006; A04

Bush administration lawyers, fighting a claim of torture by a Guantanamo 
Bay detainee, yesterday argued that the new law that bans cruel, inhuman 
or degrading treatment of detainees in U.S. custody does not apply to 
people held at the military prison.

In federal court yesterday and in legal filings, Justice Department 
lawyers contended that a detainee at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, cannot use 
legislation drafted by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to challenge treatment 
that the detainee's lawyers described as "systematic torture."

Government lawyers have argued that another portion of that same law, 
the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, removes general access to U.S. 
courts for all Guantanamo Bay captives. Therefore, they said, Mohammed 
Bawazir, a Yemeni national held since May 2002, cannot claim protection 
under the anti-torture provisions.

Bawazir's attorneys contend that "extremely painful" new tactics used by 
the government to force-feed him and end his hunger strike amount to 
torture.

U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler said in a hearing yesterday that she 
found allegations of aggressive U.S. military tactics used to break the 
detainee hunger strike "extremely disturbing" and possibly against U.S. 
and international law. But Justice Department lawyers argued that even 
if the tactics were considered in violation of McCain's language, 
detainees at Guantanamo would have no recourse to challenge them in court.

In Bawazir's case, the government claims that it had to forcefully 
intervene in a hunger strike that was causing his weight to drop 
dangerously. In January, officials strapped Bawazir into a special 
chair, put a larger tube than they had previously used through his nose 
and kept him restrained for nearly two hours at a time to make sure he 
did not purge the food he was being given, the government and Bawazir's 
attorneys said.

Richard Murphy Jr., Bawazir's attorney, said his client gave in to the 
new techniques and began eating solid food days after the first use of 
the restraint chair. Murphy said the military deliberately made the 
process painful and embarrassing, noting that Bawazir soiled himself 
because of the approach.

Kessler said getting to the root of the allegations is an "urgent matter."

"These allegations . . . describe disgusting treatment, that if proven, 
is treatment that is cruel, profoundly disturbing and violative of" U.S. 
and foreign treaties banning torture, Kessler told the government's 
lawyers. She said she needs more information, but made clear she is 
considering banning the use of larger nasal-gastric tubes and the 
restraint chair.

In court filings, the Justice Department lawyers argued that language in 
the law written by Sens. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) and Carl M. Levin 
(D-Mich.) gives Guantanamo Bay detainees access to the courts only to 
appeal their enemy combatant status determinations and convictions by 
military commissions.

"Unfortunately, I think the government's right; it's a correct reading 
of the law," said Tom Malinowski, Washington advocacy director for Human 
Rights Watch. "The law says you can't torture detainees at Guantanamo, 
but it also says you can't enforce that law in the courts."

Thomas Wilner, a lawyer representing several detainees at Guantanamo, 
agreed that the law cannot be enforced. "This is what Guantanamo was 
about to begin with, a place to keep detainees out of the U.S. precisely 
so they can say they can't go to court," Wilner said.

A spokeswoman for McCain's office did not respond to questions yesterday.

Murphy told the judge the military's claims that it switched tactics to 
protect Bawazir should not be believed. He noted that on Jan. 11 -- days 
after the new law passed -- the Defense Department made the identical 
health determination for about 20 other detainees, all of whom had been 
engaged in the hunger strike.

Guantanamo Bay officials deny that the tactics constitute torture. They 
wrote in sworn statements that they are necessary efforts to ensure 
detainee health. Maj. Gen. Jay W. Hood, the facility's commander, wrote 
that Bawazir's claims of abuse are "patently false."

"In short, he is a trained al Qaida terrorist, who has been taught to 
claim torture, abuse, and medical mistreatment if captured," Hood wrote. 
He added that Bawazir allegedly went to Afghanistan to train for jihad 
and ultimately fought with the Taliban against U.S. troops.

Navy Capt. Stephen G. Hooker, who runs the prison's detention hospital, 
noted that the hunger strike began on Aug. 8, reached a peak of 131 
participants on Sept. 11, and dropped to 84 on Christmas Day. After use 
of the restraint chair began, only five captives continued not eating.

Hooker wrote that he suspected Bawazir was purging his food after 
feedings. Bawazir weighed 130 pounds in late 2002, according to Hooker, 
but 97 pounds on the day he was first strapped to the chair. As of 
Sunday, his weight was back to 137 pounds, the government said.

Kessler noted with irritation that Hood and Hooker made largely general 
claims about the group of detainees on the hunger strike in defending 
the switch to the new force-feeding procedures used on Bawazir.

"I know it's a sad day when a federal judge has to ask a DOJ attorney 
this, but I'm asking you -- why should I believe them?" Kessler asked 
Justice Department attorney Terry Henry.

Henry said he would attempt to gather more information from the 
officials but said there was no legal basis for the court to intervene. 
Bawazir's weight is back to normal, his health is "robust" and he is no 
longer on a hunger strike, Henry said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/02/AR2006030202054.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060303/046c7546/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Fri Mar  3 04:41:21 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Fri, 03 Mar 2006 07:41:21 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Antarctic Ice Sheet Is Melting Rapidly - Washington Post
Message-ID: <44083971.2060207@comcast.net>

Antarctic Ice Sheet Is Melting Rapidly
New Study Warns Of Rising Sea Levels

By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 3, 2006; A01

The Antarctic ice sheet is losing as much as 36 cubic miles of ice a 
year in a trend that scientists link to global warming, according to a 
new paper that provides the first evidence that the sheet's total mass 
is shrinking significantly.

The new findings, which are being published today in the journal 
Science, suggest that global sea level could rise substantially over the 
next several centuries.

It is one of a slew of scientific papers in recent weeks that have 
sought to gauge the impact of climate change on the world's oceans and 
lakes. Just last month two researchers reported that Greenland's 
glaciers are melting into the sea twice as fast as previously believed, 
and a separate paper in Science today predicts that by the end of this 
century lakes and streams on one-fourth of the African continent could 
be drying up because of higher temperatures.

The new Antarctic measurements, using data from two NASA satellites 
called the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), found that 
the amount of water pouring annually from the ice sheet into the ocean 
-- equivalent to the amount of water the United States uses in three 
months -- is causing global sea level to rise by 0.4 millimeters a year. 
The continent holds 90 percent of the world's ice, and the disappearance 
of even its smaller West Antarctic ice sheet could raise worldwide sea 
levels by an estimated 20 feet.

"The ice sheet is losing mass at a significant rate," said Isabella 
Velicogna, the study's lead author and a research scientist at Colorado 
University at Boulder's Cooperative Institute for Research in 
Environmental Sciences. "It's a good indicator of how the climate is 
changing. It tells us we have to pay attention."

Richard Alley, a Pennsylvania State University glaciologist who has 
studied the Antarctic ice sheet but was not involved in the new 
research, said more research is needed to determine if the shrinkage is 
a long-term trend, because the new report is based on just three years 
of data. "One person's trend is another person's fluctuation," he said.

But Alley called the study significant and "a bit surprising" because a 
major international scientific panel predicted five years ago that the 
Antarctic ice sheet would gain mass this century as higher temperatures 
led to increased snowfall.

"It looks like the ice sheets are ahead of schedule" in terms of 
melting, Alley said. "That's a wake-up call. We better figure out what's 
going on."

Velicogna acknowledged that it is hard to predict how fast the ice sheet 
will melt in the future but said, "I don't expect it's going to stop in 
the next couple of years."

Scientists have been debating whether the Antarctic ice sheet is 
expanding or shrinking overall, because the center of the sheet tends to 
gain mass through snowfall whereas the coastal regions are more 
vulnerable to melting.

Velicogna and her co-author, University of Colorado at Boulder physics 
professor John Wahr, based their measurements on data from the two GRACE 
satellites that circle the world more than a dozen times a day at an 
altitude of 310 miles. The satellites measure variations in Earth's mass 
and gravitational pull: Increases or decreases in the Antarctic ice 
sheet's mass change the distance between the satellites as they fly over 
the region.

"The strength of GRACE is that we were able to assess the entire 
Antarctic region in one fell swoop to determine if it was gaining or 
losing mass," Wahr said.

But some scientists remain unconvinced. Oregon state climatologist 
George Taylor noted that sea ice in some areas of Antarctica is 
expanding and part of the region is getting colder, despite computer 
models that would predict otherwise.

"The Antarctic is really a puzzle," said Taylor, who writes for the Web 
site TSCDaily, which is partly financed by fossil fuel companies that 
oppose curbs on greenhouse gases linked to climate change. "A lot more 
research is needed to understand the degree of climate and ice trends in 
and around the Antarctic."

At the other end of the temperature spectrum, two South African 
researchers are reporting today in Science that their computer models 
indicate that by 2100 climate change may rob the south and west of 
Africa and areas in the upper Nile region of a significant portion of 
their current water supply. Warming may reduce the rainfall needed to 
replenish up to 25 percent of Africa's surface water, said Maarten de 
Wit and Jacek Stankiewicz at the University of Cape Town in Rondebosch, 
South Africa.

"Water is essential to human survival," they wrote, "and changes in its 
supply can potentially have devastating implications, particularly in 
Africa, where much of the population relies on local rivers for water."

Congressional Democrats, including Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.) and Rep. 
Henry A. Waxman (Calif.) said yesterday that the two new papers show 
that the United States must act quickly to impose mandatory limits on 
carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The Bush administration 
opposes such curbs on the grounds that they could hurt the country's 
economy and has instead invested money on new technology to limit 
greenhouse emissions and further climate science research.

"Climate change is not just someone else's concern but a very real 
threat to the lives and livelihood of people across the globe," Kerry said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/02/AR2006030201712.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060303/7f521a42/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Fri Mar  3 04:43:44 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Fri, 03 Mar 2006 07:43:44 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] This Is 'Fully Prepared'? - Eugene Robinson - Washington
	Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <44083A00.7080505@comcast.net>

This Is 'Fully Prepared'?

By Eugene Robinson
Friday, March 3, 2006; A17

"I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees."

George W. Bush said those words to Diane Sawyer last Sept. 1, when 
desperate people in flooded New Orleans were still being rescued from 
their roofs. Now we know that just four days earlier, in a 
videoconference briefing, one of the nation's leading hurricane experts 
had explicitly warned that failure of the protective levees was "a very, 
very grave concern."

We also know that in his final briefing before Hurricane Katrina hit, 
the president did not ask a single question. He did, however, reassure 
local officials that help would soon be on the way. "I want to assure 
the folks at the state level that we are fully prepared," Bush said.

Given what happened over the following week, all I can say is: Be 
afraid. Be very afraid.

At least now I know why the White House is so obsessively secretive 
about its decision-making process. The leaked videotapes and transcripts 
of pre-Katrina briefings that were obtained this week by the Associated 
Press leave in tatters the defining myth of the Bush administration -- 
an undeserved aura of cool, unflinching competence and steely resolve. 
Instead, the tapes show bureaucratic inertia and a president for whom 
delegation seems to mean detachment.

The briefings were held as satellite photos showed monstrous Katrina 
practically filling the whole Gulf of Mexico, and there was nothing that 
could have been done to save the Gulf Coast from a terrible blow. 
However, there was much that could have been done to organize and 
support evacuation, rescue and relief efforts. The federal government 
had learned, for example, that local officials in Louisiana had mounted 
no effective effort to evacuate people from institutions -- hospitals, 
prisons, schools. Yet the federal response was essentially a shrug.

What we didn't know before these tapes came out is how specifically the 
president had been warned of the impending disaster, in all its 
particulars. The story was foretold days before the hurricane made landfall.

The hapless Michael Brown proved to be a disaster as head of the Federal 
Emergency Management Agency, but in the days before Katrina hit he did a 
pretty good job of sounding the alarm. His hair was on fire as he tried 
to get his boss, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, and the 
White House to pay attention and absorb the fact that this was the "big 
one."

The president was attending the briefings via secure video from his 
ranch in Crawford, Tex. After hearing what he heard, how could he have 
told anyone the federal government was "fully prepared" to help? And how 
on earth could he have said days later that no one thought the New 
Orleans levees might fail?

In a way, I'd worry less if I thought the president were being 
intentionally duplicitous. But I worry that somehow he didn't fully take 
in the reality of the situation, let alone its gravity. His response was 
to sign all the right pieces of paper and then reassure others, and 
perhaps himself, that everything was under control when it should have 
been obvious that nothing was under control.

The day after his claim about no one anticipating the failure of the 
levees, when the federal response was still a chaotic and ineffectual 
mess, Bush uttered the immortal line to his foundering FEMA director: 
"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job." Did he really believe that?

A chief executive who isolates himself from bad news is one thing. A 
chief executive who hears bad news, in detail, and then plays it back as 
"heck of a job" is something else.

Is there a pattern here? President Bush surely sees, as we all see, that 
Iraq is in danger of falling into the abyss of sectarian civil war. He 
must realize that he got bad advice and tried to occupy the country with 
too few troops, making calamitous mistakes along the way. He surely sees 
the continuing violence in Afghanistan as the Taliban tries to regroup 
across the border in Pakistan, where Osama bin Laden is thought to be 
hiding. But he doesn't seem to really grapple with the bad news from the 
multi-front "war on terrorism" he has launched, preferring to 
acknowledge only the spread of democratic institutions.

Some in the administration are now calling it "the long war," which 
indicates no end in sight.

Oh, and health authorities agree that it's just a matter of time before 
the avian flu pandemic reaches U.S. shores. The administration says the 
government is prepared to provide all necessary help to local officials.

Be very afraid.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/02/AR2006030201210.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060303/7d230570/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Fri Mar  3 04:51:45 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Fri, 03 Mar 2006 07:51:45 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] SHOULD READ: Bush's Self-Evident Certitude - Michael
 Kinsley - Washington Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <44083BE1.9060307@comcast.net>

Bush's Self-Evident Certitude

By Michael Kinsley
Friday, March 3, 2006; A17

The case for democracy is "self-evident," as someone once put it. The 
case for the world's most powerful democracy to take as its mission the 
spreading of democracy around the world is pretty self-evident, too: 
What's good for us is good for others. Those others will be grateful. A 
world full of democracies created or protected with our help ought to be 
more peaceful and prosperous and favorably disposed toward us.

There is no valid case against democracy. You used to hear a lot that 
democracy is not suitable for some classes of foreigners: simply 
incompatible with the cultures of East Asia (because deference to 
authority is too ingrained there) or the Arab Middle East (because 
everybody is a religious fanatic) or Africa (because they're too 
"tribal," or too predisposed to rule by a "big daddy" . . . or 
something). But this line of argument has gone out of fashion, pushed 
offstage by free and fair elections in some surprising places.

Yet the case against spreading democracy -- especially through military 
force -- as a mission of the U.S. government is also pretty 
self-evident. American blood and treasure should not be spent on 
democracy for other people. Or, short of that absolute, there are limits 
to the blood and treasure the United States should be expected to spend 
on democracy elsewhere, and the nature of war makes that cost hard to 
predict and hard to limit. Furthermore, the encouraging discovery that 
free elections are possible in unexpected places has a discouraging 
corollary: If tolerance and pluralism and suchlike Western values are 
not essential preconditions for democratic elections, they are not the 
necessary result of elections either.

The present debate over when to use American power in defense of 
democracies other than our own is at least more wholesome than the 
previous debate about using force to thwart or overthrow foreign 
democracies. The argument against tolerating communist governments 
elected fair and square used to be that the election that brought them 
to office would probably be the last. "I don't see why we need to stand 
by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its 
own people," as Henry Kissinger put it. But today's concern about what 
we might call "nasty democracy" is in some ways more depressing. It is 
not that a regime will use democracy in the short run to stifle it in 
the long run. The danger is that democracy will reveal the people's true 
and continuing preference for a society with no place for all the other 
Western liberal values that our founding document calls "self-evident" 
(equality, freedom to pursue happiness and so on). Even worse, these 
societies may decide to export their distaste for Western values just as 
we try to export the values themselves -- and they may not agonize, 
Western-style, over the distinction between violent and nonviolent means 
of persuasion.

Recent news has left us awash in examples: the triumph of Hamas in the 
Palestinian elections; the emergence of a similarly attractive group, 
the Muslim Brotherhood, as an electoral force in Egypt; and above all 
the result of the American-sponsored election in Iraq, which seems to be 
just about the opposite of the lion-and-lamb tranquility that democracy 
enthusiasts had hoped for. But if these developments gave President Bush 
any pause about his aggressive democratization project, he showed no 
sign of it Wednesday during his surprise drop-by in Afghanistan. From 
Bush's description, that legendarily bloodthirsty land has been 
transformed into something like Minnesota. It's a place where "men and 
women are respected" and "young girls can go to school" and "people are 
able to realize their dreams." We shall see.

In his biography of Margaret Thatcher, the British journalist Hugo Young 
used the term "inspirational certainty" to describe the strength that 
some political leaders get from refusing to let anything change their 
minds. Thatcher had it, and so did Ronald Reagan. Bush would like to 
have it. But on this particular issue, at least, he can't because he 
actually has changed his mind. In the 2000 election he opposed what was 
then called nation-building -- and he opposed it for all the 
self-evident reasons. Now he supports it, for equally self-evident 
reasons. If the arguments for both sides of some policy question are 
self-evident, the correct answer must not be. But Bush avoids the trap 
of complication by taking his self-evident truths sequentially.

Bush parries any challenge to explain his change of views with the 
simple assertion that Sept. 11, 2001, changed everything. It's easy to 
see how that day might have changed his opinion about the urgency of the 
war on terrorism. But how, exactly, is it supposed to have changed his 
opinion about the aggressive pursuit of democracy as a tactic in that war?

We don't want a President Hamlet, publicly rehearsing his doubts as he 
leads the nation into battle. But the men and women risking their lives 
for democracy in Iraq deserve at least a tiny sense that the president 
who sends them there has considered the evidence against his policy and 
has some sense of why he rejects it.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/02/AR2006030201217.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060303/82ed1b3b/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Fri Mar  3 04:54:52 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Fri, 03 Mar 2006 07:54:52 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Hollywood's Wars - David Ignatius - Washington Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <44083C9C.8050109@comcast.net>

Hollywood's Wars

By David Ignatius
Friday, March 3, 2006; A17

The Academy Awards are a cultural artifact. Like the rings on a tree, or 
the sediment layers of a fossil bed, they provide a record -- of what we 
were thinking about, what made us laugh, what frightened us, year by 
year. They also provide a chance to see glamorous actors and actresses 
in really cool clothes, but we'll leave that for Joan and Melissa Rivers.

I've been looking at this year's nominees for best picture and comparing 
them to best-picture nominees over the past 70 years. Because America is 
at war, I have been especially curious about how this year's nominees 
compare with those of other war periods -- World War II, Korea, Vietnam. 
My conclusion is that it's not the war abroad that matters this year but 
the one at home.

What's obvious about this year's nominees is that they are not the usual 
Tinseltown entertainment. America may have its troubles, but Hollywood's 
response is introspection rather than escapism. Each of the five 
nominated pictures -- "Brokeback Mountain," "Capote," "Crash," "Good 
Night, and Good Luck" and "Munich" -- is a journey inward. Nobody would 
accuse the producers of trying to take our minds off our problems.

This year's best movies are dark and deeply serious, embracing racial 
and sexual themes that Hollywood has often buried. The year's headline 
film has to be "Brokeback Mountain." Its portrait of suppressed gay love 
was a genuine breakthrough, opening a category of experience that had 
previously been out of bounds for a mass-market film. I felt the same 
way about "Crash," which had such jolting sounds and images of what race 
feels like in America today that it seemed to be wired directly into 
your nerve endings. I enjoyed "Capote," too, though like Truman Capote's 
work, it seemed more a one-man show than a fully realized movie.

In this war year, the Oscar nominees include two antiwar films, "Munich" 
and "Good Night, and Good Luck." Each chose an oblique way to express 
the anger and confusion that Americans feel about Iraq and the war on 
terrorism. And each highlighted the personal courage involved in 
challenging government policy in wartime. The profile of a mythic Edward 
R. Murrow defying McCarthyism during the Cold War implicitly criticized 
the media's coverage of the Bush administration. And Steven Spielberg's 
brave portrait of disoriented Israeli hit men showed us how 
anti-terrorist wars of revenge can peel back against themselves.

Compare this year's list with the best-picture winners during other 
wars. Start with World War II: For 1942 the winner was "Mrs. Miniver," a 
tear-jerker about a middle-class British family during the Blitz that 
even its director, William Wyler, said was "obviously a propaganda 
film." The winner for 1943 was the most romantic piece of wartime 
propaganda ever made, "Casablanca." For 1944 it was the heartwarming but 
eminently forgettable "Going My Way," with Bing Crosby as a crooning 
priest. It was as the war was ending that Hollywood allowed itself to 
brood a bit. The 1945 winner, "The Lost Weekend," was an unflinching 
look at the ravages of alcoholism; the 1946 winner, "The Best Years of 
Our Lives," conveyed the trauma of returning war veterans.

Korean War films were flamboyantly escapist. The winner for 1951 was the 
elegant but frivolous "An American in Paris." The next year's "best 
picture" was a Hollywood flapdoodle about circus life, Cecil B. 
DeMille's "The Greatest Show on Earth."

The Vietnam War was a slow-burning fuse. While the war was escalating, 
the Oscar winners were lovable fluff or Hollywood morality tales: "The 
Sound of Music" (1965); "A Man for All Seasons" (1966); "In the Heat of 
the Night" (1967) and "Oliver!" (1968). It was only later that Hollywood 
engaged the darkness and confusion of the war, in "The Deer Hunter," 
which won the Oscar for 1978, and "Platoon," which won in 1986.

Perhaps this year's crop of Oscar nominees is telling us that America 
doesn't really feel it's at war. The war in Iraq touches the soldiers 
who are there and their families, but for most other people it is 
largely an abstraction. Who needs escapist entertainment to distract you 
from a war you don't see or feel in the first place? In "Good Night, and 
Good Luck" and "Munich," we are celebrating the people who lose faith in 
government assurances, not the fighters.

The great Iraq war movies will come in time, as the reality of that 
conflict and its consequences become clearer. It's the culture wars that 
motivate this year's best-picture nominees -- the wars at home over race 
and gender that we experience every day.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/02/AR2006030201207.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060303/80a6e306/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Fri Mar  3 04:57:52 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Fri, 03 Mar 2006 07:57:52 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] IMPORTANT: Extreme politics in S. Dakota - Scot Lehigh -
 Boston Globe Op-Ed
Message-ID: <44083D50.60902@comcast.net>


  Extreme politics in S. Dakota

By Scot Lehigh  |  March 3, 2006  |   The Boston Globe

SOUTH DAKOTA is the latest flashpoint in the battle over abortion -- and 
what's happening there reveals a lot about the extreme viewpoint of some 
abortion foes.

The bill the South Dakota Legislature has put before Governor Mike 
Rounds would outlaw abortion even in cases of rape or incest. The only 
health exception would be to save a woman's life. Performing an abortion 
would become a felony, punishable by up to five years in prison.

Even if the Republican governor signs the bill, something Rounds has 
suggested he will probably do, it's highly unlikely that the legislation 
would survive a court challenge. Certainly it wouldn't under previous US 
Supreme Court rulings.

But antiabortion forces just as clearly hope the legislation will 
trigger a reconstituted high court to revisit this issue, particularly 
if President Bush gets to appoint another justice in the time it takes 
for the matter to wend its way upward.

Regardless of the bill's ultimate fate, however, the ideology behind it 
is instructive.

In a telephone interview yesterday, I asked South Dakota State 
Representative Roger Hunt, primary sponsor of the ban, why his 
legislation didn't include an exemption for women who became pregnant 
after rape or incest.

Hunt contended that it did: Women could use emergency contraception in 
the interval between the rape or incestuous sexual encounter and the 
time that medical tests first confirm a pregnancy, a period he estimated 
at three to seven days.

But once a woman discovers she is pregnant, Hunt said, the fetus must be 
protected.

''If there is a rape, it really is an injustice to that woman," he said. 
''But there are aksi remedies for that woman. The perpetrator can be 
prosecuted. Family, friends, pregnancy-crisis centers are all there to 
help her, as well as adoption procedures to assist her. But the unborn 
child whose life is terminated has no remedy."

It doesn't matter to Hunt that such a fetus would be at a very early 
stage of development. A South Dakota legislative task force has 
determined that life begins at conception, the Republican state 
representative explained.

''Whether it is a few days or a few months, you have life," Hunt said. 
''If there is life, now we are talking about balancing a woman's right 
to choose and the life of the unborn child."

Balancing? Hunt and the South Dakota Legislature have made it crystal 
clear that they put the interests of a fetus at any stage of development 
over those of a pregnant woman or girl, even if she happens to be a 
victim of rape or incest.

Nor do any health concerns beyond those ''designed or intended to 
prevent the death" of the woman matter to them.

''The health exemption is nothing but a wide open barn door to permit 
all kinds of abortions," Hunt averred. ''We might as well not even pass 
a bill if we are going to have a broad exemption that is undefined, such 
as women's health."

Watching this episode, one might ask, what happened to South Dakota?

Actually, the measure ''is not supported by the people of South Dakota 
and would be considered by the majority . . . in this state to be beyond 
what they would want to see," contends Kate Looby, Planned Parenthood's 
South Dakota director.

This specific legislation hasn't been polled, but previous 
public-opinion surveys suggest that Looby is probably right. In a May 
2004 poll for the Sioux Falls Argus Leader and KELO-TV, a Sioux Falls 
station, 34 percent of those surveyed said abortion should be legal, 
with the decision left to the woman, while another 38 percent said 
abortion should be available in specific circumstances such as rape, 
incest, or to save the life of the mother. Twenty-five percent said 
abortion should be illegal under any circumstances.

Although this measure is clearly designed to provoke a court test, Hunt 
says he hopes it will someday take effect in South Dakota.

Now, abortion is a complex, difficult, emotional issue, one that 
reasonable people can disagree on. Still, it is dismaying that Hunt and 
his colleagues would compel a woman to continue a pregnancy conceived 
under terrible circumstances.

It's just as alarming that they make no allowance for a doctor's 
judgment that carrying a pregnancy to term could injure a woman's 
health. But these are the burdens some abortion foes would impose on 
others in the name of their own particular ideology.

Shame.


http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/03/extreme_politics_in_s_dakota/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060303/6575148a/attachment-0001.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Fri Mar  3 05:00:43 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Fri, 03 Mar 2006 08:00:43 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Single and not voting - Ellen Goodman - Boston Globe
	Op-Ed
Message-ID: <44083DFB.8090102@comcast.net>


  Single and not voting

By Ellen Goodman  |  March 3, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

THERE ARE TIMES when political polling reminds me of one of Liz 
Carpenter's favorite stories. Back in the Carter administration when the 
indomitable Texan was working on women's rights, she asked a university 
president how his campus was broken down by sex. ''Well, ma'am," he 
answered thoughtfully, ''liquor is more of a problem."

Over the years, sexual breakdowns became a regular feature in the 
polling firmament. The gender gap was discovered and then elevated to a 
truism, and finally divided into various subsets of the gene pool.

We had long treatises and longer campaigns built around Soccer Moms and 
Security Moms, not to mention NASCAR Dads. And we added something new, 
something borrowed, and something blue to the 2004 analysis: an 
intragender gap called the marriage gap. Married women leaned to the 
right. Single women leaned to the left.

The story of the hour was Sex and the Single Voter, as if unmarried 
women formed a cohort of Manolo Blahnik Wearers for Kerry. In reality 
they were more Payless. But in the end, 62 percent of unmarried women 
voters picked Kerry and 55 percent of married women voters chose Bush.

The good news for the Democrats was and is that unmarried women are the 
most progressive block in the demographic neighborhood. The bad news is 
that they were and are less likely to vote. In 2004, 59 percent of 
unmarried women voted compared with 71 percent of married women.

In the words of Republican pollster and soundbitetress Kellyanne Conway, 
''Women who have what we call the four magic M's -- marriage, munchkins, 
mortgages, and mutual funds -- are much more likely to vote." And vote 
Republican.

Women who are unmarried because of three magic D's -- delay, divorce, 
and death -- are more likely to vote Democratic. But less likely to vote 
at all.

Fast forward now to the onset of the 2006 election cycle. Many believe 
the best place for Democrats to go fishing for new voters is in the pond 
of 20 million single women who either aren't registered or don't vote.

Enter Anna Greenberg, who conducted a survey for Women's Voices, Women's 
Vote to figure out why they aren't trekking to the polling booths.

It turns out that single men who don't vote are mostly young and 
disaffected. Single women are spread out further along the age spectrum, 
clustered lower on the economic scale, and more likely to believe in a 
role for government in their lives.

But here is the nut. ''Unmarried men are cynical about politics and 
policymakers," says Greenberg. ''Unmarried women are insecure about 
politics." They know less, are more likely to admit it, and a good half 
told her that people shouldn't vote unless they are informed.

This isn't just a matter of boys raising their hands in class first. We 
know, alas, that women are less informed about objective facts such as, 
say, how many justices serve on the Supreme Court. In my least-favorite 
footnote to the 2004 campaign, 40 percent of Americans believed 
incorrectly that Saddam Hussein was connected to 9/11. But there was 
another sex breakdown: 29 percent of men and 51 percent of women 
believed it.

The information gap may be because of women's overwhelmingly busier 
lives. Single women especially have less money and more kids than single 
men. But it may also be because of the media gap. In the gendered media 
world, men are the target audience of talk radio where the subject is 
sports and politics and the style is anger. Women are a prime audience 
for ''Oprah" and reality shows where the subject is relationships and 
the style is empathy.

Even Jon Stewart's ''The Daily Show," where young people get their 
''news" hit with a pox on both houses, has barely a woman on staff or 
screen. Meanwhile ''American Idol" draws votes from some 30 million 
viewers but doesn't require them to register for the real election.

This year, I am sure Democrats will look for ways to, um, engage single 
women without ignoring wives. Even if Democrats are the preferred party 
of the unwed, we won't see them promoting an antimarriage platform.

Greenberg insists that saying ''I do" does not mean saying ''I do become 
a Republican." The marriage gap does not come from sleeping with the 
enemy or being drafted by Republican husbands. Divorced women are not 
likely to change politics when they find new partners. Those who marry 
young and stay married may be more conservative to begin with. These are 
somewhat different economic and social groups.

As for the growing cohort of young women who have delayed marriage? 
Greenberg is convinced that they will bring their more progressive views 
with them on the honeymoon.

Well, she ought to know. The 37-year-old pollster is getting married 
Saturday. The groom, she adds quickly, is a Democrat.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/03/single_and_not_voting/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060303/bfc7e1ba/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Fri Mar  3 08:03:05 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Fri,  3 Mar 2006 16:03:05 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Strange City. Thankless Job. Heartless
	Russian Winter.
Message-ID: <20060303160305.200D983D22@lax-gw03.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

INTERNATIONAL / EUROPE | March 3, 2006
Moscow Journal: Strange City. Thankless Job. Heartless Russian Winter.
By C. J. CHIVERS
Migrant workers toil at the low-paying and physically draining jobs that many Russians do not want.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/03/international/europe/03moscow.html?ex=1142053200&en=e61a2b0eeb03cf79&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060303/3a0e476f/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Fri Mar  3 08:06:16 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Fri,  3 Mar 2006 16:06:16 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: A Voting Machine Mess
Message-ID: <20060303160616.3F49083D44@lax-gw03.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

HAVA is a mess..corrupt, hackable machines being pushed on a clueless population...at least Spitzer will be Gov


OPINION | March 3, 2006
Editorial: A Voting Machine Mess

New York State has the worst record in the nation when it comes to complying with the Help America Vote Act, but negotiating a solution in a rushed atmosphere could involve some very bad compromises.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/03/opinion/03fri3.html?ex=1142053200&en=fcdc289778ccdceb&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060303/df9125bf/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Fri Mar  3 08:07:59 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Fri,  3 Mar 2006 16:07:59 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Recourse Grows Slim for Immigrants Who Fall
	Ill
Message-ID: <20060303160759.A82A49FC1D@lax-gw05.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

HEALTH | March 3, 2006
Being a Patient: Recourse Grows Slim for Immigrants Who Fall Ill
By NINA BERNSTEIN
In the last decade, more and more immigrants are delaying care or retreating to bootleg drugs and unlicensed practitioners.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/03/health/03patient.html?ex=1142053200&en=e9c0a1980bfcbde4&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060303/a0982f96/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Fri Mar  3 08:11:18 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Fri,  3 Mar 2006 16:11:18 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Archivist Urges U.S. to Reopen Classified
	Files
Message-ID: <20060303161118.4DFD29FBEE@lax-gw05.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

WASHINGTON | March 3, 2006
Archivist Urges U.S. to Reopen Classified Files
By SCOTT SHANE
The National Archives told intelligence agencies to stop removing previously declassified documents from public access.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/03/politics/03archives.html?ex=1142053200&en=13170363a25850b0&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060303/a3837d39/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Fri Mar  3 08:12:31 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: 3 Mar 2006 16:12:31 -0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] Headlines for March 3, 2006
Message-ID: <20060303161231.28722.qmail@trinity.democracynow.org>

Mike Blaxill  ( mblaxill at yahoo.com )
sent you this story from democracynow.org




+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  Headlines for March 3, 2006
|  http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/03/1510231
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+


- Bush Signs Controversial Nuke Deal on India Visit 
- Democrats Repeat Calls For Independent Katrina Investigation
- Bush Was Given Intel Discrediting Stated Reasons for Invasion
- 15 Anti-Torture Activists Arrested Outside White House
- Wife of British PM Calls Torture ?Terrorism of the State? 
- Study: Antartic Ice Sheet Shrinking Significantly
- Senate Overwhelmingly Approves Patriot Act Renewal
- Mississippi Moves Towards Near-Total Abortion Ban
- Kenyan Government Criticized for Media Crackdown 
- Chicago Police Oppose Proposal To Honor Fred Hampton 
This story continues at: 
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/03/1510231


From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Fri Mar  3 09:06:29 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (Mike Blaxill)
Date: Fri, 3 Mar 2006 09:06:29 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] Pay off your credit card and they call Homeland Security
	on your ass
Message-ID: <20060303170629.87508.qmail@web53002.mail.yahoo.com>

http://www.shns.com/shns/g_index2.cfm?action=detail&pk=RAISEALARM-02-28-06

Pay too much and you could raise the alarm

By BOB KERR
The Providence Journal
28-FEB-06

PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- Walter Soehnge is a retired
Texas schoolteacher who traveled north with his
wife, Deana, saw summer change to fall in Rhode
Island and decided this was a place to stay for a
while.

So the Soehnges live in Scituate now and Walter
sometimes has breakfast at the Gentleman Farmer
in Scituate Village, where he has passed the test
and become a regular despite an accent that is
definitely not local.

And it was there, at his usual table last week,
that he told me that he was "madder than a
panther with kerosene on his tail."

He says things like that. Texas does leave its
mark on a man.

What got him so upset might seem trivial to some
people who have learned to accept small
infringements on their freedom as just part of
the way things are in this age of terror-fed
paranoia. It's that "everything changed after
9/11" thing.

But not Walter.

"We're a product of the '60s," he said. "We
believe government should be way away from us in
that regard."

He was referring to the recent decision by him
and his wife to be responsible, to do the kind of
thing that just about anyone would say makes
good, solid financial sense.

They paid down some debt. The balance on their
JCPenney Platinum MasterCard had gotten to an
unhealthy level. So they sent in a large payment,
a check for $6,522.

And an alarm went off. A red flag went up. The
Soehnges' behavior was found questionable.

And all they did was pay down their debt. They
didn't call a suspected terrorist on their cell
phone. They didn't try to sneak a machine gun
through customs.

They just paid a hefty chunk of their credit card
balance. And they learned how frighteningly wide
the net of suspicion has been cast.

After sending in the check, they checked online
to see if their account had been duly credited.
They learned that the check had arrived, but the
amount available for credit on their account
hadn't changed.

So Deana Soehnge called the credit-card company.
Then Walter called.

"When you mess with my money, I want to know
why," he said.

They both learned the same astounding piece of
information about the little things that can set
the threat sensors to beeping and blinking.

They were told, as they moved up the managerial
ladder at the call center, that the amount they
had sent in was much larger than their normal
monthly payment. And if the increase hits a
certain percentage higher than that normal
payment, Homeland Security has to be notified.
And the money doesn't move until the threat alert
is lifted.

Walter called television stations, the American
Civil Liberties Union and me. And he went on the
Internet to see what he could learn. He learned
about changes in something called the Bank
Privacy Act.

"The more I'm on, the scarier it gets," he said.
"It's scary how easily someone in Homeland
Security can get permission to spy."

Eventually, his and his wife's money was freed
up. The Soehnges were apparently found not to be
promoting global terrorism under the guise of
paying a credit-card bill. They never did learn
how a large credit card payment can pose a
security threat.

But the experience has been a reminder that a
small piece of privacy has been surrendered.
Walter Soehnge, who says he holds solid,
middle-of-the-road American beliefs, worries
about rights being lost.

"If it can happen to me, it can happen to
others," he said.

(Bob Kerr is a columnist for The Providence
Journal. E-mail bkerr at projo.com.)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.shns.com.)

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Fri Mar  3 10:45:00 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Fri, 03 Mar 2006 10:45:00 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] George the Unready By PAUL KRUGMAN
Message-ID: <C02DCEAC.29A8C%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 3, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
George the Unready
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Iraqi insurgents, hurricanes and low-income Medicare recipients have three
things in common. Each has been at the center of a policy disaster. In each
case experts warned about the impending disaster. And in each case ? well,
let's look at what happened.

Knight Ridder's Washington bureau reports that from 2003 on, intelligence
agencies "repeatedly warned the White House" that "the insurgency in Iraq
had deep local roots, was likely to worsen and could lead to civil war." But
senior administration officials insisted that the insurgents were a mix of
dead-enders and foreign terrorists.

Intelligence analysts who refused to go along with that line were attacked
for not being team players. According to U.S. News & World Report, President
Bush's reaction to a pessimistic report from the C.I.A.'s Baghdad station
chief was to remark, "What is he, some kind of defeatist?"

Many people have now seen the video of the briefing Mr. Bush received before
Hurricane Katrina struck. Much has been made of the revelation that Mr. Bush
was dishonest when he claimed, a few days later, that nobody anticipated the
breach of the levees.

But what's really striking, given the gravity of the warnings, is the lack
of urgency Mr. Bush and his administration displayed in responding to the
storm. A horrified nation watched the scenes of misery at the Superdome and
wondered why help hadn't arrived. But as Newsweek reports, for several days
nobody was willing to tell Mr. Bush, who "equates disagreement with
disloyalty," how badly things were going. "For most of those first few
days," Newsweek says, "Bush was hearing what a good job the Feds were
doing."

Now for one you may not have heard about. The new Medicare drug program got
off to a disastrous start: "Low-income Medicare beneficiaries around the
country were often overcharged, and some were turned away from pharmacies
without getting their medications, in the first week of Medicare's new drug
benefit," The New York Times reported.

How did this happen? The same way the other disasters happened: experts who
warned of trouble ahead were told to shut up.

We can get a sense of what went on by looking at a 2005 report by the
nonpartisan Government Accountability Office on potential problems with the
drug program. Included with the report is a letter from Mark McClellan, the
Medicare administrator. Rather than taking the concerns of the G.A.O.
seriously, he tried to bully it into changing its conclusions. He demanded
that the report say that the administration had "established effective
contingency plans" ? which it hadn't ? and that it drop the assertion that
some people would encounter difficulties obtaining necessary drugs, which is
exactly what happened.

Experts within the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services must have
faced similar bullying. And unlike experts at the independent G.A.O., they
were not in a position to stand up for what they knew to be true.

In short, our country is being run by people who assume that things will
turn out the way they want. And if someone warns of problems, they shoot the
messenger.

Some commentators speak of the series of disasters now afflicting the Bush
administration ? there seems to be a new one every week ? as if it were just
a string of bad luck. But it isn't.

If good luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity, bad luck is
what happens when lack of preparation meets a challenge. And our leaders,
who think they can govern through a mix of wishful thinking and
intimidation, are never, ever prepared.

Correction

On Jan. 30 I cited an article in The American Prospect that reported that
Indian tribes who hired Jack Abramoff had reduced their contributions to
Democrats by 9 percent. Dwight Morris, who prepared the study on which the
article was based, says on The American Prospect's blog that "there is no
statistically valid way to calculate this number given the way the data were
compiled." The American Prospect was sloppy, and so was I for not checking
its methodology.

However, Mr. Morris goes on to say this is a minor point because other
calculations show "an undeniably Republican shift in giving."

Pre-Abramoff, the tribes gave slightly more money to Democrats than to
Republicans; post-Abramoff, they gave 70 percent to Republicans, versus only
30 percent to Democrats. In other words, there's nothing bipartisan about
the Abramoff scandal.

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From michael at michaelbutler.com  Fri Mar  3 10:50:28 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Fri, 03 Mar 2006 10:50:28 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] The Big Question By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Message-ID: <C02DCFF4.29A8F%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 3, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
The Big Question
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Since the start of the Iraq war, it's been clear that "victory" rested on
the answer to one Big Question: Was Iraq the way Iraq was because Saddam was
the way Saddam was, or was Saddam the way Saddam was because Iraq was the
way Iraq was ? a country congenitally divided among Shiites, Sunnis and
Kurds that can be held together only by an iron fist.

Unfortunately, to answer this big question ? even Iraqis didn't know ? the
U.S. had to provide a minimum degree of security for all Iraqis, so people
could feel relaxed enough to think beyond their most narrow tribal or
religious identities. We didn't do that, because of President Bush's
decision to approach the Iraq invasion with the Rumsfeld Doctrine, which
calls for just enough troops to fail, rather than the proven Powell
Doctrine, which calls for overwhelming force to win.

What happened in the absence of an overwhelming U.S. force was the looting
of government buildings and ammo dumps, open borders for infiltrators, and
then widespread insecurity, which naturally prompted Iraqis to fall back on
tribal loyalties and militias, rather than trusting the Iraqi Army or the
police. People are very good at figuring out who will protect them in a
crisis, and too many Iraqis opted for local militias.

Yes, we are now better at training an Iraqi Army and have held national
elections. But the failure to provide security after the invasion means we
are trying to build these national institutions in competition with the
insurgents, Qaeda terrorists, Shiite death squads and sectarian Iraqi
militias that sprouted in the security vacuum.

One thing that covering the Lebanese civil war taught me was this: once
sectarian militias take root, they develop their own interests and are very
hard to uproot. "Militias are the infrastructure of civil war, and the basis
of warlordism," the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, told The
Washington Post.

This did not have to be. The Bush team repeatedly declared that it had
enough troops in Iraq and that no one on the ground was asking for more.
Totally untrue. As Paul Bremer, who led the U.S. civilian administration in
Iraq, reveals in his new book, "My Year in Iraq," he repeatedly asked for
more troops, but was ignored.

Mr. Bremer confesses in his book: "Coalition forces were spread too thin on
the ground. During my morning intelligence briefings, I would sometimes
picture an understrength fire crew racing from one blaze to another." He
writes that he told Condoleezza Rice in 2003, "The coalition's got about
half the number of soldiers we need here, and we run a real risk of having
this thing go south on us."

Mr. Bremer describes this in 2004: "On May 18, I gave Rice a heads-up that I
intended to send Secretary Rumsfeld a very private message suggesting that
the coalition needed more troops. ... That afternoon I sent my message. ...
I noted that the deterioration of the security situation since April had
made it clear, to me at least, that we were trying to cover too many fronts
with too few resources." But, Mr. Bremer writes of Mr. Rumsfeld, "I did not
hear back from him."

Because the U.S. never deployed enough troops, America alone cannot
establish order in Iraq today. We don't have a way to do that. And Iraq's
Army, no matter how well trained, will never have enough will ? without a
broad political consensus. So we're down to the last hope, and it's a mighty
thin reed. The only people who can produce a decent outcome now are Iraq's
new leaders ? by coming together, burying their hatchets, forging a real
national unity government and getting their followers to follow.

This is the season of decision. We have an Iraqi government elected on the
basis of an Iraqi-written constitution. Either the elected Iraqi leaders
will heroically come together and forge a national unity government ? and
save Iraq ? or they will divide Iraq. Our job was to help them decide in a
reasonably secure environment, not in a shooting gallery. We failed in that
task, but they will have to decide nevertheless.

It is Iraqis who will now tell Americans whether they should stay or go. A
majority of Americans, in a gut way, always understood the value of trying
to produce a democratizing government in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world.
That is why there has been no big antiwar movement. Americans should, and
will, stick with Iraq if they sense that Iraqis are on a pathway to building
a decent, stable government. But Americans will not, and should not,
baby-sit an Iraqi civil war. The minute they sense that's what's happening,
you will see the bottom fall out of U.S. public support for this war.

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From michael at intrafi.com  Fri Mar  3 11:11:22 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Fri, 03 Mar 2006 19:11:22 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] BBC E-mail: Guantanamo man tells of 'torture'
Message-ID: <20060303_191122_044765.michael@intrafi.com>

Michael Butler saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you
should see it.



** Guantanamo man tells of 'torture' **
A Kuwaiti held at Guantanamo since 2002 criticises the US regime at the military camp, in a rare BBC interview.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/americas/4769604.stm >


** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all
in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/dailyemail/ >


** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have?been verified.

If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm


From michael at intrafi.com  Fri Mar  3 11:12:38 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Fri, 03 Mar 2006 19:12:38 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] BBC E-mail: Moscow urges Hamas to transform
Message-ID: <20060303_191238_081561.michael@intrafi.com>

Michael Butler saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you
should see it.



** Moscow urges Hamas to transform **
Russia calls on Hamas to transform itself into a political organisation, in landmark talks in Moscow.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/4769112.stm >


** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all
in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/dailyemail/ >


** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have?been verified.

If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm


From michael at intrafi.com  Fri Mar  3 11:18:59 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Fri, 3 Mar 2006 11:18:59 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] FT.com / Comment & analysis / Comment - Why can America
	not mind its own businesses?
Message-ID: <19029011.1141413539329.JavaMail.tomcat@localhost>



*Please note, the sender's email address has not been verified.



You have received the following link from michael at intrafi.com

 
********************
 
If you are having trouble with any of the links in this message, or if the URL's are not appearing as links, please follow the instructions at the bottom of this email.
 
Title: FT.com / Comment & analysis / Comment - Why can America not mind its own businesses?
 
  
Copy and paste the following into your Web browser to access the sent link:
http://www.emailthis.clickability.com/et/emailThis?clickMap=viewThis&etMailToID=23297572&pt=Y
 

Copy and paste the following into your Web browser to SAVE THIS link:
http://www.savethis.clickability.com/st/saveThisPopupApp?clickMap=saveFromET&partnerID=1744&etMailToID=23297572&pt=Y

 
Copy and paste the following into your Web browser to forward this link:
http://www.emailthis.clickability.com/et/emailThis?clickMap=forward&etMailToID=23297572&partnerID=1744&pt=Y

  
 
********************


Email pages from any Web site you visit - add the EMAIL THIS button to your browser, copy and paste the following into your Web browser:
http://www.emailthis.clickability.com/et/emailThis?clickMap=browserButtons&pt=Y"


*********************



Instructions:
-----------------------------------------
If your e-mail program doesn't recognize Web addresses:
1. With your mouse, highlight the Web Address above. Be sure to highlight the entire Web address, even if it spans more than one line in your email. 
2. Select Copy from the Edit menu at the top of your screen. 
3. Launch your Web browser.
4. Paste the address into your Web browser by selecting Paste from the Edit menu.
5. Click Go or press Enter or Return on your keyboard. 
 
********************
 
 
 
 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060303/f8bab0c6/attachment.htm 

From michael at intrafi.com  Fri Mar  3 11:13:29 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (Michael)
Date: Fri, 3 Mar 2006 14:13:29 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Article from The Nation
Message-ID: <200603031913.k23JDTSb020460@thor.thenation.com>

If you like this article, please consider subscribing to The Nation at special discounted rates. You can order online https://ssl.thenation.com or call our toll-free number at 1-800-333-8536.

 



http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion?pid=65143
=====================================
03/02/2006 @ 01:20am

Guess Who Was Advising the Emirates?
by The Nation

   Guess who just bobbed to the surface smack dab in the middle of the
   Dubai ports deal? Why, none other than Slick Willie. That?s right, we
   now learn that Big Bill Clinton was on the phone a couple of weeks
   ago offering the monarchs of Dubai some free advice on how to slip
   their ports management deal by a rather skeptical, if not
   dumbfounded, American public.

   Clinton was offering his sage counsel in private at the time that his
   wife, in public, was denouncing the deal. American politics hasn?t
   seen such a cynical duo since the advent of the Carville-Matalin
   spectacle.

   The former president?s paid flacks are now trying give this all an
   innocuous spin: ?President Clinton is the former president of the US
   and as such receives many calls from world leaders and leading
   figures every week,? said his official spokesman. And, we?re further
   told, Clinton was a good Boy Scout and earnestly advised the Emirs to
   submit to any and all reviews that might be asked of them. (There?s
   no report he was biting his lip or crossing his fingers behind his
   back as he chatted up our royal buddies).

   What Clinton didn?t say, obviously, is that the whole thing stinks
   and that the Emirates should simply withdraw the deal.

   How will any of this play out politically? Guess it depends on what
   your definition of a schmo is.



From grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net  Thu Mar  2 08:26:05 2006
From: grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net (Golsorkhi)
Date: Thu, 02 Mar 2006 11:26:05 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] FW: 20 Terrorist training camps in Iran Uncovered
In-Reply-To: <CBE5680D-52B5-497C-8198-F761871B4F03@thesamiis.com>
Message-ID: <E1FFGGE-0005zc-SW@smtpauth04.mail.atl.earthlink.net>


------ Forwarded Message
From: Samii Shahla <shahla at thesamiis.com>
Date: Wed, 1 Mar 2006 17:30:48 -0500
Subject: 20 Terrorist training camps in Iran Uncovered

Global Politician
3/01/06

20 Terrorist training camps in Iran Uncovered

By Farhad Razi

A list of 20 terrorist camps and centers run by Iran?s Islamic Revolutionary
Guards Corps (IRGC) has recently been obtained from a former IRGC officer.
The names and details of the training centers were provided by a defector
from the IRGC, who has recently left Iran and now lives in hiding in a
neighbouring country. We agreed to keep his identity secret for obvious
security reasons. The former IRGC officer said the camps and the training
centers were under the control of the IRGC?s elite Qods Force, the
extra-territorial arm of the Revolutionary Guards.

?The Qods Force has an extensive network that uses the facilities of Iranian
embassies or cultural and economic missions or a number of religious
institutions such as the Islamic Communications and Culture Organisation to
recruit radical Islamists in Muslim countries or among the Muslims living in
the West. After going through preliminary training and security checks in
those countries, the recruits are then sent to Iran via third countries and
end up in one of the Qods Force training camps?, the officer said.

The Imam Ali Garrison has been a long-time training ground for foreign
terrorist operatives. Presently, some 50 Islamists from neighbouring Arab
countries are receiving training there in five groups of 10, the officer
said.

?Iraq followed by the Palestinian territories have become the focal point of
the Qods Force?s activities. Many of the foreign recruits in these camps now
come from these two areas, but others come from a wide range of countries,
including the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, North Africa and south-east
Asia?, he said. ?In most camps, the Sunnis outnumber the Shiites?.

?The scale and breadth of Qods Force operations in Iraq are far beyond what
we did even during the war with Saddam?, the officer said, referring to the
IRGC?s extensive activities in Iraq during the eight-year Iran-Iraq war in
the 1980s. ?Vast areas of Iraq are under the virtual control of the Qods
Force through its Iraqi surrogates. It uses a vast array of charities,
companies and other fronts to conduct its activities across Iraq?.

?We would send our officers into Iraq to operate for months under the cover
of a construction company?, he said. ?Kawthar Company operated in Najaf last
year to carry out construction work in the area around Imam Ali Shrine, but
it was in fact a front company for the Qods Force. Qods officers, disguised
as company employees, established contacts with Iraqi operatives and
organised underground cells in southern Iraq?.

The officer said Qods Force officers also used the Iranian Red Crescent and
the state-run television and radio corporation as fronts for their
operations in Iraq.

A special branch inside Iran?s Foreign Ministry is responsible for assisting
the Qods Force in bringing in foreign recruits. The recruits first travel to
third countries where they are given new passports by Iranian agents to
facilitate their entry into Iran. Upon finishing their training course, the
new agents leave Iran for third countries from where they use their genuine
passports to return to their countries of origin or where missions are
planned. 

The list of the bases used for training terrorists identified are as
follows:

1) Imam Ali Training Garrison, Tajrish Square, Tehran,
2) Bahonar Garrison, Chalous Street, close to the dam of Karaj,
3) Qom?s Ali-Abad Garrison, Tehran-Qom highway,
4) Mostafa Khomeini Garrison, Eshrat-Abad district, Tehran,
5) Crate Camp Garrison, 40 kilometres from the Ahwaz-Mahshar highway,
6) Fateh Qani-Hosseini Garrison, between Tehran and Qom
7) Qayour Asli Garrison, 30 kilometres from Ahwaz-Khorramshahr highway,
8) Abouzar Garrison, Qaleh-Shahin district, Ahwaz, Khuzestan province
9) Hezbollah Garrison, Varamin, east of Tehran
10) Eezeh Training Garrison
11) Amir-ol-Momenin Garrison, Ban-Roushan, Ilam province
12) Kothar Training Garrison, Dezful Street, Shoushtar, Khuzestan province
13) Imam Sadeq Garrison, Qom
14) Lavizan Training Center, north-east Tehran
15) Abyek Training Center, west of Tehran
16) Dervish Training Center, 18 kilometres from the Ahwaz-Mahshar highway,
17) Qazanchi Training Center, Ravansar-Kermanshah-Kamyaran tri-junction,
18) Beit-ol-Moqaddas University, Qom
19) Navab Safavi School, Ahwaz
20) Nahavand Training Center, 45 kilometres from Nahavand, western Iran

Farhad Razi is a specialist on Islamic radicalism and terrorism. He also
writes for Iran Focus.

URL:?http://globalpolitician.com/articledes.asp?ID=1639&cid=2&sid=4


------ End of Forwarded Message

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060302/412a8fdb/attachment.htm 

From grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net  Fri Mar  3 13:12:42 2006
From: grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net (Golsorkhi)
Date: Fri, 03 Mar 2006 16:12:42 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] FW: UPI - Reza Pahlavi of Iran
In-Reply-To: <002e01c63ee6$62e7b3b0$6401a8c0@DF2ZTG61>
Message-ID: <E1FFHcj-000707-7l@smtpauth04.mail.atl.earthlink.net>

    
------ Forwarded Message
From: "Farhad Sepahbody" <sepa at sedona.net>
Date: Fri, 3 Mar 2006 10:17:44 -0700
To: "Golsorkhi" <grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net>
Subject: UPI - Reza Pahlavi of Iran

GRG:

While not openly supporting any one particular opposition group, Reza
Pahlavi of Iran, the son of the late and the last shah to sit on the Peacock
Throne, is hoping to revive the relevancy of Iran's imperial family. He
personally would like to become more involved in Iranian politics, but he
stresses, the choice must be that of the people of Iran.
The message is ready to be sent with the following file or link attachments:
Shortcut to: 
http://www.upi.com/InternationalIntelligence/view.php?StoryID=20060301-10184
9-3882r

Note: To protect against computer viruses, e-mail programs may prevent
sending or receiving certain types of file attachments.  Check your e-mail
security settings to determine how attachments are handled.

------ End of Forwarded Message

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060303/7c30f858/attachment.htm 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/octet-stream
Size: 136 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060303/7c30f858/attachment.obj 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Fri Mar  3 15:40:01 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Fri, 3 Mar 2006 18:40:01 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] RIM settles
Message-ID: <000801c63f1b$cdb69640$803fe440@Harold>

RIM settles even though it "Won" all patent suits. The judge in question refused to acknowledge the US Patent Court ???? So where is the Justice??

http://www.cbc.ca/story/business/national/2006/03/03/rim1-060303.html

Just shows you how some US judges are concerning certain foreign companies operating in America, This is not the first time, nor the last.

If RIM had donated  $1,000,000 to Bush's Library like UAE did (Ports issue) then it would be different, but RIM took the high road and did not buy politicians and judges like NTP has and in doing so lost.

Legal vultures like NTP give America a bad name for business.

America is for sale and America at the end of the day will suffer these actions when 75 + % of its GNP which it is nearing  is controlled buy foreign interests as it's debt is.

RIM has decided to pay the piper/blackmailer and get on with business instead of wasting more time in a US court that is not fair!

RIM is fortunate that it can pay this extortion, but many many companies can not and are forced out of business.

Later in disgust, H

I apologise for my diatribe, but this action/conduct disturbs me.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060303/9a31bd8f/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Fri Mar  3 16:00:03 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (Ian)
Date: Fri, 3 Mar 2006 19:00:03 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: A Voting Machine Mess
References: <20060303160616.3F49083D44@lax-gw03.mroute.net>
Message-ID: <011301c63f1e$97db2c90$99ca6c42@iancn2ccrvzt0j>

E-Mail ThisAs I noted yesterday, the truth behind this story is that NYS is being forced to comply with federal rules that would require touch-screen voting machines - the same ones that may well have been responsible for the miscount in Ohio during the 2004 presidential elections, and which have been found to be far less secure than their manufacturers state - setting aside, of course, that the two largest manufacturers of the machines are owned by CEOs who have over $100,000 to the Bush campaign in each of the last two elections.
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: mblaxill at yahoo.com 
  To: mb-civic at islandlists.com 
  Sent: Friday, March 03, 2006 11:06 AM
  Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: A Voting Machine Mess


            
                 
                
             
              This page was sent to you by:  mblaxill at yahoo.com 
              Message from sender:
              HAVA is a mess..corrupt, hackable machines being pushed on a clueless population...at least Spitzer will be Gov 

              OPINION   | March 3, 2006 
              Editorial:  A Voting Machine Mess 
              New York State has the worst record in the nation when it comes to complying with the Help America Vote Act, but negotiating a solution in a rushed atmosphere could involve some very bad compromises. 

             
             
                 
                     
                    1. A Ray of Hope for Diabetics 
                    2. Stretched to Limit, Women Stall March to Work 
                    3. David Pogue: Apple Laptop Has Looks and Brains 
                    4. Critic's Notebook: Brokeback Spoofs: Tough Guys Unmasked 
                    5.  Op-Ed Columnist: Harvard-Bound? Chin Up 

                    ?  Go to Complete List 
                     
                   
             
             
                
              Copyright 2006  The New York Times Company | Privacy Policy    
                 
       



------------------------------------------------------------------------------


  _______________________________________________
  Mb-civic mailing list
  Mb-civic at islandlists.com
  http://www.islandlists.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mb-civic
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060303/d0934f41/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Fri Mar  3 16:05:51 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Sat,  4 Mar 2006 00:05:51 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Report Warns Malnutrition Begins in Cradle
Message-ID: <20060304000551.031C53AE4E4@lax-gw06.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

HEALTH | March 3, 2006
Report Warns Malnutrition Begins in Cradle
By CELIA W. DUGGER
A World Bank report says the problem of malnutrition for 100 million children must be addressed before the age 2.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/03/health/03hunger.html?ex=1142053200&en=8d598e2874a0ac8a&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060304/89d95ff1/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Fri Mar  3 16:05:50 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Sat,  4 Mar 2006 00:05:50 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Muslim-Led Protesters Rage Against Bush on
	His India Visit
Message-ID: <20060304000550.2A4063AE4A7@lax-gw06.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

Remember 2/15/03 when over 30,000,000 people protested in over 100 cities in 20 coutries to stop the planned invasion of Iraq? If you remember, those protests were not "anti-American," but more specifically anti-Bush (and anti-Blair). Well, it looks like 2/15/03 all over again: "anti-American" protests that are really anti-Bush. This guy has to be the worst thing that's happened to America since Joe McCarthy...(unless you can think of someone worse...)


INTERNATIONAL / ASIA PACIFIC | March 3, 2006
Muslim-Led Protesters Rage Against Bush on His India Visit
By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS and HARI KUMAR
For the second day in a row, raucous protests against President Bush's visit erupted across India.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/03/international/asia/03protests.html?ex=1142053200&en=1d86ff0b35aae566&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060304/3fcc6db1/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Fri Mar  3 16:08:55 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Sat,  4 Mar 2006 00:08:55 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Loss of Antarctic Ice Increases
Message-ID: <20060304000855.7381313B78F@lax-gw04.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

SCIENCE | March 3, 2006
Loss of Antarctic Ice Increases
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Two satellite surveys show that Antarctica is losing ice faster than it can be replenished, and thus is contributing to rising sea levels.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/03/science/03melt.html?ex=1142053200&en=183e4a950a740eaf&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060304/a128da35/attachment-0001.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Fri Mar  3 16:08:55 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Sat,  4 Mar 2006 00:08:55 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Six Animal Rights Advocates Are Convicted
	of Terrorism
Message-ID: <20060304000855.EAF3413B746@lax-gw04.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

I have noticed that real discussion on Civic has all but ceased. In that regard, I would really like to hear from people on this particular issue. Specifically, is this a free speech issue? Or does it touch on "incitement?" What should (or shouldn't) be done re animal rights groups that border (if not cross the line) into a form of eco-terrorism?


NEW YORK REGION | March 3, 2006
Six Animal Rights Advocates Are Convicted of Terrorism
By DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI
The New Jersey case was the first test of the Animal Enterprise Terror Act, enacted in 1992 to curb the most aggressive tactics used by activists.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/03/nyregion/03animals.html?ex=1142053200&en=0ed2cde0fa6d568d&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060304/5d25e5be/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Fri Mar  3 16:11:20 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Sat,  4 Mar 2006 00:11:20 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Suit Accuses a Police Chief of Blocking CPR
Message-ID: <20060304001120.CE34123700E@lax-gw01.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

This is just flat-out outrageous! This police chief should be summarily dismissed - for causing a man's unnecessary death, and for being a blatant homophobe!


NATIONAL | March 3, 2006
Suit Accuses a Police Chief of Blocking CPR
By ADAM LIPTAK
The suit claims a West Virginia police chief told a rescuer to stop trying to save the life of a man the chief said was H.I.V. positive.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/03/national/03cpr.html?ex=1142053200&en=173de28fe040235c&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060304/7e3e19ea/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Fri Mar  3 16:11:21 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Sat,  4 Mar 2006 00:11:21 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Senate Panel Rejects Ethics Office Plan
Message-ID: <20060304001121.6301A237193@lax-gw01.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

Surprise, surprise...and they had this vote during the same session in which they extended the Patriot Act. Neat. NOT!


WASHINGTON | March 3, 2006
Senate Panel Rejects Ethics Office Plan
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
The defeat of a proposal for an independent office to investigate ethics abuses was the second time this week senators backed away from expansive lobbying law changes.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/03/politics/03lobby.html?ex=1142053200&en=f2c88d928e7bec17&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060304/1c9ae50e/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Fri Mar  3 16:12:20 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Sat,  4 Mar 2006 00:12:20 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: The Gospel vs. H.R. 4437
Message-ID: <20060304001220.53A7424AED7@lax-gw02.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

Bravo!


OPINION | March 3, 2006
Editorial: The Gospel vs. H.R. 4437

Cardinal Roger Mahony's declaration of solidarity with illegal immigrants, in opposition to a bill that was recently passed by the House, is a startling call to civil disobedience, as courageous as it is timely.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/03/opinion/03fri1.html?ex=1142053200&en=afa25fc24a9e2c59&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060304/b9199eb6/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Fri Mar  3 16:12:19 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Sat,  4 Mar 2006 00:12:19 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Wal-Mart Extending Dominance of the Grocery
	Business
Message-ID: <20060304001219.CC0C324AE98@lax-gw02.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

Holy Food Control, Batman!


BUSINESS | March 3, 2006
Wal-Mart Extending Dominance of the Grocery Business 
By MELANIE WARNER
As Wal-Mart hunts for ways to take costs out of its grocery business, the company has become more involved in creating the products it sells.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/03/business/03walmart.html?ex=1142053200&en=4977fba7687dfe2e&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060304/7764ca25/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Fri Mar  3 16:20:03 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Sat,  4 Mar 2006 00:20:03 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Support the Troops? Here Are Ways (6
	Letters)
Message-ID: <20060304002003.4EB78249BCF@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

What we're saying...Love that fourth letter...


OPINION | March 3, 2006
Support the Troops? Here Are Ways (6 Letters)

To the Editor:.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/03/opinion/l03kristof.html?ex=1142053200&en=6a2721e6f519d4dc&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060304/e0124118/attachment-0001.htm 

From grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net  Fri Mar  3 12:24:06 2006
From: grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net (Golsorkhi)
Date: Fri, 03 Mar 2006 15:24:06 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] FW: Check out this clip from IFILM.com!
In-Reply-To: <C02DD956.39DE%maani@bluestone-entertainment.com>
Message-ID: <E1FFMB4-00062U-F7@smtpauth04.mail.atl.earthlink.net>

Michael,  Please see this.  One courageous lady in a sea of cowards.  Reza
------ Forwarded Message
From: Maani <maani at bluestone-entertainment.com>
Date: Fri, 03 Mar 2006 11:30:30 -0800
To: Golsorkhi <grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net>, Elahe Golsorkhi
<egolsorkhi at yahoo.com>, Leila Ghaffari <leils1 at mac.com>, Yasmin Zafar
<yasminz at earthlink.net>, Mehrnaz Ghaffari <mehrnazghaffari at hotmail.com>,
Amir Zafar <azafar at earthlink.net>
Subject: FW: Check out this clip from IFILM.com!

I LOVE THIS WOMAN!!!!!!!!!!!!
------ Forwarded Message
From: <maani at bluestone-entertainment.com>
Date: Fri, 3 Mar 2006 11:26:59 -0800 (PST)
To: <maani at bluestone-entertainment.com>
Subject: Check out this clip from IFILM.com!

Message from maani at bluestone-entertainment.comI saw this clip at IFILM.com
and thought you'd be into it. Click on the link to IFILM.com below:

Wafa Sultan Clashes with Muslim Cleric Video/Main Info
http://www.ifilm.com/ifilmdetail/2703896



IFILM.com <http://www.ifilm.com>
Because You Like To Watch


"Email to a Friend" is a service provided by IFILM.com to its users.
  

------ End of Forwarded Message


------ End of Forwarded Message

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060303/2fbeecd7/attachment.htm 

From michael at intrafi.com  Fri Mar  3 18:09:01 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Fri,  3 Mar 2006 18:09:01 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] Alternet: Meet the Nativists
Message-ID: <20060304020901.9A76FB80AA@alternet.org>


This story has been forwarded to you from
http://www.alternet.org by michael at intrafi.com



-------------------------------------
Meet the Nativists
http://www.alternet.org/story/32644

Introducing Rep. Tommy Tancredo, Glenn Spencer and Jim Gilchrist -- the political leaders of a growing xenophobic movement in the United States.
-------------------------------------


From michael at intrafi.com  Fri Mar  3 18:05:19 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (Michael)
Date: Fri, 3 Mar 2006 21:05:19 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Article from Tom Dispatch
Message-ID: <200603040205.k2425JRh013241@thor.thenation.com>

An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060303/f457c30a/attachment.htm 

From michael at intrafi.com  Fri Mar  3 18:51:04 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Fri,  3 Mar 2006 18:51:04 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] Alternet: Cronkite vs. O'Reilly: May the Most Trusted
	Man Win
Message-ID: <20060304025104.6965BB81BC@alternet.org>


This story has been forwarded to you from
http://www.alternet.org by michael at intrafi.com



-------------------------------------
Cronkite vs. O'Reilly: May the Most Trusted Man Win
http://www.alternet.org/story/33009

When Walter Cronkite spoke out against current drug war policies, Bill O'Reilly -- predictably enough -- launched an attack.
-------------------------------------


From michael at intrafi.com  Fri Mar  3 18:52:22 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Fri,  3 Mar 2006 18:52:22 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] Alternet: The Church's One-Size-Fits-All Sexuality
Message-ID: <20060304025222.AB301B81BC@alternet.org>


This story has been forwarded to you from
http://www.alternet.org by michael at intrafi.com



-------------------------------------
The Church's One-Size-Fits-All Sexuality
http://www.alternet.org/story/31925

As we know, Christ came down to earth to instruct us in the ways in which we must limit our sexual expression. His core message was: Stop touching yourself! 
-------------------------------------


From michael at intrafi.com  Fri Mar  3 18:53:00 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Fri,  3 Mar 2006 18:53:00 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] Alternet: The Ohio Vote Debacle
Message-ID: <20060304025300.2F66EB81BC@alternet.org>


This story has been forwarded to you from
http://www.alternet.org by michael at intrafi.com



-------------------------------------
The Ohio Vote Debacle
http://www.alternet.org/story/33006

Did 308,000 canceled Ohio voter registrations put Bush back in the White House? 
-------------------------------------


From michael at intrafi.com  Fri Mar  3 19:53:25 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael butler)
Date: Fri, 3 Mar 2006 22:53:25 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] TruthDig: Gore Vidal on
Message-ID: <44090f358c04b@intrafi.com>

Hi,

 I read this on Truthdig and thought you would find it interesting.

 =-=-=-=-=-=-=
Gore Vidal on "Capote," "Brokeback Mountain" and why "Match Point" is the 
Best Picture of the Year 

In a Truthdig interview, America?s most celebrated man of letters weighs in 
on this year?s Best Picture nominations and recalls his own encounters with 
Truman Capote. (Or, listen to an expanded podcast version.) 

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060303_gore_vidal_sex_oscars/

 Copyright ? 2006 Truthdig, L.L.C. All rights reserved.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=
This is a one-time mailing from
TruthDig.com
on behalf of the sender.
Please report any misuse to editor-at-truthdig.com

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060303/f4152bb5/attachment.htm 

From michael at intrafi.com  Fri Mar  3 19:59:23 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael butler)
Date: Fri, 3 Mar 2006 22:59:23 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] TruthDig: Down to the Wire
Message-ID: <4409109b3b732@intrafi.com>

Hi,

 I read this on Truthdig and thought you would find it interesting.

 =-=-=-=-=-=-=
Down to the Wire

OK, the votes are in and now we all, or those of us who care, will have to 
wait till March 5 to find out whether the high water mark of the Year of the 
Queer in Hollywood will have been the nominations sweep by ?Brokeback 
Mountain,? Hoffman, Huffman, etc.  In other words, did the Academy voters 
actually mark their ballots for this year?s apparent favorites?  Will the 
foxy stalwarts of cable talk shows be proved wrong again? 

When the Brokeback wave first broke over the industry the predictable 
consensus of the bloviators was that the ?gay cowboy? film would bomb once 
it ventured outside the coastal enclaves into the heartland, but that it 
would clean up at that March madness of the lavender left known as the 
Oscars.   

http://www.truthdig.com/dig/blogitem/20060227_brokeback_oscars_downtothewir
e/ 

 Copyright ? 2006 Truthdig, L.L.C. All rights reserved.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=
This is a one-time mailing from
TruthDig.com
on behalf of the sender.
Please report any misuse to editor-at-truthdig.com

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060303/79ca406d/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sat Mar  4 05:42:50 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sat, 04 Mar 2006 08:42:50 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] MUST READ: Transcript of 'Brilliant Speech by Woman on
 Arab TV' (Thanks, Michael and Golshori!)
Message-ID: <4409995A.2@comcast.net>

Arab-American Psychologist Wafa Sultan: There Is No Clash of 
Civilizations but a Clash between the Mentality of the Middle Ages and 
That of the 21st Century

Following are excerpts from an interview with Arab-American psychologist 
Wafa Sultan. The interview was aired on Al-Jazeera TV on February 21, 2006
.

Wafa Sultan: The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash 
of religions, or a clash of civilizations. It is a clash between two 
opposites, between two eras. It is a clash between a mentality that 
belongs to the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the 
21st century. It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, 
between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and 
rationality. It is a clash between freedom and oppression, between 
democracy and dictatorship. It is a clash between human rights, on the 
one hand, and the violation of these rights, on other hand. It is a 
clash between those who treat women like beasts, and those who treat 
them like human beings. What we see today is not a clash of 
civilizations. Civilizations do not clash, but compete.

[...]

Host: I understand from your words that what is happening today is a 
clash between the culture of the West, and the backwardness and 
ignorance of the Muslims?

Wafa Sultan: Yes, that is what I mean.

[...]

Host: Who came up with the concept of a clash of civilizations? Was it 
not Samuel Huntington? It was not Bin Laden. I would like to discuss 
this issue, if you don't mind...

Wafa Sultan: The Muslims are the ones who began using this expression. 
The Muslims are the ones who began the clash of civilizations. The 
Prophet of Islam said: "I was ordered to fight the people until they 
believe in Allah and His Messenger." When the Muslims divided the people 
into Muslims and non-Muslims, and called to fight the others until they 
believe in what they themselves believe, they started this clash, and 
began this war. In order to start this war, they must reexamine their 
Islamic books and curricula, which are full of calls for takfir and 
fighting the infidels.

My colleague has said that he never offends other people's beliefs. What 
civilization on the face of this earth allows him to call other people 
by names that they did not choose for themselves? Once, he calls them 
Ahl Al-Dhimma, another time he calls them the "People of the Book," and 
yet another time he compares them to apes and pigs, or he calls the 
Christians "those who incur Allah's wrath." Who told you that they are 
"People of the Book"? They are not the People of the Book, they are 
people of many books. All the useful scientific books that you have 
today are theirs, the fruit of their free and creative thinking. What 
gives you the right to call them "those who incur Allah's wrath," or 
"those who have gone astray," and then come here and say that your 
religion commands you to refrain from offending the beliefs of others?

I am not a Christian, a Muslim, or a Jew. I am a secular human being. I 
do not believe in the supernatural, but I respect others' right to 
believe in it.

Dr. Ibrahim Al-Khouli: Are you a heretic?

Wafa Sultan: You can say whatever you like. I am a secular human being 
who does not believe in the supernatural...

Dr. Ibrahim Al-Khouli: If you are a heretic, there is no point in 
rebuking you, since you have blasphemed against Islam, the Prophet, and 
the Koran...

Wafa Sultan: These are personal matters that do not concern you.

[...]

Wafa Sultan: Brother, you can believe in stones, as long as you don't 
throw them at me. You are free to worship whoever you want, but other 
people's beliefs are not your concern, whether they believe that the 
Messiah is God, son of Mary, or that Satan is God, son of Mary. Let 
people have their beliefs.

[...]

Wafa Sultan: The Jews have come from the tragedy (of the Holocaust), and 
forced the world to respect them, with their knowledge, not with their 
terror, with their work, not their crying and yelling. Humanity owes 
most of the discoveries and science of the 19th and 20th centuries to 
Jewish scientists. 15 million people, scattered throughout the world, 
united and won their rights through work and knowledge. We have not seen 
a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a 
single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen a single Jew protest by 
killing people. The Muslims have turned three Buddha statues into 
rubble. We have not seen a single Buddhist burn down a Mosque, kill a 
Muslim, or burn down an embassy. Only the Muslims defend their beliefs 
by burning down churches, killing people, and destroying embassies. This 
path will not yield any results. The Muslims must ask themselves what 
they can do for humankind, before they demand that humankind respect them.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060304/eeb782a0/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sat Mar  4 05:44:04 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sat, 04 Mar 2006 08:44:04 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Former GOP Lawmaker Gets 8 Years - Washington Post
Message-ID: <440999A4.4010909@comcast.net>

Former GOP Lawmaker Gets 8 Years
Cunningham Also Must Pay Back Millions for Bribery and Tax Offenses

By Sonya Geis and Charles R. Babcock
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, March 4, 2006; A01

SAN DIEGO, March 3 -- Former congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham, a 
decorated fighter pilot in Vietnam who admitted taking $2.4 million in 
bribes from two defense contractors, was sentenced Friday to eight years 
and four months in federal prison for selling his office.

U.S. District Judge Larry A. Burns imposed the sentence after 
prosecutors argued for the maximum 10 years and defense attorneys 
suggested that six years was enough because Cunningham, 64, is suffering 
from various physical ailments, as well as depression. The California 
Republican resigned from Congress after pleading guilty to tax evasion 
and conspiracy to commit bribery in November.

Appearing much thinner than he did last fall, Cunningham choked up as he 
addressed the judge. "No man has ever been more sorry," he said. "I made 
a very wrong turn. I rationalized decisions I knew were wrong. I did 
that, sir."

Burns said the amount of money Cunningham took "emasculates" previous 
bribery crimes. Noting that he, too, raised a family on a government 
salary, the judge said he understood wanting "the good things in life." 
But Burns added: "You weren't wet. You weren't cold. You weren't hungry, 
and yet you did these things."

In a related development, the CIA's inspector general is looking into 
whether Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, the agency's executive director and its 
third-ranking official, arranged for any contracts to be given to 
companies associated with Brent Wilkes, one of the contractors 
identified as having made payments to Cunningham. Foggo, a senior 
intelligence officer handling complex clandestine contracts, is an old 
friend of Wilkes from their high school and college days. The 
investigation was first reported by Newsweek.

"It is standard practice . . . to look into assertions that mention 
agency officers. That should in no way be seen as lending credibility to 
any allegation," the CIA said in a statement. "Mr. Foggo has overseen 
many contracts in his decades of public service. He reaffirms that they 
were properly awarded and administered."

In the San Diego courtroom, Cunningham wiped away tears when his 
attorney, K. Lee Blalack II of Washington, referred to the former 
congressman's wartime service, which included shooting down five enemy 
planes over Vietnam and being shot down himself. "There are men in this 
courtroom who are walking around and breathing because Duke Cunningham 
put his life at risk," Blalack said.

Blalack said Cunningham already had suffered greatly. "This man has been 
humiliated beyond belief by his own hand. He is estranged from those he 
loves most and cares most about," Blalack said. "All his worldly 
possessions are gone. He will carry a crushing tax debt until the day he 
dies. He will go to jail until he's 70 years old."

But prosecutor Jason A. Forge said Cunningham should not get a break, 
pointing out that he spent months denying the allegations after they 
appeared last June.

"As these crimes are unprecedented, so, too, should be his punishment," 
prosecutor Philip Halpern told the judge. He said that Cunningham "was 
squandering precious tax dollars for, among other things, systems the 
military didn't ask for, didn't need and frequently didn't use."

The judge recommended the prison term be served in a federal facility 
near Bakersfield, Calif. In addition, Burns ordered that Cunningham pay 
$1.8 million in back taxes and penalties plus $1.85 million in 
restitution based on the bribes he received.

Cunningham's greed was unparalleled, according to prosecutors, who 
detailed in two pre-sentencing memos what they would have presented at 
trial.

One included a detailed list -- with pictures -- of the house, boat, 
cars, antiques, rugs and other bribes he took over the past five years. 
It contained a copy of a "bribe menu" on Cunningham's personal note card 
that signified he would trade $1 million of federal funding for $50,000, 
and then offer a discount of $25,000 per million once he had collected 
$200,000.

In return, Cunningham admitting using his seats on the appropriations 
and intelligence committees to earmark funding for programs intended for 
the companies of Mitchell J. Wade and Wilkes. He then "bullied and 
hectored" Pentagon officials to ensure their firms, MZM Inc. and ADCS 
Inc., were awarded federal contracts, the government said.

Wade pleaded guilty Feb. 24 in Washington to four criminal charges 
related to the case. Wilkes has not been charged, though prosecutors 
said the investigation is continuing.

Thomas E. Mann, an expert on Congress at the Brookings Institution, said 
Friday that "we haven't seen anything like" the magnitude and duration 
of Cunningham's corruption since the Teapot Dome scandal of the 1920s.

Cunningham was elected to Congress in 1990, a few years after retiring 
from the Navy, in which he had been an instructor at the "top gun" 
school for fighter pilots and the first ace in the Vietnam War. When the 
GOP took over the House in 1995, he used his committee seats to earmark 
funds for Wade and Wilkes. Wilkes's company collected at least $80 
million in federal contracts, and Wade's was awarded more than $150 
million in the past three years.

Cunningham's downfall began last June when the San Diego Union-Tribune 
reported that Wade had bought the lawmaker's home near San Diego for 
$1.675 million and sold it months later at a $700,000 loss. Cunningham 
used the profits -- after Wade sent him a $115,100 check to pay the 
capital gains tax -- to buy a $2.55 million mansion in nearby Rancho 
Santa Fe. That was followed by a disclosure that Cunningham was living 
rent-free while in Washington on Wade's yacht, the Duke-Stir.

At first, prosecutors said, Cunningham attempted to cover up his crimes 
by writing a phony undated letter to Wade offering to pay his loss on 
the home sale to "eliminate any negative perception." To explain away 
rugs and antiques Wade had bought for him, Cunningham said that his 
check to the rug dealer had been lost in the mail, and that he 
"reminded" the antiques dealer he had given Wade cash for the purchases, 
prosecutors wrote.

The dealer recalled no such transaction. The rugs and antiques will be 
auctioned off this month to help pay what Cunningham owes the government.

Despite the conviction, Cunningham will get a congressional pension. 
Peter Sepp, spokesman for the National Taxpayers Union, estimated that 
Cunningham's 15 years in the House will make him eligible for about 
$36,000 a year. With his 21 years of Navy duty added to that total, his 
annual pension would be about $64,400, Sepp said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/03/AR2006030300290.html?referrer=email
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060304/a4454407/attachment-0001.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sat Mar  4 05:48:27 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sat, 04 Mar 2006 08:48:27 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] The Man Who Wasn't There on 9/11 - Washington Post
Message-ID: <44099AAB.6090307@comcast.net>

The Man Who Wasn't There on 9/11
Next Week, U.S. Will Begin Its Case for Moussaoui's Death

By Jerry Markon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 4, 2006; A01

Zacarias Moussaoui was sitting in jail when the hijacked planes crashed 
into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and in a field in 
Pennsylvania. Now, the government wants him executed for that day of 
terror because he did nothing to stop it.

After the jury is selected Monday, prosecutors will argue that even 
though Moussaoui wasn't there, he should be held accountable for the 
murders of nearly 3,000 people on Sept. 11, 2001. Their task, on its 
face, is formidable: Federal law says people can be executed only for 
killing someone or participating in a violent act that directly caused a 
death.

Yet legal experts say prosecutors stand a reasonable chance of securing 
a death sentence for the only person convicted in the United States on 
charges stemming from Sept. 11. The reason: Moussaoui's own words. When 
he pleaded guilty, he acknowledged that he had lied to the FBI when he 
was arrested a month before Sept. 11 "to allow his al-Qaeda brothers to 
go forward."

Relying on that admission, prosecutors will argue that Moussaoui might 
as well have pulled the trigger -- because if he had confessed his 
knowledge of the plot, the hijackings could have been stopped. "I think 
they have a good case, given his own statements," said Andrew McBride, a 
former federal prosecutor who has tried numerous death penalty cases. 
"He admits that he lied to further the conspiracy. Legally, that 
probably makes it."

Moussaoui, 37, pleaded guilty in April to charges that include 
conspiracy to commit aircraft piracy. He has become the poster boy for 
the deadliest terrorist strike in U.S. history, yet his precise role 
remains unknown, even to the government. If he had not been arrested, 
investigators have theorized, he could have been anything from the "20th 
hijacker" to a last-minute replacement to the pilot of a fifth plane 
intended to strike the White House.

Whatever Moussaoui's intentions were, the trial in U.S. District Court 
in Alexandria promises to combine weighty matters of national security 
with elements of the absurd. The trial is expected to last one to three 
months.

The anonymous 18-member jury, including six alternates, will watch the 
Justice Department lay out for the first time in a public courtroom its 
view of how the Sept. 11 attacks were planned and executed. A death 
sentence would do much to support the Bush administration's strategy of 
keeping the case in the criminal justice system -- instead of before a 
military court -- to show that the system can handle complex terrorism 
matters and punish the guilty.

Alexandria Location

The administration is also relying on jurors to validate its decision to 
try the case in Alexandria instead of New York, where most major 
terrorism cases had been prosecuted. Officials have said they felt the 
Northern Virginia jury pool is more conservative and pro-government. Yet 
they are fighting the weight of history: No Alexandria federal jury has 
ever returned a death sentence.

Defense attorneys will try to exploit that by probing the sensitive 
underside of the government's failure to stop the attacks. They will 
argue that U.S. officials knew far more about al-Qaeda's plans than 
Moussaoui did, according to court documents. Even if Moussaoui had told 
all he knew, the defense says, the government's own failures show that 
agents would not have acted properly on the information.

A hint of the high-level nature of the evidence emerged last week when 
the defense battled to secure the testimony of Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), 
who is trying to persuade a judge to quash a subpoena.

Weldon has alleged at congressional hearings that a secret Pentagon 
program, known as Able Danger, identified lead hijacker Mohamed Atta 
more than a year before Sept. 11. "This information is plainly helpful 
to the defense as it showed that the government possessed specific 
information about the presence of the ringleader of the Sept. 11 attacks 
in the United States before Sept. 11," defense attorneys wrote in a 
court filing.

Defense lawyers are also fighting a highly unusual opponent: their own 
client.

In what legal observers call a first for the U.S. justice system, 
Moussaoui -- an avowed al-Qaeda member who swore a blood oath to Osama 
bin Laden -- is being given a public forum. He has said he plans to 
testify, and sources familiar with the case say his attorneys have no 
idea what he might say.

The French citizen has already shown he will make the most of the 
opportunity. He was repeatedly ejected from the courtroom by U.S. 
District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema during jury selection for erupting at 
his attorneys, the judge and prosecutors. Even when he was allowed back 
in, he muttered blessings for bin Laden and curses for America after the 
judge had left.

His behavior will be witnessed by family members of Sept. 11 victims, 
who are gathering to watch the trial at remote viewing locations at five 
federal courthouses across the country. If jurors decide that Moussaoui 
is eligible for the death penalty, a second phase of the trial will 
feature highly emotional testimony from family members and people 
injured on Sept. 11.

If Moussaoui's own words could hurt him before the jury, they may have 
already helped prosecutors make their case. Prosecutors will argue, 
court documents say, that Moussaoui should die because he allowed the 
plot to proceed by lying to the FBI and that his deception was a direct 
cause of the deaths.

When Moussaoui was arrested in Minnesota a month before Sept. 11, he 
told federal agents that he was training as a pilot for personal 
enjoyment and that after finishing, he intended to visit New York and 
Washington as a tourist.

When he pleaded guilty, Moussaoui signed a statement of facts admitting 
that he had lied to the FBI to allow al-Qaeda "to go forward with the 
operation to fly planes into American buildings." Prosecutors pointed to 
this admission in proposed jury instructions they submitted to the judge 
last week.

Stephen A. Saltzburg, a George Washington University law professor, said 
the government should be able to prove much of its case. "There is no 
doubt they can prove that he joined the conspiracy . . . and that he 
didn't do anything to stop

9/11," Saltsburg said.

Prosecution's Task

The harder part, Saltzburg said, is showing that Moussaoui's lies 
directly contributed to the murders. In the end, he said, it may depend 
on how Brinkema instructs the jury on the law. "How is he responsible 
for Sept. 11 and the deaths on Sept. 11?" Saltzburg said. "It's that 
last step, the last link."

Prosecutors declined to comment but have indicated in court documents 
that they do not feel they need to prove that Moussaoui had a specific 
task on Sept. 11.

"I think no one will ever know," McBride said. "The only people who have 
an idea are Osama bin Laden and some of his lieutenants."

Moussaoui's intentions have been mysterious ever since his name first 
emerged in press reports -- he was called Habib Zacarias Moussaoui then 
-- a few days after Sept. 11.

He was born in the Basque region of France, to a Moroccan father and a 
French mother, according to interviews and court documents. His father 
was an abusive alcoholic, and Moussaoui spent his first five years in 
and out of orphanages, according to court records filed by the defense.

Although Moussaoui grew up only nominally practicing Islam, he moved to 
London as a young man to master English and became exposed to "the 
radical mosques which flourished in London in the 1990s," the court 
papers said.

Hooking up with bin Laden's organization, Moussaoui trained at an 
al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan and managed an al-Qaeda guesthouse in 
Kandahar, he acknowledged in the court document he signed. He entered 
the United States in 2001 and began taking flying lessons at Airman 
Flight School in Norman, Okla.

As Sept. 11 approached, Moussaoui took a series of actions that closely 
mirrored those of the hijackers. He bought two knives and made sure 
their blades were short enough to get through airport security, 
according to court documents and the independent commission that 
investigated the 9/11 attacks. In August 2001, he received nearly 
$15,000 from al-Qaeda and began training on a 747 simulator at a flight 
school in Minnesota.

The 9/11 commission later concluded that Moussaoui was most likely being 
primed as a Sept. 11 replacement pilot and that the hijackers probably 
would have postponed their strike if his arrest had been announced.

Moussaoui's conduct raised suspicions at the flight school because he 
wanted to fly large jets when he had little training. He did not want a 
pilot's license. His instructor reported him to the authorities, and 
Moussaoui was arrested on immigration charges Aug. 16, 2001.

Moussaoui's actions were considered suspicious enough that the 
then-director of the CIA, George J. Tenet, was briefed, but a series of 
government missteps, chronicled at length by the 9/11 commission, 
prevented investigators from piecing together Moussaoui's intentions -- 
or the Sept. 11 plot.

After Sept. 11, Moussaoui emerged as a key suspect. Some government 
officials, including Vice President Cheney, suggested that he might have 
been the 20th hijacker, referring to the fact that the plane that 
crashed in a field in Pennsylvania had only four hijackers aboard. The 
other three planes had five hijackers each.

Moussaoui signed his plea agreement as the "20th hijacker," though he 
often called himself that in handwritten motions filed from jail, 
usually in a mocking tone.

But prosecutors have vehemently pointed out that they never called 
Moussaoui the 20th hijacker in any court proceeding, even as he has 
become known as that to many people. "Instead, the '20th hijacker' 
theory appears to be a creation of the media coverage and the isolated 
statements of certain government officials in the immediate aftermath of 
the Sept. 11 attacks," prosecutors wrote in an appellate court brief 
filed in 2003.

Although the government has never spelled out his role, a federal grand 
jury in Alexandria indicted Moussaoui in December 2001 on conspiracy 
charges.

In July 2002, Moussaoui interrupted a routine court hearing and tried to 
plead guilty, claiming an intimate knowledge of the hijackings.

"I have certain knowledge about September 11," Moussaoui said, according 
to a transcript. "I know exactly who done it. I know which group, who 
participated, when it was decided. I have many information."

After Brinkema gave him a week to think about it, Moussaoui withdrew his 
plea and claimed that although he is an al-Qaeda member, he had no 
advance knowledge of the hijackings.

A constitutional showdown over Moussaoui's access to top al-Qaeda 
detainees, who Moussaoui's attorneys said had information that could 
clear him, then delayed the case for more than two years. Eventually, a 
federal appeals court ruled that Moussaoui could not interview the 
detainees but could present to the jury portions of statements they made 
to interrogators.

Last April 22, Moussaoui pleaded guilty to six conspiracy counts. Yet 
the day's proceedings only added to the uncertainty.

The court document Moussaoui signed said that he had participated in the 
al-Qaeda plot that culminated in Sept. 11 and that bin Laden had 
personally instructed him to fly an airplane into the White House. But 
when Moussaoui stepped to the lectern, he denied any role in Sept. 11 
and said the White House attack would be an attempt to free Sheik Omar 
Abdel Rahman, who is imprisoned for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

"This conspiracy was a different conspiracy than 9/11," Moussaoui said.

As he was led from the courtroom by security officers, he shouted: 
"Lord! God curse America!"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/03/AR2006030301751.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060304/cedbe29b/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sat Mar  4 05:50:51 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sat, 04 Mar 2006 08:50:51 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Looking Back (and Ahead) With Edwards - George F. Will -
 Washington Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <44099B3B.3090301@comcast.net>

Looking Back (and Ahead) With Edwards

By George F. Will
Sunday, March 5, 2006; B07

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. -- "Sometimes," says John Edwards, "people need a 
breather." He is not talking about himself, although surely he needed 
one after his brief rocket ride through the upper atmosphere of national 
politics. That ride ended -- or perhaps paused -- when the Kerry-Edwards 
ticket lost. The people who Edwards thinks really need a breather from 
presidential candidates are the voters.

But Edwards is roaming around, with 2008 in mind. His travels to more 
than 30 states have been organized around his interest in poverty. His 
Senate term ended nine weeks after the election, and he went to earth 
here. While his wife, Elizabeth, continues to recover from breast 
cancer, he is directing the new Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity 
at the University of North Carolina.

Most Americans seem to regard as the only searing economic injustice the 
violation of their constitutional right -- surely it is in the Bill of 
Rights -- to cheap gasoline. But Edwards believes attacking poverty can 
be politically energizing if, by stressing "work, responsibility, 
family," the attack "is built around a value system the nation embraces."

In a speech shortly after Hurricane Katrina, he rightly stressed the 
correlation of family disintegration -- especially out-of-wedlock births 
-- with many social pathologies associated with poverty. He said, "It is 
wrong when all Americans see this happening and do nothing to stop it."

But no one knows how to stop it. Anyway, spending at least $6.6 trillion 
on poverty-related programs in the four decades since President Johnson 
declared the "war on poverty" is not "nothing." In fact, it has 
purchased a new paradigm of poverty.

Edwards has a 1930s paradigm of poverty: Poor people are like everyone 
else; they just lack goods and services (housing, transportation, 
training, etc.) that government knows how to deliver. Hence he calls for 
a higher minimum wage and job-creation programs. And because no Democrat 
with national ambitions will dare to offend teachers unions, he rejects 
school choice vouchers and says this: "Give working parents who are poor 
housing vouchers so they have a chance to move into neighborhoods with 
better schools."

But the 1930s paradigm of poverty was alive in 1968 when the National 
Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, created in response to urban 
riots, thought this would be an imaginative cure: government creation of 
2 million jobs. This at a moment when the unemployment rate was 3.7 percent.

The 1930s paradigm has been refuted by four decades of experience. The 
new paradigm is of behavior-driven poverty that results from 
individuals' nonmaterial deficits. It results from a scarcity of certain 
habits and mores -- punctuality, hygiene, industriousness, deferral of 
gratification, etc. -- that are not developed in disorganized homes.

Edwards, who does not recognize the name James Q. Wilson, may have 
missed this paradigm shift. Many people in public life, and almost all 
those with presidential ambitions, are too busy for the study and 
reflection necessary for mastering any subject.

In 2000, just his second year in the Senate -- his second year in public 
life -- Edwards was on the short list of finalists to be Al Gore's 
running mate. Edwards's appetite was whetted, and he began the 
peripatetic scurrying around that preceded his run for the 2004 
presidential nomination. He lost, but he was the last man standing 
against John Kerry, and he can torment himself with plausible thoughts 
about how, with this or that tactical move, he could have won the Iowa 
caucuses -- he finished second, with 31.9 percent of delegate strength 
to Kerry's 37.6 percent -- and the nomination.

When Democrats wonder what red states Hillary Clinton could turn blue in 
2008, the wondering does not help Edwards, whose presence on the 2004 
ticket did not sway his own state: In 2000 Bush beat Gore-Lieberman in 
North Carolina 56-43. In 2004 Bush beat Kerry-Edwards here 56-44. And 
Democrats know that Gore might now be in his second term if he had 
carried his home state.

Edwards says that one lesson of 2004 is that presidential elections "are 
not issue-driven"; rather, they are character-driven and voters see 
issues as reflections of character. The issues "show people who you 
are." Perhaps.

But the idea that the candidate's persona is primary and that issues are 
secondary is a mistake made by some Democrats who yearn for another John 
Kennedy. He was a talented but quite traditional politician whom many 
Democrats wrongly remember as proving that charisma trumps substantive 
politics. Edwards, who has been called Kennedyesque, has a stake in that 
yearning.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/03/AR2006030301756.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060304/7f283654/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sat Mar  4 05:54:08 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sat, 04 Mar 2006 08:54:08 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] EXCELLENT: The Genius of Art Buchwald - Ronald G. Shafer
 - Washingtonn Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <44099C00.301@comcast.net>

The Genius of Art Buchwald

By Ronald G. Shafer
Saturday, March 4, 2006; A17

As Art Buchwald keeps his fellow patients in stitches at a Washington 
hospice, it's time to remember how this national treasure of humor has 
kept us all laughing for more than 50 years. In his heyday, Buchwald, 
now 80, was in more newspapers than any other columnist. Harry Truman's 
secretary of state, Dean Acheson, called him "the greatest satirist in 
English since Pope and Swift."

Buchwald's genius is that he makes us laugh and he makes us think. He 
first gained world attention writing from Paris in the 1950s when 
President Eisenhower's press secretary, James Hagerty, called a special 
NATO press briefing to take seriously a Buchwald spoof column, 
denouncing it as "unadulterated rot." Buchwald retorted: "Hagerty is 
wrong -- I write adulterated rot."

In the 1960s Buchwald brought his humor to Washington. Some didn't 
appreciate it. During the Vietnam War, President Lyndon Johnson caught 
press secretary Bill Moyers reading a typically antiwar Buchwald column. 
"Do you think he's funny?" the president barked. To which Moyers quickly 
replied: "No, sir."

Buchwald rose to new heights during the Watergate scandal, explaining 
that the sound in the 18 1/2 -minute gap in the White House tapes 
actually was Nixon humming. His columns on President Reagan, compiled in 
a book called "While Reagan Slept," earned him a Pulitzer Prize for 
outstanding commentary in 1982. Even after a stroke in 2000, Buchwald 
rebounded, jabbing at President George W. Bush and the war in Iraq. His 
columns continued until just a few weeks ago, because, as he said, "I 
still have fire in the belly."

Art Buchwald's humor grew out of adversity. As a child in New York City, 
he and his two sisters were shuttled from one foster home to another. He 
never knew his mother, who was committed to an asylum soon after his birth.

But Art Buchwald grabbed onto life. During World War II, it took courage 
for the 17-year-old Buchwald to join the Marines. It took courage to go 
far away to the University of Southern California -- while neglecting to 
mention that he was a high school dropout. He used the G.I. Bill to go 
all the way to Paris, where his chutzpah got him a job on the New York 
Herald Tribune and fame with a column, "Paris After Dark."

The demons from Buchwald's youth returned in two bouts of depression -- 
one in the early 1960s amid anxiety about his switch to Washington and a 
second in the 1980s during the breakup of his long marriage. He still 
jokes that if he has a third bout of depression, "I will be inducted in 
the Bipolar Hall of Fame."

Buchwald never forgot his roots. At a time when he was the highest-paid 
lecturer in America, he would speak for free at many charity events. He 
dressed up in a bunny costume at Ethel Kennedy's annual Easter egg hunt. 
His friends know him as a serious and kind man who also happens to love 
to make people laugh.

The late senator Paul Douglas once told Buchwald: "You are very lucky. 
American society only lets a few people make fun of them, and you have 
one of the licenses." Douglas didn't have it quite right. We are the 
lucky ones.

The writer is a retired editor and reporter for the Wall Street Journal 
who has known Art Buchwald since writing a story about him 37 years ago.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/03/AR2006030301614.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060304/285a5d19/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sat Mar  4 05:57:31 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sat, 04 Mar 2006 08:57:31 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] A Leaner,
	Meaner Military - Newt Gingrich - Washington Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <44099CCB.7040704@comcast.net>

A Leaner, Meaner Military

By Newt Gingrich
Saturday, March 4, 2006; A17

The Post's Feb. 13 editorial "Mr. Rumsfeld's Flawed Vision" managed to 
miss the major achievements of a remarkable Quadrennial Defense Review 
(QDR). This was the most thorough and systematically managed review in 
Pentagon history. The review board, co-chaired by Deputy Defense 
Secretary Gordon England and Adm. Edmund Giambastiani, spent half a year 
forcing changes in a complex bureaucratic system famous for its ability 
to hide and wait for the current civilian leadership to disappear so it 
can continue its old, comfortable ways. Only by sheer force of will has 
the senior leadership, under the direction of Defense Secretary Donald 
Rumsfeld and Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 
muscled through substantial and historic change in the Defense Department.

This effort to craft a change-oriented QDR has to be seen in the larger 
context of change throughout the Defense Department. The fact that Gen. 
Peter Schoomaker was brought out of retirement to impose Rumsfeld's 
vision on a reluctant Army is the best example of the determined, 
systematic change involved. Schoomaker has become the most single-minded 
Army modernizer since George Catlett Marshall. As Army chief of staff he 
ended the individual replacement system, dating to 1917, which everyone 
knew was destructive to unit cohesion but no one had had the will and 
determination to replace. Ending the practice of heedlessly moving 
individual soldiers in and out of units has produced the highest level 
of unit readiness in modern history.

The Army has shifted from 11 unwieldy World War II-type divisions to 77 
rapidly deployable brigades designed for modern war. This makes it more 
deployable, more usable and more effective. Army modernization is being 
extended by the creation of more Special Operations units and the Marine 
Corps is being turned into a more effective organization for what I call 
"the long war against the irreconcilable wing of Islam."

The Navy and Air Force have continued to shift toward unmanned vehicles, 
more effective power projection and more sophisticated capabilities to 
contain and deter China. The shift toward unmanned vehicles alone would 
have been considered dramatic a decade ago. The development of new 
submarine capability is a powerful tool as Chinese imports and seaborne 
trade increase.

In terms of reshaping the Pentagon, the largest and most comprehensive 
base closing in defense history was recently completed; it will yield 
billions in savings. Under Rumsfeld's leadership, the Pentagon has also 
reconfigured forces from Europe and Korea into more usable and effective 
form. Furthermore, these changes have been made while increasing the 
amount of training and cooperation undertaken with our allies.

At the Pentagon, the creation of the National Security Personnel System 
-- which is being challenged in the courts -- is historic and vitally 
necessary to the effective use of resources for national security. The 
fact that it has been opposed by every labor union in the Defense 
Department is one indication of how thorough and far-reaching it is.

There are a number of steps that have to be taken to modernize the 
nondefense aspects of national security. As Senate Armed Services 
Committee Chairman John Warner has noted, large segments of the civilian 
government are not doing their job and in some cases are not even 
showing up for their assignments. Rumsfeld is aware of these problems, 
but it is hard to imagine that he could challenge other departments in a 
public document such as the QDR.

The Post wrongly asserts that "Mr. Rumsfeld essentially proposes to 
reinforce and perpetuate the greatest single mistake of his tenure, 
which was failing to deploy enough soldiers to win the wars the United 
States has taken on." In fact, there is no evidence that more troops 
would have accomplished anything more than what was accomplished in 
Afghanistan. The mistake in Iraq was not keeping the Iraqi regular army 
intact to assume the responsibility of policing in June 2003. Additional 
troops were not sent to Iraq for the very reason that military leaders 
did not want to create an even bigger footprint leading to greater 
alienation and hostility on the part of the Iraqi people.

Finally, The Post seems upset that some new weapons systems have not 
been entirely eliminated. The F-22, for example, has been cut from 380 
aircraft to 180, reflecting the low likelihood of major air battles 
against a large and modern adversary. Yet there may come a morning when 
-- facing a challenge in Iran, North Korea or potentially with China in 
the Taiwan Straits -- the F-22 will prove its worth. The issue with 
next-generation aircraft is not, as The Post asserts, a question of air 
superiority but of survivability against antiaircraft missiles when 
Russia's and other countries are prepared to sell their best systems to 
a range of countries that oppose the United States. It is also true that 
the Navy continues to build aircraft carriers. But carriers have been 
modernized, and today's movable naval airfields are far more capable 
than they were a generation ago.

Someone at The Post has a fixation on "weapons systems killed" as proof 
of leadership ability in the Defense Department. That fixation reduces 
change in national security to a narrow and inaccurate calculation.

Rumsfeld's second tour of duty as defense secretary marks a period of 
dramatic change in which the United States has been simultaneously 
fighting a global war against Islamic extremists, conducting campaigns 
in Afghanistan and Iraq, making preparations to preempt North Korea and 
Iran if necessary, undertaking strategies to contain China over the next 
two decades, dramatically changing the structure and rhythm of the Army, 
and beginning a revolution in both special operations capabilities and 
unmanned vehicles. This is an extraordinary level of change, and the QDR 
is best seen as one more building block in this new architecture of 
21st-century American security.

The writer, a former speaker of the House, serves on the Defense Policy 
Board, to which he was appointed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/03/AR2006030301612.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060304/de061790/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sat Mar  4 06:00:15 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sat, 04 Mar 2006 09:00:15 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] A natural disaster's political roots - Barbara Goldoftas
 - Boston Globe Op-Ed
Message-ID: <44099D6F.1030301@comcast.net>


  A natural disaster's political roots

By Barbara Goldoftas  |  March 4, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

THE RECENT coup attempt in the Philippines and mudslide that turned a 
village into a mass grave may seem unrelated. In many respects they are, 
but in important ways the Philippines' environmental woes are 
inextricably linked to the political turmoil that persists there.

The ways that societies respond to environmental problems reveal their 
strengths and their fault lines. In the Philippines, longstanding 
conflicts over forests, fisheries, and other natural resources have deep 
roots. Weak political institutions -- attributed only partly to the 
dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos -- reinforced economic weaknesses, 
bringing ecological decline that in turn deepened economic problems. In 
particular, the island of Leyte -- where the mudslide occurred -- shows 
how uncontrolled logging takes an economic and ecological toll.

The mudslide in the village of Guinsaugon in Saint Bernard town was not 
unexpected. Scientists had warned that the area was geologically 
unstable; since early February, unseasonably heavy rains brought by the 
ocean cooling called La Ni?a had caused flooding and mudslides there. 
Throughout the archipelago, flash floods and landslides strike regularly 
in logged-over areas, and the Philippine Atmospheric Geophysical and 
Astronomical Services Administration now warns that at least 15 
provinces face a high risk of flooding and landslides.

Leyte has been hit by some of the worst. In 2003, more than 150 people 
died in mudslides. In 1991, mud and floodwaters thundered down 
deforested foothills and through the city of Ormoc, taking as many as 
8,000 lives in minutes.

Poor decision-making, misplaced priorities, political neglect, and few 
economic options can masquerade as a natural disaster or just plain bad 
luck. In the Philippines, mudslides are only one example of the 
consequences of decades of poor environmental management and the 
long-term costs of ecological decline.

The archipelago is made up of more than 7,100 islands, about 2,000 of 
them inhabited. Like Leyte, many islands are mountainous. Thick tropical 
forest once covered their slopes, anchoring the soil and regulating the 
water cycle, which are important during the intense seasonal rains and 
typhoons. Much of the forestland was cleared over just a few decades, 
starting after World War II when the country became a major supplier of 
tropical wood. Timber became its leading export, headed primarily for 
the United States and Japan. Trees that commercial loggers left behind 
were often cut by bootleg loggers and peasants clearing land to farm.

For a century, foresters warned about the costs of over-logging in the 
Philippines, advising that trees should cover more than half of 
mountainous islands. The logging industry was largely unregulated, 
particularly during the Marcos era, through a combination of corruption, 
weak political institutions and greed. Despite protected areas and 
environmental laws, the Philippines became one of the most severely 
deforested countries in the tropics. By the late 1980s, trees covered 
far less than 10 percent of many islands. The results were erosion, 
mudslides, flash floods, and drought. The ecological decline helped 
impoverish the rural areas. Those provinces that were among the first to 
be logged, including Leyte, remain among the country's poorest.

As we are seeing in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, one 
environmental problem leads to another, and environmental disasters 
bring long-term costs. In the Philippines, the demise of the forests 
brought the collapse of the logging industry. It changed regional 
weather patterns. As people migrated to the coasts to find work, they 
created new pressures on the rich coastal fisheries, which also 
declined. The erosion of the forests and fisheries, in turn, heightened 
poverty in rural areas and sent millions of ecological refugees fleeing 
to the cities, where they often lived as squatters. The influx of people 
overwhelmed roads, power, and sewage and water systems, deepening urban 
environmental problems that can threaten human health.

Environmental changes have complex political causes. Even when causes 
have global dimensions, many of the costs -- ecological, economic, 
social, human -- are felt acutely at the local level. There is no quick 
fix, and while disaster-management schemes and warning systems can help 
save people's lives, they cannot prevent disasters from happening. 
Strong, level-headed governance, political will, and economic decisions 
that are forward-thinking are far more important.

Barbara Goldoftas is author of ''The Green Tiger: The Costs of 
Ecological Decline in the Philippines."

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/04/a_natural_disasters_political_roots/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060304/6348cf63/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sat Mar  4 06:04:05 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sat, 04 Mar 2006 09:04:05 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] BRILLIANT: Dear Senator Dole: I must respectfully
 decline your invitation - Derrick Z. Jackson - Boston Globe Op-Ed
Message-ID: <44099E55.8090206@comcast.net>


  Dear Senator Dole: I must respectfully decline your invitation

By Derrick Z. Jackson  |  March 4, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

NO WONDER we never found weapons of mass destruction. The Republicans 
cannot even find Republicans!

I know this because I received a letter from Senator Elizabeth Dole, the 
National Republican Senatorial Committee chairwoman, to join the 
Republican Senatorial Inner Circle. Her letter praises me for my 
''remarkable support of President Bush's agenda."

Along with a certificate for framing, the letter said I was in the ''top 
echelon" of only 100 people from Massachusetts who were extended this 
invitation on the circle's 25th anniversary. It said, ''Mr. Jackson, 
please know there are many strong Republicans in Massachusetts, but we 
cannot recognize them all. . . . President Bush, Vice President Cheney, 
Senate majority leader Frist, and the Republican members of the Senate 
are counting on you to answer this call and accept this well-deserved 
invitation."

If someone at Republican headquarters twitched their fingers on a 
keyboard, they would have seen how ill-deserved this invitation was. If 
they had Googled me, they would have seen that the second reference to 
Derrick Z. Jackson is my 2003 column that said that despite the capture 
of Saddam Hussein, ''The invasion was still a lie." On the first results 
page there is also the column about Bush's speech at racist Bob Jones 
University and the headline, ''A disturbing lesson about the real George 
W." On the first page of references for Derrick Jackson sans the ''Z," 
Google has my 2004 column titled, ''Reagan's heart of darkness."

The Republicans talk about a big-tent party, but this is ridiculous. 
Even if this letter had come from a Democratic senatorial inner circle, 
it would have been laughable. I am a registered Democrat who often 
criticizes the party's wishy-washy capitulations. I wrote that President 
Clinton should have resigned over his lying and loss of moral authority 
in the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

But for the Republicans to offer me a $2,000 membership and have my name 
''permanently etched on the Founders Wall in the Honors Courtyard of the 
Ronald Reagan Republican Center" after a column on Reagan's heart of 
darkness is a dazzling plummet to the depths of media literacy. We have 
long known that Bush himself does not read newspapers. But his lack of 
curiosity appears to have become an epidemic.

We have the Keystone Kops sale of six ports to a Dubai-owned company 
that neither Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Homeland Security 
Secretary Michael Chertoff, nor Treasury Secretary John Snow knew about. 
The mounting evidence that the government ignored the early accounts of 
Hurricane Katrina breaching the levees of New Orleans made Republican 
congressman Christopher Shays say the government had ''failed all levels 
in planning for and responding to Hurricane Katrina. The White House was 
clearly in a fog, Secretary Chertoff [the head of Homeland Security] was 
totally detached and Michael Brown [former head of FEMA] was negligent."

On the clueless negligence on my invite, I called the Inner Circle 
several times, to no avail, to see how it had happened. Over the years, 
the Inner Circle invited several decisively un-Republican newspaper 
columnists, Democratic elected officials, Democratic National Committee 
cochairman Steven Grossman, and rapper Eazy-E.

Along with the certificate and Dole's letter was a request from majority 
leader Bill Frist to fill out a survey on the party's priorities. 
Frist's letter said, ''With careful consideration of those who are most 
active in their support of President Bush and the Republican Party, you 
have been selected to represent your district. . . . Many media pundits 
and Democratic strategists believe that for Senate Democrats to regain 
the majority this November they must continue their unprecedented 
obstruction to rally their most LIBERAL supporters. . . . That is why I 
need you to complete and RETURN THE SURVEY DOCUMENT -- AT ONCE."

Journalism ethics prevent me from completing Frist's questionnaire and 
giving answers the opposite of what he wants to hear -- as much as I 
would like to rearrange the deck chairs on his tax-cutting Titanic. But 
there is still hope for others to answer the survey.

Dole's letter says, ''I need to make sure this crucial echelon is 
operating at top strength. . . . If you cannot participate, please let 
me know, so that I may extend this honor to those currently on the 
reserve list."

Dear Senator Dole, I hereby announce that I cannot participate. If the 
careful consideration of your Republican operatives put me on your A 
team, that gives me great hope the reserves can still save this country!

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/04/dear_senator_dole_i_must_respectfully_decline_your_invitation/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060304/7960b030/attachment-0001.htm 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Sat Mar  4 07:40:58 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Sat, 4 Mar 2006 10:40:58 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Blair: God will be my judge on Iraq
Message-ID: <000b01c63fa2$0b8427e0$113fe440@Harold>

I call this passing the buck !
Harry

Blair: 'God will be my judge on Iraq' 
By Andy McSmith 
Published: 04 March 2006 
Tony Blair has proclaimed that God will judge whether he was right to send British troops to Iraq, echoing statements from his ally George Bush. 

Contradicting warnings from advisers not to mix politics and religion, the Prime Minister said that his interest in politics sprang from his Christianity and its "values and philosophy" had guided him in public life.

Explaining how he managed to live with the decision to go to war in Iraq, Mr Blair replied: "If you have faith about these things then you realise that judgement is made by other people. If you believe in God,it's made by God as well." His remarks, made in an interview to be shown on ITV's Parkinson show tonight, invite comparison with President Bush, a born-again Christian, who has made a virtue of bringing religion into politics. But they also carry the risk of inflaming opinion in the Arab world, where the term "crusader" is commonly used to condemn Christian leaders who meddle in the Middle East.

It is also exactly the sort of comment he has been repeatedly urged not to make for domestic purposes, because of the risk that a sceptical British public will react badly to politicians who appear to be "preaching". Mr Blair was instructed by his former director of communications, Alastair Campbell: "We don't do God."

As well as invoking God as the final judge of the Iraq war, Mr Blair also explained how his religious and political beliefs came to him simultaneously. "There were people at university who got me into politics. I kind of got into religion, politics, at the same time, in a way. And until the age of about 20 I really wasn't very interested in politics at all," he told Michael Parkinson. "That's how I got interested in it."

He refused to accept a description of himself as a "Christian socialist" - but only because the phrase contained the "s" word. "It's a long time since anyone used the word socialist about me," he said.

He agreed that his politics could be described as Christian "in terms of the values and the philosophy". He also confirmed that religion illuminates his politics. "If you have a religious belief, it does - but it's probably best not to take it too far," he said.

Roger Bacon, who has been trying unsuccessfully to meet Tony Blair since his son, Major Matthew Bacon, 34, was killed in Iraq, said last night: "This would explain why he won't see the parents. How can he speak to us when God told him to send the troops out to Iraq so our sons could be killed?"

And Rose Gentle, whose son Gordon was killed in Basra in 2004, said she was "quite disgusted" at the comments made by the Prime Minister. The Military Families Against the War campaigner said: "How can he say he is a Christian? A Christian would never put people out there to be killed.

"A good Christian wouldn't be for this war. I'm actually quite disgusted by the comments. It's a joke."

During his eight-year premiership, the only decisions that have caused Mr Blair sleepless nights have been those that involved taking the UK to war, he said. But he added: "The only way you can take a decision like that is to try to do the right thing, according to your conscience. And, for the rest of it, you leave it to the judgement that history will make."

Mr Blair refused to say whether he had prayed for guidance on whether to send British troops into Iraq - which has cost the lives of 103 British troops, 2,300 US soldiers, and up to 30,000 Iraqis, with many thousands maimed or injured, in a conflict which has claimed more lives since the fall of Baghdad than the war itself.

There have been persistent reports that Mr Blair joined the President in prayer for God's guidance at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, in 2002, at the summit at which many people believe a secret decision was reached to invade Iraq.

The claim was made in a book by the Christian author Stephen Mansfield, who said he had heard it from White House officials. It was later backed up by a writer on Time magazine, David Aikman.

Mr Bush once told Palestinian leaders: "God would tell me, 'George, go end the tyranny in Iraq' and I did."

Mr Blair's Cabinet includes several deeply committed Christians, such as Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, who is a Roman Catholic, and the Chief Whip, Hilary Armstrong - but they rarely break the injunction not to mix religion and politics publicly
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060304/084ef1dd/attachment.htm 

From ean at sbcglobal.net  Wed Mar  1 21:39:45 2006
From: ean at sbcglobal.net (ean at sbcglobal.net)
Date: Wed, 01 Mar 2006 21:39:45 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Garrison Keillor: What to Do When the Emperor Has No
	Clothes
Message-ID: <E1FFLPy-0000yv-Ew@smtpauth04.mail.atl.earthlink.net>

Published on Wednesday, March 1, 2006 by the Chicago Tribune
 
by Garrison Keillor
 http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0301-34.htm

These are troubling times for all of us who love this country, as surely 
we all do, even the satirists. You may poke fun at your mother, but if 
she is belittled by others it burns your bacon. A blowhard French 
journalist writes a book about America that is full of arrogant stupidity, 
and you want to let the air out of him and mail him home flat. And then 
you read the paper and realize the country is led by a man who isn't 
paying attention, and you hope that somebody will poke him. Or put a 
sign on his desk that says, "Try much harder."

Do we need to impeach him to bring some focus to this man's life? 
The Feb. 27 issue of The New Yorker carries an article by Jane Mayer 
about a loyal conservative Republican and U.S. Navy lawyer, Albert 
Mora, and his resistance to the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo 
Bay. From within the Pentagon bureaucracy, he did battle against 
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and John Yoo, who then was at 
the Justice Department, and shadowy figures taking orders from Vice 
President Dick "Gunner" Cheney, arguing America had ratified the 
Geneva Convention that forbids cruel, inhumane and degrading 
treatment of prisoners, and so it has the force of law. They seemed to 
be arguing that President Bush has the right to order prisoners to be 
tortured.

One such prisoner, Mohamed al-Qahtani, was held naked in isolation 
under bright lights for months, threatened by dogs, subjected to 
unbearable noise volumes and otherwise abused, so that he begged to 
be allowed to kill himself. When the Senate approved the Torture 
Convention in 1994, it defined torture as an act "specifically intended to 
inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering."

Is the law a law or is it a piece of toast?

Wiretap surveillance of Americans without a warrant? Great. Go for it. 
How about turning over American ports to a country more closely tied 
to Sept. 11, 2001, than Saddam Hussein was? Fine by me. No 
problem. And what about the war in Iraq? Hey, you're doing a heck of a 
job. No need to tweak a thing. And your blue button-down shirt--it's 
you.

But torture is something else. Most people agree with this, and in a 
democracy that puts the torturers in a delicate position. They must 
make sure to destroy their e-mails and have subordinates who will take 
the fall. Because it is impossible to keep torture secret. It goes against 
the American grain and it eats at the conscience of even the most 
disciplined, and in the end the truth will come out. It is coming out now.

Our adventure in Iraq, at a cost of billions, has brought that country to 
the verge of civil war while earning us more enemies than ever before. 
And tax money earmarked for security is being dumped into pork-
barrel projects anywhere somebody wants their own SWAT team. 
Detonation of a nuclear bomb within our borders--pick any big city--is a 
real possibility, as much so now as five years ago. Meanwhile, many 
Democrats have conceded the very subject of security and positioned 
themselves as Guardians of Our Forests and Benefactors of Waifs 
and Owls, neglecting the most basic job of government, which is to 
defend this country. The peaceful lagoon that is the White House is 
designed for the comfort of a vulnerable man. Perfectly 
understandable, but not what is needed now. The U.S. Constitution 
provides a simple, ultimate way to hold him to account for war crimes 
and the failure to attend to the country's defense. Impeach him and let 
the Senate hear the evidence.

Garrison Keillor is an author and the radio host of "A Prairie Home 
Companion."

? 2006 Chicago Tribune

###


-- 
You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, 
option D (up to 3 emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options 
(option A - 1x/week, option B - 3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option D - 
up to 3x/day) please reply and let us know!  If someone forwarded you 
this email and you want to be on our list, send an email to 
ean at sbcglobal.net and tell us which option you'd like.


"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060301/843e710f/attachment.htm 

From activist at democrats.com  Sat Mar  4 01:30:18 2006
From: activist at democrats.com (Democrats.com)
Date: Sat, 4 Mar 2006 04:30:18 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Please John Conyers: Impeach Bush NOW
Message-ID: <20060304043018.986138@democrats.com>

Please John Conyers: Impeach Bush NOW
by Bob Fertik
http://www.democrats.com/please-john-conyers

On Thursday, Harper's Magazine held a truly outstanding forum on impeaching George Bush with Sam Seder, Rep. John Conyers, John Dean, Liz Holtzman, Lewis Lapham, and Michael Ratner (photo by Kate Anne).

Everyone agreed Bush should be impeached, the important question was when.

During Q&A, I asked John Conyers if he would introduce Articles of Impeachment now. He replied, "My goodness, please look at H.Res. 635, which calls for an investigation that could lead to impeachment. But I cannot call for impeachment now, before we have investigated all the facts."

My time was up, so I could not continue the debate. But if I could, these are the arguments I would make for the immediate introduction of Articles of Impeachment.

First, the Articles of Impeachment have been written. You can find them in Michael Ratner's brand new book. We don't need a committee to struggle for months over the wording; Conyers and his allies can simply "throw the book" at Bush.

Second, when House Republicans impeached President Clinton in 1998, they emphasized ad nauseum that "impeachment" is merely the equivalent of an indictment, the determination that there is sufficient evidence to charge a suspect with a crime. Impeachment, like an indictment, leads to a trial, in which a jury (in this case the Senate) determines whether the evidence is sufficient for conviction. The evidence we have in hand (as presented in Michael Ratner's book, as well as John Conyers' thorough report on the Iraq War lies, The Constitution in Crisis) is far more than is needed for an indictment. There is absolutely no reason for Conyers' proposed Select Committee to do the work of the Senate in weighing the evidence.

Third, Bush's criminal activity is ongoing and must be stopped. Our occupation of Iraq has already cost 2,300 American lives and at least 28,636 Iraqi lives, if not well over 100,000. We are committing war crimes by torturing and murdering prisoners, using chemical weapons and depleted uranium, and pushing Iraq to the brink of civil war. Bush is still wiretapping countless Americans without a warrant, in direct violation of the FISA law. And even though Bush's crimes are flagrant and obscene, the Republican Congress refuses to either investigate them or stop them.

Finally, as the panelists made clear, the American people are truly in a state of despair that George Bush is able to commit these unspeakable crimes without any effort to hold him accountable. By introducing real Articles of Impeachment - even if only a few Members do so - those Members will make a powerful statement that they are determined to challenge that despair and demand accountability. That act of leadership, in and of itself, would galvanize the 52% of Americans (when last measured in January, long before Dubai and the Katrina tapes) who support impeachment. And it would most likely persuade even more Americans that Bush's impeachment was both necessary and urgent. So if 55% or 60% or even 65% of Americans supported impeachment, Republicans in Congress would have a very difficult time standing in the way - especially as they faced a disastrous election in November.

After four distinguished decades in Congress, John Conyers is not a man who acts rashly. But all of us who have watched Bush shred the Constitution know that Conyers has tried to stop him every step of the way by sending urgent letters, filing Freedom of Information requests, and proposing Resolutions of Inquiry. Through those diligent efforts, Conyers has laid the most solid groundwork possible for impeachment. 

So please John Conyers, I honestly beg you to introduce Articles of Impeachment now.

Action items:

1. Send this article with a few words of your own to campaign at johnconyers.com

2. Urge your Representative and Senators to support Impeachment:
http://democrats.com/peoplesemailnetwork/65

3. C-Span taped this outstanding forum but it does not appear on C-Span's schedule for Saturday, Sunday or Monday. Email viewer at c-span.org and urge them to broadcast it.

4. The New York Times is one block from Town Hall, yet it did not even mention this historic event. Email Executive Editor Bill Keller executive-editor at nytimes.com and Public Editor Byron Calame public at nytimes.com and demand to know why.

5. Link to this article from your favorite blogs and ask the blog owner to join ImpeachPAC's Citizens Impeachment Commission.

6. Register to join in local protests:
http://www.democrats.com/user/register

7. Read the whole protest plan:
http://www.democrats.com/cd 

8. Organize your congressional district:
http://pdamerica.org/orgs/cdpp-form.php

9. Support our efforts by contributing to ImpeachPAC.

Thank you for your tireless efforts to save American Democracy!

_______________

UPCOMING EVENTS TO END THE WAR AND HOLD WARMAKERS ACCOUNTABLE

Sign up for these, find others, and create your own at
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/event

See Also: UFPJ's 3rd Anniversary of the War Calendar of Events
http://unitedforpeace.org/calendar.php?caltype=39&lcountry=&state=&search=Search

See Also: PDA Events
http://pdamerica.org/events/main-list.php

4th Annual Party for Progressives!
Activist San Diego presents:
We say NO to War! We Support Peace & Justice for All!
Special Guest: CINDY SHEEHAN
Sat March 4, 8 -11pm
Balboa Park Club Ballroom, San Diego, CA
Dancing to award winning dance band LIQUID BLUE
To purchase tickets: 619-528-8383 or www.ActivistSanDiego.org 



Scott Ritter and Gore Vidal in LA
U.S. Tour of Duty's Real Intelligence Project, Los Angeles City Beat, and Progressive Talk AM 1150 present an emergency public discussion about Iraq, Iran and America's constitutional crisis with Former UN Weapons Inspector SCOTT RITTER and GORE VIDAL
March 4, 4 - 5:30 p.m.
Immanuel Presbyterian Church
3300 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles
Doors open 3 p.m.
http://www.ustourofduty.org

IRAQI & U.S. WOMEN SAY NO TO WAR!
March 5 - 6 Events in NY
March 7 - 9 Events in DC
Tuesday 7 March 7-9 PM
Foundry United Methodist Church
Meet the Delegation:
Gold Star Mothers Cindy Sheehan and Elaine Johnson
Eman Khammas, Nadje Al-Ali, Faiza Al-Araji and Others
Medea Benjamin, Ann Wright and Others...
Music by In Process, Holly Near and more

1500 16th Street NW DC (16th & P)
Dupont Circle Metro, #30 bus - Suggested donation $10.00 

March/Rally to Deliver Women's Peace Plan 
with 100,000 signatures 
Wednesday 8 March NOON
(sign and forward the petition at http://womensaynotowar.org)
start at Iraqi Embassy
and finish at the White House
NOON meet: 1801 P streets, NW - Dupont Circle Metro 

Iraqi Women's Briefing and Q&A for Congress 
Thursday 9 March 11 AM
Sponsored by Out of Iraq Caucus (Room TBD)
For more Info about the Iraqi delegation and additional events: 
http://womensaynotowar.org 
or call Allison at 202 487 5112 or email dc at codepinkalert.org 




____________________


FORWARD THIS EMAIL 

#####

If you received this from a friend, you can subscribe at:
http://afterdowningstreet.org

To unsubscribe from AfterDowningStreet Updates, click here:
http://archive.democrats.com/unsub.cfm?email=mb-civic at islandlists.com&fieldname=L16

To unsubscribe from all Democrats.com mailings, click here:
http://archive.democrats.com/unsub.cfm?email=mb-civic at islandlists.com&fieldname=L1
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060304/17cdb22d/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Sat Mar  4 08:33:52 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Sat,  4 Mar 2006 16:33:52 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Iran Softens Tone,
	but Talks With Europeans on Nuclear Program End in Bitterness
Message-ID: <20060304163352.2592524AFA2@lax-gw02.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

INTERNATIONAL / EUROPE | March 4, 2006
Iran Softens Tone, but Talks With Europeans on Nuclear Program End in Bitterness
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
The nuclear talks ended ahead of Monday's meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency's 35-nation board.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/04/international/europe/04iran.html?ex=1142139600&en=42afbe6e1126870b&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060304/d9fa5223/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Sat Mar  4 08:34:52 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Sat,  4 Mar 2006 16:34:52 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Hoping for Best in Home Sales,
	2 Sides Sit Tight
Message-ID: <20060304163452.3C6DD11FA7A@lax-gw07.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

BUSINESS | March 4, 2006
Hoping for Best in Home Sales, 2 Sides Sit Tight
By VIKAS BAJAJ and DAVID LEONHARDT
While many home buyers are convinced that prices will fall, just as many sellers are biding their time until bids improve.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/04/business/04real.html?ex=1142139600&en=4cd017a91b613726&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060304/e892aed0/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Sat Mar  4 08:36:18 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Sat,  4 Mar 2006 16:36:18 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Bush Plan Would Raise Deficit by $1.2
	Trillion, Budget Office Says
Message-ID: <20060304163618.6A9093AE739@lax-gw06.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

WASHINGTON | March 4, 2006
Bush Plan Would Raise Deficit by $1.2 Trillion, Budget Office Says
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
President Bush's budget would increase the federal deficit by $35 billion this year and by more than $1.2 trillion over the next decade, a report said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/04/politics/04budget.html?ex=1142139600&en=1ecde8a02c45f494&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060304/e086ebd5/attachment-0001.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Sat Mar  4 08:41:24 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Sat,  4 Mar 2006 16:41:24 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: A Load of Manure
Message-ID: <20060304164124.A1FCD23726C@lax-gw01.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

OPINION | March 4, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor: A Load of Manure
By NICOLETTE HAHN NIMAN 
Unlike solar or wind, power from manure can create more environmental problems than it solves and is a poor source of energy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/04/opinion/04niman.html?ex=1142139600&en=be9d0a36f920145b&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060304/176b11c7/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Sat Mar  4 08:42:37 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Sat,  4 Mar 2006 16:42:37 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Out of Old Mines' Muck Rises New
	Reclamation Model for West
Message-ID: <20060304164237.4808013B74B@lax-gw04.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

NATIONAL | March 4, 2006
Out of Old Mines' Muck Rises New Reclamation Model for West
By KIRK JOHNSON
In a risky move, Breckenridge, Colo., and Summit County bought a piece of mining land and the responsibility to clean up the waste.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/04/national/04colorado.html?ex=1142139600&en=6ad76f7114edf9f1&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060304/69b05fa2/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Sat Mar  4 08:45:47 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Sat,  4 Mar 2006 16:45:47 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Noodle Prices Rise,
	Along With Chinese Tempers
Message-ID: <20060304164547.82692249E97@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

the noodle cartel


INTERNATIONAL / ASIA PACIFIC | March 4, 2006
Noodle Prices Rise, Along With Chinese Tempers
By JIM YARDLEY
Costlier noodles in Lanzhou, China, have prompted a full-blown controversy, with price fixing by a noodle cartel being alleged.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/04/international/asia/04china.html?ex=1142139600&en=8513c9766643971a&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060304/9f937e8e/attachment.htm 

From jameshburns at webtv.net  Sat Mar  4 10:07:45 2006
From: jameshburns at webtv.net (Jim Burns)
Date: Sat, 4 Mar 2006 13:07:45 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Art Buchwald, Says Goodnight...
In-Reply-To: mb-civic-request@islandlists.com's message of Sat, 04 Mar 2006
	08:51:52 -0800
Message-ID: <15033-4409D771-3442@storefull-3271.bay.webtv.net>


This is a rather exraordinary piece, as it turns out the famed humorist,
has taken himself off dialysis...
 
The Final Days of Art Buchwald: A Visit 
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002115616 


From michael at michaelbutler.com  Sat Mar  4 12:10:33 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Sat, 04 Mar 2006 12:10:33 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Free Harvard! (Or Not) By JOHN TIERNEY
Message-ID: <C02F3439.29B30%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 4, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Free Harvard! (Or Not)
By JOHN TIERNEY

After the faculty's coup d'etat at Harvard, I asked some contrarian
academics if there was any way to wrest control of universities from the
faculty. I started off with one possible reform: how about eliminating
tenure for professors?

Forget it, most of the academics said, and not entirely because they liked
that perk of their jobs. One of them pointed to a practical problem: "As
long as the classics department has the right to choose the next generation
of professors, you'd better give them tenure, because otherwise they'll
never choose someone better than they are."

He wasn't arguing that professors are particularly petty, just that they
work in a world with peculiar incentives. Authority is so diffuse that no
one's accountable. Lawrence Summers was ostensibly in charge of Harvard, but
he had little power to fire or hire anyone. The candidates are picked after
a vote in each department. Summers could veto new hires and try to push
departments in new directions ? but once the faculty got annoyed, he was out
of a job.

If newspapers were run like this, by committees of tenured journalists
unconcerned with circulation and ad revenue, we wouldn't spend much time
trying to improve the weather map or the news summaries or movie listings.
We'd all be too busy writing 27-part series to be submitted for peer review
by the Pulitzer board.

After a while, as we hired more reporters like ourselves, we'd be surprised
when outsiders complained. We'd be as genuinely puzzled as the Harvard
professors who wrote to me after I mentioned an issue that arose under
Summers: the complaint that the history department didn't offer a
traditional survey course on the American Revolution and the writing of the
Constitution.

The letter writers defended the history department as being more
student-friendly than other departments, which may well be true. They noted,
correctly, that there are courses in various departments and programs
dealing with the American Revolution and the Constitution. But those are not
the nuts-and-bolts survey courses traditionalists want.

Humanities survey courses are out of favor now, partly because they're too
concerned with dead white males, and partly because professors can save time
by teaching their own specialized work. The system rewards professors for
not focusing on teaching. The incentive is to devote yourself to research ?
at least until you get tenure, at which point even the research becomes
optional.

One way to fix this would be to give university presidents the hiring and
firing authority that most executives have. That way, they could insist on
more attention to teaching. They could require tenured professors to keep
doing productive research. They could hire a more intellectually and
politically diverse faculty.

They could do all those things ? but would they? University presidents don't
face the same market pressures as C.E.O.'s. If it's a school with a good
reputation, the president can count on income from tuition, alumni gifts and
the endowment. If it's a state school, the president can also count on
public money.

Without outside pressure, the president's chief concern would be the same as
it today: to avoid any unpleasant public battles with the faculty. As the
incumbents with the most direct stake in the institution, they'd still be a
power. Roger Meiners, the co-author of "Faulty Towers," a critique of
academia, doesn't think that eliminating tenure would make much difference
in how university administrators behaved.

"Any dean who would fire anyone would have a reputation as a nasty person
and could never advance in academic administration," said Meiners, an
economist at the University of Texas. "You get ahead by massaging the system
as it is, not attempting so-called radical reform by dumping academic
dolts."

In some cases, a brave board might stand by a reformer like Summers. But
most academics I talked to ? the contrarians who supported Summers ? figure
that giving university presidents more power would only make things worse.

"Abolishing tenure could just turn the decision making over to deans who
come out of today's orthodox academic world," said Fred Siegel, a historian
at Cooper Union. "That would mean that the few remaining non-leftists would
get pushed out."

So is there any way to change academia? "The Achilles heel of academics is
their status anxiety," Siegel said. "The only way to attack them is with
mockery."

Maureen Dowd is on a book leave.

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From michael at michaelbutler.com  Sat Mar  4 12:11:56 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Sat, 04 Mar 2006 12:11:56 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Lessons From Another Insurgency By ANIT MUKHERJEE
Message-ID: <C02F348C.29B31%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 4, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
Lessons From Another Insurgency
By ANIT MUKHERJEE

Washington

DURING his trip to South Asia, President Bush has done his best to whistle
past the diplomatic graveyard of Kashmir, issuing only bland encouragements
to the leaders of India and Pakistan to resolve the status of the disputed
territory. That's a shame, because instead of ignoring Kashmir, Mr. Bush and
his administration should be studying it as a case study in dealing with an
insurgency.

"I joined the insurgents only because of you," the young Kashmiri man told
me, sobbing, "because of the way you humiliated me, they way you tormented
me. To regain my honor, I picked up the gun." It was one of my more shocking
encounters during my two and a half years of counterinsurgency duties as an
Indian Army officer in Kashmir. Shocking, because it was the antithesis of
everything I had worked toward. The self-awareness that inevitably dawns on
all soldiers in a combat zone came upon me: I was not a part of the
solution; I was the problem, or at least part of the problem.

I had regularly summoned that young man to my post to ask him about
militants in my area of responsibility. I singled him out because other
villagers had told me that he was in the know. As I subsequently discovered,
this information was false, fed to me by the villagers because this boy,
from the wrong side of the tracks, had fallen in love with a rich man's
daughter. Later, upon his word that he would have nothing more to do with
the insurgents, I let him go, promising, in turn, to leave him alone. I
never saw that young man again and hope that he is safe, wherever he may be.

During the first year of my counterinsurgency duties, I believe I created
more insurgents than I, for want of a better word, eliminated. This was not
only because of inexperience, but also because I lacked fundamental
knowledge of the terrain, the people, the culture. I also didn't know how to
sift through local intelligence effectively.

As a result, I mostly drew on tips and informants who, with hindsight, were
mostly unreliable. The motives for giving me this information were usually
property and land disputes, family feuds, tribal and ethnic conflicts and
other causes unrelated to the insurgency. Thus, a combination of my own
na?vet? and enthusiasm, not to mention pressure from senior commanders to
deliver results, resulted in actions that alienated the locals and,
inadvertently, helped the insurgency.

It was only after a year of combat operations that I was able to build up my
own intelligence network and gained the experience to be effective. Although
conventional wisdom says that the tours of duty should be short, in my
experience militaries fighting insurgencies should instead keep junior
officers in the field for as long as they can. Successful counterinsurgency
campaigns have usually been small-team operations led by junior officers
with intimate knowledge of their areas of responsibility.

After the first year of conducting operations with questionable results, my
unit made a significant shift toward people-friendly operations. That meant
taking off shoes before searching mosques, deciding not to search old men,
women and children and even letting insurgents escape rather than risking a
firefight in a built-up area.

Over time, our hard work paid off. Tips became more frequent and reliable.
As we gained the trust of the locals, we succeeded in preventing recruitment
while eliminating insurgents.

As the insurgents in Kashmir lacked the ability to mount conventional
attacks, their weapon of choice was the improvised explosive device.
Eventually, we largely neutralized this threat by constantly changing our
tactics. By being unpredictable and undertaking intensive offensive
operations, admittedly a function of abundant manpower, we seized the
initiative and became the hunter rather than the hunted.

One of the few, and rarely noticed, successes of Indian security agencies
has been their ability to subvert an insurgency. For example, in Kashmir,
Indian intelligence services were able to buy out an entire strand of
insurgents in the mid-1990's and create local counterinsurgents called
Ikhwanis. For a time, they were extremely effective, and were able to wipe
out the local insurgency before the foreign-born jihadis poured into the
valley. By the time we deployed in the valley in 1999, the Ikhwanis
themselves had become corrupted and were being phased out. But that
experience taught us how critical it was to co-opt the locals into our
counterinsurgency strategy.

Undoubtedly, the Indian Army has learned a lot after 16 years in Kashmir,
but its experience raises the question ? can a military learn without
bleeding? The sad answer is no.

Almost four years have passed since I left the Kashmir Valley. Although the
conflict gets less public attention, civilians, soldiers and militants still
die every day. Despite the seemingly endless daily toll, a few months ago
the commander of India's Northern Army at the time, Lt. Gen. Hari Prasad,
had the confidence to declare that "normalcy is round the corner."

True, the level of violence in Kashmir has decreased and this augurs well
for peace in the valley. But the Indian Army has not, and can never, quash
the insurgency. On the contrary, one of the first lessons taught to all
soldiers deploying in Kashmir is that an insurgency can never be militarily
defeated. It can only be managed until a political solution is found ? a
lesson that the Bush administration would do well to remember.

Anit Mukherjee, a doctoral candidate at the School of Advanced International
Studies at Johns Hopkins, served in the Indian Army for nine years.

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Sat Mar  4 12:15:55 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (harry.sifton at sympatico.ca)
Date: Sat, 04 Mar 2006 20:15:55 GMT
Subject: [Mb-civic] Guardian Unlimited: Oops, we helped ruin the planet
Message-ID: <20060304201555.973AC96CF4@mussel.gul3.gnl>

Harry spotted this on the Guardian Unlimited site and thought you should see it.

-------
Note from Harry:

Green traveling
-------

To see this story with its related links on the Guardian Unlimited site, go to http://www.guardian.co.uk

Oops, we helped ruin the planet
&#183; Guide owners join to discourage 'casual flying' &#183; Books to carry warnings on global warming
Patrick Barkham
Saturday March 04 2006
The Guardian


They are the gurus of globetrotting, the men who built publishing empires from their adventures and wrote guidebooks encouraging millions to venture further afield than ever before. Now the founders of the Rough Guides and Lonely Planet books, troubled that they have helped spread a casual attitude towards air travel that could trigger devastating climate change, are uniting to urge tourists to fly less.

Mark Ellingham, the founder of Rough Guides, and Tony Wheeler, who created Lonely Planet after taking the hippie trail across Asia, want fellow travellers to "fly less and stay longer" and donate money to carbon offsetting schemes. From next month, warnings will appear in all new editions of their guides about the impact of flying on global warming alongside alternative ways of reaching certain destinations.

But the founders of the UK's two biggest travel publishers are refusing to give up flying and admit they are not paragons of environmental virtue.

Asked if he felt guilty about the hundreds of flights he has undertaken, Mr Wheeler - visiting London on a business trip from Australia - said: "Absolutely. I'm the worst example of it. I'm not going to stop but every time I jump on a plane I think, 'oh no, I'm doing it again.'"

Lonely Planet began when Mr Wheeler and his wife, Maureen, travelled - mostly by bus and rickshaw - from London to Australia in the 1970s, cobbling together a guide on their way. Six million copies of more than 600 different LP guidebooks are sold each year, inspiring backpackers and middle-class tourists to take long-haul flights to exotic destinations.

Both men have also pledged to donate money to the charity Climate Care to offset the carbon emissions of their 650 staff who fly around the world every year compiling and updating their travel books. In Rough Guides, the warnings will come under the "getting there" sections of all new editions and will emphasise alternative forms of travel. The guide to Paris, for example, will recommend taking the train.

The men accept it is less easy to take an alternative route to Peru, but instead preach that travellers should spend longer in one place and cut out frivolous weekend hops. A Rough Guide to Climate Change will join more than 200 Rough Guide travel books later this year.

Mr Ellingham, who produced the first Rough Guide with student friends in 1982 after travelling round Greece, recognised their advice could look hypocritical. "Like so much in life, it's a contradiction but we are uniquely well-placed to address travellers," he said. "We've got a responsibility to make people aware of the information about climate change so people have a less casual attitude towards flying. We want to show that two companies who are direct rivals feel this is an issue important enough to coordinate and cooperate on."

While air travel is predicted to increase threefold in the next 20 years, Mr Ellingham denied his company had encouraged the surge in flying. "I'm not sure we could or should claim any responsibility for increasing travel or tourism. Were Rough Guides and the Lonely Planet to disappear overnight would people travel less? Not really."

The guides will not tell travellers how many holiday flights each year are acceptable. "It's even more hypocritical to try to preach to people and say you should only fly this much," said Mr Ellingham.

The Rough Guides founder said he had reduced his air travel and would personally support a moratorium on airport expansion, as well as increased departure and arrival taxes. "I wouldn't promote myself as a paragon of virtue in that but I'm certainly cutting down on casual travel. If someone invited me to a stag party in Prague I wouldn't go - what's wrong with Bournemouth?"

Both men recognised that carbon offsetting schemes were not a perfect solution but argued that they demonstrated people were increasingly aware of the pollution they were causing and were "better than doing nothing".

They do not mind if their advice discourages people from travelling and hits sales of their books. "I'd rather customers bought one book today than no books at all tomorrow," said Mr Wheeler. "If we do real damage to our planet we're not going to be able to travel anywhere. We want our kids to be able to travel as well."

How to travel guilt-free

China

The Rough Guide says: "Xi Hu - the lake around which Hangzhou curls - and its shores still offer wonderful Chinese vistas of trees, hills, flowers... and pagodas".

Cost of return flight in emissions: 1.8 tonnes of CO2

Cost of offsetting it: &pound;15.80 to tree-planting scheme in the UK.

India

The Lonely Planet says: "Jaipur - Rajasthan's dusky-and-dirty pink capital twinkles and clatters under the sunlight".

Cost of return flight in emissions: 1.5 tonnes of CO2

Cost of offsetting it: &pound;16.50 to an eco-fuelled boiler scheme in Scotland.

Thailand

The Lonely Planet says: "Ko Tao is this century's diamond in the rough ... the local folk are more involved in fishing and growing coconuts than tourism."

Cost of return flight in emissions: 2.1 tonnes of CO2

Cost of offsetting it: &pound;21.30 to a solar-panel scheme in Sri Lanka.

Puerto Rico 

The Lonely Planet says: "San Juan... is where the island's heartbeat is - a place of great economic opportunity, beautiful, gleaming casinos and hotels, multiple art galleries, museums and a sophisticated nightlife."

Cost of return flight in emissions: 1.5 tonnes of CO2

Cost of offsetting it: &pound;15.90 towards energy-saving projects in the Carribean.

Morocco 

The Lonely Planet says: "The name Marrakech conjures up images of medieval bazaars, labyrinths filled with exotic smells and the cries of hawkers, sunlit squares hidden from the outside world and a musical accompaniment to a way of life little changed in centuries."

Cost of return flight in emissions: 0.8 tonnes of CO2

Cost of offsetting it: &pound;9.70 towards forestry in Uganda.

Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited


From michael at intrafi.com  Sat Mar  4 12:17:10 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Sat, 04 Mar 2006 20:17:10 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] BBC E-mail: Hamas hails 'breakthrough' visit
Message-ID: <20060304_201710_058402.michael@intrafi.com>

Michael Butler saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you
should see it.



** Hamas hails 'breakthrough' visit **
Members of Palestinian militant group Hamas say their visit to Moscow counters US attempts to isolate it.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/4773594.stm >


** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all
in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/dailyemail/ >


** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have?been verified.

If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm


From nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca  Sat Mar  4 12:34:01 2006
From: nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca (CBC News Online)
Date: Sat, 4 Mar 2006 20:34:01 UT
Subject: [Mb-civic] CBC News - U.S. STREAMS CONTAMINATED WITH PESTICIDES:
	REPORT
Message-ID: <20060304203401.B61EF32F85@web05.nm.cbc.ca>

An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Url: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060304/2de8083c/attachment.diff 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Sat Mar  4 12:45:41 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Sat, 4 Mar 2006 15:45:41 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Antarctic Ice "the cold truth"
Message-ID: <000801c63fcc$9d5501b0$0a3fe440@Harold>

Antarctic Ice the cold truth - Science magazine

http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=030306H

Later H
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060304/c4fb5154/attachment.htm 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Sat Mar  4 15:58:52 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Sat, 4 Mar 2006 18:58:52 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Blair under fire for evoking God in Iraq war decision
Message-ID: <000801c63fe7$9a92b920$0b27e440@Harold>

     Blair under fire for evoking God in Iraq war decision 



            LONDON (AFP) - Tony Blair triggered strong reactions from parents of soldiers killed in Iraq and the political opposition, after the British prime minister evoked God in his decision to go to war. 

            Details emerged Friday of Blair's interview on an ITV1 television talk show where he said God and history would judge his action in joining the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003. 

            "That decision has to be taken and has to be lived with, and in the end there is a judgment that -- well, I think if you have faith about these things then you realise that judgment is made by other people," Blair said in the interview with host Michael Parkinson which will air Saturday night. 

            Pressed to clarify what he meant, Blair, a devout Christian, replied: "If you believe in God, it's made by God as well." 


            The words did not sit well with Rose Gentle, whose son Gordon was killed in Basra in 2004, one of the 103 British soldiers to date to have lost their lives in the Iraqi conflict. 


            "How can he say he is a Christian?" said Gentle, a campaigner with Military Families Against the War. 


            "A good Christian wouldn't be for this war. I'm actually quite disgusted by the comments." 


            Reg Keys, the father of a dead soldier, accused Blair of "using God as a get-out for total strategic failure and I find it abhorrent." 


            His son Lance Corporal Tom Keys was one of six Royal Military policemen killed by an Iraqi mob in Majar al-Kabir in June 2003. 


            Keys, who stood against the prime minister in the last general election on an anti-war ticket, said Blair's remarks reminded him of US President George W. Bush who was quoted as saying last year that God told him to invade Iraq and Afghanistan. 


            "God and religion have nothing to do with this war," Keys said. 


            That view was echoed by the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, Britain's second opposition party, who said "going to war isn't just an act of faith." 


            It requires legal analysis and a close look at the consequences, and Blair's "prospectus for military action was flawed," Menzies Campbell said. 


            Other Liberal Democrats agreed that God should not be part of the equation. 


            "It is a bizarre and shocking revelation that the prime minister claims to have been guided by the supernatural in this matter, especially given the particular religious sensitivities in the Middle East," said Evan Harris, a Liberal Democrat member of parliament from the Oxford area, who is an honorary associate of the National Secular Society. 


            "We don't want Bush or Khomeini-type fundamentalism in our politics," he added. 


            Blair is seen by some as the most religious British premier since William Gladstone (1809-1898), who gave up his vocation as a pastor to enter politics. 


            Blair's handlers, including his former communications chief Alastair Campbell, have reportedly tried to steer Blair away from references to God, including reputedly removing the phrase "God bless you" from Blair's television address on the outbreak of the Iraq war. 


            During last year's election campaign, BBC interviewer Jeremy Paxman asked Blair if he prayed with Bush. 


            Looking decidedly uncomfortable, Blair replied: "No, Jeremy, we don't pray together." 


            But questions of religion surround Blair. There is speculation he plans to convert from High Church Anglican to Catholicism after leaving office. 


            Blair's wife Cherie is a strong Catholic and he regularly attends Mass with her and their children at the prime minister's country residence in Chequers. 


            The Catholic priest of that parish, Timothy Russ, has revealed that Blair asked for advice on moving between the churches. 


            But Blair says he has no plans to convert and only attends Catholic services so the family can worship together. 


            ? Copyright Agence France-Presse. All rights reserved. The information contained In this news report may not be published, broadcast or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of Agence France-Presse 
     
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060304/5e6fc0fe/attachment.htm 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Sat Mar  4 16:10:08 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Sat, 4 Mar 2006 19:10:08 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Women's rights in Pakistan
Message-ID: <000a01c63fe9$2d8fb380$0b27e440@Harold>

Land, Gold and Women !

Article by Terrence McKenna, (CBC correspondent)

Pakistan

http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/pakistan/mckenna_pakistan.html

Worth reading,

H
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060304/7cdfeb13/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Sat Mar  4 16:44:57 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Sun,  5 Mar 2006 00:44:57 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: 3 Israelis Set Off Fireworks Inside Church
Message-ID: <20060305004457.F11909FCE3@lax-gw05.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

While it is obviously stupid to be setting off fireworks in a church, even setting aside the bodily damage they might cause, I am actually far more surprised - even concerned - that the reaction of a church full of CHRISTIANS would be to physically harm these people, and threaten to lynch them. How sadly ironic that these people are in a house of worship, worshipping Jesus, and instead of showing Christ-like attributes, they resort to anger, violence and threats of death.


INTERNATIONAL / MIDDLE EAST | March 4, 2006
3 Israelis Set Off Fireworks Inside Church
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
Three Israelis caused panic when they set off loud fireworks during a service at a church in in Nazareth.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/04/international/middleeast/04firecracker.html?ex=1142139600&en=44d52df6236f3b37&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060305/98bdec29/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Sat Mar  4 16:45:36 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Sun,  5 Mar 2006 00:45:36 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: U.S. Isolated in Opposing Plan for a New
	U.N. Rights Council
Message-ID: <20060305004536.2F353249F4B@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

No surprise here...


INTERNATIONAL | March 4, 2006
U.S. Isolated in Opposing Plan for a New U.N. Rights Council
By WARREN HOGE
The United States' pledge to vote against adoption of a proposal to replace the discredited Human Rights Commission has thrown the United Nations into turmoil.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/04/international/04nations.html?ex=1142139600&en=0a8aac29f8a083e5&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060305/d1d99c2e/attachment-0001.htm 

From nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca  Sat Mar  4 18:22:45 2006
From: nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca (CBC News Online)
Date: Sun, 5 Mar 2006 02:22:45 UT
Subject: [Mb-civic] CBC News - FRANCE GIVES NORMAN MAILER ITS HIGHEST HONOUR
Message-ID: <20060305022245.EE8643EA7B@web02.nm.cbc.ca>

An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Url: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060305/1e4ddccf/attachment.diff 

From barbarasiomos38 at msn.com  Sat Mar  4 23:08:16 2006
From: barbarasiomos38 at msn.com (Barbara Siomos)
Date: Sun, 05 Mar 2006 07:08:16 GMT
Subject: [Mb-civic] Palden Gyatso on Hunger Strike at Turin Olympics
Message-ID: <BAY114-DAV16D6B54267C27ECA2A1E83ABE80@phx.gbl>




-----Original Message-----
From: Lhadon Tethong
Sent: Sat, 25 Feb 2006 10:47:57 -0800
To: sft-region1 at lists.riseup.net, sft-region2 at lists.riseup.net, sft-region3 at lists.riseup.net, sft-region4 at lists.riseup.net, sft-region5 at lists.riseup.net, sft-region6 at lists.riseup.net, sft-region7 at lists.riseup.net, sft-region8 at lists.riseup.net
Subject: [sft-sector2] Palden Gyatso on Hunger Strike at Turin Olympics

Palden Gyatso on Hunger Strike at Turin Olympics

Palden Gyatso, one of Tibets longest-serving political prisoners, and two 
young Tibetan men are on a hunger strike in a tent outside the Turin Olympic 
Village in Italy, to call attention to Chinas oppression in Tibet. Earlier 
today the hunger strikers were met by a delegation sent by the International 
Olympic Committee who assured them they would raise the issue of human 
rights in Tibet during the closing press conference on Sunday. This action, 
organized by the Tibetan Youth Congress and Tibet Support Groups, has 
received significant media and public attention in Italy but also needs 
international support.

Palden Gyatso, who is in his mid-seventies, was a young monk when he was 
first arrested and imprisoned for peaceful, pro-independence protests in 
Lhasa. After 33 years of imprisonment, beatings, interrogation and solitary 
confinement, the Chinese authorities released him in response to immense 
pressure from other governments and Tibet supporters in the global 
community. After escaping to exile, he traveled the world, spreading the 
truth about Chinas occupation of Tibet and oppression of Tibetans. With his 
raw honesty and clear memory, he has inspired compassion, courage and a 
burning concern for Tibet in countless students and people in the West. Many 
of us in the Tibet movement today can trace our involvement to the time when 
we first heard Palden speak or read his story - "Autobiography of a Tibetan 
Monk," also published as "Fire Under the Snow."

Send a message of support to Palden Gyatso, Sonam Wangdu and Tamding 
Choephel and read more about the hunger strike here: 
http://www.tibetanyouthcongress.org

Send an email to the IOC and Chinese government calling for change in Tibet: 
http://2008-freetibet.org/

Read more about Palden's life: http://www.paldengyatso.com/

-- Lhadon Tethong
Executive Director
Students for a Free Tibet
602 East 14th Street, 2 Floor, New York, NY 10009 USA
Tel: (212) 358-0071 / Fax: (212) 358-1771

Learn more about SFT: http://www.studentsforafreetibet.org
Check out SFT's blog: http://tibetwillbefree.blogspot.com
************************************************
Students for a Free Tibet (SFT) works in solidarity with the Tibetan people in their struggle for freedom and independence. We are a chapter-based network of young people and activists around the world. Through education, grassroots organizing, and non-violent direct action, we campaign for Tibetans fundamental right to political freedom. Our role is to empower and train youth as leaders in the worldwide movement for social justice. 


From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Sun Mar  5 05:42:38 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Sun, 5 Mar 2006 08:42:38 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] White House trains efforts on Media leaks
Message-ID: <000801c6405a$af191a10$8f27e440@Harold>

The White House wants to punish those who get the truth out. 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/04/AR2006030400867_pf.html

I have the vision of a Reporter, a CIA or a NSA employee with their finger in a Dam of information wanting to get out, but are afraid to be called traitor!

Later H
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060305/023ffeed/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sun Mar  5 05:56:56 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sun, 05 Mar 2006 08:56:56 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Israeli Arabs See Lesson in Hamas Victory - Washington
	Post
Message-ID: <440AEE28.1090209@comcast.net>

Israeli Arabs See Lesson in Hamas Victory

By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, March 5, 2006; A17

KFAR QASEM, Israel -- Ibrahim Sarsur, the former mayor of this Arab city 
with a view of Tel Aviv's skyline, stepped onto the plywood platform 
soon after the evening call to prayer. Over his shoulder, a green banner 
warned, "Voting for the Zionist parties is supporting those who spilled 
our blood, robbed our land and violated our holy places."

"If you give your vote to them, a Jew will enter and an Arab will not," 
Sarsur shouted to the hundreds of men filling rows of white plastic 
chairs in a smoke-filled community center. "Islam has opened our hearts 
-- this is our message.

"Why do you have to vote?" he asked, then answered his question: "For 
this program that connects this life with the next life."

With national elections less than a month away, parties that represent 
Israel's Arab population are struggling to maintain their small foothold 
in the Israeli parliament. As the parties grapple with new legal 
barriers, fresh competition and a frustrated constituency, at least one 
coalition is drawing a lesson from Hamas's recent victory in the 
Palestinian territories: The solution is Islam.

The United Arab List has adopted an explicitly Islamic message in the 
hopes of inspiring thousands of Arab voters who have boycotted past 
elections. Using Koranic verse and showcasing religious candidates, 
Sarsur's party, called the Islamic Movement, and its secular-nationalist 
partner are seeking to unite Israel's religious Islamic parties, who 
like their more radical Palestinian counterparts have long disagreed 
over whether to take part in elections that, in effect, presume the 
legitimacy of the Jewish state.

By winning a parliamentary majority in its first national elections, 
Hamas has validated for many members of Israel's religious Islamic 
parties the virtue of participating in mainstream politics. But the 
Islamic turn here has alarmed a coalition of Zionist parties, which 
narrowly failed last week to have the United Arab List disqualified from 
the March 28 elections for advocating the creation of an Islamic state 
in Israel.

"Hamas gave the Islamists here an example to follow," said Jafar Farah, 
director of the Musawa Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel. "The 
Arab parties will never win a majority here, so their position is much 
different. But Hamas's participation has affected positively the 
discussion within Israel's Islamic movement."

In a recent interview at his home, festooned with ribbons celebrating 
his second pilgrimage to Mecca this year, Sarsur said the success of his 
candidate list depends on his ability to get Islamic voters to the 
polls. Only 62 percent of eligible Arabs cast ballots in Israel's 2003 
elections, their lowest turnout in a parliamentary election. The goal 
this time, Sarsur said, is to increase turnout by 10 percentage points. 
By his estimate, that would translate into a two-seat gain for the Arab 
parties in the Knesset, Israel's parliament.

"We are concentrating on the religious elements, using religious 
terminology, in trying to appeal to the hearts of those who have been 
boycotting," Sarsur said. "We are trying to persuade all Islamists that 
having us in the Knesset is of greater value than a boycott."

The Arab families who remained in their villages during Israel's 1948 
war of independence account for roughly 20 percent of the Jewish state's 
6 million people. Though citizens of Israel, they face discrimination in 
immigration policy, land ownership, education and public employment, 
either explicitly or in the application of the law.

They are also viewed with suspicion by Israel's security services, who 
fear they might be a Palestinian fifth column concentrated in a strip of 
towns running north from here along the 1949 armistice line into the 
Galilee region. When Arabs in these towns erupted in protest at the 
start of the most recent Palestinian uprising in the fall of 2000, 13 
were killed as Israeli security forces put down the riots.

Now the victory of Hamas, designated a terrorist organization by the 
United States and the European Union, has revived fears over the 
intentions of Israel's Arab citizens. Last month, the head of Israel's 
Shin Bet security service, Yuval Diskin, warned that "a Hamas government 
along the borders of Israel could have an impact on the Israeli Arabs 
and the Islamic organizations in Israel. This could be a problem."

"When we hear people at the top political levels saying we are a threat, 
it can only make us very anxious," said Sarsur, who heads the Islamic 
Movement's southern branch. "The Judaization of the state threatens us. 
But we want to be Israelis in the civil sense of the word."

The Arab parties are a collection of religious Islamic parties and 
communist and secular-nationalist movements, and together they hold 
eight of the Israeli parliament's 120 seats. They exert influence on the 
margins, but sometimes in important ways. Arab support for Israel's 
withdrawal from the Gaza Strip last year helped ensure its passage in 
parliament.

Since the 2003 election, however, the threshold to qualify for a Knesset 
seat has been raised from 1.5 percent to 2 percent of the popular vote, 
raising doubts that the three Arab groups in parliament will keep their 
spots. Arab leaders say the Kadima party, the centrist group formed late 
last year by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, is likely to peel off some 
Arab voters now that Sharon is unable to run because of a debilitating 
stroke. And the Labor Party will enter elections behind Amir Peretz, 
whose long tenure running Israel's labor federation, a bastion of Arab 
workers, has made him a popular candidate to many of them.

"The Arab political situation is very, very bad," said Asad Ghanem, head 
of the government department at the University of Haifa. The Arab 
parties' candidates, he said, "are seen by many in the Arab public as 
opportunistic, as politicians who only want to hang onto their seats. It 
may be that the Arab public will punish these Arab parties."

Like Hamas and the smaller radical group Islamic Jihad in the 
Palestinian territories, which lie about a mile east of this city's 
palm-lined medians and green-domed mosque, Israel's Islamic movement is 
split over the best approach toward a political system endorsed by Israel.

The movement's northern branch, led by Raed Salah, has urged followers 
to boycott Israeli elections. The longtime mayor of Um el-Fahem, Salah 
has been in and out of Israeli jails for the past two decades for having 
contacts with anti-Israel groups, including Hamas.

But Salah recently softened his message. Following the Islamic 
Movement's convention a few days after Hamas's Jan. 25 victory, the 
northern branch announced that its "followers have the right to take a 
position in the Knesset elections that is in accordance with our 
ideological understanding and our national feelings."

The statement could provide a boost to Sarsur's southern branch, whose 
base is this former farming community of 20,000 that now mostly provides 
cheap labor to the service industries on Israel's coastal plain.

Sarsur, a slight, garrulous man with a tidy gray beard, was born here in 
1959 -- three years after Israeli border police killed 49 villagers for 
violating curfew at a time when the Arab population of Israel was living 
under military government. A dozen of his relatives were among the dead.

He studied English literature at Bar-Ilan University and hoped to teach 
in a high school. But he gave up after the Education Ministry rejected 
his application for nine years. He ran successfully for mayor and is now 
a civil engineer.

Campaign literature emphasizes Sarsur's title as "sheik," a religious 
leader. And three of the top five candidates on the list -- which 
includes the nationalist Arab Renewal Party -- are with a religious 
Islamic party.

"We have strong relations with Hamas in Gaza," Sarsur said. "And we can 
play a very constructive role in this process. We know the mentality of 
the Islamists in the occupied territories. And we know the mentality of 
the Israelis."

At twilight, Kamal Ibder, his bushy beard streaked with a white stripe, 
draped party banners around a traffic circle at the entrance to town. 
"Our power," the signs declared, "is in our unity."

When Ibder is not driving a forklift at a Coca-Cola plant near Tel Aviv, 
he is a foot soldier for the Islamic Movement. He ascribes what he 
believes is its growing support to the same kind of grass-roots social 
work that made Hamas popular among Palestinians.

"When it comes to the Islamic Movement, we're talking about a party that 
takes care of the needy, as opposed to the others who only care when the 
elections come," said Ibder, 43. "I am very optimistic."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/04/AR2006030401057.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060305/d5186533/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sun Mar  5 06:01:24 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sun, 05 Mar 2006 09:01:24 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Bush Offers Praise To Pakistani Leader - Washington Post
Message-ID: <440AEF34.3070700@comcast.net>

Bush Offers Praise To Pakistani Leader
Government Beats, Arrests Protesters In Advance of President's Appearance

By Jim Vandehei and John Lancaster
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, March 5, 2006; A01

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, March 4 -- President Bush on Saturday praised 
Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, for his efforts in hunting 
down al-Qaeda operatives inside his country and his long-term commitment 
to democracy during a day-long visit to the capital.

"In the long run, he understands that extremists can be defeated by 
freedom and democracy and prosperity and better education," Bush said of 
Musharraf in a joint news conference at the presidential palace.

Bush's visit to Pakistan came at the end of a four-day trip to South 
Asia, which included a stop in Afghanistan and two days in India, where 
he announced an unprecedented agreement that would provide U.S. nuclear 
power assistance to India while allowing the country to increase 
production of nuclear weapons.

Bush's visit to Pakistan, his first to the country, was also symbolic. 
Musharraf is a key ally in the administration's global fight against 
terrorism, and hundreds of al-Qaeda members have been killed or captured 
here. Yet some U.S. officials have questioned his desire to aggressively 
battle militants and his record on democratic reforms.

Only hours before Bush's appearance, the Pakistani government cracked 
down on political leaders and others planning to protest the president's 
visit. In the city of Rawalpindi, about 10 miles from Islamabad, police 
arrested about 20 members of Tehrik-e-Insaaf, a small political party, 
as they staged a noisy but peaceful demonstration, beating some of them 
with bamboo sticks as foreign journalists and camera crews recorded the 
scene.

The protest was supposed to have been much larger, but early Saturday 
morning, police detained the leader of the party, former international 
cricket star Imran Khan, and placed him under house arrest, along with 
about a dozen other party officials, according to a party leader who 
remained at large and declined to be named for fear that he could be 
arrested. Later Saturday morning, blue-uniformed police blocked the 
driveway to Khan's palatial hilltop home near Islamabad and barred 
reporters from entering.

Reached by telephone, Khan speculated that Musharraf had ordered his 
detention because "he's just petrified that there could be a lot of 
people" at the protest. Khan added, "These double standards have to be 
exposed. . . . To call this democracy is a joke."

Bush and Musharraf did not mention the crackdown in their only joint 
appearance in the heavily fortified capital. The city's streets were 
cleared as Pakistan and the United States took extraordinary security 
measures to protect Bush and his entourage two days after a U.S. 
diplomat was killed by a suicide bomber in Karachi.

At a news conference Saturday afternoon, Pakistan's foreign minister, 
Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri, said the detentions of Khan and other protest 
organizers were necessary to prevent the kind of disturbances that led 
to several deaths in Pakistan during the recent protests over cartoon 
depictions of the prophet Muhammad. "The idea is to prevent a breakdown 
of law and order," he said, asserting that such detentions normally last 
for less than a day.

The scene in Pakistan was even more tense than usual as a result of 
waves of violent protests, often directed at the United States, over the 
cartoons, which were initially published in a Danish newspaper. 
Musharraf, whom many Pakistanis consider too cozy with Bush and the 
West, began the news conference by condemning the cartoons and saying 
that they are not justified by the principle of freedom of press. Bush 
has defended the right of the press to print the cartoons, despite their 
offensive nature. He did not comment on the controversy Saturday.

Bush offered guarded praise of Musharraf's democratic moves since 
seizing power in a bloodless coup in 1999. He did not mention 
Musharraf's refusal to step down as army chief, which the Pakistani 
leader had promised to do as part of a democratization process. Nor did 
Bush echo the concerns of some inside the administration that Musharraf 
continues to stifle religious and other freedoms. He described a 
democratic Pakistan as more of a hope than reality.

But Musharraf offered an extraordinary defense. "Unfortunately, we are 
accused a lot on not moving forward on democracy," he said. "We have 
empowered the people of Pakistan now -- they were never empowered before 
-- by introducing a local government system where we have given the 
destiny of their areas for development, for welfare, for progress in 
their own hands through financial, political and administrative 
involvement." Bush said the two leaders strategized on how to make the 
next round of national elections more open and fair.

Unprovoked, Musharraf defended his refusal to relinquish his military 
position, which he had promised to do by 2004. He said he would revisit 
the issue next year.

U.S. officials said Bush is more concerned about Musharraf's help in 
hunting down terrorists than he is about Pakistan's mixed record on 
democracy, in large part because Bush realizes democracy is new to the 
region and will take time to blossom.

Bush said he was pleased with Pakistan's commitment to finding Osama bin 
Laden, who is believed to be hiding along the Pakistani-Afghan border, 
and other terrorists.

"Part of my mission today was to determine whether or not the president 
is as committed as he has been in the past to bringing these terrorists 
to justice, and he is," Bush said. "He understands the stakes, he 
understands the responsibility, and he understands the need to make sure 
our strategy is able to defeat the enemy."

Musharraf said "if there are slippages" in Pakistan's pursuit of 
terrorists, they have been caused by "implementation," not intentions.

Still, Bush made clear that Pakistan, while an important ally, has not 
earned his trust in the way that neighboring India has.

"I explained that Pakistan and India are different countries with 
different needs and different histories," Bush said. "So, as we proceed 
forward, our strategy will take in effect those well-known differences." 
He did, however, pledged to continue U.S. economic assistance.

Bush spent the entire day here, starting with a welcoming ceremony and 
ending with a state dinner. In the afternoon, Bush, a former owner of 
the Texas Rangers, took a swing at cricket, hitting a few balls and 
bowling -- akin to pitching -- with about two dozen children. He 
presented them with autographed baseballs.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/04/AR2006030400467.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060305/55c2dd42/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sun Mar  5 06:04:32 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sun, 05 Mar 2006 09:04:32 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Life After Roe - William Saletan - Washington Post
	Sunday Outlook
Message-ID: <440AEFF0.7050504@comcast.net>

Life After Roe

By William Saletan
Sunday, March 5, 2006; B01

For the first time in 14 years, legal abortion in the United States is 
in serious jeopardy.

In recent days, the shape of this assault has become clear. First, on 
the morning of Justice Samuel Alito Jr.'s debut, the Supreme Court 
announced that it would review the constitutionality of the 
Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, setting up what anti-abortion activists 
hope will be the beginning of the end of Roe v. Wade . The next day, 
South Dakota lawmakers passed a ban on virtually all abortions, and 
abortion rights groups vowed to litigate it all the way to the high 
court, which would force the justices either to overturn or reaffirm 
Roe. A few days later, the court told the abortion rights side it could 
no longer use racketeering laws to halt blockades and protests at 
abortion clinics.

The impending legal battles put us on the verge of repeating the last 
two decades of the abortion war: anti-abortion victory, abortion rights 
backlash. At the end of the cycle 20 years from now, we'll be right back 
where we are today. Unless, that is, we find a way out.

And that means moving beyond Roe.

Politically, legally and technologically the 33-year-old court decision 
is increasingly obsolete as a framework for managing decisions about 
reproduction. But only the abortion rights movement can lead the way 
beyond it. The anti-abortion groups can't launch the post-Roe era, 
because they are determined to abolish its guarantee of individual 
autonomy, and the public won't stand for that. It must be up to 
reproductive rights supporters to give the public what it wants: 
abortion reduction within a framework of autonomy.

Three political asteroids are heading toward us that make the latest 
round of the abortion confrontation inevitable. The first is the 
so-called "partial birth" abortion ban. Second is the South Dakota law. 
The third is the potential retirement of Justice John Paul Stevens. The 
order in which they hit will determine how close Roe comes to being 
overturned. But one way or another, they'll reignite the cycle of 
victory, backlash and defeat.

Six years ago, in the middle of the 2000 presidential campaign, the 
court struck down a partial-birth ban from Nebraska because it was too 
vague and lacked an exception for pregnancies that threatened the 
woman's health. The case, Stenberg v. Carhart , was decided on a 5 to 4 
vote. Anti-abortion groups faced a choice: Add a health exception to the 
federal partial-birth bill to get it through the court, or refuse and 
gamble that a future court, populated by justices chosen by President 
Bush, would reverse Stenberg and uphold the ban.

They gambled, and the gamble paid off. In July 2005, a week before an 
appeals court sent the federal ban toward the Supreme Court, Justice 
Sandra Day O'Connor, the fifth vote in Stenberg, announced her 
retirement. Her replacement by Alito creates an almost certain five-vote 
majority against Stenberg. Justices don't overturn precedents casually, 
but Stenberg is far more vulnerable than Roe. Roe is more than three 
decades old, was a 7 to 2 decision, has been used as a basis for 
subsequent Supreme Court opinions and was reaffirmed under fire 14 years 
ago in Planned Parenthood v. Casey . Stenberg is six years old, was a 5 
to 4 decision, hasn't been woven into subsequent opinions and was never 
reaffirmed. Roe affects many women and is popular. Stenberg affects 
fewer women and is less popular.

A Roberts-Alito-Stevens court would probably overturn Stenberg in June 
2007. There's no chance it would overturn Roe, since five of the 
justices who reaffirmed Roe in Casey would still be on the court. But 
the ruling could set off a political explosion. That's what happened 17 
years ago when the court, in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services , 
narrowed its interpretation of Roe. Justice Harry Blackmun, Roe's 
author, accused his colleagues of inviting legislatures to attack Roe, 
which he predicted "would not survive." That was enough to scare 
pro-choice voters and make them a decisive force in many states. Three 
years later, in Casey, Blackmun warned the country that he would soon 
have to retire, putting Roe in jeopardy.

A similar warning from Stevens in the upcoming partial-birth case could 
easily set off such an explosion next summer. Or Stevens could guarantee 
such an explosion by retiring.

If he does neither, South Dakota will do it for him. Because the South 
Dakota ban so flagrantly defies Roe, lower courts will probably strike 
it down quickly, moving it up the chain. If it comes out of an appeals 
court by the end of 2007, abortion rights groups will take it straight 
to the high court, hoping to make Roe a central issue in the 2008 
elections. The court might refuse to hear the case if it's clear that 
five justices won't reconsider Roe. Or it might sit on the case until 
after the elections. But the explosion will happen anyway. By May 2008, 
Stevens will be 88, two years beyond the age at which any other recent 
justice has died or retired. Everyone will know that he has one foot out 
the door, and so does Roe.

In short, 2008 will look a lot like 1989, with a surge of pro-abortion 
rights voting and a frightened retreat by anti-abortion politicians. But 
one thing will be different: The House, Senate and White House will be 
up for grabs. Instead of picking up a couple of governorships, Democrats 
and abortion rights supporters could find themselves in control of the 
federal government.

That's where they need to ditch their old script. The last time abortion 
rights backers were in power over both Congress and the White House, in 
1993 and 1994, they tried to enshrine Roe in federal law and subsidize 
abortions through Medicaid and President Bill Clinton's health insurance 
proposal. A couple of years ago, in a book about the abortion rights 
movement, I suggested that its agenda then had been too ambitious. Now I 
think it wasn't ambitious enough. Real ambition isn't about fortifying 
the territory you've won. It's about moving on so that the territory 
behind you no longer needs defending. The territory we need to leave 
behind is Roe.

Roe established a right to abortion through the end of the second 
trimester. The latter part of that time frame has always been the most 
controversial. Improvements in neonatal care have made fetuses 
viable--capable of surviving delivery--earlier than was possible in 
1973. That's why Justice O'Connor said Roe was "on a collision course 
with itself" and eventually led her colleagues to abandon the trimester 
framework. Meanwhile, sonograms and embryology have made people aware of 
how well developed fetuses are while still legally vulnerable to 
abortion. We even do surgery on fetuses now, which makes aborting them 
seem that much more perverse. These developments may explain, in part, 
why two-thirds of Americans think abortion should be illegal in the 
second trimester--and why anti-abortion activists targeted partial-birth 
abortions for legislative assault.

But if medical technology has helped to expose this moral problem, it 
can also help us solve it. Second-trimester abortions are becoming not 
just harder to stomach, but easier to avoid. In 1973, according to the 
Alan Guttmacher Institute, fewer than 40 percent of abortions took place 
before the ninth week of gestation. By 2000, the latest year for which 
data have been analyzed, the percentage was nearly 60 and rising. The 
same high-resolution ultrasound that makes you queasy about aborting a 
12-week fetus has made it safer to perform abortions at four or five 
weeks instead of waiting, as women were once routinely told to do. In 
1993, only 7 percent of abortion providers could end a pregnancy at four 
weeks or earlier; by 2001, 37 percent could do it. And by 2002, 
two-thirds of clinics belonging to the National Abortion Federation were 
offering pills that abort pregnancies in the first seven weeks.

Better yet, technology is helping many women avoid unwanted pregnancies 
altogether. According to the Centers for Disease Control, "emergency 
contraception"--high-dose birth control pills taken after sex to block 
ovulation, fertilization or implantation--was almost unheard of a decade 
ago. By 2002, however, about 10 percent of women between the ages of 18 
and 24 had used such pills. Some activists are fighting these pills in 
many states and at the Food and Drug Administration, but polls suggest 
that even most people who oppose legal abortion would tolerate the pills.

The most widely accepted moral solution, short of abstinence, is 
contraception taken before sex. Here, again, the news is basically good: 
Contraceptive use rose 11 percent from 1982 to 2002 (though progress was 
uneven), and during this period, the abortion rate dropped by about 30 
percent.

Birth control isn't just more common; it's more effective. The weak link 
in contraception is the human being who's too excited, impatient or 
forgetful to take it or use it carefully. But technology can also help 
circumvent that weak link. When the CDC began tracking birth control 
methods in 1982, it had no category for long-lasting injectable 
contraceptives or implants. By 2002, it found that 4 percent of women 
were using these methods. Some injectables require refills every three 
months, but implants have improved considerably. The maker of Implanon, 
for instance, says that this implant takes barely a minute to insert, 
begins working within 24 hours, prevents pregnancy for up to three years 
and can be removed in less than three minutes with a 90 percent 
probability that a woman will resume ovulating the next month. In 
clinical trials, says the company, "no pregnancies occurred during use 
over approximately 73,000 monthly cycles," largely because the "user 
cannot forget to take the product."

Technology can't avert all our failings or tragedies. There will always 
be abortions. But when you look at the trends--more foolproof 
contraception, more access to morning-after pills, earlier and fewer 
abortions--you can begin to envision a gradual, voluntary exodus from at 
least half the time frame protected by Roe. That's the half the public 
doesn't support.

Maybe that six-month window made more sense in 1973 than it does today. 
Maybe, if we spend the next 10 years helping women avoid 
second-trimester abortions, we won't have to spend the next 20 or 40 
years defending them. Maybe the best way to end the assault on Roe is to 
make it irrelevant.

The road out of Roe won't be easy. Conservatives are already fighting 
early abortion pills, morning-after pills, sex education and birth 
control. But that's a different fight from the one we've been stuck in 
since 1973. It's a more winnable fight, and a more righteous one. Five 
hundred years from now, people will look back on our surgical abortions 
the way we look back on the butchery of medieval barbers. Like the 
barbers, we're just trying to help people to the best of our ability. 
But our ability is growing. So should our wisdom, and our ambitions.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/03/AR2006030302078.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060305/fe8ef8fd/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sun Mar  5 06:07:24 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sun, 05 Mar 2006 09:07:24 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] What's Achievable in the Mideast - Jim Hoagland -
 Washington Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <440AF09C.50500@comcast.net>

What's Achievable in the Mideast

By Jim Hoagland
Sunday, March 5, 2006; B07

Backlash against democratic change is on the march in the Middle East 
one year after freedom seemed to be surging ahead there. This cyclical 
ebb and flow of forces should be the cause of adjustment in the West, 
not of despair or of abandoning the push for democratic reform in the 
region.

The illusion that Lebanon's weak democratic forces would easily shake 
off Syria's stranglehold on their country has been dispelled. So have 
hopes that elections in Iran, Iraq, Egypt and the Palestinian 
territories would automatically enhance or entrench political reform or 
moderation. But pronouncing democracy in the Middle East a failure after 
this year of reactive turmoil overshoots the runway again -- in the 
opposite direction.

The Bush administration should instead adjust the pace of its strong 
push for democracy in Muslim lands to reflect the changes it has helped 
produce. This applies most urgently to the long war between Israelis and 
Palestinians.

President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have outlined a 
generational commitment to replacing a stability of tyranny long 
underwritten by U.S. policy with the unpredictability of free choice. 
Helping establish a democratic Palestinian state that would live in 
peace with Israel has been both centerpiece and condition for Bush's 
long-term vision.

But the American president must also cope with the inconveniences of 
democracy. Bush has not a generation but less than three years left in 
office. It is time for him and Rice to focus on their political 
mortality; that is, to focus ruthlessly on tangible actions that would 
clear the way for their successors to achieve the grand design of 
expanding freedom.

The electoral victory of the radicals of Hamas -- who refuse to 
recognize peace pacts reached with Israel or to negotiate any new 
accords with the Jewish state -- underlines both the need and the 
possibility of this shifting of gears by Washington. Hamas spokesmen say 
they will remain peaceful as long as Israel unilaterally concedes what 
Hamas wants.

Instead of getting bogged down in tactical disputes over whether to have 
diplomatic contacts with Hamas as a prelude to resuming peace 
negotiations, the Bush team and its allies should commit themselves to 
creating the conditions for the controlled separation of Israelis and 
Palestinians through effective and equitable security barriers by Jan. 
1, 2009.

Separation has replaced negotiation as the only viable approach to 
coexistence -- at least for the time left to Bush -- for both Israelis 
and Palestinians.

The immediate American role should be to provide the push and the 
assurances needed to get Israel to duplicate Ariel Sharon's unilateral 
disengagement from the Gaza Strip and yield more than 90 percent of the 
West Bank, while compensating the Palestinians with land swaps for the 
few housing areas close to Jerusalem not evacuated.

The arrangement of de facto frontiers for a two-state solution would 
resemble what are known in Israel as the Clinton parameters, which 
emerged from Israeli-Palestinian talks at Camp David under President 
Bill Clinton in 2000 and then in Taba, Egypt, in January 2001.

It is not as good a solution as a formal peace treaty would be. But as 
former secretary of state George Shultz, who thinks deeply about the 
Mideast, told me recently, the failure of the Oslo accords and the Camp 
David talks has to be acknowledged and corrected:

"The only thing the Palestinians have at this point to offer the 
Israelis is a willingness to participate in constructing a secure 
environment. But if the Palestinians won't commit to that and the 
Israelis can produce that outcome themselves through security barriers 
and other means," negotiations become pointless. "There are times when 
it is best not to try to get people to agree on a finality."

But Bush cannot afford to have stagnation on the Israeli-Palestinian 
front as he tries to win wider Arab acceptance of his reform agenda. One 
way to stress movement is to make it clear that the United States 
supports a drawing of the line of separation as close as possible to the 
1967 borders and will insist on a humane operation of the line of 
security strips and barriers -- known as "the fence" to the Israelis and 
as "the wall" to their critics.

Such moves will help reduce the baggage that Bush's successors must 
carry when it comes their time to promote democracy and seek other 
timely change in the Middle East. Lightening their load is a worthy goal 
even for a personally ambitious president.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/03/AR2006030301754.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060305/66e70452/attachment-0001.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sun Mar  5 06:09:54 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sun, 05 Mar 2006 09:09:54 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] The GOP's Order on The Court - David S. Broder -
 Washington Post op-Ed
Message-ID: <440AF132.1070206@comcast.net>

The GOP's Order on The Court

By David S. Broder
Sunday, March 5, 2006; B07

Ken Mehlman has not had an easy time of it in his first year as chairman 
of the Republican National Committee. As point man for the White House's 
political team, he experienced defeats at the hands of the Democrats in 
last November's two big gubernatorial races -- and growing criticism 
from within GOP ranks about President Bush's policy stumbles. From 
Social Security to Hurricane Katrina to the Dubai Ports World deal, 
Mehlman has been on the receiving end of brickbats.

But last week he could watch as two politically important victories 
became likely in an arena where Republicans still hold sway -- the 
Supreme Court.

The justices' questions during oral arguments strongly suggested that 
legislation enacted by Vermont to limit campaign spending would be 
struck down -- as Republicans hope.

In a more complex case, challenging Texas's mid-decade Republican 
congressional redistricting plan, the hints from the high court bench 
were that the substance of the scheme -- if not every feature -- will 
survive judicial scrutiny.

For a party as hard-pressed as Republicans are these days, the prospect 
of twin victories when the Supreme Court hands down its decisions this 
spring is welcome news indeed.

It shows the advantage the GOP has gained with seven of the nine seats 
on the Supreme Court being filled by appointees of Republican presidents.

The Vermont case was a relative slam-dunk. Under the controlling Supreme 
Court precedent, now almost 30 years old, political contributions may be 
limited to avoid the appearance of corruption, but political spending -- 
which the court said directly implicates freedom of expression -- may not.

Vermont challenged that decision with sliding-scale limits on spending 
for races from governor down to state legislature. But Chief Justice 
John Roberts questioned whether there really was any corruption problem 
in Vermont, and Justice Stephen Breyer -- one of the two Democrats on 
the bench -- joined in the public worries about the limits being so low 
as to stifle competition.

The Texas case is harder to forecast. It stems from the legislature, 
with a newly elected Republican majority, approving in 2003 a 
congressional redistricting plan, promoted by Rep. Tom DeLay, that 
yielded five more Republican seats in the 32-member delegation; a sixth 
was added when Rep. Ralph Hall switched parties. The previous map had 
been drawn up by the courts in 2001 when the legislature, then divided 
between the parties, deadlocked.

In numerous briefs filed by critics and supporters of the Republican 
plan, the court was asked to consider the propriety of any mid-decade 
redistricting, the rights and wrongs of the oddly shaped districts that 
resulted and the impact on minority constituencies that enjoy special 
protection under the Voting Rights Act.

There was little in the oral argument to suggest the court would find 
any constitutional bar to the mid-decade redistricting -- especially 
since it was the first plan to emerge from the legislature.

As for the gerrymandering of district lines, even in odd configurations, 
the court has traditionally chosen to stay out of that political 
thicket, and Justice David Souter, often the most liberal of the 
Republicans, told the attorney challenging the plan that it's impossible 
"to take partisanship out of the political process."

The impact on Latino and African American voters appeared to trouble 
some of the justices. Questioning showed that about 100,000 Hispanics 
had been moved out of a south Texas district, improving the election 
prospects of Republican Rep. Henry Bonilla. The state contended they 
were shifting Democrats -- not Latinos -- and Roberts, for one, appeared 
to buy the argument that the motivation was political, not racial.

Mehlman, who supervised the Republicans' brief on the case, came to 
court to watch the arguments and -- with all the usual lawyerly cautions 
about not reading the justices' minds -- said afterward, "I feel very 
good about it."

Some scholars with less of a partisan bias warn that the Vermont case 
will leave the escalating cost of campaigns unchecked and the Texas case 
may unleash a national wave of repeated redistricting every time a 
legislature changes hands.

Mehlman said he thinks those fears are exaggerated. Few states would 
contemplate setting campaign-spending limits as low as Vermont did, he 
said, and the Texas circumstances -- legislative gridlock preventing 
correction of an earlier districting plan open to criticism as a 
Democratic gerrymander -- are unique.

Besides, after the year he's had, he's in no position to look a gift 
horse in the mouth.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/03/AR2006030301753.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060305/b72c6a72/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sun Mar  5 06:14:52 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sun, 05 Mar 2006 09:14:52 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] US freeze on Hamas aid carries humanitarian price - The
	Boston Globe
Message-ID: <440AF25C.2020400@comcast.net>


  US freeze on Hamas aid carries humanitarian price

By Anne Barnard and Farah Stockman  |  March 5, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

JERUSALEM -- Ditch diggers have stopped building a multimillion-dollar 
US-funded pipeline meant to bring clean drinking water to the 
overcrowded Gaza Strip. Trainers have stopped teaching Palestinian 
judges how to better fight crime and corruption. A Boston-based 
contractor has stopped teaching Palestinian mothers how to prevent 
malnutrition in their babies.

An unprecedented US government review of aid to Palestinians has frozen 
all US-funded projects in the West Bank and Gaza, as officials in 
Washington weigh whether and how they can deliver humanitarian aid 
without channeling funding through Hamas, the militant group that won 
January's parliamentary election, or the government Hamas will soon appoint.

International aid groups, many with years of experience carrying out 
US-funded projects, have expressed alarm at the US policy. They say that 
trying to deliver humanitarian assistance without any involvement from 
the Palestinian government is unrealistic on a practical level and could 
undo years of work building Palestinian health and education systems and 
other institutions.

The United States Agency for International Development spent $275 
million in the West Bank and Gaza last year. For the past decade, the 
United States has channeled aid to Palestinians through dozens of 
nonprofit organizations and contractors that build courthouses, schools, 
roads, and water systems; promote the rule of law and democracy; train 
health workers, teachers, and judges; award micro-loans to small 
businesses; and carry out other projects that entail varying degrees of 
cooperation with Palestinian ministries.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says that once a Hamas Cabinet takes 
power in the coming weeks, the United States, which lists Hamas as a 
terrorist organization, will cut off all aid that is routed through the 
Palestinian government or could somehow benefit it. But she vows that 
the United States will continue to provide humanitarian assistance 
directly to Palestinians.

But that's easier said than done, say US and Palestinian officials and 
heads of aid groups.

Drawing the line between helping 3.4 million impoverished Palestinians 
and helping their government is nearly impossible, aid groups say, when 
most hospitals, clinics, and schools are run by the Palestinian 
Authority, the governing body for the West Bank and Gaza.

Aid workers say that US officials have told them that if the strictest 
interpretation of the policy wins out, it could prohibit even routine 
contacts with government bureaucrats, most of whom are currently not 
Hamas members, or even with doctors and professors at Palestinian 
Authority-funded hospitals and universities.

Thomas Neu, who has spent more than a decade in Jerusalem running 
US-funded programs for American Near East Refugee Aid, or Anera, says 
nearly all of his programs are threatened. Anera -- a nonprofit group 
that distributed $30 million in aid to Palestinians last year, most of 
it from the United States -- builds schools and hands them over to the 
Ministry of Education. It brings in $15 million worth of medical 
supplies each year, requiring permission from the Ministry of Health, 
and distributes much of it to public hospitals.

Aid workers and Palestinian officials say that some US officials here 
have joined them in trying to persuade Washington decision-makers to 
find ways to keep aid flowing and to understand the difficulty of 
drawing clear lines between purely nongovernmental humanitarian programs 
and those that fall into a gray area, connecting somehow with the 
Palestinian Authority to deliver humanitarian aid.

Like Anera, John Snow Inc., a health consulting group based in Boston, 
finds itself in an ambiguous position. It has had to suspend a $20 
million USAID-funded program called Hanan that teaches mothers to combat 
increasing malnutrition among Palestinian children, because it works 
with public health employees and public clinics.

US diplomats here acknowledge that aid professionals are confused and 
anxious over how US policy will define proscribed assistance. The 
diplomats agree that even programs with apparently humanitarian aims, 
like Hanan, could be at risk because they deal with ministries or public 
institutions.

''There are probably some areas that are not going to pass through that 
humanitarian sieve," said Anna-Maija Litvak, a spokeswoman for USAID in 
Tel Aviv.

''There is definitely a lot of worry and anxiety," she added, saying 
that USAID personnel have been telling aid groups and contractors, ''It 
is a process; we don't have clear answers."

Even groups that don't receive US funding are affected, such as 
Ohio-based United Palestinian Children's Appeal. The group has put on 
hold plans to fly in American surgeons this month to perform specialized 
surgery on children with complex ailments, using public hospitals. US 
officials have warned aid workers that they could be prosecuted or sued 
under US antiterrorism legislation for contacts with any government 
institution, possibly even hospitals, once a Hamas Cabinet takes office.

''I'm not interested in going to jail myself for sending doctors there 
to help children," said Steve Sosebee, an American who runs the program, 
which treated more than 2,000 Palestinian children last year. ''They say 
it's not going to affect humanitarian issues, but it will if it prevents 
us from treating these kids."

State Department officials say the United States is facing an 
unprecedented situation: the first time a group it lists as a terrorist 
organization has won control of a government.

The policy puzzle over humanitarian aid springs from a clash between two 
US goals: helping ordinary Palestinians, a vital part of the US strategy 
to win hearts and minds in the Middle East; and keeping US dollars from 
going to Hamas, which has killed hundreds of Israelis in suicide 
bombings and vows to destroy the Jewish state.

The United States has not directly funded the Palestinian Authority 
since 1997 because of concerns about corruption. Instead, it funnels 
nearly all funds through aid groups and contractors, whose projects 
usually require some contact with the authority.

''By avoiding dealing with the PA, you are going to impact humanitarian 
issues," said Ghassan Khatib, the planning minister in the outgoing 
government led by the defeated Fatah party. He said that while about 
half the Palestinian Authority's budget goes to security, most of the 
rest goes to health and education, including the salaries of 40,000 
teachers and 15,000 health workers.

A Western diplomat here, who asked not to be named because of the 
sensitivity of the issue, said that cutting government entirely out of 
the loop ''frees Hamas from responsibility [for providing services] and 
will make the economy even sicker."

Even Fulbright scholarships and other programs that bring individual 
Palestinian scholars to US universities could be at risk, because many 
candidates' home schools receive Palestinian Authority funding.

''You might say, 'So some professors won't get to go to the US, so 
what?' " said an American running one such program, who asked not to be 
named to protect his chances of continued funding. ''But exposing them 
to US culture and rigorous methods of study has a long-term impact."

Ghassan Faramand, a law professor at Birzeit University in the West 
Bank, runs training programs for judges and court workers that are at 
risk because of their ties to the Ministry of Justice. He said that 
decades of US programs promoting the rule of law and civil society made 
Palestinians a model in the Middle East and paved the way for January's 
peaceful, well-organized election and the losing party's peaceful exit 
from power.

''It's not easy for America . . . to say, 'We're leaving,' " he said. 
''Not only will people be upset and angry . . . but Bush's campaign for 
democracy in the Middle East will be threatened."

He hopes to find a loophole, perhaps by working through a new judicial 
body appointed by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, whom the United 
States has signaled it will still work with. He says his program would 
have to fold without US funding, but he would still have to pay workers 
he has already contracted.

Larger organizations can shift their focus to other countries or try to 
work while totally bypassing government. But Neu, from Anera, said they 
are reluctant to set up parallel systems in areas like health where the 
Palestinian Authority functions well.

Two weeks ago in Washington, Assistant Secretary of State David Welch 
and Michael Doran, the White House specialist on Israeli-Palestinian 
affairs, promised to set up a joint task force with Palestinian aid 
groups to help determine what aid should continue. But at the meeting 
arranged by the Arab American Institute, the US officials had few 
specific answers.

Peter Gubser, president of the nonprofit Anera, said he asked if his 
group could keep building schools, but received no clear answer.

''I think the answer is that if it is a Hamas-dominated government, the 
answer will be no," Gubser said, though he added that the officials 
suggested it might depend on whether a Hamas member heads the Education 
Ministry.

Islamic charities, dominated by Hamas and funded by donations from 
across the Muslim world, would probably step in to fill the gap, aid 
workers said.

Cairo Arafat, an official in the outgoing Planning Ministry, said Israel 
has the ultimate responsibility for humanitarian concerns in territory 
that it occupies.

http://www.boston.com/news/world/middleeast/articles/2006/03/05/us_freeze_on_hamas_aid_carries_humanitarian_price/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060305/887e928f/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sun Mar  5 06:18:43 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sun, 05 Mar 2006 09:18:43 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Last roundup for wild horses - Deanne Stillman - Boston
	Globe Op-Ed
Message-ID: <440AF343.50505@comcast.net>


  Last roundup for wild horses

By Deanne Stillman  |  March 5, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

PEOPLE KEEP comparing George W. Bush to Richard Nixon. But that's wrong.

In 2005, President Bush signed legislation that will destroy our 
greatest icon -- the wild horse. In 1971, President Nixon signed 
legislation protecting it. This was the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and 
Burro Act, a hard-fought bill brought to lawmakers by ''Wild Horse 
Annie," a Nevada character who saw blood spilling from a truck hauling 
mustangs to the slaughterhouse, then dropped everything and spent the 
rest of her life trying to save them.

Now those trucks are revving their engines again. Starting on March 10, 
7,200 wild horses in government pipelines will begin to make their way 
to the three horse slaughterhouses in this country -- which are owned by 
France and Belgium.

In 1900, about 2 million wild horses roamed the West. By 1950, there 
were 50,000. Today, there are about 25,000 -- perhaps spelling doom for 
the mustang. What happened? World War I, the pet food industry, and 
cattle ranchers, who contend that the remaining wild horses steal food 
from 3 million cows on the range. In the old days, they hired 
contractors to gun down mustangs and bring them the ears. Today, Big 
Beef still hires guns -- politicians who set policy for the Bureau of 
Land Management, the agency that presided over a recent fixed grazing 
study yet is supposed to protect the wild horse. Now, the animal America 
rode in on is facing its meanest battle.

Last year, Senator Conrad Burns of Montana, a Republican who once 
referred to Bush as ''the man who wears the spurs," attached a rider to 
the 2005 appropriations bill, permitting the Bureau of Land Management 
to sell horses it has rounded up that are over 10 years old or haven't 
been adopted by the third try through its own program to be sold to the 
lowest bidder. But 10 is not old for a horse, and it's not unusual for a 
horse to remain unadopted on the third try -- there are barely enough 
adopters to take in the thousands of available horses (but those who do 
include the US Marine Corps Color Guard, which trains palominos from the 
Nevada range for parade duty -- naming some after famous battles, 
including Montezuma Willy and Peking).

Days after Bush signed the bill, 36 horses criminalized as 
''three-strikers" ended up at the killer plants. A nationwide outcry led 
to a new bill, temporarily halting such sales by cutting off funding for 
federal meat inspectors at the slaughterhouses. But Department of 
Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns -- a friend to the meat lobby -- has 
done an end-run around the legislation, granting petitioners of the 
slaughterhouses permission to hire their own inspectors, beginning on 
March 10.

Last week, the second bell for the mustang tolled. With thousands of 
wild horses about to hit the market, the Bureau of Land Management 
announced a partnership with the Public Lands Council, urging public 
lands ranchers to buy wild horses for $10 each and put them back on the 
range. But the Public Lands Council consists of the National Cattlemen's 
Beef Association, the American Sheep Industry, and the Association of 
National Grasslands -- the very people who have been trying to expunge 
wild horses for years.

Wild horse advocates fear that some ranchers, businessmen after all, 
will turn around and sell the horses to the slaughterhouse. Making the 
plan even more suspicious is the fact that the wild horses are simply 
not returned to the land, which supposedly could not support them in the 
first place.

Conrad Burns is right -- the president is wearing the spurs. And he's 
driving our greatest partner off a cliff. So next time you see Montezuma 
Willy and Peking at a parade, take a picture and say goodbye. Or, join 
the posse and stop the horse thief at the pass.

''Wild horses and burros merit man's protection historically," Nixon 
said, ''for they are a living link with the days of the conquistadors, 
through the heroic times of the western Indians and pioneers, to our own 
day when the tonic of wilderness seems all too scarce. More than that, 
they merit it as a matter of ecological right -- as anyone knows who has 
ever stood awed at the indomitable spirit and sheer energy of a mustang 
running free."

Deanne Stillman, author of ''Twentynine Palms," is writing ''Horse 
Latitudes: Last Stand for the Wild Horse in the American West."

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/05/last_roundup_for_wild_horses/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060305/cbb94b1f/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Sun Mar  5 08:42:04 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Sun,  5 Mar 2006 16:42:04 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: As Crisis Brews,
	Iran Hits Bumps in Atomic Path
Message-ID: <20060305164204.8D5EE3AEB36@lax-gw06.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

INTERNATIONAL / MIDDLE EAST | March 5, 2006
As Crisis Brews, Iran Hits Bumps in Atomic Path
By WILLIAM J. BROAD and DAVID E. SANGER
As alarms are sounded over Iran's nuclear ambitions, obstacles continue to slow the progress of Tehran's atomic program.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/05/international/middleeast/05iran.html?ex=1142226000&en=a18708234b87b3b8&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060305/0dc611bf/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Sun Mar  5 08:43:43 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Sun,  5 Mar 2006 16:43:43 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: A Muslim Leader in Brooklyn,
	Reconciling 2 Worlds
Message-ID: <20060305164343.5B2343AE824@lax-gw06.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

NEW YORK REGION | March 5, 2006
An Imam in America: A Muslim Leader in Brooklyn, Reconciling 2 Worlds
By ANDREA ELLIOTT
An imam must find ways to reconcile Muslim tradition with American life, a job that has worn him out and opened his mind.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/05/nyregion/05imam.html?ex=1142226000&en=5b67c1d265b90329&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060305/43fe7d26/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Sun Mar  5 08:44:30 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Sun,  5 Mar 2006 16:44:30 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Iran's Best Friend
Message-ID: <20060305164430.40B409FDF1@lax-gw05.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

OPINION | March 5, 2006
Iran's Best Friend

The Bush administration has done more to empower Iran than its most ambitious ayatollah could have dared to imagine.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/05/opinion/05sun1.html?ex=1142226000&en=53f953b59d6410c2&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060305/e9ea510b/attachment-0001.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Sun Mar  5 08:45:07 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Sun,  5 Mar 2006 16:45:07 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Principles Defeat Politics at the U.N.
Message-ID: <20060305164507.13F4E83EA5@lax-gw03.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

OPINION | March 5, 2006
Op-Ed Contributors: Principles Defeat Politics at the U.N.
By JIMMY CARTER, ?SCAR ARIAS, KIM DAE JUNG, SHIRIN EBADI and DESMOND TUTU
Reforming the United Nations Commission on Human Rights will allow us to finally put principles over politics for the betterment of all.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/05/opinion/05carter.html?ex=1142226000&en=3ad9750078c95ca4&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060305/d4030378/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Sun Mar  5 08:49:42 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Sun,  5 Mar 2006 16:49:42 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Hamas Delegation Visits Moscow for a Crash
	Course in Diplomacy
Message-ID: <20060305164942.3CDFF24A0D6@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

INTERNATIONAL / MIDDLE EAST | March 4, 2006
Hamas Delegation Visits Moscow for a Crash Course in Diplomacy
By STEVEN LEE MYERS and GREG MYRE
Russia warned the leaders of the militant Palestinian group to recognize Israel or face isolation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/04/international/middleeast/04hamas.html?ex=1142226000&en=c22536e3cc842519&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060305/9ba5f91b/attachment.htm 

From geomilman at milman.com  Sun Mar  5 09:57:04 2006
From: geomilman at milman.com (George R. Milman)
Date: Sun, 5 Mar 2006 09:57:04 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] COUNT 'EM - by Hendrik Hertzberg - in The New Yorker
Message-ID: <000a01c6407e$364fe360$8c00a8c0@george>

 

Last Thursday morning, in one of the smaller function rooms at the National
Press Club, in Washington, an ad-hoc bunch of amateurs, once-weres,
might-bes, and goo-goos floated an initiative that, with a little luck,
could enable our ramshackle republic to take a long, and long overdue, step
toward a more perfect union. The idea behind their initiative is this: that
the President of the United States should be elected by the people of the
United States.

http://www.newyorker.com/printables/talk/060306ta_talk_hertzberg

 

 

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060305/73ce8532/attachment.htm 

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Sun Mar  5 12:29:06 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Sun, 05 Mar 2006 12:29:06 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Warm, Warmer, Warmest By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Message-ID: <C0308A12.29B80%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 5, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Warm, Warmer, Warmest
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

One of the hottest environmental battles has been over oil drilling in the
coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, but the sad reality is
that much of the Arctic plain will probably be lost anyway in this century
to rising sea levels.

That should be our paramount struggle: to stop global warming. It threatens
not only the Arctic plain, but also low-lying areas around the world with
100 million inhabitants. And it could be accelerating because of the three
scariest words in climate science: positive feedback loops.

Bear with me now: a positive feedback loop occurs when a small change leads
to an even larger change of the same type. For example, a modest amount of
warming melts ice in northern climates. But the bare ground absorbs three
times as much heat as ground covered by snow or ice, so the change amplifies
the original warming. Even more ice melts, more heat is absorbed, and the
spiral grows.

That feedback loop is well understood and part of climate models, but others
aren't.

For example, perhaps the biggest single source of uncertainty about whether
Lower Manhattan will be underwater in 2100 has to do with the glaciers of
Greenland. If Greenland's ice sheet melted completely, that alone ? over
centuries ? would raise the oceans by 23 feet. And those glaciers are
dumping much more water into the oceans than they did a decade ago,
according to two satellite surveys just published, but the studies disagree
on the amounts.

Positive feedback seems to be at work. As a glacier melts a little, the
water trickles down to the rock and lubricates the glacier's slide toward
the sea. So, because of this and other effects, some of Greenland's glaciers
are now, in glacial terms, rocketing toward the sea at 7.5 miles a year.

Here's another positive loop. The Arctic permafrost may hold 14 percent of
the world's carbon, but as it melts, some of its carbon dioxide and methane
are released, adding to the amount of greenhouse gases. So more permafrost
melts.

Likewise, millions of years ago, warming oceans with vast amounts of methane
in their depths had great episodes of methane belching, which added to the
greenhouse effect then. I don't expect the oceans to burp in the same
massive way tomorrow, but if they did, no one would know how to fit those
unmannerly oceans into a climate model.

Part of the challenge in modeling climate is that we're already off the
charts with greenhouse gases like nitrous oxide, carbon dioxide and methane.
"We've driven them out of the range that has existed for the last one
million years," noted James Hansen, NASA's top climate expert. "And the
climate has not fully responded to changes that have already occurred."

In fairness, there are also negative feedback loops, which could dampen
change. For example, warmer temperatures could mean more snow over
Antarctica, implying an initial buildup of the Antarctic ice sheet. The
added ice could slow global warming and rising sea levels. But a new study
just published in Science Express says that the Antarctic ice sheet is
already thinning significantly ? raising more alarms and casting doubt on
that negative feedback.

In any case, it's clear that negative feedback loops in climatology are much
less common than positive loops, which amplify change and leave our climate
both unstable and vulnerable to human folly.

Still with me?

Look, I know that climate science can be ? here's a shock ? boring! But it's
better for us to slog through it now than for coming generations to slog
through the rising waters of, say, Manhattan. It may be more exciting to
thump the table about Iraq or torture ? or even the preservation of the
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge ? and those are all hugely important. But
global warming may ultimately be the greatest test we face as stewards of
our planet. And so far we're failing catastrophically.

"Historians of science will be brutal on us," said Jerry Mahlman, a climate
expert at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. "We are right now in
a state of deep denial about how severe the problem is. Political people are
saying, 'Well, it's not on my watch.' They're ducking for cover, because
who's going to tell the American people?"

We know what to do: energy conservation, gas taxes and carbon taxes, more
renewable energy sources like wind and solar power, and new (and safe)
nuclear power plants. But our political system is paralyzed in the face of
what may be the single biggest challenge to our planet.

"Are we an intelligent species or not?" Dr. Mahlman asked. "Right now, the
evidence is against it."

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From michael at michaelbutler.com  Sun Mar  5 12:35:05 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Sun, 05 Mar 2006 12:35:05 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] It's Not Isolationism,
	but It's Not Attractive By DAVID BROOKS
Message-ID: <C0308B79.29B81%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 5, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
It's Not Isolationism, but It's Not Attractive
By DAVID BROOKS

This was going to be a column on the growing isolationism of the American
people. I was going to argue that in the post-Iraq era, the quickest way for
an unprincipled cynic to get to the White House is by running as a smiling
Democratic-Buchananite.

Attack the Dubai ports deal to burnish your security credentials. Call for
less foreign adventurism and more spending at home to win the Democratic
base. Go hard against illegal immigration to win the working class. Rail
against China and free trade deals to build support in the Midwest. Bash
France just for the fun of it. Bingo! You're cruising to Inauguration Day.

Unfortunately, before I had finished that column, I looked at the facts. The
bulk of the evidence suggests there is no rising tide of isolationism in
this country, even with the bloodshed in Iraq.

A polling analyst, Ruy Teixeira, has taken the closest look at the data over
at his Web site, Donkey Rising. Teixeira argues that instead of seeing a
turn to isolationism, what we are seeing in poll after poll is public
opinion returning to normal post-World War II levels, after the unusual 9/11
blip.

Much of the isolationist talk started when a Pew survey found that 42
percent of Americans believe that the U.S. should mind its own business
internationally, a 12-point rise over three years. But Teixeira points out
that the 42 percent number puts Americans back where they were throughout
the Clinton years, when Americans supported more foreign interventions than
ever before.

Meanwhile, the rest of the evidence shows high engagement in foreign
affairs. Public support for multilateral action remains phenomenally strong.
Support for foreign aid is higher than it's been. International issues like
global terrorism remain among Americans' top concerns.

Attitudes toward economic globalization are, if anything, more positive than
they have been historically. In 1953, 54 percent of Americans favored free
trade. In 2000, 64 percent of Americans said free trade was good for the
U.S. In 2004, 64 percent said globalization was good for the U.S. and 65
percent agreed international trade was good for "your standard of living."

In the late 1940's, Americans were asked if the U.S. should be active abroad
or stay out of world affairs. Back then, during the heyday of American
internationalism, 69 percent said the U.S. should be active abroad. Today,
the share of people who say that is the same: 69 percent.

On the Republican side, there has been no surge of Pat Buchanan-style
paleoconservatism. On the contrary, the influence of Reagan and Bush, and
the growing evangelical interest in foreign affairs, have virtually
eliminated isolationism from the Republican Party, its traditional home.
Meanwhile, the likely Democratic presidential nominee is Hillary Clinton,
who has been barely distinguishable from John McCain on foreign policy
matters (aside from her ports pandering).

In short, Iraq, in this sphere as in so many, is not Vietnam. The Vietnam
War caused America to swing from extroversion to introversion. The Iraq war
has a different dynamic.

That's because in the late 1960's, the Vietnamese were not going around the
world carrying out suicide attacks. Vietnamese were not rioting over
cartoons. The Vietnamese did not fly planes into skyscrapers. The current
conflict has an element of existential menace Vietnam did not have.

Thus the chief effect of Iraq is not to move the U.S. toward isolationism;
it has been to shift American opinion from one form of internationalism to
another.

George Bush's brand was based on the premise that Arabs aren't very
different from anybody else, and can be brought into the family of
democratic nations. This brand is, sadly, fading.

The rising internationalism is based, by contrast, on Arab exceptionalism.
This is the belief that while most of the world is chugging toward a
globally integrated future, the Arab world remains caught in its own
medieval whirlpool of horror. The Arab countries cannot become quickly
democratic; their people aren't ready for pluralistic modernity; they just
have to be walled off so they don't hurt us again.

People won't express such quasi-racial views directly to pollsters, but the
attitude shows up in the mammoth reaction to the Dubai ports deal, in the
spike of people who want the U.S. to eliminate its dependence on Middle East
oil, in the reaction to the cartoon riots. A similar attitudinal shift is
evident in Europe ? in spades.

As I tried to argue in a column about the ports deal, this reaction is a
crude overgeneralization, but it's there. As the election season progresses,
voters are going to pull candidates in a gritty, bloody-minded direction. No
more uplifting talk about freedom. Soon the contest will be over who can be
toughest on the crescent menace.

America isn't growing more isolationist. Americans are going to be happy to
integrate with the world, just not with the Arab world.

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From michael at michaelbutler.com  Sun Mar  5 12:37:34 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Sun, 05 Mar 2006 12:37:34 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] =?iso-8859-1?q?Principles_Defeat_Politics_at_the_U=2EN?=
	=?iso-8859-1?q?=2E_By_JIMMY_CARTER=2C_=D3_SCAR_ARIAS=2C_KIM_DAE_JU?=
	=?iso-8859-1?q?NG=2C_SHIRIN_EBADI_and_DESMOND=09TUTU?=
Message-ID: <C0308C0E.29B82%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 5, 2006
Op-Ed Contributors
Principles Defeat Politics at the U.N.
By JIMMY CARTER, ?SCAR ARIAS, KIM DAE JUNG, SHIRIN EBADI and DESMOND TUTU

IN the global struggle for the advancement of human rights, the United
Nations has reached a defining moment. The president of the General
Assembly, Jan Eliasson of Sweden, has led five months of negotiations to
develop a proposal to reform the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.
Although the commission has accomplished many things, including the adoption
of human rights standards, treaties and fact-finding mechanisms that measure
the performance of governments, it has become more of a political
battleground than a meaningful force for protecting victims of human rights
violations, and it must be reformed.

Last year, Secretary General Kofi Annan boldly proposed that the United
Nations replace the commission with a new more elevated and effective body.
His visionary proposal started a very creative process through which
governments have thoroughly examined and debated the features of a new body
that a large majority could embrace. Mr. Eliasson has now produced a draft
resolution with many positive elements that has gained the support of the
vast majority of the membership of the United Nations.

Some have asserted that the proposal is just a weak compromise. We challenge
this claim.

The new council creates new expectations that members will uphold the
highest standards in the promotion and protection of human rights, fully
cooperate with the council, and undergo additional scrutiny through a peer
review. Most significantly, a member that commits gross and systematic
violations of human rights can be suspended from the body.

The council includes a new requirement that members be approved by a
majority of the General Assembly ? or 96 countries ? rather than simply
being appointed by their regional groups. With these new procedures and the
articulation for the first time of standards for membership, we believe the
new body will be led by countries with a greater commitment to human rights.

Instead of having one highly politicized meeting per year, the council will
meet throughout the year so that it can address urgent human rights issues
in a timely way. This will create a more regularized, constructive and
professional process. The politics and double standards of the existing
commission will be redressed by providing for periodic review of the human
rights records of all 191 members, including the most powerful.

In addition, the proposal ensures robust participation by human rights
organizations and activists in the deliberations and secures the system of
special rapporteurs and other fact-finding mechanisms ? the best feature of
the commission.

The draft before United Nations members represents a very significant and
meaningful improvement over the existing commission, and to reopen
negotiations would put at risk these gains and give those who would prefer a
weaker system another opportunity to do mischief. This risks reintroducing
very damaging proposals, like giving politically motivated member states
control and oversight of the high commissioner for human rights, now an
independent office and important voice for victims; new restrictions on
special rapporteurs, nongovernmental organizations and news media;
elimination or new high thresholds for passing country resolutions, and so
forth.

Our aim must be to build a solid foundation for protecting human rights and
coming to the aid of victims within the only truly global organization of
governments on the planet. Mr. Eliasson has found a way forward that can
bring everyone on board. Nearly 60 years after the adoption of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, he has finally brought us to where we can begin
to put principles over politics for the betterment of all.

Jimmy Carter, ?scar Arias, Kim Dae Jung, Shirin Ebadi and Desmond Tutu are
Nobel Peace Prize laureates.

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From hecate at diamonddragon.com  Sun Mar  5 12:44:03 2006
From: hecate at diamonddragon.com (Hecate)
Date: Sun, 05 Mar 2006 20:44:03 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] BBC E-mail: Himalayan melting risk surveyed
Message-ID: <20060305_204403_089101.hecate@diamonddragon.com>

Hecate saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you
should see it.

** Message **
Two years ago Unep and the Kathmandu-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development found that 20 glacial lakes in Nepal and 24 in Bhutan were filling up so rapidly that their walls could breach by 2009. 



** Himalayan melting risk surveyed **
A new weather station is expected to show the extent of melting from global warming in the Himalayas
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/4762576.stm >


** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all
in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/dailyemail/ >


** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have?been verified.

If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm


From ean at sbcglobal.net  Sat Mar  4 21:40:31 2006
From: ean at sbcglobal.net (ean at sbcglobal.net)
Date: Sat, 04 Mar 2006 21:40:31 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] The Ohio Vote Debacle
Message-ID: <E1FG2H1-0007E9-57@smtpauth07.mail.atl.earthlink.net>

AlterNet
The Ohio Vote Debacle
By Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, AlterNet
Posted on March 3, 2006,
http://www.alternet.org/story/33006/

While life goes on during the Bush2 nightmare, so does the research 
on what really happened in Ohio in 2004 to give George W. Bush a 
second term.

Pundits throughout the state and nation -- many of them alleged 
Democrats -- continue to tell those of us who question Bush's second 
coming that we should "get over it," that the election is old news.

But things get curiouser and curiouser.

In our 2005 compendium "How the GOP Stole America's 2004 Election 
& Is Rigging 2008," we list more than a hundred different ways the 
Republican Party denied the democratic process in the Buckeye State. 
For a book of documents to be published Sept. 11 by the New Press 
entitled "What Happened in Ohio," we are continuing to dig.

It turns out, we missed more than a few of the dirty tricks Karl Rove, 
Ken Blackwell and their GOP used to get themselves four more years. 
In an election won with death by a thousand cuts, some that are still 
hidden go very deep. Over the next few weeks we will list them as they 
are verified.

One of them has just surfaced to the staggering tune of 175,000 
purged voters in Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), the traditional 
stronghold of the Ohio Democratic Party. An additional 10,000 that 
registered to vote there for the 2004 election were lost due to "clerical 
error."

As we reported more than a year ago, some 133,000 voters were 
purged from the registration rolls in Hamilton County (Cincinnati) and 
Lucas County (Toledo) between 2000 and 2004. The 105,000 from 
Cincinnati and 28,000 from Toledo exceeded Bush's official alleged 
margin of victory -- just under 119,000 votes out of some 5.6 million 
the Republican Secretary of State. J. Kenneth Blackwell deemed worth 
counting.

Exit polls flashed worldwide on CNN at 12:20 am Wednesday morning, 
Nov. 3, showed John Kerry winning Ohio by 4.2 percent of the popular 
vote, probably about 250,000 votes. We believe this is an accurate 
reflection of what really happened here.

But by morning Bush was being handed the presidency, claiming a 2.5 
percent Buckeye victory, as certified by Blackwell. In conjunction with 
other exit polling, the lead switch from Kerry to Bush is a virtual 
statistical impossibility. Yet John Kerry conceded with more than 
250,000 ballots still uncounted, though Bush at the time was allegedly 
ahead only by 138,000, a margin that later slipped to less than 119,000 
in the official vote count.

At the time, very few people knew about those first 133,000 voters that 
had been eliminated from the registration rolls in Cincinnati and 
Toledo. County election boards purged the voting registration lists. 
Though all Ohio election boards are allegedly bipartisan, in fact they 
are all controlled by the Republican Party. Each has four seats, filled 
by law with two Democrats and two Republicans.

But all tie votes are decided by the secretary of state, in this case 
Blackwell, the extreme right-wing Republican now running for 
governor. Blackwell served in 2004 not only as the man in charge of 
the state's vote count, but also as co-chair of the Ohio Bush-Cheney 
campaign. Many independent observers have deemed this to be a 
conflict of interest. On election day, Blackwell met personally with 
Bush, Karl Rove and Matt Damschroder, chair of the Franklin County 
(Columbus) Board of Elections, formerly the chair of the county's 
Republican Party.

The Board of Elections in Toledo was chaired by Bernadette Noe, wife 
of Tom Noe, northwestern Ohio's "Mr. Republican." A close personal 
confidante of the Bush family, Noe raised more than $100,000 for the 
GOP presidential campaign in 2004. He is currently under indictment 
for three felony violations of federal election law, and 53 counts of 
fraud, theft and other felonies in the "disappearance" of more than $13 
million in state funds. Noe was entrusted with investing those funds by 
Republican Gov. Robert Taft, who recently pled guilty to four 
misdemeanor charges, making him the only convicted criminal ever to 
serve as governor of Ohio.

The rationale given by Noe and the Republican-controlled BOE in 
Lucas and Hamilton counties was that the voters should be eliminated 
from the rolls because they had allegedly not voted in the previous two 
federal elections.

There is no law that requires such voters be eliminated. And there is 
no public verification that has been offered to confirm that these people 
had not, in fact, voted in those elections.

Nonetheless, tens of thousands of voters turned up in mostly 
Democratic wards in Cincinnati and Toledo, only to find they had been 
mysteriously removed from the voter rolls. In many cases, sworn 
testimony and affidavits given at hearings after the election confirmed 
that many of these citizens had in fact voted in the previous two federal 
elections and had not moved from where they were registered. In 
some cases, their stability at those addresses stretched back for 
decades.

The problem was partially confirmed by a doubling of provisional 
ballots cast during the 2004 election, as opposed to the number cast in 
2000. Provisional ballots have been traditionally used in Ohio as a 
stopgap for people whose voting procedures are somehow 
compromised at the polls, but who are nonetheless valid registrants.

Prior to the 2004 election, Blackwell made a range of unilateral 
pronouncements that threw the provisional balloting process into 
chaos. Among other things, he demanded that voters casting 
provisional ballots provide their birth dates, a requirement that was 
often not mentioned by poll workers. Eyewitnesses testify that many 
provisional ballots were merely tossed in the trash at Ohio polling 
stations.

To this day, more than 16,000 provisional ballots (along with more than 
90,000 machine-spoiled ballots) cast in Ohio remain uncounted. The 
secretary of state refuses to explain why. A third attempt by the Green 
and Libertarian parties to obtain a meaningful recount of the Ohio 
presidential vote has again been denied by the courts, though the 
parties are appealing.

Soon after the 2004 election, Damschroder announced that Franklin 
County would eliminate another 170,000 citizens from the voter rolls in 
Columbus. Furthermore, House Bill 3, recently passed by the GOP-
dominated legislature, has imposed a series of restrictions that will 
make it much harder for citizens to restore their names to the voter 
rolls, or to register in the first place.

All this, however, pales before a new revelation just released by the 
board of elections in Cuyahoga County, the heavily Democratic county 
surrounding Cleveland.

Robert J. Bennett, the Republican chair of the Cuyahoga Board of 
Elections, and the chair of the Ohio Republican Party, has confirmed 
that prior to the 2004 election, his BOE eliminated -- with no public 
notice -- a staggering 175,414 voters from the Cleveland-area 
registration rolls. He has not explained why the revelation of this 
massive registration purge has been kept secret for so long. Virtually 
no Ohio or national media has bothered to report on this story.

Many of the affected precincts in Cuyahoga County went 90 percent 
and more for John Kerry. The county overall went more than 60 
percent for Kerry.

The eliminations have been given credence by repeated sworn 
testimony and affidavits from long-time Cleveland voters that they 
came to their usual polling stations only to be told that they were not 
registered. When they could get them, many were forced to cast 
provisional ballots which were highly likely to be pitched in the trash, or 
which remain uncounted.

Ohio election history would indicate that the elimination of 175,000 
voters in heavily Democratic Cleveland must almost certainly spell 
doom for any state-wide Democratic campaign. These 175,000 pre-
2004 election eliminations must now be added to the 105,000 from 
Cincinnati and the 28,000 from Toledo.

Therefore, to put it simply: at least 308,000 voters, most of them likely 
Democrats, were eliminated from the registration rolls prior to an 
election allegedly won by less than 119,000 votes, where more than 
106,000 votes still remain uncounted, and where the GOP secretary of 
state continues to successfully fight off a meaningful recount.

There are more than 80 other Ohio counties where additional pre-
November 2004 mass eliminations by GOP-controlled boards of 
elections may have occurred. Further "anomalies" in the Ohio 2004 
vote count continue to surface.

In addition, it seems evident that the Democratic Party will now enter 
Ohio's 2006 gubernatorial and U.S. Senate races, and its 2008 
presidential contest, with close to a half-million voters having been 
eliminated from the registration rolls, the vast majority of them from 
traditional Democratic strongholds, and with serious legislative barriers 
having been erected against new voter registration drives.

Stay tuned.

Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of "How the GOP 
Stole America's 2004 Election & Is Rigging 2008," available via Free 
Press. They are co-editors, with Steve Rosenfeld, of "What Happened 
in Ohio?

coming in September from The New Press.
? 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/33006/



-- 
You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, 
option D (up to 3 emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options 
(option A - 1x/week, option B - 3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option D - 
up to 3x/day) please reply and let us know!  If someone forwarded you 
this email and you want to be on our list, send an email to 
ean at sbcglobal.net and tell us which option you'd like.


"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060304/deef3aac/attachment.htm 

From ean at sbcglobal.net  Sat Mar  4 15:00:40 2006
From: ean at sbcglobal.net (ean at sbcglobal.net)
Date: Sat, 04 Mar 2006 15:00:40 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Venezuela's  Threat
Message-ID: <E1FG2HM-0007PN-7T@smtpauth07.mail.atl.earthlink.net>


Today's commentary:
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2006-02/27olson.cfm

==================================

ZNet Commentary
Venezuela's  Threat March 04, 2006
By Gary Olson 

Here is today's multiple choice question:  Who recently provided 1.15
million gallons of low-cost heating oil to thousands of poor and working
class families in seven East Coast states, including 25,000 people in
Philadelphia, and did so with the words,"No one should be forced to
sacrifice food, shelter, or medicine to stay warm" ? 

  a.) King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia
  b.) Felix Rodriquez
  c.) George W. Bush
  d.) Oprah Winfrey
  e.) 10 major U.S. oil companies. 

The correct answer is "b" and Rodriquez is the CEO of Citgo, a subsidiary
of Venezuela's state-run oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela SA (PDVSA). 
On behalf of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, he also distributed free
heating oil to dozens of homeless shelters from Maine to Delaware. 

Venezuela, with the largest oil deposits outside the Middle East and the
world's fifth largest oil producer, also sold oil at far lower costs to
fifteen poor nations in the Caribbean and Central America. Even Native
Americans in Maine were recipients, and Chief Bill Philips of the Micmac
tribe thanked Pres. Chavez: "He is a fellow Native from the Americas, and
we appreciate Chavez trying to bring low-cost heating oil for our
elderly." 

The 10 U.S. oil companies  did not respond to requests to help the poor.
Just one of them, Exxon, reported record profits of $36 billion in 2005.

Can the twice democratically-elected Chavez be the same fellow that Pat
Robertson wants the CIA to assassinate, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld has
likened to Adolf Hitler; and official and semi-official types have placed
on the White House "enemies list," labeled a "red devil," as "lethal as
Osama bin Laden," and a "madman"?  Further, the U.S. supported a
unsuccessful military coup against Chavez in 2002 and Condoleeza Rice has
called the Venezuelan government a "major threat to the region."

Assuming for the moment that preventing Pennsylvanians from freezing to
death hasn't prompted this venomous rhetoric, what could account for it? 
Perhaps the answer lies in some evil deeds done by Pres. Chavez back in
Venezuela. What mischief has he been up to there?

The challenges are daunting in Venezuela where 80% of the population is
poor and some 1 million children scratch out a bare subsistance in the
major cities. After four decades of indifferent upper-class rule, Chavez,
a 51-year-old former army paratrooper, was elected president in 1998 and
again in 2004.

According to Washington-based economist Mark Weisbrot, "The tangible
improvements for those living in Caracus' poor barrios have been noticed
in the rest of Latin America, a region with the most outrageously unequal
income distribution in the world."  Here are a few highlights of his
tenure:

  * For the first time time, universal health care is official state
  policy and peasants are living longer due to accessible health care. *
  Elementary schools are providing three free meals a day to all students,
  drawing some million new students to school. * misiones
  (missions/government projects) are extending vital social services like
  literacy training, food subsidies, and rudimentary health care to the
  poor. * Indigenous Venezuealans, homosexuals and women are now protected
  in the constitution. * Land reform is redistributing idle land to
  landless peasants.

  * Operation milegro (miracle), a joint venture with Cuban doctors, has
  restored eyesight to thousands of blind people in the region.

Venezuelan elites, who despise Chavez and call him a "monkey," have tried
mightily to sabotage the economy for eight years but it grew at a
respectable nine percent in 2005, the highest in the hemisphere. 

Venezuelan oil has made this possible but only Chavez acted on the clearly
subversive and radical notion that his country's vast resources should be
used to benefit the country's people and even those beyond its borders.  

Oil was nationalized in 1976, but according to all accounts the oil
bureaucracy operated as a "state within a state," refusing to function on
behalf of the citizens. The system remains imperfect but Chavez finally
excercised effective control over PSVSA in 2001. State oil profits were
over $25 billion last year and the petrodollars are now staying home in
the form of high social spending, faithfully reflecting social ownership
of this natural resource. Something must be working because his approval
rating stands at 77%, the highest in the Americas.

And of course this begins to explain why Chavez is viewed as a threat, as
a "virus" that might "infect" others. An alternative development model
where the citizens, not private U.S. foreign investors, are the primary
beneficiaries of government policy is feared by U.S. elites.  As Latin
American expert Prof. Rosa Maria Pegueros observes, from Washington's
perspective the real threat is that if Chavez succeeds, he may "create an
eqalitarian society that has the power to resist United States hegemony."

Who knows where this virus may appear next. To help it spread, I'm filling
my tank at the Citgo station from now on. 

Gary Olson, Ph.D. is chair of the Political Science Department at Moravian
College in Bethlehem,PA.  Contact:olson at moravian.edu   



-- 
You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, option D (up 
to 3 emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options (option A - 1x/week, 
option B - 3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option D - up to 3x/day) please reply 
and let us know!  If someone forwarded you this email and you want to be on 
our list, send an email to ean at sbcglobal.net and tell us which option you'd like.


"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060304/7b49936e/attachment-0001.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Sun Mar  5 16:13:20 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Mon,  6 Mar 2006 00:13:20 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: AT&T to Buy BellSouth,
	Creating Telecom Giant
Message-ID: <20060306001320.DDBE0249D98@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

Remember when they split up Bell Telephone into seven separate companies? Well...since AT&T eventually bought up 3 of those old companies, and BellSouth bought up 3 others, this means that, with the exception of one "baby Bell," the entire Bell network will be back together as one company!!


BUSINESS | March 5, 2006
AT&T to Buy BellSouth, Creating Telecom Giant
By KEN BELSON
The $67 billion deal would form a company serving nearly 70 million local phone customers and controlling Cingular Wireless.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/05/business/05cnd-phone.html?ex=1142226000&en=fe68c2c3a3357ac1&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060306/fdd3c223/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Sun Mar  5 16:17:28 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Mon,  6 Mar 2006 00:17:28 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Torture and Death of Jew Deepen Fears in
	France
Message-ID: <20060306001728.DD80A11FC3D@lax-gw07.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

INTERNATIONAL / EUROPE | March 5, 2006
Torture and Death of Jew Deepen Fears in France
By CRAIG S. SMITH
The gruesome kidnapping and murder of a Jewish man bares anew the racial and religious hatreds beneath the surface in France.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/05/international/europe/05france.html?ex=1142226000&en=f19c5a316fe2a7cc&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060306/b078cda1/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Sun Mar  5 16:17:55 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Mon,  6 Mar 2006 00:17:55 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: He's Battered, but His Agenda Isn't Beaten
Message-ID: <20060306001755.05166249F85@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

WEEK IN REVIEW | March 5, 2006
Hanging In: He's Battered, but His Agenda Isn't Beaten
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
Can President Bush recover the political clout to continue to advance his conservative domestic goals?
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/05/weekinreview/05kirkpatrick.html?ex=1142226000&en=b87cffbd19e1ab63&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060306/92936c04/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Sun Mar  5 16:19:08 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Mon,  6 Mar 2006 00:19:08 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: American World Order
Message-ID: <20060306001908.C54E2237427@lax-gw01.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

BOOKS / SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW | March 5, 2006
'The Case for Goliath,' by Michael Mandelbaum: American World Order
Review by MARTIN WALKER
Michael Mandelbaum argues U.S. dominance is better than the alternatives.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/05/books/review/05walker.html?ex=1142226000&en=217c9365323ccf95&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060306/b69ffb6a/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Sun Mar  5 16:19:18 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Mon,  6 Mar 2006 00:19:18 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Dollars Without Borders
Message-ID: <20060306001918.CACA3249D13@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

BOOKS / SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW | March 5, 2006
Globalization Books by Jeffry A. Frieden and Jeff Faux: Dollars Without Borders
Review by MICHAEL HIRSH
Two new books weigh the risks and rewards of globalization.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/05/books/review/05hirsh.html?ex=1142226000&en=a166ce343760d42d&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060306/dffdaa9a/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Sun Mar  5 16:20:10 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Mon,  6 Mar 2006 00:20:10 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: And This Year's Oscar Goes to ... a Movie
	That Takes a Stand
Message-ID: <20060306002010.171FA24B052@lax-gw02.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

OPINION | March 5, 2006
Editorial Observer: And This Year's Oscar Goes to ... a Movie That Takes a Stand
By ADAM COHEN
The Academy Awards have a history of avoiding politics. But this year's lineup could be a sign that the nation's political mood is shifting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/05/opinion/05sun4.html?ex=1142226000&en=c41de710b299fd03&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060306/09b0c26c/attachment-0001.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Sun Mar  5 16:20:21 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Mon,  6 Mar 2006 00:20:21 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: The Iraq Mess
Message-ID: <20060306002021.C9CE383EA2@lax-gw03.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

What we're saying...


OPINION | March 5, 2006
The Iraq Mess

To the Editor:.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/05/opinion/l05iraq.html?ex=1142226000&en=6168917938b338e7&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060306/04c9077e/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Sun Mar  5 16:27:53 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Mon,  6 Mar 2006 00:27:53 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: NYTimes.com: Après Le Deluge, Moi
Message-ID: <20060306002753.4F0F79FE4C@lax-gw05.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

If you want a truly dismal, depressing read (and who doesn't? LOL), pick up a hard copy of the Times Magazine ("The Real Estate Issue") and both read the articles and thumb through the ads. You will see ads for "luxury" housing in NY, FL and other cities that START at over $1 million (but have an average selling price of over $3 million), and read about greed, rapaciousness, and condo and co-op building, with nary a word about affordable housing for anyone anywhere. This particular article tells of one rapacious New Orleans developer who is going to make zillions from people wealthy enough to afford his units, while the poor and middle class whose homes were lost will no longer be able to afford to live in New Orleans. Yes, the guy did do a few "good deeds" re the people of NO. But what comes acorss clearly is a mindset that puts money, power and position above any notion of fairness, much less nobility. Peace.


MAGAZINE | March 5, 2006
Speculator: Apr?s Le Deluge, Moi
By GARY RIVLIN
One man's flood is another man's opportunity to buy hotels, condos, office buildings and any other property he can close on. How Patrick Quinn is trying to become the Donald Trump of New Orleans.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/05/magazine/305speculator.1.html?ex=1142226000&en=c1ac627550206f01&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060306/50d0c315/attachment.htm 

From michael at intrafi.com  Sun Mar  5 16:24:20 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (Michael)
Date: Sun, 5 Mar 2006 19:24:20 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Article from Tom Dispatch
Message-ID: <200603060024.k260OKlA013877@thor.thenation.com>

An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060305/9facbceb/attachment.htm 

From geomilman at milman.com  Sun Mar  5 10:02:54 2006
From: geomilman at milman.com (George R. Milman)
Date: Sun, 5 Mar 2006 10:02:54 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] How we really elect 'em.
Message-ID: <E1FG4VK-0000Rx-9a@smtpauth07.mail.atl.earthlink.net>




 <http://www.newyorker.com/main/start/> 



COMMENT

COUNT 'EM

by Hendrik Hertzberg

Issue of 2006-03-06
Posted 2006-02-27

Last Thursday morning, in one of the smaller function rooms at the National
Press Club, in Washington, an ad-hoc bunch of amateurs, once-weres,
might-bes, and goo-goos floated an initiative that, with a little luck,
could enable our ramshackle republic to take a long, and long overdue, step
toward a more perfect union. The idea behind their initiative is this: that
the President of the United States should be elected by the people of the
United States.

This idea is neither new nor outlandish, but for most of the past couple of
centuries it has been dismissed as unachievable. The Electoral College is
enshrined in the Constitution itself, so getting rid of it would require the
concurrence of two-thirds of both houses of Congress plus three-quarters of
the state legislatures. That's not going to happen. 

But maybe it doesn't have to. The promoters of the Campaign for a National
Popular Vote, as they're calling themselves, have come up with an elegant
finesse. Instead of trying to change the Constitution, they propose to apply
it, one bit in particular: Article II, Section 1, which instructs each state
to "appoint" its Presidential electors "in such Manner as the Legislature
thereof may direct." Here's how the plan would work. One by one, legislature
by legislature, state law by state law, individual states would pledge
themselves to an interstate compact under which they would agree to award
their electoral votes to the nationwide winner of the popular vote. The
compact would take effect only when enough states had joined it to elect a
President-that is, enough to cast a majority of the five hundred and
thirty-eight electoral votes. (Theoretically, as few as eleven states could
do the trick.) And then, presto! All of a sudden, the people of all fifty
states plus the District of Columbia are empowered to elect their President
the same way they elect their governors, mayors, senators, and congressmen.
We still have the Electoral College, with its colorful eighteenth-century
rituals, but it can no longer do any damage. It becomes a tourist
attraction, like the British monarchy. 

There is very little doubt about the constitutional and legal feasibility of
this plan. The power of state legislatures to direct the choice of their
states' electors, the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled, is essentially
unlimited. As the Court pointed out in one well-known case, the State
legislature's power to select the manner for appointing electors is plenary;
it may, if it so chooses, select the electors itself, which indeed was the
manner used by State legislatures in several States for many years after the
Framing of our Constitution. (Bush v. Gore, 2000) 

The political feasibility of the plan is another matter. Its initial backers
are middleweights at best. Its originator is a scientist-John R. Koza, a
Stanford professor who teaches courses in genetic algorithms and made a
small fortune by co-inventing the rub-off instant lottery ticket. At
Thursday's press conference, a few representatives of the media's wonkish
fringe (Congressional Quarterly, Roll Call, C-Span) heard mostly from
formers: John Anderson, a former Republican congressman from Illinois (and
1980 independent Presidential candidate); Birch Bayh, a former Democratic
senator from Indiana; and John Buchanan, a former Republican congressman
from Alabama. Former Representative Tom Campbell, of California, and former
Senators Jake Garn, of Utah, and David Durenberger, of Minnesota-Republicans
all-have also signed on. The presence of so many Republicans is a deliberate
choice, designed to counter suspicions that a Democratic plot is afoot. But,
in reality, no one has the slightest idea which party, if either, would
benefit. It's true that George W. Bush's court-certified
five-hundred-and-thirty-seven-vote edge in Florida trumped Al Gore's
half-million-vote national plurality in 2000. But it's also true that Bush's
three-million-vote majority in 2004 would have been vaporized by a switch of
sixty thousand votes in Ohio. 

On the other hand, in only one of the past twenty-nine Presidential
elections has the winner of the popular vote not also been the winner of the
electoral vote. So why not stick with an arrangement that, since 1888, has
"worked" ninety-seven per cent of the time? Because the deepest argument for
a national popular vote has nothing to do with who wins. It has to do with
the over-all health of a democratic order.

As has become increasingly clear over the past few general elections, with
their red states and blue states, an American Presidential campaign is no
longer truly national. It takes place almost exclusively in the purple
states-the "battleground states," where neither party can be sure of a lock.
In 2004, there were thirteen such states, accounting for twenty-eight per
cent of the population (and thirty-two per cent of the ultimate vote, since
turnout increases with the uncertainty of the outcome). In the final month,
the candidates spent $237 million on advertising, $229 million of it in
those thirteen states. (In twenty-three states, they didn't spend a dime.)
At the same time, President Bush, Vice-President Cheney, Senator Kerry, and
Senator Edwards attended a total of two hundred and ninety-one campaign
events. Two hundred and sixty-eight of them were in the lucky thirteen.

There's a traditional view that without the Electoral College Presidential
campaigns would simply ignore the small states. It hasn't worked that way.
The real division that the Electoral College creates, in tandem with the
winner-take-all rule, is not between large states and small states but
between battleground states and what might be called spectator states. Of
the thirteen least populous states, six are red, six are blue, and one-New
Hampshire-is up for grabs. Guess which twelve Bush and Kerry stiffed and
which one got plenty of love, long after the primary season? Size doesn't
matter. At the other end of the spectrum, the three biggest states-blue
California, red Texas, and blue New York-were utterly ignored, except for
purposes of fund-raising.

That's not the worst of it, though. After all, some people might count it a
blessing to be spared the October onslaught of thirty-second spots and
traffic jams caused by self-important motorcades. The worst of it is the
death of participatory politics in two-thirds of the country. If you live in
a spectator state, it might be fun to persuade your neighbors to vote your
way, or ring their doorbells, or hand them leaflets. But it can't make a
difference. And it doesn't matter which side you're on or which color your
state is. Widening your ticket's margin of victory or narrowing its margin
of defeat is equally pointless. In this sense, our Presidential campaigns
are not only not national; in most of the country they're not local, either.
They're just not.

For fifty years, polls have consistently shown that seventy per cent of the
public favors direct election. Nevertheless, the National Popular Vote plan
will meet with a lot of resistance, some of it from battleground-state
politicians. But in all those spectator states there are scores of millions
of voters, and thousands of politicians, who would like to get in on the
game. They might prefer to see our Presidents elected not by red states and
blue states and purple states, and not by big states or small states, but by
the United States. Last Friday, a bill went into the hopper of the Illinois
legislature. We'll see.

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060305/cb51bfd4/attachment-0001.htm 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 1054 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060305/cb51bfd4/attachment-0004.gif 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 949 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060305/cb51bfd4/attachment-0005.gif 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 49 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060305/cb51bfd4/attachment-0006.gif 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 73 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060305/cb51bfd4/attachment-0007.gif 

From grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net  Sun Mar  5 11:10:24 2006
From: grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net (Golsorkhi)
Date: Sun, 05 Mar 2006 14:10:24 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] FW: How we duped the West,
	by Iran's nuclear negotiator !!!!!!!
In-Reply-To: <2EE506E3-8E2F-4B43-A744-F0043E629FD1@thesamiis.com>
Message-ID: <E1FG4au-0004O5-Um@smtpauth07.mail.atl.earthlink.net>


------ Forwarded Message
From: Samii Shahla <shahla at thesamiis.com>
Date: Sat, 4 Mar 2006 23:56:06 -0500
Subject: How we duped the West, by Iran's nuclear negotiator !!!!!!!

Telegraph Co. - UK

How we duped the West, by Iran's nuclear negotiator

By Philip Sherwell in Washington
(Filed: 05/03/2006)

The man who for two years led Iran's nuclear negotiations has laid out in
unprecedented detail how the regime took advantage of talks with Britain,
France and Germany to forge ahead with its secret atomic programme.

In a speech to a closed meeting of leading Islamic clerics and academics,
Hassan Rowhani, who headed talks with the so-called EU3 until last year,
revealed how Teheran played for time and tried to dupe the West after its
secret nuclear programme was uncovered by the Iranian opposition in 2002.

Iran has completed uranium enrichment equipment at Isfahan
He boasted that while talks were taking place in Teheran, Iran was able to
complete the installation of equipment for conversion of yellowcake - a key
stage in the nuclear fuel process - at its Isfahan plant but at the same
time convince European diplomats that nothing was afoot.

"From the outset, the Americans kept telling the Europeans, 'The Iranians
are lying and deceiving you and they have not told you everything.' The
Europeans used to respond, 'We trust them'," he said.

Revelation of Mr Rowhani's remarks comes at an awkward moment for the
Iranian government, ahead of a meeting tomorrow of the United Nations'
atomic watchdog, which must make a fresh assessment of Iran's banned nuclear
operations.

The judgment of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is the final
step before Iran's case is passed to the UN Security Council, where
sanctions may be considered.

In his address to the Supreme Council of Cultural Revolution, Mr Rowhani
appears to have been seeking to rebut criticism from hardliners that he gave
too much ground in talks with the European troika. The contents of the
speech were published in a regime journal that circulates among the ruling
elite.

He told his audience: "When we were negotiating with the Europeans in
Teheran we were still installing some of the equipment at the Isfahan site.
There was plenty of work to be done to complete the site and finish the work
there. In reality, by creating a tame situation, we could finish Isfahan."

America and its European allies believe that Iran is clandestinely
developing an atomic bomb but Teheran insists it is merely seeking nuclear
energy for peaceful purposes. Iran's negotiating team engaged in a
last-ditch attempt last week to head off Security Council involvement. In
January the regime removed IAEA seals on sensitive nuclear equipment and
last month it resumed banned uranium enrichment.

Iran is trying to win support from Russia, which opposes any UN sanctions,
having unsuccessfully tried to persuade European leaders to give them more
time. Against this backdrop, Mr Rowhani's surprisingly candid comments on
Iran's record of obfuscation and delay are illuminating.

He described the regime's quandary in September 2003 when the IAEA had
demanded a "complete picture" of its nuclear activities. "The dilemma was if
we offered a complete picture, the picture itself could lead us to the UN
Security Council," he said. "And not providing a complete picture would also
be a violation of the resolution and we could have been referred to the
Security Council for not implementing the resolution."

Mr Rowhani disclosed that on at least two occasions the IAEA obtained
information on secret nuclear-related experiments from academic papers
published by scientists involved in the work.

The Iranians' biggest setback came when Libya secretly negotiated with
America and Britain to close down its nuclear operations. Mr Rowhani said
that Iran had bought much of its nuclear-related equipment from "the same
dealer" - a reference to the network of A Q Khan, the rogue Pakistani atomic
scientist. From information supplied by Libya, it became clear that Iran had
bought P2 advanced centrifuges.

In a separate development, the opposition National Council of Resistance of
Iran (NCRI) has obtained a copy of a confidential parliamentary report
making clear that Iranian MPs were also kept in the dark on the nuclear
programme, which was funded secretly, outside the normal budgetary process.

Mohammad Mohaddessin, the NCRI's foreign affairs chief, told the Sunday
Telegraph: "Rowhani's remarks show that the mullahs wanted to deceive the
international community from the onset of negotiations with EU3 - and that
the mullahs were fully aware that if they were transparent, the regime's
nuclear file would be referred to the UN immediately."

4 March 2006: Iran refuses to give ground over nuclear 'research'
19 February 2006: Iranian fatwa approves use of nuclear weapons
16 January 2006: Iran 'could go nuclear within three years'
---

Information appearing on telegraph.co.uk is the copyright of Telegraph Group
Limited and must not be reproduced in any medium without licence. For the
full copyright statement see Copyright

URL:?http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/03/05/wiran05
.xml&sSheet=/portal/2006/03/05/ixportal.html?


------ End of Forwarded Message

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060305/97aa181b/attachment.htm 

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Sun Mar  5 17:34:50 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Sun, 05 Mar 2006 17:34:50 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Twilight's Last Gleaming     By John Cory
Message-ID: <C030D1BA.29BB8%michael@michaelbutler.com>

    Twilight's Last Gleaming
    By John Cory
    t r u t h o u t | Perspective

    Sunday 05 March 2006

    Who are these people? These people who line their pockets with the lives
of our loved ones? These gray men who lurk in shadows and kill the sunshine
of democracy? These people who wear morality like a cheap suit pilfered from
the collection plate of decency? Who are these people who have turned
America into their own personal ATM machine? These are the people of the lie
- Republicans.

    Who are these people? These people who sit in spineless silence unable
to speak in defense of America? These people who mime the words of our
founders, afraid to act with independence? Who utter the words "We concede,"
instead of "We the People?" These are the people who lie down - Democrats.

    Newspapers no longer serve the public, only their corporate masters.
They have wedged themselves firmly between the cheeks of power, a tissue to
sanitize the bullshit. The media has finally achieved the ultimate
self-delusion; broadcasting sitcom politics, and talking points of the
throne, it has become the court jester with tinkling bells and curly pointed
shoes: useless, untrustworthy, and fused in falsehoods and facades.

    This is twilight's last gleaming. Attention must be paid. Democracy is
dying.

    Bush and Company wants us to be afraid. Republicans sell us fear as they
sell out America.

    Democrats wait in the wings, picking up their pieces of silver to keep
mum. Both political parties capitalize on all the fear.

    Democrats think we will become so fearful of Republicans that we will
have no other choice but to elect them. That is their incentive. Low
profile, quiet acquiescence, and they think their silence will be rewarded.

    This is not the time for silence. According to recent polls from Zogby,
Fox News, Gallup and CNN, 72% of our troops believe the war in Iraq is a
failure and we should withdraw. 64% of the public disapproves of Bush's
handling of Iraq. 69% of Americans are against the Dubai Port deal. 52% do
not find Bush "honest and trustworthy."

    And yet Democrats can find no voice, no fight, no issue to unify them to
protect "we the people." Major print and media outlets can find no reason to
investigate Republican scandals, bribery and lies, no reason to question an
administration that started a war with a lie and failed its own citizens
when Katrina hit, by lying about what they did or did not know. Katrina,
like 9/11, left the boy king wide-eyed and unprepared. Leader of the free
world? Most Americans think not.

    When it comes time for voting, here is what I will remember: the
silence.

    If there is a voice for America, let them speak now. Let them speak for
the poor women who not only will find abortion illegal, but will not be
allowed birth control and contraceptives. Let them speak for the old and
infirm who will not be able to have healthcare and cost-effective drug
prescriptions. Let them speak for true family values of providing for our
veterans and protecting our troops with proper body armor and ending a false
war so no more loved ones have to die for a lie.

    But most of all, let them now speak up for the one precious gift that is
America - Freedom. Freedom of speech - Freedom to dissent - Freedom from
illegal domestic spying. Freedom, sweet freedom for which our fathers,
brothers, and sisters have fought and died for over the past 230 years!

    Hunter S. Thompson warned, "Big dark coming soon." Big dark is here.

    Our Constitution hangs by a thread. Make no mistake, this is twilight's
last gleaming. It's time to defend America, not sell it down the river of
corporate greed. It is time to stand up, not slink away to fight another
day, because there are no more days. The monarchs of mendacity under George
Bush are dismantling democracy at every opportunity.

    Democrats, you want my vote? Earn it! Get up off your ass and take a
stand! Take back America. Stop whimpering. Throw out your Republican-lite
Bush lickspittles and suit up for battle. We the people will support you if
you speak up for the America we live in and want to preserve. You cannot
claim victory simply because you kept the GOP from burying the Constitution
while you let them drive it underground.

    This is twilight's last gleaming. Who will speak up for America?

 


From ean at sbcglobal.net  Sun Mar  5 17:52:41 2006
From: ean at sbcglobal.net (ean at sbcglobal.net)
Date: Sun, 05 Mar 2006 17:52:41 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Troops to Bush: Get Us Out of Here!
Message-ID: <E1FG50B-00089F-A0@smtpauth07.mail.atl.earthlink.net>

CounterPunch - Mar 2, 2006
http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff03022006.html

Troops to Bush: Get Us Out of Here!

By DAVE LINDORFF

Well, now we have it.

If you're one of those people with a yellow "Support the Troops" magnet on
your car, you might consider doing what 72 percent of those troops in Iraq
want, which is to go home.

You might not know it if you get your news from TV or your local paper--or
even if you read the New York Times but skip the opinion page--but Zogby
International, a leading polling organization, just did a major poll of
944 American soldiers and marines in Iraq and found that nearly three
quarters of them thought the US should exit Iraq within a year. More than
half thought the US should leave within six months, and 29 percent said
the US should leave "immediately." (That's what the Commander in Chief and
the vice president, both of whom avoided having to fight in Vietnam, like
to call "cutting and running.")

The Zogby poll results should be big news, but it didn't make most of the
mainstream papers or the major TV news programs.

A spokesperson at Zogby said, philosophically, "This is the kind of story
that has a long shelf life. These are not the kinds of opinions that shift
up and down rapidly; they are strongly held opinions being expressed by
the troops who were interviewed. We find that these kinds of polls don't
get covered as news in themselves in today's media. They tend to get
picked up and used to illuminate other stories, over time."

The spokesperson, Communications Director Fritz Wenzel, said that the 48
hours following Zogby's release of the new poll, with its startling
results, were "the busiest days I've had in this job," with over 50
reporters contacting him for interviews. Oddly though, this busiest day of
calling didn't produce much in the way of stories.

A likely explanation for this seeming paradox is that reporters clearly
recognized the news value of a poll finding that the vast majority of
American forces in Iraq believe that the war is a fiasco and that it's
time to get the hell out, but senior management wouldn't let them go with
the story. That's why the poll results, instead of being reported as the
breaking news that they are, will end up being tucked discretely into
broader pieces, as the Washington Post did, putting the information midway
through an article on President Bush's falling approval rating (now at
34%). That's why the New York Times ignored the story in its news pages,
and let it be covered in an op-ed column by Nicholas Kristof.

The poll, conducted between mid-January and mid-February, asked the troops
other questions besides just the one about staying and fighting on or
going home.

Among the other startling things Zogby discovered:

    * While the administration keeps going on about "foreign fighters"
    being
the problem in Iraq, only 26% of the troops questioned thought eliminating
foreign fighters would weaken the insurgency.

    * The strongest opposition to "staying the course" in Iraq came from
reserve and National Guard troops, but even among active-duty Marines, the
most gung-ho of troops in Iraq, 58% favored a pull-out within a year.
Nearly half of reserve and guard troops favored an immediate pull-out.

    * While the president talks about starting to reduce the number of US
troops in Iraq, currently at a peak of 136,000 (a political imperative
with congressional elections coming up this November), a majority of
troops in the country say it would take a doubling of troops and a stepped
up bombing campaign to control the Iraqi insurgency.

    * A clear majority of the troops oppose torture and aggressive
interrogation techniques and four out of five polled oppose the use of
such banned weapons as napalm and phosphorus bombs, such as US forces
employed in the assault on Fallujah in November 2004.

    * This kind of information, which runs counter to the prevailing
    wisdom
about attitudes of soldiers in the field, should be big news based upon
the standard "man-bites-dog" theory of what constitutes news, but so far,
the major media are for the most part ducking it, treating it as a
"dog-bites-man" non-story.

A good illustration of how this kind of journalistic cowardice undermines
effective political discourse in America is provided by the continuing
ignorance about the causes of the war. Even in America itself, a large
percentage of people still believe, against all the evidence, that
invading Iraq made sense because Saddam Hussein was behind the 9-11
attacks. He was not, as even the president has been grudgingly forced to
admit. Yet the media have done such a bad job of making this clear that
Zogby reports 85 percent of troops in Iraq still think they're fighting
"to retaliate for Saddam's role in the 9-11 attacks."

The clearest message of the Zogby poll is that those who want to "support
the troops" now know what the troops themselves want, and what they want
is "OUT!"

Those Americans who want to do something significant to support the troops
beyond just displaying a meaningless yellow ribbon might start by calling
their local media outlets and asking why there hasn't been a story about
the latest Zogby poll.

That could be followed up by a few calls to local Congressional
delegations, calling attention to the poll, and demanding an end to the
war, in the interest of supporting our troops.

[Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation into the
Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His new book of CounterPunch 
columns
titled "This Can't be Happening!" is published by Common Courage Press.
Lindorff's new book, "The Case for Impeachment", co-authored by Barbara
Olshansky, is due out May 1.]



------------------------------
-- 
You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, 
option D (up to 3 emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options 
(option A - 1x/week, option B - 3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option D - 
up to 3x/day) please reply and let us know!  If someone forwarded you 
this email and you want to be on our list, send an email to 
ean at sbcglobal.net and tell us which option you'd like.


"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060305/e601aba2/attachment.htm 

From ean at sbcglobal.net  Sun Mar  5 17:52:41 2006
From: ean at sbcglobal.net (ean at sbcglobal.net)
Date: Sun, 05 Mar 2006 17:52:41 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Bush in India:  Nuclear Cave In
Message-ID: <E1FG52T-0001q8-RP@smtpauth07.mail.atl.earthlink.net>

Via NY Transfer News Collective  *  All the News that Doesn't Fit
To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
 http://olm.blythe-systems.com/mailman/listinfo/nytr
or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
 nytr-request at olm.blythe-systems.com

------------

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace - Mar 2, 2006
http://www.carnegieendowment.org/npp/

Nuclear Cave In  	

By Joseph Cirincione

Buffeted by political turmoil at home, President Bush sought a foreign
affairs victory in India.  To clinch a nuclear weapons deal, the president
had to give in to demands from the Indian nuclear lobby to exempt large
portions of the country?s nuclear infrastructure from international
inspection.  With details of the deal still under wraps, it appears that
at least one-third of current and planned Indian reactors would be exempt
from IAEA inspections and that the president gave into Indian demands for
?Indian-specific? inspections that would fall far short of the normal,
full-scope inspections originally sought. Worse, Indian officials have
made clear that India alone will decide which future reactors will be kept
in the military category and exempt from any safeguards.

The deal endorses and assists India?s nuclear weapons program. 
US-supplied uranium fuel would free up India?s limited uranium reserves
for fuel that would be burned in these reactors to make nuclear weapons. 
This would allow India to increase its production from the estimated 6 to
10 additional nuclear bombs per year to several dozen per year.  India
today has enough separated plutonium for 75 to 110 nuclear weapons, though
it is not known how many it has actually produced.

The Indian leaders and press are crowing about their victory over America.
For good reason: President Bush has done what Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford,
Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and his own father refused to
do--break U.S. and international law to aid India?s nuclear weapons
program. In 1974, India cheated on its agreements with the United States
and other nations to do what Iran is accused of doing now: using a
peaceful nuclear energy program to build a nuclear bomb.  India used
plutonium produced in a Canadian-supplied reactor to detonate a bomb it
then called a ?peaceful nuclear device.? In response, President Richard
Nixon and Congress stiffened U.S. laws and Nixon organized the Nuclear
Suppliers Group to prevent any other nation from following India?s
example. President Bush has now unilaterally shattered those guidelines
and his action would violate the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
proscription against aiding another nation?s nuclear weapons program.  It
would require the repeal or revision of several major U.S. laws, including
the U.S. Nonproliferation Act.  Nor has he won any significant concessions
from India.  India refuses to agree to end its production of nuclear
weapons material, something the U.S., the UK, France, Russia and China
have already done.

This is where the president is likely to run into trouble.  Republicans
and Democrats in Congress are deeply concerned about the deal and the way
it was crafted.  Keeping with the administration?s penchant for secrecy,
the deal was cooked by a handful of senior officials (one of whom is now a
lobbyist for the Indian government) and never reviewed by the Departments
of State, Defense or Energy before it was announced with a champagne toast
by President Bush and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.  Congress 
was
never consulted.
 Republican committee staff say the first members heard about it was when
the fax announcing the deal came into their offices.  Worse, for the
president, this appears to be another give away to a foreign government at
the expense of U.S. national security interests.

Bad Example

In addition to breaking U.S. law and shattering long-standing barriers to
proliferation, lawmakers are concerned about the example the nuclear
weapons deal sets for other nations.

The lesson Iran is likely to draw is simple:  if you hold out long enough,
the Americans will cave.  All this talk about violating treaties, they
will reason, is just smoke.  When the Americans think you are important
enough, they will break the rules to accommodate you.

Pakistani officials have already said they expect Pakistan to receive a
similar deal, and Israel is surely waiting in the wings.  Other nations
may decide that they can break the rules, too, to grant special deals to
their friends.  China is already rumored to be seeking a deal to provide
open nuclear assistance to Pakistan?a practice it stopped in the early
1990s after a successful diplomatic campaign by the United States to bring
China into conformity with the Non-Proliferation Treaty restrictions. 
Will Russia decide that it can make an exception for Iran?

Lawmakers loyal to President Bush are already signaling tough times ahead
for this deal.

Rep. Ed Royce (R-CA), Chairman of the Subcommittee on International
Terrorism and Nonproliferation offered the following statement after the
deal was announced:

?There is enthusiastic support on Capitol Hill for growing U.S.-India
ties. However, the U.S.-India agreement on civil nuclear cooperation has
implications beyond U.S.-India relations. In this process, the goal of
curbing nuclear proliferation should be paramount. Congress will continue
its careful consideration of this far reaching agreement.?

His subcommittee has oversight and legislative responsibilities over
nonproliferation matters.  Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN), Chairman of the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has made no secret of his concerns, as
has Rep. Henry Hyde (R-IL), Chairman of the House International Relations
Committee.  Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA) says, ?America cannot credibly
preach nuclear temperance from a barstool.  We can't tell Iran, a country
that has signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, that they can't have
[uranium] enrichment technologies while simultaneously carving out a
special exemption from nuclear proliferation laws for India, a nation that
has refused to sign the treaty.?

This looming Congressional battle will pit the proliferation fighters
against the nuclear lobby and the increasingly powerful India lobby.
Companies and countries (including France, Canada and Russia) are lining
up to sell fuel and reactors to India.  They will be joined by the
neoconservatives who seek to construct an anti-China alliance.  For them,
as one architect of the India deal reportedly said, ?The problem is not
that India has too many nuclear weapons, it is that they do not have
enough.?

If President Bush was riding high in the polls and had a string of
national security victories behind him, this David and Goliath battle
would be won by the nuclear giants. But with sagging popularity, deep
concern over his leadership, and anger at the administration?s disregard
for laws and consultation, lawmakers more concerned about proliferation
than profits could block or amend this deal.  The president may have made
a fatal error in putting nuclear weapons at the heart of improved
U.S.-India relations. Lawmakers want the latter, but not at the price of
the former.

                            ***

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace 

A Deeply Flawed India Deal 

By Caterina Dutto 
Published: February 28, 2006

In a February 14 letter to Congress, six nonproliferation experts and
former government officials detailed the serious problems with the
proposed US-India nuclear deal. Their core concern is that U.S. trade and
cooperation would directly assist India?s nuclear weapons program. This
would violate existing U.S. laws and the U.S. commitment in the nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty ?not in any way to assist, encourage, or induce
any non-nuclear weapon State to manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear
weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.?

The experts say, ?Building upon the already strong U.S.-Indian partnership
is an important goal, and we remain convinced that it can be achieved
without undermining U.S. leadership efforts to prevent the proliferation
of the world?s most dangerous weapons.?

They caution, however, that ?on balance, India?s commitments under the
current terms of the proposed arrangement do not justify making
far-reaching exceptions to U.S. law and international nonproliferation
norms. At a minimum, this requires permanent, facility-specific safeguards
on a mutually agreed and broad list of current and future civil Indian
nuclear facilities and material, as well a cutoff of Indian fissile
material production for weapons.?

For a pdf of the seven-page letter, click here.
http://www.armscontrol.org/pdf/20060214_India_Clarifying_Responses.pdf


------------------------------

BBC - Mar 2, 2006
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4766608.stm

Hurdles ahead for landmark nuclear deal

By Jonathan Marcus
BBC Diplomatic correspondent

The nuclear deal with India enshrines a shift in US policy with
far-reaching implications.

It underscores the special relationship between Delhi and Washington. And
it sends powerful - and in many ways contradictory - signals about the
Bush administration's attitude towards the nuclear non-proliferation
regime.

As far as the Bush administration is concerned, this is a win-win deal.

A friendly, democratic and powerful regional ally, India gains access to
civil nuclear technology to help power its industrial growth.

At the same time India will effectively have to segregate its nuclear
facilities into two programmes - one civil and the other military, with
the former coming under additional international safeguards.

Hurdles

Not so long ago, of course, India was one of the nuclear bad-guys.

t has steadfastly refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
(NPT) and it has developed its own nuclear bomb.

The US applied sanctions against India and a battery of US legislation put
India into a kind of nuclear isolation.

Hurdle one for the Bush administration is to get Congress to unpick this
legislation.

Attitudes on Capitol Hill are mixed. There is a good deal of unease about
the agreement on non-proliferation grounds, a fear that India is being
rewarded despite its nuclear weapons programme and a belief that
Washington could have struck a tougher bargain.

There are concerns, for example, that India will still be able to produce
more fissile material for its bomb-making programme and thus will be able
to expand its nuclear arsenal.

Nonetheless, there is also a strong tide of pro-Indian sentiment among US
legislators.

Hurdle two is to persuade the 44-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group - who
co-ordinate sales of nuclear technology - of the merits of the deal, where
again, opinion is divided.

'Useful benchmark'

Here the US has already had some preliminary talks.

Some countries back the US and India. Britain, Russia and France (Paris,
too, is eager to sell India nuclear technology) have all, in terms of
initial positions, been positive.

Ireland, Japan and the Netherlands have been far from enthusiastic.

Agreement at the group is not necessarily essential.

But its consensus view on nuclear transfers provides a useful
international benchmark.

Regional implications

Since so much of non-proliferation policy depends upon creating as broad a
diplomatic coalition as possible, it would be unwise of the US to break
this tradition of consensus.

The deal could have significant regional implications, especially if India
continues to develop the military side of its nuclear programme.

China's only comment so far has been a rather restrained call for any
US-India co-operation to be in line with the rules of the global
non-proliferation regime.

Though there are some strategic experts in Beijing who are carefully
watching the burgeoning US-India relationship for any sign that India is
being turned into a regional bulwark against China.

It is in the arms control community - especially among US experts - that
the deal has caused most concern.

Many fear that Washington is again signalling that international rules -
like the NPT - set standards that can be conveniently ignored in some
cases, while the Bush administration vigorously tries to apply them in
others.

? BBC MMVI

-- 
You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, 
option D (up to 3 emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options 
(option A - 1x/week, option B - 3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option D - 
up to 3x/day) please reply and let us know!  If someone forwarded you 
this email and you want to be on our list, send an email to 
ean at sbcglobal.net and tell us which option you'd like.


"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060305/84aa866b/attachment-0001.htm 

From michael at intrafi.com  Sun Mar  5 19:43:40 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Sun, 05 Mar 2006 22:43:40 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] An article for you from an Economist.com reader.
Message-ID: <200603060315.WAA18249@stage-web-app.economist.com>


- AN ARTICLE FOR YOU, FROM ECONOMIST.COM -

Dear civic,

Michael Butler (michael at intrafi.com) wants you to see this article on Economist.com.



(Note: the sender's e-mail address above has not been verified.)

Subscribe to The Economist print edition, get great savings and FREE full access to Economist.com.  Click here to subscribe:  http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/email.cfm 

Alternatively subscribe to online only version by clicking on the link below and save 25%:

http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/offer.cfm?campaign=168-XLMT



DENYING THE HOLOCAUST
Feb 23rd 2006  

It is loathsome, but should not be a crime

FABRICATING history is an act of intellectual vandalism that poisons
modern understanding of past misdeeds and heroism alike. But should it
be a crime? In civilised countries, the truth is best policed by
scholars, not criminal prosecutors. Historians who distort, inflate and
invent find their credibility shredded by their peers, not the police.
But David Irving, an author of books about the second world war, is now
starting a three-year prison sentence in Austria (see article[1]) for
remarks he made in 1989 doubting the existence of gas chambers at
Auschwitz. That has won him praise in Iran, where the president,
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, recently described the holocaust as a "myth".

Holocaust denial is ridiculous, but it is too common, and too damaging,
to be a joke. It commonly makes four claims: that the numbers of Jews
killed were wildly inflated; that any persecution was matched or
exceeded by allied war crimes against Germans; that Hitler was ignorant
of, or even opposed to, the killing of Jews; and that accounts of
systematic extermination were invented to benefit Israel. 

Holocaust deniers such as Mr Irving are expert at taking anomalies and
contradictions in the historical record and erecting such pyramids of
loathsome nonsense upon them. From the gaps (all explicable) in the
surviving evidence about Auschwitz-Birkenau they infer that the gas
chambers there were a propaganda invention. And not only that: other
details of the Holocaust are invented too. In fact it didn't really
happen: Hitler liked Jews. Or (as the Palestinian movement Hamas
argues) Jews caused the war. Holocaust denial (or "revisionism" as its
pseudo-scholarly advocates term it) uses quibbles, semantics and phoney
logic to befuddle the gullible about the mass murder of millions of
innocents. 

To the fair-minded, such claims are preposterous. But among the
prejudiced, silly and ignorant they flourish, especially on the
internet. They gain a touch of intellectual legitimacy from a handful
of cranky academics--though of these only Mr Irving has any claim to be
a historian. His early works, particularly on military matters, were
acclaimed. Nobody doubts his knowledge of German archives, or his skill
in deciphering the crabbed handwriting of senior Nazis.

But there are plenty of doubts about his integrity. At a libel action
in London in 2000, in which he had every chance to make his best case,
the judge concluded that he was "anti-Semitic and racist", saying he
had "persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated
historical evidence" and "portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly
favourable light."

It is hard to see what the Austrian court's sentence can add to that.
Keeping Mr Irving in jail at most may stop him going to a conference
that Mr Ahmadinejad is convening to "rewrite and revise" the history of
the holocaust. But against that small plus are two big minuses. One is
that the sentence makes Mr Irving look a martyr. The other is that it
makes the West look hypocritical: all too willing to bruise Muslim
feelings, while protecting Jewish ones by law.

Laws against holocaust denial (which 14 countries have) were never a
good idea. The best defence against neo-Nazis is reason and ridicule,
not the criminal law. But at a time when the western world is battling
to defend free speech against religious zealotry, they look
particularly indefensible. It is punishment enough for Mr Irving that
he has lost his professional credibility. He should not lose his
liberty too.

-----
[1] http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_ID=5555832
 

See this article with graphics and related items at http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_VVQRTQN

Go to http://www.economist.com for more global news, views and analysis from the Economist Group.

- ABOUT ECONOMIST.COM -

Economist.com is the online version of The Economist newspaper, an independent weekly international news and business publication offering clear reporting, commentary and analysis on world politics, business, finance, science & technology, culture, society and the arts.
Economist.com also offers exclusive content online, including additional articles throughout the week in the Global Agenda section.

-	SUBSCRIBE NOW AND SAVE 25% -

Click here: http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/offer.cfm?campaign=168-XLMT

Subscribe now with 25% off and receive full access to:

* all the articles published in The Economist newspaper
* the online archive - allowing you to search and retrieve over 33,000 articles published in The Economist since 1997
* The World in  - The Economist's outlook on the year
* Business encyclopedia - allows you to find a definition and explanation for any business term


- ABOUT THIS E-MAIL -

This e-mail was sent to you by the person at the e-mail address listed
above through a link found on Economist.com.  We will not send you any
future messages as a result of your being the recipient of this e-mail.


- COPYRIGHT -

This e-mail message and Economist articles linked from it are copyright
(c) 2006 The Economist Newspaper Group Limited. All rights reserved.
http://www.economist.com/help/copy_general.cfm

Economist.com privacy policy: http://www.economist.com/about/privacy.cfm



From michael at intrafi.com  Sun Mar  5 19:45:27 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Sun, 05 Mar 2006 22:45:27 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] An article for you from an Economist.com reader.
Message-ID: <200603060317.WAA18267@stage-web-app.economist.com>


- AN ARTICLE FOR YOU, FROM ECONOMIST.COM -

Dear civic,

Michael Butler (michael at intrafi.com) wants you to see this article on Economist.com.



(Note: the sender's e-mail address above has not been verified.)

Subscribe to The Economist print edition, get great savings and FREE full access to Economist.com.  Click here to subscribe:  http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/email.cfm 

Alternatively subscribe to online only version by clicking on the link below and save 25%:

http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/offer.cfm?campaign=168-XLMT



WHY IT WILL TAKE SO LONG TO WIN
Feb 23rd 2006  

A speech by Donald Rumsfeld shows that the administration still doesn't
get it

IN A century's time historians may well ponder why it took America so
long to win the war on terror, especially given that the world's
foremost democracy was battling against opponents who would rather have
dragged society back to the Dark Ages. If so, they may well find part
of the answer in a speech Donald Rumsfeld gave last week on the role of
the media at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

In one way, the speech marked a step forward for the defence secretary,
because it concentrated on the need to win "hearts and minds". Until
recently he plainly regarded such a focus on "soft power" as, well,
soft--part of "Old Europe's" appeasement of terrorism. No matter that
his generals, allies and counter-insurgency manuals told him that it
was impossible to defeat fanaticism without changing public opinion;
the master of military transformation would "drain the swamp" in Iraq
(and the wider Muslim world) through superior firepower, high-tech
intelligence and incarceration. When people--even trenchant supporters
of America, like this newspaper--harped on about such details as due
process, the Geneva Conventions or the importance of explaining his
policies personally to critics, it was proof of our weak-mindedness.


 Now something--was it, one wonders, Abu Ghraib? Or Guantanamo? Or the
torture memos? Or the fact that China now lectures America on human
rights? Or the tragic decline in sympathy for America around the
world?--seems to have prompted a meagre mental adjustment on Mr
Rumsfeld's part. His recent Quadrennial Defence Review confessed that
"victory in the long war depends on strategic communication" and even
issued a plea for "considerably improved language and cultural
awareness". His speech in New York was an attempt to flesh out this
strategy. Yet it ended up illustrating how completely the defence
secretary still fails to "get it".

Mr Rumsfeld's thesis was that al-Qaeda and other extremist groups had
managed to poison the Muslim public's view of the West by somehow
"out-communicating" America. A group of fanatics, whose leaders live in
caves and dare not use cellular phones, has apparently been much better
at mastering the modern internet age than the most sophisticated
government in the world. A good part of his speech was focused on how
with slicker PR America could win the propaganda war: there would be
more media training for military personnel, 24-hour media operation
centres, and so on.

In narrow terms, these prescriptions make sense. More controversial
were Mr Rumsfeld's swipes at the media. He grumbled that the mockery of
journalists had mucked up his crass scheme to pay for articles to be
placed in Iraqi newspapers; that they jeopardised security (in a
television interview, he claimed that al-Qaeda people had been tipped
off by the disclosure that their phone calls could be listened to); and
above all that his critics did not play fair, giving more space to
America's transgressions (like Abu Ghraib) than to those of its enemies
(such as Saddam Hussein's mass graves). 

Some journalism is indeed indefensible: witness the disgustingly
anti-American and especially anti-Semitic fare in many Arabic
television stations and newspapers. And Mr Rumsfeld has every right to
point out that the western press makes mistakes--though some of them
are at his bidding. He correctly attacked American TV networks for not
showing pictures of Saddam's abuses. But they were also wrong to hide
some pictures of American abuses at Abu Ghraib--which have now emerged
on Australian television, sparking off fresh problems in the Muslim
world.

The most unnerving thing about Mr Rumsfeld's remarks is that he still
seems to think that winning hearts and minds is just a question of
better presentation. But no amount of spin will make locking people up
indefinitely without trial at Guantanamo Bay look compatible with
American principles of justice. Mr Rumsfeld retorts that 15 detainees
who had been released went back to the battlefield to try to kill
Americans. A sad statistic, but a lot more than 15 hearts and minds are
turned against America every day Guantanamo stays open. And exactly the
same argument goes for the Bush administration's insane attempts to
reserve the right to torture people.

 These arguments have gone well past points of principle; they are to
do with the hard pragmatic task of grinding out a victory against a
relentless enemy. In its great struggle against Soviet communism--a far
more potent foe than Islamist extremism--America stood firmly on the
side of human rights and freedom. Unless it stands credibly on that
side again, winning this fight will take far longer than it should do.
 

See this article with graphics and related items at http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_VVQRTTV

Go to http://www.economist.com for more global news, views and analysis from the Economist Group.

- ABOUT ECONOMIST.COM -

Economist.com is the online version of The Economist newspaper, an independent weekly international news and business publication offering clear reporting, commentary and analysis on world politics, business, finance, science & technology, culture, society and the arts.
Economist.com also offers exclusive content online, including additional articles throughout the week in the Global Agenda section.

-	SUBSCRIBE NOW AND SAVE 25% -

Click here: http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/offer.cfm?campaign=168-XLMT

Subscribe now with 25% off and receive full access to:

* all the articles published in The Economist newspaper
* the online archive - allowing you to search and retrieve over 33,000 articles published in The Economist since 1997
* The World in  - The Economist's outlook on the year
* Business encyclopedia - allows you to find a definition and explanation for any business term


- ABOUT THIS E-MAIL -

This e-mail was sent to you by the person at the e-mail address listed
above through a link found on Economist.com.  We will not send you any
future messages as a result of your being the recipient of this e-mail.


- COPYRIGHT -

This e-mail message and Economist articles linked from it are copyright
(c) 2006 The Economist Newspaper Group Limited. All rights reserved.
http://www.economist.com/help/copy_general.cfm

Economist.com privacy policy: http://www.economist.com/about/privacy.cfm



From michael at intrafi.com  Sun Mar  5 19:47:22 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Sun, 05 Mar 2006 22:47:22 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] An article for you from an Economist.com reader.
Message-ID: <200603060319.WAA18278@stage-web-app.economist.com>


- AN ARTICLE FOR YOU, FROM ECONOMIST.COM -

Dear civic,

Michael Butler (michael at intrafi.com) wants you to see this article on Economist.com.



(Note: the sender's e-mail address above has not been verified.)

Subscribe to The Economist print edition, get great savings and FREE full access to Economist.com.  Click here to subscribe:  http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/email.cfm 

Alternatively subscribe to online only version by clicking on the link below and save 25%:

http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/offer.cfm?campaign=168-XLMT



PURITANS OR PORNOGRAPHERS?
Feb 23rd 2006  

The schizophrenia at the heart of anti-Americanism

DURING George Bush's first term, public diplomacy might have been
summed up in the phrase "Never apologise, never explain". This time
round Mr Bush is going for a more emollient approach. Condoleezza Rice
is putting much more effort into diplomacy of all varieties, public and
private, than Colin Powell did (for one thing, she's less allergic to
aeroplanes); the administration's two leading bovver-boys, Dick Cheney
and Donald Rumsfeld, have shot themselves in the feet; and Mr Bush has
signalled his commitment to improving America's image abroad by putting
his trusted confidante, Karen Hughes, in charge of America's public
diplomacy.

But will this renewed emphasis on soft power make any difference? There
are lots of reasons for scepticism. One is that huge power inevitably
provokes huge suspicion. A second is that America's policy in Iraq has
solidified that opposition into a global phenomenon. But consider a
third, advanced by Peter Berger, one of America's best-known
sociologists, at a Washington, DC, seminar (organised with James
Hunter, the academic who invented the term "culture wars"). Foreigners,
argues Mr Berger, have oddly confused views of America as a land of
"Puritans and pornographers"--and that confusion makes fighting
anti-Americanism extremely difficult.

"Puritans and pornographers" is a caricature, of course. But provided
you adopt a broad definition of both Puritanism and pornography--with
Puritanism standing for religion and pornography standing for popular
culture--it is not an absurd one. America is a strikingly effective
producer of popular culture. It not only makes more of it than any
other country; it also produces more in-your-face culture--loud
mouthed, libidinous and impossible to ignore. Yet it also stands out
from other developed countries when it comes to resisting
secularisation. America is the only modern country where most people
belong to a religious organisation and where some 90% believe in God. 

Arguably, America's religiosity and its popular culture spring from the
same commitment to free markets. Its churches, no less than its film
studios, have thrived precisely because they have never been shackled
to the state and thus have to compete for customers. But whatever their
common roots, pornography and Puritanism produce very different sorts
of anti-Americanism.

 For many Euro-secularists, America's religiosity is its least
attractive characteristic. They can't believe that any modern person
can be religious unless they are either stupid (Britain's PRIVATE EYE
dubs George Bush the leader of the "Latter Day Morons") or insane (a
former German chancellor was known to accuse Mr Bush of "hearing
voices"). The Pew Research Centre's survey of global attitudes last
year discovered that most French and Dutch, as well as pluralities of
Britons and Germans, think America is too religious.

Yet many cultural conservatives dislike America for exactly the
opposite reason--because it is a battering ram for popular culture. A
few Muslims worry that America is a "Crusader state", engaged in a
religious war with Islam (a worry not helped by the suggestion after
September 11th from one conservative pundit, Ann Coulter: "We should
invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to
Christianity"). But most Muslims, and quite a number of traditional
Europeans, worry far more about America's version of Mammon than about
its version of God.

 In some parts of the Muslim world, majorities admit to enjoying
American films and music (though in Pakistan only 4% admit to such
cravings). But majorities also tell Pew's researchers that they are
worried about American values and lifestyles. This plays on two
deep-seated worries about American popular culture: that it is hard to
filter so that you just get the good bits (download Bob Dylan on to
your son's iPod, and Snoop Dogg soon pops up as well) and that popular
culture spawns social change. Children end up hanging around at the
mall or at McDonald's rather than coming home for dinner. 

CULTURE WARS GO GLOBAL
What makes the "pornography" and the Puritanism so hard to take for
foreigners is that America is so aggressive at exporting both of them.
With pop culture, this is well documented. The perennial tedium of the
Oscars ceremony won't prevent millions of people from watching it. But
America is also a world-beater when it comes to exporting religion.
Pentecostalism, which started off at a Bible college in Topeka, Kansas,
in 1901, is now the world's fastest-growing religion, with 500m
followers. There are more than 140,000 American missionaries around the
world and American-style mega-churches are beginning to appear in
Europe. Meanwhile, in Congress, evangelicals are taking the lead in
shaping American policy on aid and human rights.

 One way of looking at this is that Mr Hunter's culture wars are now
going global. That is partly because the battles between pornographers
and Puritans in America rivet outsiders: who could not fail to be
interested in the Kansas attorney-general who wants to be informed
whenever there is "compelling evidence" of sexual interaction involving
teenagers in his state? But there is also a deeper reason: many other
countries are having to grapple with the problems America has. 

This may be most obvious in the developing world, where traditional
societies will inevitably have to endure their own version of America's
culture wars as they get richer. But secular Europe has also recently
discovered that it has not "outgrown" religious conflict--whether it be
Christians complaining about the blasphemous BBC or the continent's
ever larger and more assertive Muslim population complaining about
cartoons. As in so many other aspects of anti-Americanism, the
schizophrenic fury against pornographers and Puritans is a twisted
compliment; America is once again leading the way.
 

See this article with graphics and related items at http://www.economist.com/world/na/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_VVVVSRQ

Go to http://www.economist.com for more global news, views and analysis from the Economist Group.

- ABOUT ECONOMIST.COM -

Economist.com is the online version of The Economist newspaper, an independent weekly international news and business publication offering clear reporting, commentary and analysis on world politics, business, finance, science & technology, culture, society and the arts.
Economist.com also offers exclusive content online, including additional articles throughout the week in the Global Agenda section.

-	SUBSCRIBE NOW AND SAVE 25% -

Click here: http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/offer.cfm?campaign=168-XLMT

Subscribe now with 25% off and receive full access to:

* all the articles published in The Economist newspaper
* the online archive - allowing you to search and retrieve over 33,000 articles published in The Economist since 1997
* The World in  - The Economist's outlook on the year
* Business encyclopedia - allows you to find a definition and explanation for any business term


- ABOUT THIS E-MAIL -

This e-mail was sent to you by the person at the e-mail address listed
above through a link found on Economist.com.  We will not send you any
future messages as a result of your being the recipient of this e-mail.


- COPYRIGHT -

This e-mail message and Economist articles linked from it are copyright
(c) 2006 The Economist Newspaper Group Limited. All rights reserved.
http://www.economist.com/help/copy_general.cfm

Economist.com privacy policy: http://www.economist.com/about/privacy.cfm



From michael at intrafi.com  Sun Mar  5 19:49:41 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Sun, 05 Mar 2006 22:49:41 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] An article for you from an Economist.com reader.
Message-ID: <200603060321.WAA18331@stage-web-app.economist.com>


- AN ARTICLE FOR YOU, FROM ECONOMIST.COM -

Dear civic,

Michael Butler (michael at intrafi.com) wants you to see this article on Economist.com.



(Note: the sender's e-mail address above has not been verified.)

Subscribe to The Economist print edition, get great savings and FREE full access to Economist.com.  Click here to subscribe:  http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/email.cfm 

Alternatively subscribe to online only version by clicking on the link below and save 25%:

http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/offer.cfm?campaign=168-XLMT



WHO'S ISOLATING WHOM? 
Feb 23rd 2006  

Despite their fear of Iran and of Islamist movements at home, most Arab
regimes seem loth to co-operate wholeheartedly with America in the
region

YOU can't have it both ways, is what America's secretary of state,
Condoleezza Rice, is telling Arab audiences during a tour of friendly
capitals to rally sagging support for American policy in the Middle
East. You can't preach violence and expect international aid, she says
of Hamas, the Islamist party that recently swept Palestinian elections.
No one will respect you if you signal reform but act repressively, she
advises Egypt's president, Hosni Mubarak. You can't say in private that
you fear Iran going nuclear but do nothing to stop it happening, she
will tell Gulf leaders.

Yet Ms Rice is hearing much the same refrain in response. America
cannot preach democracy in Palestine, then chastise the winners, just
as it cannot demand concessions from Hamas without Israel budging, too.
It cannot bully dictatorial allies to reform, then always expect their
support. And America cannot single out Iran on the nuclear issue, while
ignoring Israel's nearby arsenal. It's like Dick Cheney hunting quail
but shooting his friend instead, joked a Saudi columnist.

Stark as they are, differences between America and allied Arab
governments, across the range of issues on Ms Rice's agenda, mask a
degree of convergence. Egypt, for example, says it agrees that Hamas
should meet such conditions as accepting previous Palestinian peace
commitments, recognising Israel's right to exist and renouncing resort
to violence. Egypt's government, stunned by the strength of the Muslim
Brotherhood in recent national elections, dearly wishes to thwart the
political advance of closely related Islamist groups such as Hamas. 

What Egyptian officials fear is that too much pressure, too soon, could
drive Hamas into further extremism. Instead of making threats, say the
Egyptians, outsiders should bolster Palestinian institutions that are
not run by Hamas, such as the presidency of Mahmoud Abbas, and give
Hamas itself time to sort out a more practical, less ideology-bound
position. "I'm sure Hamas will develop, will evolve," Egypt's foreign
minister, Ahmed Abul Gheit, said at a joint conference with Ms Rice,
"We should not prejudge the issue."

As for internal reform, the signs are that it is America that is muting
its demands. Last time Ms Rice was in Cairo, in June, she appealed for
Egypt to lead the region in democratisation. Since then, Egypt has held
presidential and parliamentary elections, but both were marred by
massive fiddling. In recent weeks, Egypt has jailed a candidate who
challenged Mr Mubarak for the presidency, summarily postponed local
elections due in April, mounted pressure on judges who protested
against vote-rigging under the country's notorious emergency laws.
During the elections some 1,500 Muslim Brothers were arrested; most
were set free quite soon, but a score or so remain behind bars. 

The Bush administration has responded by suspending talks on a
bilateral free-trade agreement. Yet in Cairo Ms Rice contented herself
with expressing disappointment at "setbacks" to reform, which she said
fell within a context of continuing progress and friendly dialogue.
Despite signs that America's western allies are inching towards talks
with the Brothers, the Bush team remains wary of offending Mr Mubarak's
regime by courting the rising party, which has yet to be made legal.
The underlying signal, it seems, is that the Bush administration deems
the regional situation too precarious, in the short run, for the kind
of hasty experimentation that might weaken occasionally useful friends
such as Mr Mubarak. 

On the issue of Iranian nuclear power, the two sides appear to have
agreed to disagree. Arab countries will not actively support Iran, a
country that all regional governments, bar Iranian-allied Syria, regard
as meddlesome and dangerous. Most will probably go along with
multilateral actions, through the UN or its agencies, that seek to curb
Iran's ambitions. Yet even Saudi Arabia, a country that has skirmished
militarily with Iran in the past and sees itself as a Sunni rival to
Shia Iran's pretensions of Islamic leadership, says bluntly it will not
openly challenge Iran.

Yet while most Arab governments may achieve fudges on such issues with
the Bush administration, the public mood across the region continues to
head towards polarisation. America's unpopularity seems only to grow as
Iraq remains chaotic, and now the cartoon controversy has tainted the
West's relatively "good cop", Europe, with a similar perceived
animosity towards Arabs and Muslims. Bolstered by its electoral
performance and sensing a surge of pan-Islamic feeling, the Muslim
Brotherhood has laid down a challenge by announcing a campaign to
secure donations from Muslims around the world to replace western aid
to Palestinians. 

That call was echoed in Iran, where Hamas's most telegenic leader,
Khaled Mishal, condemned financial "blackmail" this week, declaring
that funds from Arab and Muslim countries would make western aid
redundant. Iran's president chipped in, suggesting helpfully that
"Since the divine treasures are infinite, you should not worry about
financial issues."

So far, no significant substitute cash has made its way to Hamas. But
should such cash start to flow, Arab governments would find it hard to
stand in the way. Obviously, an even starker Muslim-western division
over the eternally-divisive Palestinian issue could muck up other parts
of America's regional agenda. This could, if not handled with care,
make Mr Bush's administration look more isolated than Iran and its
fellow rejectionists. 
 

See this article with graphics and related items at http://www.economist.com/world/africa/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5555841

Go to http://www.economist.com for more global news, views and analysis from the Economist Group.

- ABOUT ECONOMIST.COM -

Economist.com is the online version of The Economist newspaper, an independent weekly international news and business publication offering clear reporting, commentary and analysis on world politics, business, finance, science & technology, culture, society and the arts.
Economist.com also offers exclusive content online, including additional articles throughout the week in the Global Agenda section.

-	SUBSCRIBE NOW AND SAVE 25% -

Click here: http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/offer.cfm?campaign=168-XLMT

Subscribe now with 25% off and receive full access to:

* all the articles published in The Economist newspaper
* the online archive - allowing you to search and retrieve over 33,000 articles published in The Economist since 1997
* The World in  - The Economist's outlook on the year
* Business encyclopedia - allows you to find a definition and explanation for any business term


- ABOUT THIS E-MAIL -

This e-mail was sent to you by the person at the e-mail address listed
above through a link found on Economist.com.  We will not send you any
future messages as a result of your being the recipient of this e-mail.


- COPYRIGHT -

This e-mail message and Economist articles linked from it are copyright
(c) 2006 The Economist Newspaper Group Limited. All rights reserved.
http://www.economist.com/help/copy_general.cfm

Economist.com privacy policy: http://www.economist.com/about/privacy.cfm



From michael at intrafi.com  Sun Mar  5 19:51:38 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Sun, 05 Mar 2006 22:51:38 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] An article for you from an Economist.com reader.
Message-ID: <200603060323.WAA18339@stage-web-app.economist.com>


- AN ARTICLE FOR YOU, FROM ECONOMIST.COM -

Dear civic,

Michael Butler (michael at intrafi.com) wants you to see this article on Economist.com.



(Note: the sender's e-mail address above has not been verified.)

Subscribe to The Economist print edition, get great savings and FREE full access to Economist.com.  Click here to subscribe:  http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/email.cfm 

Alternatively subscribe to online only version by clicking on the link below and save 25%:

http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/offer.cfm?campaign=168-XLMT



IRAN'S POLITICS
Feb 23rd 2006  

It will be hard for a real opposition to emerge, even with American
cash 

PITY those Americans, George Bush among them, who long for their ideas
about democracy to take root in Iran. Mindful of the mistake that his
and earlier administrations made in backing Iraqi exile groups that
turned out to enjoy scant support back home, and aware that, for Iran's
democracy-seekers, gifts from America carry the taint of collusion with
the enemy, Mr Bush has often encouraged Iranians to strive for "the
freedom they seek and deserve"--and pretty much left it at that. Until
this month, that is, when his secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice,
asked Congress to pledge $75m to the cause.

That is a big increase on the $10m previously budgeted. It is also a
statement of intent by an administration often accused of having no
clear policy on Iran. Helping to establish a "different system", a goal
identified by a senior American official after Ms Rice's testimony, is
a short rhetorical step from the "regime change" to which some American
hawks want Mr Bush to commit. 


So America's challenge now is to find suitable NGOs, trade unions,
human-rights groups and students to receive the $20m they have been
allocated. (The other $55m will help disseminate Persian-language
broadcasts and propaganda on the internet.) Iran's internal opposition
lacks a Nelson Mandela; Iranians in the diaspora (1m in the United
States) cannot even boast of an Ahmed Chalabi, the neo-conservatives'
failed favourite to run Iraq. 

Citing infiltration of Iranian NGOs by government agents, the same
official predicted that the awards would go to groups based outside
Iran. Anyone doubting that his call for unity among expatriates will be
hard to realise need only surf the 20-odd Los Angeles-based
Persian-language television channels which can be viewed by owners of
satellite dishes in Iran. From brilliantined monarchists and religious
eccentrics who have not seen Iran since the 1979 revolution, to
youthful music presenters who have not seen it at all, they have little
in common save their dislike for the Islamic Republic.

Even supposing the promise of cash moves the diaspora to unite, the
credibility of its leading lights is low. Though he has astutely backed
calls for a referendum on a political system to replace the Islamic
Republic, Reza Pahlavi, the personable but reputedly unambitious son of
the last shah, is little spoken of in Iran. 

As for the People's Mujahideen Organisation of Iran (PMOI), which sided
with Saddam Hussein during his war with Iran in the 1980s and is
officially considered a terrorist organisation by the United States and
the European Union, it is widely despised by Iranians back home,
millions of whom lost relatives in that war. The group fosters a cult
of personality around Maryam Rajavi, wife (probably widow) of its
long-time leader. There is growing support in the United States and
Europe for removing the terrorist label attached to the PMOI, which is
widely credited with having exposed several of the nuclear-research
facilities the Iranian government had kept secret for many years. But
that may not endear it to people in Iran either.

Ms Rice cannot even count on the relatively pro-American sentiment that
most ordinary Iranians evinced during the calmer Clinton presidency.
While no reliable opinion poll has been carried out on the subject,
anecdotal evidence suggests that Iranians' scepticism of American
motives has risen since the invasion of Iraq. Mr Bush's determination
to prevent the Iranians from becoming producers of nuclear fuel that
would, if they wanted, enable them to make a bomb has piqued
nationalists. This month, bigger-than-usual crowds gathered in Tehran,
Iran's capital, to commemorate the revolution's anniversary and shout
"Death to America!"

THE PRESIDENT'S NATIONALIST TAILWIND
The combination of a protracted international crisis and last summer's
election of a hardline president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has allowed
Iran's conservative establishment quietly to bury the reform movement
of Muhammad Khatami, Mr Ahmadinejad's predecessor. Their most
interesting newspapers banned and their leading lights silenced or
jailed, the reformists have even fallen in line behind the hardliners'
tough nuclear diplomacy. The once-vibrant student movement is moribund.
In the face of "undemocratic actions", laments Mehdi Makaremi, a
reformist columnist, student bodies content themselves with "issuing
statements".

By banning adventurous newspapers and filtering websites, the
authorities have denied publicity to political prisoners such as Akbar
Ganji. Five years ago, this outspoken critic of the ruling theocracy
was on everyone's lips; now, despite spending much of last year on
hunger strike, he has slipped from public view. In a land of high
unemployment and few effective trade unions, industrial unrest is rare;
strikes are dealt with decisively, and often before they happen. A
recent protest by bus drivers in Tehran, the capital, was pre-empted
with hundreds of arrests; the disgruntled drivers, back at work, have
been promised better conditions. 

NOT ABOUT TO BOIL OVER YET
So Iran is not the hothouse of dissent that American hawks depict. It
may indeed, in the words of one of its leading literary dissidents, be
"bereft of any effective opposition, legal or illegal". But that does
not mean that everyone is content: only that frustrations, inadequately
addressed by Mr Khatami, express themselves in different ways. Threats
now come from two currents, religious heterodoxy and separatist
nationalism, that have intermittently irritated the Islamic Republic, a
Shia state run by ethnic Persians, since its inception. 

Two regions bordering Iraq, Kurdistan in the north and Khuzestan on the
Persian Gulf coast, are rumbling. For the mostly Sunni Kurds, the
Khatami presidency, which they hoped would usher in religious and
political autonomy, was a disappointment; many now covet the
quasi-independence being enjoyed by their Iraqi cousins across the
border. Since the shooting last summer of a dissident at the hands of
the security forces, and subsequent unrest in Kurdish towns, there have
been reports of sporadic attacks on soldiers by Kurdish militants. 

Iran's interior minister says he detects a British hand behind last
month's explosions in the oil-rich, partly-Arab province of Khuzestan,
which killed seven people. Last year, Khuzestan suffered sectarian
rioting and other deadly blasts; these, too, were blamed on the
British, who run a neighbouring chunk of southern Iraq. The British
deny these outlandish accusations. 

Iran's clerical establishment is increasingly exercised by the
Nematullahi-Gonabadi order of Sufis, Muslims who neglect some Shia
practices in favour of a mystic relationship with God. The order claims
to have more than 1m members, many with deep pockets, in Iran and
abroad. Last week the authorities destroyed a prayer hall erected by
the Sufis in the shrine city of Qom; there were reports of serious
injuries and some 1,000 Sufis were briefly arrested. Repression, say
the order's supporters, will only increase its popularity. At last,
music to George Bush's ears--though the Sufis may not qualify as an NGO
deemed worthy of cash from America. 
 

See this article with graphics and related items at http://www.economist.com/world/africa/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_VVVRRRQ

Go to http://www.economist.com for more global news, views and analysis from the Economist Group.

- ABOUT ECONOMIST.COM -

Economist.com is the online version of The Economist newspaper, an independent weekly international news and business publication offering clear reporting, commentary and analysis on world politics, business, finance, science & technology, culture, society and the arts.
Economist.com also offers exclusive content online, including additional articles throughout the week in the Global Agenda section.

-	SUBSCRIBE NOW AND SAVE 25% -

Click here: http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/offer.cfm?campaign=168-XLMT

Subscribe now with 25% off and receive full access to:

* all the articles published in The Economist newspaper
* the online archive - allowing you to search and retrieve over 33,000 articles published in The Economist since 1997
* The World in  - The Economist's outlook on the year
* Business encyclopedia - allows you to find a definition and explanation for any business term


- ABOUT THIS E-MAIL -

This e-mail was sent to you by the person at the e-mail address listed
above through a link found on Economist.com.  We will not send you any
future messages as a result of your being the recipient of this e-mail.


- COPYRIGHT -

This e-mail message and Economist articles linked from it are copyright
(c) 2006 The Economist Newspaper Group Limited. All rights reserved.
http://www.economist.com/help/copy_general.cfm

Economist.com privacy policy: http://www.economist.com/about/privacy.cfm



From jameshburns at webtv.net  Mon Mar  6 01:35:47 2006
From: jameshburns at webtv.net (Jim Burns)
Date: Mon, 6 Mar 2006 04:35:47 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Me, "Quoted" in Today's NEWS...
In-Reply-To: mb-civic-request@islandlists.com's message of Sun, 05 Mar 2006
	06:25:55 -0800
Message-ID: <7196-440C0273-7790@storefull-3277.bay.webtv.net>


On Dubai, and Dubya.


"I'm fairly certain that the gateways of my city should not be guarded
by the cousins of those who destroyed a cherished part of what so many
of us hold dear." 

Jim Burns
New York Daily News, 3/6/06 
 


From swiggard at comcast.net  Mon Mar  6 03:49:17 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Mon, 06 Mar 2006 06:49:17 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] A Bang-Up Night for 'Crash' - Washington Post
Message-ID: <440C21BD.6040208@comcast.net>

A Bang-Up Night for 'Crash'
Drama Is Surprise Winner as Best Picture; 'Brokeback's' Lee Is Top Director

By Hank Stuever and William Booth
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, March 6, 2006; A01

HOLLYWOOD, March 5 -- "Crash," an ensemble story about underlying racial 
tensions across Los Angeles, won Best Picture on Sunday night at the 
Academy Awards. Its surprise win proved true the eleventh-hour buzz that 
surrounded the film, which touched a nerve among people who live in and 
around the endless, multicultural sprawl of the city and intuit its 
character from behind the wheels of their cars.

"Crash" has been controversial, with critics saying that it 
oversimplifies race issues and that some of the characters were 
stereotypes -- a notion that director Paul Haggis again batted aside 
during a backstage interview. "My favorite kind of film is the kind 
where you argue when you walk outside after the film, and break up with 
your date."

Haggis, who co-wrote the "Crash" script, which also won for Best 
Original Screenplay, noted that "a lot of people made this film. We owe 
a lot of people for being here." (Fourteen people share producing 
credits on "Crash," which has prompted two lawsuits over money and credit.)

Some cultural critics also complained during the awards season that 
"Crash" and the other Best Picture nominees -- voted on by the 
6,000-plus-member Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences -- all 
were somehow out of touch with the mainstream.

Another Best Picture nominee, "Brokeback Mountain," the 
ranch-hands-in-love story that further stoked a national debate about 
gay rights, won three awards, including Best Director for Ang Lee.

"I wish I knew how to quit you," Lee quipped as he accepted his award, 
acknowledging that the movie's famous line had become something of a 
punch line. But he also very quickly thanked "two people who don't exist 
-- Ennis and Jack," the film's doomed couple. "They taught all of us who 
made 'Brokeback Mountain' about . . . the greatness of love itself." 
Asked backstage whether "Brokeback" lost Best Picture because of its 
subject matter, or some discomfort on the part of Academy voters, Lee 
answered simply, "I don't know."

In a year in which no Best Picture nominee captured a big audience or 
boffo receipts, the 78th annual dispensations of Oscar statuettes were 
similarly scattered among the year's films. "Crash," "Brokeback 
Mountain," "Memoirs of a Geisha" and "King Kong" each had three wins.

Philip Seymour Hoffman won Best Actor for his portrayal in "Capote" of 
the shyly flamboyant writer's quest to tell his best-selling story of 
murders in Kansas. "I'm really overwhelmed," Hoffman said. "You know 
that Van Morrison song, 'I love, I love, I love,' and he keeps repeating 
it?" The actor also thanked his mother profusely: "We're at the party, 
Ma, ya know?" he said. "She took me to my first play. . . . Her passions 
became my passions. Be proud, Mom, we're here tonight and it's so good."

Reese Witherspoon won Best Actress for her portrayal of June Carter Cash 
in the Johnny Cash biopic "Walk the Line," and she also thanked her 
parents: "I'm so blessed to have my mother and my father, for being so 
proud of me it didn't matter whether I was making my bed or making a 
movie. My grandmother taught me to be a real woman, to have strength and 
self-respect and never give those things away. . . . I'm just trying to 
matter, and live a good life and make something that means something to 
somebody."

The show's host, Jon Stewart of Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" -- 
tapped to step in to what has become an ongoing search for a celebrity 
who can click with Oscar-host duties -- brought the show his trademark 
blend of cheeky, faux-everything humor. "Man, we are cruising tonight -- 
we are going to get home in time to watch 'Desperate Housewives,' " 
Stewart said of the 3-hour 22-minute program. (The show was about 10 
minutes longer than last year's -- still, the four-hour Oscar broadcast 
is becoming a thing of the past.)

"Crash" also won for film editing. Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana won 
Best Screenplay Adaptation for "Brokeback Mountain," which was 
originally a short story by E. Annie Proulx.

George Clooney won Best Supporting Actor for his role as a rogue CIA 
agent in "Syriana." Clooney, who also was nominated for Best Director, 
offered a defense, in his acceptance speech, against the criticism that 
Hollywood puts out provocative, but unpopular and left-leaning, movies. 
"This Academy, this group of people, gave Hattie McDaniel an Oscar in 
1939 [for her role as Mammy in "Gone With the Wind"] when blacks were 
still sitting in the backs of theaters," he said. "I'm proud to be . . . 
part of this community, proud to be out of touch."

Rachel Weisz won Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of a 
humanitarian worker in Africa in "The Constant Gardener."

"March of the Penguins," a French-made love story about penguins' annual 
journey from the frigid sea to parenthood in Antarctica, won Best 
Documentary Feature. "A Note of Triumph: The Golden Age of Norman 
Corwin" won the short-subject prize.

"It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp," the anthem from "Hustle & Flow," won 
Best Original Song. Winners Jordan Houston, Cedric Coleman and Paul 
Beauregard of the group Three 6 Mafia took the stage and gave as many 
overjoyed shout-outs as time allowed.

"How come they're the most excited people out here tonight?" asked 
Stewart, who mused that things just got a lot easier for a pimp. "That's 
how you accept an Oscar!"

The buildup to Sunday night's big awards was about a lot of smaller 
awards for movies that made a bigger dent in the box office and pop 
culture, for the way those movies looked and sounded: "King Kong" won 
Oscars for sound mixing, sound editing and visual effects; "Memoirs of a 
Geisha" won for cinematography, art direction and costume design; "The 
Chronicles of Narnia" won for makeup.

Best Original Score went to Gustavo Santaolalla for his work on 
"Brokeback Mountain"; the Best Animated Feature was "Wallace and Gromit: 
The Curse of the Were-Rabbit."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/05/AR2006030500363.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060306/f22a94e1/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Mon Mar  6 03:51:53 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Mon, 06 Mar 2006 06:51:53 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Iraq's Crisis of Scarred Psyches - Washington Post
Message-ID: <440C2259.6010908@comcast.net>

Iraq's Crisis of Scarred Psyches
Untreated Mental Disorders Seen as Widespread

By Jonathan Finer and Omar Fekeiki
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 6, 2006; A01

BAGHDAD -- More than 25 years after Saddam Hussein's rise to power 
ushered in a period of virtually uninterrupted trauma -- three wars, 
crippling economic sanctions and now a violent insurgency -- the 
psychological damage to many Iraqis is only now being assessed, 
psychiatrists and government officials here say.

Even as a grim, though incomplete, picture of the population's mental 
health has emerged in recent studies, so too has the realization that 
the country's health care system is ill-equipped to deal with what are 
likely millions of potential psychiatric patients with conditions born 
of the hardship of recent years.

One recent study was sparked by one of the country's darkest days in 
recent memory. Last Aug. 31, nearly 1,000 Shiite Muslim pilgrims died -- 
some trampled in a crush of humanity, others by drowning -- when a 
religious procession across a Baghdad bridge became a lethal stampede.

Months after the dead were buried and the wounded had begun to heal, a 
team of psychiatrists at the Health Ministry established a psychological 
outreach facility in Sadr City, a teeming Shiite slum in the capital, to 
assess and treat the damage inflicted on victims, witnesses and their 
families. What they found surpassed even their worst fears. More than 90 
percent of the people surveyed suffered from psychological disorders, 
including depression, insomnia and post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

"The people we've identified as troubled are just the tip of the iceberg 
in terms of the mental health situation in this country," said Ali Abdul 
Razak, 55, who runs the clinic in a dank corner of Sadr City's Imam Ali 
Hospital. "I don't consider this post-traumatic, I consider it 
'continuous traumatic,' because the trauma they have is ongoing."

Resources for treatment are scarce. Only about 75 psychiatrists remain 
in a country that has endured a brutal eight-year war with Iran and two 
wars with the United States, along with crippling economic sanctions in 
the 1990s and the bloody insurgency today. Many fled along with other 
professionals to escape kidnappings and threats from insurgents. As a 
result, there is one psychiatrist for about every 300,000 Iraqis, 
compared with about one for every 10,000 Americans. There are currently 
no child psychiatrists in this country of about 25 million, Razak said.

This year the Health Ministry declared mental health a top priority and 
opened two psychological outreach centers in Baghdad (the second is in 
the city's main teaching hospital in the predominantly Sunni Muslim 
neighborhood of Yarmouk). In addition to studying those affected by the 
bridge collapse, the ministry has begun collecting data on the 
population as whole.

In a survey of just over 1,000 randomly selected people across five 
Baghdad neighborhoods, completed this month by psychiatrists at 
Baghdad's Mustansariyah University, about 890 reported having 
experienced a violent incident firsthand, including all 27 children 
under 12 in the sample.

Most alarming, according to the physicians who analyzed the data, was 
that exposure to trauma has grown dramatically more common since the 
U.S.-led invasion in 2003. The people in the study recalled 3,504 
violent incidents between 1979, when Hussein came to power, and 2003. 
Since the invasion, they have recorded 6,463.

In the survey, the psychiatrists adapted an Iraqi version of the Harvard 
Trauma Questionnaire, a research tool once used to evaluate the mental 
health of Southeast Asian refugees displaced by war.

Among the 42 yes-or-no queries, Iraqi subjects were asked to indicate 
whether they had been "oppressed because of ethnicity, religion or 
sect," "witnessed the desecration or destruction of religious shrines," 
"witnessed mass execution of civilians," been "used as a human shield," 
"witnessed rotting corpses," or been "forced to pay for a bullet used to 
kill a family member."

Those at the greatest risk, psychiatrists say, are people who came of 
age during Hussein's reign and have rarely known a life without trauma.

"For more than 40 years, everything in our country said to be a hero you 
must be violent. Violence was how we survived, by identifying with 
aggressors," said Muhammad Lafta, the deputy national adviser for mental 
health and a psychiatrist at al-Rashid Hospital, one of two dedicated 
psychiatric hospitals in the country. Under Hussein, he said, elementary 
school students were made to assemble at least once a week to watch 
their principals fire AK-47 assault rifles into the air.

The damage to Hussein Ali Saoud's mind is reflected in the 
molten-looking, purplish scars that rend the skin of both his forearms. 
An Iraqi soldier during the 2003 invasion, he said he watched two of his 
platoon mates die from gunshot wounds as U.S. troops invaded Baghdad. 
Since then, he has sought relief by taking drugs and slicing jagged 
lines in his flesh with a razor.

"I get nervous and start to feel like someone is suffocating me," said 
Saoud, 30, joined by his younger brother in a recent visit to the 
outreach center at the Yarmouk hospital, where doctors diagnosed PTSD. 
"When I see myself bleeding it helps me relax, even though I know it is 
wrong."

International advisers and experts say Iraq's mental health system has a 
long way to go, despite about $25 million in aid, including a $6 million 
grant from the Japanese government.

"It's pretty small beer, compared to the scope of the problem. You're 
probably talking about epidemic levels of PTSD," said Keith Humphreys, a 
psychiatrist and associate professor at Stanford Medical School who is 
helping train Iraqi doctors in modern practices. "The health system was 
pretty good, including mental health care. But in the last 25 years or 
so, they've virtually been kept in the dark. They weren't allowed to go 
to conferences or even read the medical journals."

Humphreys and other American and European psychiatrists have led 
conferences for their Iraqi counterparts in the region, although not in 
Iraq because security is tenuous, a fact he said complicates the 
psychiatrists' work.

"The thing with psychiatric work, though, is that to make progress you 
first have to have a functioning society," Humphreys said. "You need to 
have peace."

Another barrier to progress is a strong stigma attached to psychiatric 
care in Iraq. "It's unacceptable to say you need mental help, so you 
have people making appointments with surgeons and then telling them they 
are depressed," Lafta said.

Muhammed Ata, 44, said he sought treatment at the Yarmouk center only 
because his sister made him. A policeman, he was patrolling the western 
Baghdad neighborhood of Khadra three months ago when a pair of 
improvised bombs exploded, killing two of his fellow officers.

"I looked for my friends, 'Where is Ayad? Where is Fuad?' No Ayad and no 
Fuad. I just saw a neck here and a hand there," Ata said. "We were like 
one family, my friends who died and me."

His sister, Nisreen Ata, who attended a recent appointment with him, 
said he has been too afraid to return to work. "He gazes at police cars 
and hums," she said.

Most patients are not victims of violence but witnesses to horrific 
events, Iraqi psychiatrists say.

Khadija Murad's older brother died fighting in the Iran-Iraq war, months 
before the end of the brutal conflict that consumed nearly a million 
lives during the 1980s. Her house burned to the ground five years ago, 
taking with it all her savings at a time when Iraq was under economic 
sanctions.

Since last January, when a car bomb exploded near an Iraqi army patrol 
passing by her house, Murad, 40, has been unable to banish from her mind 
the images of smoke and screaming and charred flesh. Overwhelmed by 
nightmares and thoughts of suicide, she said, she made her way to the 
center at Yarmouk Hospital.

"Every other day I feel fine, but then it always comes back," said 
Murad, clutching her year-old son Hussein, as she described bouts of 
depression and anxiety that have twice caused her to leave her husband 
and four children to move in with her parents. "I stop eating. I cry. I 
just want to go to sleep and not wake up."

Asked how long it would take for the country's collective psyche to 
recover from the turmoil of recent years, Lafta, the psychiatrist at 
al-Rashid Hospital, predicted "a generation or more, from the time the 
fighting here stops."

"The damage was done over a long period," he said, "and it will take 
decades to heal."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/05/AR2006030500948.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060306/b0edb5a9/attachment-0001.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Mon Mar  6 03:53:58 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Mon, 06 Mar 2006 06:53:58 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] America's Immigration Advantage - Marcelo M.
 Suarez-Orozco - Washington Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <440C22D6.5090906@comcast.net>

America's Immigration Advantage

By Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco
Monday, March 6, 2006; A15

As Congress gears up for another round of immigration debate, it is 
instructive to place the recent American experience in context. How do 
we compare to the other side of the Atlantic, which is wrestling with 
its own immigration dilemmas? There are three major areas of difference 
between this country and Europe.

First, in Europe, the combination of the welfare state and the job 
ceiling that immigrants face is creating a huge problem for the second 
generation, which receives fairly good schooling but then crashes into a 
wall of discrimination and racism in the labor market. Algerian French 
citizens with good French educations simply cannot find jobs 
commensurate with their educational credentials and achievements, 
because of their last names or physical appearance. One cannot 
underestimate the frustration this produces.

In the United States there is a powerful segmentation in the labor 
market according to one's education, but for many immigrants moving to 
this country, America can be a dream realized when it comes to achieving 
educational success and rewards in the job market.

Furthermore, about a third of all immigrants arrive in this country with 
college degrees, a "gift" in free human capital to the U.S. economy 
estimated to be in the order of $50 billion per year. Every fall when I 
was teaching "Latino Cultures" at Harvard College, I would ask the 100 
or so eager undergraduates, "How many of you are immigrants or the 
children of immigrants?" Some two-thirds would raise their hands. While 
the United States surely has problems educating immigrant youngsters and 
easing their transition into the labor market, they do not approach 
those in Europe, where unemployment among the second generation 
approaches 50 percent in some cities.

Second, in most European countries formal immigration stopped in the 
early 1970s, and immigration is now mostly driven by asylum-seeking and 
marriage. In Europe today immigration is patterned by kinship and social 
structures that favor arranged marriages and marriage within the group. 
It is common for second-generation Kurdish or Afghan girls in Stockholm 
to end up marrying cousins back in Kurdistan or Afghanistan so that the 
men can migrate to Europe. This has two immediate effects: It prevents 
the immigrants from crossing a most cherished threshold of social 
integration -- marriage with people of the new country -- and it 
replenishes the cultural traditions of the old country as newly arrived 
villagers settle in European cities.

In contrast, immigrants in the United States have always, over many 
years, gravitated to marriage outside their own groups (a dynamic 
sometimes called "ethnic flight") -- from Jews marrying Christians and 
Japanese marrying whites to Latinos marrying African Americans.

Third, in countries such as Denmark, Sweden and Germany, immigrants have 
no place in the cultural narrative of the nation. In the United States, 
immigration is at the center of the quasi-sacred narrative accounting 
for how we came to be the country we are today. The United States is one 
of only a handful of advanced democracies that can claim immigration as 
both history and destiny. Immigrants built the nation, and the immigrant 
second generation is now the fastest-growing demographic sector of the 
population. Today immigrants proudly enter the mainstream through 
hyphenated identities: We talk about Mexican Americans, Haitian 
Americans, Irish Americans and Chinese Americans as natural categories 
of belonging to the American tapestry. When I was teaching in Paris a 
few years ago, I asked my students, "Do you talk about Tunisian-French, 
Algerian-French or Turkish-Germans here in Europe?" There was an 
uncomfortable silence. "You don't understand; we are all French," was 
the polite answer of a shy graduate student.

Immigrants thus face a double bind: They are asked to be French while 
not really allowed to fully join the new society in terms of jobs and 
the opportunity structure.

In the United States, the current anxiety is over illegal immigration. 
In Europe the continuing concerns are cultural practices -- within-group 
marriage, arranged marriages, free speech, equality between the sexes in 
Muslim immigrant communities, and the separation of religion from the 
political process -- all of which, when combined with enduring European 
xenophobia and labor market discrimination, will prove to be much harder 
to address, let alone fix.

The writer, co-founder of the Harvard Immigration Project, is now a 
university professor and co-director of immigration studies at New York 
University. He is the co-author of "Children of Immigration."


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/05/AR2006030500940.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060306/4fd6a826/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Mon Mar  6 03:57:50 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Mon, 06 Mar 2006 06:57:50 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Trade And the China Card - Sebastian Mallaby -
	Washington Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <440C23BE.4030202@comcast.net>

Trade And the China Card

By Sebastian Mallaby
Monday, March 6, 2006; A15

Globalization scares people. Security threats scare people. By fusing 
these fears during the Dubai ports flap, demagogues have had a field 
day. Now, having demonstrated this formula, the demagogues are poised to 
strike again. Their next target will be arriving soon, in the person of 
President Hu Jintao of China.

For a fear monger with a club, next month's Chinese state visit is a 
self-teeing golf ball. China accounts for more than a quarter of 
America's astonishing trade deficit, and the country has become a proxy 
for all globalization anxieties: It's painted as a low-wage threat and 
simultaneously a high-science threat, a piratical menace to technology 
patents and simultaneously a challenge to America's scientific 
preeminence. Meanwhile, China constitutes a security threat, too: It's 
spending billions on an arms buildup, and lying about the real numbers. 
If demagogues can turn a tiny ally such as Dubai into a villain, you can 
bet they'll do the same for China.

Politics makes this irresistible. Democrats talk bravely of taking back 
the House this fall, but they acknowledge that, despite the Iraq mess, 
Republicans retain an edge on national security. The way to neutralize 
that advantage is to link security to pocketbook concerns, on which 
Democrats are more trusted. If security means fighting terrorists, 
President Bush's credentials remain difficult to challenge. If security 
means standing up to foreigners despite commercial temptations to make 
nice, voters are more likely to back Democrats.

So the Dems are going to play the China card, and the Bush 
administration, which will be in the uncomfortable position of hosting 
Hu's visit, will be thrust onto the defensive. Congressional 
Republicans, who have stopped betting their job security on the 
president's prestige, won't listen to the administration's pleas for 
statesmanlike restraint. When Democrats attack China, Republicans will 
scramble to sound equally aggressive.

You can see this process playing out already. Sen. Chuck Schumer, one of 
the chief brewers of the Dubai storm, is sponsoring a bill that would 
impose a 27.5 percent tariff on all Chinese goods unless China revalues 
its currency. This tariff would be illegal under the rules of the World 
Trade Organization, but Schumer doesn't mind: His bill isn't going to 
become law, but it will advance the electoral prospects of the 
Democratic Party. Meanwhile, Republicans are readying their response. 
Sen. Chuck Grassley, the chairman of the powerful Finance Committee, is 
cooking up his own anti-China legislation.

So the stage is set for competitive China-bashing, and it's not clear 
that the administration will be able to keep the lid on. So far the Bush 
team has been responsible on China, coaxing it to revalue its currency 
for its own good while holding off Schumer-style pressure for a trade 
war. But there are signs that this forbearance may be running out. The 
Treasury may be getting ready to brand China a currency manipulator in a 
report that's due out around the time of Hu's visit, and the 
administration recently produced a "top-to-bottom" review of trade with 
China that was designed to sound macho. The scary thing is that if 
protectionist pressure mounts, China's response won't follow the Dubai 
playbook. We're not dealing with a private company that wants to know 
how high to jump. We're dealing with a brittle dictatorship that has 
limited space to accommodate American demands, even if it wanted to.

Strange though this may sound, China's policy toward the United States 
resembles U.S. policy toward China. The Chinese leadership, like the 
Bush administration, has tried to make economic relations go well, 
tackling domestic lobbies in the process. Since China's accession to the 
WTO five years ago, it has changed thousands of statutes and regulations 
in order to comply with WTO rules, so much so that the United States has 
brought fewer WTO cases against China than it has brought against Europe.

But there is a limit to what the Chinese regime feels able to do, just 
as there is a limit to the political risks that the Bush administration 
will run to head off a trade war. The Bush administration isn't doing 
the main thing it could do to bring down the U.S. trade deficit: get 
serious about balancing the federal budget. Equally, the Chinese 
leadership isn't doing the main thing it could do: allow its currency to 
rise significantly against the dollar.

There's a powerful reason for China's recalcitrance. The country's 
technocrats were convinced years ago that revaluation made economic 
sense. But revaluation would cut the price of food imports, depressing 
earnings of Chinese farmers. Faced with simmering discontent among rural 
Chinese who have been left behind by China's coastal boom, the 
dictatorship fears that currency revaluation could unleash furious protest.

So the United States and China may be headed toward serious trade 
conflict. Both sides feel they have shown more than adequate good faith; 
both have political reasons not to make further efforts. Back in the 
1980s and early 1990s, similar friction between the United States and 
Japan created poisonous resentment on both sides: U.S. politicians 
smashed Japanese products with sledgehammers, and in 1995 an 
anti-American demonstration in Japan became the biggest protest march in 
a quarter of a century.

The prospect of a similar trade war with China is unnerving, to say the 
least. We're not talking about a quarrel with a military ally. We're 
talking about a fight with an opaque military rival.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/05/AR2006030500943.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060306/fe134898/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Mon Mar  6 04:00:23 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Mon, 06 Mar 2006 07:00:23 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] No Delivery from Evil - Andrew D. Cohen - Washington
	Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <440C2457.8010801@comcast.net>

No Delivery from Evil

By Andrew D. Cohen
special to washingtonpost.com
Monday, March 6, 2006; 12:00 AM

Don't expect the looming trial of confessed Al Qaeda trainee Zacarias 
Moussaoui to answer your remaining questions about the terror attacks of 
September 11, 2001. Do not expect it to satisfy your desire for revenge, 
or justice, or whatever people mean when they use the word "closure." 
He's the wrong guy, and this is the wrong case, to accomplish those 
meaningful things despite the collective cathartic exercise we all are 
about to endure.

Moussaoui's federal sentencing proceeding is really just a hollow shell 
-- he's a prop and little more -- and when it is over the government, 
win or lose, will have paid a terribly high price to dispatch a 
dyspeptic loser who has proven to be as undisciplined a criminal 
defendant as he was a low-level terror operative. What was supposed to 
be the world-wide show trial to demonstrate that America could offer 
fair justice even to its most vicious enemies instead has devolved into 
a soggy legal mess. Ever since the government picked this guy as the 
fall guy for the mass crime that took place on 9/11, the case has been a 
public-relations disaster -- and the trial is only going to make it all 
worse.

Part of the blame goes to Moussaoui himself, who is either as mad as his 
lawyers say he is, or who knows intrinsically how to turn legal arcana 
into political theatre. But surely the federal officials who decided to 
turn the Moussaoui's case into a public trial might have suspected that 
an Al Qaeda thug -- and a reportedly schizophrenic one at that -- 
wouldn't simply sit still in court and behave like good, old-fashioned, 
home-grown criminals do. The federal government has literally given a 
microphone to a guy who says into it every chance he gets that he hates 
America. Talk about the White House being off-message these days.

Indeed, ever since the Bush Administration decided to give Moussaoui the 
venue and the forum of a civil courtroom -- instead of a tucked-away 
military tribunal, for which he is eligible because he is not a US 
citizen -- he has twisted this case into knots. And so have federal 
prosecutors and U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema, who have fought 
sharply for years over precisely what "due process" ought to mean in the 
case of a guy whose bosses were bin Laden and two of his capos, Ramzi 
Binalshibh, and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

Because of the nature of the charges against Moussaoui, the facts to 
which he already has pleaded guilty, and federal death penalty rules, 
the trial portends a nasty battle of blame between the two sides, 
presided over by a judge who already has ruled (and then been overruled) 
that the death penalty is inapposite in this case. That is simply not a 
recipe that is likely to cook up a neat and tidy result for the 
government despite the overwhelmingly compelling narrative that federal 
prosecutors are going to work with when they finally begin to present 
their evidence.

Federal prosecutors want a reply writ large of the 1997 Oklahoma City 
bombing trials, in which they wove together seamlessly emotional victim 
testimony with circumstantial evidence to gain the convictions of 
Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. But McVeigh was a real murderer and 
Nichols did far more to help the bomb plot than Moussaoui came close to 
doing. And that is a factual difference that no somber litany of the 
names of the dead and no enormous in-court model of the Twin Towers can 
change.

If Moussaoui ultimately is condemned after this trial it won't be 
because he pulled a trigger (he didn't) or even knew of the specific 
9/11 plot (he didn't). It won't be because he is the 9-11 mastermind (he 
wasn't) or because he was supposed to be on one of those doomed planes 
(he wasn't). It will be because federal conspiracy law is a vast expanse 
that authorizes the government to link together one sub-plot to another 
until the chain is established. Moussaoui was a terror conspirator. And 
terror conspirators murdered nearly 3,000 people on 9/11. Ergo, federal 
law says and the government intends to prove, Moussaoui conspired to 
murder those people. The case is no more complex than that.

The trial is really two different trials. First, the feds have to 
establish a link between Moussaoui and the murder of 9/11. Only if they 
do, beyond a reasonable doubt, will they then be able to move on to 
Phase II of the sentencing, the phase more familiar to devotees of this 
sort of thing, in which prosecutors try to convince jurors that 
Moussaoui deserves to die. It is in Phase II, if we get there, that 
jurors will be bombarded by prosecutors with "aggravating" factors that 
warrant a death sentence for Moussaoui and by "mitigating" factors by 
his defense. Of course, everyone knows that nothing in Moussaoui's 
miserable life mitigates what happened on 9/11 so Phase I of the 
proceeding is where his lot will be decided.

The feds must establish first that Moussaoui's lies to federal agents at 
the time of his arrest -- e.g., when he denied his latent interest in 
flying planes into buildings -- "resulted" in at least one of the 9/11 
deaths. Indeed, because of the peculiarities of federal criminal law, in 
addition to trying to pin Moussaoui to the worst crime in American 
history, the feds also must try to pin on him the rap that he also is 
responsible for the worst intelligence failure in American history; that 
had he told the truth to the authorities back in August 2001 they would 
have foiled the plot one month later.

The government, in other words, needs by law to blame Moussaoui for the 
attacks even though he was reportedly clueless and in custody on 9/11. 
Moussaoui's lawyers, not surprisingly, therefore want to try to deflect 
blame from their client by arguing that government was clueless, too. 
They will try to convince the jury that nothing the defendant could have 
said in August 2001 would have awakened sleepy intelligence officials to 
the imminent threat of hijacked planes being piloted into buildings. So 
a trial about terrorism will also become a trial about foiling terrorism 
-- and our failure to do so back in 2001. Ugly? You bet.

Defense attorneys are going to hammer away at the government's 
pre-attack intelligence as they try to convince jurors that the feds 
knew way more than Moussaoui about the threat of hijacked planes being 
used as missiles. For example, they are likely to argue that if the 
government didn't do enough to beef up airline security after the 
infamous August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing memo entitled "Bin 
Laden determined to strike in U.S. (by hijacking airplanes)" than why in 
the world would an honest Moussaoui statement that month have done 
anything more to convince the machinery of government to get into gear? 
The idea will be to convince jurors that Moussaoui's silence- his 
refusal to divulge his terror training-- would not have made a difference.

It's a delicate balance for both sets of attorneys. After all, even if 
Moussaoui wasn't the 20th hijacker he really is a bad guy. He proclaims 
his terror ties to all who will listen. And he clearly had bad intent 
when he was taking those flight training courses. Had he not been 
arrested on immigration charges, he very well might have murdered 
hundreds or even thousands. And, in any event, he was by his own 
admission involved in a criminal conspiracy. The defense has to somehow 
acknowledge this to jurors-- to save their own credibility-- but at the 
same time keep reminding the panel that was not involved in the specific 
conspiracy that successfully achieved its notorious ends. He wasn't part 
of the plot to hijack planes on 9-11 and take down the Twin Towers and 
the Pentagon.

Government attorneys, meanwhile, have portray Moussaoui as the bogeyman 
even as they concede that he apparently knew very little about 9/11 and 
was instead part of a second or subsequent wave of terrorists. You can 
be sure that federal prosecutors will try to ensure that the enormity of 
the crime, the enormity of the event in human history, overshadows in 
the minds of jurors whatever minor role Mousasoui played in it. But 
there is a risk in that strategy, too, because if jurors believe even 
just a little bit that the government has the wrong guy, or is trying to 
shift its own measure of guilt for not stopping the attacks onto 
Moussaoui, there will be no death penalty. Remember, all it takes is one 
juror.

Is there enough evidence to tie Moussaoui to this horrific crime as a 
matter of law? Is there enough to justify a sentence of death? Can the 
government's "overlapping conspiracy" theory work here? We all will know 
in a few months. But no amount of fancy law talk, and no stretch of 
already stretched federal law, makes Moussaoui into the true bad guy of 
9/11. That guy is hiding in a cave somewhere in Pakistan probably 
laughing at the whole episode. And that's why more bad things than good 
things can happen to the government during this trial; it's why the 
grieving families of 9/11 will never get the satisfaction they rightly 
seek and certainly deserve; and it's why the embarrassment and further 
loss of credibility the trial will generate for and to our intelligence 
community will hardly be worth it.

When the shouting is over, no matter what happens to Moussaoui, the 
trial will lay bare only two immutable truths about this story: 1) that 
the feds have tried disingenuously to make Moussaoui pay for the crimes 
committed by the real hijackers and Osama bin Laden, and; 2) that if 
Moussaoui's deceptive answers to authorities in August, 2001 "resulted" 
in the terror attacks of 9/11 than we were back then a nation that had 
to rely upon a sworn enemy like Moussaoui to deliver us from the evil of 
that day. Neither of these truths is pretty. But both are going to be 
forced upon us by an Administration that is too far deep to pull out of 
this case now and too stubborn to admit it never should have gone down 
this road in the first place.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/05/AR2006030500671.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060306/fe02c19d/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Mon Mar  6 04:03:55 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Mon, 06 Mar 2006 07:03:55 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] EXCELLENT:  Bush, lies,
 and videotape - James Carroll - Boston Globe Op-Ed
Message-ID: <440C252B.8000305@comcast.net>


  Bush, lies, and videotape

By James Carroll  |  March 6, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

IF GEORGE W. BUSH were a character in a novel or a play, last week might 
have been the turning point in the narrative. He was shown on film being 
explicitly warned, just hours before Hurricane Katrina hit, that the 
levees in New Orleans were vulnerable.

But everyone knows that after the levees broke, he denied having been 
warned that such a thing was possible. The broadcast of the film 
amounted to a terrible epiphany: The president seemed caught in a lie. 
Grave questions had already been raised about his administration's 
manipulations of the truth, especially in relation to the war in Iraq. 
Does the truth matter in America any more?

Critics of the president (among whom I must be counted) might come to 
yet another swift judgment of him, finding further evidence of a 
disqualifying character flaw. Rumbles about impeachment can be heard, 
despite the unlikelihood of such an outcome, shy of still-fanciful 
Democratic victories in the fall elections.

But what if our concern with Bush was embedded in literature, not 
politics? In that case, the conflict we would care about is not the one 
between a public figure and his critics, but the struggle inside the man 
himself. Literature unfolds across an inner landscape, and on that 
terrain the character flaw is essential.

Indeed, the character flaw of the hero is what enables a reader or 
playgoer to identify with him, even while passing judgment. Last week's 
videotape revelation raised public questions about the president's 
truthfulness, but the private question -- the one a man must face alone, 
in the crucible of conscience -- is a version of the question we all 
must ask of ourselves.

Consider the possibilities. The fictional character -- let's call him 
''Bush" -- learns that his firm public statement about what he had been 
told is radically contradicted by incontrovertible evidence. What he 
told the nation at its moment of crisis was not true, and that 
contradiction is now exposed.

Learning this, in one narrative line, ''Bush" might feel deeply shamed 
to have laid bare what he has always known was a lie. The character flaw 
is deception. But in another narrative line, ''Bush" might be shocked to 
realize that, in the traumatic moments of the hurricane crisis, he had 
blocked all memory of the critical briefing. He hadn't consciously lied, 
but had constructed a new reality tailored to personal and political 
needs. The character flaw, in this case, is not deception, but 
self-deception.

Whatever ''Bush" did in the past, however, the drama that matters 
adheres in what he does now, at the moment of being exposed. Whether 
''Bush" is a deceiver or a self-deceiver, the question is: What happens 
inside him at the terrible moment of judgment? In that instant, will he 
experience a transformation in awareness, as the truth of his condition 
shows itself? Or will he descend into a further circle of denial, 
deepening his predicament?

If this were a novel or a play, we would watch with a certain empathy, 
alert to revelations of our own inevitable implication in deception and 
self-deception. None of us is innocent, and it is to wrestle with that 
fact of our condition that we read books and buy theater tickets.

But the present American story is not a work of literature. From all 
appearances, the president is not a candidate for the role of ''Bush" 
because a narrative that unfolds across the terrain of an inner life 
requires an inner life, and Bush shows no sign of having one.

Even a character flaw presumes a depth of character that the president 
seems to lack. What interior conflict can there be for a man who 
attributes all failures, all mistakes, all crimes to those around him, 
as if he himself (alone of all humans) is blameless? Where there is no 
capacity for shame, there is none for insight, much less transformation. 
Without the secret struggle against the self, there can be no drama, 
only pathos.

As for us, the beholders of this narrative, there can be no suspension 
of disbelief, no identification, and no recognition of our own fate 
being rescued by a confrontation with the truth. On the contrary, since 
this is not literature but life, there is only the increased awareness 
of the danger into which the world is plunged by having such a hollow 
creature in the position of ultimate power.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/06/bush_lies_and_videotape/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060306/27b4dd81/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Mon Mar  6 04:06:40 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Mon, 06 Mar 2006 07:06:40 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] SHOULD READ: Heading for a 'roasted world' - John K.
 Bullard - Boston Globe Op-Ed
Message-ID: <440C25D0.9070805@comcast.net>


  Heading for a 'roasted world'

By John K. Bullard  |  March 6, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

WE ARE so dependent on our political leaders, much more than we realize. 
The visible aspects of leadership such as making decisions, taking 
positions, and funding projects pale in comparison to the hidden ability 
to focus our attention or distract us.

Our political leaders don't win every debate, but they have a huge 
influence on what we debate. Leadership requires that one be able to 
tell the difference between what is urgent and what is important and to 
gauge magnitude. Leaders should help educate us on important issues. 
They should encourage civic discourse, debate, and action on these 
important issues. And the scale of the action must fit the magnitude of 
the problem.

The issue of global warming is proof that a vacuum exists precisely 
where leadership is most needed. The existence of human-induced climate 
change should be beyond fundamental debate. The science is clear. The 
trends are alarming. The implications are profoundly threatening to the 
status quo. We are looking at a world that by midcentury will be 
significantly warmer and different in ways we can only guess.

John Holdren, the incoming president of the American Association for the 
Advancement of Science and an energy specialist from the Kennedy School 
and the Woods Hole Research Center, has said that the 5-7 degree change 
predicted from a doubling of greenhouse gases by 2050 may be a best-case 
scenario. We are headed for a quadrupling of these gases, which would 
lead to a 20-degree change by midcentury. He calls this a ''roasted world."

James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, 
has said if we are not operating very differently within 10 years, this 
change will be irreversible. Other scientists do not give us that much time.

But temperature change is only one effect. Rising sea levels, from 
thermal expansion and melting ice caps, is another. Major shifts in 
thermohaline circulation, such as the Gulf Stream, because of increasing 
amounts of fresh water off of Iceland, could change the climate in 
Europe within a generation.

It has happened before. These are changes many people think they can 
escape by moving. We simply don't grasp the size of the problem.

Rising temperatures lead to more evaporation and more energy in the 
atmosphere, leading to more severe weather. Katrina's impact was felt 
far beyond Mississippi and Louisiana. Katrina turned part of the United 
States into a Third World country in a matter of hours.

It will cost the federal government $75 billion that we don't have. How 
many Katrinas would it take to bankrupt the country? To finish off the 
insurance industry? To cause massive human dislocation? To overwhelm 
health and shelter providers? Why would we think that this can't happen 
to us?

There are those who see our planet not as fragile, but strong. They see 
earth as a sustainable, developing, self-correcting organism that has 
existed for more than 10 billion years. Looking at earth this way, one 
realizes that humans have been part of this system for only 4 million of 
those years. Right now, human beings may be the only species whose 
elimination would benefit all other species. Are we immune from this 
correction? Why would we think so? This isn't about saving the earth. 
The earth will do a fine job of saving itself. This is about us.

Right now we are showing (and our leaders exemplify) characteristics 
that, in combination, are toxic. We have believed since Genesis that we 
are apart from nature and our job is to achieve dominion over the earth. 
We believe we are in control of the earth. What hubris. We are largely 
ignorant of science, and we hope what we don't know can't hurt us. And 
lastly, we live in denial. This issue of the changing climate isn't 
really that big a deal. Arrogance, ignorance, and denial -- that is a 
fatal combination.

What we need from our leaders is the opposite. We need them to know that 
there is no more important issue than reducing greenhouse gas emissions. 
We need a proper sense of perspective. This isn't just about Cape Wind. 
This is about more Cape Winds, everywhere we can put them. This is about 
nuclear power because the risks from long-term storage of nuclear fuel 
rods pales in comparison with the harm being caused right now.

In the past, leaders have mobilized actions that have changed the course 
of the world. But a melting glacier doesn't have the political impact of 
Pearl Harbor or a Soviet sputnik. So today's leaders don't see the 
magnitude of the threat.

My granddaughter is 18 months old. This issue will change her life. What 
will I say to her? We can respond to this crisis. Many of us are willing 
to play a role, to change our behavior. We need to believe that our 
individual actions will be combined with others to change the course of 
human events. That's why we need leaders. But we need leaders who have 
the intelligence to see climate change for what it is -- a crisis. We 
need leaders who realize we are not guaranteed an existence. And that we 
need to act now, not only for future generations, but for ourselves.

John K. Bullard, the former mayor of New Bedford, is president of the 
Sea Education Association. He directed the NOAA's Office of Sustainable 
Development in the Clinton administration.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/06/heading_for_a_roasted_world/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060306/e6e6b879/attachment.htm 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Mon Mar  6 07:55:04 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (harry.sifton at sympatico.ca)
Date: Mon, 06 Mar 2006 15:55:04 GMT
Subject: [Mb-civic] Guardian Unlimited: '14,
	000 detained without trial in Iraq'
Message-ID: <20060306155504.8FD87988B1@mussel.gul3.gnl>

HS spotted this on the Guardian Unlimited site and thought you should see it.

To see this story with its related links on the Guardian Unlimited site, go to http://www.guardian.co.uk

'14,000 detained without trial in Iraq'
Mike McDonough
Monday March 06 2006
The Guardian


US and UK forces in Iraq have detained thousands of people without charge or trial for long periods and there is growing evidence of Iraqi security forces torturing detainees, Amnesty International said today.

In a new report published today, the human rights group criticised the US-led multinational force for interning some 14,000 people.

Around 3,800 people have been held for over a year, while another 200 have been detained for more than two years, the report - Beyond Abu Ghraib: detention and torture in Iraq - said. 

"It is a dangerous precedent for the world that the US and UK think it completely defensible to hold thousands of people without charge or trial," Amnesty spokesman Neil Durkin said. 

The detainee situation in Iraq was comparable to Guant&aacute;namo Bay, he added, but on a much larger scale, and the detentions appeared to be "arbitrary and indefinite".

"It sends a very worrying message to the people of Iraq that the multinational force does not think normal human rights standards apply," he said. 

Amnesty said there was no fresh evidence of US-led troops abusing detainees in ways similar to Abu Ghraib prison, but it warned that the US practice of denying detainees access to lawyers or visits by relatives for their first 60 days in custody left the door open to mistreatment.

"The worry is that people will suffer abuse during that period and it is less likely to be checked if there is no form of external oversight," Mr Durkin said. 

The Amnesty report also claimed Iraqi security forces were systematically violating the rights of detainees.

Many cases of torture, including electric shocks or beatings with plastic cables, have been reported since US-led forces handed power to Iraqi officials in June 2004, the document said. 

Several detainees reportedly died in Iraqi custody last year, and some of their bodies bore injuries consistent with torture, Amnesty said. 

The report expressed particular concern about the activities of the Wolf brigade, a unit that reports to the Iraqi interior ministry. 

Mr Durkin insisted it was feasible for the Iraqi authorities to implement international human rights standards despite the country's extremely volatile security situation. 

"We do not see what is unreasonable about abiding by human rights standards in attempts to police Iraq," he said. "And you are not going to fuel resentment to the same degree as if you imprison people without charge, that is a recipe for disaster."

Amnesty acknowledged that armed groups opposed to the US-led force were responsible for many of the abuses being committed in Iraq, including attacks targeting civilians. 

But the group said it had addressed that issue in earlier reports, and that it was not the focus of its latest publication.

The vast majority of the 14,000 people held in Iraq are in US custody. 

British troops are holding 43 detainees at a facility in Shaiba, southern Iraq, a spokesman for the Foreign Office said. Their detention is subject to regular review by an internment panel, but lawyers can only make written submissions. 

Amnesty said it was concerned the lawyers do not have access to any substantive evidence against their clients. 

One man, Hillal "Abdul Razzaq" Ali al-Jedda, has been in British custody since his arrest in October 2004. The 48-year-old dual Iraqi and UK national has not been charged with any offence, and a court of appeal judgment on his detention is awaited following a hearing in January.

The Foreign Office said the UK followed UN guidelines for detaining suspects. 

"We believe that the detention is legal and fair and subject to review," a spokesman said. 


Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited


From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Mon Mar  6 08:02:27 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Mon,  6 Mar 2006 16:02:27 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Huge Phone Deal Seeks to Thwart Smaller
	Rivals
Message-ID: <20060306160227.A140F3AEBF5@lax-gw06.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

BUSINESS | March 6, 2006
Huge Phone Deal Seeks to Thwart Smaller Rivals
By KEN BELSON
AT&T's acquisition of BellSouth would recreate a big chunk of the Ma Bell monopoly that was broken up in 1984.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/06/business/06phone.html?ex=1142312400&en=1a39898fbe60d2bb&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060306/32165272/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Mon Mar  6 08:03:21 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Mon,  6 Mar 2006 16:03:21 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Schools Avoid Class Ranking, Vexing Colleges
Message-ID: <20060306160321.19FB624B0B3@lax-gw02.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

EDUCATION | March 5, 2006
Schools Avoid Class Ranking, Vexing Colleges
By ALAN FINDER
Many high schools have stopped providing class ranking information to colleges, fearing it could harm students' admission chances.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/05/education/05rank.html?ex=1142312400&en=3ac68ebd5e49d73c&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060306/82209f7b/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Mon Mar  6 08:03:59 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Mon,  6 Mar 2006 16:03:59 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Academic, Heal Thyself
Message-ID: <20060306160359.A4CC611F9F3@lax-gw07.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

OPINION | March 6, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor: Academic, Heal Thyself
By CAMILLE PAGLIA
Harvard's reputation for disinterested scholarship has been gored by the manipulations of the self-serving cabal that forced Lawrence H. Summers's premature resignation. 
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/06/opinion/06paglia.html?ex=1142312400&en=48eaab3df3249f0d&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060306/749e1d2e/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Mon Mar  6 08:04:35 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Mon,  6 Mar 2006 16:04:35 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Hazards of Boom-Time Borrowing
Message-ID: <20060306160435.B4E9224B091@lax-gw02.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

OPINION | March 6, 2006
Editorial: Hazards of Boom-Time Borrowing

For the typical American family, financial well-being now hangs in a balance between frothy home values and stagnating wages plus rising debt.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/06/opinion/06mon2.html?ex=1142312400&en=403422d10be46510&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060306/275f640f/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Mon Mar  6 08:06:07 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Mon,  6 Mar 2006 16:06:07 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: NYTimes.com: Voices Baffled, Brash and Irate in Guantánamo
Message-ID: <20060306160607.BBB4683EDD@lax-gw03.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

INTERNATIONAL / AMERICAS | March 6, 2006
Voices Baffled, Brash and Irate in Guant?namo
By TIM GOLDEN
Newly released Pentagon documents provide the most detailed information to date about the detainees.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/06/international/americas/06gitmo.html?ex=1142312400&en=f991756efe3826bf&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060306/68c29aa3/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Mon Mar  6 08:06:57 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Mon,  6 Mar 2006 16:06:57 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Scant Drop Seen in Abortion Rate if Parents
	Are Told
Message-ID: <20060306160657.1691F9FE2D@lax-gw05.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

NATIONAL | March 6, 2006
Scant Drop Seen in Abortion Rate if Parents Are Told
By ANDREW LEHREN and JOHN LELAND
Parental notification laws have not produced the sharp drop in abortions that advocates had hoped for, a Times analysis shows.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/06/national/06abortion.html?ex=1142312400&en=ff533d9870b1db54&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060306/95de8a90/attachment-0001.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Mon Mar  6 08:09:44 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: 6 Mar 2006 16:09:44 -0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] Headlines for March 6, 2006
Message-ID: <20060306160944.12666.qmail@trinity.democracynow.org>

Mike Blaxill  ( mblaxill at yahoo.com )
sent you this story from democracynow.org




+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  Headlines for March 6, 2006
|  http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/06/1424236
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+


- Pakistan Cracks Down on Protests As Bush Concludes Visit
- Amnesty Says US-Run Iraqi Prison System ?Recipe for Abuse? 
- Study: 90% of Baghdad Residents Suffer Psychological Disorders
- UN Warns of Massive Food Crisis in Kenya
- Report: Bush Admin Launching Campaign Against Government Leaks
- Cunningham Sentenced To Eight Years in Prison 
- Lynne Stewart Diagnosed With Breast Cancer
This story continues at: 
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/06/1424236


From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Mon Mar  6 08:30:18 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Mon, 6 Mar 2006 11:30:18 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Your Carbon footprint
Message-ID: <000a01c6413b$44db3390$443fe440@Harold>




 Answerer as best you can, this will surprise you and it is not pretty.

http://www.bp.com/extendedsectiongenericarticle.do?categoryId=9006010&contentId=7012265

Harry
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060306/d40e50b4/attachment.htm 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Mon Mar  6 09:25:57 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Mon, 6 Mar 2006 12:25:57 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Unsutainable growth
Message-ID: <000801c64143$0ab29d90$443fe440@Harold>

12 February 2006

Unsustainable Growth

By Gwynne Dyer

        It's exactly the sort of document that an American think-tank would
have produced in the year 1900, if they had had think-tanks in 1900.  This
time it's the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the leading research institute
in the world's most populous country, and the document is called China
Modernisation Report 2006.

        That imaginary American think-tank of a century ago would certainly
have predicted massive urbanisation and far higher incomes in the United
States by 1950, because those trends were already well established at the
time.  It might not have forecast that half the American population would
own automobiles by 1950, let alone that tens of millions of Americans could
afford to travel abroad by then, but a bold forecaster might have done so. 
And when it all came true, nothing terrible happened as a result.

        This time the predictions won't come true, because terrible things
will start to happen long before 2050.  This is deeply unfair, because all
China wants for its citizens is the same lifestyle that most Western
countries had achieved by 1950.  But they got away with it because they
were the first countries to industrialise, and China won't because it is so
big and because it has come so late to the game.

        The report, published on 9 February, glows with enthusiasm for the
predicted rise in Chinese incomes (tenfold by 2050, to $1300 a month), for
the 500 million peasants who will move to the cities, for the 600 million
city-dwellers who will move out into hi-tech suburban homes.  Half China's
people will own their own cars and be able to afford overseas travel, the
report predicts.  But I don't think so.

        The Chinese people deserve prosperity, and they have waited too
long for it, but they cannot have it in the classic Western style.  Take
the cars alone.  Within a decade, China will be the second-largest
automobile manufacturer on the planet -- but for half the Chinese
population to own cars, the world's total stock of motor vehicles must
almost double.  For half of Indians and Brazilians and Russians also to own
cars (and all these countries have similar expectations), the car
population of the planet must triple.

        It doesn't work at the local level (nine of the world's ten most
polluted cities are already in China), and it doesn't work at the global
level.  It is taboo to say so outside of scientific and environmental
circles, because the rapid growth of the Chinese and Indian economies is
now the main motor driving world economic growth, but it cannot go on like
this.

        At the beginning of the Second World War the world had two billion
people, of whom about one-quarter lived in industrialised countries -- but
few of them owned cars, or ran air-conditioners, or travelled abroad. Forty
years later there were four billion people.  Those who lived in fully
industrialised societies by now consumed far more energy and produced far
more waste, as a "modern" lifestyle now included cars, meat in most meals,
electrical appliances galore and, for many people, foreign travel, but they
were still only a quarter of the population. Total human pressure on the
environment? Up fivefold or sixfold in forty years.

        Now we have six and a half billion people, and we are still running
at a quarter of the human race living in developed countries, so the
pressure on the environment is around ten times what it was in 1940.  But
the predicted development of China by 2050 (and the comparable growth of
India, Brazil and Russia) will raise the share of the human race living in
high-consumption industrial economies to over half of the global population
-- which will exceed eight billion by that time. Total human pressure on
the environment: perhaps twenty-five times higher in a single century.

        It's China's turn, and it's monstrously unfair that it cannot just
follow the same development path that Britain first carved in the late
1800s, and all the rest of the West followed in the1900s. But it can't. You
cannot get away with that style of development any more when the world is
already as damaged as it is now.

        The most frightening map I have ever seen is one published in James
Lovelock's new book, Revenge of Gaia, that shows what proportion of the
Earth's surface would remain suitable for agriculture if the average global
temperature went up by 5 degrees C (9 degrees F). None of China is
habitable (above desert population densities) except Manchuria. None of
India makes it either, except the foothills of the Himalayas, and none of
the United States except the Pacific Northwest.

        That is a completely unacceptable outcome of headlong
"modernisation" in the old style, so the China Modernisation Report 2006 is
just a fantasy.  Somewhere between now and the future it envisages for
2050, the negative consequences of continuing down the present path will
become so large and undeniable that the current pattern of development will
be abandoned. It may not be abandoned soon enough to avoid terrible
consequences for China and the world, but the day will never arrive when
half of China's population owns cars.

        On the other hand, the day MUST arrive when China's people (and
India's and Brazil's and Indonesia's) live as well as Americans, or else
there will be hell to pay. So the day may well arrive when more than half
of all Americans don't own cars either.  The future, as usual, is not going
to be like the present.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060306/b5da9765/attachment.htm 

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Mon Mar  6 10:15:28 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Mon, 06 Mar 2006 10:15:28 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] CIA Leak Path: Cheney, Libby,
	Woodward     By Jason Leopold
Message-ID: <C031BC40.29C0B%michael@michaelbutler.com>

    CIA Leak Path: Cheney, Libby, Woodward
    By Jason Leopold
    t r u t h o u t | Report

    Monday 06 March 2006

    In mid-June 2003, when former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's criticism
against the White House's use of pre-war Iraq intelligence started to make
national headlines, Vice President Dick Cheney told his former chief of
staff and close confidant I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby to leak classified
intelligence data on Iraq's nuclear ambitions to a legendary Washington
journalist in order to undercut the charges made against the Bush
administration by the former ambassador.

    On June 27, 2003, Bob Woodward, the Pulitzer Prize winning reporter,
became the first journalist to whom Libby leaked a portion of the classified
National Intelligence Estimate that purportedly showed how Iraq tried to
acquire yellowcake uranium from Niger.

    This story is based on interviews with current and former administration
officials who work or worked at the CIA, the State Department and the
National Security Council. All of the individuals are familiar with the
events that took place in the days that led up to Libby's meeting with
Woodward and other journalists in which the NIE was discussed.

    Woodward, currently an assistant managing editor of the Washington Post,
did not return calls for comment. Leonard Downie, the executive editor of
the Post, would not comment for this story. A spokeswoman for Cheney said
she could not comment for this story, and attorneys for Libby did not return
calls for comment.

    Libby was indicted in October on five-counts of perjury, obstruction of
justice, and lying to investigators related to his role in the leak of
covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson, Ambassador Wilson's wife.

    The leak of the NIE to Woodward was orchestrated by Cheney and Libby in
mid-June 2003 in hopes that Woodward would write a story for the Washington
Post that would contradict the assertions made by Wilson - that there was no
truth to intelligence cited by the Bush administration on numerous occasions
that Iraq tried to purchase 500 tons of uranium from Niger.

    Just two weeks earlier, Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus wrote an
article attacking the administration's use of the Niger uranium allegations
in President Bush's January 28, 2003 State of the Union address. Pincus's
article was based on an unnamed source - later learned to be Joseph Wilson -
who called into question the veracity of the White House's use of the
documents that supposedly proved Iraq sought uranium from Niger.

    Cheney and then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley led a
campaign beginning in March 2003 to discredit Wilson, according to current
and former State Department and CIA officials. Although the officials said
they helped prepare negative information on Wilson about his personal and
professional life and had given it to Libby and Cheney, Wilson seemed to
drop off the radar once the Iraq war started on March 19, 2003.

    With no sign of weapons of mass destruction to be found in Iraq, news
accounts started to call into question the credibility of the
administration's pre-war intelligence. In May 2003, Wilson re-emerged at a
political conference in Washington sponsored by the Senate Democratic Policy
Committee. There he told the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff that
he had been the special envoy who traveled to Niger in February 2002 to
check out allegations that Iraq tried to purchase uranium from the country.
He told Kristoff that he briefed a CIA analyst that the claims were untrue.
Wilson said he believed the administration had ignored his report and had
been dishonest with Congress and the American people.

    Then rumors started to swirl inside the Beltway in mid-June 2003 that
Wilson would soon go public and reveal that he was tapped by the CIA to
travel to Niger a year earlier to check out whether there was any truth to
the intelligence that claimed Iraq tried to acquire uranium from the African
country. He reported back to the CIA in March 2002 that the intelligence was
bogus.

    A day or two after Pincus's article was published in the Post, a meeting
took place in Cheney's office to coordinate a response to the charges. In
attendance were Libby, Cheney, and several other senior aides to the vice
president as well as officials from the State Department, and the National
Security Council.

    It was then that Cheney decided the only way to counter Wilson's
criticism was by having Libby leak portions of the NIE to a select group of
reporters whose previous work in their respective publications had advanced
the White House's political agenda.

    For an administration that despises leaks, the decision by Cheney to
declassify highly sensitive portions of the NIE and have his most trusted
aide leak it to reporters in order to attack the former ambassador's
credibility shows how personal the Wilson issue had become for the vice
president.

    Perhaps it's just a coincidence, but the timing of an executive order
signed by President Bush supposedly granting Cheney the authority to
declassify such national security intelligence fits nicely into the time
frame when he and his senior aides spearheaded a campaign to discredit
Wilson.

    The executive order was signed on March 23, 2003, four days after the
start of the Iraq war, and two weeks after Wilson first appeared on the
administration's radar.

    In an interview with Fox News last month, Cheney said he had the legal
authority to declassify intelligence as he saw fit. There is still strong
debate about the interpretation of the executive order Cheney referred to
that provided him with such power. Cheney's comments came on the heels of a
disclosure Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald made in a letter to defense
attorneys representing Libby in the leak case.

    In the letter, Fitzgerald said Libby testified before a grand jury that
he was authorized by his "superiors" to leak portions of the NIE to
journalists.

    Woodward was first on deck. He met with Libby on June 27, 2003, in
Libby's office next to the White House. A week or so earlier, Woodward met
with two other government officials, one of whom told him in a "casual" and
off-handed manner that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA.

    Woodward said the meeting with Libby and the other government officials
had been set up simply as "confidential background interviews for my 2004
book "Plan of Attack" about the lead-up to the Iraq war, ongoing reporting
for the Washington Post and research for a book on Bush's second term to be
published in 2006."

    Woodward wrote a first-person account for the Washington Post after he
gave sworn deposition to Fitzgerald about information he had learned about
Valerie Plame Wilson. It was a shocking revelation at the time. Woodward had
publicly discounted the importance of the Plame Wilson leak and had referred
to Fitzgerald as a "junkyard dog" prosecutor. He then revealed in November
that he had been told about Plame Wilson's CIA employment in June 2003 -
before any other journalist.

    In that first person account published in the Post, the Watergate-era
journalist wrote that when he met with Libby on June 27, 2003, "Libby
discussed the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's alleged
weapons of mass destruction, mentioned "yellowcake" and said there was an
effort by the Iraqis to get it from Africa. It goes back to February '02.
This was the time of Wilson's trip to Niger."

    The information in the NIE about Niger was still considered highly
classified and extremely sensitive, and although Woodward had been the
recipient of classified information on other occasions during the course of
gathering material for his books, the data he was provided with concerning
the NIE had been authorized by Cheney in order to rebut Wilson. Woodward
never wrote a story for the Post about the intelligence information he was
given.

    Libby also met with former New York Times reporter Judith Miller,
another Pulitzer Prize winner, and leaked the same portions of the NIE when
questions were raised by Miller about Wilson's claims about the
administration's use of pre-war Iraq intelligence.

    Miller and Woodward had been handpicked by Libby to receive the
information contained in the NIE, sources familiar with the events that led
up to the meetings said, and were urged by Libby to write stories to
undercut Wilson's credibility by showing that the NIE disagreed with
Wilson's claims.

    Miller never wrote a story for the Time, either. She testified before a
grand jury that Libby gave her information in the NIE concerning Iraq's
attempt to acquire yellowcake uranium from Niger.

    In the meantime, while Libby had been leaking portions of the NIE in
late June to back up the administration's use of the Niger claims, other
officials from Cheney's office and the National Security Council had been
speaking with a select group of journalists and had revealed Plame Wilson's
identity.

    On July 6, 2003, Wilson went public. A week later, his wife's name and
covert status were published in newspaper reports.

    In the interest of fairness, any individual named in this story who
believes he has been portrayed unfairly will have the opportunity to use
this space to respond.

 


From lindahassler at sbcglobal.net  Mon Mar  6 10:50:25 2006
From: lindahassler at sbcglobal.net (Linda Hassler)
Date: Mon, 6 Mar 2006 12:50:25 -0600
Subject: [Mb-civic] Taking back our country
Message-ID: <c8abdee9bbbe609d58feeb12d112bb9b@sbcglobal.net>

Here's a primer for strengthening the Democratic platform.

sent by Linda Hassler

The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right
by Michael Lerner
ISBN:
0060842474 (More details...)
Available at:
Airport, Beaverton, Quimby Warehouse
Upcoming Event
Tuesday, March 7th 2006 07:30 PM

Powell's City of Books on Burnside, Portland, OR
In The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious 
Right, a "highly decent and challenging critique" (Kirkus Reviews), 
Rabbi Michael Lerner offers a spiritual manifesto for a new kind of 
social change movement that seeks to reclaim America from the Religious 
Right.

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

The unholy alliance of the Political Right and the Religious Right 
threatens to destroy the America we love. It also threatens to generate 
a popular aversion to God and religion by identifying religious values 
with a pro-war, pro-business, pro-rich, anti-science, and 
anti-environmental stance.

  Over the past few decades, the Republicans have achieved political 
dominance by forging a union with the Religious Right. This marriage 
has provided a sanctimonious veneer for policies that have helped the 
rich get richer while ignoring the needs of the middle class and the 
poor, dismantling environmental and civil liberties protections, and 
seeking global domination. The Right champions the materialism and 
ruthless selfishness promoted by unrestrained capitalism and then 
laments the moral crises of family instability and loneliness 
experienced by people who bring these commercial values into their 
homes and personal lives. In response, the Religious Right offers 
insular communities for the faithful and a culture that blames 
liberals, activist judges, homosexuals, independent women, and all 
secular people for the moral and spiritual emptiness so many Americans 
experience.

  Yet, however distorted both the Right's analysis and its solutions to 
America's spiritual crisis may be, it wins allegiance by addressing the 
human hunger for a life with some higher purpose. The Left, by 
contrast, remains largely tone-deaf to the spiritual needs of the 
American people. It is the yearning for meaning in life, not just the 
desire for money or power, that lies at the core of American politics.

  Addressing the central mystery of contemporary politics ? why so many 
Americans vote against their own economic interests ? The Left Hand of 
God provides an invaluable, timely, and blunt critique of the current 
state of faith in government. Lerner challenges the Left to give up its 
deeply held fear of religion and to distinguish between a 
domination-oriented, Right-Hand-of-God tradition and a more 
compassionate and hope-oriented Left-Hand-of-God worldview. Further, 
Lerner describes the ways that Democrats have misunderstood and 
alienated significant parts of their potential constituency. To succeed 
again, Lerner argues, the Democratic Party must rethink its 
relationship to God, champion a progressive spiritual vision, reject 
the old bottom line that promotes the globalization of selfishness, and 
deal head-on with the very real spiritual crisis that many Americans 
experience every day.

  Lerner presents a vision that incorporates and then goes far beyond 
contemporary liberal and progressive politics. He argues for a new 
bottom line in our economy, schools, and government. This is a 
fundamentally fresh approach, one that takes spiritual needs seriously 
in our economic and political lives. Presenting an eight-point 
progressive spiritual covenant with America, Lerner provides a 
blueprint for how the Democratic Party can effectively challenge the 
Right and position itself to win the White House and Congress. By 
appealing to religious, secular, and spiritual but not necessarily 
religious people, The Left Hand of God blazes a trail that could change 
our world and reclaim America from the Religious Right.

About the Author
Rabbi Michael Lerner is an internationally renowned social theorist, 
theologian, psychotherapist, and the editor of Tikkun magazine. He 
earned a Ph.D in philosophy from the University of California, 
Berkeley, and in clinical psychology from the Wright Institute. Lerner 
is rabbi of Beyt Tikkun synagogue, which meets in San Francisco and 
Berkeley.


From michael at intrafi.com  Mon Mar  6 11:46:40 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Mon,  6 Mar 2006 19:46:40 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Too Hot to Handle, Too Hot to Not Handle
Message-ID: <20060306194640.103D783E16@lax-gw03.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: michael at intrafi.com.

THEATER / NEWS & FEATURES | March 6, 2006
Connections: Too Hot to Handle, Too Hot to Not Handle
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
Is it any wonder New York Theater Workshop got jittery and postponed a production of "My Name Is Rachel Corrie"?
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/06/theater/newsandfeatures/06conn.html?ex=1142312400&en=d975f93d0001bd04&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060306/df842249/attachment.htm 

From michael at intrafi.com  Mon Mar  6 11:46:40 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Mon,  6 Mar 2006 19:46:40 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Too Hot to Handle, Too Hot to Not Handle
Message-ID: <20060306194640.0F4FC13B88D@lax-gw04.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: michael at intrafi.com.

THEATER / NEWS & FEATURES | March 6, 2006
Connections: Too Hot to Handle, Too Hot to Not Handle
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
Is it any wonder New York Theater Workshop got jittery and postponed a production of "My Name Is Rachel Corrie"?
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/06/theater/newsandfeatures/06conn.html?ex=1142312400&en=d975f93d0001bd04&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060306/8f2c4861/attachment.htm 

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Mon Mar  6 11:51:05 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Mon, 06 Mar 2006 11:51:05 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Feeling No Pain By PAUL KRUGMAN
Message-ID: <C031D2A9.29C26%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 6, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Feeling No Pain
By PAUL KRUGMAN

President Bush's main purpose in visiting India seems to have been to
promote nuclear proliferation. But he also had some kind words for
outsourcing. And those words help explain something that I know deeply
puzzles the administration's political gurus: Mr. Bush's dismal polling on
economic issues.

Now the American economy isn't doing as well as Bush partisans think it is.
In fact, since the end of the 2001 recession, the recovery in jobs, output
and especially wages has been unusually weak by historical standards. Still,
the economy is expanding, so it's impressive just how large a majority of
Americans disapproves of Mr. Bush's economic management.

Why doesn't Mr. Bush get any economic respect? I think it's because most
Americans sense, correctly, that he doesn't care about people like them.
We're living in a time when many Americans are feeling economically
insecure, but a tiny elite has been growing incredibly rich. And Mr. Bush's
problem is that he identifies so totally with the lucky, wealthy few that in
unscripted settings he can't manage even a few sentences of empathy with
ordinary Americans. He doesn't feel your pain, and it shows.

Here's what Mr. Bush said in India, when someone raised the question of the
political backlash against outsourcing: "Losing jobs is painful, so let's
make sure people are educated so they can find ? fill the jobs of the 21st
century. And let's make sure that there's pro-growth economic policies in
place. What does that mean? That means low taxes; it means less regulation;
it means fewer lawsuits; it means wise energy policy."

O.K., so you're a 50-year-old worker whose job has just been outsourced, and
Mr. Bush tells you that you should go get a 21st-century education and
rejoice in the joys of a lawsuit-free economy. Uh-huh.

Actually, Mr. Bush's remarks were even more off-key than they seem, coming
during a visit to India. India's surge into world markets hasn't followed
the pattern set by other developing nations, which started their export
drive in low-tech industries like clothing. Instead, India has moved
directly into industries that advanced countries like the United States
thought were their exclusive turf. When Business Week put together a list of
areas "where India has made an impact ... and where it's going next," that
list consisted almost entirely of high-technology activities like software
and chip design.

What this means is that American workers whose jobs are threatened by Indian
competition are, in many cases, people who thought they already had acquired
the skills to "fill the jobs of the 21st century" ? but have just discovered
that Indians, who are paid about a tenth as much, also have those skills.

Am I saying that we should try to stop outsourcing? No. But if you don't
feel conflicted about the effects of globalization, if you don't worry about
the many losers from the process, you aren't paying attention. And American
workers deserve a better answer to their concerns than yet another assertion
that a rising tide raises all boats, because that's manifestly untrue.

The fact is that we're living in a time when most Americans are seeing
little if any benefit from overall income growth, because their share of the
economic pie is falling. Between 1979 and 2003, according to a recent
research paper published by the I.R.S., the share of overall income received
by the bottom 80 percent of taxpayers fell from 50 percent to barely over 40
percent. The main winners from this upward redistribution of income were a
tiny, wealthy elite: more than half the income share lost by the bottom 80
percent was gained by just one-fourth of 1 percent of the population, people
with incomes of at least $750,000 in 2003.

And those fortunate few are the only people Mr. Bush seems to care about.
Look at what he had to offer after asserting, in effect, that workers get
outsourced because they don't have the right education: lower taxes,
deregulation and fewer lawsuits. Funny, that doesn't sound like "pro-growth"
policy to me. Instead, it sounds like a wish list for wealthy individuals
and big corporations.

Mr. Bush once joked that his base consisted of the "haves and the
have-mores." But it wasn't much of a joke. His remarks in India show that he
really can't imagine what it's like not to be a member of a privileged
economic elite.

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From michael at michaelbutler.com  Mon Mar  6 11:57:33 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Mon, 06 Mar 2006 11:57:33 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Nuclear Madness By BOB HERBERT
Message-ID: <C031D42D.29C28%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 6, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Nuclear Madness
By BOB HERBERT

The key to understanding the Bush administration and its policies is
contained in the widely cited New York Times Magazine article, "Faith,
Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush," by Ron Suskind.

That's the article in which Mr. Suskind described how a senior Bush adviser
contemptuously dismissed the community that most of us live in, "the
reality-based community."

The times have changed and reality isn't what it used to be. As the adviser
explained, "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own
reality."

This mad-hatter thinking was on display again last week. President Bush, who
used specious claims about a nuclear threat to launch his disastrous war in
Iraq, agreed to a deal ? in blatant violation of international accords and
several decades of bipartisan U.S. policy ? that would enable India to
double or triple its annual production of nuclear weapons.

The president turned his back on the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty
(dismissed, like reality-based thinking, as pass?) and moved the world a
step closer to an accelerated nuclear arms race in Asia and elsewhere. In
the president's empire-based, otherworldly way of thinking, this was a good
thing.

For decades, U.S. law and the provisions of the nonproliferation treaty have
precluded the sale of nuclear fuel and reactor components to India, which
has acquired an atomic arsenal and has refused to sign the treaty. President
Bush turned that policy upside down last week, agreeing to share nuclear
energy technology with India, even as it continues to develop nuclear
weapons in a program that is shielded from international inspectors.

The attempt to stop the spread of nuclear weapons beyond the five original
members of the so-called nuclear club ? the U.S., Russia, Britain, France
and China ? has not been perfect by any means. But it hasn't been bad. Back
in the 1960's there was a fear that before long there might be dozens of
additional states with nuclear weapons. But so far the spread has been held
to four ? Israel, India, Pakistan and most likely North Korea.

A cornerstone of the nonproliferation strategy has been the refusal to share
nuclear energy technology with nations unwilling to abide by the provisions
of the nonproliferation treaty. Last week George W. Bush decided he would
change all that by carving out an exception for India.

Presidents from both parties ? from Richard Nixon through Bill Clinton ? had
refused to make this deal, which India has wanted for more than three
decades.

"It's a terrible deal, a disaster," said Joseph Cirincione, the director for
nonproliferation at the Carnegie Endowment. "The Indians are free to make as
much nuclear material as they want. Meanwhile, we're going to sell them fuel
for their civilian reactors. That frees up their resources for the military
side, and that stinks."

With President Bush undermining the nonproliferation treaty, critics are
worried that it's only a matter of time before other bilateral deals are
made ? say, China with Pakistan, which has already asked Mr. Bush for a deal
similar to India's and been turned down.

"We can't break the rules for India and then expect other countries to play
by them," said Representative Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who is
one of the leading opponents of the deal, which will require Congressional
approval.

In the early 1960's, President John F. Kennedy, a member in good standing of
the reality-based community, tried to convey the menace posed to mankind by
nuclear weapons. "Today," he said, "every inhabitant of this planet must
contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man,
woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the
slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or
miscalculation or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before
they abolish us."

Today, in 2006, as Congressman Markey reminds us, terrorists as well as
rogue governments are racing to get their hands on nukes.

"We've had a consensus for a generation," he said, "that the world will
cooperate to restrict the spread of these nuclear materials. If this
consensus breaks down, then we increase exponentially the likelihood that
the catastrophic event that Kennedy warned about will, in fact, occur."

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From michael at michaelbutler.com  Mon Mar  6 12:01:25 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Mon, 06 Mar 2006 12:01:25 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Academic, Heal Thyself By CAMILLE PAGLIA
Message-ID: <C031D515.29C2A%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 6, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
Academic, Heal Thyself
By CAMILLE PAGLIA

Philadelphia

WHAT went wrong at Harvard?

Tomorrow, Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences will meet for the first
time since the resignation of the university's president, Lawrence H.
Summers, two weeks ago. The dean of Arts and Sciences, William Kirby,
resigned in late January, reportedly after clashing with Mr. Summers. When
Mr. Summers leaves on July 1, there will be a serious leadership vacuum at
Harvard, which has been torn by strife during his short five-year tenure.

Larry Summers, a former Treasury secretary, assumed the presidency with a
high sense of mission. Determined to effect change, he took bold and
confrontational positions. He endorsed proposals to expand the campus across
the Charles River to Allston, attacked anti-Semitism and rampant grade
inflation and laudably argued for the return of R.O.T.C. to Harvard.

But whatever his good intentions, Mr. Summers often inspired more heat than
light. His stellar early career as an economics professor did not prepare
him for dealing with an ingrown humanities faculty that has been sunk in
political correctness for decades. As president, he had a duty to research
the tribal creeds and customs of those he wished to convert. Foolishly
thinking plain speech and common sense would suffice, he flunked Academic
Anthropology 101.

While many issues are rumored to have played a role in Mr. Summers's
resignation (including charges of favoritism in a messy legal case involving
foreign investments), the controversy that will inevitably symbolize his
presidency was the manufactured outcry early last year over his glancing
reference at a conference to possible innate differences between the sexes
in aptitude for science and math. The feminist pressure groups rose en masse
from their lavishly feathered nests and set up a furious cackle that led to
a 218-to-185 vote of no confidence by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences last
March.

Instead of welcoming this golden opportunity to introduce the forbidden
subject of biology to academic gender studies (where a rigid dogma of social
constructionism reigns), Mr. Summers collapsed like a rag doll. A few months
later, after issuing one abject apology after another, he threw $50 million
at a jerrybuilt program to expand the comfort zone of female scientists and
others on campus. That one desperate act of profligate appeasement tells
volumes about the climate of persecution and extortion around gender issues
at too many American universities.

In a widely reported incident four years ago, Mr. Summers's private
conversation with Cornel West, one of Harvard's short list of distinguished
scholars who have the title of "university professor" (because they teach
across department lines), resulted in Dr. West angrily decamping to
Princeton. Whatever critique of affirmative action Mr. Summers intended was
lost in what became a soap opera of hurt feelings and facile accusations of
racism.

There was a larger issue of campus governance at stake. While it is
certainly in Harvard's best interests to ensure that its university
professors remain productive at a high scholarly level (the president
reportedly slighted Dr. West's recording of a rap CD), it is unclear on what
authority Mr. Summers was challenging Dr. West in the first place. The
provost, not the president, is the chief academic officer of any university.
But Harvard reinstituted a provost only in the early 1990's, and the
weakness of that position is suggested by the provost's near invisibility
through the public battles of the Summers regime.

The ideological groupthink of Harvard's humanities faculty does patent
disservice to the undergraduates in their charge, but it is the faculty
alone that should properly determine curriculum and academic policy, a
responsibility that descends from the birth of European universities in the
Middle Ages. Over the past 40 years, there has been a radical expansion of
administrative bureaucracies on American college campuses that has distorted
the budget and turned education toward consumerism, a checkbook alliance
with parents who are being bled dry by grotesquely exorbitant tuitions.

Mr. Summers's strategic blunders unfortunately took the spotlight off
entrenched political correctness and changed the debate to academic power:
who has it, and how should it be exercised? Nationwide, campus
administrations faced with factionalized or obdurate faculties have in some
cases taken matters into their own hands by creating programs or reducing
and even eliminating departments. The trend is disturbingly away from
faculty power.

Hence more is at stake in the Harvard affair than merely one overpriced
campus with an exaggerated reputation. Support for Larry Summers was strong
among Harvard undergraduates and outside the Faculty of Arts and Sciences,
which constitutes only one of Harvard's many colleges and professional
schools. The Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz protested that Mr.
Summers had been removed by "a coup d'?tat." But by his failure to provide a
systematic rationale for his words and actions, Mr. Summers gave the
impression of governing by whim and impulse. The leader of so huge and
complex an institution cannot be a whirling dervish.

IT now remains to be seen whether Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences is
capable of self-critique. Will its members acknowledge their own insularity
and excesses, or will they continue down the path of smug
self-congratulation and vanity? Harvard's reputation for disinterested
scholarship has been severely gored by the shadowy manipulations of the
self-serving cabal who forced Mr. Summers's premature resignation. That so
few of the ostensibly aggrieved faculty members deigned to speak on the
record to The Crimson, the student newspaper, illustrates the cagey
hypocrisy that permeates fashionable campus leftism, which worships
diversity in all things except diversity of thought.

If Harvard cannot correct itself in this crisis, it will signal that academe
cannot be trusted to reform itself from within. There is a rising tide of
off-campus discontent with the monolithic orthodoxies of humanities
departments. David Horowitz, a 1960's radical turned conservative, has
researched the lopsided party registration of humanities professors (who
tend to be Democrats like me) and proposed an "academic bill of rights" to
guarantee fairness and political balance in the classroom. The conservative
radio host Sean Hannity regularly broadcasts students' justifiable
complaints about biased teachers and urges students to take recording
devices to class to gather evidence.

These efforts to hold professors accountable are welcome and bracing, but
the danger is that such tactics can be abused. Tenure owes its very
existence to past intrusions by state legislatures in the curricular
business of state universities. If politicians start to meddle in campus
governance, academic freedom will be the victim. And when students become
snitches, we are heading toward dictatorship by Mao's Red Guards or Hitler
Youth.

Over the last three decades of trendy poststructuralism and postmodernism,
American humanities professors fell under the sway of a ruthless guild
mentality. Corruption and cronyism became systemic, spread by the
ostentatious conference circuit and the new humanities centers of the
1980's. Harvard did not begin that blight but became an extreme example of
it. Amid the ruins of the Summers presidency, there is a tremendous
opportunity for recovery and renewal of the humanities. Which way will
Harvard go?

Camille Paglia is the university professor of humanities and media studies
at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From michael at michaelbutler.com  Mon Mar  6 12:19:49 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Mon, 06 Mar 2006 12:19:49 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] FW: 9-11 Questions Art Bell Refuses to Answer
In-Reply-To: <BAY104-F3726555AC448C2B6D2F29BD5E90@phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <C031D965.29C31%michael@michaelbutler.com>


------ Forwarded Message
From: "ernesto ciccarelli" <chiosceola at hotmail.com>
Date: Mon, 06 Mar 2006 08:30:33 -0500

Subject: FW: 9-11 Questions Art Bell Refuses to Answer

>TEN 9-11 QUESTIONS ART BELL REFUSES TO ANSWER
>    by Victor Thorn - August 12, 2004
>
>QUESTION ONE  The Pentagon: The government contends that Flight 77  a
>Boeing 757  struck the ground floor of the Pentagon, completely entered the
>building; then disintegrated due to intense heat from the explosion. Yet
>photographs of the initial hole in the northwest wall show it to be only 18
>feet in diameter. This poses a problem, for a Boeing 757's wingspan is 124'
>10" across, while it measures 44' 6" from the ground to the tip of its
>tail. How could this massive airliner fit through an 18' hole, especially
>when the windows on each side of the initial hole, as well as on top of it
>survived the crash and were unbroken? In addition, the front lawn of the
>Pentagon was photographed as completely untouched directly following the
>crash, with no tire marks, scorch marks, ruts, or burn marks. It
>practically looked like a putting green, yet the plane struck on the GROUND
>FLOOR. Last but not least, a Boeing 757 weighs 65 tons. The government
>contends that all the wreckage, including the tempered steel and galvanized
>aluminum it was made of, was vaporized into thin air; yet the Pentagon's
>infrastructure did not vaporize, while some of the deceased Pentagon
>employees were identified by their fingerprints! So, human flesh doesn't
>vaporize, but metal and aluminum do? Please explain.
>
>QUESTION TWO  WORLD TRADE CENTER BUILDING # 7: Larry Silverstein, owner of
>the World Trade Center complex, admitted during a September 2002 PBS
>documentary entitled America Rebuilds that he ordered WTC #7 to be
>destroyed via a controlled demolition late on the afternoon of 9-11.
>Building 7 was not even struck by an airplane, and only had a miniscule
>fire inside it which was contained to one floor. When was this building
>wired for demolition  on the afternoon of 9-11 when pandemonium ensued
>throughout Manhattan, or beforehand? In addition, who specifically were the
>people who wired the building, whether on 9-11 or beforehand?
>
>QUESTION THREE  WORLD TRADE CENTER TOWERS: The government/mainstream media
>version of events contends that the Twin Towers collapsed due to intense
>heat created by fire. Yet it takes a temperature of 2795 degrees to melt
>the type of construction-grade steel used to build the WTC, while jet fuel
>only burns at a maximum temperature of 1472 degrees. Also, all of the jet
>fuel that spilled from the airliners burned-up within a matter of 1-2
>minutes. Thirdly, never in the history of the world has a steel building
>collapsed due to fire, including those which burned for infinitely longer
>periods of time with much more intense flames. Fourthly, the South Tower
>was struck 17 minutes after the North Tower, had most of the fuel from the
>jet splash outside the building, and burned at a much slower pace. Yet it
>fell 30 minutes before the North Tower. How can this highly improbably (not
>to mention physically impossible) scenario be explained? Lastly, when we
>bring physics into the equation and put to use a scientific formula to
>calculate how long it takes a structure to do a resistance-free gravity
>fall from top to bottom (H= ?at2) , we would find that the WTC towers would
>drop in approximately nine seconds  which is exactly how long it took both
>of them to fall. How can this phenomenon be explained, considering all the
>massive columns, floors, walls, and equipment inside each tower that would
>provide considerable resistance? Also, just out of curiosity, explain the
>pool of molten steel that burned seven-stories beneath ground level at both
>towers for 5-6 weeks after 9-11? Did this also derive from the miniscule
>amount of jet fuel that that burned out in 1-2 minutes?
>
>QUESTION FOUR  HIJACKERS STILL ALIVE: Five of the 19 men purported to have
>been suicide hijackers on the morning of 9-11 have been verifiably proven
>to still be alive and well. FIVE OF THEM. In addition, not one Arab name
>was found on any of the passenger records for any of the four hijacked
>airliners on the morning of 9-11. How do we account for these
>discrepancies?
>
>QUESTION FIVE  LACK OF PILOTING SKILLS: While on the subject of
>'hijackers,' there is an overwhelming amount of first-hand testimony
>presented by the flight instructors who gave lessons to the supposed pilots
>at the schools they attended prior to 9-11. While acting as
>pilots-in-training, they were unanimously characterized as incompetent,
>inept, and without the mechanical skills to even operate an automobile, let
>alone an airplane. These instructors also stated that these men were
>utterly incapable of performing the highly complex maneuvers utilized on
>9-11. How could these men  Afghanistani cave-dwellers  who were nicknamed
>"Dumb and Dumber," miraculously be able to execute moves that were only
>achievable by the upper Top Gun elite of our Air Force?
>
>QUESTION SIX  MILITARY STAND-DOWN: From September, 2000 to June, 2001, the
>Pentagon launched fighter jets 67 times to intercept wayward planes. In
>fact, a very rigid set of rules, procedures, and protocol has been in place
>for years that have to be lawfully followed whenever any type of aircraft
>strays off its course or is hijacked. Within the past decade, and every day
>after 9-11, these procedures have been followed to a T, and have not been
>corrupted or ignored. Yet on the morning of 9-11, on FOUR separate
>occasions, this system fell apart beyond comprehension. In fact, from the
>time the FAA discovered that the first plane had been hijacked until the
>Pentagon was struck - a total of 84 MINUTES had elapsed. On top of that,
>the Pentagon houses the NMCC (National Military Command Center), and
>possesses anti-aircraft and missile installations; yet none of these
>protective devices were activated or used  even after EVERYONE knew that
>the WTC towers had been attacked. This outrage so far exceeds mere
>incompetence that author David Ray Griffin wrote, "The attacks could not
>have succeeded unless some U.S. officials had given stand-down orders for
>standard operating procedures to be cancelled on that particular day." How
>are all of these curious anomalies explained?
>
>QUESTION SEVEN  FLIGHT 93: Wreckage from Flight 93 that was downed in
>Pennsylvania was strewn over an area stretching for eight miles from the
>crash site. Is this physically possible from a mere plane wreck, or was
>this flight shot from the sky, thus leaving a trail of parts (some of the
>pieces weighing over 1000 pounds) for eight miles?
>
>QUESTION EIGHT  9/11 WAR GAMES: On the morning of 9-11, the CIAs National
>Reconnaissance Office (NRO), headed by John Fulton, was performing test
>exercise 'war games' where jet planes were to be flown into buildings. In
>addition, NORAD was also conducting an exercise called Vigilant Warrior.
>Why hasn't the American public been told about these tests, and why has
>nearly every member of the Bush administration stated that they could have
>never conceived of airplanes hitting buildings where there have been
>numerous government studies documenting this very subject (with Donald
>Rumsfeld being well aware of all of them)? Lastly, if the FAA, NORAD, and
>NMCC were all 'confused' on the morning of 9-11 as to whether these
>exercises were tests or the real thing, how did the 'hijackers'
>coincidentally know which day to select for their attacks?
>
>QUESTION NINE  9/11 PRE-KNOWLEDGE: While the subject of pre-knowledge is on
>the table, when President Bush was whisked-out of the infamous Florida
>classroom where he read a book about goats, it was revealed that the
>'terrorists' had obtained top secret codes for the White House and Air
>Force One. The NSA's top secret Echelon surveillance system had also been
>cracked; while the CEO of Israel's Odigo Instant Messaging service admitted
>that text messages warning of the 9-11 attacks had been transmitted two
>hours before the WTC had been struck. Further, the short-selling of stocks
>relating to insider information for both American and United Airlines can
>be directly traced back to the CIA's Buzzy Krongard. Are we to believe that
>19 cave-dwellers in Afghanistan had the capabilities to derive this inside
>information, and why hasn't the CIA (which uses Echelon and Promis software
>to monitor such stock trading) revealed who was behind the highly suspect
>short-selling of stocks?
>
>QUESTION TEN  REMOVAL OF EVIDENCE: Finally, if you want direct evidence,
>why don't you question why the government immediately hauled-away all of
>the physical evidence from the World Trade Center without even a cursory
>inspection from FEMA, fire inspectors, or the FBI, which is a direct
>violation of every ethic and law concerning a crime scene? Also, why did
>the government immediately bring in wrecking balls to destroy the
>Pentagon's fa?ade, while at the same time removing every piece of evidence
>without inspection? In addition, why did they immediately tear up the lawn
>in front of the Pentagon (which revealed no tire, burn, or scorch marks)?
>Why did the FBI retrieve every videotape from a variety of gas stations and
>locales surrounding the Pentagon; then refuse to make them public? Further,
>why has the Pentagon only released five frames of videotape from the
>attacks that THEY filmed? Why not the entire film for public scrutiny and
>review? Likewise, why won't the FAA make available tape recordings made by
>air traffic controllers on the morning of 9-11 that contradict the official
>cover-story?
>
>CONCLUSION: Art, due to the length of these questions, I did not provide
>any corroborating source material for you to verify these statements. But
>if you wish, I will immediately provide for you (without delay) the
>necessary footnotes and resources for you to fact-check each and every
>detail.
>
>On the morning of June 13, 2004 you made an outrageous, unfounded statement
>that 9-11 truth-seekers were asinine, reprehensible, horrendous, and didn't
>have a shred of proof. The ball is now in your court, Mr. Bell  are you man
>enough to back-up your words (as I have), or will you continue to hide
>behind your microphone and shrink from your responsibility as a broadcaster
>and American to give us the truth? Millions of your listeners and readers
>are awaiting your response.
>
>E-mail these questions to Art at: artbell at mindspring.com
>
>
>Home | Submissions | Bookstore | Past Issues | Donations | Contact Us
>Copyright ? 2004, WING TV ?  All rights reserved. Website by pcStudios.
>March 5, 2006
>http://www.wingtv.net/bell.html



------ End of Forwarded Message



From michael at intrafi.com  Mon Mar  6 12:30:10 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Mon, 6 Mar 2006 12:30:10 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] FT.com / World / International economy - Trading
	partners request access to US ports
Message-ID: <27608022.1141677010692.JavaMail.tomcat@localhost>



*Please note, the sender's email address has not been verified.



You have received the following link from michael at intrafi.com

 
********************
 
If you are having trouble with any of the links in this message, or if the URL's are not appearing as links, please follow the instructions at the bottom of this email.
 
Title: FT.com / World / International economy - Trading partners request access to US ports 
 
  
Copy and paste the following into your Web browser to access the sent link:
http://www.emailthis.clickability.com/et/emailThis?clickMap=viewThis&etMailToID=379432228&pt=Y
 

Copy and paste the following into your Web browser to SAVE THIS link:
http://www.savethis.clickability.com/st/saveThisPopupApp?clickMap=saveFromET&partnerID=1744&etMailToID=379432228&pt=Y

 
Copy and paste the following into your Web browser to forward this link:
http://www.emailthis.clickability.com/et/emailThis?clickMap=forward&etMailToID=379432228&partnerID=1744&pt=Y

  
 
********************


Email pages from any Web site you visit - add the EMAIL THIS button to your browser, copy and paste the following into your Web browser:
http://www.emailthis.clickability.com/et/emailThis?clickMap=browserButtons&pt=Y"


*********************



Instructions:
-----------------------------------------
If your e-mail program doesn't recognize Web addresses:
1. With your mouse, highlight the Web Address above. Be sure to highlight the entire Web address, even if it spans more than one line in your email. 
2. Select Copy from the Edit menu at the top of your screen. 
3. Launch your Web browser.
4. Paste the address into your Web browser by selecting Paste from the Edit menu.
5. Click Go or press Enter or Return on your keyboard. 
 
********************
 
 
 
 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060306/7b2dc6cd/attachment.htm 

From michael at intrafi.com  Mon Mar  6 13:45:24 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Mon, 06 Mar 2006 21:45:24 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] BBC E-mail: Musharraf says Karzai 'oblivious'
Message-ID: <20060306_214524_048479.michael@intrafi.com>

Michael Butler saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you
should see it.



** Musharraf says Karzai 'oblivious' **
Pakistan's leader says Afghan President Hamid Karzai is unaware of security issues in his own country.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/south_asia/4777610.stm >


** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all
in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/dailyemail/ >


** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have?been verified.

If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm


From michael at intrafi.com  Mon Mar  6 14:08:48 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Mon, 6 Mar 2006 14:08:48 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Withdrawal Symptoms
Message-ID: <200603062208.k26M8mO9009347@linux19585.dn.net>



Withdrawal Symptoms

Quitting Iraq won't undo the real damage of the war.

by James K. Galbraith

March/April 2006 Issue

     
     IN NOVEMBER 2004, Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez came to a luncheon at my professional home, the LBJ School of Public Affairs. I attended and asked some inconvenient questions. It was an inconsequential exchange, but two weeks later I received a surprising invitation: Would I fly to Germany in February and speak to the leadership of the Army V Corps about the operational conditions of Iraq? I have no military experience, and have never been to Iraq, while many in my audience?mostly generals and colonels?had spent over a year there. But of course I went. My unstated assignment was to say some inconvenient things, which may have otherwise gone unsaid.
     Inconvenience has since gone public, big time. Back in November, Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.) gave a breakthrough speech, describing the troops as ?stretched thin?: ?Recruitment is down, even as our military has lowered its standards. Defense budgets are being cut. Personnel costs are skyrocketing.? Choices will have to be made.? At the same time, Murtha added, success in Iraq is very remote. ?Oil production and energy production are below pre-war levels. Our reconstruction efforts have been crippled by the security situation. Only $9 billion of the $18 billion appropriated for reconstruction has been spent. Unemployment remains at about 60 percent. Clean water is scarce.? And most importantly, insurgent incidents have increased from about 150 per week to over 700 in the last year.? Since the revelations at Abu Ghraib, American casualties have doubled.?
     For this, Cheney blasted him, but then it emerged that Murtha?s crime was tipping the administration?s own hand. It appears we are beginning a long, slow, painful retreat from Iraq.
     But are we drawing the full and correct lessons from this disaster? Some former liberal hawks now take refuge in what Sam Rosenfeld and Matthew Yglesias call ?the incompetence dodge?: that things would have turned out okay if only the neocon cabal were not in charge. Such libhawks would withdraw U.S. forces only to use them again, in another (but, of course, more justified and better planned) war. And that would mean a bigger war, with a bigger force on the ground, and a much bigger budget to support it.
     But the reality is that the Iraq war could not be won by a force of any size or by an expenditure of any amount. Against determined opposition, occupations in the modern world cannot prevail. They haven?t for more than 60 years. The reason is that the basic economics of warfare have changed. Here are six reasons I gave to the officers in Germany?a pure exercise in stating what they already knew.
     Sixty years ago the then-colonial world was mostly rural; today it consists of enormous cities. These urban jungles of concrete provide vast advantages?concealment, fortification, communication, intelligence?to the defender. In cities, troops on patrol are isolated and exposed; their location is always known, while that of the enemy is not. More patrols mean more targets. The superior firepower of the occupiers just means that a lot more innocent people get hurt.
     So does the ?crude? weaponry of insurgents. Car bombs, booby traps, and suicide belts are cheap and effective. Detonated by radio or wire from within a nearby building, roadside bombs equalize the insurgent and the invader. Detonated by fanatics, suicide bombs are extremely difficult to stop. Shaped explosives, which have started to appear in Iraq, are able to burn right through armor plate. To prevent these attacks means emphasizing force protection; this gets in the way of everything else.  
     The violence in Iraq is horrific, but it?s the media that makes it intolerable. Indeed, the violence is horrific only by modern standards. To truly cow a colonial population (as in British India in 1857, or on the American plains in the late 19th century) requires mass murder on a far larger scale. The presence of the media makes this most inconvenient. As we demonstrated at Fallujah, the sure way to subdue a hostile city is to destroy it. But that?s no way to win a political war back home?or hearts and minds in Iraq.  
     Jet travel is a military mixed blessing. Today?s army works on rotations; soldiers are deployed for about a year and then (in principle at least) they come home. When that happens, local liaisons and intelligence relationships must be rebuilt. On the other hand, if soldiers are denied the right to rotate home, their morale is going to suffer far more than in the old days when there was no such expectation. Email and blogs make sure that morale problems get home fast when the soldiers do not.  
     As if that were not enough, war today cannot escape the free market. When we invaded Iraq, the borders collapsed and import restrictions were eliminated. Imports surged, notably of electrical appliances like air conditioners and refrigerators. By the time the electricity supply was rebuilt, demand had skyrocketed, and the power could run for only a few hours a day. Without control over electrical demand, the reconstruction effort was crippled, and the Americans couldn?t win the Iraqi people?s respect and support. They were expecting miracles, after all, and they didn?t get them.  
     Finally, there has been a fundamental change of expectations: call it the presumption of independence. The British may have believed that their empire would always be the ?dread and envy of them all,? but today no one believes the American presence in Iraq can endure over the long term. So unless you are in a safe zone (like Kurdistan) or part of an exiled elite with a posh flat in London, it does not pay to cuddle up to the occupying power. The retribution could be most unpleasant.  
     These are now the fundamental facts of wars of occupation. They tell us that foreign military power cannot long prevail over the territory of a people?in this case, the Sunnis of central Iraq?who are prepared to resist it to the death. This does not necessarily mean that the new Iraq will collapse when we leave. But if we cannot defeat the insurgency, then the insurgents will have to be accommodated, somehow, politically. Or else we leave the country to fight it out even more brutally in our absence.  
     We should have known we?d face this situation. In tiny East Timor, a ragtag band of resisters harried the Indonesian army for more than 25 years; that band (splendid people, by the way) now runs the world?s newest independent state. In Afghanistan, U.S.-assisted guerrillas drove out the Red army; their successors now make most of the country ungovernable. In Chechnya, the country has been destroyed but the rebellion hasn?t been subdued. And then there was Vietnam.  
     During the Cold War, we ringed the world with bases?but always in alliance with existing governments that were legitimate, at least up to a point. One may disapprove of the regimes we supported, but this model for the projection of military power works. It is called ?containment.? It works as long as the host regimes remain viable and as long as the military power it projects isn?t tested in actual combat. When these conditions failed?in Iran, in the Philippines, in Vietnam?so did the strategy.  
     The successful use of military power?as Mao Zedong understood when he called America a ?paper tiger??entails a large element of bluff. Vietnam deflated the image that American power could never be challenged. To some extent, the Gulf War of 1991 restored that image, but the restoration was achieved by the limited aims and quick termination of that war. The Clinton successes in the Balkans came in part because all sides bought this lesson of the Gulf War. (With Serbia, the bluff came close to being called again; the Kosovo bombing campaign took 80 days and Russian diplomacy rescued us in the end.)  
     But now Iraq has once again exposed what military power cannot achieve, short of nuclear weapons. Iran and North Korea have taken notice. Meanwhile, our friends, the Europeans and the Japanese, must be asking themselves: Exactly what sort of security does the American alliance buy, and at what price?  
     Bush and Cheney have done more than merely bungle a war and damage the Army. They have destroyed the foundation of the post-Cold War world security system, which was the accepted authority of American military power. That reputation is now gone. It cannot be restored simply by retreating from Iraq. This does not mean that every ongoing alliance will now collapse. But they are all more vulnerable than they were before, and once we leave central Iraq, they will be weaker still. As these paper tigers start to blow in the wind, so too will America?s economic security erode.  
     From this point of view, the fuss over whether we were misled into war?Is the sky blue? Is the grass green??stands in the way of a deeper debate that should start quite soon and ask this question: Now that Bush and Cheney have screwed up the only successful known model for world security under our leadership, what the devil do we do? 

James K. Galbraith teaches economics at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas-Austin. He previously served in several positions on the staff of the U.S. Congress, including executive director of the Joint Economic Committee.


     
@2006 The Foundation for National Progress

Read the article online:

     http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2006/03/withdrawal_symptoms.html
     
Check out the latest from Mother Jones at:

     http://www.motherjones.com
     

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Mon Mar  6 14:22:01 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Mon, 06 Mar 2006 14:22:01 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Give Bush this Power and the Hen Coop Is Given to the Fox
Message-ID: <C031F609.29C4B%michael@michaelbutler.com>

    Go to Original

    Bush to Ask Congress for Line-Item Veto Power
    Reuters

    Sunday 05 March 2006

    Washington - President George W. Bush will soon make a formal request to
Congress for a line-item veto - authority that would give him power to
cancel specific spending items in budget bills, an administration official
said on Sunday.

    Many presidents have sought such authority on the argument it would help
cut down on wasteful spending in the budget. In a rare yielding of some of
its powers of the purse strings, Congress passed legislation granting a
line-item veto to President Bill Clinton.

    The Supreme Court struck down the law in 1998, ruling by a vote of 6-3
that Congress did not have the authority under the Constitution to give the
president that power.

    The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he did not
wish to be seen as pre-empting the president's announcement, said that Bush
would transmit to Congress a proposal with language aimed at withstanding a
Supreme Court challenge.

    Bush plans to announce his intention to draw up a proposal on the
line-item veto on Monday morning during a ceremony to swear in the new
chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, Edward Lazear, the
official said.

    Bush, who has never vetoed a spending bill, has been criticized by many
conservatives for the surge in federal expenditures on his watch.
Republicans worry the record deficits could hurt them in this year's midterm
elections in which Democrats are seeking to regain control of one or both
houses of Congress.

    The Bush administration has forecast a fiscal 2007 budget deficit of
$439 billion, an all-time high.

    The lobbying scandal involving Jack Abramoff and the conviction of
former California Republican Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham on bribery charges
have put a spotlight on budget earmarks - targeted spending items often
added to unrelated spending bills.

    Bush called in his State of the Union address for a line-item veto but
did not offer specifics. He has also said he wants to see Congress put
limits on earmarks.

 


From swiggard at comcast.net  Mon Mar  6 14:37:14 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (swiggard at comcast.net)
Date: Mon, 6 Mar 2006 17:37:14 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Annals of creeping fascism: Disappearing Dockets
Message-ID: <380-22006316223714625@M2W049.mail2web.com>

Disappearing dockets 
When public dockets have holes, the public's right to open judicial
proceedings is jeopardized. 
By Kirsten B. Mitchell and Susan Burgess
from: The News Media and the Law - Winter 2006
http://www.rcfp.org/news/mag/30-1/_contents.html

It was a novel defense by any stretch of the imagination: Julio, a.k.a.
Pepe ? he was known as both in the Colombian drug world ? rebuffed an
alleged deal that would have shaved time off his prison sentence if he paid
$30 million-plus to federal drug informants. 

To help prove his case ? and the alleged massive U.S. government conspiracy
? Fabio Ochoa-Vasquez, as he is known to U.S. prosecutors, wanted access to
court documents in the case of Colombian drug lord Nicolas Bergonzoli, who
could testify firsthand about the government's alleged corruption scheme.

But there was a problem. Bergonzoli was prosecuted, convicted, sentenced
and imprisoned in total secrecy, hampering Ochoa-Vasquez's trial
preparation. Bergonzoli's case was so secret, it wasn't even listed as
"SEALED." The case number ? 99-00196-CR ? was missing from the public
docket at the federal courthouse.

The case simply didn't exist. 

The U.S. District Court in Miami, where both men went on trial, isn't
unique. During the past five years, 469 cases in U.S. District Court in
Washington, D.C., have been prosecuted and tried in complete secrecy, with
no public knowledge even of the cases' existence and no way for the public
to challenge the secrecy. 

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press found the cases by
searching the court's entire civil and criminal docket for the past five
years. During the five-year period ending Dec. 30, an average of 18 percent
of nearly 3,000 criminal cases were not docketed in Washington's U.S.
District Court ? one of 94 federal courts nationwide. Undocketed civil
cases were so few ? 65 of more than 12,000 ? as to be statistically
insignificant. (See chart, page 5) 

Many, if not all, of the civil off-the-docket cases are believed to be
whistle blower suits filed under the federal False Claims Act, which allows
private citizens to sue on behalf of the U.S. government charging fraud by
government contractors and other entities receiving or using government
money. By law, such qui tam suits are filed under seal for 60 days while
the government decides whether to intervene in the case, allowing time to
investigate the alleged wrongdoing without the company knowing. After two
months, such suits may or may not appear on the docket.

Cases missing from the criminal docket are typically gang-related
prosecutions that tend to culminate in multi-defendant drug and murder
conspiracy trials, say court officials and lawyers with access to the cases
who were interviewed for this story. Very few, if any, of the cases are
terrorism related, they say.

The incomplete public dockets raise important public policy concerns about
openness to court proceedings, an attribute of English and American trials
for centuries.

Although neither the U.S. Supreme Court nor the U.S. Court of Appeals in
Washington, D.C., has ruled on the issue, two federal appellate courts have
ruled secret docketing unconstitutional. 

Off the docket v. sealed

Keeping cases off the docket ? and off the public record ? is different
from sealing cases. The only way to determine the existence of
off-the-docket cases is to scroll through public dockets searching for
missing case numbers. (See "Finding hidden dockets," page 6)

Sealed cases are assigned case numbers that appear on the public docket.
Some 12 percent of cases, the vast majority of them criminal, were listed
as "SEALED" in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., according to a June
2005 search of the U.S. Party/Case Index, an electronic federal court
records database. All of those "SEALED" cases were assigned public docket
numbers, allowing the public to know that they exist. 

"You must disclose that a case exists and is moving through the courts. If
you don't do that, you can't have monitoring by the public, press, or
different government agencies on what these cases are all about," said Dan
Christensen, a reporter who broke the 2003 story of Mohamed K. Bellahouel,
an Algerian-born U.S. resident detained secretly for five months after the
Sept. 11 attacks. Christensen, a former Miami Daily Business Review
reporter now with The Miami Herald, spotted the case after its docket
number disappeared from the public record. (Shrouded in secrecy,
Bellahouel's case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which
declined to hear the case in 2004.)

In Washington's federal district court, most off-the-docket criminal cases
were kept off the public docket after prosecutors asked judges to seal the
cases, according to those who handle such cases.

While Justice Department guidelines recognize a strong presumption against
closing criminal proceedings and outline limited reasons allowing for
closure, they don't specifically address nonpublic docketing.

Both the department's arguments for and the judge's approval of sealing an
undocketed case are shielded from public view, making it impossible to know
whether the guidelines are followed. What's more, the U.S. Attorney's
Office in Washington does not monitor how many requests it makes to seal
cases or how many requests are approved.

Prosecutors seek to seal cases in part to protect ongoing investigations by
the government with an eye toward nabbing more criminals and keeping
informants and witnesses alive, said Stevan E. Bunnell, chief of the
Criminal Division at the U.S. Department of Justice.

Under the department's "Policy with Regard to Open Judicial Proceedings,"
requests to seal cases must be approved by a deputy attorney general, a
sufficiently burdensome and time-consuming process that prosecutors are
reluctant to do unless they really need to, Bunnell said.

The guidelines say that proceedings may be closed if failure to close them
will produce "a substantial likelihood and imminent danger to the safety of
parties, witnesses, or other persons."

In the nation's capital, "there are people who would be in serious danger,
who would be killed, if it was known they cooperated with the government,"
said an official with the Office of the Federal Public Defender for the
District of Columbia. "And all the stake holders in the situation
understand that and so the case is sealed to protect the individual."

A former public defender who requested anonymity said "when a case is not
even docketed, that presumably reflects a decision by a judge that the
existence of a case on the docket ? even without more identifying
information ? could be detrimental to the government's investigation or the
safety of the defendant, although one may tend to view that rationale with
skepticism from the perspective of the public's right to know."

In Washington, a 67-square-mile city sharply divided by income, education
levels and race, the bulk of criminal investigations take place in a small
geographic area, increasing the likelihood that cooperators will run into
the people that they have informed on. 

At one point, prosecutors noticed that criminals used public court records
to spot cases in which nothing had happened since an arrest. The criminals,
correctly concluding that defendants in such cases were cooperating, often
retaliated by killing them, said an official with the U.S. Attorney's
Office.

"In 30 years, I don't know how many gangs I've seen prosecuted. There's the
K Street gang, the L Street gang, the M Street gang and on and on," said
one court official who did not want to be named because he does not speak
for the court. "I think there's a heightened concern by this court over the
health and welfare of witnesses."

That plays out in the number of off-the-docket criminal cases, which has
risen in recent years ? from a low of 79 in 2003 to a high of 111 in 2005. 

The vault

How do off-the-docket cases end up in the secret vault?

All cases ? public and secret ? are randomly assigned to one of 21 federal
judges in Washington and then sent by those judges to the clerk's office
where clerks enter the cases into the docketing system. The judge will have
specified any cases that are to be kept off the docket. Cases that are off
the public docket are entered in a section of the docketing system closed
to the public and even to some employees of the clerk's office. No note is
made in the public docket that the cases even exist. 

While Chief Judge Thomas F. Hogan does not approve non-docketed criminal
cases, he does review civil cases that are not on the public docket,
according to Sheldon Snook, administrative assistant to the chief judge and
spokesman for the court. 

Court officials say the judges follow the "Rules for the U.S. District
Court in Washington, D.C.," in sealing cases, but the rules, like the rules
prosecutors follow, provide no procedures for keeping cases off the public
docket. 

And judges who agree to seal cases or keep them off the docket do not
justify their actions publicly through a public order weighing the public's
right to know against the need for secrecy. 

But Snook said judges are careful not to abuse their power to shield entire
cases from the public.

"The judges here in Washington, they are sensitive to the whole issue of
sealing cases," he said. "There's a presumption that the court's business
should be done in public."

All 21 U.S. District Court judges contacted by the Reporters Committee
either did not return phone calls or declined to discuss secret docketing,
referring all questions to Snook. 

The federal district court's rules outline a process in which "[a]ny news
organization or other interested person, other than a party or a subpoenaed
witness" can apply to the court for "relief relating to any aspect of the
proceedings in a criminal case." But, as Ochoa-Vasquez learned in defending
his case, that is difficult or impossible when the only thing anyone knows
about these cases is that they are not docketed. 

Ochoa-Vasquez intervened in Bergonzoli's case and succeeded in unsealing a
few docket entries in that case, but he was able to do that only because a
record in U.S. District Court in Connecticut, where the indictment was
first filed, contained the post-transfer case number assigned by the U.S.
District Court in Florida. 

The court record now reflects that Bergonzoli cooperated with the
government, entered a plea agreement, and, on Jan. 30, 2002, was sentenced
to just over three years in prison. But many key documents in the case
remain sealed to this day. Bergonzoli was never called to testify in
Ochoa-Vasquez's case. 

In Washington, D.C., and many federal district courts nationwide, once
off-the-docket cases have been entered on the secret docket, they don't go
onto rows and rows of shelves holding burgeoning case files. They go
straight to a vault in the clerk's office, shielded from the public and
where few court employees have access.

Courts weigh in

Secret dockets have been ruled unconstitutional in the Eleventh Circuit ?
covering federal district courts in Alabama, Georgia and Florida ? and in
the Second Circuit ? covering Connecticut, New York and Vermont.

In Ochoa-Vasquez's case, which was combined with Bergonzoli's case on
appeal, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Atlanta (11th Cir.) ruled in October
that sealed dockets violate the First Amendment. Magistrate judges in
Ochoa-Vasquez's case had ordered transcripts and court orders related to a
co-defendant not only sealed, but "held in the vault and not docketed,"
according to the appellate court ruling. (See "A rare glimpse," page 8) 

Although the U.S. District had since moved those documents to the public
docket and unsealed many other documents at issue in the case, the
three-judge appeals panel used its authority to weigh in on secret
docketing. 

Acknowledging that the issue was not properly before the court, "We
nevertheless exercise our supervisorial authority to remind the district
court that it cannot employ secret docketing procedures that we explicitly
found unconstitutional" in United States v. Valenti in 1993. In that case,
the court ruled that a dual docketing system, one public and one nonpublic,
unconstitutionally infringed on the public and press' right of access to
criminal proceedings. 

"[P]ublic docket sheets are essential to provide 'meaningful access' to
criminal proceedings," Judge B. Avant Edenfield, a visiting U.S. district
judge from Savannah, Ga., wrote for the panel in Ochoa-Vasquez.

Dockets act "as both an index and a publication," Edenfield wrote. "As an
index, the docket catalogues all the proceedings and information taken
before a court in that case. It permits both the court and observers to
locate documents and proceedings that otherwise would be lost within the
court's vast record collections. It also allows one to quickly determine
the status of a case, the actions of the parties, and the determinations of
the judge, without requiring the inspection of every item in the case file.
As a publication, the docket sheet provides the public and press with
notice of case developments. This role assumes particular importance when
the court is considering sealing a proceeding or judicial record."

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press submitted a
friend-of-the-court brief in the Ochoa-Vasquez case but took no position on
anything other than courtroom openness. 

The appellate court, which noted the centuries-old history of open criminal
proceedings in England and America, affirmed Ochoa-Vasquez's conviction and
sentence, ruling that he had not shown that he did not receive a fair trial
because of the secret docketing or the court's failure to articulate its
reasons for sealing documents. 

The entire appellate court denied rehearing the case in January. 

In the Valenti case, the 11th Circuit case cited by the Ochoa-Vasquez
panel, a different three-judge panel ruled that a dual docketing system
used in U.S. District Court in Tampa violated the public's First Amendment
right of access to criminal proceedings by rendering it impossible for
anyone to exercise that right. The public and the press had no knowledge
that the case at issue ? which involved conspiracy, extortion and bribery
charges against a Florida defense attorney and an assistant state attorney
? even existed.

Judge Joseph W. Hatchett wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel that the
"maintenance of a public and a sealed docket is inconsistent with affording
the various interests of the public and the press meaningful access to
criminal proceedings" and that the "dual-docketing system can effectively
preclude the public and the press from seeking to exercise their
constitutional right of access to the transcripts of closed bench
conferences."

The U.S. Court of Appeals in New York City (2nd Cir.) similarly ruled in
2004 that the press and public have a qualified First Amendment right to
inspect docket sheets. Writing for a unanimous three-judge panel in The
Hartford Courant Co. v. Pellegrino, Judge Robert A. Katzmann explained that
"the ability of the public and press to attend civil and criminal cases
would be merely theoretical if the information provided by docket sheets
were inaccessible." 

"[T]he docketing of a hearing on sealing provides effective notice to the
public that it may occur," Katzmann wrote.

Striking down the Connecticut state court's secret docketing system, the
panel reasoned that both history and logic support the finding of a
presumptive First Amendment right to access court dockets. As early as the
1800s, the court explained, English dockets were open to the public, as
demonstrated by the definition of the word "docket" in Thomas E. Tomlins'
"Law Dictionary" of 1809: "[w]hen rolls of judgments are brought into
[Common Bench] they are docketted, and entered on the docket of that term;
so that upon any occasion you may soon find out a judgment, by searching
these dockets, if you know the attorney's name." And in the United States,
the court noted, early legislatures passed state laws mandating the use of
open docket books to permit public viewing and copying.

The public policy behind a First Amendment right to court proceedings
supports an open docket system as well, the court said. "Precisely because
docket sheets provide a map of the proceedings in the underlying cases,
their availability greatly enhances the appearance of fairness. They have
also been used to reveal potential judicial biases or conflicts of
interest," Katzmann wrote. "In addition, docket sheets furnish an
'opportunity both for understanding the system in general and its workings
in a particular case.' By inspecting materials like docket sheets, the
public can discern the prevalence of certain types of cases, the nature of
the parties to particular kinds of actions, information about the
settlement rates in different areas of law, and the types of materials that
are likely to be sealed."

Katzmann explicitly noted, however, that the presumptive openness of docket
sheets could be rebutted "upon demonstration that suppression is essential
to preserve higher values and is narrowly tailored to serve that interest."
For instance, if the government alleges an "extraordinary situation" where
"'an individual might be [put] at risk' from public docketing, the district
court may take steps to protect the privacy interests involved." This did
not mean, however, that courts could withhold all information about the
case's existence from the public docket, only that identifying information
could be withheld if it was necessary to protect the privacy interests at
stake.

The Reporters Committee also filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the
Courant case. 

Changes 

Under Connecticut's old system of sealing, parties to cases could request
that everything about the case be sealed and kept off the docket; that only
the docket number but no other information be made public; or that both the
docket number and parties' names, but nothing else, be public.

Secret docketing no longer exists in Connecticut. The state's Superior
Court judges adopted new rules abolishing the use of secret dockets as a
result of The Hartford Courant case and a subsequent legislative
investigation, said Dan Klau, attorney for The Connecticut Law Tribune, one
of the plaintiffs in the case. The rules incorporate the state high court's
standard for sealing cases, which dictates that a judge must give notice
when he considers sealing something and an opportunity for the public to
speak out against closure.

The judicial branch also added a section to its Web site listing all
sealing motions on a court calendar.

Before the docketing procedures were revised, some Connecticut courts were
keeping cases off the docket at the request of litigants because some
judges incorrectly believed that keeping the case off the docket was a
reasonable way to seal the case, Klau said. 

"There was a real lack of understanding of the constitutional limitations
when it comes to sealing files," he said, "and as a result of the case,
judges have a much more heightened awareness of the constitutional
standards that must be met when you seal something."

Sheryl Loesch, the clerk of court in Florida's middle district ? which
covers a broad swath of central Florida from Jacksonville to Tampa, said
that secret docketing also is a thing of the past in federal courthouses
there. All cases, even those that are completely sealed, are on a public
docket sheet, she said. 

But an electronic search of the criminal docket for the U.S. District Court
in Tampa found that between Oct. 20, when the 11th Circuit ruled in
Ochoa-Vasquez, and Feb. 10, there were 11 of 175 criminal cases missing
from the docket, suggesting that at least in Tampa, secret docketing
continues. Court staff in the middle district explained that those docket
numbers are assigned to sealed criminal cases that are stored in a vault
until they become public. But it is unclear when ? or if ? those cases will
be made public.

It also is unclear whether federal district courts in southern Florida have
changed their practices. Clerk of Court Clarence Maddox did not return
several telephone calls and e-mail messages, and it is impossible to run
docket reports remotely because the state's Southern District does not yet
use Case Management/Electronic Case Files, the Web-based case management
system used by most federal bankruptcy and district courts.

"There's no way to know if there's been a change," said G. Richard Strafer,
one of Ochoa-Vasquez's defense attorneys. "Most judges may be less inclined
to go along with prosecutors' requests [for secret docketing], but how you
ever know that ? that's the problem with this."

Christensen shared Strafer's skepticism, recalling the coincidences that
led him to uncover the secret docketing in southern Florida's federal
district courts. "The nature of this is that you may never know that
something is going on," he said. "There are cases going on in secret and
you wouldn't even know to ask a question in the first place."

Ochoa-Vasquez's case illustrates several problems caused by undocketed
cases, including defendants' inability to confront their accused when
government cooperation programs shield the people who outed them, and the
public's inability to learn about allegations of corrupt government
prosecutors, Strafer said. 

The case, "was a perfect source of material for an investigative reporter
to dig into ? [but] it took years to unearth it all and since the
revelations were so piecemeal, no reporters really got into it. The sealing
helped prevent the public and the media from doing their job. There's a
corrupt sentencing program that the government has admitted to ? you'd
think there would be judges upset they'd been bamboozled by the
government's own attorneys."

None of the federal courts' oversight agencies have dictated any rules
regarding secret dockets for the nation's 94 federal courts. The Judicial
Conference of the United States, a committee of federal judges who set
policy for the federal courts, has never officially addressed the issue,
said Bob Deyling, assistant general counsel at the Administrative Office of
the U.S. Courts. The office, which does not monitor courts' docketing
procedures, expects courts to administer their dockets independently. 

Even if district courts tracked such data, they would not necessarily
report on it, said David Sellers, the office's assistant director of public
affairs. 

And in Washington, D.C., the federal court's Rules Committee, a panel of
lawyers that advises the court on its rules, has not dealt with secret
docketing, Snook said. 

Once and forever

Once a case is off the public docket in U.S. District Court in Washington,
D.C., it's likely to remain that way forever. In some cases, a judge may
order a case sealed for a particular amount of time ? say two years ?
unless the parties seek to keep it sealed longer. But in most cases,
there's no such provision. 

Even after defendants have served prison sentences, witnesses have died or
informants have gone into witness protection, the court won't transfer a
case to the public docket unless someone ? prosecutors or an interested
member of the public ? petitions the court to do so.

"The court would not arbitrarily lift a seal without being asked," Snook
said. 

Nor does the D.C. U.S. Attorney's Office review cases it has requested be
kept off the public docket. "From a cooperator's perspective, there's
almost never a reason to unseal his or her case," said a former public
defender. "Depending on the case, a cooperator may face potential danger
both in prison and after he or she returns to the community. A defense
lawyer in these circumstances has a duty to try to protect his or her
client to the maximum extent possible."

That means that even after a case ends, the public remains completely in
the dark about defendants prosecuted, tried and sentenced in a court system
based for centuries on judicial openness. The cases, for all intents and
purposes, simply do not exist. Stacey Sutton, an attorney who filed a brief
on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union in Ochoa-Vasquez's case, is
troubled by that. 

"It's a bedrock of our constitutional system that courts are open to the
public," she said. "That there are entire cases closed to the public is
inherently adverse to our system."


--------------------------------------------------------------------
mail2web - Check your email from the web at
http://mail2web.com/ .




From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Mon Mar  6 14:54:55 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (Ian)
Date: Mon, 6 Mar 2006 17:54:55 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Your Carbon footprint
References: <000a01c6413b$44db3390$443fe440@Harold>
Message-ID: <00ca01c64170$fd9b3df0$99ca6c42@iancn2ccrvzt0j>

Harold:

My household contribution is just over 7 tons per year - 11 tons less than the U.S. average.  Thanks for sending this along.  I'm glad to know my housemates and I are "doing the right thing."

Peace.
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Harold Sifton 
  To: MB Civic 
  Sent: Monday, March 06, 2006 11:30 AM
  Subject: [Mb-civic] Your Carbon footprint





   Answerer as best you can, this will surprise you and it is not pretty.

  http://www.bp.com/extendedsectiongenericarticle.do?categoryId=9006010&contentId=7012265

  Harry


------------------------------------------------------------------------------


  _______________________________________________
  Mb-civic mailing list
  Mb-civic at islandlists.com
  http://www.islandlists.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mb-civic
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060306/15b9e2f5/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Mon Mar  6 14:59:24 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Mon,  6 Mar 2006 22:59:24 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Kabuki Congress
Message-ID: <20060306225924.5A6C513B6D1@lax-gw04.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

OPINION | March 6, 2006
Editorial: Kabuki Congress

Putting on face paint and pretending that illusion is reality is fine for Kabuki theater. Congress should have higher standards.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/06/opinion/06mon1.html?ex=1142312400&en=00839fb7ffd80da9&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060306/ff3e5ffc/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Mon Mar  6 15:00:08 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Mon,  6 Mar 2006 23:00:08 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Don't Worry About Ports?
Message-ID: <20060306230008.F1D3883DE9@lax-gw03.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

What we're saying...


OPINION | March 6, 2006
Don't Worry About Ports?

To the Editor:.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/06/opinion/l06krugman.html?ex=1142312400&en=b2c43d7e56a6fedd&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060306/06387bed/attachment.htm 

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Mon Mar  6 20:29:09 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Mon, 06 Mar 2006 20:29:09 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] WILLIAM SWIGGARD SENT
Message-ID: <C0324C18.29C75%michael@michaelbutler.com>

Bill sent these today.
They are so interesting I am repeating them.
Michael

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/msword
Size: 29184 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060306/0a68e558/attachment-0002.wiz 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/msword
Size: 31744 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060306/0a68e558/attachment-0003.wiz 

From michael at intrafi.com  Mon Mar  6 20:48:40 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Mon,  6 Mar 2006 20:48:40 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] Alternet: The Peace Movement's Plan For Iran
Message-ID: <20060307044840.40F90B8208@alternet.org>


This story has been forwarded to you from
http://www.alternet.org by michael at intrafi.com



-------------------------------------
The Peace Movement's Plan For Iran
http://www.alternet.org/story/33062

The Iranian nuclear crisis could be dramatically defused, in a stroke, if American leaders would simply say the right thing to Iranian leaders.
-------------------------------------


From michael at intrafi.com  Mon Mar  6 21:01:09 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Mon,  6 Mar 2006 21:01:09 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] Alternet: Excerpt: Articles of Impeachment
Message-ID: <20060307050109.DC9B8B8278@alternet.org>


This story has been forwarded to you from
http://www.alternet.org by michael at intrafi.com



-------------------------------------
Excerpt: Articles of Impeachment
http://www.alternet.org/story/32866

A new book lays out four clear legal arguments that point to impeachment of President Bush as a necessary remedy for the violation of our Constitution.
-------------------------------------


From geomilman at milman.com  Mon Mar  6 23:27:37 2006
From: geomilman at milman.com (George R. Milman)
Date: Mon, 6 Mar 2006 23:27:37 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] U.S. faces latest trouble with Iraqi forces: Loyalty -
	By Edward Wong The New York Times
Message-ID: <000a01c641b8$9c62daf0$8c00a8c0@george>

Baghdad.  For much of the war in Iraq, U.S. military commanders have said
their most important mission here was to prepare Iraqi security forces to
take over the fight against the Sunni- led insurgency. But with the threat
of full-scale sectarian strife looming larger, they are suddenly grappling
with the possibility that they have been arming one side in a prospective
civil war.

 

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/03/06/news/military.php

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060306/d7b4fc37/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Tue Mar  7 03:45:10 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Tue, 07 Mar 2006 06:45:10 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Democrats Struggle To Seize Opportunity - Washington Post
Message-ID: <440D7246.7020407@comcast.net>

Democrats Struggle To Seize Opportunity
Amid GOP Troubles, No Unified Message

By Shailagh Murray and Charles Babington
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, March 7, 2006; A01

News about GOP political corruption, inept hurricane response and chaos 
in Iraq has lifted Democrats' hopes of winning control of Congress this 
fall. But seizing the opportunity has not been easy, as they found when 
they tried to unveil an agenda of their own.

Democratic leaders had set a goal of issuing their legislative manifesto 
by November 2005 to give voters a full year to digest their proposals. 
But some Democrats protested that the release date was too early, so 
they put it off until January. The new date slipped twice again, and now 
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) says the document will be 
unveiled in "a matter of weeks."

Some Democrats fear that the hesitant handling is symbolic of larger 
problems facing the party in trying to seize control of the House and 
Senate after more than a decade of almost unbroken minority status. 
Lawmakers and strategists have complained about erratic or uncertain 
leadership and repeated delays in resolving important issues.

The conflict goes well beyond Capitol Hill. The failure of congressional 
leaders to deliver a clear message has left some Democratic governors 
deeply frustrated and at odds with Washington Democrats over strategy.

Party leaders, for example, have yet to decide whether Democrats should 
focus on a sharply negative campaign against President Bush and the 
Republicans, by jumping on debacles such as the administration's 
handling of the Dubai port deal -- or stress their own priorities and 
values.

There is no agreement on whether to try to nationalize the congressional 
campaign with a blueprint or "contract" with voters, as the Republicans 
did successfully in 1994, or to keep the races more local in tone. And 
the party is still divided over the war in Iraq: Some Democrats, 
including Pelosi, call for a phased withdrawal; many others back a 
longer-term military and economic commitment.

"It could be a great year for Democrats," said Rep. Jim Cooper 
(D-Tenn.), but the party must present a more moderate face and 
distinguish itself more clearly from the GOP on issues such as ethics. 
"The comment I hear is 'I'd really like to vote for you guys, but I 
can't stand the folks I see on TV,' " Cooper said in a telephone 
interview from Nashville.

On issues such as explaining that former lobbyist Jack Abramoff's work 
"was a 110 percent Republican operation," Cooper said, "we're not making 
nearly as much headway as we should." Abramoff has pleaded guilty in a 
corruption scandal.

The Democratic leaders in Congress -- Pelosi and Sen. Harry M. Reid 
(Nev.) -- are the party's chief strategists and architects of the 
agenda, which they view as a way to market party ideas on energy, health 
care, education and other issues. They have held countless meetings to 
construct the right list, consulting with governors, mayors and just 
about every Democratic adviser in town.

"By the time the election rolls around, people are going to know where 
Democrats stand," Reid said.

But many in the party have their doubts. On Feb. 27, Reid and Pelosi 
appeared before the Democratic Governors Association. At one point in 
the conversation, Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, noting that the two leaders had 
talked about a variety of themes and ideas, asked for help. Could they 
reduce the message to just two or three core ideas that governors could 
echo in the states?

According to multiple accounts from those in the room, Reid said they 
had narrowed the list to six and proceeded to talk about them. Pelosi 
then offered her six -- not all the same as Reid's. Oregon Gov. Ted 
Kulongoski said later: "One of the other governors said 'What do you 
think?' and I said 'You know what I think? I don't think we have a 
message.' "

Others, including Sen. Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.) and Rep. Rahm Emanuel 
(Ill.) -- who head the Senate and House campaign efforts -- believe the 
November election will turn mainly on how voters view Republicans. 
Schumer is leading the Democratic attack on the port deal, excoriating 
the administration for jeopardizing national security -- a realm in 
which Republicans have held the advantage with voters.

He and Emanuel have sought to delay the agenda's release to allow 
Democratic attacks to hold the stage with minimum distraction. "When 
you're in the opposition, you both propose and oppose," Emanuel said. 
"But fundamentally, this is going to be a referendum on [Republican] 
stewardship."

Also dividing Democratic strategists is the question of what lessons to 
take from the Republican landslide of 1994, when the GOP won the Senate 
and picked up 54 House seats, wiping out 40 years of Democratic rule. 
Some Democrats associate that breakthrough with the House Republicans' 
"Contract With America," a list of proposals on policy and government.

"We should take a page from their book" and have "an overarching theme" 
similar to the 1994 contract, said Sen. Thomas R. Carper (D-Del.).

Many of his colleagues agree, but not Reid. "We're not going to do a 
'Contract With America,' " Reid said in an interview. He noted that the 
GOP document received scant attention when it was presented a few weeks 
before the 1994 election, and political historians say it played a minor 
role in the outcome. "There's a great mythology about the contract," 
Reid said.

Even the party's five-word 2006 motto has preoccupied congressional 
Democrats for months. "We had meetings where senators offered 
suggestions," Reid said. "We had focus groups. We worked hard on that. . 
. . It's a long, slow, arduous process."

That slogan -- "Together, America Can Do Better" -- was revived from the 
2004 presidential campaign of Sen. John F. Kerry. It was the last line 
of Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine's response to President Bush's State 
of the Union address, and Reid, Pelosi and Democratic National Committee 
Chairman Howard Dean have used it in speeches. But there is an effort 
afoot to drop the word "together." It tests well in focus groups and 
audiences, Democratic sources said, but it makes the syntax incorrect.

Governors privately scoff at the slogan. They also say the message 
coming from congressional leaders has been too relentlessly negative. 
"They want to coordinate. They want to collaborate. That's all good," 
said one Democratic governor who declined to be identified in order to 
talk candidly about a closed-door meeting. "The question is: Coordinate 
or collaborate on what? People need to know not just what we're against 
but what we're for. That's the kind of message the governors are 
interested in developing at the national level."

Reid spokesman Jim Manley said congressional Democrats have spent the 
past year redefining the debates over terrorism and Iraq and have 
prepared the ground for a shift to a more positive message that will 
focus on energy, health care and homeland security, all areas in which 
the governors would concur, he predicted. "We've had an unprecedented 
level of cooperation," he said.

Pelosi spokesman Brendan Daly added: "At the end of the day, I think 
everyone will be on board."

Perhaps the Democrats' greatest dilemma is how to respond to the Iraq 
war. It looms as the biggest question mark over Bush's administration 
and the Republican lawmakers who have backed him on the conflict almost 
without question.

Congressional Democrats have been split over the war since 2002, when 
many voted to authorize military action. The ground shifted last 
November when Rep. John P. Murtha (Pa.), a leading Democratic voice on 
military matters, called for U.S. troops to be withdrawn as soon as 
possible. Two weeks later, Pelosi endorsed his stance.

Although Pelosi said she was not speaking for her caucus, some 
colleagues complained that she was handing Republicans a gift by 
enabling them to tag Democrats as soft on terrorism and forcing 
Democratic candidates to explain whether they agreed with their House 
leader.

There is little question that the political landscape looks promising 
for Democrats. A Feb. 9 poll by the Pew Research Center found that 
Democrats lead Republicans 50 to 41 percent in a generic ballot.

But congressional Democrats have some key deficiencies. For instance, 
they lack the hard-charging, charismatic figurehead that Gingrich 
represented for the House GOP in 1994. But the Democrats have an 
abundance of presidential hopefuls, and their agendas sometimes differ 
from those of Reid, Schumer, Pelosi and Emanuel.

For instance, Sen. Russell Feingold (Wis.) tried to filibuster the 
renewal of the USA Patriot Act, a move opposed by most of his Senate 
colleagues, including Reid. Kerry (Mass.) led an unsuccessful filibuster 
attempt against Samuel A. Alito Jr.'s confirmation as a Supreme Court 
justice. The best-known Democrat is Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.), 
whose plans for a 2008 presidential bid leave many of her colleagues 
wary of how her famous but divisive presence might affect them.

"There are lots of skeptics," Schumer conceded. But the polls look 
better and better, he stressed. "There may be some inside-the-Beltway 
babble, but it's not affecting the voters," said Schumer, who wants the 
agenda delayed again -- until summer.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/01/AR2006030102193.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060307/d679710a/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Tue Mar  7 03:47:25 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Tue, 07 Mar 2006 06:47:25 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] The Democrats' Real Problem - E. J. Dionne - Washington
	Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <440D72CD.1000808@comcast.net>

The Democrats' Real Problem

By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Tuesday, March 7, 2006; A17

It is now an ingrained journalistic habit: After a period of bad news 
for President Bush, media outlets invariably devote time and space to 
"balancing" stories that all say more or less: "Yes, the Republicans are 
in trouble, but the Democrats have no alternatives, no plans," etc.

The pattern began to fall in place this weekend in the wake of two truly 
miserable weeks for Bush.

The stories about the Democrats are by no means flatly false -- 
Democrats don't yet have a fully worked-out alternative program -- but 
they are based on a false premise, and they underestimate what I'll call 
the positive power of negative thinking.

The false premise is that oppositions win midterm elections by offering 
a clear program, such as the Republicans' 1994 Contract With America. 
I've been testing this idea with such architects of the 1994 "Republican 
revolution" as former representative Vin Weber and Tony Blankley, who 
was Newt Gingrich's top communications adviser and now edits the 
Washington Times editorial page.

Both said the main contribution of the contract was to give 
inexperienced Republican candidates something to say once the political 
tide started moving the GOP's way. But both insisted that it was 
disaffection with Bill Clinton, not the contract, that created the 
Republicans' opportunity -- something Bob Dole said at the time.

The Democrats' real problem is that they have failed to show how their 
critique of the Republican status quo is the essential first step toward 
the alternative program they will owe the voters in the presidential 
year of 2008.

This failure has made it easier for Republicans to cast anti-Bush 
feeling (aka, "Bush hatred") as a psychological disorder. The GOP 
shrewdly makes the president's critics look crazed and suggests that 
opposition to Bush is of no more significance than, say, the loathing 
that many watchers of "American Idol" love to express toward Simon 
Cowell, the meanest of the show's judges.

The president's critics need to identify precisely why they oppose him, 
not only so they can make clear that they are not psycho basket cases 
but also to convey the idea that they know what needs to be put right.

Bush critics will almost always point first to the administration's 
arrogance, a word used recently not by some left-wing Bush hater but by 
the loyal conservative writer Byron York. In the New Republic, York 
chose the A-word to explain why Republicans are turning on the White 
House's "we-know-best approach."

The cure for an arrogant government that doesn't take critics seriously 
is accountability. Divided government never looked so good. That's 
especially true at a moment when polls suggest that a majority is 
yearning for more competence and greater moderation.

For example, moderates and liberals alike are mystified by budget 
policies saddling our kids with debt tomorrow to pay for tax cuts for 
the wealthy today. Moderating this radical fiscal approach is something 
the voters clearly could accomplish with their ballots this fall.

But Democrats have no good answer to Iraq. True. And neither does Bush, 
who started the war and should be held accountable for where we are now.

The philosophical man who owns our neighborhood Chinese restaurant 
recently shared with me a brilliant aphorism to describe how to build a 
good business. "You have to do the right thing," he said, "and you have 
to do the thing right."

That summarizes what unites Bush's Iraq critics. Many Americans opposed 
the war in the first place, but many who supported it are aghast that 
the administration did the thing so badly. It did not dispatch enough 
troops to achieve order at the outset, and it failed to plan for the 
inevitable conflicts that would arise among the country's ethnic and 
religious groups.

What comes from this is not isolationism but an awareness that even a 
very powerful country needs to be a careful steward of its power. It 
should never go into a war without considering the probability of 
unintended consequences and planning for the worst case and not just the 
best one.

This is the basis for a saner foreign policy in the long run. As for 
Iraq, the voters should let the president know that he can no longer 
keep repeating his rah-rah mantras about standing down when the Iraqis 
stand up. Presidents deserve to be punished for insulting our intelligence.

Thus the shortcoming of Democratic leaders is not that they don't have a 
program but that they have not yet convinced opinion makers that 
fighting bad policies is actually constructive -- and that, between 
presidential elections, keeping matters from getting worse is sometimes 
the most positive alternative on offer.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/06/AR2006030601613.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060307/14974ad6/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Tue Mar  7 03:51:27 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Tue, 07 Mar 2006 06:51:27 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Part-Time Congress - Norman Ornstein - Washington Post
	Op-Ed
Message-ID: <440D73BF.8080609@comcast.net>

Part-Time Congress

By Norman Ornstein
Tuesday, March 7, 2006; A17

The House of Representatives returns this week to an overloaded agenda. 
A promise of aggressive oversight of the deal with Dubai to manage U.S. 
ports will compete with the following:

Renewal of the Patriot Act; the conflict with the White House over 
electronic surveillance; the need to hammer out a budget by the 
beginning of April; health care and pension reform (highlighted by the 
desire to find a fix for the bumpy rollout of the Medicare prescription 
drug law); Katrina relief and repair of a dysfunctional Department of 
Homeland Security; lobbying and ethics reform; and a host of other issues.

The House should be well-rested to take on its daunting workload, after 
a generous recess (known officially as a "district work period") over 
President's Day. That was preceded by a recess for the entire month of 
January and by a February in which voting was done on all of three days 
(along with another three days with no votes before 6:30 p.m.). And 
members had better be rested, because if their published schedule for 
the year ahead is followed, they'll have to compress their work into a 
tiny number of days. The House schedule for 2006, the second session of 
the 109th Congress, has a grand total of 71 days when votes are 
scheduled to take place, along with an additional 26 when no votes will 
occur before 6:30 p.m. The total of 97 calendar days, counted 
generously, is the smallest number in 60 years and the days of what 
Harry Truman derided as that "do-nothing 80th Congress."

During the 1960s and '70s, the average Congress was in session 323 days. 
In the 1980s and '90s, the average declined to 278. The days in session 
have plummeted since; it's likely that the average per two-year Congress 
for the first six years of the Bush presidency will be below 250.

Of course, days in session and days voting don't give a full picture of 
Congress and its work. Committees and subcommittees hold hearings, do 
oversight and mark up bills. Still, the average Congress in the 1960s 
and '70s had 5,372 committee and subcommittee meetings; in the 1980s and 
1990s, the average was 4,793. In the last Congress, the 108th, the 
number was 2,135. We do not have final figures yet for 2005, but they 
are likely to be lower yet, and with oversight practically nonexistent.

When I came to Washington in 1969, I became familiar with what was 
called the "Tuesday-to-Thursday Club," the band of members, mostly from 
the Northeast and regions near Washington, who would try to limit their 
time in the capital to three days a week. They would leave late Thursday 
evening or early Friday morning to go home and return here late Monday 
night or early Tuesday. Those club members were in the minority; most 
legislators spent the full workweek in Washington and were here two or 
three weekends a month as well when Congress was in session.

Today the "Tuesday-to-Thursday Club" includes nearly all members, with 
one distinction from the earlier era: They get back into Washington late 
Tuesday night, or even early Wednesday, and head out again early 
Thursday afternoon, having spent just one full day and parts of two 
others on Capitol Hill.

Why the change? One reason is that most lawmakers now leave their 
families back in the district instead of having them live in Washington. 
Another is the explosion in the number of flights from area airports, 
making it easier for lawmakers from all over the country, including even 
Alaska and Hawaii, to go back and forth.

But there are other, more important reasons. One is the drive for 
members to get out and raise money, both for their own campaigns and for 
those of their current and prospective party colleagues. Many members 
now have "leadership PACs," which are required for those who want to 
become subcommittee or committee chairmen or to move up in party 
leadership. These PACs raise hundreds of thousands of dollars in 
campaign contributions over and above a member's own needs, in order to 
help "the team." Another is the visceral distaste of current members, 
especially the majority Republicans who set the schedule, for 
Washington. Service in Congress is not a privilege and an experience to 
be savored so much as it is like taking castor oil -- an unpleasant 
necessity, and one indulged in as little as possible.

Then there is the strategy of the majority leadership. Getting bills 
passed, keeping party discipline and satisfying interest groups means 
folding legislation into a small number of huge omnibus bills, bringing 
them up with little notice and less debate, structuring the votes around 
restrictive rules that limit or forbid amendments, and demanding party 
fealty on the votes that take place by labeling them "procedural." The 
less time the members spend in hearings, floor debate and generally 
poking around the Hill, the easier it is for the leaders to get their 
way without scrutiny or challenge.

Mention the part-time nature of this Congress to many people, and the 
reaction is, "Good, the less time they're in session, the less the 
danger to the country." Wrong. Congress does not do less -- it has its 
full impact on society -- it just does things in a shoddier way.

A part-time Congress in a country with a $13 trillion economy and 
federal budget near $3 trillion, in a globalized, technologically 
sophisticated world, is itself a danger to the checks and balances built 
into American democracy, and to high-quality, careful policymaking and 
oversight. It's not too much to ask Congress to commit to spending at 
least half the year -- 26 weeks -- working full-time, five days a week, 
thus providing at least a measure of the deliberation and attention to 
detail that are so lacking now.

The writer is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/06/AR2006030601611.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060307/8c764270/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Tue Mar  7 03:54:29 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Tue, 07 Mar 2006 06:54:29 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] ATTENTION PARENTS: IMs: What's a Mother to Do? - Ruth
 Marcus - Washington Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <440D7475.4020104@comcast.net>

IMs: What's a Mother to Do?

By Ruth Marcus
Tuesday, March 7, 2006; A17

I've been wrestling recently with the issue of domestic surveillance. 
Not the NSA-al-Qaeda variety. I mean an even more controversial kind of 
domestic surveillance: spying on your kids.

Time was, a parent's major privacy dilemma was whether to peek at a 
child's diary. More than one mom of my acquaintance -- some sheepish, 
some unrepentant -- has acknowledged engaging in such old-fashioned 
snooping. But as more and more communication has migrated from 
ink-on-paper to cyberspace, the always imprecise calibration of 
children's privacy vs. parental oversight has taken on new layers of 
moral complexity and technological feasibility. Big Brother, meet Big 
Mother.

Is monitoring your kids' Internet activity -- say, reviewing the Web 
sites they've visited -- a violation of their rights or a paradigm of 
parental responsibility? At what age is this Net nannyism appropriate? 
When kids are just learning to surf the World Wide Web, certainly, but 
it's not as if you can stop worrying once the training wheels are off. 
One mother told me she discreetly checks the porn sites in her teenage 
son's history folder to make certain they're not too extreme. I cringed, 
too, but her approach may be realistic; teenage boys will be teenage 
boys, and they're not just looking at centerfolds these days.

The questions don't get any easier from there. Do gentle parents read 
their children's e-mail? Install software to intercept their instant 
messages? Keep track of who's in their chat rooms? Read their blogs? 
Even for those who insist they wouldn't read an old-fashioned diary or 
eavesdrop on a telephone call, privacy in cyberspace poses difficult issues.

The first, of course, is keeping kids safe and away from harmful 
material. But intruding on the grounds of safety is the easy call. The 
harder one is deciding what expectation of privacy children ought to 
have in their online lives. In part, this is because, with the Internet, 
the medium affects the message. The simultaneous immediacy and distance 
afforded by Internet communication leads people -- children as well as 
adults -- to write things that they wouldn't say in person, or even over 
the phone. Mean girls tend to get even meaner in cyberspace.

Think of all the nasty notes you wrote -- or, if you're more like me, 
that were written about you -- in middle school. Then imagine the 
ability to cut and paste them and send them to your 10 closest buddies. 
The Internet facilitates and expands the ability of kids to do the 
dumbest things.

And there's another factor: Kids today probably aren't any more apt than 
kids a generation or more ago to do dumb things. But they may be more 
apt to do them younger. That in itself alters the privacy calculus. And 
so, merely shielding your kids against talking to strangers online or 
visiting inappropriate sites might not be going far enough.

My husband and I have been thinking about all this lately because of the 
IM fever that's infected our daughters, about to be 9 and 11. Instant 
messaging -- often with the same friends they're simultaneously on the 
phone with -- has become their new hobby. And while I'm not worried 
about who they're "talking" to -- I know who's on their buddy list -- I 
do worry about what's being said, and how.

Yes, 9 sounded awfully young to us, too, and, yes, we thought hard about 
just saying no, to her and her older sister. But taking away a 
middle-schooler's IM these days is like denying her access to the 
telephone. And, or so we told ourselves, even if we were letting them 
jump the gun, we'd be confronting the same problems in a few years.

Instead, we've had The Talk -- many talks, actually -- about the rules 
of the Internet road. Still, there's something disturbingly familiar 
about the eyes-glazed-over look I get whenever this subject comes up. It 
is, I fear, the same disdainful yeah, yeah, yeah response my parents got 
when they lectured me 30-some years ago about whatever it was I was 
probably already doing.

I was talking about this with some parents the other day when the issue 
of monitoring software came up -- programs that, depending on the degree 
of intrusiveness, record all Internet use or simply log 
instant-messaging conversations. Roaming around the Internet afterward, 
I came across an IM monitoring program that offered a free 10-day trial 
period. I confess: The download tempted me, and I did click. I snooped 
on a few of my kids' conservations, which were notable mostly for their 
inanity and deliberate (I hope) misspellings.

So was I satisfied? Kind of, in that sick and guilty way you feel after 
you've downed an entire pint of Ben & Jerry's in one stealthy sitting. 
Would I install the software permanently? Don't know, but probably not 
without telling my kids it was there.

I do know this: It's all made me nostalgic for the ethically unambiguous 
days when the only domestic surveillance we felt the need to engage in 
was switching on the baby monitor and listening for the snufflings of a 
sleeping infant.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/06/AR2006030601238.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060307/bad46b53/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Tue Mar  7 03:56:44 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Tue, 07 Mar 2006 06:56:44 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] US needs nuclear policy - Michael A. Levi - Boston Globe
	Op-Ed
Message-ID: <440D74FC.1030804@comcast.net>


  US needs nuclear policy

By Michael A. Levi  |  March 7, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

LAST WEEK, President Bush sealed a landmark nuclear deal with India. 
This week, the International Atomic Energy Agency's Board of Governors 
meets to confront the Iranian nuclear program. At the same time, 
Congress has been grappling with a raft of nuclear items in the 
president's budget. And all the while, the nuclear standoff with North 
Korea continues. This bursting nuclear agenda begs a question: Does 
America need a nuclear weapons policy?

When Henry Kissinger posed a similar question in his 2001 book ''Does 
America Need a Foreign Policy?" he meant to criticize the conduct of 
foreign policy as the sum of exercises in crisis management. A similar 
critique applies to American nuclear weapons policy today.

The alternative -- sorely needed now -- is a nuclear weapons policy 
based upon enduring foundations. The United States, of course, faces 
crises that must be addressed now. But it faced crises during the Cold 
War, and still sustained a core set of nuclear arms control principles 
for several decades. Today, a new set of fundamental principles -- 
whatever their specific details -- would provide coherence, direction, 
and predictability to American nuclear weapons policy. That would make 
American policy far more effective.

American nonproliferation policy is incoherent. The United States 
proposes to promote nuclear energy technologies in India that might 
increase the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation, while it attempts to 
persuade Iran to curb its own activities. In recent years, it has 
explored a range of new nuclear weapons concepts while counseling others 
that nuclear weapons are anachronistic. There will inevitably be tension 
among elements of American policy, and even apparent double standards 
will sometimes make sense. But the current state reflects a lack of 
underlying principles to guide policy makers through these conflicts, 
with the result being a nonproliferation strategy that often works 
against itself.

American policy also lacks direction. During the Cold War, our aim was 
stability -- we sought to avoid nuclear war. But what is the shape of 
the nuclear world that the United States now aims to create? Is our goal 
to prevent all future proliferation? It might seem so, but we have 
already failed with North Korea. Is our aim to reduce the impact where 
proliferation occurs? If it is, we have not sufficiently engaged Iran's 
neighbors to prevent a chain reaction should Iran go nuclear. Is our 
object to prevent nuclear terrorism? Perhaps, but we have allowed Cold 
War-style concerns about Russia to interfere with efforts to secure its 
arsenal from terrorists. This lack of direction and long-term vision 
means that steps taken today will provide an inadequate foundation for 
the future.

All of this makes United States policy unpredictable, for allies and for 
enemies alike. As a result, friends are wary of following the United 
States -- they do not know where its policy will lead. In the case of 
Iran, this has led to a two-year delay in referring Iran to the UN 
Security Council. Every time the United States suggested making that 
move, its European allies protested that they did not know what would 
come next.

Principles would provide guidance in resolving tensions, thus producing 
more coherent policy; they would provide direction by defining long-term 
goals; and, as foundations that would last longer than specific 
policies, they would promote predictability in the American approach. 
They would also provide boundaries within which partisans could debate 
American policy, much as Cold War arms control principles once 
effectively channeled partisan debate.

Building long-term foundations will not obviate the need to resolve 
today's crises, and the administration has become more effectively 
engaged in addressing a range of problems. But gains today may prove 
illusory without a long-term plan.

Michael A. Levi, coauthor of ''The Future of Arms Control," is a fellow 
at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/07/us_needs_nuclear_policy/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060307/63249493/attachment-0001.htm 

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Mon Mar  6 21:00:29 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Mon, 06 Mar 2006 21:00:29 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Great Book to Read
Message-ID: <C032536D.29C80%michael@michaelbutler.com>

M.L. Sillman suggested "Tournament Of Shadows" by Meyer and Brysac.
Subtitled, "The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia"
I can't suggest it more if you really want to understand the background of
our great problems.
It is also a fascinating read. I am sure Oprah would like it.
Michael


From activist at democrats.com  Mon Mar  6 21:28:56 2006
From: activist at democrats.com (Democrats.com)
Date: Tue, 7 Mar 2006 00:28:56 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Senate: Investigate Illegal Wiretapping!
Message-ID: <20060307002856.599579@democrats.com>

Tell the Senate to Investigate Bush's Illegal Wiretapping

On Tuesday March 7, the Senate Intelligence Committee will hold a vote on whether to investigate the domestic wiretaps that the president has already admitted were performed in defiance of the FISA court. Bill Frist has now threatened to restructure the Senate Intelligence Committee itself to strip it of oversight responsibility if it even dares to investigate Bush's dictatorial violations of the law. It is critically important that we speak out now to make sure justice prevails in this very winnable fight. With the votes against him three weeks ago, Senator Pat Roberts (R-KS) has already once unilaterally blocked a vote on this matter. We must raise every voice to make sure they know the people will not let them get away with it again.  
http://www.millionemailmarch.com/wiretap_hearing.php

The key swing votes are Republican "moderates" Olympia Snowe (R-ME, 202-224-5344) and Chuck Hagel (R-NE, 202-224-4224). Let's start calling their offices at 9:00 a.m. and keep calling until they vote for a thorough investigation.
http://vichydems.blogspot.com/


Constituents of Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and Chuck Hagel (R-NE) should call their offices at 202-224-3121 starting at 9:00 a.m.
http://www.millionemailmarch.com/wiretap_hearing.php

_________________

Hey Pollsters: Quit Censoring Impeachment!

Seven months have passed since we began politely asking Corporate Media pollsters to include impeachment questions in their polls. Despite our efforts, every media pollster has refused to include an impeachment question (unless we paid for it). The few that have bothered to reply to our letters (like Richard Morin of the Pentagon Post) have basically told us to go "Cheney" ourselves. In the past two weeks, most of these pollsters have released new data. And every single poll shows a steep drop in Bush's approval rating. It's time to tell the media pollsters to stop censoring the truth and to include an impeachment question in every poll from now until Bush is impeached - and imprisoned. 
http://democrats.com/quit-censoring-impeachment

We have all of their email addresses here. We've been patient for too long - let's give 'em hell!
http://democrats.com/bush-impeachment-polls
_________________

Exclusive Release of New Song By Anti-Flag

The political band Anti-Flag has given Afterdowningstreet.org the exclusive release of the unreleased song "Depleted Uranium Is A War Crime" from Anti-Flag's upcoming release "For Blood and Empire."

Listen here:
http://tinyurl.com/g8xqm

Congressman Jim McDermott has introduced a bill in Congress, H.R. 2410, The Depleted Uranium Munitions Study Act, which calls for in-depth studies to be conducted on DU and its effects on the health of those exposed to it. Ask Your Congress Member to Cosponsor.
http://www.millionemailmarch.com/du.php

Learn more about DU.
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/8597

_________________

Wall Street Journal Uses I Word: Graphic Tells the Story
Impeachment Proves Risky Political Issue
Some Democratic Activists Push Removing Bush From Office, But Mainstream Steers Clear
By JEANNE CUMMINGS, Wall Street Journal, March 6, 2006; Page A4

If Democratic candidate Tony Trupiano wins a Michigan House seat this fall, he pledges that one of his first acts will be to introduce articles of impeachment against President Bush.

That has earned Mr. Trupiano the endorsement of ImpeachPAC, a group of Democratic activists seeking to remove Mr. Bush from office. ImpeachPAC's Web site lists 14 candidates offering similar commitments, which are reminiscent of the Republican drive to oust former President Bill Clinton after the Monica Lewinsky scandal. READ MORE
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/8583

Read Bob Fertik's Reply to this article.
http://www.democrats.com/wsj-impeachpac

_________________

Co-Sponsors of H Res 635 Now at 28

There are now 28 Congress Members who believe an investigation should be conducted into possible grounds for impeachment. Learn more and ask your member to co-sponsor:
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/5768

_________________

UPCOMING EVENTS FOR IMPEACHMENT AND PEACE in CHARLOTTESVILLE, VIRGINIA

Town Hall Forum on the War in Iraq
Monday, March 13, 7 p.m. McLEOD AUDITORIUM - UVA School of Nursing.

Eman Ahmad Khamas, Iraqi journalist, activist living in Baghdad, defends women?s rights, documents crimes committed by U.S. and Iraqi forces. 

Lt.Col.Karen Kwiatkowski, retired from Office of the Sec. of Defense on Near East South Asia Policy, outspoken critic of the Pentagon's pre-war propaganda development.

Ray McGovern, veteran Army officer and retired 27-year CIA analyst, Co-Founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, witness at Congressional hearings on Downing Street Minutes.

Gael Murphy, cofounder of CODE PINK-Women for Peace, Board of Dir. International Occupation Watch Center, Steering Committee United for Peace and Justice, 

David Swanson, cofounder of After Downing Street, Board member of Progressive Democrats of America, Washington Director of Democrats.com and Impeach PAC.

Tia Steele, member of Gold Star Families Speak Out, mother of U.S. soldier killed in Iraq.

Al Weed, Congressional candidate in Virginia?s 5th district, Veteran, opposes the Iraq war.

$5 suggested donation, no one turned away 

Film: "Occupation Dreamland"
Wednesday, March 15, 7 p.m. WILSON HALL 301-University of Virginia
About a group of U.S. soldiers in Falluja. Iraq 

March for Peace and Impeachment
Monday, March 20, 4 p.m. ROTUNDA to DOWNTOWN
March beginning at the Rotunda - University of Virginia - at 4 p.m. and proceeding to the Freedom of Expression Wall on the Downtown Mall near City Hall for a rally. Come prepared to buy a yard sign and carry it in the march, or bring your own posters, flags, noise makers, musical instruments. 

3 YEARS TOO MANY

WAGE PEACE

Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice charlottesvillepeace.org
434 961-6278, 540 456-6028

_________________

Stop the Katrina Evictions
March 14
Demand a stop to evictions, demand trailers for survivors, and demand passage of H.R. 4197.
Press Conference: 1:00 a.m. ? 2:00 p.m.
Rayburn House Office Building ? Room #2237
Mardi Gras Style March for Justice: 2:00 p.m. ? 3:00 p.m. from Capitol South Metro Stop at 12:00 p.m. to the White House
Rally & Protest at the White House: 3:00 p.m. ? 11:59 p.m. Lafayette Park
http://www.katrinamarch.org 

_________________

Sign up for these events, find others, and create your own at
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/event

See Also UFPJ:
http://unitedforpeace.org/calendar.php?caltype=39&lcountry=&state=&search=Search

And PDA:
http://pdamerica.org/events/main-list.php


____________________


FORWARD THIS EMAIL 

#####

If you received this from a friend, you can subscribe at:
http://afterdowningstreet.org

To unsubscribe from AfterDowningStreet Updates, click here:
http://archive.democrats.com/unsub.cfm?email=mb-civic at islandlists.com&fieldname=L16

To unsubscribe from all Democrats.com mailings, click here:
http://archive.democrats.com/unsub.cfm?email=mb-civic at islandlists.com&fieldname=L1
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060307/c13dd22c/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Tue Mar  7 04:00:48 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Tue, 07 Mar 2006 07:00:48 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] RECOMMENDED: Iraq's insecure democracy - H.D.S. Greenway
 - Boston Globe Op-Ed
Message-ID: <440D75F0.8090903@comcast.net>


  Iraq's insecure democracy

By H.D.S. Greenway  |  March 7, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

MUCH OF the Bush administration's hopes for Iraq, and the transformative 
powers of democracy in the Middle East, lie in the ruins of the Askariya 
mosque's golden dome in the city of Samarra. For the bombing of the 
mosque exposed clearly what America wants so much to deny: that in the 
present climate of lawlessness there are ethnic and religious tensions 
in Iraq that are simply not going to allow for the kind of democracy the 
administration naively envisioned.

A degree of hypocrisy was also exposed after elections in both Iraq and 
the West Bank and Gaza. Despite the president's rhetoric about freedom 
on the march, the first thing the Bush administration did after Hamas 
won its victory was to search about for ways to undermine the will of 
the Palestinian people as expressed in a free and fair election. Plots 
were reportedly hatched with Israel to make life so miserable for the 
Palestinians that they would go back to the polls in another election 
and throw the recently victorious Hamas out. Secretary of State 
Condoleezza Rice got on her plane and flew off to drum up support for 
denying the Palestinians money.

Both tactics are extremely short-sighted, for the Palestinians have 
shown time and time again that they put their pride and their national 
aspirations ahead of their comfort. If this policy is continued, the 
United States will lose its leverage to help shape events in the West 
Bank and Gaza, relinquishing the field to Iran and the more radical 
elements in the Sunni Arab world. And then Hamas will be even further 
away from recognizing Israel or forswearing violence.

The old Israeli adage that ''the Palestinians must be made to understand 
in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated 
people," as an Israeli army chief of staff once expressed it, has never 
worked and isn't going to work now.

And no sooner did the Iraqis make their choices in an acceptably fair 
election than the Americans started to tell them what America wanted in 
the way of an Iraqi government. America's capable and hard-working 
ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, was not wrong in stressing that a 
government of national unity was the best way for Iraq to proceed, but 
to go public with the impotent threat that the United States would 
withdraw its support of the new Iraqi government if it didn't accede to 
America's wishes was simply a crude exercise in imperial manipulation 
and humiliation that, in the end, will do more harm than good. Even if 
he gets his way, Khalilzad's tantrum will simply de-legitimize the 
results in the eyes of the Iraqi people as the work of American puppets.

Khalilzad is not wrong in his assessment that sectarian militias will 
lead to ''warlordism," but the chance to talk the Iraqis out of 
maintaining militias went by the board with Donald Rumsfeld's 
catastrophic failure to secure the country after the US invasion. For 
the classic pattern when a state falls apart, and when people lack 
security, is for them to fall back and rely upon what political 
psychologists call the ''survival group."

It is well known that when a group feels threatened it defines itself in 
the narrowest of terms to distinguish friend from foe. It is only when 
the group feels less threatened that it can reach out to others to form 
a broader definition of national purpose.

American ambassadors can threaten the Iraqis all they want, but without 
security Iraqis are simply not going to give up the means of protecting 
their particular survival group, their militias. And a broader 
definition of national purpose won't be possible as long as there is no 
security. Nothing could have made that point more strongly than the 
aftermath of the golden dome bombing.

I remember the late Harvard psychologist John Mack telling me that the 
psychological functions served by identification with a survival group 
''are common to all conflicts; survival and a sense of self-worth. These 
are all fundamental psychological principles, a sense of having power 
versus powerlessness."

''At bottom, our survival group . . . defines our sense of self. Any 
political thinker who seeks a fellowship of mankind must recognize the 
psychological meaning of the identity of self. Failure to do so will 
limit such concepts as brotherhood of man to philosophical and utopian 
visions and imaginings."

And I am sorry to say that it is precisely the ''utopian visions and 
imaginings" of the Bush administration that got us into this disaster in 
the first place.


http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/07/iraqs_insecure_democracy/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060307/0ada00ae/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Tue Mar  7 03:44:09 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Tue, 07 Mar 2006 06:44:09 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Mideast Investment Up in U.S. - Washington Post
Message-ID: <440D7209.2050300@comcast.net>

Mideast Investment Up in U.S.
Proposed Ports Deal Is Just Part of Flood of Oil Wealth Spilling Ashore

By Paul Blustein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 7, 2006; A01

Middle Eastern investment in the United States is once again picking up 
steam, showing big gains since the tense period following the Sept. 11, 
2001, terrorist attacks. And while some takeovers are triggering alarm 
-- most famously, the purchase by a Dubai-owned company of a seaports 
management firm -- others are evoking warm welcomes.

Spearheading the trend is Dubai's Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktum 
(popularly known as "Sheik Mo"), ruler of the freewheeling city-state, 
which is part of the United Arab Emirates. The ports deal is just one of 
a series of recent purchases by companies he controls.

Other acquisitions include a $1 billion portfolio of 21,000 apartments 
in U.S. Sun Belt cities; a 2.2 percent stake in the automotive giant 
DaimlerChrysler AG that cost another $1 billion; and a Manhattan 
landmark building, 230 Park Ave. The emirate also made major purchases 
in other countries over the past year, notably a $1.5 billion takeover 
of Britain's Tussauds Group, which owns the famous waxworks, along with 
theme parks, roller coasters and other entertainment-oriented businesses.

On Thursday came news that yet another Dubai acquisition is drawing Bush 
administration scrutiny because of the national security risks -- this 
time of plants in Georgia and Connecticut that make precision components 
used in engines for military aircraft and tanks.

But an entirely different reaction greeted the disclosure several months 
ago that Dubai Investment Group had acquired the Essex House hotel in 
Manhattan and promised to sink $50 million into renovating it.

That announcement prompted New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg to 
exult: "Another iconic hotel overlooking Central Park will be preserved 
and its unionized workforce protected. This is excellent news for New 
York's tourism and hospitality industries."

Behind such transactions are two powerful forces. One, of course, is the 
high price of energy, which has left several oil-producing Arab 
countries swimming in cash. The other is the burgeoning U.S. trade 
deficit -- $726 billion last year -- which means that the United States 
needs foreign capital; a country that imports more than it exports must 
cover the gap with money from abroad.

Until now, investments in the United States from Europe and other parts 
of Asia have dwarfed those from the Middle East. But an increasing share 
of the foreign money required to fuel the U.S. economy is likely to come 
from places that, like Dubai, trigger visceral reactions among Americans 
seared by memories of the Sept. 11 attacks.

"The price of oil is going only one way -- up -- for the next five 
years, because it is going to take at least that long for alternatives 
to kick in," said Youssef M. Ibrahim, managing director of the Strategic 
Energy Investment Group, a consulting firm based in Dubai. "So there is 
no question in my mind that billions of dollars will continue flowing 
this way, and people cannot handle all of that kind of money here. 
You've got to circulate the money, and the United States is still the 
biggest market."

Already, the list of U.S. businesses owned by Arab investors -- not just 
from Dubai -- includes some well-known names. Among them are Caribou 
Coffee Co., the fast-growing rival to Starbucks Corp.; Church's Chicken, 
a fast-food concern; Loehmann's, a specialty retailer; TLC Health Care 
Services Inc., a provider of home nursing and hospice care; and even 
several financial publications, including the American Banker.

Such "direct" investment in hard assets -- companies, factories and real 
estate -- is generally preferable for the U.S. economy, in the view of 
most economists, to foreign investment in bonds, stocks and other 
financial assets. One advantage of direct investments is that they 
cannot be dumped in a panic the way that, say, a Treasury bond can. 
Moreover, they often involve high-wage jobs. Average annual compensation 
per worker at U.S. subsidiaries of foreign companies is about $60,500, 
34 percent higher than the rate at all U.S. companies, according to the 
Organization for International Investment.

The main drawback of a direct investment is that it involves foreign 
control, which can raise national security concerns. That is why an 
interagency government panel, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the 
United States, reviews many foreign takeovers. That process may be 
revamped by Congress due to indignation over the panel's decision to 
approve the purchase by Dubai Ports World of Peninsular and Oriental 
Steam Navigation Co., a British firm that manages container terminals on 
the East Coast.

Arab direct investments would probably be more extensive were it not for 
the political and legal atmosphere in the post-Sept. 11 era. "Middle 
Eastern investors are still a little skittish about investing in the 
United States," said James A. Fetgatter, chief executive of the 
Association of Foreign Investors in Real Estate.

To some extent, Arab investors think U.S. property is overpriced, so 
they are putting more of their overseas bets in Asia, said Gary Sheehan, 
an executive with Sentinel Real Estate Corp. in New York. But an 
additional factor is their fear about what might befall their holdings 
at the hands of U.S. authorities.

"I was in Bahrain the week before last and had a meeting at a bank where 
they said they would love to invest in the States," Sheehan said. "But 
they said: 'Syrian interests own 12 percent of our bank. So we know that 
if push comes to shove' " -- that is, a serious confrontation between 
Washington and Damascus -- " 'our assets will be frozen.' "

Such negativity toward investing in the United States could well deepen 
as a result of the controversy over the Dubai ports deal, some in the 
region warn. Sheikha Lubna al-Qassimi, the UAE economy minister, told 
the Financial Times last week that the United States will become less 
attractive if investment decisions are subject to political 
interference. "There are other countries that are competing for [our] 
money," she said.

But worries about a drying-up of Arab investment are overblown, 
according to others, including C. MacLaine Kenan, an executive in the 
Atlanta office of Arcapita Inc., one of the biggest firms serving as a 
conduit for foreign Arab investors in U.S. businesses.

Arcapita has raised billions of dollars from investors in the UAE, Saudi 
Arabia, Qatar and neighboring countries and has invested the majority of 
it in the United States, where it owns Caribou Coffee, Church's Chicken 
and other companies, as well as real estate. The investments have to 
conform with sharia, or Islamic law, which means that they cannot 
involve businesses that traffic in alcohol, pork, pornography or 
gambling and that they have to use special types of financing to avoid 
violating Muslim rules against charging interest.

"Our investors will spend some time complaining about U.S. politics, but 
at the end of the day, they're pretty shrewd in divorcing the economic 
opportunity from the political issue," Kenan said. "And they generally 
know the political problems will in most cases blow over. So every now 
and again, we get people saying: 'I wish this [U.S.] administration 
would do better. But by the way, how's this investment going?' "

The typical Middle Eastern investor is "a pretty happy camper," Kenan 
added, because markets in the region have soared along with oil prices. 
"So they have more appetite for investment abroad, and they know the 
United States is a place a smart investor needs to have some money."

Whatever Arab investors abroad finally do, their clout is relatively 
small -- at least for now. At the end of 2004, investors from Arab 
countries held just $4 billion in direct investment in the United 
States, according to Commerce Department data.

British investors, by contrast, held $252 billion, Japanese investors 
held $177 billion, Dutch investors held $167 billion and German 
investors held $163 billion. Their holdings span industries often deemed 
"critical," such as telecommunications (Finland's Nokia Corp. and 
Sweden's Ericsson Inc.), energy (British Petroleum PLC and Royal Dutch 
Shell PLC) and utilities (E.On AG of Germany, which controls much of the 
gas and electricity distribution in Kentucky).

Although foreign investors are far from controlling the U.S. economy -- 
their payrolls constitute an estimated 3.5 percent of the nation's 
workforce -- the United States is growing increasingly dependent on them 
as the trade gap widens. To obtain the money necessary to pay for 
imports, the United States this year will probably need to attract 
foreign capital at the rate of about $20 billion a week, which is equal 
to selling three companies the size of the maritime firm purchased by 
Dubai Ports World, noted Brad Setser, an economist with Roubini Global 
Economics LLC in New York.

To be sure, most of the money flowing into the United States comes in 
the form of Treasury bonds and other financial assets rather than 
corporate acquisitions. Foreigners held roughly $9 trillion of U.S. 
financial assets at the end of 2004, according to government data. 
Middle Eastern oil exporters held a modest percentage of that, including 
about $121 billion in U.S. government securities, the data show.

But the oil revenue flooding into the Mideast means that the region's 
financial strength is rising apace. The cumulative trade surplus of 
Middle Eastern oil exporters, which was $500 billion from 2000 to 2005, 
will come close to $800 billion by year-end, Setser wrote recently.

"Which is just to say," he said, "that there are a lot more Dubai Ports 
Worlds out there."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/06/AR2006030601817.html?referrer=email
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060307/302d6352/attachment.htm 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Tue Mar  7 06:08:52 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (harry.sifton at sympatico.ca)
Date: Tue, 7 Mar 2006 06:08:52 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] USATODAY.com
Message-ID: <13421866.1141740532695.JavaMail.tomcat@localhost>



*Please note, the sender's email address has not been verified.



You have received the following link from harry.sifton at sympatico.ca

 
********************
 
If you are having trouble with any of the links in this message, or if the URL's are not appearing as links, please follow the instructions at the bottom of this email.
 
Title: USATODAY.com
 
  
Copy and paste the following into your Web browser to access the sent link:
http://www.emailthis.clickability.com/et/emailThis?clickMap=viewThis&etMailToID=843449443&pt=Y
 

Copy and paste the following into your Web browser to SAVE THIS link:
http://www.savethis.clickability.com/st/saveThisPopupApp?clickMap=saveFromET&partnerID=1660&etMailToID=843449443&pt=Y

 
Copy and paste the following into your Web browser to forward this link:
http://www.emailthis.clickability.com/et/emailThis?clickMap=forward&etMailToID=843449443&partnerID=1660&pt=Y

  
 
********************


Email pages from any Web site you visit - add the EMAIL THIS button to your browser, copy and paste the following into your Web browser:
http://www.emailthis.clickability.com/et/emailThis?clickMap=browserButtons&pt=Y"


*********************



Instructions:
-----------------------------------------
If your e-mail program doesn't recognize Web addresses:
1. With your mouse, highlight the Web Address above. Be sure to highlight the entire Web address, even if it spans more than one line in your email. 
2. Select Copy from the Edit menu at the top of your screen. 
3. Launch your Web browser.
4. Paste the address into your Web browser by selecting Paste from the Edit menu.
5. Click Go or press Enter or Return on your keyboard. 
 
********************
 
 
 
 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060307/9dc566c2/attachment.htm 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Tue Mar  7 06:46:01 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Tue, 7 Mar 2006 09:46:01 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] 8,000 troops have left posts since Iraq war began
Message-ID: <000d01c641f5$de1a8230$0c27e440@Harold>


8,000 have left posts since Iraq war began 
By Bill Nichols
USA TODAY 

WASHINGTON ? At least 8,000 members of the all-volunteer U.S. military have deserted since the Iraq war began, Pentagon records show, although the overall desertion rate has plunged since the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001. 

Since fall 2003, 4,387 Army soldiers, 3,454 Navy sailors and 82 Air Force personnel have deserted. The Marine Corps does not track the number of desertions each year but listed 1,455 Marines in desertion status last September, the end of fiscal 2005, says Capt. Jay Delarosa, a Marine Corps spokesman.

Desertion records are kept by fiscal year, so there are no figures from the beginning of the war in March 2003 until that fall.

Some lawyers who represent deserters say the war in Iraq is driving more soldiers to question their service and that the Pentagon is cracking down on deserters to discourage anti-war sentiment.

?The last thing (Pentagon officials) want is for people to think ? that this is like Vietnam,? says Tod Ensign, head of Citizen Soldier, an anti-war group that offers legal aid to deserters.

Desertion numbers have dropped since 9/11. The Army, Navy and Air Force reported 7,978 desertions in 2001, compared with 3,456 in 2005. The Marines showed 1,603 deserters in 2001. That declined by 148 in 2005. 

The desertion rate was much higher during the Vietnam era. The Army saw a high of 33,094 deserters in 1971 ? 3.4% of the Army force. But there was a draft and the active-duty force was 2.7 million.

Desertions in 2005 represent 0.24% of the 1.4 million U.S. forces.

Opposition to the war prompts a small fraction of desertions, says Army spokeswoman Maj. Elizabeth Robbins. ?People always desert, and most do it because they don't adapt well to the military,? she says. The majority of desertions happen inside the USA, Robbins says. There is only one known case of desertion in Iraq.

Most deserters return without coercion. Commander Randy Lescault, spokesman for the Naval Personnel Command, says that between 2001 and 2005, 58% of Navy deserters walked back in. Of the rest, most are apprehended during traffic stops.

Penalties range from other-than-honorable discharges to death for desertion during wartime. 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060307/9b6c63fe/attachment.htm 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Tue Mar  7 07:38:33 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Tue, 7 Mar 2006 10:38:33 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] New Bill Would Prohibit Anonymous Posts on Forums
Message-ID: <000801c641fd$349ddc90$0c27e440@Harold>

ASSEMBLY, No. 1327 


STATE OF NEW JERSEY

212th LEGISLATURE

 

PRE-FILED FOR INTRODUCTION IN THE 2006 SESSION







Sponsored by:

Assemblyman PETER J. BIONDI

District 16 (Morris and Somerset)









SYNOPSIS

     Makes certain operators of interactive computer services and Internet service providers liable to persons injured by false or defamatory messages posted on public forum websites. 



CURRENT VERSION OF TEXT 

     As introduced.

   



An Act concerning the posting of certain Internet messages and supplementing chapter 38A of Title 2A of the New Jersey Statutes.



     Be It Enacted by the Senate and General Assembly of the State of New Jersey:



     1.  As used in this act:

     "Information content provider" means any person or entity that is responsible, in whole or in part, for the creation or development of information provided through the Internet or any other interactive computer service.

     "Interactive computer service" means any information system, service, or access software provider that provides or enables computer access by multiple users to a computer server, including specifically a service or system that provides service to the Internet.

     "Internet" means the international computer network of both federal and non-federal interoperable packet switched data networks.

     "Internet service provider" or "provider" means any person, business or organization qualified to do business in this State that provides individuals, corporations, or other entities with the ability to connect to the Internet through equipment that is located in this State.

     "Operator" means any person, business or organization qualified to do business in this State that operates an interactive computer service.



     2.  The operator of any interactive computer service or an Internet service provider shall establish, maintain and enforce a policy to require any information content provider who posts written messages on a public forum website either to be identified by a legal name and address, or to register a legal name and address with the operator of the interactive computer service or the Internet service provider through which the information content provider gains access to the interactive computer service or Internet, as appropriate.



     3.  An operator of an interactive computer service or an Internet service provider shall establish and maintain reasonable procedures to enable any person to request and obtain disclosure of the legal name and address of an information content provider who posts false or defamatory information about the person on a public forum website.



     4.  Any person who is damaged by false or defamatory written messages that originate from an information content provider who posts such messages on a public forum website may file suit in Superior Court against an operator or provider that fails to establish, maintain and enforce the policy required pursuant to section 2 of P.L.    , c.    (C.) (pending before the Legislature as this bill), and may recover compensatory and punitive damages and the cost of the suit, including a reasonable attorney's fee, cost of investigation and litigation from such operator or provider. 



     5. This act shall take effect on the 90th day following enactment.





STATEMENT



     This bill would require an operator of any interactive computer service or an Internet service provider to establish, maintain and enforce a policy requiring an information content provider who posts messages on a public forum website either to be identified by legal name and address or to register a legal name and address with the operator or provider prior to posting messages on a public forum website.

     The bill requires an operator of an interactive computer service or an Internet service provider to establish and maintain reasonable procedures to enable any person to request and obtain disclosure of the legal name and address of an information content provider who posts false or defamatory information about the person on a public forum website.

     In addition, the bill makes any operator or Internet service provider liable for compensatory and punitive damages as well as costs of a law suit filed by a person damaged by the posting of such messages if the operator or Internet service provider fails to establish, maintain and enforce the policy required by section 2 of the bill.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060307/b67cd0eb/attachment-0001.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Tue Mar  7 07:57:54 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Tue,  7 Mar 2006 15:57:54 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Mr. Bush's Asian Road Trip
Message-ID: <20060307155754.CCCFE24A299@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

OPINION | March 7, 2006
Editorial: Mr. Bush's Asian Road Trip

President Bush's spectacularly misconceived trip to Pakistan and India may have inflicted serious damage to American goals.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/07/opinion/07tue1.html?ex=1142398800&en=a4c42ce2e20a0bc1&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060307/93bde63a/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Tue Mar  7 07:58:37 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Tue,  7 Mar 2006 15:58:37 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Still Evolving, Human Genes Tell New Story
Message-ID: <20060307155837.6418811FB42@lax-gw07.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

SCIENCE | March 7, 2006
Still Evolving, Human Genes Tell New Story
By NICHOLAS WADE
The discovery of relatively recent changes in 700 regions of the genome is the strongest evidence yet that human evolution continues.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/07/science/07evolve.html?ex=1142398800&en=449f6b88be91e5f9&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060307/5ca1a056/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Tue Mar  7 08:00:14 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Tue,  7 Mar 2006 16:00:14 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: U.S. Wins Ruling Over Recruiting at
	Universities
Message-ID: <20060307160014.8C0AC23752E@lax-gw01.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

WASHINGTON / WASHINGTON SPECIAL | March 7, 2006
U.S. Wins Ruling Over Recruiting at Universities
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
The Supreme Court upheld a law that cuts federal financing for universities that do not give access to military recruiters.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/07/politics/politicsspecial1/07scotus.html?ex=1142398800&en=6b41be85df2f6186&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060307/5c486a58/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Tue Mar  7 08:05:28 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Tue,  7 Mar 2006 16:05:28 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Resurgent Wolves Now Considered Pests by
	Some
Message-ID: <20060307160528.53E7011FC1E@lax-gw07.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

NATIONAL | March 7, 2006
Wyoming Journal: Resurgent Wolves Now Considered Pests by Some
By JIM ROBBINS
Some cattle ranchers and others in the state want to kill wolves without any restrictions. But the federal government will not allow that.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/07/national/07wolf.html?ex=1142398800&en=69de660c78325e16&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060307/ccce410d/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Tue Mar  7 08:06:18 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Tue,  7 Mar 2006 16:06:18 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Is Antitrust No Longer the Issue?
Message-ID: <20060307160618.DFC6E9FE92@lax-gw05.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

WASHINGTON | March 7, 2006
Is Antitrust No Longer the Issue?
By STEPHEN LABATON
While officials and lobbyists say the AT&T-BellSouth deal faces few regulatory obstacles, changes in the marketplace may bring different political headwinds.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/07/politics/07policy.html?ex=1142398800&en=2a70b242903aef9d&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060307/84c51603/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Tue Mar  7 08:10:17 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: 7 Mar 2006 16:10:17 -0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] Headlines for March 7, 2006
Message-ID: <20060307161017.18738.qmail@trinity.democracynow.org>

Mike Blaxill  ( mblaxill at yahoo.com )
sent you this story from democracynow.org




+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  Headlines for March 7, 2006
|  http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/07/1442237
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+


- New Video Shows 3 of 4 CPT Hostages in Iraq 
- Britain Announces Intent To Withdraw Troops from Iraq 
- Khalilzad Warns of Iraq Civil War 
- UK Admits Granting CIA Aircraft Use of Airfields
- Army Announces New Review of Tillman Death
- Mofaz: ?No One Immune? From Targeted Killings
- South Dakota Gov. Signs Near-Total Abortion Ban
- South Central Farm Wins Temporary Eviction Delay
This story continues at: 
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/07/1442237


From hecate at diamonddragon.com  Tue Mar  7 09:58:27 2006
From: hecate at diamonddragon.com (Hecate)
Date: Tue, 07 Mar 2006 17:58:27 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] BBC E-mail: Stopping the next extinction wave
Message-ID: <20060307_175827_092297.hecate@diamonddragon.com>

Hecate saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you
should see it.

** Message **
But overall, extinctions are coming at 100 to 1,000 times the normal background rate, according to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a vast attempt to audit the Earth's ecological health which was published last year. 

It concluded that a third of all amphibians, a fifth of mammals and an eighth of all birds are now threatened with extinction. 

It also concluded that although humanity is the cause, humanity will ultimately be among the losers


** Stopping the next extinction wave **
A new study identifies 20 regions in the world which may become extinction 'hot-spots' in the near future.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/4780876.stm >


** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all
in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/dailyemail/ >


** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have?been verified.

If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm


From hecate at diamonddragon.com  Tue Mar  7 10:00:46 2006
From: hecate at diamonddragon.com (Hecate)
Date: Tue, 07 Mar 2006 18:00:46 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] BBC E-mail: Indian temple city hit by blasts
Message-ID: <20060307_180046_084780.hecate@diamonddragon.com>

Hecate saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you
should see it.



** Indian temple city hit by blasts **
At least 15 people die after suspected bomb blasts in the Indian temple city of Varanasi, police say.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/south_asia/4782618.stm >


** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all
in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/dailyemail/ >


** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have?been verified.

If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm


From hecate at diamonddragon.com  Tue Mar  7 10:06:06 2006
From: hecate at diamonddragon.com (Hecate)
Date: Tue, 07 Mar 2006 18:06:06 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] BBC E-mail: Aborigine singer 'left for dead'
Message-ID: <20060307_180606_024147.hecate@diamonddragon.com>

Hecate saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you
should see it.



** Aborigine singer 'left for dead' **
A renowned indigenous Australian singer says she was ignored for five hours after collapsing at a busy bus stop.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/asia-pacific/4781688.stm >


** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all
in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/dailyemail/ >


** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have?been verified.

If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm


From hecate at diamonddragon.com  Tue Mar  7 10:07:20 2006
From: hecate at diamonddragon.com (Hecate)
Date: Tue, 07 Mar 2006 18:07:20 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] BBC E-mail: Top US official denies 'torture'
Message-ID: <20060307_180720_073403.hecate@diamonddragon.com>

Hecate saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you
should see it.



** Top US official denies 'torture' **
The US attorney general defends the treatment of terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay against international criticism.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/americas/4782594.stm >


** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all
in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/dailyemail/ >


** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have?been verified.

If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm


From michael at intrafi.com  Tue Mar  7 10:07:53 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Tue,  7 Mar 2006 18:07:53 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] [BrowserCMS] Article from the American Prospect
Message-ID: <29524668.1141754870806.JavaMail.www@localhost>

michael at intrafi.com (as entered on our Web site) sent this article to you.
Comment from sender: ''
Article Title: Who?s Taking Over What?
Article URL: http://www.prospect.org/web/view-web.ww?id=11223


The American Prospect  http://www.prospect.org/web


From hecate at diamonddragon.com  Tue Mar  7 10:19:28 2006
From: hecate at diamonddragon.com (hecate at diamonddragon.com)
Date: Tue, 7 Mar 2006 10:19:28 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] In federal job: Blow whistle, get boot
Message-ID: <20736584.1141755568063.JavaMail.tomcat@localhost>



*Please note, the sender's email address has not been verified.



You have received the following link from hecate at diamonddragon.com

 
********************
 
If you are having trouble with any of the links in this message, or if the URL's are not appearing as links, please follow the instructions at the bottom of this email.
 
Title: In federal job: Blow whistle, get boot
 
  
Copy and paste the following into your Web browser to access the sent link:
http://www.emailthis.clickability.com/et/emailThis?clickMap=viewThis&etMailToID=1384480586&pt=Y
 

Copy and paste the following into your Web browser to SAVE THIS link:
http://www.savethis.clickability.com/st/saveThisPopupApp?clickMap=saveFromET&partnerID=525&etMailToID=1384480586&pt=Y

 
Copy and paste the following into your Web browser to forward this link:
http://www.emailthis.clickability.com/et/emailThis?clickMap=forward&etMailToID=1384480586&partnerID=525&pt=Y

  
 
********************


Email pages from any Web site you visit - add the EMAIL THIS button to your browser, copy and paste the following into your Web browser:
http://www.emailthis.clickability.com/et/emailThis?clickMap=browserButtons&pt=Y"


*********************



Instructions:
-----------------------------------------
If your e-mail program doesn't recognize Web addresses:
1. With your mouse, highlight the Web Address above. Be sure to highlight the entire Web address, even if it spans more than one line in your email. 
2. Select Copy from the Edit menu at the top of your screen. 
3. Launch your Web browser.
4. Paste the address into your Web browser by selecting Paste from the Edit menu.
5. Click Go or press Enter or Return on your keyboard. 
 
********************
 
 
 
 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060307/20279add/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Tue Mar  7 10:32:46 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (Ian)
Date: Tue, 7 Mar 2006 13:32:46 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Is Antitrust No Longer the Issue?
References: <20060307160618.DFC6E9FE92@lax-gw05.mroute.net>
Message-ID: <006601c64215$88b186c0$99ca6c42@iancn2ccrvzt0j>

E-Mail ThisAntitrust is no longer an issue in an era when deregulation is rampant.  Note that AT&T already admits that this merger will cost upwards of 10,000 jobs - and that is a conservative number.

Whether telecomm or any other industry, the constant mergers, acquisition, agglomerations and cross-corporate "synergies" that concentrate power in the hands of a few is among the most sinister issues right now.  Just one example (and our resident expert, Dusty, will back me up on this): in 1983, there were 30 major record labels - not just indies (of which there were some 450), but truly major labels.  In 1987, that number was 20.  In 1995, it was 10.  As of 2005, it is 5.  And now there is talk of two of those five merging to create another behemoth, bringing the total number of record labels to 4.

As a general matter re this type of agglomeration, where is the outrage?
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: mblaxill at yahoo.com 
  To: mb-civic at islandlists.com 
  Sent: Tuesday, March 07, 2006 11:06 AM
  Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Is Antitrust No Longer the Issue?


            
                
                   
                
                
             
              This page was sent to you by:  mblaxill at yahoo.com 

              WASHINGTON   | March 7, 2006 
              Is Antitrust No Longer the Issue? 
              By STEPHEN LABATON 
              While officials and lobbyists say the AT&T-BellSouth deal faces few regulatory obstacles, changes in the marketplace may bring different political headwinds. 
             
             
                 
                     
                    1. Revising Art History's Big Book: Who's In and Who Comes Out? 
                    2. Hey Neighbor, Stop Piggybacking on My Wireless 
                    3. Still Evolving, Human Genes Tell New Story 
                    4. Op-Ed Contributor: Academic, Heal Thyself 
                    5. Amsterdam House: This Very, Very Old House 

                    ?  Go to Complete List 
                     
                   
                   
                          Advertisement 
                                Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

                                Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.
                                http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/   


                         
                   
                   
                     
                          Do you love NY? Get the insider's guide to where to stay, what to do and where to eat. Go to www.nytimes.com/travel for your NYC Guide now. Click here. 



                   
             
             
                
              Copyright 2006  The New York Times Company | Privacy Policy    
                 
       



------------------------------------------------------------------------------


  _______________________________________________
  Mb-civic mailing list
  Mb-civic at islandlists.com
  http://www.islandlists.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mb-civic
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060307/8035f7f4/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Tue Mar  7 10:37:05 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Tue,  7 Mar 2006 18:37:05 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: 3 Jews Are Attacked in a Paris Suburb
Message-ID: <20060307183705.72A4511FAE0@lax-gw07.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

INTERNATIONAL / EUROPE | March 7, 2006
3 Jews Are Attacked in a Paris Suburb
By CRAIG S. SMITH
Three attacks against Jews over the weekend have added to anxiety that anti-Semitism is growing among a new generation of French citizens.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/07/international/europe/07france.html?ex=1142398800&en=476fce6ef6ce4756&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060307/703ba000/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Tue Mar  7 10:38:04 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Tue,  7 Mar 2006 18:38:04 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: The Business of Government
Message-ID: <20060307183804.5259511FA7B@lax-gw07.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

OPINION | March 7, 2006
Editorial: The Business of Government

There are any number of object lessons in the downfall of former Representative Randy Cunningham, the greedy politician who took millions of dollars in bribes.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/07/opinion/07tue3.html?ex=1142398800&en=a2c42ce2e4895c41&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060307/c33001df/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Tue Mar  7 10:38:40 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Tue,  7 Mar 2006 18:38:40 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Should the U.S. Isolate Hamas? (5 Letters)
Message-ID: <20060307183840.C5E703AE57A@lax-gw06.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

What we're saying...


OPINION | March 7, 2006
Should the U.S. Isolate Hamas? (5 Letters)

To the Editor:.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/07/opinion/l07mideast.html?ex=1142398800&en=576736fad03055e1&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060307/95b85701/attachment-0001.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Tue Mar  7 10:39:22 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Tue,  7 Mar 2006 18:39:22 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Global Warming: The Will to Act (2 Letters)
Message-ID: <20060307183922.989B9249D22@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

What we're saying (2)...


OPINION | March 7, 2006
Global Warming: The Will to Act (2 Letters)

To the Editor:.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/07/opinion/l07kristof.html?ex=1142398800&en=64f8f06c95419ea8&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060307/bd54061e/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Tue Mar  7 10:39:40 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Tue,  7 Mar 2006 18:39:40 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Tortured Soul
Message-ID: <20060307183940.D4C8F237356@lax-gw01.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

What we're saying (3)...


OPINION | March 7, 2006
Tortured Soul

To the Editor:.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/07/opinion/l07torture.html?ex=1142398800&en=d2fa13f7bf9a8c91&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060307/00b89dbe/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Tue Mar  7 10:41:19 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Tue,  7 Mar 2006 18:41:19 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Wal-Mart Enlists Bloggers in P.R. Campaign
Message-ID: <20060307184119.1D3D3249DA7@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

This is what a cornered animal does...


TECHNOLOGY | March 7, 2006
Wal-Mart Enlists Bloggers in P.R. Campaign
By MICHAEL BARBARO
Wal-Mart is looking beyond the mainstream media and working directly with bloggers. But the strategy raises concerns about what bloggers should disclose to readers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/07/technology/07blog.html?ex=1142398800&en=426cdc4411e20380&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060307/c25733b2/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Tue Mar  7 10:59:03 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Tue,  7 Mar 2006 18:59:03 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Dana Reeve,
	Leading Advocate for Spinal Cord Research, Dies
Message-ID: <20060307185903.8EFCB3AE3D2@lax-gw06.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

I was privileged to have met and spoken with Ms. Reeve during a book tour. She was among the most genuine, serious and dedicated people I have met in any cause. She was articulate, passionate and good-natured, and listened as well as she spoke. A true loss to a cause that needs powerful voices. Peace.


NATIONAL | March 7, 2006
Dana Reeve, Leading Advocate for Spinal Cord Research, Dies
By JOHN O'NEIL
After her husband's death, Dana Reeves raised her public profile to help find cures for spinal-cord injuries. She was 44.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/07/national/07cnd-reeve.html?ex=1142398800&en=ee445f22b1cf0e14&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060307/4ab3befe/attachment.htm 

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Tue Mar  7 12:40:41 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Tue, 07 Mar 2006 12:40:41 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Where Killers Roam,
	the Poison Spreads By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Message-ID: <C0332FC9.29CE5%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 7, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Where Killers Roam, the Poison Spreads
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

ALONG THE CHAD-SUDAN BORDER

For more than two years, the world has pretty much ignored the genocide
unfolding in the Darfur region of Sudan, just as it turned away from the
slaughter of Armenians, Jews, Cambodians and Rwandans in earlier decades.

And now, apparently encouraged by the world's acquiescence, Sudan is sending
its proxy forces to invade neighboring Chad and kill and rape members of the
same African tribes that have already been ethnically cleansed in Darfur
itself.

I've spent the last three days along the Chad-Sudan border, where this
brutal war is unfolding. But "war" doesn't feel like the right term, for
that implies combat between armies.

What is happening here is more like what happens in a stockyard. Militias
backed by Sudan race on camels and pickup trucks into Chadian villages and
use machine guns to mow down farming families, whose only offense is that
they belong to the wrong tribes and have black skin.

I found it eerie to drive on the dirt track along the border because
countless villages have been torched or abandoned. Many tens of thousands of
peasants have fled their villages, and you can drive for mile after mile and
see no sign of life ? except for the smoke of the villages or fields being
burned by the Sudan-armed janjaweed militia.

In some places the janjaweed, made up of nomadic Arab tribes that persecute
several black African tribes, have turned villages into grazing lands for
the livestock they have stolen. At one point, my vehicle got stuck in the
sand, and a group of janjaweed children materialized and helped push me out.
The children were watching a huge herd of cattle with many different brands.
Their fathers were presumably off killing people.

This is my sixth trip to the Darfur region, and I've often seen burned
villages within Darfur itself, but now the cancer has spread to Chad.

One young man, Haroun Ismael, returned with me ? very nervously ? to the
edge of his village of Karmadodo, between the towns of Adr? and Ad?. Eleven
days earlier, Sudanese military aircraft and a force of several hundred
janjaweed had suddenly attacked the village. Mr. Haroun and his wife had run
for their lives, with his wife carrying their 3-month-old baby, Ahmed.

The janjaweed raiders overtook Mr. Haroun's wife and beat her so badly that
she is still unconscious. They also grabbed Ahmed from her arms.

"They looked at the baby," Mr. Haroun added, "and since he was a boy, they
shot him."

Sudan is also arming and equipping a proxy army of Chadian rebels under a
commander named Muhammad Nour. The rebels were repulsed when they tried to
invade Chad in late December, and now they are regrouping for another
attempt.

Sudan's aim seems to be to overthrow Chad's president and install a pawn in
his place, in part because this would allow Sudan's Army to attack rebels in
Darfur from both directions.

Regardless of whether the rebels succeed in overthrowing Chad's government,
they could ignite a new civil war in Chad. Much will depend on whether the
French will use their military base in Chad to fight any Sudanese-sponsored
invasion; the French aren't saying what they'll do.

Chad's army is too small to defend its border, so it tries to defend
potential invasion routes. That leaves villages in other areas defenseless.

"See that smoke over there?" asked Ali Muhammad in the market town of
Borota. "The janjaweed are burning our fields today."

"Most people here have fled," he added, "but I have old family members to
look after, so I can't leave."

These areas are too insecure for the United Nations and most international
aid workers, who are already doing a heroic and dangerous job in Darfur and
Chad. So Mr. Ali and others left behind get no food aid and go hungry.

In the last few weeks, President Bush has shown an increased willingness to
address the slaughter in Darfur. He should now encourage the French to use
their forces to defend Chad from proxy invasions, make a presidential speech
to spotlight the issue, attend a donor conference for Darfur, encourage the
use of a NATO bridging force until U.N. peacekeepers can arrive, enforce a
no-fly zone and open a new initiative for peace talks among the sheiks of
Darfur.

The present Western policy of playing down genocide and hoping it will peter
out has proved to be bankrupt practically as well as morally. Granted, there
are no neat solutions in Darfur. But ignoring brutality has only magnified
it, and it's just shameful to pretend not to notice the terrified villagers
here, huddling with their children each night and wondering when they are
going to be massacred.

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From michael at michaelbutler.com  Tue Mar  7 12:44:56 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Tue, 07 Mar 2006 12:44:56 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] City Schools That Work By JOHN TIERNEY
Message-ID: <C03330C8.29CE7%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 7, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
City Schools That Work
By JOHN TIERNEY

MILWAUKEE

At first glance, the near north side of Milwaukee can be a bleak place, now
that it has lost the department stores, factories and other businesses that
used to thrive there. But if you want to see inner-city children getting a
good education, it's the most beautiful spot in America.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel refers to one of the area's arteries, North
Avenue, as the Main Street of School Reform because of the new schools that
have opened since the city's radical experiment in education began 15 years
ago. At that time, there were two newspapers in Milwaukee, the liberal
Journal and the conservative Sentinel, and they both editorialized against
the new school-voucher program.

Now there's one combined newspaper with a different point of view. The
Journal Sentinel, which endorsed John Kerry in 2004, has parted company with
the Democratic Party on the voucher issue. It backed Republican efforts this
year to expand the program, which has led to the creation of dozens of new
private schools in Milwaukee.

"We've seen what school choice can do," said Gregory Stanford, an editorial
writer and a columnist at the paper. "It's impressive to go around to the
voucher schools and see kids learning. Their parents are much more satisfied
with these schools. And the fears that the public schools would be hurt have
turned out to be wrong."

In fact, the students in public schools have benefited from the competition.
Two studies by Harvard researchers, one by Caroline Hoxby and another by
Rajashri Chakrabarti, have shown that as the voucher program expanded in
Milwaukee, there was a marked improvement in test scores at the public
schools most threatened by the program (the ones with large numbers of
low-income students eligible for the vouchers).

The competition spurred the public system to shift power from the central
administration to individual schools, allowing councils of parents and
teachers to decide who should teach there, instead of forcing the schools to
accept incompetent teachers just because they had seniority.

"Poor teachers used to shuffle from one school on to another in what we
called the dance of the lemons," says Ken Johnson, the head of the school
board. "But we couldn't let that continue once our students had the option
to go somewhere else. We had to react to students' needs. We had to start
seeing them as customers, not just seat-fillers."

Some of the new voucher schools have flopped ? but the advantage of a
voucher program is that a bad private school can be shut down a lot faster
than a bad public school. And while critics complain that there still isn't
definitive evidence that voucher students are doing better over all in their
new schools, the results so far in Milwaukee and other cities are more than
enough to declare vouchers a success.

"All the good research, including the voucher opponents' work, shows that
kids who accept vouchers are doing at least as well as their public school
peers," says Joseph Viteritti of Hunter College. "That's remarkable,
considering how much less money is being spent on the voucher students."

In Milwaukee, where the public system spends more than $10,000 per student,
private schools get less than $6,400 for each voucher student. But when you
see what can be done for that money, you realize what's wrong with
Democrats' favorite solution for education: more money for the public-school
monopoly.

At the CEO Leadership Academy, a high school with 125 students in the new
wing of a Baptist church, you find students who compare the school to a
family. They rhapsodize about small classes, teachers who stay after school
to help them and the feeling that the school is a calm oasis from the
streets ? not what they got in their old public schools.

"When I first heard about this school, they told me the school day's longer
and you have to wear a uniform," said Elliott Barnes, a ninth grader. "I
didn't like that at all. But then I walked in here and noticed right away
how many people were smiling in the hall. In my public school, when a
stranger smiled at you there, you started worrying."

The school principal, Denise Pitchford, worked in the public schools, but
she took a pay cut in exchange for less red tape. "I wanted the flexibility
to give immediate personal attention to every student," she said. "To me, it
represented less money but a better opportunity." Just like the whole
voucher program.

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From michael at intrafi.com  Tue Mar  7 12:46:33 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Tue,  7 Mar 2006 20:46:33 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Mr. Bush's Asian Road Trip
Message-ID: <20060307204633.47D3A83D4A@lax-gw03.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: michael at intrafi.com.

OPINION | March 7, 2006
Editorial: Mr. Bush's Asian Road Trip

President Bush's spectacularly misconceived trip to Pakistan and India may have inflicted serious damage to American goals.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/07/opinion/07tue1.html?ex=1142398800&en=a4c42ce2e20a0bc1&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060307/c8b05b0a/attachment.htm 

From michael at intrafi.com  Tue Mar  7 12:46:00 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Tue,  7 Mar 2006 20:46:00 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Unnatural Selection
Message-ID: <20060307204600.7E23B249E9D@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: michael at intrafi.com.

OPINION | March 7, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor: Unnatural Selection
By MORRIS B. HOFFMAN
To those of us who believe that jurors take their oaths seriously and that most jurors can put aside their biases, the peremptory challenge system has become an embarrassment.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/07/opinion/07hoffman.html?ex=1142398800&en=5df725756a395930&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060307/cd7932c4/attachment.htm 

From ean at sbcglobal.net  Mon Mar  6 21:42:28 2006
From: ean at sbcglobal.net (ean at sbcglobal.net)
Date: Mon, 06 Mar 2006 21:42:28 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Unsustainable Growth
Message-ID: <E1FGj7H-0003rM-DO@smtpauth08.mail.atl.earthlink.net>

12 February 2006

Unsustainable Growth

By Gwynne Dyer
http://www.noabc.com/default~area~docread~docid~343.htm

It?s exactly the sort of document that an American think-tank would have produced in 
the year 1900, if they had had think-tanks in 1900. This time it?s the Chinese 
Academy of Sciences, the leading research institute in the world?s most populous 
country, and the document is called China Modernisation Report 2006.

That imaginary American think-tank of a century ago would certainly have predicted 
massive urbanisation and far higher incomes in the United States by 1950, because 
those trends were already well established at the time. It might not have forecast that 
half the American population would own automobiles by 1950, let alone that tens of 
millions of Americans could afford to travel abroad by then, but a bold forecaster 
might have been done so. And when it all came true, nothing terrible happened as a 
result.

This time the predictions won?t come true, because terrible things will start to happen 
long before 2050. This is deeply unfair, because all China wants for its citizens is the 
same lifestyle that most Western countries had achieved by 1950. But they got away 
with it because they were the first countries to industrialise, and China won?t because 
it is so big and because it has come so late to the game.

The report, published on 9 February, glows with enthusiasm for the predicted rise in 
Chinese incomes (tenfold by 2050, to $1300 a month), for the 500 million peasants 
who will move to the cities, for the 600 million city-dwellers who will move out into hi-
tech suburban homes. Half China?s people will own their own cars and be able to 
afford overseas travel, the report predicts. But I don?t think so.

The Chinese people deserve prosperity, and they have waited too long for it, but they 
cannot have it in the classic Western style. Take the cars alone. Within a decade, 
China will be the second-largest automobile manufacturer on the planet ? but for half 
the Chinese population to own cars, the world?s total stock of motor vehicles must 
almost double. For half of Indians and Brazilians and Russians also to own cars (and 
all these countries have similar expectations), the car population of the planet must 
triple.

It doesn?t work at the local level (nine of the world?s ten most polluted cities are 
already in China), and it doesn?t work at the global level. It is taboo to say so outside 
of scientific and environmental circles, because the rapid growth of the Chinese and 
Indian economies is now the main motor driving world economic growth, but it 
cannot go on like this.

At the beginning of the Second World War the world had two billion people, of whom 
about one-quarter lived in industrialised countries? but few of them owned cars, or 
ran air-conditioners, or travelled abroad. Forty years later there were four billion 
people. Those who lived in fully industrialised societies now consumed far more 
energy and produced far more waste, as a ?modern? lifestyle now included cars, 
meat in most meals, electrical appliances galore and, for many people, foreign travel, 
but they were still only a quarter of the population. Total human pressure on the 
environment? Up fivefold or sixfold in forty years.

Now we have six and a half billion people, and we are still running at a quarter of the 
human race living in developed countries, so the pressure on the environment is 
around ten times what it was in 1940. But the predicted development of China by 
2050 (and the comparable growth of India, Brazil and Russia) will raise the share of 
the human race living in high-consumption industrial economies to over half of the 
global population ? which will exceed eight billion by that time. Total human pressure 
on the environment: perhaps twenty-five times higher in a single century.

It?s China?s turn, and it?s monstrously unfair that it cannot just follow the same 
development path that Britain first carved in the late 1800s, and all the rest of the 
West followed in the1900s. But it can?t. You cannot get away with that style of 
development any more when the world is already as damaged as it is now.

The most frightening map I have ever seen is one published in James Lovelock?s 
new book, Revenge of Gaia, that shows what proportion of the Earth?s surface would 
remain suitable for agriculture if the average global temperature went up by 5 
degrees C (9 degrees F). None of China is habitable (above desert population 
densities) except Manchuria. None of India makes it either, except the foothills of the 
Himalayas, and none of the United States except the Pacific Northwest.

That is a completely unacceptable outcome of headlong ?modernisation? in the old 
style, so the China Modernisation Report 2006 is just a fantasy. Somewhere between 
now and the future it envisages for 2050, the negative consequences of continuing 
down the present path will become so large and undeniable that the current pattern 
of development will be abandoned. It may not be abandoned soon enough to avoid 
terrible consequences for China and the world, but the day will never arrive when half 
of China?s population owns cars.

On the other hand, the day MUST arrive when China?s people (and India?s and 
Brazil?s nd Indonesia?s) live as well as Americans, or else there will be hell to pay. So 
the day may well arrive when more than half of all Americans don?t own cars either. 
The future, as usual, is not going to be like the present.



-- 
You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, option D (up to 3 
emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options (option A - 1x/week, option B - 
3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option D - up to 3x/day) please reply and let us know!  
If someone forwarded you this email and you want to be on our list, send an email to 
ean at sbcglobal.net and tell us which option you'd like.


"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060306/102e1aa0/attachment.htm 

From nemo1043 at yahoo.com  Tue Mar  7 07:03:55 2006
From: nemo1043 at yahoo.com (Allison Burnett)
Date: Tue, 07 Mar 2006 07:03:55 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] The dark underside of the Dubai deal
Message-ID: <E1FGj8M-00051a-37@smtpauth08.mail.atl.earthlink.net>

'Having Dinner with the Right People': Bill Clinton, Jack Kemp, and How
Money Is Clouding the Ports Deal Debate  (38?comments?)
 READ MORE: Iraq, Halliburton, Tim Russert, Dick Cheney, 2006, George W.
Bush 

Lenin's fabled admonition that capitalists are so eager to make a buck
they'll sell you the rope with which to hang them is in need of an update:
they'll also lease you the ports through which terrorists can sneak the
dirty bomb with which to blow them up.

 The establishment's full-throated support of the Dubai ports deal is an
object lesson in how huge amounts of money can cloud the thinking of people
on both sides of the political spectrum.

 The latest example of someone whose judgment has been clouded by cash is
Jack Kemp. There he was on Meet the Press on Sunday defending his public
support for the Dubai ports deal. "You're very against public opinion," said
Tim Russert. "Very much against Congressional opinion."

 Kemp was undaunted, and launched into an impassioned defense of the deal
and of the United Arab Emerites, echoing a column he wrote taking to task
those who have criticized it.

 "It's the right thing to do," he said, calling the UAE a "valued ally" and
reiterating the claim that canceling the deal would, as he put it in his
column, "weaken our own national security and our chances for peace and
liberation throughout the Middle East and Africa" (Shades of Andrea
Mitchell, another die-hard member of the establishment, who suggested on
Hardball that killing the ports deal could lead to rioting in the Muslim
world).

 What Kemp didn't say is that the UAE has invested millions in Free Market
Global, an energy-trading company that he chairs.

 You think all those zeroes might have had some influence on his opinion?
Maybe not. But I'm pretty sure that a disclosure of his financial connection
to those he was so fulsomely praising would have had some influence on the
opinions of those watching.

 Especially if viewers learned that Gen. Tommy Franks, whom Kemp used as his
debating trump card -- quoting both in print and on Meet the Press the
General extolling the Emirates -- is on the advisory board of Free Market
Global, and stands to profit from maintaining good relations with the
oil-rich emirs.

 I called Kemp to ask him why he hadn't mentioned this intersection of
interests, but I haven't heard back, even though I said why I was calling.
Or perhaps because I did.

 Despite Kemp's reputation as the GOP's go-to guy on poverty and economic
disenfranchisement, he remains masterful at the Washington money-power game.

 A 2004 Jane Mayer article in the New Yorker on Dick Cheney and
Halliburton's Iraq contracts, quotes a businessman with close ties to the
Bush administration as saying: "This is how corruption is done these days.
It's not about bribes. You just help your friends to get access. Cheney
doesn't call the Defense Department and tell them, 'Pick Halliburton.' It's
just having dinner with the right people." Earlier, Mayer described how
Kemp, while seeking help for a venture in Iraq in 2003, had had Cheney over
for dinner, along with two sons of the President of the UAE. This is
especially interesting in light of what a powerful -- and politically
connected -- entrepreneur told me: that Cheney was the real force behind the
administration's rapid approval of the Dubai deal.

 Just scratch the surface of Kemp's business dealings and relationships, and
all sorts of interesting connections ooze out. For instance, there were
Kemp's 2003 efforts to establish a "21st Century Marshall Plan" for Iraq.
Among those helping him develop the plan was Samir Vincent, an
Iraqi-American businessman who was a player in the oil-for-food scandal, and
who last year pleaded guilty to illegally lobbying for Iraq. Prior to
becoming involved with Vincent, Kemp had gotten the thumbs up on him from
former Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci, who assured Kemp that Vincent
was his tennis partner and "a good guy". Game, set, match. For his part,
Carlucci is the chairman emeritus of the Carlyle Group, the Bushies'
favorite private equity firm. Carlyle has received at least $100 million in
funding from the ruling families of...yep, the UAE.

 Consulting deals, investment deals, equity deals... port deals. They are
all part of the same money-as-political-lubricant continuum. Policy KY.
"It's just having dinner with the right people."

 People like Bill Clinton who, we learned last week, had advised the UAE on
the ports deal. I can't help but wonder if that advice was in any way
colored by the millions (the exact figures are still not in) Dubai has given
to Clinton -- in speaking fees and donations to his presidential library.
And then, as Lloyd Grove reports, there is Clinton's lucrative relationship
with Ron Burkle's private investment firm, Yucaipa, which has partnered with
Dubai in bidding on some major investment deals. Money clouds on both sides
of the aisle.

That's why transparency is so important on matters like this. Jack Kemp,
Bill Clinton, and the establishment's cost-benefit analysis of the Dubai
ports deal is clearly different than yours or mine.

 Pocketing millions may allow them to overlook the very real risks the deal
brings. For the rest of us, we have to ask ourselves: is even the slightest
increase in risk to our security worth it?

 The answer for those of us not on the receiving end of the UAE's largess
remains a resounding "No!
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060307/1accde42/attachment.htm 

From michael at intrafi.com  Tue Mar  7 15:43:18 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Tue,  7 Mar 2006 15:43:18 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] Alternet: Throwing Consumers to the Wolves
Message-ID: <20060307234318.74168B81EA@alternet.org>


This story has been forwarded to you from
http://www.alternet.org by michael at intrafi.com



-------------------------------------
Throwing Consumers to the Wolves
http://www.alternet.org/story/33187

A federal bankruptcy judge says the new bankruptcy law is good for one thing: allowing creditors to make more money off the backs of debt-ridden consumers.
-------------------------------------


From sportsonline at cbc.ca  Tue Mar  7 17:04:51 2006
From: sportsonline at cbc.ca (CBC Sports Online)
Date: Wed, 8 Mar 2006 01:04:51 UT
Subject: [Mb-civic] CBC Sports - BOOK ALLEGES BONDS'S DRUG USE
Message-ID: <20060308010451.646FE32F85@web05.nm.cbc.ca>

An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Url: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060308/746adc77/attachment.diff 

From michael at intrafi.com  Tue Mar  7 17:00:18 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (Michael)
Date: Tue, 7 Mar 2006 20:00:18 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Article from Tom Dispatch
Message-ID: <200603080100.k2810ImC014367@thor.thenation.com>

An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060307/34ed2bd2/attachment-0001.htm 

From info at bravenewfilms.org  Tue Mar  7 09:13:27 2006
From: info at bravenewfilms.org (Robert Greenwald)
Date: Tue, 7 Mar 2006 12:13:27 -0500 (EST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] Announcing Brave New Films' next documentary: THE BIG
 BUY: How Tom DeLay Stole Congress
Message-ID: <E1FGncH-0003Hp-WF@smtpauth01.mail.atl.earthlink.net>

Dear Brave New Activists and Supporters,

Like all of you, we at Brave New Films have been distraught and furious as the revelations of corruption in Congress have unfolded. The size and scope of this corruption, and its impact on all our lives, is enormous. So of course, several months ago we began to discuss doing a film on the topic. Then, to our great relief and pleasure, we found that two very talented guys from Texas, Mark Birnbaum and Jim Schermbeck, were close to finishing a documentary called THE BIG BUY: HOW TOM DELAY STOLE CONGRESS. THE BIG BUY connects the dots between corporate power, dirty money elections and corruption. One thing quickly led to another, and now...

We're excited and proud to announce that Brave New Films will be distributing THE BIG BUY. Read more about the film in today's New York Times and watch the teaser trailer.

http://tomdelaymovie.com/

What that really means is, all of you, who have made UNCOVERED, OUTFOXED and WAL-MART possible, will be called upon to use your energy, your anger and your smarts, to let the world know what really happened in Texas and Washington, D.C. Your success in getting the truth out about Fox News, Wal-Mart, and the reasons the U.S. went to war, has been amazing. And, we're asking you again to join with us once again in a battle for truth and demcoracy, using THE BIG BUY as a tool for change. As with the other films, your ideas, plans and creative ways to use the film or organize around it will be needed and welcomed..

We need your help to make sure this film is seen. Please order your copy now. Your early support and DVD orders will allow Brave New Films to continue our work in organizing and educating for social change. As you know, we are a nonprofit working outside the standard distribution system with our films, so your support is crucial to our continuing success.

http://tomdelaymovie.com/buy.php

Jim and Mark have spent more than three years of their lives shooting and editing THE BIG BUY, financing the production out of their own pockets. The result of their tireless work, commitment and personal sacrifice is a must-see film -- one that reveals exactly how and why large corporations have used Tom DeLay to advance their national agendas of greed. They've supported him with barrels of money, which ultimately led to the re-districting that gave Republicans dominance in the House of Representatives. This dominance led to the passage of CAFTA, the Energy Bill and federal budgets which have helped DeLay and his corporate supporters at the expense of all of us. (If you have any doubt about the implications of the rise of corporate power and its effect on our democratic institutions, please get a hold of the book, The People's Business: Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy, by Charlie Cray, Ralph Nader and Lee Drutman. All of us at Brave New Films have been deeply affected by its analysis of the battles that lie ahead.)

While DeLay is from Texas, his corrupt practices are a national issue. The filmmakers, with their deep roots in Texas, have keyed in on that state's political culture. However DeLay's corrupt practices are not specific to the Lone Star State, and this film should be seen as a warning to all of us. As Ronnie Earle says in the film, "It's not about Democrats and Republicans; it's about cops and robbers."

We're announcing the film today -- the day of DeLay's primary victory -- to let him know that he's not going to escape the crimes that he has committed. In early May, we plan to have a red carpet gala world premiere in Houston at the Angelika Film Center.

We're confident that THE BIG BUY, like our other films, can be effective in uniting issue-oriented groups across the country to work for broader change. We know we will never win if we focus just on single issues (see the new book Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics by Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, for compelling evidence of this). We believe this film can follow in the tradition of UNCOVERED, OUTFOXED and WAL-MART, to help unite many groups in battle for a truly democratic government.

SEE YOU AT A SCREENING IN YOUR THEATRE, HOME, CHURCH OR SCHOOL!

Robert Greenwald

P.S. Don't miss the teaser trailer. It'll get your blood boiling.

http://tomdelaymovie.com/

P.P.S. Yes, we're hoping you will host a screening of the film. If you're interested, you can let us know on the website and we'll keep you in the loop. We're going to do them in June, about a month after the DVD comes out, so there is plenty of time for everyone to get the DVDs, watch them, and make plans.

---
You are receiving this because you purchased a film from Brave New Films, signed up on one of our websites, or attended one of our film screenings. If you don't wish to receive these monthly emails, you can unsubscribe immediately by replying with "unsubscribe" in the subject. You can reach us at info at bravenewfilms.org or 10510 Culver Blvd., Culver City, CA 90232
/*Your email ID. <diaEmailID='90853110' thread=1024/>--*/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060307/157bd044/attachment.htm 

From barbarasiomos38 at msn.com  Tue Mar  7 21:52:14 2006
From: barbarasiomos38 at msn.com (Barbara Siomos)
Date: Wed, 08 Mar 2006 05:52:14 GMT
Subject: [Mb-civic] Dana Reeve, Leading Advocate for Spinal Cord Research,
	Dies
Message-ID: <BAY114-DAV5F46C92958E7E4E56339AABEF0@phx.gbl>

This is a true loss to the world which needs more people of her style and wisdom. WoW!  Ian I had not the chance as you to meet her yet I am totally stunned by this tragedy, their poor son with the help and love of friends will have to truck on....  :-(

peace,
barbara


-----Original Message-----
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com
Sent: Tue, 7 Mar 2006 10:59:03 -0800
To: mb-civic at islandlists.com
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Dana Reeve, Leading Advocate for Spinal Cord Research, Dies

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

I was privileged to have met and spoken with Ms. Reeve during a book tour. She was among the most genuine, serious and dedicated people I have met in any cause. She was articulate, passionate and good-natured, and listened as well as she spoke. A true loss to a cause that needs powerful voices. Peace.


NATIONAL | March 7, 2006
Dana Reeve, Leading Advocate for Spinal Cord Research, Dies
By JOHN O'NEIL
After her husband's death, Dana Reeves raised her public profile to help find cures for spinal-cord injuries. She was 44.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/07/national/07cnd-reeve.html?ex=1142398800&en=ee445f22b1cf0e14&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060308/16e4eaf5/attachment.htm 

From barbarasiomos38 at msn.com  Tue Mar  7 23:47:38 2006
From: barbarasiomos38 at msn.com (Barbara Siomos)
Date: Wed, 08 Mar 2006 07:47:38 GMT
Subject: [Mb-civic] March 10th Rally~Union Square march to United Nations
Message-ID: <BAY114-DAV11BB8D4605B3664894C4F2ABEF0@phx.gbl>

Tibetan National Uprising Day Commemoration in New York City
This Friday, March 10th, 2006

Join hundreds of Tibetans and their supporters will demonstrate in commemoration of the 47th anniversary of the 1959 uprising against the Chinese occupation of Tibet. March 10th, 1959 marked the culmination of the Tibetans opposition to the Chinese invasion and occupation of their country. One week later, the demonstrations in Lhasa, the capital city of Tibet, ended with the Dalai Lama fleeing to India. Chinese forces went on to massacre tens of thousands of unarmed Tibetan men, women and children. To honor the memory of those who were killed in the uprising, as well as the over one million Tibetans who have since died as a direct result of the Chinese occupation, Tibetans and their supporters commemorate March 10 with demonstrations and vigils around the world. 


WHAT: Mass rally and a march from Union Square to United Nations.

WHEN/ WHERE: 10am 12:30pm Union Square (14th Street)
12:30pm 1pm March to the United Nations
1pm 3:30pm United Nations, Dag Hammerskjld Plaza (47th St. & 1st Ave.)




-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060308/a61e5386/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Wed Mar  8 03:46:43 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Wed, 08 Mar 2006 06:46:43 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Democrats' Data Mining Stirs an Intraparty Battle -
	Washington Post
Message-ID: <440EC423.2010706@comcast.net>

Democrats' Data Mining Stirs an Intraparty Battle
With Private Effort on Voter Information, Ickes and Soros Challenge Dean 
and DNC

By Thomas B. Edsall
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 8, 2006; A01

A group of well-connected Democrats led by a former top aide to Bill 
Clinton is raising millions of dollars to start a private firm that 
plans to compile huge amounts of data on Americans to identify 
Democratic voters and blunt what has been a clear Republican lead in 
using technology for political advantage.

The effort by Harold Ickes, a deputy chief of staff in the Clinton White 
House and an adviser to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), is 
prompting intense behind-the-scenes debate in Democratic circles. 
Officials at the Democratic National Committee think that creating a 
modern database is their job, and they say that a competing for-profit 
entity could divert energy and money that should instead be invested 
with the national party.

Ickes and others involved in the effort acknowledge that their 
activities are in part a vote of no confidence that the DNC under 
Chairman Howard Dean is ready to compete with Republicans on the 
technological front. "The Republicans have developed a cadre of people 
who appreciate databases and know how to use them, and we are way behind 
the march," said Ickes, whose political technology venture is being 
backed by financier George Soros.

"It's unclear what the DNC is doing. Is it going to be kept up to date?" 
Ickes asked, adding that out-of-date voter information is "worse than 
having no database at all."

Ickes's effort is drawing particular notice among Washington operatives 
who know about it because of speculation that he is acting to build a 
campaign resource for a possible 2008 presidential run by Hillary 
Clinton. She has long been concerned, advisers say, that Democrats and 
liberals lack the political infrastructure of Republicans and their 
conservative allies. Ickes said his new venture, Data Warehouse, will at 
first seek to sell its targeting information to politically active 
unions and liberal interest groups, rather than campaigns.

As it stands now, the DNC and Data Warehouse, created by Ickes and 
Democratic operative Laura Quinn, will separately try to build vast and 
detailed voter lists -- each effort requiring sophisticated expertise 
and costing well over $10 million.

"From an institutional standpoint, this is one of the most important 
things the DNC can and should do. Building this voter file is part of 
our job," Communications Director Karen Finney said. "We believe this is 
something we have to do at the DNC. Our job is to build the 
infrastructure of the party."

In the 2003-2004 election cycle, the DNC began building a national voter 
file, and it proved highly effective in raising money. Because of many 
technical problems, however, it was not useful to state and local 
organizations trying to get out the vote.

The pressure on Democrats to begin more aggressive "data mining" in the 
hunt for votes began after the 2002 midterm elections and intensified 
after the 2004 presidential contest, when the GOP harnessed data 
technology to powerful effect.

In 2002, for the first time in recent memory, Republicans ran better 
get-out-the-vote programs than Democrats. When well done, such drives 
typically raise a candidate's Election Day performance by two to four 
percentage points. Democrats have become increasingly fearful that the 
GOP is capitalizing on high-speed computers and the growing volume of 
data available from government files and consumer marketing firms -- as 
well as the party's own surveys -- to better target potential supporters.

The Republican database has allowed the party and its candidates to 
tailor messages to individual voters and households, using information 
about the kind of magazines they receive, whether they own guns, the 
churches they attend, their incomes, their charitable contributions and 
their voting histories.

This makes it possible to specifically address the issues of voters who, 
in the case of many GOP supporters, may oppose abortion, support gun 
rights or be angry about government use of eminent domain to take 
private property. A personalized pitch can be made during door-knocking, 
through direct mail and e-mail, and via phone banks.

This approach is designed to complement the broad-brush approach of 
television and radio advertising, which by its nature must be addressed 
to large, and often diverse, audiences.

Traditional get-out-the-vote efforts operated crudely, such as by 
canvassing neighborhoods in which at least 65 percent of residents voted 
for a particular party. It was often deemed too inefficient to focus on 
neighborhoods where the partisan tilt was less decisive, and it ran the 
risk of doing more to turn out the opposition's vote.

The advantage of data-based targeting is that political field operatives 
can home in on precisely the voters they wish to reach -- the 
antiabortion parishioners of a traditionally Democratic African American 
church congregation, for instance.

Consultants working for the Republican National Committee developed 
strategies to design messages targeting individual voters' "anger 
points" in the belief that grievance is one of the strongest motivations 
to get people to turn out on Election Day.

Under the direction of Bush adviser Karl Rove, the RNC and state parties 
repeatedly tested the voter file and different ways to contact voters to 
determine which were most effective at boosting turnout.

"They were smart. They came into our neighborhoods. They came into 
Democratic areas with very specific targeted messages to take Democratic 
voters away from us," then-DNC Chairman Terence R. McAuliffe said after 
the 2004 contest. "They were much more sophisticated in their message 
delivery."

Ickes has quietly raised an estimated $7.5 million in start-up money for 
Data Warehouse. A prospectus said the company will need at least $11.5 
million in initial capital.

In addition to Soros's support, Ickes has the financial backing of some 
of the wealthy participants in a new fundraising group called the 
Democracy Alliance. He and Quinn, who will be chief executive of Data 
Warehouse, have hired technology specialists from internet retailer 
Amazon.com and a Harvard-Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer 
project.

Quinn had worked on the voter file program under McAuliffe, but Dean 
brought in his own people after he took over in early 2005.

These included former Dean presidential campaign workers who formed a 
company called Blue State Digital, now under contract with the DNC.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/07/AR2006030701860.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060308/061c549e/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Wed Mar  8 03:47:51 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Wed, 08 Mar 2006 06:47:51 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] House Agrees To Vote On Ports - Washington Post
Message-ID: <440EC467.5000406@comcast.net>

House Agrees To Vote On Ports
Showdown With President Likely

By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 8, 2006; A01

Efforts by the White House to hold off legislation challenging a 
Dubai-owned company's acquisition of operations at six major U.S. ports 
collapsed yesterday when House Republican leaders agreed to allow a vote 
next week that could kill the deal.

Appropriations Committee Chairman Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.) will attach 
legislation to block the deal today to a must-pass emergency spending 
bill funding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. A House vote on the 
measure next week will set up a direct confrontation with President 
Bush, who sternly vowed to veto any bill delaying or stopping Dubai 
Ports World's purchase of London-based Peninsular & Oriental Steamship Co.

"Listen, this is a very big political problem," said House Majority 
Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), explaining that he had to give his 
rank-and-file members a chance to vote. "There are two things that go on 
in this town. We do public policy, and we do politics. And you know, 
most bills at the end of the day, the politics and the policy kind of 
come together, but not always. And we are into one of these situations 
where this has become a very hot political potato."

Ron Bonjean, spokesman for House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), 
said GOP leadership is "endorsing the viewpoint of our members and 
Chairman Lewis that we do not believe the U.S. should allow a 
government-owned company to operate American ports."

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said last night that the 
administration is "committed to keeping open and sincere lines of 
communication with Congress." She added, though, that "the president's 
position is unchanged."

Since the Dubai port issue exploded last month, the Bush administration, 
GOP leaders and DP World officials have tried to defuse the situation 
and to buy time to let the issue fade.

In a deal brokered by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), DP 
World resubmitted its acquisition this week to the administration for a 
45-day national security investigation. Frist has said he will hold off 
any legislation in the Senate until that inquiry is completed, a vow 
meant to give the administration and the company a chance to present 
their case.

That agreement appears to have quieted calls in the Senate for immediate 
action against the deal. Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.), an early critic of 
the deal, said briefings by port security experts and company officials 
have eased his concerns. But House Republican aides and Senate Democrats 
said the Senate will almost certainly have to follow once the House acts.

"This issue is going to go away like the sun's not going to come up in 
the morning," said Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.).

"There's a lot of politics going on around here," Martinez said.

The House is still boiling. Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan 
Hunter (R-Calif.), with bipartisan support, introduced legislation 
yesterday that would scuttle the deal; mandate that the owners of 
"critical infrastructure" in the United States, including ports, 
highways and power plants, be American; and demand that cargo entering 
U.S. ports be screened within six months of passage.

"This is a question at the heart of the security challenges we will be 
facing in this next century," Hunter said.

House Homeland Security Chairman Peter T. King (R-N.Y.) has been 
shopping around a compromise requiring DP World to team with a U.S. 
partner, which would have complete control of operations at the 
company's holdings at the ports of New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, 
Philadelphia, Miami and New Orleans.

But lawmakers from both parties suggested they could not accept that. 
Hunter said employees and management would remain obedient to the 
company's owners, no matter how walled off from operations those owners 
are. "It's difficult to come to the conclusion that security can be 
absolute and ownership can be irrelevant," he said.

Even King questioned whether it would be workable. If DP World were 
guaranteed a percentage of the profits from its U.S. holdings, it would 
have to have access to financial records that King wants to deny the 
company. Instead, King said, DP World would have to receive a flat 
annual sum from those operations, a contract that may be impossible to 
write.

DP World officials were similarly noncommittal.

"We appreciate the comments and suggestion of the congressman, among 
many other congressmen and people from the White House also, as well as 
the senators," Sultan Bin Sulayem, Dubai Ports World's chairman, told 
CNN. "This 45 days that we have volunteered for review is a good chance 
for all of us, I think. And I think by the end of this, they will 
realize that there is no fear, no worry about security."

DP World officials suggested yesterday that within days, Peninsular & 
Oriental's operations will belong to them, no matter what Congress does.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/07/AR2006030701229.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060308/d34f79cc/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Wed Mar  8 03:50:47 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Wed, 08 Mar 2006 06:50:47 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] IMPORTANT: The Planet Can't Wait - David Ignatius -
 Washington Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <440EC517.2080305@comcast.net>

The Planet Can't Wait
Climate Change Is Real and Must Be Addressed Now
<>
By David Ignatius
The Washington Post
Wednesday, March 8, 2006; A19

The warnings are coming from frogs and beetles, from melting ice and 
changing ocean currents, and from scientists and responsible politicians 
around the world. And yet what is the U.S. government doing about global 
warming? Nothing. That should shock the conscience of Americans.

Actually, the Bush administration's policy is worse than doing nothing. 
It has resisted efforts by other nations to discuss new actions that 
could reduce emissions of carbon dioxide before the global climate 
reaches a disastrous tipping point. And it muzzles administration 
scientists to keep them from warning about the seriousness of the issue. 
The administration's position is that more research is needed -- and 
then, as evidence grows that humans are adding to global warming, it 
calls for still more research.

Congress is no better. Most members apparently are waiting for 
permission from lobbyists and campaign contributors before getting 
serious about climate change. The McCain-Lieberman bill to cap emissions 
languishes in the Senate; Pete Domenici, the powerful chairman of the 
Senate Energy Committee, has issued a white paper calling for ideas for 
legislation, but there's no word when a bill might emerge from his 
committee. Meanwhile, the Senate environment committee is also claiming 
jurisdiction. So what we have in the Senate is a turf fight. And don't 
even talk about the House. Maybe members would get interested if they 
thought Dubai was behind global warming.

Giant corporations such as General Electric and Citigroup have concluded 
that global warming is real, and they are beginning to mobilize their 
resources to do something about it. This business activism may offer the 
best hope of moving government off its duff. I asked Tom Donohue, the 
head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and one of Washington's savviest 
political operators, when he might commit his organization's 
considerable clout to taking action on this issue. He's still in the 
"needs more study" mode, but he added, "When the time is right, we'll be 
as helpful as we can." Hey, Tom, the time is right.

Every week brings new evidence that global climate change is real and 
that it's advancing more rapidly than scientists had expected. This past 
week brought a report in Science that the Antarctic is losing as much as 
36 cubic miles of ice a year. Last month researchers reported that 
glaciers in Greenland are melting twice as fast as previously estimated. 
One normally cautious scientist, Richard Alley, told The Post's Juliet 
Eilperin he was concerned about the Antarctic findings, since just five 
years ago scientists had been expecting more ice. "That's a wake-up 
call," he said. "We better figure out what's going on."

Animals don't have the luxury of ordering up more studies of global 
warming. Andrew Revkin of the New York Times reported in January that 
colorful harlequin frogs found in Latin America are dying at alarming 
rates because of a fungus that seems to be linked to global warming. 
Doug Struck explained last week in The Post that climate change is 
helping the ravenous mountain pine beetle devour forests in British 
Columbia, killing more trees than wildfires or logging. Similar findings 
are stacked in a depressing pile in my study that keeps getting taller.

And now we come to the Bush administration -- the folks who once warned 
that it would be folly to wait so long for evidence that the "smoking 
gun" might be a mushroom cloud. Their spirit of vigilance was applied to 
Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, which turned out not to exist -- but 
not to climate change, which does. In a meeting in Montreal last 
December, the chief American delegate, Harlan L. Watson, got so peeved 
about a proposal for new global "mechanisms" to carry out the 1992 Kyoto 
Protocol that he walked out. The American side relented after the 
wording was softened to "opportunities," and there's now at least a hope 
for future talks about talks about global warming.

But woe unto any administration official who becomes so concerned about 
global warming that he actually tries to sound the alarm. James E. 
Hansen, the top climate scientist at NASA, found that political minders 
at NASA headquarters had ordered a review of his lectures, papers, 
interviews and Internet postings after he called for quick reductions in 
greenhouse gas emissions to ease global warming. A 24-year-old former 
Bush campaign worker who allegedly had been involved in efforts to 
muzzle Hansen later resigned -- after reports surfaced that he had 
fudged his r?sum?.

Usually, America's political antics are forgivable, but not on this 
issue. As evidence grows that human activity is accelerating dangerous 
changes in the world's climate, the Bush administration's excuses for 
inaction are running out. History will not forgive political leaders who 
failed to act on this issue, and neither should voters.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/07/AR2006030701199.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060308/087bbbb1/attachment-0001.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Wed Mar  8 03:53:14 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Wed, 08 Mar 2006 06:53:14 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Build a Fence -- And Amnesty - Robert J. Samuelson -
 Washington Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <440EC5AA.3040605@comcast.net>

Build a Fence -- And Amnesty

By Robert J. Samuelson
The Washington Post
Wednesday, March 8, 2006; A19

It's time to build a real fence or a wall along every foot of the 1,989 
miles of the U.S.-Mexican border. There can be only two arguments 
against this approach to keeping out illegal immigrants: (1) it won't 
work -- possible, but we won't know unless we try; or (2) we don't want 
it to work -- then, we should say so and open our borders to anyone but 
criminals and terrorists. Either way, we need more candor in our 
immigration debates. Now is the time, because Congress is considering 
its first major immigration legislation in years.

In 2005 the Border Patrol stopped 1.19 million people trying to enter 
the United States illegally; 98.5 percent of them were caught along the 
southern border. Of those who got through and stayed (crude estimate: 
some 500,000 annually), about two-thirds lack a high school education. 
Even a country as accepting of newcomers as the United States cannot 
effortlessly absorb infinite numbers of poor and unskilled workers. 
Legal immigration totals 750,000 to 1 million people annually, many of 
them also unskilled.

I do not like advocating a fence. It looks and feels bad. It's easily 
stigmatized as racist. It would antagonize Mexico. The imagery is 
appalling, but it beats the alternative: a growing underclass and social 
tensions. Moreover, a genuine fence would probably work. The 
construction of about 10 miles of steel and concrete barriers up to 15 
feet high in San Diego has reduced illegal crossings in that sector by 
about 95 percent since 1992, reports Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), a 
supporter of a U.S.-Mexico fence. Sure, there will be tunnels and 
ladders. But getting in will be harder. Policing will be easier.

We also need to stiffen employer fines for hiring illegal immigrants. 
Businesses should have to check prospective workers against computer 
databases with Social Security numbers, passports or immigration 
documents. Now employers only have to inspect physical documents, which 
are easily forged. Even these lax rules are widely flouted and poorly 
policed. In 2004 the Department of Homeland Security cited only three 
employers for possible violations, says the Government Accountability 
Office. With an estimated 10 million to 12 million illegal immigrants in 
the United States, that's mighty slim.

Fewer jobs and genuine border control ought to curb illegal immigration. 
Good. Naturally, there's another point of view. It is that the United 
States needs more unskilled workers to fill jobs native-born Americans 
won't take. One solution is to admit more unskilled workers legally. By 
this view, Hispanics are assimilating economically and culturally as 
fast as some groups in the past.

Perhaps. But common sense and available evidence suggest skepticism. If 
there are "shortages" of unskilled American workers, the obvious remedy 
is to raise their wages. A Texas roofing contractor testified to 
Congress that he couldn't get enough roofers at $9 an hour. Okay, 
increase it to $10 or $12. Higher wages will bring forth more workers. 
Perish the thought. Business groups, led by the U.S. Chamber of 
Commerce, clamor for more guest workers. That's a euphemism for cheap 
labor. These business groups seem unperturbed by extravagant increases 
in chief executives' pay. But they're horrified by anything that might 
raise the wages of maids, waitresses, laborers or gardeners.

As for assimilation, it's true that millions of Hispanic families are 
moving into -- and reshaping -- the American mainstream. But average 
trends look less encouraging. Since 1990 about 90 percent of the 
increase in people living below the government's poverty lines has come 
among Hispanics. That has to be mainly immigrants and their U.S.-born 
children. In a report, the Pew Hispanic Center notes:

? Residential segregation is increasing. In 2000, 43 percent of 
Hispanics lived in neighborhoods with Hispanic majorities, up from 39 
percent in 1990.

? The median net worth of Hispanic households is about 9 percent of that 
of non-Hispanic whites (net worth is what people own minus what they owe).

? Only about a quarter of Hispanic college students graduate compared 
with about half for non-Hispanic whites.

Assimilation takes time. The big difference between today's Hispanic 
inflows and past immigration waves is that those stopped. History or 
restrictive laws intervened. There was time for newcomers to adapt. Left 
alone, there's no obvious reason why the present Hispanic immigration 
should even pause. Today's unskilled arrivals make it harder for 
yesterday's to get ahead. The two compete. In 2004 the already-low 
median wages for foreign-born Hispanics dropped 1.6 percent, reports 
Rakesh Kochhar of the Pew Center.

There's a paradox. To make immigration succeed, we need to curb some 
immigration. That's why it's vital to control our border. It also 
explains why it's important not to "solve" that problem merely by 
legalizing these huge inflows. Unfortunately, the legislation being 
considered by the Senate Judiciary Committee would do precisely that. 
Among other things, it would create a virtually open-ended guest worker 
program.

If we control new inflows, we should legalize the illegal immigrants 
already here. Many have American-born children, who are U.S. citizens. 
It is not desirable or ethical to force most illegal immigrants to 
leave. Yes, they broke the law, but we were complicit by making the law 
so easy to break. Their present shadowy status deprives them of rights 
and exposes them to exploitation. We should want the melting pot to work 
-- and fear that it might come to a boil.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/07/AR2006030701202.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060308/d83664e4/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Wed Mar  8 03:57:50 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Wed, 08 Mar 2006 06:57:50 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Skip St. Petersburg,
 Mr. Bush - Anne Applebaum - Washington Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <440EC6BE.7030506@comcast.net>

Skip St. Petersburg, Mr. Bush

By Anne Applebaum
The Washington Post
Wednesday, March 8, 2006; A19

Close your eyes and say it out loud: "G-8." Let the two syllables run 
across your tongue again: "gee-eight." What images drift into your brain?

If you are like most Americans, I suspect that this simple psychological 
experiment will produce something like, "stuffy statesmen, boring 
meeting, prepackaged conclusions." Or maybe, "screaming protesters, riot 
police, prepackaged slogans." Or even, "turn the page and read something 
else."

Maybe it isn't surprising. After all, the Group of Eight, once known as 
the Group of Seven, started life as a private meeting between the 
leaders of the world's largest industrial democracies. Off the record, 
they discussed the economic and political problems of the day. The only 
"message" produced was a statement to the effect that inflation was bad 
and oil prices were high.

Over the years, the G-8 evolved. Even as it came to mean less and less 
to Americans, it meant more and more to others. The Japanese, seeing the 
G-8 as a substitute for the U.N. Security Council they'll never join, 
spent lavishly, racking up a $750 million bill last time they hosted. 
The Europeans, leaping on the chance to set the international agenda, 
chose elaborate, crowd-pleasing "themes" to do with aid or technology. 
African, Latin American and Middle Eastern leaders showed up to bask in 
the reflected limelight. The Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, was 
allowed first to attend meetings and then to join, on the muddled 
grounds that making him a member, despite his country's lack of 
qualifications, would magically turn Russia into one of the world's 
largest democracies, too. It did not.

But now, having acquired ludicrous levels of significance and symbolism, 
the institution faces a genuine crisis. In July, the organization is 
going to meet for the first time under Russian leadership, in Russian 
President Vladimir Putin's hometown of St. Petersburg. And for the first 
time, a G-8 summit could produce, along with the bland communique, a 
political backlash harmful to all.

For by going to St. Petersburg, President Bush, Prime Minister Tony 
Blair, President Jacques Chirac, and the leaders of Italy, Germany, 
Canada and Japan will in effect place their stamp of approval on the 
removal of political rights, the harassment of independent groups, the 
renationalization of energy and the censorship of media that Putin has 
imposed on his country since he took over from Yeltsin six years ago. 
They will also give their blessing to Putin's use of gas pipelines to 
threaten Ukraine, and to his ambiguous role in Iranian nuclear and 
Middle East peace negotiations. And after Bush goes home, the denizens 
of the Kremlin -- along with Venezuelans, Iranians, Arab leaders and 
others around the world -- will sit back, laugh and agree that the 
leaders of the so-called West merely pay lip service to the ideals of 
freedom and democracy; they don't really believe in them. If you have 
enough oil, they'll let you into their clubs anyway. The long-term 
result: The American president's ability to speak credibly about 
democracy and political freedom will be irreparably damaged.

Perhaps you think it ridiculous to sound so apocalyptic about a meeting 
that most Americans find too boring to read about. But don't listen to 
me, listen to Andrei Illarionov, an economic adviser to Putin before he 
resigned last year in disgust. Illarionov says that Putin invariably 
returns from G-8 meetings feeling strengthened and empowered in his 
political course -- and it is true that Putin's opponents have been 
arrested or put on trial in a summit's wake. He also says the G-8 is 
taken deadly seriously in Russia, and shrugs when told that Americans 
don't much care one way or the other. "What is important is not how you, 
in the U.S., view the G-8. You have to think how your participation will 
be viewed and used in the world." Nor does it matter that U.S. leaders 
have always met with Russian dictators, since, to the Russians and to 
others, this is much different from a bilateral meeting: "There is no 
case in previous history when you endorsed such policies at such a 
level, at the G-8 level."

I should explain that Illarionov is in Washington this week for a 
conference. I should also add that he says he's been surprised by how 
many people, both here and in Russia, have asked whether he's really 
returning to Moscow afterward -- "will you dare go back" being a 
question that no one even considered asking five years ago. It is tragic 
but true: Russia has once again become a place where blunt-speaking 
economists have to watch their backs.

There is still time: President Bush has four months to decide whether he 
wants to endorse this new Russia, four months to decide whether he wants 
to bestow on Putin the full approval of the West's most prestigious 
club, four months to decide whether he will destroy what remains of his 
credibility as a promoter of democracy and human rights. He can mitigate 
the damage -- he can stop in Vilnius or Kiev on the way, he can declare 
his faith in freedom to his Russian hosts -- but neither the Kremlin, 
nor the other opponents of democracy around the world, will care. All 
they will remember is that he was there.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/07/AR2006030701332.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060308/2a475353/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Wed Mar  8 04:04:15 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Wed, 08 Mar 2006 07:04:15 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Notes from Harry Browne - Jeff Jacoby - Boston Globe
	Op-Ed
Message-ID: <440EC83F.6030807@comcast.net>


  Notes from Harry Browne

By Jeff Jacoby  |  March 8, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

IT CAME as a jolt to learn that Harry Browne -- scholar, gentleman, 
apostle of freedom, and two-time Libertarian Party candidate for 
president -- had died on March 1 of Lou Gehrig's disease. It came as an 
even greater jolt to discover that his last published words were 
apparently a criticism of . . . me.

The final post on ''Harry Browne's Journal," his online blog, was about 
a column of mine arguing that Supreme Court nominees should be compelled 
to give substantive answers to questions asked during their Senate 
confirmation hearings. Those hearings, I had written, should be used to 
remind the justices that they are not lords and masters but ''public 
servants who must answer, however indirectly, to the people."

Harry didn't quote that line. Instead he quoted my description of the 
Supreme Court's immense reach: ''From the power of presidents to hold 
terror suspects indefinitely to the power of Congress to override state 
law, from the execution of murderers to the recognition of same-sex 
marriage, from affirmative action to abortion, [John] Roberts and his 
fellow justices will shape national policy for years to come."

Then came Harry's scolding: ''Not one of the items mentioned is listed 
in the Constitution as a function of the federal government . . . 
Roberts's job is awesome, no question about it. The only problem is that 
the politicians and pundits have a different job description than that 
given in the Constitution."

I wish he had sent me an e-mail with that criticism. I would have 
reassured him that on this issue, we didn't differ in the least -- I was 
describing the judiciary as it has become, not as the Founders intended 
it to be. But by the time I saw Harry's objection, it was too late to reply.

Notes from Harry weren't uncommon, and they were unfailingly polite, 
even when he was distressed by a stand I had taken. He knew I was a fan 
of his, if not quite as dogmatically antigovernment or as willing to 
treat unfettered individual autonomy as the highest of all values.

Twice I had voted for him for president -- a distinction, I once told 
him, he shared with Ronald Reagan. The first time was in 1996, when I 
wouldn't vote to reelect Bill Clinton and couldn't bring myself to 
support either of his two leading opponents, the feckless Bob Dole or 
the bizarre Ross Perot. Instead, I pulled the lever for the 
distinguished-looking Libertarian who spoke with such refreshing 
bluntness about the maddening inability of the state to get things 
right. Of Dole's proposal that year to use the military for drug 
interdiction, Harry had said, ''Government can't keep drugs out of the 
country; it can't even keep drugs out of its own prisons." Social 
Security he defined as ''a fraudulent scheme in which the government 
collects money from you for your retirement -- and immediately spends 
the money on something else."

Four years later, unwilling to back the younger George Bush when the 
elder Bush had been such a disappointment, I voted Libertarian again.

But then came 9/11 and the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. Like many 
hard-and-fast Libertarians Harry was an antiwar isolationist, convinced 
that America would have few problems in the world if it stayed home and 
minded its own business. Al Qaeda's terror attacks, he insisted, were 
caused by US foreign policy, not Islamist extremism; he compared 
Republicans who supported Bush to Germans who supported Hitler.

I disagreed vehemently, as I generally disagree with Libertarians on 
foreign policy, and Harry's notes to me became more impassioned. ''God 
only knows what the results of Bush's idealism will be," he wrote last 
year, ''but it won't be a democratic Middle East, an end to terrorism, 
or peace in the world." When I said it was ''perverse" not to 
acknowledge the good that had been accomplished by Saddam's ouster -- 
''the mass graves are being exhumed, not added to; the prison rape rooms 
are shut down; Saddam and his thugs are going on trial" -- he replied by 
writing an article that questioned whether the atrocities of Saddam's 
regime had ever actually taken place. It saddened me that a man so 
attuned to the loss of liberty at home could be so cavalier about the 
horrors of dictatorship elsewhere.

Looking back at Harry Browne's record, though, what stands out are not 
the infelicities but the intensity of his American dream. Let Americans 
live freely, he insisted, and the results would be harmony, tolerance, 
responsibility, and success. ''That is the America we should have," he 
once wrote. ''The beacon of liberty, providing light and hope and 
inspiration for the entire world."

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/08/notes_from_harry_browne/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060308/5084ff17/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Wed Mar  8 04:00:41 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Wed, 08 Mar 2006 07:00:41 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Making Russia a better neighbor - Mark Brzezinski -
 Boston Globe Op-Ed
Message-ID: <440EC769.8080708@comcast.net>


  Making Russia a better neighbor

By Mark Brzezinski  |  March 8, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

LAST SUMMER, the Council of Europe issued a report urging Russia to 
cease treating ''neighboring and other countries in the region as zones 
of special influence." The report urges Russia to ''constructively 
contribute to resolution of open issues and cease with activities . . . 
which undermine the countries' sovereignty and territorial integrity."

A key message from President Bush to President Vladimir Putin should be 
that Russia's own integration into the world, a highly desirable 
objective, is jeopardized if at the same time the Kremlin has a policy 
of undercutting democratic development along its borders.

It's unlikely that there's a Kremlin master plan guiding Russia's 
actions toward her neighbors. Instead, Russia's actions are driven 
variably by ambition and nostalgia, confusion or misinterpretation, 
irritation or resentment.

And Russia's policy toward the former Soviet republics varies -- it's 
manifested in different ways and it produces different results. The 
Baltic States today are confident of their independence and sovereignty, 
but they remain afraid of Russia. Baltic leaders and Ukraine claim that 
Russia uses energy to assert leverage, by having Russian concerns 
acquire key elements of their energy sectors.

Ukraine and Belarus are themselves contrasts between striving for 
independence and extreme dependency. Ukrainian President Viktor 
Yuschenko has been clear about the goal of Ukraine's membership in the 
European Union. But he realizes the vital importance of not estranging 
Russia and has taken steps to develop dialogue with the Kremlin, even 
after Russia shut off gas supplies on Jan. 1. By contrast, Belarus 
remains a dependency where democracy demonstrations in the lead-up to 
the March 19 presidential election have been brutally crushed.

In the Caucasus and Moldova, Russia has tried to readjust the 
orientation of her neighbors, with little success. In 2002, Russia told 
Georgia to end its political and security relationship with NATO, and 
urged Georgia to accept Russian bases for the long-term. In Central 
Asia, dictators who previously resisted closer cooperation with Moscow 
have been encouraged by the Kremlin's urging to be heavy-handed with any 
signs of religious revival. Only Russia and China endorsed the 
Uzbekistan government's killing of hundreds of demonstrators in Andijon 
last summer.

There are signs that Russia is adjusting to new realities. In Georgia, 
Russia accommodated itself to Georgian central control over Ajaria and 
helped with the removal from Georgia of separatist leader Aslan 
Abashidze. In 2005, Russian and Georgian authorities agreed to troop 
withdrawal with a timetable and benchmarks, and ended their demand for 
financial compensation. But there are potential loopholes through 
follow-on pacts, and Russian troops and arsenals in Georgia may be 
redeployed to Armenia -- alarming Azerbaijan.

It's in Russia's interest, and in America's, for there to be greater 
trust and cooperation between Russia and her neighbors. The United 
States should strive to get Russia to understand that it is not pursuing 
a policy to transform the region into a zone of American control through 
''color revolutions." Instead, what's been happening there is part of a 
process of what's been happening in Europe for more than 50 years.

At the same time, countries in Russia's neighborhood need reassurance 
that the United States is committed to their independence, integrity, 
and stability. The lack of Western reaction to Russian meddling made 
some new democracies worry that their sovereignty is entirely 
subordinate to other key US interests with Russia.

In the near-term, the upcoming Belarus presidential election provides an 
important test. Today Belarus is one of the most repressive former 
Soviet republics. Last week, police beat and detained Alexander Kozulin, 
an opposition presidential candidate. A new law pushed through 
Parliament last year makes organizing a public protest -- or making 
statements that discredit the state -- punishable by three to five years 
in prison.

Symbolizing solidarity with the opposition, Bush met recently with the 
widows of two Belarusan leaders who were murdered by Alexander 
Lukashenko's government. But as Western governments develop a strategy 
in the event that international monitors report electoral fraud on March 
19, it must be remembered that Lukashenko's major financial and 
political sponsor is Putin.

In the long term, the West might consider a more dynamic vision of its 
relationship with a democratic Russia. As the Russia task force of the 
Council on Foreign Relations recommends: ''Western leaders should also 
diversify their political contacts within Russia. It's not enough to 
meet with representatives of 'civil society.' Open and routine contact 
with opposition political figures and organizations carry a more potent 
message." Doing so would give credibility and consistency to Bush's 
freedom agenda.

Mark Brzezinski, a Washington attorney, was director of Russian and 
Eurasian affairs on the National Security Council in the Clinton 
administration.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/08/making_russia_a_better_neighbor/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060308/87b4b5ac/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Wed Mar  8 08:54:35 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Wed,  8 Mar 2006 16:54:35 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: G.O.P. Senators Say Accord Is Set on
	Wiretapping
Message-ID: <20060308165435.96FFC83E20@lax-gw03.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

WASHINGTON | March 8, 2006
G.O.P. Senators Say Accord Is Set on Wiretapping
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and SCOTT SHANE
A deal with the White House would impose oversight on domestic spying but avoids the full committee inquiry sought by Democrats.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/08/politics/08nsa.html?ex=1142485200&en=67d5b9fc218292b9&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060308/53a6032b/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Wed Mar  8 08:55:42 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Wed,  8 Mar 2006 16:55:42 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Many Couples Must Negotiate Terms of
	'Brokeback' Marriages
Message-ID: <20060308165542.C29CB13B74C@lax-gw04.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

HEALTH | March 7, 2006
Many Couples Must Negotiate Terms of 'Brokeback' Marriages
By KATY BUTLER
An estimated 1.7 million to 3.4 million American women were once or are now married to men who have sex with men.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/07/health/07broke.html?ex=1142485200&en=2ef0b468b333dd78&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060308/b5d62b87/attachment-0001.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Wed Mar  8 08:57:13 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Wed,  8 Mar 2006 16:57:13 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: With a New Leader,
	Chile Seems to Shuck Its Strait Laces
Message-ID: <20060308165713.86F469FCFF@lax-gw05.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

INTERNATIONAL / AMERICAS | March 8, 2006
Letter From Chile: With a New Leader, Chile Seems to Shuck Its Strait Laces
By LARRY ROHTER
The iron hand of Pinochet has given way to divorce, the end of movie censorship and public posing in the nude.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/08/international/americas/08letter.html?ex=1142485200&en=a1248a1117d6f3c6&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060308/d59e3150/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Wed Mar  8 09:01:00 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Wed,  8 Mar 2006 17:01:00 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: G.O.P. Leaders Vowing to Block Ports
	Agreement
Message-ID: <20060308170100.3B11F23707C@lax-gw01.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

WASHINGTON | March 8, 2006
G.O.P. Leaders Vowing to Block Ports Agreement
By CARL HULSE
Defying President Bush, the lawmakers said they would take action to scuttle a Dubai firm's deal before a 45-day review is over.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/08/politics/08ports.html?ex=1142485200&en=01e6c9a0d4e20251&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060308/21c84e08/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Wed Mar  8 09:01:43 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: 8 Mar 2006 17:01:43 -0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] Headlines for March 8, 2006
Message-ID: <20060308170143.30604.qmail@trinity.democracynow.org>

Mike Blaxill  ( mblaxill at yahoo.com )
sent you this story from democracynow.org




+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  Headlines for March 8, 2006
|  http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/08/1620201
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+


- Bush, GOP Sens. Reach Eavesdropping Agreement 
- House Renews Patriot Act 
- Republicans Force Vote on Dubai Firm Port Deal
- Conflict Brewing At Columbia Over Finkelstein Lecture
- Bodies of 2 Katrina Victims Found in New Orleans
- House Demolitions Resume in Ninth Ward
- Ex-Enron CFO Testifies Skilling Ordered Fraudulent Reports
This story continues at: 
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/08/1620201


From michael at michaelbutler.com  Wed Mar  8 10:34:17 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Wed, 08 Mar 2006 10:34:17 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Nipping and Tucking on Both Coasts By MAUREEN DOWD
Message-ID: <C03463A9.29D56%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 8, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Nipping and Tucking on Both Coasts
By MAUREEN DOWD

There is a crash of ideologies between the country's two most self-regarding
and fantasy-spinning power centers. The Bush crowd cringes away from gay
cowboys spooning, gay authors flouncing, transgender babes exploring and
George the Dashing Clooneying in movies about the glories of free speech and
the dangers of oilmen influencing policy.

But as I looked around Vanity Fair's slinky Oscar party on Sunday night, it
struck me that the bellicose Bushies do share a presentation aesthetic with
Tinseltown's trompe l'oeil beauties: you see no furrowed brows, no regretful
winces, no unflattering wrinkles, no admissions of imperfection, no qualms
about puffing up what you really have, no visible signs of hard lessons
learned, and no desire to confront reality in the mirror.

Who ever thought Dick Cheney and Mamie Van Doren would have so much in
common?

The White House is constantly trying to do laser resurfacing on its Iraq
policy, to sandblast away the damage from its own mistakes. But its veneer
may be beyond repair.

In Hollywood terms, we've reached an Indiana Jones crisis moment in our
parlous protectorate. The cave is collapsing, the snakes are encroaching,
the vehicles are exploding, the crushing ball is rolling down on us. The
public has stopped buying the administration's sugary spin. The Washington
Post reported yesterday that 80 percent of Americans ? cutting across party
lines ? say sectarian violence makes civil war in Iraq likely. More than a
third call it "very likely." Half also think the U.S. should begin
withdrawing troops from Iraq, the poll found, and two-thirds say the
president has no clear plan for Iraq.

The widespread resistance to the Dubai ports deal, even among newly
fractious Republicans, indicates that Americans have lost faith in the
president's competence ? a faith shredded by the White House's obtuseness
and lies on Katrina.

As Hollywood often does, the administration scorns introspection and
originality. It sticks with the same worn themes: Stay the course. Victory's
around the corner. Anyone who expresses skepticism is a defeatist, a softie
on terrorism.

On "Meet the Press" on Sunday, Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, said Iraq was "going very, very well, from everything you look
at." And at a Pentagon briefing yesterday, Rummy, who should have resigned
in shame long ago, tried to blame the press, echoing Gen. George Casey in
saying: "Much of the reporting in the U.S. and abroad has exaggerated the
situation."

He added, "The steady stream of errors all seem to be of a nature to inflame
the situation and to give heart to the terrorists."

After all the horrible mistakes in judgment the defense secretary has made ?
mistakes that have left our troops without proper backup and armor, created
an inept and corrupt occupation, and confused soldiers into thinking torture
was O.K. ? it takes humongous gall to suggest that the problem is really the
reporters.

Many experts say we're close to a civil war ? or already in one. Even the
U.S. envoy, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, told The Los Angeles Times on
Monday that the invasion of Iraq had opened a "Pandora's box" of tribal and
religious fissures that could devour the region. His words evoked a
harrowing image of the bad spirits swarming up the mountain in Disney's
"Fantasia" as Mussorgsky's "Night on Bald Mountain" played.

He said that if there's another incident like the Shiite shrine's being
blown up, Iraq is "really vulnerable."

The Pentagon says it'll look once more at the death by friendly fire of the
football player and Army Ranger Pat Tillman in Afghanistan, because the
first three inquiries had problems ? one more sad illustration of the
administration's cynical attempt not to let anything get in the way of its
heroic, and dermatologically plumped up, story line for America.

Correction

My column of Feb. 18 said that Scooter Libby testified that "superiors" had
authorized him to leak classified information about Valerie Plame. Rather,
Mr. Libby testified that "superiors" had authorized him to leak classified
information from an intelligence report to rebut critics and justify the
Iraq war, not information about Valerie Plame.

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From michael at intrafi.com  Wed Mar  8 10:39:39 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Wed,  8 Mar 2006 18:39:39 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Iraq's Little Armies
Message-ID: <20060308183939.A6892249CC6@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: michael at intrafi.com.

OPINION | March 8, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor: Iraq's Little Armies
By MATT SHERMAN
Until militias are made subservient to the elected government, there will be no stability in Iraq.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/08/opinion/08sherman.html?ex=1142485200&en=353bb4493bbef64c&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060308/49e208b7/attachment.htm 

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Wed Mar  8 10:39:07 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Wed, 08 Mar 2006 10:39:07 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Letting India in the Club? By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Message-ID: <C03464CB.29D59%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 8, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Letting India in the Club?
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

India is a country that had me at hello. Call me biased, but I have a soft
spot for countries of one billion people, speaking a hundred different
languages and practicing a variety of religions, whose people hold regular
free and fair elections and, despite massive poverty, still produce
generations of doctors and engineers who help to make the world a more
productive and peaceful place. Sure, as today's bombings in India
illustrate, it has its problems ? but it is not Iraq. It is a beacon of
tolerance and stability.

So I applaud President Bush's desire to form a deeper partnership with
India. There is only one thing I would not do for that cause: endorse ? in
its current form ? the nuclear arms deal that the Bush team just cut with
New Delhi. I am all for finding a creative way to bring India into the
world's nuclear family. India deserves to be treated differently than Iran.
But we can't do it in a way that could melt down the Nuclear
Nonproliferation Treaty and foster a nuclear arms race in South Asia.

What's the problem? India has never signed the N.P.T., which is the
international legal framework that limited the world's nuclear club to the
U.S., China, Russia, Britain and France. For decades, U.S. policy has been
very consistent: we do not sell civilian nuclear technology to any country
that has not signed the N.P.T. And since that included India, India could
never buy reactors, even for its civilian power needs, from America.

But with India eager to buy U.S. nuclear technology, and the U.S. eager to
build India into an economic and geostrategic counterweight to China, the
Bush team wanted ? rightly ? to find a way to get India out of the corner it
put itself in when it first set off a nuclear blast in 1974. Under the
Bush-India deal, India would designate 14 of its 22 nuclear power reactors
as "civilian," to be put under international safeguards, leaving the other 8
free from inspections and able to produce as much bomb-grade plutonium as
India wanted. In return, U.S. companies would be able to sell India
civilian-use nuclear reactors and technology.

This is a troubling deal for two reasons. First, it could only undermine the
Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Yes, I know, the Bush team doesn't believe
in treaties and says the treaty isn't restraining the rogues anyway. But
this treaty is the legal basis by which we have been able to build
coalitions against the nuclear rogues to restrain them from spreading W.M.D.
One of the key legal bases for isolating Saddam Hussein was that he'd
violated the N.P.T., which Iraq had signed. The legal basis by which we are
building a coalition against Iran's going nuclear is the N.P.T. Under the
N.P.T., we board ships suspected of carrying W.M.D. Japan, Brazil and
Argentina all chose to forgo nuclear weapons to gain access to foreign
nuclear technology by abiding by the N.P.T. What are they going to think if
India gets a free pass?

What should we have done? Bob Einhorn, who has worked on nonproliferation
for every administration since Nixon's, has the right idea: Tell India that
it can have this deal ? provided it does something hard that would clearly
reinforce the global nonproliferation regime. And that would be halting all
production of weapons-grade material, thereby capping India's stockpile of
nuclear bomb ingredients where it is. That could be a lever to get Pakistan
to do the same. The fewer bomb-making materials around, the less likely it
is for any to fall into the hands of terrorists.

"The Bush administration proposed such a production cutoff in negotiations,
but dropped the idea when India balked," Mr. Einhorn said. "India says it is
willing to adopt the same responsibilities and practices as the other
nuclear powers. It so happens that the five original nuclear powers ? U.S.,
U.K., France, Russia and China ? have all stopped producing fissile material
for weapons. If we are going to bring India into the club, it should do so
as well."

India says it needs to keep producing nuclear material to have a more
credible deterrent. I can't judge that. All I know is that we should not go
ahead with this deal until India is ready to halt its production of
weapons-grade material.

"The problem the Bush administration faces in selling the nuclear deal is
not, as the president has said, that 'some people just don't want to change'
or that they are focused on outdated concerns," Mr. Einhorn argued. "People
are willing to change. They want to support the president's India
initiative, even modify longstanding policies. But they want to do it in a
way that also serves an objective that is hardly outdated: preventing
nuclear proliferation."

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From michael at intrafi.com  Wed Mar  8 10:44:59 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Wed, 8 Mar 2006 10:44:59 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] =?iso-8859-1?q?FT=2Ecom_/_Comment_=26_analysis_/_Analy?=
 =?iso-8859-1?q?sis_-_Dubai_sees_future_as_ally=2C_entrep=F4t_and_playgrou?=
 =?iso-8859-1?q?nd?=
Message-ID: <25591282.1141843499080.JavaMail.tomcat@localhost>



*Please note, the sender's email address has not been verified.



You have received the following link from michael at intrafi.com

 
********************
 
If you are having trouble with any of the links in this message, or if the URL's are not appearing as links, please follow the instructions at the bottom of this email.
 
Title: FT.com / Comment & analysis / Analysis - Dubai sees future as ally, entrep?t and playground
 
  
Copy and paste the following into your Web browser to access the sent link:
http://www.emailthis.clickability.com/et/emailThis?clickMap=viewThis&etMailToID=378861951&pt=Y
 

Copy and paste the following into your Web browser to SAVE THIS link:
http://www.savethis.clickability.com/st/saveThisPopupApp?clickMap=saveFromET&partnerID=1744&etMailToID=378861951&pt=Y

 
Copy and paste the following into your Web browser to forward this link:
http://www.emailthis.clickability.com/et/emailThis?clickMap=forward&etMailToID=378861951&partnerID=1744&pt=Y

  
 
********************


Email pages from any Web site you visit - add the EMAIL THIS button to your browser, copy and paste the following into your Web browser:
http://www.emailthis.clickability.com/et/emailThis?clickMap=browserButtons&pt=Y"


*********************



Instructions:
-----------------------------------------
If your e-mail program doesn't recognize Web addresses:
1. With your mouse, highlight the Web Address above. Be sure to highlight the entire Web address, even if it spans more than one line in your email. 
2. Select Copy from the Edit menu at the top of your screen. 
3. Launch your Web browser.
4. Paste the address into your Web browser by selecting Paste from the Edit menu.
5. Click Go or press Enter or Return on your keyboard. 
 
********************
 
 
 
 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060308/eb20a19c/attachment.htm 

From michael at intrafi.com  Wed Mar  8 10:46:23 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Wed, 8 Mar 2006 10:46:23 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] FT.com / Comment & analysis / Comment - Old media must
	embrace the amateur
Message-ID: <8737170.1141843583372.JavaMail.tomcat@localhost>



*Please note, the sender's email address has not been verified.



You have received the following link from michael at intrafi.com

 
********************
 
If you are having trouble with any of the links in this message, or if the URL's are not appearing as links, please follow the instructions at the bottom of this email.
 
Title: FT.com / Comment & analysis / Comment - Old media must embrace the amateur
 
  
Copy and paste the following into your Web browser to access the sent link:
http://www.emailthis.clickability.com/et/emailThis?clickMap=viewThis&etMailToID=875028876&pt=Y
 

Copy and paste the following into your Web browser to SAVE THIS link:
http://www.savethis.clickability.com/st/saveThisPopupApp?clickMap=saveFromET&partnerID=1744&etMailToID=875028876&pt=Y

 
Copy and paste the following into your Web browser to forward this link:
http://www.emailthis.clickability.com/et/emailThis?clickMap=forward&etMailToID=875028876&partnerID=1744&pt=Y

  
 
********************


Email pages from any Web site you visit - add the EMAIL THIS button to your browser, copy and paste the following into your Web browser:
http://www.emailthis.clickability.com/et/emailThis?clickMap=browserButtons&pt=Y"


*********************



Instructions:
-----------------------------------------
If your e-mail program doesn't recognize Web addresses:
1. With your mouse, highlight the Web Address above. Be sure to highlight the entire Web address, even if it spans more than one line in your email. 
2. Select Copy from the Edit menu at the top of your screen. 
3. Launch your Web browser.
4. Paste the address into your Web browser by selecting Paste from the Edit menu.
5. Click Go or press Enter or Return on your keyboard. 
 
********************
 
 
 
 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060308/efc93d82/attachment-0001.htm 

From michael at intrafi.com  Wed Mar  8 10:47:28 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Wed, 8 Mar 2006 10:47:28 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] FT.com / World / US - Republicans seek to derail US
	ports deal
Message-ID: <470531.1141843648899.JavaMail.tomcat@localhost>



*Please note, the sender's email address has not been verified.



You have received the following link from michael at intrafi.com

 
********************
 
If you are having trouble with any of the links in this message, or if the URL's are not appearing as links, please follow the instructions at the bottom of this email.
 
Title: FT.com / World / US - Republicans seek to derail US ports deal
 
  
Copy and paste the following into your Web browser to access the sent link:
http://www.emailthis.clickability.com/et/emailThis?clickMap=viewThis&etMailToID=27699541&pt=Y
 

Copy and paste the following into your Web browser to SAVE THIS link:
http://www.savethis.clickability.com/st/saveThisPopupApp?clickMap=saveFromET&partnerID=1700&etMailToID=27699541&pt=Y

 
Copy and paste the following into your Web browser to forward this link:
http://www.emailthis.clickability.com/et/emailThis?clickMap=forward&etMailToID=27699541&partnerID=1700&pt=Y

  
 
********************


Email pages from any Web site you visit - add the EMAIL THIS button to your browser, copy and paste the following into your Web browser:
http://www.emailthis.clickability.com/et/emailThis?clickMap=browserButtons&pt=Y"


*********************



Instructions:
-----------------------------------------
If your e-mail program doesn't recognize Web addresses:
1. With your mouse, highlight the Web Address above. Be sure to highlight the entire Web address, even if it spans more than one line in your email. 
2. Select Copy from the Edit menu at the top of your screen. 
3. Launch your Web browser.
4. Paste the address into your Web browser by selecting Paste from the Edit menu.
5. Click Go or press Enter or Return on your keyboard. 
 
********************
 
 
 
 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060308/5394060b/attachment.htm 

From ean at sbcglobal.net  Tue Mar  7 18:17:29 2006
From: ean at sbcglobal.net (ean at sbcglobal.net)
Date: Tue, 07 Mar 2006 18:17:29 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] HAVE YOU EVER BEEN CONVICTED OF A FELONY?
Message-ID: <E1FH4Pl-0001KE-4a@smtpauth04.mail.atl.earthlink.net>

HAVE YOU EVER BEEN CONVICTED OF A FELONY?
By Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

Have you ever been convicted of a felony?

That question is asked throughout our lives.

By people who are interviewing us for a job.

By courts seeking jurors.

By Little League officials screening coaches.

For background checks of all kinds.

People want to know.

If you have been convicted of a felony, then it says something bad about
you.

And if you have been convicted of a felony, then people generally don't
want anything to do with you.

So, our advice -- don't get convicted of a felony.

But let's say we had a system where you could commit a felony, and not be
convicted of a felony.

Let's say you rob a bank, and get caught robbing the bank.

And the prosecutor says to you -- okay, we can do this two ways.

You can plead guilty to the crime. And be sentenced to prison. And you
would have been convicted of a felony.

And that felony will follow you the rest of your life.

Or you can just agree to go to prison, and agree to pay a fine -- and we
won't convict you of the felony.

So, when you get out of prison, there won't be that black mark on your
record.

And when you are asked throughout your life -- have you ever been
convicted of a felony? -- you can tell the truth and say -- no.

The prosecutor gets everything the prosecutor could get with a
conviction -- restitution, prison, a fine.

Except for the conviction.

Prosecutors would never accept such a system for human being criminals.

Because prosecutors believe they represent the public.

And in cases of serious crimes, they must defend the public's right to get
justice.

And justice demands not only punishment but deterrence.

And deterrence demands of us that we remember for our entire lives that
rules exist for a reason.

Society says, if you commit a serious crime, the conviction will follow
you your whole life.

Those are the rules for human beings who commit serious crimes.

For corporate criminals, the rules have changed, in just the past couple
of years.

The change is this -- a major U.S. corporation that commits a felony no
longer has to plead guilty to a felony.

Instead, federal prosecutors will offer -- and the corporation will
accept -- a deferred prosecution or non prosecution agreement.

And it is difficult to find a prosecutor, defense attorney, academic or
politician who is not supportive of this trend.

They argue this -- a prosecutor gets everything they could get from a
criminal prosecution -- fines, restitution, changing in corporate
structure, cooperation against the guilty individuals -- except for the
conviction.

And a conviction would threaten innocent third parties -- workers and
investors. See Arthur Andersen.

So, with deferred and non prosecution agreements, you get the best of both
worlds -- change within the corporation, fines paid to the government,
restitution to the victim -- and few if any collateral consequences
against innocent third parties.

This sea change has largely gone unnoticed in the mainstream media.

It used to be that a corporation caught committing a serious crime would
be convicted of committing a serious crime.

No longer.

Under the new system, outside of a few antitrust and environmental
crimes, it is highly unlikely that a major corporate criminal will be
convicted of a crime in the United States.

Corporations too do not like to answer "yes" to the question -- have you
ever been convicted of a felony?

They could be barred from government contracts, from the various
markets. Consumers, investors and workers may shun them.

Had corporations introduced legislation in Congress to repeal corporate
criminal liability, there would have been an uproar in the press.

But they have effectively repealed corporate criminal liability for big
business -- through prosecutorial discretion. It is unclear what the
effects of this effective repeal will be.

But to those who defend the trend, they must answer this question -- why
the double standard?

Why not offer deferred prosecution and non prosecution deals to all
major individual felons -- drug pushers, money launderers and muggers
alike?

After all, you get all of the benefits of a criminal prosecution,
without the collateral consequences.

Prison, fines, restitution.

It's just that, when you go to answer -- have you ever been convicted of a
felony? -- then all of us -- individuals and corporations alike -- will be
able to answer "no" with a clear conscience.


Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime
Reporter, <http://www.corporatecrimereporter.com>. Robert Weissman is
editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor,
<http://www.multinationalmonitor.org>. Mokhiber and Weissman are
co-authors of On the Rampage: Corporate Predators and the Destruction of
Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press).

(c) Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

This article is posted at:
<http://lists.essential.org/pipermail/corp-focus/2006/000232.html>





_______________________________________________

Focus on the Corporation is a weekly column written by Russell Mokhiber
and Robert Weissman. Please feel free to forward the column to friends or
repost the column on other lists. If you would like to post the column on
a web site or publish it in print format, we ask that you first contact us
(russell at corporatecrimereporter.com or rob at essential.org).

Focus on the Corporation is distributed to individuals on the listserve
corp-focus at lists.essential.org. To subscribe, unsubscribe or change your
address to corp-focus, go to:
<http://lists.essential.org/mailman/listinfo/corp-focus> or send an e-mail
message to corp-focus-admin at lists.essential.org with your request.

Focus on the Corporation columns are posted at
<http://www.corporatepredators.org>.


-- 
You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, 
option D (up to 3 emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options 
(option A - 1x/week, option B - 3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option D - 
up to 3x/day) please reply and let us know!  If someone forwarded you 
this email and you want to be on our list, send an email to 
ean at sbcglobal.net and tell us which option you'd like.


"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060307/6d137357/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Wed Mar  8 11:47:04 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Wed,  8 Mar 2006 19:47:04 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: They Came for the Chicken Farmer
Message-ID: <20060308194704.482EB249D0F@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

OPINION | March 8, 2006
Editorial: They Came for the Chicken Farmer

Far too many prisoners at Guant?namo Bay seem to be innocents or lowly foot soldiers simply caught up in the whirlwind after 9/11.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/08/opinion/08wed1.html?ex=1142485200&en=c9bd9baaedc87353&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060308/8f9f6f2a/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Wed Mar  8 11:48:28 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Wed,  8 Mar 2006 19:48:28 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: The Call of the Wild Web
Message-ID: <20060308194828.464CA24AEE7@lax-gw02.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

OPINION | March 8, 2006
Editorial: The Call of the Wild Web

The proposed $67 billion megamerger between AT&T and BellSouth raises important questions about the future of the Internet itself.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/08/opinion/08wed2.html?ex=1142485200&en=27140bb93c40c9f4&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060308/f66eceea/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Wed Mar  8 11:48:40 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Wed,  8 Mar 2006 19:48:40 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Beware of What's Sold as Reform
Message-ID: <20060308194840.1D3C99FCDE@lax-gw05.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

OPINION | March 8, 2006
Editorial: Beware of What's Sold as Reform

Revelations about the money-driven symbiosis of lawmaker and lobbyist make it clear that any law stripped of credible enforcement is an election-year charade.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/08/opinion/08wed3.html?ex=1142485200&en=2846f5bd01e2a47a&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060308/e585db96/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Wed Mar  8 11:49:01 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Wed,  8 Mar 2006 19:49:01 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Bush and the Nuclear Subcontinent (4
	Letters)
Message-ID: <20060308194901.099D52371E5@lax-gw01.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

What we're saying...


OPINION | March 8, 2006
Bush and the Nuclear Subcontinent (4 Letters)

To the Editor:.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/08/opinion/l08asia.html?ex=1142485200&en=d301a957549ca710&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060308/724eecd8/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Wed Mar  8 11:49:35 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Wed,  8 Mar 2006 19:49:35 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Do Americans Want to Go It Alone? (4
	Letters)
Message-ID: <20060308194935.4C19E237195@lax-gw01.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

What we're saying (2)...


OPINION | March 8, 2006
Do Americans Want to Go It Alone? (4 Letters)

To the Editor:.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/08/opinion/l08brooks.html?ex=1142485200&en=de81e2730f4f0b97&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060308/e3de6b0a/attachment.htm 

From michael at intrafi.com  Wed Mar  8 12:30:42 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Wed,  8 Mar 2006 20:30:42 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: The Fallback
Message-ID: <20060308203042.21ACF24AFA2@lax-gw02.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: michael at intrafi.com.

MAGAZINE | March 12, 2006
The Fallback
By MATT BAI
There are two and a half years until the 2008 election, and Hillary Clinton already seems to have a lock on the Democratic nomination. But for those Democrats who think she's not electable? Meet Mark Warner of Virginia, the man who wants to be the party's Plan B. 
http://select.nytimes.com/preview/2006/03/12/magazine/1125000314884.html?emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060308/e0d83466/attachment.htm 

From michael at intrafi.com  Wed Mar  8 12:42:40 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael butler)
Date: Wed, 8 Mar 2006 15:42:40 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] TruthDig: 'They tried to attach themselves to his virtue;
	then they wiped their feet with him.'--Mary Tillman
Message-ID: <440f41c067667@intrafi.com>

Hi,

 I read this on Truthdig and thought you would find it interesting.

 =-=-=-=-=-=-=
'They tried to attach themselves to his virtue; then they wiped their feet 
with him.'--Mary Tillman 

With the Pentagon?s inspector general suggesting criminal negligence in the 
killing of former NFL star and Army Ranger Pat Tillman, it is time to demand 
congressional hearings into the way the Bush administration cynically spun 
the story to serve its political purposes at the expense of the truth. 

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060307_pat_tillman_investigation/

 Copyright ? 2006 Truthdig, L.L.C. All rights reserved.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=
This is a one-time mailing from
TruthDig.com
on behalf of the sender.
Please report any misuse to editor-at-truthdig.com

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060308/ca34916f/attachment.htm 

From michael at intrafi.com  Wed Mar  8 12:44:09 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael butler)
Date: Wed, 8 Mar 2006 15:44:09 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] TruthDig: 'This Place Is Broken'
Message-ID: <440f42192098c@intrafi.com>

Hi,

 I read this on Truthdig and thought you would find it interesting.

 =-=-=-=-=-=-=
'This Place Is Broken'

Gore Vidal on fascism, terrorism and wartime propaganda. Part II of 
Truthdig?s interview with the award-winning novelist. (earlier: part I) 

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060308_vidal_terrorism_propaganda_war/

 Copyright ? 2006 Truthdig, L.L.C. All rights reserved.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=
This is a one-time mailing from
TruthDig.com
on behalf of the sender.
Please report any misuse to editor-at-truthdig.com

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060308/77d0d72e/attachment.htm 

From michael at intrafi.com  Wed Mar  8 12:52:20 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael butler)
Date: Wed, 8 Mar 2006 15:52:20 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] TruthDig: The Towering Solons of Abortion
Message-ID: <440f44043de41@intrafi.com>

Hi,

 I read this on Truthdig and thought you would find it interesting.

 =-=-=-=-=-=-=
The Towering Solons of Abortion

When you think ?enlightenment,? the first thing that comes to your mind is 
?the South Dakota Legislature,? right? 

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060307_ivins_abortion/

 Copyright ? 2006 Truthdig, L.L.C. All rights reserved.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=
This is a one-time mailing from
TruthDig.com
on behalf of the sender.
Please report any misuse to editor-at-truthdig.com

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060308/89b4acbf/attachment-0001.htm 

From michael at intrafi.com  Wed Mar  8 12:54:51 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Wed,  8 Mar 2006 12:54:51 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] Alternet: The Truthiness Taliban
Message-ID: <20060308205451.A9F61B8238@alternet.org>


This story has been forwarded to you from
http://www.alternet.org by michael at intrafi.com



-------------------------------------
The Truthiness Taliban
http://www.alternet.org/story/33226

When Americans turn off the TV and pay attention to real matters, we seem eager to forget the facts and embrace the 'truthiness.'
-------------------------------------


From michael at michaelbutler.com  Wed Mar  8 13:11:26 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Wed, 08 Mar 2006 13:11:26 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Because They Hate by Brigitte Gabriel
Message-ID: <C034887F.29D85%michael@michaelbutler.com>

Pamela Surtees sent this:


  Because They Hate
By Brigitte  Gabriel
<http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/authors.asp?ID=2779>
 FrontPageMagazine.com | February 20,  2006
 
[Editor's Note: Below are selected excerpts from Brigitte Gabriel's speech
delivered at the Intelligence Summit  in Washington DC, Saturday February
18, 2006]. 
  

  
We gather here today to share information and knowledge.  Intelligence is
not merely cold hard data about numerical strength or  armament or
disposition of military forces. The most important element of  intelligence
has to be understanding the mindset and intention of the enemy.  The West
has been wallowing in a state of ignorance and denial for thirty  years as
Muslim extremist perpetrated evil against innocent victims in the  name of
Allah.
  

I was ten years old when my home exploded around me,  burying me under the
rubble and leaving me to drink my blood to survive, as  the perpetrators
shouted ?Allah Akbar!? My only crime was that I  was a Christian living in a
Christian town. At 10 years old, I learned the  meaning of the word
"infidel." 
  

I had a crash course in survival. Not in the Girl Scouts,  but in a bomb
shelter where I lived for seven years in pitch darkness,  freezing cold,
drinking stale water and eating grass to live. At the age of  13 I dressed
in my burial clothes going to bed at night, waiting to be  slaughtered. By
the age of 20, I had buried most of my friends--killed by  Muslims. We were
not Americans living in New York, or Britons in London. We were Arab
Christians living in Lebanon.
  

As a victim of Islamic terror, I was amazed when I saw  Americans waking up
on September 12, 2001, and asking themselves "Why do  they hate us?" The
psychoanalyst experts were coming up with all sort of  excuses as to what
did we do to offend the Muslim World. But if America and the West were
paying attention to the Middle East they would not have had to ask the
question. Simply put, they hate us because we are defined in their eyes by
one simple word: "infidels."
  

Under the banner of Islam "la, ilaha illa allah,  muhammad rasoulu allah,"
(None is god except Allah; Muhammad is the  Messenger of Allah) they
murdered Jewish children in Israel, massacred  Christians in Lebanon, killed
Copts in Egypt, Assyrians in Syria, Hindus in  India, and expelled almost
900,000 Jews from Muslim lands. We Middle Eastern  infidels paid the price
then. Now infidels worldwide are paying the price for  indifference and
shortsightedness.
  

Tolerating evil is a crime. Appeasing murderers doesn't  buy protection. It
earns one disrespect and loathing in the enemy's eyes. Yet  apathy is the
weapon by which the West is committing suicide. Political  correctness forms
the shackles around our ankles, by which Islamists are  leading us to our
demise.
  

America and the West are doomed to failure in  this war unless they stand up
and identify the real enemy: Islam. You hear  about Wahabbi and Salafi Islam
as the only extreme form of Islam. All the  other Muslims, supposedly, are
wonderful moderates. Closer to the truth are  the pictures of the irrational
eruption of violence in reaction to the  cartoons of Mohammed printed by a
Danish newspaper. From burning embassies,  to calls to butcher those who
mock Islam, to warnings that the West be  prepared for another holocaust,
those pictures have given us a glimpse into  the real face of the enemy.
News pictures and video of these events represent  a canvas of hate
decorated by different nationalities who share one common  ideology of hate,
bigotry and intolerance derived from one source: authentic  Islam. An Islam
that is awakening from centuries of slumber to re-ignite its  wrath against
the infidel and dominate the world. An Islam which has declared  "Intifada"
on the West.
  

America and the West can no longer afford to  lay in their lazy state of
overweight ignorance. The consequences of this  mental disease are starting
to attack the body, and if they don't take the  necessary steps now to
control it, death will be knocking soon. If you want  to understand the
nature of the enemy we face, visualize a tapestry of  snakes. They slither
and they hiss, and they would eat each other alive, but  they will unite in
a hideous mass to achieve their common goal of imposing  Islam on the world.
  

This is the ugly face of the enemy we are fighting. We  are fighting a
powerful ideology that is capable of altering basic human  instincts. An
ideology that can turn a mother into a launching pad of death.  A perfect
example is a recently elected Hamas official in the Palestinian
Territories who raves in heavenly joy about sending her three sons to death
and offering the ones who are still alive for the cause. It is an ideology
that is capable of offering highly educated individuals such as doctors and
lawyers far more joy in attaining death than any respect and stature, life
in  society is ever capable of giving them.
  

The United States has been a prime target for radical  Islamic hatred and
terror. Every Friday, mosques in the Middle East ring with  shrill prayers
and monotonous chants calling death, destruction and damnation  down on
America and its people. The radical Islamists? deeds have been  as vile as
their words. Since the Iran hostage crisis, more than three  thousand
Americans have died in a terror campaign almost unprecedented in its
calculated cruelty along with thousands of other citizens worldwide. Even
the  Nazis did not turn their own children into human bombs, and then
rejoice at  their deaths as well the deaths of their victims. This
intentional,  indiscriminate and wholesale murder of innocent American
citizens is  justified and glorified in the name of Islam.
  

America cannot effectively defend itself in  this war unless and until the
American people understand the nature of the  enemy that we face. Even after
9/11 there are those who say that we must  ?engage? our terrorist enemies,
that we must ?address their  grievances?. Their grievance is our freedom of
religion. Their  grievance is our freedom of speech. Their grievance is our
democratic process  where the rule of law comes from the voices of many not
that of just one  prophet. It is the respect we instill in our children
towards all religions.  It is the equality we grant each other as human
beings sharing a planet and  striving to make the world a better place for
all humanity. Their grievance  is the kindness and respect a man shows a
woman, the justice we practice as  equals under the law, and the mercy we
grant our enemy. Their grievance  cannot be answered by an apology for who
or what we are.
  

Our mediocre attitude of not confronting Islamic forces  of bigotry and
hatred wherever they raised their ugly head in the last 30  years, has
empowered and strengthened our enemy to launch a full scale attack  on the
very freedoms we cherish in their effort to impose their values and  way of
life on our civilization.
  

If we don't wake up and challenge our Muslim community to  take action
against the terrorists within it, if we don't believe in  ourselves as
Americans and in the standards we should hold every patriotic  American to,
we are going to pay a price for our delusion. For the sake of  our children
and our country, we must wake up and take action. In the face of  a torrent
of hateful invective and terrorist murder, America?s learning curve since
the Iran hostage crisis is so shallow that it is almost flat.  The longer we
lay supine, the more difficult it will be to stand erect.
  
 

 
 

Brigitte Gabriel is an expert on the Middle East conflict and lectures
nationally and internationally on the subject. She's the  former news anchor
of World News for Middle East television and the founder  of
AmericanCongressforTruth.com.



From olhippie at tampabay.rr.com  Wed Mar  8 15:56:59 2006
From: olhippie at tampabay.rr.com (Robin McNamara)
Date: Wed, 8 Mar 2006 18:56:59 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] " Let The Ball Roll"
Message-ID: <000601c6430b$fd0c49a0$97bc2041@CowBox>


Iran says they will inflict "Harm & Pain" & to "Let The Ball Roll"


http://apnews.myway.com/article/20060308/D8G7H2G02.html


Peace
Robin






http://lpintop.tripod.com/robinmcnamara
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060308/4ad12c5a/attachment.htm 

From nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca  Wed Mar  8 16:34:34 2006
From: nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca (CBC News Online)
Date: Thu, 9 Mar 2006 00:34:34 UT
Subject: [Mb-civic] CBC News - STUDENTS ARRESTED IN CONNECTION WITH ALABAMA
	CHURCH ARSONS
Message-ID: <20060309003434.AC1D03EA7B@web02.nm.cbc.ca>

An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Url: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/3924fc46/attachment.diff 

From nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca  Wed Mar  8 16:37:21 2006
From: nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca (CBC News Online)
Date: Thu, 9 Mar 2006 00:37:21 UT
Subject: [Mb-civic] CBC News - JAPANESE CABINET APPROVES PLAN TO FINGERPRINT
	FOREIGNERS
Message-ID: <20060309003721.3462F3EA7B@web02.nm.cbc.ca>

An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Url: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/f9d5b264/attachment.diff 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Wed Mar  8 18:08:38 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Wed, 8 Mar 2006 21:08:38 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Baseball upset
Message-ID: <000701c6431e$649f28f0$783fe440@Harold>

I know this is a silly thing to post, but the fact that Canada beat the United States in the World Baseball Classic (MLB Professionals are playing) is something of amazement. I'm sure that at the end of the series the US will win the Classic, still funny!

http://sports.sympatico.msn.cbc.ca/Home/ContentPosting.aspx?feedname=CBC-SPORTS-V2&newsitemid=canada-wbc060308&showbyline=True

Later H
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060308/9da67e7f/attachment.htm 

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Wed Mar  8 21:25:13 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Wed, 08 Mar 2006 21:25:13 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] HERE May Be Our Next Candidate
Message-ID: <C034FC39.29DBD%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 12, 2006
The Fallback
By MATT BAI

If you harbor serious thoughts of running for the presidency, the first
thing you do ? long before you commission any polls or make any ads, years
before you charter planes to take you back and forth between Iowa and New
Hampshire ? is to sit down with guys like Chris Korge. A real-estate
developer in Coral Gables, outside Miami, Korge is one of the Democratic
Party's most proficient "bundlers." That is, in the last two presidential
elections, he bundled together more than $7 million in campaign

For Korge, the 2008 presidential campaign began a few days after Kerry lost,
when, he says, one prospective candidate ? he won't say who ? called to
enlist his help. Having raised money for both of Bill Clinton's presidential
campaigns, which earned him an overnight stay in the Lincoln Bedroom, Korge
already knew he would support Hillary Clinton if she ran; he considers her
the most impressive politician he has ever met, including her husband. But
that didn't stop her potential rivals ? John Edwards, Joe Biden, Evan Bayh,
Wesley Clark ? from dropping by, nor did it stop Korge, a guy who rightly
prides himself on knowing just about everybody in Democratic politics, from
taking the meetings. "In the last six months, I've pretty much seen or
talked with all of them, or they've tried to meet with me," Korge told me
during a conversation in late January.

A few weeks before we spoke, Korge had lunch at the Capital Grille in Miami
with Mark Warner, who was then in his final weeks as Virginia's governor.
Though little known nationally, Warner has emerged in recent months as the
bright new star in the constellation of would-be candidates, a source of
curiosity among Democrats searching for a charismatic outsider to lead the
party. Pundits credit Warner's popularity in Republican-dominated Virginia ?
his 80 percent approval rating when he left office made him one of the most
adored governors in the state's history ? with enabling his Democratic
lieutenant governor, Tim Kaine, to win the election to succeed him last
November. Suddenly, Warner is being mentioned near the top of every list of
candidates vying for the nomination in 2008.

Over lunch with Korge and his real-estate partner, Warner made what has
become, more or less, his standard pitch. Much as he likes John Kerry and
worked hard for him in Virginia, Warner said, the Democratic Party had once
again, in 2004, nominated a candidate who could not appeal on a cultural
level to white, small-town voters in wide swaths of the country. Warner
argued that he was more likely than any of the other potential Democratic
candidates to break that cycle. The candidate he was really talking about,
of course, was Clinton. It wasn't that she wouldn't do a great job in the
White House, necessarily; what Warner was saying, without actually saying
it, was that she couldn't get there. Democrats, he liked to say, could not
afford to keep trotting out nominees who could expect to win only 16 blue
states and then hope, just maybe, for the "triple bank shot" that might
deliver Ohio or Florida. They needed a candidate who could compete
everywhere.

Korge had already heard some version of the same case from several of
Warner's rivals. "They can't help themselves," he told me. "What you hear is
two things: one, why Hillary can't win, and two, why they're going to be the
other candidate who emerges in the showdown with Hillary." Korge told Warner
the same thing he told the other suitors, including John Kerry: he was loyal
to Hillary and intended to stay that way. That was fine, Warner said, but
would Korge be willing to introduce him to friends who weren't yet decided?
Korge deflected the request. To him, helping Warner raise money would have
been "counterproductive."

You might think this would have deflated Warner. It didn't. He knows that
many of the money guys he goes to see at this early stage are going to
pledge their allegiance to Clinton. But the path of a campaign is long and
twisting, and there may come a time when Korge needs a fallback candidate.
More to the point, aside from being a fund-raiser, Korge is a validator, the
kind of guy to whom others in business and politics will listen. There are
perhaps 20,000 activists and contributors whose choices influence the
Democratic nominating process, and Korge talks with more than a few of them;
his casual appraisals mean something.


From swiggard at comcast.net  Thu Mar  9 03:48:16 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Thu, 09 Mar 2006 06:48:16 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Negative Perception Of Islam Increasing - Washington Post
Message-ID: <44101600.8080706@comcast.net>

Negative Perception Of Islam Increasing
Poll Numbers in U.S. Higher Than in 2001

By Claudia Deane and Darryl Fears
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, March 9, 2006; A01

As the war in Iraq grinds into its fourth year, a growing proportion of 
Americans are expressing unfavorable views of Islam, and a majority now 
say that Muslims are disproportionately prone to violence, according to 
a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

The poll found that nearly half of Americans -- 46 percent -- have a 
negative view of Islam, seven percentage points higher than in the tense 
months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and 
the Pentagon, when Muslims were often targeted for violence.

The survey comes at a time of increasing tension; the wars in 
Afghanistan and Iraq show little sign of ending, and members of Congress 
are seeking to block the Bush administration's attempt to hire an Arab 
company to manage operations at six of the nation's ports. Also, 
Americans are reading news of deadly protests by Muslims over Danish 
cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad.

Conservative and liberal experts said Americans' attitudes about Islam 
are fueled in part by political statements and media reports that focus 
almost solely on the actions of Muslim extremists.

According to the poll, the proportion of Americans who believe that 
Islam helps to stoke violence against non-Muslims has more than doubled 
since the attacks, from 14 percent in January 2002 to 33 percent today.

The survey also found that one in three Americans have heard prejudiced 
comments about Muslims lately. In a separate question, slightly more (43 
percent) reported having heard negative remarks about Arabs. One in four 
Americans admitted to harboring prejudice toward Muslims, the same 
proportion that expressed some personal bias against Arabs.

Though the two groups are often linked in popular discourse, most of the 
world's Muslims are not of Arab descent. For example, the country with 
the largest Muslim population is Indonesia.

As a school bus driver in Chicago, Gary McCord, 65, dealt with many 
children of Arab descent. "Some of the best families I've ever had were 
some of my Muslim families," he said in a follow-up interview. "They 
were so nice to me." He now works for a Palestinian Christian family, 
whose members he says are "really marvelous."

But his good feelings do not extend to Islam. "I don't mean to sound 
harsh or anything, but I don't like what the Muslim people believe in, 
according to the Koran. Because I think they preach hate," he said.

As for the controversial cartoons of Muhammad, he said Arabs seem 
hypersensitive about religion. "I think it's been blown out of 
proportion," he said.

Frederick Cole, a welder in Roosevelt, Utah, acknowledged: "As far as 
being prejudiced against them, I'd have to say maybe a little bit. If I 
were to go through an airport and I saw one out of the corner of my eye, 
I'd say, 'I wonder what he's thinking.' " Still, Cole, 30, said, "I 
don't think the religion is based on just wanting to terrorize people."

A total of 1,000 randomly selected Americans were interviewed March 2-5 
for this Post-ABC News poll. The margin of sampling error for the 
overall results is plus or minus three percentage points.

Americans who said they understood Islam were more likely to see the 
religion overall as peaceful and respectful. But they were no less 
likely to say it harbors harmful extremists, and they were also no less 
likely to have prejudiced feelings against Muslims.

In Gadsden, Ala., Ron Hardy, an auto parts supplier, said Arabs own a 
lot of stores in his area and "they're okay." But, Hardy, 41, said "I do 
think" Islam has been "hijacked by some militant-like guys."

Edward Rios, 31, an engineer in McHenry, Ill., said he feels that Islam 
"is as good a religion as any other" yet vengeance seems to be "built 
into their own set of beliefs: If someone attacks our people, it is your 
duty to defend them. . . . I don't think Christianity has anything like 
that."

James J. Zogby, president of the Washington-based Arab American 
Institute, said he is not surprised by the poll's results. Politicians, 
authors and media commentators have demonized the Arab world since 2001, 
he said.

"The intensity has not abated and remains a vein that's very near the 
surface, ready to be tapped at any moment," Zogby said. "Members of 
Congress have been exploiting this over the ports issue. Radio 
commentators have been talking about it nonstop."

Juan Cole, a professor of modern Middle Eastern and South Asian history 
at the University of Michigan, agreed, saying Americans "have been given 
the message to respond this way by the American political elite, mass 
media and by select special interests."

Cole said he was shocked when a radio talk show host asked him if 
Islamic extremists would set off a nuclear bomb in the United States in 
the next six months. "It was ridiculous. I think anti-Arab racism and 
profiling has become respectable," he said.

Ronald Stockton, a professor of political science at the University of 
Michigan at Dearborn who helped conduct a study of Arabs in the Detroit 
area and on views of them held by non-Arabs, said an exceptionally high 
percentage of non-Muslims feels the media depicts Arabs unfairly, yet 
still holds negative opinions.

"You're getting a constant drumbeat of negative information about 
Islam," he said.

Michael Franc, vice president of government relations for the 
conservative Heritage Foundation, said that the survey responses "seems 
to me to be a real backlash against Islam" and that congressional 
leaders do not help the problem by sometimes using language that links 
all Muslims with extremists.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/08/AR2006030802221.html?referrer=email
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/a684ac74/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Thu Mar  9 03:51:09 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Thu, 09 Mar 2006 06:51:09 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] A Conscience With a Lens (Gordon Parks Appreciation) -
 Washington Post
Message-ID: <441016AD.6020005@comcast.net>

A Conscience With a Lens
Gordon Parks Turned Photographs Into Poetry

By Wil Haygood
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 9, 2006; C01

Those who remember say that seeing Gordon Parks on the streets of 
Manhattan in the early 1950s was a beautiful thing.

His hair was wavy and black and swept back. Sometimes he wore an ascot. 
Maybe the night before he had been up in Harlem, hanging out with 
Langston Hughes or Jimmy Baldwin at Small's Paradise, having a bit to 
drink, talking about his photographs of Paris. Parks was always going or 
coming. And he always had his cameras.

"I'd see him on downtown street corners, always with a camera," says 
Evelyn Cunningham, a journalist who befriended Parks in the 1950s. "He'd 
be testing the light."

Cunningham says she and others always marveled at how Parks kept up such 
a stylish persona -- and his reputation as a major photographer.

He held dinner parties and soirees, wore long coats in the rain, and 
boxed up his cameras in lovely suitcases to travel.

He had a thing for fresh flowers.

He was not a great poet, but he was a poet nevertheless.

"He was a very sexy guy," says Cunningham. "He was always hitting on 
women -- tall, short. I was amused. I'm not criticizing. All the women 
loved him. He was glamorous and had a very beautiful apartment. He also 
laughed at himself. That, I thought, was refreshing. He didn't take 
himself very seriously -- but he took his cameras seriously."

Parks, who died Tuesday at the age of 93 in New York, crisscrossed 
America and the world for decades. He was an artist, writer, movie 
director. He was a Life photographer when that gig gave you a powerful 
cachet. In America, he used his cameras like six-shooters, aiming right 
at the nation's broken souls, her sad-eyed children, her blacks, browns 
and whites, her shoeshine men and faceless women with both dishrag and 
dignity.

In recent years Parks had been treated with tributes, a still-trim man 
with white hair out at Manhattan museums and galleries, swiveling into 
throngs of admirers, his hand shooting to shake this hand and that as he 
was reminded time and time again of the impact of his books and movies 
and photographs. Especially the photographs.

Parks's life had daguerreotype qualities: He was born in Kansas, he had 
worked as a sheepherder, he once went on the road with a semi-pro 
basketball team. In his youth he had struck out like Huck Finn, living 
in railroad towns, scribbling notes on postcards, letting those back 
home know all was okay.

"He didn't know fear," says Deborah Willis, a professor of history and 
imaging at New York University who befriended Parks in the 1970s, and 
who has done much to bring the work of black photographers to wider 
audiences. "He would always say to me, 'Debbie, you gotta keep working.' 
He would show me a way of moving on. I think it was rooted in the way he 
grew up."

Willis is teaching about Parks this semester at Harvard in a course 
titled "The Body and the Lens."

"It's about how Gordon used his work in a political way," she says.

Like Baldwin, Hughes and Richard Wright, he stretched boundaries and 
woke up others.

The government helped when he got work in the historical section of the 
Farm Security Administration's photography project.

In Washington in 1942 he aimed his camera at a woman no one had heard of 
by the name of Ella Watson. She was a cleaning lady with a thin, haunted 
face. She was poor as nickels. Parks once said the photograph said as 
much as a picture of a cross burning: "I thought then . . . that you 
could not photograph a person who turns you away from the motion picture 
ticket window, or someone who refuses to feed you, or someone who 
refuses to wait on you in a store. You could not photograph him and say, 
'This is a bigot,' because bigots have a way of looking like everybody 
else."

"With that image," says Willis of the Watson photograph, "he was trying 
to show survival -- and beauty. The beauty in looking at the woman in 
raising her children and adopted daughter. The broom and mop were iconic 
images of the American woman. He was constructing a story about women 
who survived."

There was much work in the '50s photographing actors, fashion shows, 
beautiful things. He had seen the awful cruelties of life, and then he 
aimed his camera into the expanse of beauty as well. Broadway intrigued 
him. There's Tallulah Bankhead onstage in "Dear Charles." There's 
languidly beautiful Hildegarde Neff onstage in "Silk Stockings." There's 
Lorraine Hansberry -- a world-beater following her Broadway debut of "A 
Raisin in the Sun" -- at Sardi's, her hair high on her head. There's a 
parish priest strolling through a wheat field with a parishioner.

But in the '60s Parks was determined again to put the saga of America 
and her deep hurts into his lens.

Chicago at that time was as cruel a city as could be when it came to 
black poverty, its ailments profound and endless. Congress was trying to 
find ways to address poverty with legislation, but it wasn't enough. In 
Chicago, there were children eating plaster in their cold apartments 
because they were hungry.

For its March 8, 1968, issue, Life gave Parks both pen and camera. He 
went to Chicago and stood on a street corner, checking the light. He 
held nothing back.

"Look at me and know that to destroy me is to destroy yourself," the 
photographer wrote in introducing his photo spread. "You are weary of 
the long hot summers. I am tired of the long hungered winters. We are 
not so far apart as it might seem. There is something about both of us 
that goes deeper than blood or black and white. . . . My children's 
needs are the same as your children's."

Sixteen pages of Parks in words and photos: a child sleeping against a 
bedroom wall with holes; children studying in darkness; a picture of 
Jesus; a snaggle-toothed child who had been eating plaster; a man with a 
wave of tears in his eyes; a child and mother on a bed.

Poorer than nickels.

And yet, there was something beautiful about the pictures. Something 
sadly beautiful.

"The beauty of those Chicago slum pictures was not that there were 
pictures there of birds in flight with beautiful color," says Jeanne 
Moutoussamy-Ashe, a photographer who was a friend of Parks's for 30 
years. "It was a beauty of the human spirit. There was beauty, no matter 
how hard the life. And that's what Gordon found interesting."

A year after his Life magazine spread, Parks directed his first movie, 
"The Learning Tree," adapted from his autobiographical novel of the same 
name. Two years later would come his hit, "Shaft." The movie, from the 
Ernest Tidyman novel, was about a black private eye who solves a 
kidnapping. It was an amalgamation of Parks's interests in fashion, 
dignity, breaking barriers.

Parks received fine reviews, Richard Roundtree became a star and Isaac 
Hayes won an Oscar for the "Shaft" musical score.

"Just auditioning for that movie was such a big deal," says Sherri 
Bronfman, who played the kidnapped daughter Marcy. "That was like the 
beginning of black movies being done.

"The white movie executives didn't know anything about us as a people. 
Parks did. We were used to auditioning for white directors who we felt 
didn't know us."

Bronfman showed up to begin filming the movie dressed in a miniskirt and 
maxicoat. She was happy. She waved hello to Parks and got herself to the 
wardrobe department. She was given a brown outfit to wear. On the set, 
Parks looked at her. He didn't like what wardrobe had outfitted her in. 
"He said, 'What you were wearing when you came in, go put that back on.' 
He had an eye," says Bronfman.

In black America, "Shaft" became both movie and cultural moment. Shaft 
was cool, stopped traffic with a wave of the arm, and didn't kowtow to 
anyone. He wasn't afraid of the man because he was The Man.

"Shaft showed our men in a whole other light," says Bronfman. "Shaft was 
take-charge. And the way Gordon allowed language to go in the movie.

"The stereotypes were not there. The characters were clearly defined."

Parks kept writing, autobiographies and photo books. He was generous 
with his time.

Moutoussamy-Ashe was in a photo exhibit at a Harlem gallery in 1976 
along with Dawoud Bey and Frank Stewart, two other photographers. At 
night she had studied Parks, looked at his images, thought she might 
someday meet that impressive man, but probably not. But there he was, at 
the door of her opening. "The great Gordon Parks showed!" she remembers. 
"We were just three novice photographers. Even the gallery owner said, 
'Wow.' We were just stunned."

As he grew sicker last year, he seemed to grow lonelier. There were 
nurses around, but no wife. He had been married three times and divorced 
three times. He was smitten with photographer Ming Smith, had been for 
years, and asked her to marry him. "I blushed," says Smith. "I told him 
I'd think about it."

Visitors to his United Nations Plaza apartment were awed by the beauty 
and the decorative touches. There were always fresh flowers. Artwork and 
books were everywhere. On New Year's Day, Smith and Bronfman went by to 
visit. There was laughter, cookies, sweets. He insisted on playing 
something on the piano. He rose, stiffly, and sat down. He played 
Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata."

An old man, young again. The women smiled.

When Bronfman reached in the closet for her coat, her eyes stopped. She 
saw it hanging there. Shiny and black and cool.

"His 'Shaft' coat," she says.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/08/AR2006030802486.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/fa34f92b/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Thu Mar  9 03:56:21 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Thu, 09 Mar 2006 06:56:21 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Two Leaders' Power Failures - Jim Hoagland - Washington
	Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <441017E5.3090407@comcast.net>

Two Leaders' Power Failures
Bush and Putin, Against the Tide

By Jim Hoagland
The Washington Post
Thursday, March 9, 2006; A19

When does a senior government official decide that the bosses can no 
longer be trusted or expected to change for the better? That they must 
instead be restrained by the force of political opposition from causing 
more damage?

The question ceased to be academic for Andrei Illarionov some time ago. 
In December he resigned as a senior economic adviser to President 
Vladimir Putin and became an outspoken critic of the way things are 
going in Russia. Listening to Illarionov's informative lament the other 
day, I couldn't help thinking of the swelling crisis of confidence in 
President Bush's leadership that is occurring in Washington.

This is not to compare Bush to Putin, a former KGB colonel, or Russia's 
shrinking democratic space to the vigorous cacophony of American 
politics. Neither comparison holds water.

But if power corrupts in the ways suggested by Lord Acton, so can 
feelings of powerlessness. Stung by terrorist assaults on their 
homelands, Bush and Putin set out separately to restore executive 
authority and a national discipline they felt had eroded over time. And 
they have now pushed efforts to concentrate power to the point of 
provoking cries of alarm -- not only from civil libertarians but also 
from those within their own political ranks.

"For three years, we were able to accomplish a good deal as an economic 
team," Illarionov told Post editors and reporters on Monday during a 
brief visit here. "But gradually, it became impossible to do anything on 
economic policy" as the Kremlin took control over Russia's most 
important businesses as well as the legislature and courts.

"For a time, I thought these could be mistakes, and they might be 
corrected. But I came to understand that was not the case," the 
economist continued.

That realization came primarily through the confiscation of the Yukos 
oil group and the brutal jailing of its chairman, Mikhail Khodorkovsky 
-- actions that Illarionov publicly and sharply criticized while still 
in office. "From then, I saw my main duty as the duty to speak out" as 
political parties and broadcast media were taken over or coerced into 
silence by the Kremlin.

After resigning, Illarionov published a scathing critique of Russia's 
being turned into "a corporate state" run for the benefit of a few who 
were empowered to ransack and loot private companies at will. His 
1,900-word article appeared in Kommersant, an opposition Moscow 
newspaper, on Jan. 23.

Both in the article and in our conversation, Illarionov refused to 
criticize Putin personally or to offer a theory about what changed 
between spring 2000 -- when Illarionov went to work at the Kremlin with 
bright hopes and enough influence to enact reforms -- and autumn 2004, 
when he effectively gave up on Putin's rule. The fact that he is 
returning to Moscow this week may account for his reticence.

Illarionov did note that huge revenue windfalls from surging energy 
prices enhanced the government's ability to do things its way. Another 
part of the answer to the puzzle of what happened may lie in a 
description I heard recently of the most pressing problems facing a 
great nation:

"The powers of the presidency have been eroded and usurped to the 
breaking point. We are engaged in a new kind of war that cannot be 
fought by old methods. It can only be directed by a strong executive who 
alone is not subject to the conflicting pressures that legislators or 
judges face. The public understands and supports that unpleasant 
reality, whatever the media and intellectuals say."

These words came from a White House aide defending U.S. policies on 
Guantanamo Bay prisoners, secret renditions and warrantless 
eavesdropping in a conversation with me. A few days later, I heard a 
Russian official use nearly identical terms to defend his country's 
coercive merging of private energy and media companies under state control.

Both Putin and Bush swim against the tides of their time as state power 
fragments or atrophies everywhere, not just in Moscow or Washington. The 
spread of technology and global communications weakens all governments. 
The better policy choice is to take those changes into account and use 
them in nimble fashion, rather than simply lashing out against them in 
strong-arm fashion.

U.S. public trust and confidence in the Bush White House are slipping 
toward the threshold of self-sustaining political disaster. A serious 
schism within the Republican Party itself is no longer unthinkable if 
the White House cannot demonstrate minimal competence in managing 
Katrina, Guantanamo, Dubai Ports World and other controversies. There is 
a point, as the case of Andrei Illarionov shows, where even those who 
wish you well will give up.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/08/AR2006030801947.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/78cfb8a1/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Thu Mar  9 04:00:08 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Thu, 09 Mar 2006 07:00:08 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Ways and Means -- and a Price - David S. Broder -
 Washington Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <441018C8.5010102@comcast.net>

Ways and Means -- and a Price

By David S. Broder
The Washington Post
Thursday, March 9, 2006; A19

In many ways, the saga of this Republican era in the House of 
Representatives can be summed up in the story of Bill Thomas, the 
California congressman who announced this week that he is retiring as 
chairman of the Ways and Means Committee and not standing for reelection.

Thomas is an able, principled conservative who has pushed through major 
legislation that has changed the direction of national policy and 
altered millions of people's life prospects. He is also someone who has 
inflicted substantial damage to the legislative process and to personal 
relationships on Capitol Hill, leaving bruised feelings in his wake.

In both ways -- in what he has accomplished and in the chaos he has 
wrought -- he typifies the mixed record of the 11 years since 
Republicans wrested control of the House from the long-dominant Democrats.

Thomas, one of the few professional political scientists to serve in 
Congress, roomed as a freshman in 1979 with a fellow academic named Newt 
Gingrich, and the two men chafed in similar fashion under Democratic 
rule. The Almanac of American Politics profile of Thomas recalls his vow 
at the time that if Republicans ever gained control, "We will not be 
civilized. We will not assume it's business as usual. We will not go 
back to playing the lackey."

No need to worry. Always one of the smartest and hardest-working 
members, Thomas came into his own as soon as the Republicans took power. 
First, as chairman of the minor House Administration Committee, he 
rammed through a set of procedural changes that tightened leadership 
control of the finances and operations of the House.

In 2001 he was named chairman of the mighty Ways and Means Committee, 
with jurisdiction over taxes, Social Security, Medicare and welfare. 
Since then, as he noted in his retirement statement on Monday, "We 
passed over $2 trillion in tax relief for hardworking American families, 
we provided the President with trade promotion authority so that he 
could seek freer and fairer trade markets, and we approved a long 
overdue voluntary prescription drug benefit in Medicare for the first 
time in the program's history."

All of those measures were and are controversial, but no one can dispute 
that Thomas's imprint on the legislation -- and, therefore, on American 
life -- has been significant.

The achievement, though, has come at a price. What was once a committee 
whose institutional pride was far greater than its partisan divisions 
has become a bitter political cockpit, where major national policy is 
set by party-line votes, rather than through patient negotiation and 
discussion.

As a result, when Thomas has brought bills to the floor of the House, 
they often have had to be muscled through by brute political force. The 
major trade bill of which he boasted passed 215 to 214. The Medicare 
drug benefit was approved only after the roll call was extended to 
almost three hours in a pre-dawn session while arms were twisted to 
avoid its apparent defeat.

Personally prickly and often impatient, Thomas quarreled bitterly with 
colleagues of both parties, but especially with some of the senior 
Democrats on his committee. His irritation with hard-edged partisans 
such as fellow Californian Pete Stark was understandable. But he 
effectively cut out the contributions of such reasonable and able 
legislators as Maryland's Ben Cardin, who in earlier years had been able 
to collaborate with Republicans on meaningful bills.

A low point came when Thomas ordered Capitol Police to break up a 
Democratic caucus in the Ways and Means library -- an action for which 
he later apologized to the House.

The irony in this situation is that the Thomas I got to know during the 
years his party was in the minority was a man with a genuine interest in 
developing the institutional strength of Congress. He regularly offered 
his own ideas on congressional reform -- always with an eye on the 
legitimate interests of Republicans but with concern that went beyond 
any narrow partisan or parochial advantage.

But like many others in the House GOP leadership, he has been willing to 
cut corners and run roughshod over others to achieve his policy goals. 
It is no accident that when the Democrats saw an opportunity to thwart 
him last year, they refused to consider any compromise on Social 
Security that did not rule out the private accounts Thomas and the 
president want.

No bridges had been built between the parties, no basis established for 
bipartisan talks on an issue of genuine national importance.

Now, facing a Republican-imposed term limit on his tenure as chairman, 
Thomas is quitting at 64, at the height of his vast intellectual and 
political powers. You have to wonder how much more he could have 
accomplished without the strong-arm tactics and how much less damage he 
might have caused.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/08/AR2006030801946.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/6d5f479f/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Thu Mar  9 04:02:52 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Thu, 09 Mar 2006 07:02:52 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] ELOQUENT AND GREAT: Culture of Intellectual Corruption -
 Richard Cohen - Washington Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <4410196C.5020205@comcast.net>

Culture of Intellectual Corruption

By Richard Cohen
The Washington Post
Thursday, March 9, 2006; 12:00 AM

It will be nearly impossible in the next several months to avoid the 
phrase "culture of corruption." It is of Democratic vintage, coined to 
take the sins of Jack Abramoff, former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham and 
maybe some others and visit them on all Republicans running for office, 
especially congressional incumbents. Strictly speaking, it's a bit of a 
smear. But if it applies anywhere, and it does, it's not to corruption 
having to do with money, it's to corruption having to do with thought. 
The Bush administration is intellectually corrupt.

Some of this corruption is induced by the inability to keep religion in 
its place. The president suffers mightily from this. After just eight 
months in office, George Bush drew a line between acceptable and 
unacceptable stem cell research and based it entirely on religious views 
that had nothing to do with science. Destruction of the cells was 
likened, as so much is nowadays, to the supposedly overriding issue of 
abortion or, as it is sometimes put, the "culture of life."

That culture, as applied by the Bush administration, holds that what 
works is what ought to work. So, for example, the official policy of the 
United States government is the promotion of sexual abstinence (outside 
of marriage), which is all right in and of itself but not as a 
substitute for a workable policy of population control and HIV-AIDS 
avoidance. The latter should entail sex education and, of course, the 
use of some sort of contraceptive device, particularly (for AIDS 
prevention) condoms. The Bush administration eschews that approach, 
exhorting the young and the randy just to eschew sex. That approach 
works until it does not. Then catastrophe hits.

Similarly, the Bush administration has somehow bottled up Plan B 
emergency contraception so that it is not yet available over the counter 
to women 17 and older. This is the case not because Plan B is dangerous 
or ineffective or even because it is an abortion agent (it is not), but 
because it is manifestly something that's needed if abstinence is, 
somehow, not practiced. In other words, the scientific basis for this 
policy apparently comes down to this: A good girl should not need such a 
pill.

In the same way, the Bush administration for too long virtually insisted 
that there was no such thing as global warming. It has since changed its 
tune, conceding some of the case, but the epiphany has come late and not 
until additional damage was done both to the environment and, with the 
rejection of the Kyoto treaty, to America's international standing. "On 
issues ranging from population control to the state of the environment, 
and from how science is taught in the classroom to whether Iraq's 
research establishment was capable of producing weapons of mass 
destruction, the administration has repeatedly turned away from 
traditional avenues of scientific advice," writes Michael Specter in The 
New Yorker.

Specter is right to link Iraq with everything else, because the debacle 
there is a product of the same magical thinking that rejected global 
warming, stem cells and condoms alike. Underlying it all is a commitment 
to belief over fact, what should be over what is. It is evidenced in the 
insistence by Bush and others that "intelligent design" is, like 
evolution, worthy of teaching. "Both sides ought to be properly taught," 
Bush once said. Yes, and astronomy and astrology, too, and maybe 
chemistry and alchemy as well. It's a totally bogus proposition.

It was a chat about a religious moment that purportedly bonded Bush to 
Vladimir Putin, the Russian leader of increasingly dictatorial bent. 
It's as if Putin, an ex-KGB spy, read Bush's file -- and conned him. He 
knew Bush would rather believe than think -- and that others in the 
administration, who knew better, would simply go along.

Intellectual corruption has cost Americans more -- much more -- than the 
occasional crooked congressman or lobbyist. Maybe they represent a 
corrupt system -- one in which the Democrats also partake -- but they 
pale in significance to a neoconservative theory that took the country 
to war to face a threat that did not exist. In the war, as with stem 
cells, we are talking about unnecessary loss of life -- right now on the 
battlefield, a bit later when the cure for some disease arrives later 
than it might have.

Corruption of any kind corrupts. It costs us either money or confidence 
or both. But intellectual corruption is far more dangerous. It ruins and 
costs lives.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2006/03/08/BL2006030801844.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/9b0ea624/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Thu Mar  9 04:06:46 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Thu, 09 Mar 2006 07:06:46 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] SHOULD READ: JFK's lessons for Iraq - Marc J.
 Selverstone - Boston Globe Op-Ed
Message-ID: <44101A56.6070305@comcast.net>


  JFK's lessons for Iraq

By Marc J. Selverstone  |  March 9, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

BEGINNING tomorrow scholars, journalists, and government officials -- 
both former and current -- will revisit a topic that remains tightly 
woven into the fabric of American political culture: the Vietnam War. 
Convening at the John F. Kennedy Library, they will explore some of the 
more contentious aspects of this chapter in our history. Among the 
questions they will ask are those concerning America's entrance into 
war, the roles played by the media and public opinion in shaping the 
course of the war, and the lessons learned from that conflict.

Arguably, the most vexing question is the great ''what if" of the entire 
war: ''What if" President John F. Kennedy had not been cut down by an 
assassin's bullet and had lived out his term -- and perhaps a subsequent 
one? Would he have made good on an expressed desire to withdraw American 
troops from Vietnam and turn the fighting over to the South Vietnamese? 
These questions are hardly academic; as a recent New York Times op-ed by 
Theodore Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. argued, Kennedy had devised 
a coordinated exit strategy that America's current president would do 
well to emulate.

Thanks to an extraordinary collection of documents -- the secret tape 
recordings that Kennedy made in the White House -- we have some sense of 
what Kennedy did, and didn't, plan to do with respect to Vietnam. 
Although available to the public for more than a decade, these tapes 
remain largely unexplored. This is due partly to the many challenges of 
the transcription process, including the identification of numerous and 
hard-to-hear voices, the placement of microphones relative to Kennedy 
and his aides, and the quality of the audio itself.

Yet several key tapes are largely intelligible and reveal the outlines 
of what is clearly a withdrawal plan, laid out by Secretary of Defense 
Robert S. McNamara and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Maxwell D. 
Taylor, in a series of recorded meetings from October 1963. As 
conceived, the plan would have removed most US troops from Vietnam by 
the end of 1964 and virtually all of them by 1965. To kick-start that 
process, the Defense Department was prepared to recall 1,000 soldiers by 
the end of 1963.

At first glance, Kennedy's endorsement of this scenario appears to be a 
flat-out commitment to wind up the US advisory effort that he himself 
had expanded during his first year in office. Yet there is much more to 
the story. For starters, the tapes suggest that this is McNamara's 
withdrawal plan. In fact, the defense secretary goes to great lengths to 
convince the president that the withdrawal process be both immediate and 
public; the agitation in his voice while making his case is 
unmistakable. Indeed, it is McNamara who lays out not only the military 
rationale but also the political calculus at work, lending further 
credence to the argument that it was the secretary who conceived of and 
authored the withdrawal.

And Kennedy's reaction to the idea suggests as much. While he had always 
maintained that the war was South Vietnam's to win or lose -- arguing 
repeatedly against the insertion of US combat troops to back up or 
supplant South Vietnamese forces -- Kennedy nevertheless seems caught 
off guard by the McNamara-Taylor proposal. These conversations reveal a 
president seemingly distant from the topic and in need of convincing.

Is there a back-story to this episode? Did Kennedy orchestrate the 
McNamara-Taylor meeting to make it seem that this was all news to him, 
that he was largely unaware of such planning or the politics of 
withdrawal? According to former administration officials, the president 
had a penchant for giving instructions to McNamara that never found 
their way into the written record. Is this, therefore, a case of Kennedy 
debating and then approving a previously considered position in the 
presence of and for the benefit of his more hawkish advisers?

Failing a written record, we cannot know for sure. Scholars still have 
no access to several August 1963 conversations that would add much to 
our understanding of Kennedy's engagement with Vietnam and his thoughts 
about US involvement. What we can say with confidence is that the 
president, though clearly desirous of an American withdrawal, recognized 
the military and political imperative of achieving it under favorable 
conditions.

As he told his most senior advisers at one of those October meetings, 
they would simply ''get a new date" if the situation in Vietnam 
prevented an American withdrawal by the end of 1965. Indeed, as Kennedy 
makes clear in these tapes, any public statement about a withdrawal must 
emphasize the fact the objective remained that of winning the war.

Do the Kennedy tapes offer useful lessons for the current war in Iraq? 
Insofar as they provide analogues not only to America's entrance but 
also to its exit from both conflicts, we would do well to recall 
Kennedy's motives for his phased withdrawal from Vietnam: increased 
pressure on the client government to institute political, economic, and 
military reforms; a tangible response to dovish critics of his policy at 
home; and -- perhaps -- the rudiments of a full withdrawal he had every 
intention of completing.

Yet we cannot know conclusively how Kennedy would have responded to the 
altered conditions in the Vietnam of 1964 and 1965. Given his many 
conflicting statements on Vietnam, all we can say, by virtue of his own 
words on the subject, is that he would have crossed that bridge when -- 
and only when -- he came upon it.

Marc J. Selverstone is an assistant professor with the Presidential 
Recordings Program at the University of Virginia's Miller Center of 
Public Affairs. Transcripts and audio of the Kennedy conversations 
mentioned above are available on the program's website, 
www.whitehousetapes.org <http://www.whitehousetapes.org/>.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/09/jfks_lessons_for_iraq/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/3998b639/attachment-0001.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Thu Mar  9 04:08:45 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Thu, 09 Mar 2006 07:08:45 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] UN force urgently needed in Darfur - Linda Mason -
	Boston Globe Op-Ed
Message-ID: <44101ACD.3050103@comcast.net>


  UN force urgently needed in Darfur

By Linda Mason  |  March 9, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

TWO WEEKS AGO, while in Darfur, Sudan, I accompanied an African Union 
military protection unit on a seven-hour patrol. The patrol that day 
went out to accompany and protect women as they searched for firewood as 
far as 15 kilometers, more than 9 miles, from the camp where they have 
been living since their villages were destroyed by government-backed 
militia two years ago.

The patrol proceeded without incident. We passed several groups of camel 
nomads, undoubtedly armed, but none approached. As I remarked to the 
commander about the effectiveness of this patrol, he answered, ''Yes, 
but we are bulls without horns."

This commander, as well as every other African Union officer I spoke 
with in Darfur, acknowledged the organization's limited impact -- their 
mandate is too narrow, their numbers are too small, and their logistic, 
light armament, and communication support are grossly insufficient.

Nearly 18 months after then-US Secretary of State Colin Powell first 
labeled the war in Darfur a genocide, the Bush administration now 
appears to realize that the cease-fire monitors have been ''protection 
on the cheap," as one diplomat stated, and cannot solve this crisis. Of 
the estimated 300,000 who have been killed to date, up to one-half have 
died since Powell's statement.

During my most recent trip to Darfur in February I spent my time 
primarily with African Union forces on their military bases and on a 
military patrol. Generally, the organization succeeds in stabilizing 
displacement camps, dramatically reducing the number of women who are 
attacked and raped as they leave their camps to gather firewood.

However, 2 million Sudanese -- fully a third of Darfur's population -- 
are virtual prisoners in the squalid camps in which they have sought 
refuge. They cannot return to their lands for fear of the renegade 
militia that now roam the countryside and perimeters of the camps, 
attacking, plundering, and raping at will.

African Union officers state that their mandate only allows troops to 
observe and monitor; they do not intervene in conflicts. Both 
government-backed forces and rebel troops know this; fighting has 
continued on all fronts with impunity. Colonel Kamili, the Rwandan 
sector commander in Zalengei, Darfur, recounted to me how just one week 
earlier he went to investigate an outbreak of fighting in Jebel Marra 
and was turned back by a rebel roadblock. He felt he could do no more 
than return to his base and file a report.

In addition, African Union forces are grossly underequipped; the 
region's various militia are far better armed. One commander in southern 
Darfur, Lieutenant Colonel Dibba, reported to me that he has 136 troops 
in his military protection force. However, he has only five vehicles, 
one of which has been broken for months. They can only send out one 
patrol a day in three vehicles. The vehicles have radios, but there is 
no base station. They keep one vehicle in the base parking lot to 
communicate with the patrol.

This same military protection unit has just one satellite phone, but 
they operate with prepaid credit and they rapidly use up their monthly 
allotted minutes in the first week or two. They have only one 
interpreter for the 136 troops. It is impossible to communicate, let 
alone protect and enforce peace.

At the nearby 14,000-resident displacement camp, I heard countless 
stories of people being attacked and raped when they left the settlement 
to collect firewood or to attempt to return to their lands to farm. Just 
two days earlier, two women were assaulted by armed men on camelback. 
They ran back in such terror that one woman arrived in the camp with the 
skin on her feet completely torn off.

In recent months, the security situation throughout Darfur has further 
deteriorated. With Sudanese government forces and rebel groups 
continuing to attack, and with armed brigands becoming increasingly 
emboldened, the African Union has limited capacity to respond and has 
done little to slow the spiraling increase in violence and attacks -- 
with humanitarian groups and the forces themselves increasingly the target.

Recent proposals by President Bush and US Ambassador to the United 
Nations John Bolton are critically important -- and overdue -- and must 
be implemented:

The UN must supplement African Union forces with additional troops, for 
a total force of 15,000 to 20,000 soldiers.

While the UN provides this additional force, NATO needs to increase 
technical and logistical support and donor nations need to offer 
additional troops and equipment.

The UN force's mandate needs to be a stronger Chapter 7 status, meaning 
that peacekeepers can intervene in conflicts and actively enforce the 
cease-fire agreement.

Bush's $514 million supplemental funding request to Congress for Darfur 
peacekeeping and humanitarian aid must be passed without delay.

There is a strong consensus among African Union officers that a UN force 
is the answer. When I asked Colonel Raji, the Nigerian commanding 
officer in Nyala, if he felt it should be African Union or UN 
peacekeepers in Darfur, he recounted to me a Nigerian fable: ''A 
villager walking down the road saw a dangerous snake but could not kill 
it. Another man from a nearby village walking by was able to seize the 
snake and kill it. It doesn't matter who kills the snake. What matters 
is that it is dead."

Linda Mason is a member of the board of Human Rights Watch and chairman 
of Bright Horizons Family Solutions.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/09/un_force_urgently_needed_in_darfur/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/d5c8ebd1/attachment.htm 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Thu Mar  9 05:29:56 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Thu, 9 Mar 2006 08:29:56 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Neo-Cons desert Bush!
Message-ID: <001601c6437d$917e8a00$2727e440@Harold>

Neo-Con allies desert Bush over Iraq

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article350092.ece

Later H
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/074bfc16/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Thu Mar  9 08:57:25 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Thu,  9 Mar 2006 16:57:25 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Suddenly,
	a Rebellion in the G.O.P. on a Signature Issue
Message-ID: <20060309165725.722F811F8B1@lax-gw07.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

WASHINGTON | March 9, 2006
News Analysis: Suddenly, a Rebellion in the G.O.P. on a Signature Issue
By CARL HULSE
After years of allowing President Bush to set their course, Republicans are rebelling over domestic spying and a port deal.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/09/politics/09assess.html?ex=1142571600&en=a11ef9ff90a1582f&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/1e18802e/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Thu Mar  9 08:59:52 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Thu,  9 Mar 2006 16:59:52 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: The Death of the Intelligence Panel
Message-ID: <20060309165952.355D924B02F@lax-gw02.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

OPINION | March 9, 2006
Editorial: The Death of the Intelligence Panel

A new Senate plan is being presented as a way to increase the supervision of intelligence gathering while giving spies needed flexibility. But it does no such thing.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/09/opinion/09thur1.html?ex=1142571600&en=05766706bb0cdaa5&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/4e324832/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Thu Mar  9 09:01:29 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Thu,  9 Mar 2006 17:01:29 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Facing Facts on Iran
Message-ID: <20060309170129.65A8213B824@lax-gw04.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

OPINION | March 9, 2006
Editorial: Facing Facts on Iran

The United States has very few other options when it comes to making Iran stop working on projects that could lead to nuclear weapons, and Iran knows it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/09/opinion/09thur2.html?ex=1142571600&en=bdb516fc4ac54799&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/0c86bc8a/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Thu Mar  9 09:07:44 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: 9 Mar 2006 17:07:44 -0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] Headlines for March 9, 2006
Message-ID: <20060309170744.3611.qmail@trinity.democracynow.org>

Mike Blaxill  ( mblaxill at yahoo.com )
sent you this story from democracynow.org




+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  Headlines for March 9, 2006
|  http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/09/1428216
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+


- 50 Kidnapped in Daytime Raid in Baghdad
- Shiites Seek Halt in Counting Deaths Caused by Militias
- State Dept Criticizes Iraq Police Force for Rights Abuses
- U.S. To Continue Planting Stories in Iraqi Press
- Protesters Greet President Bush in New Orleans
- Five Vermont Towns Back Impeachment of Bush
- Pro-Choice Protests Scheduled in South Dakota
- Over 20,000 Protest Anti-Immigrant Law in D.C.  
- Four Arrested in Jamaica For Killing Gay AIDS Activist
This story continues at: 
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/09/1428216


From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Thu Mar  9 09:06:42 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Thu,  9 Mar 2006 17:06:42 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Jewish Panel Delays a Vote on Gay Issues
Message-ID: <20060309170642.426A524A0F7@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

NATIONAL | March 9, 2006
Jewish Panel Delays a Vote on Gay Issues
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Experts who set policy for Conservative Judaism decided to wait until December to vote on lifting the movement's ban on gay rabbis and same-sex union ceremonies.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/09/national/09jews.html?ex=1142571600&en=c1c117e48f4b85de&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/a4cd0841/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Thu Mar  9 09:04:03 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Thu,  9 Mar 2006 17:04:03 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: China Returns Sharp Retort to U.S. Report
	on Human Rights
Message-ID: <20060309170403.BB0CD84021@lax-gw03.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

INTERNATIONAL / ASIA PACIFIC | March 9, 2006
China Returns Sharp Retort to U.S. Report on Human Rights
By JOSEPH KAHN
China argued that racial discrimination remained pervasive and the U.S. military abused prisoners at detention centers abroad.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/09/international/asia/09cnd-china.html?ex=1142571600&en=3a12ea3ce2d4ef3a&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/406c4f2c/attachment-0001.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Thu Mar  9 09:05:15 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Thu,  9 Mar 2006 17:05:15 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Justice Dept. Report Cites F.B.I. Violations
Message-ID: <20060309170515.61FD5840AA@lax-gw03.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

WASHINGTON | March 9, 2006
Justice Dept. Report Cites F.B.I. Violations
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
More than 100 violations in the last two years included wiretaps that were broader or longer than approved by a court.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/09/politics/09terror.html?ex=1142571600&en=c7362a16ad4099e5&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/a9d90314/attachment.htm 

From hecate at diamonddragon.com  Thu Mar  9 09:07:14 2006
From: hecate at diamonddragon.com (Hecate)
Date: Thu, 09 Mar 2006 17:07:14 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] BBC E-mail: US trade deficit widens further
Message-ID: <20060309_170714_072071.hecate@diamonddragon.com>

Hecate saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you
should see it.

** Message **
Economists said the figures pointed to the annual deficit rising above $800bn in 2006. 

** US trade deficit widens further **
The US trade deficit increases to a record high of $68.5bn in January, due in part to rising imports of oil and cars.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/business/4790012.stm >


** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all
in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/dailyemail/ >


** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have?been verified.

If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm


From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Thu Mar  9 10:07:31 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Thu,  9 Mar 2006 18:07:31 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Exporting Censorship
Message-ID: <20060309180731.365F69FC62@lax-gw05.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

OPINION | March 9, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor: Exporting Censorship
By XENI JARDIN
If American companies are already obligated to disclose the sale of bombs and guns to repressive regimes, why not censorware?
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/09/opinion/09jardin.html?ex=1142571600&en=45ef957752636416&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/754857c7/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Thu Mar  9 10:06:22 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Thu,  9 Mar 2006 18:06:22 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: G.O.P. Plan Would Allow Spying Without
	Warrants
Message-ID: <20060309180622.8ECB413B9AB@lax-gw04.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

WASHINGTON | March 9, 2006
G.O.P. Plan Would Allow Spying Without Warrants
By SCOTT SHANE and DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
Republican senators said the proposal was a hard-wrung compromise with the White House for oversight of eavesdropping.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/09/politics/09nsa.html?ex=1142571600&en=8d55a71fc3d9f6f3&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/090c6255/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Thu Mar  9 10:08:22 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Thu,  9 Mar 2006 18:08:22 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Sounds of Politics: Clashing Themes (2
	Letters)
Message-ID: <20060309180822.2D0E1237354@lax-gw01.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

What we're saying...


OPINION | March 9, 2006
Sounds of Politics: Clashing Themes (2 Letters)

To the Editor:.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/09/opinion/l09dems.html?ex=1142571600&en=e645804d981ce116&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/c502e499/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Thu Mar  9 10:05:35 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Thu,  9 Mar 2006 18:05:35 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Abramoff Says Top Republicans Were Allies
Message-ID: <20060309180535.8A78484342@lax-gw03.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

WASHINGTON | March 9, 2006
Abramoff Says Top Republicans Were Allies
By REUTERS
Jack Abramoff says in a magazine that he worked closely with many top Republicans, despite their claims to the contrary.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/09/politics/09abramoff.html?ex=1142571600&en=20a5ff4f4d4555db&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/12ecc724/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Thu Mar  9 10:08:47 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Thu,  9 Mar 2006 18:08:47 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: The Katrina Video
Message-ID: <20060309180847.169E913B948@lax-gw04.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

What we're saying (2)...


OPINION | March 9, 2006
The Katrina Video

To the Editor:.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/09/opinion/l09levees.html?ex=1142571600&en=7928a94143c24592&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/968c3e20/attachment-0001.htm 

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Thu Mar  9 09:59:50 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Thu, 09 Mar 2006 09:59:50 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Children in Torment By BOB HERBERT
Message-ID: <C035AD16.29E00%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 9, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Children in Torment
By BOB HERBERT

Two little boys ? toddlers in Yonkers ? died horrible deaths last July when
they were left alone in a bathroom with scalding water running in the tub.
The water overflowed and flooded the room. The children, in agony, were
unable to escape as the water burned and blistered their feet and ankles and
kept on rising. One of the boys struggled to save himself by standing on his
toes, but to no avail.

Authorities said that when the boys were found, they were lying face up in
the water on the bathroom floor, their bodies all but completely scorched.
They had burned to death.

The boys ? one was nearly three years old and the other 20 months ? had been
left in the bathroom (which had a damaged door that was difficult to open)
by David Maldonado, the live-in boyfriend of the boys' mother. Police said
he was the father of one of the children.

The two adults had taken heroin. While the children suffered and died, the
grown-ups, according to the authorities, were lying in bed, lost in a deep
drug-fueled sleep. Both have pleaded guilty in connection with the deaths,
and have been imprisoned.

I've been reading (and sometimes writing) stories like this for many years.
Every few months or so, some horrifying child abuse case elbows its way onto
the front pages, and there is a general outcry: How could this have
happened? Where were the caseworkers? Lock up the monsters who did this!
Let's investigate and reform the child welfare system.

And then the story subsides and we behave as if this murderous abuse of
helpless children trapped in the torture chambers of their own homes has
somehow subsided with it. But child abuse is a hideous, widespread and
chronic problem across the country. And despite the sensational cases that
periodically grab the headlines, it doesn't get nearly enough attention.

What some adults do to the children in their care can seem like behavior
left over from the Inquisition. According to the U.S. Department of Health
and Human Services, nearly 1,500 children died from abuse or neglect in
2003, the latest year for which reasonably reliable statistics are
available. That's four children every day, and that estimate is probably
low. Record-keeping in some states is notoriously haphazard.

Authorities in Michigan reported the heartbreaking case of a 7-year-old,
Ricky Holland, who begged his school nurse not to send him home to his
adoptive parents. "Let me stay in school," he pleaded.

He was later beaten to death with a hammer, prosecutors said, and his bloody
body was dragged away in a garbage bag. His parents were charged with his
death.

The deaths, as horrible as they are, don't begin to convey the enormity of
the problem. In 2003, authorities were alerted to nearly three million cases
of youngsters who were alleged to have been abused or neglected, and
confirmed a million of them. The number of cases that never come to light
is, of course, anybody's guess.

What's remarkable to me is that we've been hearing about this enormously
tragic problem for so long, decades, and yet the reaction to each sickening
case that makes it into the media spotlight is shock. How many times are we
going to be shocked before serious steps are taken to alleviate the terrible
suffering and prevent the horrible deaths of as many of these children as we
can?

We know some things about child abuse and neglect. We know that there is a
profound connection between child abuse and substance abuse, for example. We
know that abuse and neglect are more likely to occur in households where
money is in short supply, especially if the caregivers are unemployed. A
crisis in the home heightens the chances that a child will be abused. And
adults who were abused as children are more likely than others to be abusers
themselves.

Child-abuse prevention programs are wholly inadequate, and child protective
services, while varying in quality from state to state, are in many
instances overwhelmed and largely unaccountable. The child protection system
has broken down ? or was never up and running at all ? in state after state
after state.

"There are no consequences to violating policy," said Marcia Robinson Lowry,
executive director of the advocacy group Children's Rights. "There are no
consequences to violating the law."

The kids who are most frequently the victims of abuse are from the lower
economic classes. They are not from families that make a habit of voting.
There is no real incentive for government officials to make the protection
of these kids a priority.

They couldn't be more alone. They are no one's natural constituency.

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Thu Mar  9 10:09:03 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Thu,  9 Mar 2006 18:09:03 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Vietnam and Iraq
Message-ID: <20060309180903.67A69844CD@lax-gw03.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

What we're saying (3)...


OPINION | March 9, 2006
Vietnam and Iraq

To the Editor:.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/09/opinion/l09brooks.html?ex=1142571600&en=d78f21a0ea7393e9&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/54633b13/attachment.htm 

From Reeeees at aol.com  Wed Mar  8 22:32:18 2006
From: Reeeees at aol.com (Reeeees at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 9 Mar 2006 01:32:18 EST
Subject: [Mb-civic] Hope
Message-ID: <E1FHP0s-00015v-4P@elasmtp-mealy.atl.sa.earthlink.net>

When I despair, I remember that  all through history the way of truth and 
love has always won.  There have  been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time 
they can seem invincible, but in the  end they always fall, always.

-Mahatma  Gandhi
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/cad565be/attachment.htm 

From ean at sbcglobal.net  Wed Mar  8 21:57:27 2006
From: ean at sbcglobal.net (ean at sbcglobal.net)
Date: Wed, 08 Mar 2006 21:57:27 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] The Coming Resource Wars
Message-ID: <E1FHPEQ-0008WN-Ov@elasmtp-mealy.atl.sa.earthlink.net>

 	
The Coming Resource Wars
Michael T. Klare
March 07, 2006

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/03/07/the_coming_resource_w
ars.php

Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at 
Hampshire College and the author of Resource Wars and Blood and 
Oil, both available in paperback from Owl Books.

It's official: the era of resource wars is upon us.  In a major London 
address, British Defense Secretary John Reid warned that global 
climate change and dwindling natural resources are combining to 
increase the likelihood of violent conflict over land, water and energy.  
Climate change, he indicated, ?will make scarce resources, clean 
water, viable agricultural land even scarcer??and this will ?make the 
emergence of violent conflict more rather than less likely.?

Although not unprecedented, Reid?s prediction of an upsurge in 
resource conflict is significant both because of his senior rank and the 
vehemence of his remarks.  ?The blunt truth is that the lack of water 
and agricultural land is a significant contributory factor to the tragic 
conflict we see unfolding in Darfur,? he declared.  ?We should see this 
as a warning sign.?

Resource conflicts of this type are most likely to arise in the developing 
world, Reid indicated, but the more advanced and affluent countries 
are not likely to be spared the damaging and destabilizing effects of 
global climate change.  With sea levels rising, water and energy 
becoming increasingly scarce and prime agricultural lands turning into 
deserts, internecine warfare over access to vital resources will become 
a global phenomenon.

Reid?s speech, delivered at the prestigious Chatham House in London 
(Britain?s equivalent of the Council on Foreign Relations), is but the 
most recent expression of a growing trend in strategic circles to view 
environmental and resource effects?rather than political orientation 
and ideology?as the most potent source of armed conflict in the 
decades to come.  With the world population rising, global 
consumption rates soaring, energy supplies rapidly disappearing and 
climate change eradicating valuable farmland, the stage is being set 
for persistent and worldwide struggles over vital resources.  Religious 
and political strife will not disappear in this scenario, but rather will be 
channeled into contests over valuable sources of water, food and 
energy.

Prior to Reid?s address, the most significant expression of this outlook 
was a report prepared for the U.S. Department of Defense by a 
California-based consulting firm in October 2003.  Entitled ?An Abrupt 
Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States 
National Security,? the report warned that global climate change is 
more likely to result in sudden, cataclysmic environmental events than 
a gradual (and therefore manageable) rise in average temperatures.  
Such events could include a substantial increase in global sea levels, 
intense storms and hurricanes and continent-wide ?dust bowl? effects.  
This would trigger pitched battles between the survivors of these 
effects for access to food, water, habitable land and energy supplies.

?Violence and disruption stemming from the stresses created by abrupt 
changes in the climate pose a different type of threat to national 
security than we are accustomed to today,? the 2003 report noted.  
?Military confrontation may be triggered by a desperate need for 
natural resources such as energy, food and water rather than by 
conflicts over ideology, religion or national honor.?

Until now, this mode of analysis has failed to command the attention of 
top American and British policymakers. For the most part, they insist 
that ideological and religious differences?notably, the clash between 
values of tolerance and democracy on one hand and extremist forms 
of Islam on the other?remain the main drivers of international conflict.  
But Reid?s speech at Chatham House suggests that a major shift in 
strategic thinking may be under way. Environmental perils may soon 
dominate the world security agenda.

This shift is due in part to the growing weight of evidence pointing to a 
significant human role in altering the planet?s basic climate systems.  
Recent studies showing the rapid shrinkage of the polar ice caps, the 
accelerated melting of North American glaciers, the increased 
frequency of severe hurricanes and a number of other such effects all 
suggest that dramatic and potentially harmful changes to the global 
climate have begun to occur. More importantly, they conclude that 
human behavior?most importantly, the burning of fossil fuels in 
factories, power plants, and motor vehicles?is the most likely cause of 
these changes.   This assessment may not have yet penetrated the 
White House and other bastions of head-in-the-sand thinking, but it is 
clearly gaining ground among scientists and thoughtful analysts around 
the world.

For the most part, public discussion of global climate change has 
tended to describe its effects as an environmental problem?as a 
threat to safe water, arable soil, temperate forests, certain species and 
so on.  And, of course, climate change is a potent threat to the 
environment; in fact, the greatest threat imaginable.  But viewing 
climate change as an environmental problem fails to do justice to the 
magnitude of the peril it poses.  As Reid?s speech and the 2003 
Pentagon study make clear, the greatest danger posed by global 
climate change is not the degradation of ecosystems per se, but rather 
the disintegration of entire human societies, producing wholesale 
starvation, mass migrations and recurring conflict over resources.

?As famine, disease, and weather-related disasters strike due to abrupt 
climate change,? the Pentagon report notes, ?many countries? needs 
will exceed their carrying capacity??that is, their ability to provide the 
minimum requirements for human survival.  This ?will create a sense of 
desperation, which is likely to lead to offensive aggression? against 
countries with a greater stock of vital resources.  ?Imagine eastern 
European countries, struggling to feed their populations with a falling 
supply of food, water, and energy, eyeing Russia, whose population is 
already in decline, for access to its grain, minerals, and energy supply.? 

Similar scenarios will be replicated all across the planet, as those 
without the means to survival invade or migrate to those with greater 
abundance?producing endless struggles between resource ?haves? 
and ?have-nots.?

It is this prospect, more than anything, that worries John Reid.  In 
particular, he expressed concern over the inadequate capacity of poor 
and unstable countries to cope with the effects of climate change, and 
the resulting risk of state collapse, civil war and mass migration.  ?More 
than 300 million people in Africa currently lack access to safe water,? 
he observed, and ?climate change will worsen this dire 
situation??provoking more wars like Darfur.  And even if these social 
disasters will occur primarily in the developing world, the wealthier 
countries will also be caught up in them, whether by participating in 
peacekeeping and humanitarian aid operations, by fending off 
unwanted migrants or by fighting for access to overseas supplies of 
food, oil, and minerals.

When reading of these nightmarish scenarios, it is easy to conjure up 
images of desperate, starving people killing one another with knives, 
staves and clubs?as was certainly often the case in the past, and 
could easily prove to be so again.  But these scenarios also envision 
the use of more deadly weapons.  ?In this world of warring states,? the 
2003 Pentagon report predicted, ?nuclear arms proliferation is 
inevitable.?  As oil and natural gas disappears, more and more 
countries will rely on nuclear power to meet their energy needs?and 
this ?will accelerate nuclear proliferation as countries develop 
enrichment and reprocessing capabilities to ensure their national 
security.?

Although speculative, these reports make one thing clear: when 
thinking about the calamitous effects of global climate change, we 
must emphasize its social and political consequences as much as its 
purely environmental effects.  Drought, flooding and storms can kill us, 
and surely will?but so will wars among the survivors of these 
catastrophes over what remains of food, water and shelter.  As Reid?s 
comments indicate, no society, however affluent, will escape 
involvement in these forms of conflict.

We can respond to these predictions in one of two ways: by relying on 
fortifications and military force to provide some degree of advantage in 
the global struggle over resources, or by taking meaningful steps to 
reduce the risk of cataclysmic climate change. 

No doubt there will be many politicians and pundits?especially in this 
country?who will tout the superiority of the military option, 
emphasizing America?s preponderance of strength.  By fortifying our 
borders and sea-shores to keep out unwanted migrants and by fighting 
around the world for needed oil supplies, it will be argued, we can 
maintain our privileged standard of living for longer than other 
countries that are less well endowed with instruments of power.  
Maybe so.  But the grueling, inconclusive war in Iraq and the failed 
national response to Hurricane Katrina show just how ineffectual such 
instruments can be when confronted with the harsh realities of an 
unforgiving world.  And as the 2003 Pentagon report reminds us, 
?constant battles over diminishing resources? will ?further reduce 
[resources] even beyond the climatic effects.?

Military superiority may provide an illusion of advantage in the coming 
struggles over vital resources, but it cannot protect us against the 
ravages of global climate change.  Although we may be somewhat 
better off than the people in Haiti and Mexico, we, too, will suffer from 
storms, drought and flooding.  As our overseas trading partners 
descend into chaos, our vital imports of food, raw materials and energy 
will disappear as well.  True, we could establish military outposts in 
some of these places to ensure the continued flow of critical 
materials?but the ever-increasing price in blood and treasure required 
to pay for this will eventually exceed our means and destroy us.  
Ultimately, our only hope of a safe and secure future lies in 
substantially reducing our emissions of greenhouse gases and working 
with the rest of the world to slow the pace of global climate change.

-- 
You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, 
option D (up to 3 emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options 
(option A - 1x/week, option B - 3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option D - 
up to 3x/day) please reply and let us know!  If someone forwarded you 
this email and you want to be on our list, send an email to 
ean at sbcglobal.net and tell us which option you'd like.


"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060308/976b9e52/attachment.htm 

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Thu Mar  9 10:00:52 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Thu, 09 Mar 2006 10:00:52 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Exporting Censorship
Message-ID: <C035AD54.29E01%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 9, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
Exporting Censorship
By XENI JARDIN

AMERICAN technology firms are taking heat from the public and Congress for
helping China's government police the Internet. But this controversy extends
well beyond China and the so-called Internet Gang of Four: Google, Yahoo,
Cisco and Microsoft. Just how many American companies are complicit hit home
for me last month when dozens of readers of BoingBoing.net e-mailed us to
say they had been suddenly denied access.

The cause was SmartFilter, a product from a Silicon Valley company, Secure
Computing. A recent update to the nannyware's list of no-no sites had
started blocking our site as containing "nudity." This is absurd: a visit to
BoingBoing might yield posts about iPod-shaped cakes and spaceship
blueprints, but not pornography. SmartFilter's data managers later told us
that even thumbnails of Michelangelo's "David" could land a site on the
forbidden "nudity" list.

Many of our locked-out readers were trying to view BoingBoing from
libraries, schools and their workplaces. That is regrettable but not tragic,
as American viewers generally have other options. But after regular visitors
from Qatar and Saudi Arabia complained, we discovered a more worrisome
problem: government-controlled Internet service providers were using
SmartFilter to effectively block access for entire countries.

Secure Computing refused to provide me with a list of the governments that
use its filters. However, the OpenNet Initiative, a partnership between the
University of Toronto, Cambridge University and Harvard Law School, has
compiled data on how such products are used in foreign nations where
censorship is easy because the governments control all Internet service
providers.

The initiative found that SmartFilter has been used by government-controlled
monopoly providers in Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tunisia and the
United Arab Emirates. It has also been used by state-controlled providers in
Iran, even though American companies are banned from selling technology
products there. (Secure Computing denies selling products or updates to
Iran, which is probably using pirated versions.)

According to OpenNet, filtering products from another American company,
Websense, have also been used by a state-controlled service provider in
Iran, ParsOnline. Yemen uses Websense products to filter content on its two
government-owned service providers. Websense software, the initiative says,
filters out "sex education and provocative clothing sites, gay- and
lesbian-related materials, gambling sites, dating sites, drug-related sites,
sites enabling anonymous Web surfing, proxy servers that circumvent
filtering, and sites with content related to converting Muslims to other
religions."

The initiative also found that Myanmar, arguably the most repressive regime
in the world, uses censorware from the American company Fortinet. And
Singapore's government-controlled Singnet server uses filtering technology
from SurfControl, a company formed from the merger of several censorware
companies that is now technically British but has its filtering operations
headquarters in California.

One of our most laudable national goals is the export of free speech and
free information, yet American companies are selling censorship. While some
advocates of technology rights have proposed consumer boycotts and
Congressional action to pressure these firms into responsible conduct, a
good first step would be adding filtering technologies to the United States
Munitions List, an index of products for which exporters have to file papers
with the State Department. While this won't end such sales, it will bring
them to light and give the public and lawmakers a better basis on which to
consider stronger steps.

If American companies are already obligated to disclose the sale of bombs
and guns to repressive regimes, why not censorware?

Xeni Jardin is a co-editor of BoingBoing.net.

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top



From ean at sbcglobal.net  Wed Mar  8 21:57:28 2006
From: ean at sbcglobal.net (ean at sbcglobal.net)
Date: Wed, 08 Mar 2006 21:57:28 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] The Planet Can't Wait
Message-ID: <E1FHPEr-0000GM-PQ@elasmtp-mealy.atl.sa.earthlink.net>

The Planet Can't Wait
Climate Change Is Real and Must Be Addressed Now
<>
By David Ignatius
The Washington Post
Wednesday, March 8, 2006; A19

The warnings are coming from frogs and beetles, from melting ice and 
changing ocean currents, and from scientists and responsible politicians 
around the world. And yet what is the U.S. government doing about global 
warming? Nothing. That should shock the conscience of Americans.

Actually, the Bush administration's policy is worse than doing nothing. 
It has resisted efforts by other nations to discuss new actions that 
could reduce emissions of carbon dioxide before the global climate 
reaches a disastrous tipping point. And it muzzles administration 
scientists to keep them from warning about the seriousness of the issue. 
The administration's position is that more research is needed -- and 
then, as evidence grows that humans are adding to global warming, it 
calls for still more research.

Congress is no better. Most members apparently are waiting for 
permission from lobbyists and campaign contributors before getting 
serious about climate change. The McCain-Lieberman bill to cap emissions 
languishes in the Senate; Pete Domenici, the powerful chairman of the 
Senate Energy Committee, has issued a white paper calling for ideas for 
legislation, but there's no word when a bill might emerge from his 
committee. Meanwhile, the Senate environment committee is also claiming 
jurisdiction. So what we have in the Senate is a turf fight. And don't 
even talk about the House. Maybe members would get interested if they 
thought Dubai was behind global warming.

Giant corporations such as General Electric and Citigroup have concluded 
that global warming is real, and they are beginning to mobilize their 
resources to do something about it. This business activism may offer the 
best hope of moving government off its duff. I asked Tom Donohue, the 
head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and one of Washington's savviest 
political operators, when he might commit his organization's 
considerable clout to taking action on this issue. He's still in the 
"needs more study" mode, but he added, "When the time is right, we'll be 
as helpful as we can." Hey, Tom, the time is right.

Every week brings new evidence that global climate change is real and 
that it's advancing more rapidly than scientists had expected. This past 
week brought a report in Science that the Antarctic is losing as much as 
36 cubic miles of ice a year. Last month researchers reported that 
glaciers in Greenland are melting twice as fast as previously estimated. 
One normally cautious scientist, Richard Alley, told The Post's Juliet 
Eilperin he was concerned about the Antarctic findings, since just five 
years ago scientists had been expecting more ice. "That's a wake-up 
call," he said. "We better figure out what's going on."

Animals don't have the luxury of ordering up more studies of global 
warming. Andrew Revkin of the New York Times reported in January that 
colorful harlequin frogs found in Latin America are dying at alarming 
rates because of a fungus that seems to be linked to global warming. 
Doug Struck explained last week in The Post that climate change is 
helping the ravenous mountain pine beetle devour forests in British 
Columbia, killing more trees than wildfires or logging. Similar findings 
are stacked in a depressing pile in my study that keeps getting taller.

And now we come to the Bush administration -- the folks who once warned 
that it would be folly to wait so long for evidence that the "smoking 
gun" might be a mushroom cloud. Their spirit of vigilance was applied to 
Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, which turned out not to exist -- but 
not to climate change, which does. In a meeting in Montreal last 
December, the chief American delegate, Harlan L. Watson, got so peeved 
about a proposal for new global "mechanisms" to carry out the 1992 Kyoto 
Protocol that he walked out. The American side relented after the 
wording was softened to "opportunities," and there's now at least a hope 
for future talks about talks about global warming.

But woe unto any administration official who becomes so concerned about 
global warming that he actually tries to sound the alarm. James E. 
Hansen, the top climate scientist at NASA, found that political minders 
at NASA headquarters had ordered a review of his lectures, papers, 
interviews and Internet postings after he called for quick reductions in 
greenhouse gas emissions to ease global warming. A 24-year-old former 
Bush campaign worker who allegedly had been involved in efforts to 
muzzle Hansen later resigned -- after reports surfaced that he had 
fudged his r?sum?.

Usually, America's political antics are forgivable, but not on this 
issue. As evidence grows that human activity is accelerating dangerous 
changes in the world's climate, the Bush administration's excuses for 
inaction are running out. History will not forgive political leaders who 
failed to act on this issue, and neither should voters.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2006/03/07/AR2006030701199.html


-- 
You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, option D (up to 3 
emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options (option A - 1x/week, option B - 3/wk, 
option C - up to 1x/day, option D - up to 3x/day) please reply and let us know!  If 
someone forwarded you this email and you want to be on our list, send an email to 
ean at sbcglobal.net and tell us which option you'd like.


"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060308/c7915502/attachment.htm 

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Thu Mar  9 09:57:48 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Thu, 09 Mar 2006 09:57:48 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Both Sides of Inequality By DAVID BROOKS
Message-ID: <C035AC9C.29DFF%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 9, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Both Sides of Inequality
By DAVID BROOKS

For the past two decades, Annette Lareau has embedded herself in American
families. She and her researchers have sat on living room floors as families
went about their business, ridden in back seats as families drove hither and
yon.

Lareau's work is well known among sociologists, but neglected by the popular
media. And that's a shame because through her close observations and careful
writings ? in books like "Unequal Childhoods" ? Lareau has been able to
capture the texture of inequality in America. She's described how radically
child-rearing techniques in upper-middle-class homes differ from those in
working-class and poor homes, and what this means for the prospects of the
kids inside.

The thing you learn from her work is that it's wrong to say good parents
raise successful kids and bad parents raise unsuccessful ones. The story is
more complicated than that.

Looking at upper-middle-class homes, Lareau describes a parenting style that
many of us ridicule but do not renounce. This involves enrolling kids in
large numbers of adult-supervised activities and driving them from place to
place. Parents are deeply involved in all aspects of their children's lives.
They make concerted efforts to provide learning experiences.

Home life involves a lot of talk and verbal jousting. Parents tend to reason
with their children, not give them orders. They present "choices" and then
subtly influence the decisions their kids make. Kids feel free to pass
judgment on adults, express themselves and even tell their siblings they
hate them when they're angry.

The pace is exhausting. Fights about homework can be titanic. But children
raised in this way know how to navigate the world of organized institutions.
They know how to talk casually with adults, how to use words to shape how
people view them, how to perform before audiences and look people in the eye
to make a good first impression.

Working-class child-rearing is different, Lareau writes. In these homes,
there tends to be a much starker boundary between the adult world and the
children's world. Parents think that the cares of adulthood will come soon
enough and that children should be left alone to organize their own
playtime. When a girl asks her mother to help her build a dollhouse out of
boxes, the mother says no, "casually and without guilt," because playtime is
deemed to be inconsequential ? a child's sphere, not an adult's.

Lareau says working-class children seem more relaxed and vibrant, and have
more intimate contact with their extended families. "Whining, which was
pervasive in middle-class homes, was rare in working-class and poor ones,"
she writes.

But these children were not as well prepared for the world of organizations
and adulthood. There was much less talk in the working-class homes. Parents
were more likely to issue brusque orders, not give explanations. Children,
like their parents, were easily intimidated by and pushed around by verbally
dexterous teachers and doctors. Middle-class kids felt entitled to
individual treatment when entering the wider world, but working-class kids
felt constrained and tongue-tied.

The children Lareau describes in her book were playful 10-year-olds. Now
they're in their early 20's, and their destinies are as you'd have
predicted. The perhaps overprogrammed middle-class kids got into good
colleges and are heading for careers as doctors and other professionals. The
working-class kids are not doing well. The little girl who built dollhouses
had a severe drug problem from ages 12 to 17. She had a child outside
wedlock, a baby she gave away because she was afraid she would hurt the
child. She now cleans houses with her mother.

Lareau told me that when she was doing the book, the working-class kids
seemed younger; they got more excited by things like going out for pizza.
Now the working-class kids seem older; they've seen and suffered more.

But the point is that the working-class parents were not bad parents. In a
perhaps more old-fashioned manner, they were attentive. They taught right
from wrong. In some ways they raised their kids in a healthier atmosphere.
(When presented with the schedules of the more affluent families, they
thought such a life would just make kids sad.)

But they did not prepare their kids for a world in which verbal skills and
the ability to thrive in organizations are so important. To help the
worse-off parents, we should raise the earned-income tax credit to lessen
their economic stress. But the core issue is that today's rich don't exploit
the poor; they just outcompete them.

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From michael at michaelbutler.com  Thu Mar  9 09:46:20 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Thu, 09 Mar 2006 09:46:20 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Pat Hunter letter to an Editor
Message-ID: <C035A9EE.29DF9%michael@michaelbutler.com>

Thank you for those occasional e-mails on news items.  I don't think I sent
you my last "letter to editor".  It made all three of the local daily
papers.  I had some good response; mostly pro and a little con.  I say,
perhaps one day one of these little letters might be the spark that starts
the fire.
Best Regards,
Pat

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/octet-stream
Size: 22016 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/8f732804/attachment.obj 

From michael at intrafi.com  Thu Mar  9 11:25:18 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Thu, 09 Mar 2006 19:25:18 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] BBC E-mail: Nigeria militants fight military
Message-ID: <20060309_192518_059287.michael@intrafi.com>

Michael Butler saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you
should see it.



** Nigeria militants fight military **
The Nigerian military says it has fought a fierce gun battle with heavily armed militants in the Niger Delta.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/africa/4789274.stm >


** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all
in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/dailyemail/ >


** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have?been verified.

If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm


From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Thu Mar  9 11:59:57 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Thu, 9 Mar 2006 14:59:57 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Fw: News Alert: Dubai Firm Gives Up Stake in U.S. Ports
Message-ID: <001401c643b4$0d939d70$8727e440@Harold>


----- Original Message ----- 
From: washingtonpost.com 
To: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca 
Sent: Thursday, March 09, 2006 2:27 PM
Subject: News Alert: Dubai Firm Gives Up Stake in U.S. Ports


      If you have any difficulty viewing this newsletter click here
                       Feedback    
     
     News Alert   1:58 p.m. ET Thursday, March 9, 2006
      Dubai Firm Gives Up Stake in U.S. Ports 
      The United Arab Emirates company that was attempting to take over management operations at six U.S. ports announced today that it will divest itself of all American interests.

      The announcement appears to head off a major confrontation that was brewing between Congress and the Bush administration over the controversial deal. 



      For more information, visit washingtonpost.com





     
           
           E-mail Preference Page  |  Advertising  |  Subscribe to the Paper  |  Privacy Policy  
           E-Mail Newsletter Services
            . To sign up for additional newsletter services or get help, visit the E-mail Preferences Page.
            . To unsubscribe, visit the E-mail Preferences Page (do not reply to this e-mail).
            ? 2006 The Washington Post Company
            Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive
            c/o E-mail Customer Care
            1515 N. Courthouse Road
            Arlington, VA 22201
            
     
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/c8f00385/attachment.htm 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Thu Mar  9 12:02:35 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (harry.sifton at sympatico.ca)
Date: Thu, 9 Mar 2006 15:02:35 -0500 (EST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] A washingtonpost.com article from:
	harry.sifton@sympatico.ca
Message-ID: <8197198.1141934555539.JavaMail.wlogic@webapp3.wpprivate.com>

You have been sent this message from harry.sifton at sympatico.ca as a courtesy of washingtonpost.com 
 
 Dubai Port Company to Divest Itself of American Holdings
 
 By Jonathan Weisman and Daniela Deane
 
 The United Arab Emirates company that was attempting to take over management operations at six U.S. ports announced today that it will divest itself of all American interests.
 
 To view the entire article, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/09/AR2006030901124.html?referrer=emailarticle
 
 
 Would you like to send this article to a friend? Go to 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/emailafriend?contentId=AR2006030901124&sent=no&referrer=emailarticle
 
 
Want the latest news in your inbox? Check out washingtonpost.com's e-mail newsletters:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?node=admin/email&referrer=emailarticle

Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive
c/o E-mail Customer Care
1515 N. Courthouse Road
Arlington, VA 22201 

? 2004 The Washington Post Company



From newsletter at villagevoice.com  Wed Mar  8 22:50:59 2006
From: newsletter at villagevoice.com (Village Voice Newsletter)
Date: Thu, 09 Mar 2006 01:50:59 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Today's 'Voice': Spring Arts Preview
Message-ID: <20060309065059.24670.qmail@www3.villagevoice.com>

An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/a2f6d37e/attachment.htm 

From autoreply at economist.com  Thu Mar  9 11:45:44 2006
From: autoreply at economist.com (autoreply at economist.com)
Date: Thu, 09 Mar 2006 14:45:44 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] An article for you from Michael Butler.
Message-ID: <200603091917.OAA23662@stage-web-app.economist.com>


- AN ARTICLE FOR YOU, FROM ECONOMIST.COM -

Dear civic,

Michael Butler (michael at intrafi.com) wants you to see this article on Economist.com.



(Note: the sender's e-mail address above has not been verified.)

Subscribe to The Economist print edition, get great savings and FREE full access to Economist.com.  Click here to subscribe:  http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/email.cfm 

Alternatively subscribe to online only version by clicking on the link below and save 25%:

http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/offer.cfm?campaign=168-XLMT



MACHO MOMS AND DEADBEAT DADS
Mar 9th 2006  

The Democrats are finally invading the Republicans' national-security
turf

"PRESIDENT BUSH wants to sell [six American ports] to the United Arab
Emirates--a country that had diplomatic ties with the Taliban," says
Harold Ford, a bright young Democratic congressman from Tennessee. In a
television ad promoting his bid for a Senate seat, he says that, unlike
George Bush, he believes that "we shouldn't outsource our national
security to anyone."

At last, the Democrats have found a national-security issue they can
agree to sound tough on. DP World, a firm owned by the Dubai
government, is buying P&O, a British firm that operates six American
ports. The public are outraged. Never mind that the UAE is an American
ally, or that port security will remain in federal hands, or that a
port-management firm has a financial interest in not blowing up the
ports it manages. Some two-thirds of Americans oppose the deal.

For the Democrats, this is a great opportunity. For years, they have
enjoyed a consistent advantage over Republicans on "mommy" issues, such
as education and health care. But Republicans have trounced them on
"daddy" issues, such as killing terrorists and defending the homeland.
The Democrats have lost a lot of elections because they are easy to
caricature as the party that thinks "there are no enemies, just friends
whose grievances we haven't yet accommodated," as Mark Steyn, a
conservative columnist, once put it. 

To turn this around, the Democrats need to sound both resolute and
united. And the fortuitous thing about the Dubai ports deal is that it
unites disparate strands of Democratic thought. Opposing the deal is
not just about protecting American ports from Islamist terrorists. It
also appeals to the party's protectionist wing--hence Mr Ford's use of
that dog-whistle word "outsource". And it appeals to those who see the
Bush administration as a conspiracy to benefit rapacious corporations. 

Democratic blogs are going wild about the fact that John Snow, Mr
Bush's treasury secretary and also the chairman of the committee that
approved the Dubai deal, used to be head of CSX, an American firm that
sold its port operations to DP World in 2004. That was after Mr Snow
had left CSX, and no one has managed to explain how he might have
profited from approving the Dubai deal, but it sounds fishy, at least
to those who have written off the Bush team as a bunch of crooks. 

There are three further reasons why Democrats have seized on the ports
issue. It gives them a soundbite--"Arab hands off our ports"--that even
the dimmest voter can understand. (Such soundbites have traditionally
been a Republican strong point.) It allows them to pander to racist
voters with plausible deniability. (Again, this is usually Republican
turf.) And it looks like an opportunity to defeat the hated Mr Bush,
not least because Republicans are nearly as suspicious of the deal as
Democrats are. On March 8th, a House panel dominated by Republicans
voted 62-2 to block the DP World deal--even though Mr Bush has promised
to veto any such attempt. 

All this hoohah comes at a time when Mr Bush's national-security
credentials are already looking tarnished. Terrorists continue to blow
up mosques in Iraq (and a Hindu temple in India). The administration
does not know how to stop Iran from building a nuclear bomb (see
article[1]). Hamas's electoral victory casts doubt on the notion that
spreading democracy in the Middle East will curb terrorism. Could it be
that the Daddy party is not, in fact, keeping Americans safe? Will
Americans turn to Mommy instead? 

Recent polls suggest the Republicans are indeed losing their lead on
national security. A recent Gallup poll found 40% of respondents
thought the Democrats would do a better job of protecting America
against terrorism and military threats, while 45% preferred the
Republicans. So the GOP's advantage has not disappeared, but it is half
what it was in September and only a third as large as it was in 2003,
when Republicans led Democrats by 51% to 36% on this issue (see chart). 

If this trend were to continue, the Democrats could reasonably expect
to start winning elections. But Michael O'Hanlon, a security analyst at
the Brookings Institution, warns against complacency. "Mr Bush has
taken a short-term hit. But it is wishful thinking for Democrats to
suppose that one month of bad news has wiped out 30 years of Republican
advantage on national security," he says. 

Republicans may have lost some of their lustre, but Democrats haven't
gained much, argues Mr O'Hanlon. Mr Bush may not have shown much skill,
but he has shown resolve in Iraq. And at home, his Department of
Homeland Security has done as good a job "as you could reasonably
expect". Databases have been integrated and border security tightened
to the extent that al-Qaeda has a hard time getting into America. 

 There remain serious weaknesses, of course. America's borders are
still porous, its chemical plants vulnerable, and it is a long way from
winning the battle for Muslim hearts and minds, as a young man named
Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar demonstrated last week by allegedly driving a
Jeep Cherokee across a college campus in North Carolina running down
students. 

Since Mr Taheri-azar was born in Iran, his one-man JIHAD has
strengthened the hand of those who think that America's chief
national-security problem is unassimilated immigrants. This view is
most common among Republicans. The Senate Judiciary Committee was
trying this week to cobble together an immigration bill that combined
stricter controls with a guest-worker programme, as Mr Bush wants. But
Republicans on the committee are divided, and if they cannot agree, an
enforcement-only bill might pass. 

Meanwhile, the Democratic National Committee has published a list of
Republican "failures on homeland security", which consists mostly of
Republican failures to back Democrat-sponsored extra spending. The
Democrats have struggled to offer a coherent alternative. On Iraq, the
party is divided between those who think America should pull out now
and those who would prefer to stabilise the place first. The former
course would probably spark an Iraqi civil war (which, to be fair, most
Americans expect to happen anyway), while the latter approach is the
same as Mr Bush's. 

One problem for the Democrats is that since Saddam Hussein's weapons of
mass destruction were not found, Mr Bush has justified his war on
idealistic grounds: replacing tyranny with democracy. Other
Republicans, such as Senator Sam Brownback, take an even more
moralistic line on foreign policy (see article[2]).

TRUST US, WE'RE REALISTS
 Since the days of Woodrow Wilson, such liberal internationalism has
traditionally been a Democratic position. Democrats who oppose Mr Bush
find themselves arguing for a more "realist" approach--that America
should be more cautious about trying to democratise the Islamic world.
Many old liberals are uncomfortable with sounding so Kissingerian,
which is one reason why the party now struggles to find a platform it
can unite around, argues Peter Beinart, author of "The Good Fight", a
forthcoming book on liberals and foreign policy. 

Both at home and abroad, the Democrats' best bet is probably to harp on
about the Bush administration's undoubted incompetence. Bumper stickers
of the "I've fixed Iraq, now I'll fix New Orleans" type will doubtless
help. From her perch in the Senate, Hillary Clinton, the party's
current frontrunner in the 2008 presidential stakes, is doing a fair
job of sounding both hawkish and competent. For every threat, from
terrorism to bird flu, she issues a timely, carefully-worded press
release. She is also mastering the art of the empty patriotic gesture,
long a Republican speciality: for example, co-sponsoring a bill to ban
flag-burning. 

Other Democrats think the party should go further. Steve Jarding and
Dave "Mudcat" Saunders, two Democratic consultants, want to "hold the
Republicans' feet to the fire" on national security, by pointing out
how many top Republicans have dodged military service. The pair has an
impressive record of wooing elusive rural, white male votes for
Democrats, such as when they helped Mark Warner win the governorship of
Virginia, a Republican stronghold, in 2001. But both sides can play
hardball: Republicans gleefully point out that Bill Clinton was
advising Dubai officials on the ports deal even as his wife was
denouncing it. 

For the foreseeable future, the Democrats will find it hard to supplant
the Republicans as the party of national security. But to win
elections, they don't need to beat them; only to neutralise their
advantage. And that could happen. 

-----
[1] http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_ID=5605667
[2] http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_ID=5603475
 

See this article with graphics and related items at http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5609392&fsrc=nwl

Go to http://www.economist.com for more global news, views and analysis from the Economist Group.

- ABOUT ECONOMIST.COM -

Economist.com is the online version of The Economist newspaper, an independent weekly international news and business publication offering clear reporting, commentary and analysis on world politics, business, finance, science & technology, culture, society and the arts.
Economist.com also offers exclusive content online, including additional articles throughout the week in the Global Agenda section.

-	SUBSCRIBE NOW AND SAVE 25% -

Click here: http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/offer.cfm?campaign=168-XLMT

Subscribe now with 25% off and receive full access to:

* all the articles published in The Economist newspaper
* the online archive - allowing you to search and retrieve over 33,000 articles published in The Economist since 1997
* The World in  - The Economist's outlook on the year
* Business encyclopedia - allows you to find a definition and explanation for any business term


- ABOUT THIS E-MAIL -

This e-mail was sent to you by the person at the e-mail address listed
above through a link found on Economist.com.  We will not send you any
future messages as a result of your being the recipient of this e-mail.


- COPYRIGHT -

This e-mail message and Economist articles linked from it are copyright
(c) 2006 The Economist Newspaper Group Limited. All rights reserved.
http://www.economist.com/help/copy_general.cfm

Economist.com privacy policy: http://www.economist.com/about/privacy.cfm



From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Thu Mar  9 13:46:04 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Thu,  9 Mar 2006 21:46:04 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Dubai Company to Transfer U.S. Ports to
	American Company
Message-ID: <20060309214604.C86B011F973@lax-gw07.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

This could easily turn into a case of "Be careful what you wish for..." if Bechtel, Halliburton, or even some subsidiary of The Carlyle Group ends up as the new owner...


WASHINGTON | March 9, 2006
Dubai Company to Transfer U.S. Ports to American Company
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and CARL HULSE
The decision came just hours after Republican leaders told President Bush that Congress would act soon to block the deal.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/09/politics/09cnd-ports.html?ex=1142571600&en=4b6bb5a104da4a59&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/587b6f42/attachment.htm 

From marylouiseparis at hotmail.com  Thu Mar  9 13:57:19 2006
From: marylouiseparis at hotmail.com (Mary Louise smn)
Date: Thu, 09 Mar 2006 21:57:19 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] Hope
In-Reply-To: <E1FHP0s-00015v-4P@elasmtp-mealy.atl.sa.earthlink.net>
Message-ID: <BAY107-F8F13812A174B6BD77276EB8EC0@phx.gbl>



                   Thank you.  Ghandi's wisdom does give solace.      
Marylouise

>From: Reeeees at aol.com
>Reply-To: mb-civic at islandlists.com
>To: michael at michaelbutler.com
>Subject: [Mb-civic] Hope
>Date: Thu, 9 Mar 2006 01:32:18 EST
>
>When I despair, I remember that  all through history the way of truth and
>love has always won.  There have  been tyrants, and murderers, and for a 
>time
>they can seem invincible, but in the  end they always fall, always.
>
>-Mahatma  Gandhi


>_______________________________________________
>Mb-civic mailing list
>Mb-civic at islandlists.com
>http://www.islandlists.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mb-civic

_________________________________________________________________
Express yourself instantly with MSN Messenger! Download today it's FREE! 
http://messenger.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200471ave/direct/01/


From michael at intrafi.com  Thu Mar  9 13:53:56 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (Michael)
Date: Thu, 9 Mar 2006 16:53:56 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Article from Tom Dispatch
Message-ID: <200603092153.k29Lrur6023345@thor.thenation.com>

An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/b4188885/attachment.htm 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Thu Mar  9 14:33:54 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Thu, 9 Mar 2006 17:33:54 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Neil Young
Message-ID: <000a01c643c9$8f43cab0$8727e440@Harold>

Just caught Neil on the Daily Show, talking about his movie Harvest Gold.

I think this is the first time I have seen Jon truly in awe of his guest and Jon has had many high profile guests.

There was none of his normal satire, just a nice chat about the challenges of playing new music to an audience.

I personally enjoyed it, as Jon did.

H

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/1de6071f/attachment.htm 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Thu Mar  9 15:16:49 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Thu, 9 Mar 2006 18:16:49 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] China hits back at US over human rights
Message-ID: <000b01c643cf$8f1cfa10$8727e440@Harold>


           
           
                 
           
            Indepth ?
           
            Viewpoint ?
           

                 
           
           
                 
           
           
                 
           
           
                 
           
           
                 
           
           
                 
           
           
                 
           
           
                 
           
           
                 
           
           
                 
           
           
                 
           
           
                 
           
           
                 
           
           

                 
                 
                 
                 
                 
           




              
        Back at ya!

            Both are abusers

            H



            China hits back at U.S. criticism on human rights; cites racism, Guantanamo 
            11:36:01 EST Mar 9, 2006 
            AUDRA ANG



            BEIJING (AP) - China on Thursday lashed out against U.S. criticism of its human rights record, saying racial discrimination and crime were still rife in the United States and noted the abuse of prisoners at U.S.-run detention centres. 

            The State Council, China's cabinet, denounced the United States for what it called rampant violence and widespread discrimination against minorities - especially blacks - in its annual response to the State Department's report on human rights worldwide. 

            "For a long time, the life and security of the people of the United States has not been under efficient protection," the Chinese report said. 

            Blacks are given heavier criminal penalties, arrested more frequently and are more likely to be targeted for hate crimes, the report said. 

            It also criticized American troops for brutality at prisons in Iraq and the detention camp for terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. 

            The response came one day after the State Department said the Chinese government's human rights record "remained poor, and the government continued to commit numerous and serious abuses." 

            The U.S. report said repression worsened in China in 2005, with a trend toward "increased harassment, detention, and imprisonment" of people seen as threats to the Chinese government. It also mentioned tightened controls over print, broadcast and electronic media and censorship of online content. 

            The U.S. State Department study, published each year since 1977, offers a comprehensive analysis of all countries in the world except the United States. 

            Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said Washington's report ignored China's progress in human rights, which he said "not only met with the satisfaction of the Chinese people but also has been widely affirmed by the international community." 

            "We express our strong dissatisfaction and resolute opposition," Qin said, adding that Washington should "immediately end the erroneous practice of interfering in other country's internal politics." 

            Also Thursday, a group of Chinese academics published their own study on human rights in the country, saying the leadership had made some progress but needed to do more. 

            "Both Chinese and American governments have put out reports but neither of them had objective comments on the conditions of human rights," said Xu Zhiyong, a Beijing professor who was one of the authors of the report. 

            "Our report objectively and reasonably comments on the conditions," Xu said in a telephone interview. 

            The report by the Open Constitution Initiative, which was posted online, cited expanded public welfare and the abolition of taxes on farm production as signs of progress. Courts have also been repealing death sentences and the use of torture to produce confessions was slowly being reduced, the report said. 

            However, it faulted the authorities for tightening restrictions on free speech and religious freedom, saying expansion of civil liberties had not kept pace with economic development. 

            "We believe the prosperity and freedom are not contradictory. On the contrary, prosperity without freedom cannot last," the report said. 

            A large section of the Chinese government report on human rights in the U.S. was devoted to racial discrimination, which it said had "long been a chronic malady of American society." 

            It said the country's blacks and other minorities have much lower living standards and incomes and faced job discrimination. Blacks were also more likely to receive the death penalty for serious crimes, it said. 

            Since the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, Muslims have been targeted for arrests and detention under "the banner of 'anti-terrorism,' " the report said. 

            It also criticized American foreign policy and detailed prison abuse by American troops in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, accusing them of using "various kinds of torture" while trying to "extract information." 

            The report also touched on: 

            -Private gun ownership in America, saying the "unchecked spread of guns has caused incessant murders." 

            -Secret wire taps and surveillance on American citizens under the Patriot Act. 

            -The poverty rate and the problem of homelessness.
           
     
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/8da336cc/attachment-0001.htm 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 190 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/8da336cc/attachment-0025.gif 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 43 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/8da336cc/attachment-0026.gif 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 52 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/8da336cc/attachment-0027.gif 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 49 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/8da336cc/attachment-0028.gif 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 54 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/8da336cc/attachment-0029.gif 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 226 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/8da336cc/attachment-0030.gif 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 201 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/8da336cc/attachment-0031.gif 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 1724 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/8da336cc/attachment-0032.gif 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 225 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/8da336cc/attachment-0033.gif 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 455 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/8da336cc/attachment-0034.gif 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 296 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/8da336cc/attachment-0035.gif 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 167 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/8da336cc/attachment-0036.gif 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 224 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/8da336cc/attachment-0037.gif 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 401 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/8da336cc/attachment-0038.gif 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 489 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/8da336cc/attachment-0039.gif 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 221 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/8da336cc/attachment-0040.gif 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 243 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/8da336cc/attachment-0041.gif 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 235 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/8da336cc/attachment-0042.gif 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 144 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/8da336cc/attachment-0043.gif 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 2550 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/8da336cc/attachment-0044.gif 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 1913 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/8da336cc/attachment-0045.gif 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 1577 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/8da336cc/attachment-0046.gif 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 144 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/8da336cc/attachment-0047.gif 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 1807 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/8da336cc/attachment-0048.gif 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 1485 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/8da336cc/attachment-0049.gif 

From barbarasiomos38 at msn.com  Thu Mar  9 16:05:04 2006
From: barbarasiomos38 at msn.com (Barbara Siomos)
Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 00:05:04 GMT
Subject: [Mb-civic] Neil Young
Message-ID: <BAY114-DAV154CAF0666B1FCE1AFDBB1ABED0@phx.gbl>

Dah!!!  Harry I do not know of whom you speak???  :-))))  The Daily show and Jon? Sorry... nice review you wrote though, I would like to know which Jon?

peace,
barbara


-----Original Message-----
From: Harold Sifton
Sent: Thu, 9 Mar 2006 14:33:54 -0800
To: MB Civic
Subject: [Mb-civic] Neil Young

Just caught Neil on the Daily Show, talking about his movie Harvest Gold.

I think this is the first time I have seen Jon truly in awe of his guest and Jon has had many high profile guests.

There was none of his normal satire, just a nice chat about the challenges of playing new music to an audience.

I personally enjoyed it, as Jon did.

H


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060310/da6b5a1f/attachment.htm 

From hecate at diamonddragon.com  Thu Mar  9 16:54:01 2006
From: hecate at diamonddragon.com (Hecate)
Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 00:54:01 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] BBC E-mail: Water policy 'fails world's poor'
Message-ID: <20060310_005401_033751.hecate@diamonddragon.com>

Hecate saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you
should see it.



** Water policy 'fails world's poor' **
Almost 20% of the world's population still lacks access to drinking water because of failing policies, a report finds.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/4787758.stm >


** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all
in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/dailyemail/ >


** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have?been verified.

If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm


From barbarasiomos38 at msn.com  Thu Mar  9 16:43:13 2006
From: barbarasiomos38 at msn.com (Barbara Siomos)
Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 00:43:13 GMT
Subject: [Mb-civic] UFW unveils new high-tech web site. Visit it today!
Message-ID: <BAY114-DAV7D80228BE5F32B443BC0DABED0@phx.gbl>




-----Original Message-----
From: United Farm Workers
Sent: Thu, 9 Mar 2006 10:42:03 -0800
To: Barbara Siomos
Subject: UFW unveils new high-tech web site. Visit it today!

UFW unveils new high-tech web site
Visit it today at www.ufw.org and tell your friends! 

The United Farm Workers has just launched its new and
dramatically redesigned web site, www.ufw.org . The revamped site
headlines ongoing UFW organizing activities and campaigns in
which activists can quickly and easily participate. Exciting
innovations include:

* A new "Union Organizing" section with updates on the latest
drives and a special "Worker Voices" section where visitors can
hear farm workers tell stories in their own words.

* A "Hot Issues" section with the latest about current news and
events right on the front page.

* An easy-to-use "Take Action" section where farm worker
supporters can make a difference by lending their voices to
specific organizing, legislative and political campaigns.

* E-cards (e-mail greeting cards with images and text to send
family and friends on special occasions) and updated photo
gallery, digital movies and audio clips of Cesar Chavez. For
example, March and April's E-cards highlight Cesar Chavez Day.

* A regularly updated events calendar featuring dozens of Cesar
Chavez Day events across the nation.

* A "Youth Activism" section to help young people learn how to
organize in their schools and communities.

* A "Research" section to make it easy for students, reporters
and historians to locate background information via a search
engine covering the web site's extensive archives.

* An on-line poll where visitors can share their opinions and
see how others feel about the same issue.

* A complete listing of UFW offices by region and state.

Please visit the site today and share the URL with your family
and friends.

If you received this message from a friend, you can sign up for
the UFW List Serve at: http://www.ufwaction.org/ufw/join.html?r=4dAhqB619cOTE&

United Farm Workers, 29700 Woodford-Tehachapi Rd., P.O. Box 62,
Keene, CA, 93531 www.ufw.org

If you would like to unsubscribe from the UFW List Serve, please
visit your subscription management page at: 
http://www.ufwaction.org/ufw/smp.tcl?nkey=wn3ugig227wd7wb&


***************************************
Powered by GetActive Software, Inc.
Member Relationship Management Solutions
That Recruit, Engage, and Retain (tm)
http://www.getactive.com
***************************************


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060310/b78ef5b3/attachment.htm 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Thu Mar  9 17:09:59 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Thu, 9 Mar 2006 20:09:59 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Fw:  Neil Young
Message-ID: <001301c643df$5d9e9600$8727e440@Harold>

And my apologies, Neil's movie title is "Heart of Gold"

Lv, H

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Harold Sifton 
To: Barbara Siomos 
Sent: Thursday, March 09, 2006 8:02 PM
Subject: Re: [Mb-civic] Neil Young


 Jon Stewart the host of the Daily Show
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Barbara Siomos 
  To: Harold Sifton ; mb-civic at islandlists.com 
  Sent: Thursday, March 09, 2006 7:05 PM
  Subject: Re: [Mb-civic] Neil Young


  Dah!!!  Harry I do not know of whom you speak???  :-))))  The Daily show and Jon? Sorry... nice review you wrote though, I would like to know which Jon?

  peace,
  barbara

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  From: Harold Sifton
  Sent: Thu, 9 Mar 2006 14:33:54 -0800
  To: MB Civic
  Subject: [Mb-civic] Neil Young


  Just caught Neil on the Daily Show, talking about his movie Harvest Gold.

  I think this is the first time I have seen Jon truly in awe of his guest and Jon has had many high profile guests.

  There was none of his normal satire, just a nice chat about the challenges of playing new music to an audience.

  I personally enjoyed it, as Jon did.

  H

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/d41ce6e2/attachment.htm 

From nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca  Thu Mar  9 17:13:54 2006
From: nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca (CBC News Online)
Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 01:13:54 UT
Subject: [Mb-civic] CBC News - UN SETS UP FUND TO SPEED EMERGENCY AID
Message-ID: <20060310011354.B4C0932F85@web05.nm.cbc.ca>

An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Url: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060310/2b3fd90c/attachment.diff 

From nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca  Thu Mar  9 17:18:06 2006
From: nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca (CBC News Online)
Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 01:18:06 UT
Subject: [Mb-civic] CBC News - POOR WATER MANAGEMENT LIMITS ACCESS TO SAFE
	WATER: REPORT
Message-ID: <20060310011806.D50FD32F85@web05.nm.cbc.ca>

An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Url: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060310/473c4e91/attachment.diff 

From nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca  Thu Mar  9 17:16:46 2006
From: nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca (CBC News Online)
Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 01:16:46 UT
Subject: [Mb-civic] CBC News - U.S. TRADE DEFICIT SETS ANOTHER RECORD IN
	JANUARY
Message-ID: <20060310011646.DF78132F85@web05.nm.cbc.ca>

An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Url: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060310/80abcbf8/attachment.diff 

From ean at sbcglobal.net  Thu Mar  9 18:50:33 2006
From: ean at sbcglobal.net (ean at sbcglobal.net)
Date: Thu, 09 Mar 2006 18:50:33 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] International Women's Day + What IF???
Message-ID: <E1FHZnq-0002aa-CH@elasmtp-mealy.atl.sa.earthlink.net>

Via Ed Pearl:

Many thanks to New York Transfer for these, as many others.
Contact information is at the bottom.  Their free, daily digest
arrives at 9pm PDT and provides unique, often valuable articles.
Ed

The Independent - 08 March 2006
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/article349913.ece


1% of the titled land in the world is owned by women

A baby girl born in the UK is likely to live to 81 - but if she is born in
Swaziland, she is likely to die at 39

70% of the 1.2 bn people living in poverty are women and children

21% of the world's managers are female

62% of unpaid family workers are female

9% of judges, 10% of company directors and 10% of top police officers in
the UK are women

Women comprise 55% of the world's population aged over 60 years old and
65% of those aged over 80

?970,000 is the difference between lifetime earnings of men and women in
the UK finance sector

85m girls worldwide are unable to attend school, compared with 45m boys.
In Chad, just 4% of girls go to school.

700,000,000 women are without adequate food, water, sanitation, health
care or education (compared with 400,000,000 men)

Women in full-time jobs earn an average 17% less than British men

Women in part-time jobs earn an average 42% less than British men

67% of all illiterate adults are women

1,440 women die each day during childbirth (a rate of one death every
minute)

1 in 7 women in Ethiopia die in pregnancy or childbirth (it is one in
19,000 in Britain)

In the US, 35% of lawyers are women but just 5% are partners in law
firms

In the EU, women comprise 3% of chief execs of major companies

12 is the number of world leaders who are women (out of 191 members of the
United Nations)

Men directed 9 out of every 10 films made in 2004

***

Long Arm of Law Reaching Up U.S. Women's Skirts

By Kimberly Gadette - WeNews commentator

(WOMENSENEWS)--The latest miscarriage of justice comes from the 
lawmakers
of South Dakota.

Last week, they passed a bill that bans all abortions except those in
which the mother's life is in mortal danger. All that's left is one
pregnant pause before Governor Mike Rounds--who has expressed his 
support
for the bill--gives full-blown birth to the bill by signing it into law.

Under the shield of the Fourteenth Amendment, guaranteeing a citizen's
right to privacy, I had the 1973 court ruling of Roe v. Wade to protect
me, allowing me to decide whether or not to continue a pregnancy.

But given the current climate in Washington, accompanied by the maelstrom
of this new South Dakota law slated to take effect July 1, I hear a
ticking clock. No longer biological, this particular clock is wired to a
shiny new bomb.

If one possessed a better view than the South Dakotan Walleye (the
official state fish), one could have seen this coming. Between Medicaid
programs that refuse payment for abortions, various state laws requiring
parental notification, self-righteous pharmacists who refuse to fill
"day-after" pills and debates over inconclusive evidence as to whether the
fetus feels pain, abortion rights are eroding fast and furiously.

If signed into law, doctors in South Dakota would face up to five years in
prison for performing an abortion unless it was absolutely necessary to
save the woman's life.

Even more appalling, per Krista Heeren-Graber of the South Dakota Network
Against Family Violence and Sexual Assault, "If a woman who is raped
becomes pregnant, the rapist would have the same rights to the child as
the mother." Wow--family court as we've never seen it before.

Abortions in Back Alley Near You

If Roe v. Wade is overturned--and it's pretty clear that proponents of the
South Dakota bill have designed it as a missile aimed straight at the
Supreme Court--medical abominations are heading to women in a U.S. back
alley right near you.

When one man puts an uninvited hand up a woman's skirt, it might be
considered harassment, molestation, assault, perhaps even rape.

But when one U.S. government puts an uninvited hand up all women's skirts,
these days it's considered business as usual.

Whether it's Sam Alito trying to get the nod from the Senate Judiciary
Committee, or a candidate vying to win an election to represent a tiny
constituency somewhere in this country, the One Big Question, repeated
until we're blue in the ovaries, is "What are your views on abortion
rights?"

Abortion, abortion, abortion.

Like prospective home buyers during a Sunday open house, it seems
everyone's entitled to barge on into women's private parts and take a
good, long look around. It's "a womb with a view." However, the view is
theirs, not mine. My property, yet their view.

Open to Public View

If this were terra firma, I'd be able to call on the Fourth Amendment to
legally defend my property rights. But since this is terra "femma" I'm
expected to simply lie there, gracious hostess to the last, while all
manner of judges, legislators and doctors probe at will. Gracious me,
there's so much traffic going on, I'm surprised they haven't put up a
stoplight.

Where's the legislation that concerns itself with men's reproductive
anatomy? Perhaps I'm being walleyed, but I can't find a thing.

The big issue is, well, "issue." It's about who issues the babies into the
world (that would be women), but who controls that process (with the
executive, legislative and judicial branches currently dominated by males,
that would be men).

When we look to treatments of the female anatomy in other countries, we
gasp with shock at descriptions of female genital mutilation.

"In some cultures, girls will be told to sit beforehand in cold water, to
numb the area and reduce the likelihood of bleeding. The girl is
immobilized, held, usually by older women, with her legs open. Mutilation
may be carried out using broken glass, a tin lid, scissors, a razor blade
or some other cutting instrument." That description is brought to you from
the Amnesty International Web site.

It's cruel. It's grotesque.

But where is the audible gasping over what would happen to women right
here in the land of the free if abortion rights are lost? Mutilation
exacts the same toll, whether in a developing country or in New York, New
York.

Primitive Gender Politics

I know that many men are just as horrified by the attack on choice as I
am. But given the current domination of our political offices by men who
oppose choice, it's hard not to see a primitive form of gender
politics--even hatred--at work.

I took my concern to many female friends, and their reactions boiled down
to one word: "control." At this late date, there is still the overarching
need for the male to control the female, even if it means laying hands on
her most private of possessions.

Why should I be surprised? Women only achieved the right to vote 86 years
ago. Before the middle of the 19th century, the property rights of a U.S.
woman went to her husband upon her marriage. It wasn't until the years
between 1839 and 1895 that this tradition was gradually reversed by a
series of Women's Property Acts passed in each state. Yet right of
separate ownership of women's most "real" of individual real estate is now
under severe scrutiny once again.

We're advancing so far, we're coming full circle. I can't wait to see the
results when we attempt to reinvent fire.

When I was young, when both Roe v. Wade and I were in early bloom, there
were nights of passionate wrestling with my boyfriend in his VW bug.
Sixteen years old and as excited as he was, I knew myself, and knew I
wasn't ready. While his hands kept groping me, mine kept slapping them
away. When I was finally ready--and when it was entirely my choice--I
stopped slapping.

What I'd give to be able to slap those government hands away today.

To the boys who currently dominate Washington, here's a message from one
of the girls: It's my choice, not yours. You can legislate and adjudicate
till you drop, but you can't control me. Control yourself. Seriously.

[Kimberly Gadette is a humor writer based in Portland, Ore. Working on her
second novel, her columns and articles entail a deep dismemberment of
topics including politics, sex, pop culture, dating, male sports and dogs.
Currently juggling seven columns, she's been published over 60 times in
the last year in publications from the West Coast to the East, as well as
internationally.]

For more information:

"Why Dressing Up for Halloween Is Wearing Thin": -
http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/2503/

Copyright 2006 Women's eNews.

***

** International Women's Day **

Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906)
American feminist leader and suffragist

"I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do
because I notice it always coincides with their own desires." - Susan B.
Anthony.

In 1896, Susan B. Anthony stepped down from the chair and addressed
the National-American Woman Suffrage Association meeting when a
resolution was offered to repudiate Elizabeth Cady Stanton's "Woman's
Bible." Aunt Susan's impassioned appeal was directed more at religious
freedom and the rights of individuals.

"The religious persecution of the ages has been done under what was
claimed to be the command of God."-Susan B. Anthony, from Rufus K.
Noyes, "Views of Religion," quoted from James A. Haught, ed., "2000
Years of Disbelief"

Source: Positive Atheism
http://www.positiveatheism.org

***

[March 8th is not only International Women's Day but also the anniversary
of the 1948 McCollum v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. Today
we honor Vashti McCollum, the courageous woman who brought this 
important
case challenging government-sanctioned school prayer, resulting in a major
victory for separation of church and state, 58 years ago today. McCollum,
now in her nineties, is an honorary officer of the Freedom from Religion
Foundation. -NY Transfer]

Today in History - March 8, 2006

Anniversary of McCollum v. Board of Education Decision

Historic 1948 Supreme Court Decision on School Prayer

On this date in 1948, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision,
McCollum v. Board of Education, barring religious instruction in
public schools, was handed down, with a vote of 8 to 1. The dramatic
case was brought by Vashti McCollum, a mother in Champaign, Ill., on
behalf of her son, Jim.

In her enduring book about the challenge, "One Woman's Fight," Vashti
described how Jim was punished by teachers and teased by students for not
taking part in religious instruction illegally taught in his public
school. Although she lost at the first two court levels and was treated as
"a very unpopular woman," Vashti did not give up. Her appeal to the U.S.
Supreme Court resulted in a stunning victory for separation of church and
state, which is still the prevailing precedent in public school law today.

Vashti, who is now in her 90s, is an Honorary Officer of the Freedom
>From Religion Foundation.

"Separation means separation, not something less. Jefferson's metaphor in
describing the relation between Church and State speaks of a 'wall of
separation,' not a fine line easily overstepped. The public school is at
once the symbol of our democracy and the most pervasive means for
promoting our common destiny. In no activity of the State is it more vital
to keep out divisive forces than in its schools, to avoid confusing, not
to say fusing, what the Constitution sought to keep strictly apart. 'The
great American principle of eternal separation' -- Elihu Root's phrase
bears repetition -- is one of the vital reliances of our Constitutional
system for assuring unities among our people stronger than our
diversities. It is the Court's duty to enforce this principle in its full
integrity." -Justice Frankfurter, concurrence, McCollum v. Board of
Education, 333 U.S. 203, 212 (1948).

To read more, see "The Case Against School Prayer" at
http://www.ffrf.org/nontracts/schoolprayer.php

source: Freedom from Religion Foundation
http://www.ffrf.org


***

sent by Bill McGinnis - Mar 3, 2006

What If President Bush Is A Continuous Political Liar,
Who Cannot Stop And Cannot Help Himself?

And what if the Vice President is also suffering from this same problem
with the truth? What do we do then?

It is starting to look to me like both of them just automatically say
whatever they think they need to say in order to get what they want, all
of the time, whether what they say is true or not.

Here are some examples: These are the exact thoughts they deliberately
conveyed to us, expressed in my words, as shown below; then followed by
the truth, briefly stated.

"Nobody warned us before the 9/11 attacks that terrorists were getting
ready to strike inside the United States." Yes, they did.

"We did everything we could have done to prevent the 9/11 attacks, given
the information we had." No, you didn't.

"Nobody could have thought that terrorists might hijack some airplanes and
fly them it into buildings." Yes, they did.

"We know that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction!" No, you didn't.

"The people of Iraq will greet us as liberators. They will be dancing in
the streets and tossing flowers." No, they didn't.

"We are making good progress in Iraq." No, we aren't.

"The people of Iraq are yearning to be free." Yes, yearning to be free
from us, the invaders.

"We don't torture." Yes we do.

"All electronic surveillance inside our Country is done with a court
order." No, it isn't.

"The economy is strong, and getting stronger." No it's not. We're living
in a false prosperity, financed by huge deficits and foreign loans.

"The Constitution gives me authority to do whatever I think I need to do
in order to protect the American people, even if Congress has passed a law
against what I want to do." No, it doesn't.

"We haven't had any terrorist attacks since 9/11." They are waiting to get
all the parts smuggled into the Country, then assembled. It takes time.

"My Government has conducted a thorough investigation, and the Dubai Ports
deal poses no possible danger to our National Security." No, you didn't.
And yes, it does. And besides, it's not "your government," it's our
government. We have foolishly allowed you temporarily to serve as
President.

And the very latest and most obvious lie, captured on video tape for all
to see: "Nobody told me the levees in New Orleans were in danger of
breaking open and flooding." Yes, they did.

The lies go on and on, maybe forever if we let them.

And so we should all be asking ourselves: "How long are we going to
tolerate this? And why should any sane person permit these lies to
continue? And what can we do to make them stop?"


Blessings to you. May God help us all.

Rev. Bill McGinnis, Director - LoveAllPeople.org

http://www.loveallpeople.org


=======================================================
=========
.NY Transfer News Collective    *    A Service of Blythe Systems
.          Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us         .
.339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012     http://www.blythe.org
.List Archives:   https://olm.blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/
.Subscribe: https://olm.blythe-systems.com/mailman/listinfo/nytr
=======================================================
=========


End of NYTr Digest, Vol 22, Issue 7
***********************************


-- 
You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, 
option D (up to 3 emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options 
(option A - 1x/week, option B - 3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option D - 
up to 3x/day) please reply and let us know!  If someone forwarded you 
this email and you want to be on our list, send an email to 
ean at sbcglobal.net and tell us which option you'd like.


"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/fde2af14/attachment-0001.htm 

From Hawaiipolo at cs.com  Thu Mar  9 17:13:05 2006
From: Hawaiipolo at cs.com (Hawaiipolo at cs.com)
Date: Thu, 9 Mar 2006 20:13:05 EST
Subject: [Mb-civic] Fwd: What the the conservatives are saying about Bush
Message-ID: <E1FHarj-0003z3-93@elasmtp-mealy.atl.sa.earthlink.net>

 
-------------- next part --------------
An embedded message was scrubbed...
From: Hawaiipolo at cs.com
Subject: What the the conservatives are saying about Bush
Date: Thu, 9 Mar 2006 20:11:24 EST
Size: 14971
Url: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/a9a2f5e1/attachment.eml 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Fri Mar 10 04:21:57 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 07:21:57 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Dubai Firm to Sell U.S. Port Operations - Washington Post
Message-ID: <44116F65.9020904@comcast.net>

Dubai Firm to Sell U.S. Port Operations
Move to End Three-Week Dispute Comes After GOP Lawmakers, Defying Bush, 
Vowed to Kill Deal

By Jonathan Weisman and Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, March 10, 2006; A01

A United Arab Emirates-based maritime company at the center of a furious 
controversy over port security bowed to pressure from Congress yesterday 
and announced that it will sell off its U.S. operations to an American 
owner.

The announcement, issued by Dubai Ports World Chief Operating Officer 
Edward H. Bilkey, came hours after House and Senate GOP leaders bluntly 
told President Bush that Congress would kill the U.S. portions of the 
company's $6.8 billion acquisition of London-based Peninsular and 
Oriental Steam Navigation Co. (P&O), which has operations at six major 
U.S. ports, including New York and Baltimore.

The company's decision climaxed a three-week furor that pitted both 
Republicans and Democrats in Congress against Bush on a volatile 
national security issue in a midterm-election year. Fueled by fear of 
terrorism in a post-Sept. 11 world, opposition to the port deal 
mushroomed to the point at which even Bush's veto threat proved 
ineffective and, if anything, further aggravated even GOP allies.

The White House praised the UAE-based company for its decision and 
reaffirmed the "strong relationship" between the two nations. "This 
decision provides a way forward and will allow us to continue working on 
other issues," White House press secretary Scott McClellan said in an 
interview.

Although the demise of the U.S. port deal is sure to leave badly bruised 
feelings in the UAE, of which Dubai is a part, analysts predicted that 
the United States will be able to preserve its extensive security and 
economic ties with the tiny country, given the strong mutual interests 
at stake. The bigger problem, they said, will be the new damage done to 
the U.S. image in the Muslim world.

Even before the deal fell through, Arab media had been portraying U.S. 
opposition as an anti-Arab slur, contrasting that resistance to the 
acceptance generally accorded in the United States to investments from 
Asian and European entities.

"This can only make the already-damaged image worse," said Youssef M. 
Ibrahim, managing director of Dubai-based Strategic Energy Investment 
Group. "The problem is, for four or five years, we haven't found a way 
to repair that damaged image."

It is not clear which American company is willing to buy DP World's U.S. 
operations. About 75 percent of containers that enter U.S. ports go 
through terminals that are operated by foreign-owned firms.

Officials at Seattle-based SSA Marine, the largest U.S.-owned terminal 
operator, said they have not been contacted. Some potential bidders may 
seek to join forces with firms that already have operations at U.S. 
ports. But the process is in the early stages, and DP World appears to 
be determined to avoid a fire sale.

One potential private-equity buyer is Washington's Carlyle Group, which 
bought the U.S. container-shipping business of CSX Corp. in 2002 for 
$300 million, selling it two years later for $650 million. Also, the 
Dubai government has been an investor in Carlyle's investment funds and 
put $100 million into its latest, $7.85 billion buyout fund.

A source at Carlyle, however, said the firm will probably not be 
interested in P&O's port operations, given the political scrutiny such a 
deal would invite.

Another potential private-equity buyer is the Blackstone Group of New 
York. Though not ruling out an offer for the business, a source at the 
firm said it is too early to tell whether P&O's U.S. operations are even 
worth seeking.

The administration quietly approved the sale of British-owned P&O to DP 
World on Jan. 17 after a review by its secretive Committee on Foreign 
Investments in the United States. But stung by the public and political 
outcry once the decision became widely known last month, the White House 
and the company owned by the Dubai government tried to placate critics 
by agreeing to a 45-day review of the deal's national security implications.

Congress began acting this week to revoke the sale, driven by 
constituent fears that Arab state ownership of U.S. port operations 
would compromise security. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) 
and Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John W. Warner (R-Va.) 
warned company officials Wednesday that they would be prudent to cut a 
deal allowing them to sell off their newly acquired U.S. operations 
through normal business channels.

"Because of the strong relationship between the United Arab Emirates and 
the United States and to preserve this relationship, DP World has 
decided to transfer fully the U.S. operations of P&O Ports North 
America, Inc. to a United States entity," Bilkey announced in a 
statement. "This decision is based on an understanding that DP World 
will have time to effect the transfer in an orderly fashion and that DP 
World will not suffer economic loss."

DP World acquired management control of 24 of 829 container terminals at 
the ports of Baltimore, New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Miami and 
New Orleans. Terminal operators are primarily responsible for 
transferring containers from ships to railroad cars and trucks, 
administration officials have noted, while port security is the 
responsibility of the U.S. Coast Guard and U.S. Customs and Border 
Protection.

Company officials and Republican congressional aides said DP World 
intends to cut all ties to U.S. ports. "To me, there's nothing more to 
be done," said House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Peter T. King 
(R-N.Y.), a fierce opponent of the acquisition. "This deal is over."

Opposition to the deal has dogged Bush for weeks. Republican 
congressional leaders who gathered at the White House for a regularly 
scheduled meeting yesterday morning used the opportunity to warn him 
that he faced a defeat. Bush tried to smooth over the dispute, aides 
said, declining to repeat his veto threat during the meeting and 
dispatching spokesmen with talking points assuring that the "lines of 
communication remain open."

At his daily briefing after the meeting, McClellan abandoned tough talk 
in favor of conciliation.

By that point, rumors were floating that the company might withdraw, but 
White House aides said neither they nor Bush knew about the decision 
until Warner emerged on the Senate floor to announce it.

"Most people learned about it on CNN," said one senior official. 
Privately, Bush advisers sounded relieved. "This closes a chapter," said 
another top aide.

Frist was trying to hold back a vote yesterday on a motion by Sen. 
Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) to block the deal, but even after the firm's 
announcement, Democrats -- and some Republicans -- pushed to put their 
opposition on the record.

In practical terms, several specialists on the region said the end of 
the Dubai deal will likely have little impact on UAE's willingness to 
continue serving as a major Middle East outpost for U.S. warships, spy 
planes and combat aircraft. That is because the extensive U.S. military 
presence is seen by UAE's leaders as serving their own security interests.

But the UAE may now be less inclined to respond as favorably as it has 
to U.S. appeals for military assistance outside the country's borders, 
analysts said. "They've been doing such things because they've felt they 
had a special relationship with us," said David L. Mack, vice president 
of the Washington-based Middle East Institute and a former U.S. 
ambassador to the UAE. "Now, I would expect less eagerness on their part 
to be as accommodating."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/09/AR2006030901124.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060310/0a9aa1ed/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Fri Mar 10 04:25:55 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 07:25:55 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Flight Instructor Recalls Unease With Moussaoui -
	Washington Post
Message-ID: <44117053.50701@comcast.net>

Flight Instructor Recalls Unease With Moussaoui
Warnings About Suspect to School's Supervisor Were Ignored, Pilot Testifies

By Timothy Dwyer and Jerry Markon
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, March 10, 2006; A02

Zacarias Moussaoui's plan to learn to fly a Boeing 747 began to unravel 
the day he met Clarence Prevost, a retired Northwest Airlines and Navy 
pilot who once flew hurricane hunters.

Prevost, 68, took the stand yesterday in U.S. District Court in 
Alexandria and described how he quickly became suspicious of Moussaoui 
after he began one-on-one classroom instruction in August 2001.

He testified that at the end of the first day of classes, he urged the 
flight executives at the Minnesota school to request an FBI background 
check on Moussaoui because he was from the Middle East, had paid his 
$6,800 tuition with $100 bills and, unlike every other student at the 
school, he wasn't a pilot.

This is the response he got from his boss, he testified: "He paid his 
money. We don't care." Prevost said he told the executive, "We'll care 
when he hijacks an airplane, and he's throwing all the switches and then 
there are all these lawsuits."

The next day, Aug. 14, 2001, after Prevost kept pushing, school 
officials called the FBI. The following day, Moussaoui was arrested by 
immigration officials and held on charges that his 90-day visa had expired.

The testimony came on the fourth day of the trial that will determine 
whether Moussaoui is put to death for his role in the plot that led to 
the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. An admitted al-Qaeda operative, Moussaoui, 
37, pleaded guilty in April to conspiring with al-Qaeda in the worst 
terrorist attack in American history. He has said that Osama bin Laden 
instructed him to fly an airplane into the White House at another time.

Prosecutors argue that Moussaoui should be executed because he lied to 
investigators when he was arrested in Minnesota -- and that Sept. 11 
could have been prevented if he revealed all he knew. Defense attorneys 
say that Moussaoui had no specific knowledge of Sept. 11 and that the 
government would not have stopped the attacks even if he had confessed. 
At the time of his arrest, according to Prevost and another flight 
instructor, Moussaoui had very poor piloting skills.

"He was not a very good pilot, not the best student," testified Shohaib 
Kassam, his primary flight instructor in Oklahoma, where Moussaoui 
trained previously. He said that despite 56 hours of flight training in 
a Cessna, the al-Qaeda member could not fly the plane straight and level 
or make turns, could not descend and was unable to fly solo.

After being grounded at Airman Flight School in Norman, Okla., he moved 
on to Pan Am International Flight Academy in Eagan, Minn., where he was 
assigned to Prevost.

Prevost recalled that at one point on that first day, he asked Moussaoui 
if he were a Muslim, and Moussaoui shouted, "I am nothing!" Prevost said 
that alarmed him. "Right then," he testified, "I wanted to get out of 
that classroom . . . and I said we shouldn't be doing this."

FBI agent Harry Samit testified that Moussaoui was obsessed with his 
flight training, even after he was arrested. While he was being taken to 
jail the first night he was in custody, Samit said Moussaoui asked if he 
could be released for just enough time to finish his training and then 
he would turn himself back in.

Samit is one of the agents who questioned Moussaoui. He said Moussaoui 
gave vague answers when asked about his source of income.

"It seemed strange that he couldn't remember how much his salary was, 
the company he worked for or the family members who he received money 
from," Samit said.

In response to questions from Assistant U.S. Attorney David J. Novak, 
Samit said that if Moussaoui had told him that he was a member of 
al-Qaeda, he would have "rang alarm bells."

Samit said he was unable to get approval for a search warrant for 
Moussaoui's bags that were seized when he was arrested. Finally, a plan 
was worked out to deport Moussaoui back to his home country, France, 
because officials there had agreed to search his bags upon arrival. 
Approval for that plan came late in the afternoon on Sept. 10, 2001.

Testimony will resume Monday.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/09/AR2006030901143.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060310/fdbfcf99/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Fri Mar 10 04:51:32 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 07:51:32 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] The Kurd Card - Charles Krauthammer - Washington Post
	Op-Ed
Message-ID: <44117654.4090104@comcast.net>

The Kurd Card

By Charles Krauthammer
The Washington Post
Friday, March 10, 2006; A19

Lost amid the news of all the bloodletting in Iraq is an important 
political development: The Kurds have switched sides. In the first 
parliament after the first set of elections, they allied themselves with 
the Shiite slate to produce the current Shiite-dominated government led 
by Ibrahim al-Jafari.

Now the Kurds have joined with the opposition Sunni and secular parties 
to oppose the Shiite bloc. The result is two large competing coalitions: 
(a) the Kurd-Sunni-secular bloc, which controls about 140 seats in the 
275-seat parliament and would constitute the barest majority, and (b) 
the Shiite bloc, which itself is a coalition of seven 
not-always-friendly parties and controls 130 seats, slightly less than a 
majority.

If only it were that simple, Iraq would have a new, secular-oriented 
government. But to protect minorities and force the creation of large 
governing coalitions, the Iraqi constitution essentially requires a 
two-thirds majority to form a government.

If we had that requirement in the United States, we might still be 
trying to settle the 2000 election. In Iraq, the result for now is 
stalemate, which could lead to disaster if the whole system 
disintegrates because of the impasse. Or it could lead to a more 
effective, less sectarian government than Jafari's.

The key question is who is going to control the two critical ministries: 
interior and defense. In Iraq, as in much of the world, interior does 
not control the national parks. It controls the police. And under the 
current government it has been under Shiite control and infiltrated by 
extreme Shiite militias. Some of these militias launched vicious 
reprisal raids against Sunnis after the bombing of the Golden Mosque in 
Samarra, jeopardizing the entire project of a national police force 
exercising legitimate authority throughout the country.

The main objective of U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, who worked 
miracles in Afghanistan, is to make sure that the Interior Ministry is 
purged of sectarianism by giving it to some neutral figure, perhaps a 
secular Sunni with no ties to the Baath Party. Similarly with the 
Defense Ministry, which controls the army. The army has, by most 
accounts, handled itself well following the mosque bombing and 
subsequent riots, and it has acted as a reliably national institution. 
It is essential that it not get into sectarian hands.

Political success in Iraq rests heavily on these two institutions. Which 
is why these negotiations, tiresome and endless as they seem, are so 
important.

The immediate issue is the prime ministership. An internal ballot among 
the Shiite bloc brought, by a single vote, another term for Jafari. The 
critical vote putting him over the top was the faction controlled by 
Moqtada al-Sadr, the radically anti-American and pro-Tehran cleric whose 
home base is the Shiite slums of Baghdad. For Sadr, a weak and 
corruption-ridden government that allows conditions to deteriorate would 
be the perfect prelude to his gaining power.

Not all parts of the Shiite coalition are happy either with Jafari's 
ineffectiveness or with his political dependence on Sadr. Splits are 
already appearing in that uneasy alliance. But the most important 
challenge to Jafari is the Kurds. They are wary of Sadr and unhappy with 
Jafari, under whom everything -- services, security, trust -- is 
deteriorating.

Admittedly, part of their calculation is sectarian. This is, after all, 
Iraq. Jafari has impeded Kurdish claims on Kirkuk and infuriated the 
Kurds by traveling to Turkey (which opposes all Kurdish ambitions) 
without their approval and with a traveling party that did not include a 
single Kurd.

The Kurd-Sunni-secular bloc wants a new prime minister who will 
establish a national unity government. Because the United States wants 
precisely the same outcome, the Kurd defection is very good news in a 
landscape of almost unrelenting bad news. The other good news is a split 
in the Shiite bloc, with a near-majority that favors a more technocratic 
prime minister and is chafing at Sadr's influence. Additionally, the 
Sunni insurgency is in the midst of its own internecine strife between 
the local ex-Baathists, who are not particularly religious and want 
power, and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's foreign jihadists, for whom killing 
Shiites combines sport and religion and who care not a whit for the 
future of the country. There are numerous reports of Sunni tribes 
declaring war on these foreign jihadists and of firefights between them.

The security situation is grim and the neighboring powers malign. The 
one hope for success in Iraq is political. The Kurdish defection has 
produced the current impasse. That impasse has contributed to the mood 
of despair here at home. But the defection holds open the best 
possibility for political success: an effective, broad-based national 
unity government that, during its mandatory four-year term, presides 
over an American withdrawal.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/09/AR2006030902195.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060310/b2cebd5b/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Fri Mar 10 04:49:35 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 07:49:35 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] IMPORTANT: Burning Allies -- and Ourselves - David
 Ignatius - Washington Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <441175DF.6040508@comcast.net>

Burning Allies -- and Ourselves

By David Ignatius
The Washington Post
Friday, March 10, 2006; A19

DUBAI -- Officials here heard late Thursday that Karl Rove had decided 
to pull the plug. President Bush's political adviser was said to have 
conveyed to a top manager of Dubai Ports World in Washington that the 
White House couldn't hold out any longer against congressional pressure 
to kill the Arab company's plan to acquire freight terminals at six U.S. 
ports. The initial response of one Dubai executive was: "Who's Karl 
Rove?" But in the end, political leaders here recognized that it was 
time to fold a losing hand.

Until Rove's decision, Dubai's business leaders had insisted they would 
fight on. The chairman of Dubai Ports World, Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, 
told me emphatically on Wednesday that his company would do whatever was 
necessary to convince Congress that the deal posed no security risk -- 
new investment, additional equipment, more scanning of cargo, special 
checks of UAE personnel, including himself. But that was before the 
House Appropriations Committee voted 62 to 2 to kill the deal.

I suspect America will pay a steep price for Congress's rejection of 
this deal. It sent a message that for all the U.S. rhetoric about free 
trade and partnerships with allies, America is basically hostile to Arab 
investment. And it shouldn't be surprising if Arab investors respond in 
kind. One could blame it all on craven members of Congress, if the 
opinion polls didn't show that Americans are overwhelmingly against the 
deal -- and suspicious of Muslims in general. Those poll numbers tell us 
that America hasn't gotten over Sept. 11, 2001. If anything, Iraq has 
deepened the country's anxiety, introspection and foreboding.

To appreciate how cockeyed America's Dubai-phobia is, you have to spend 
a little time here, as I did this week. The truth is, this is one of the 
few places in the Arab world where things have been going in the right 
direction -- away from terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism and toward 
an open, modern economy. That's why congressional opposition came as 
such a surprise here. People in the UAE think they're America's friends.

The ports deal was part of the UAE's embrace of things Western. 
Wednesday night, I traveled with the minister of higher education, Sheik 
Nahayan bin Mubarak, to the dusty city of Al Ain to attend a Mozart 
festival at which the Vienna Chamber Orchestra performed. And I visited 
the American University of Sharjah, created nine years ago as a beacon 
of liberal arts education. On a wall next to the chancellor's office is 
a photo of the twin towers in New York, taken by one of the students on 
June 8, 2001. "There are no words strong enough to express how we feel 
today," reads a statement signed by UAE students.

It's hard to imagine an Arab more pro-American than Sulayem. He earned a 
degree in economics from Temple University in 1981, and he's still a 
fanatic about Philadelphia cheese steaks. He described a pilgrimage last 
New Year's Eve from New York to Pat's King of Steaks in South Philly, 
only to find the place closed. Before the deal collapsed, Sulayem had a 
free-trader's conviction that good business judgment would prevail over 
political rhetoric. "We are businessmen -- we don't understand politics 
-- but it is a surprise to us. We have been cooperating with the U.S. We 
are their best friends."

Many of the UAE's political leaders, including the crown prince, 
Mohammed bin Zayed, had grown increasingly convinced this week that the 
wisest course would be to pull out. But that view was resisted until 
almost the end by the business leadership in Dubai, including Dubai's 
ruler, Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid.

Arab radicals will be gloating, admonishing the UAE leaders, "We told 
you so." But officials here recognize that they're in a common fight 
with us against al-Qaeda. And unlike some Arab nations, the UAE really 
is fighting -- reforming its education system to block Islamic zealots 
and taking public stands with the United States despite terrorist 
threats. They have created one of the best intelligence services in the 
Arab world, and their special forces will be fighting quietly alongside 
the United States in Afghanistan tomorrow, and the day after.

President Bush tried to do the right thing on the Dubai ports deal, but 
he got rolled by a runaway Congress. The collapse of the deal was a 
measure of Bush's political weakness -- but even more, of America's 
traumatized post-Sept. 11 politics. The ironic fact is that the UAE is 
precisely the kind of Arab ally the United States needs most now. But 
that clearly didn't matter to an election-year Congress, which responded 
to the Dubai deal with a frenzy of Muslim-bashing disguised as concern 
about terrorism. And we wonder why the rest of the world doesn't like us.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/09/AR2006030902291.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060310/b7075eda/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Fri Mar 10 04:54:11 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 07:54:11 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Republican Breakdown - David S. Broder - Washington Post
	Op-Ed
Message-ID: <441176F3.4080306@comcast.net>

Republican Breakdown

By David S. Broder
The Washington Post
Friday, March 10, 2006; A19

At the beginning of this year, or even a month ago, no one would have 
guessed that a routine business transaction between two foreign-based 
firms would prove to be the lever for breaking up the governing 
Republican coalition in Washington.

But that is exactly what happened in the eruption of political protest 
over the proposed takeover of cargo operations at six U.S. ports by 
Dubai Ports World from the London-based Peninsular & Oriental Steam 
Navigation Co.

Congressional Republicans, spurred by what members describe as a wave of 
grass-roots protest, were poised to block the sale despite President 
Bush's insistence that it be allowed to go forward. Yesterday the Dubai 
company said it would pull out of the American ports deal.

Before that, the conflict brought to the surface deep-seated resentments 
from the Capitol end of Pennsylvania Avenue toward the people around the 
president -- and, surprisingly, toward Bush himself. The harmony that 
had prevailed during most of Bush's tenure -- the deference that a 
Republican-controlled Congress has generally shown to his wishes -- 
disappeared. Even the normal circumspection with which congressional 
Republicans treat the White House withered in the unexpected heat of 
this dispute.

Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia, a committee chairman, told The Post, "This 
is probably the worst administration ever in getting Congress's opinion 
on anything."

The rebellion was fueled by talk radio and cable TV commentators 
stressing that the proposed new operators are based in the United Arab 
Emirates. White House efforts to point out that the UAE has been an ally 
in the war on terrorism and has provided important logistical support to 
the Navy did not quiet the uproar, and an offer to begin an additional 
45-day security review of the deal came too late to reverse the tide of 
public opinion.

Even before the ports deal broke into the news, congressional 
Republicans were beginning to signal their inclination to go their own 
way, regardless of White House wishes. Despite six months of 
salesmanship by the president last year, his proposal for introducing 
private accounts into Social Security never caught on with the public, 
and as a result it never even came up for a vote in the House and Senate.

The Bush budget proposals struggled throughout the year and finally were 
approved only in an overtime session. But this ports issue was striking 
because it tested Bush's political credibility on what had been his 
strongest front: national security.

His reputation in that area has been damaged by the continuing strife in 
Iraq, a nation that, according to this week's Post-ABC News poll, 80 
percent of Americans believe is headed for civil war.

In a pointed comment on the proposed ports deal, House Speaker Dennis 
Hastert said of Congress, "We will continue to use our best judgment on 
how to protect the American people." He left the clear implication that 
Bush was not necessarily doing that.

Democrats were understandably gleeful at the spectacle of the 
Republicans fighting among themselves, especially over what is purported 
to be a national security issue. Partisan Democrats such as Sen. Charles 
Schumer of New York, the head of his party's Senate campaign committee, 
jumped on the ports issue quickly -- hardly expecting that the 
Republicans would be scrambling for space aboard the bandwagon.

Now the Democrats are broadening the argument, claiming that the Dubai 
deal is another example of the White House being unaware of, or 
incapable of anticipating, serious problems -- whether they involve the 
insurgency in Iraq or the levees in New Orleans.

But before the Democrats get too gleeful, they ought to ponder the 
nativist sentiment that was also fueling this populist rebellion. Some 
portion of the antagonism stemmed directly from the fact that this is an 
Arab-based company.

Another Post poll reported this week that more than 2 out of 5 of those 
surveyed said they had recently heard negative comments about Arabs. 
Attitudes toward Muslims, the survey said, are even more negative now 
than immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The same nativist spirit poisons the current debate about immigration. 
Talking to public officials recently from states such as Minnesota and 
Illinois -- far from the southern border -- I heard blunt expressions of 
the negative public reaction to the changing demographics of rural and 
suburban communities that have received many new immigrants.

Liberals such as Schumer ought to reflect that they are playing with 
fire when they help stoke this fever.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/09/AR2006030902290.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060310/652a9c53/attachment-0001.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Fri Mar 10 04:56:45 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 07:56:45 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Limit campaign fund-raising - Alan Simpson - Boston
	Globe Op-Ed
Message-ID: <4411778D.70100@comcast.net>


  Limit campaign fund-raising

By Alan Simpson  |  March 10, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

WHEN I WAS first elected to the US Senate, I thought I was elected to 
serve the folks of Wyoming. But as time went on, the demands for 
campaign cash became so great that it was almost impossible to do my job 
without spending much of my time raising money.

I wasn't the only one. Voters should be concerned about how much time 
elected officials spend raising money rather than legislating. US 
senators running for reelection in 2004 raised and spent, on average, 
more than $6.5 million. The average US House member raised and spent 
more than $1 million in 2004.

Raising that kind of money takes a lot of work -- work that could be 
better used making good policies and visiting with constituents. That's 
why I'm a strong supporter of the type of campaign spending limits law 
that Vermont passed in 1997 -- and which the US Supreme Court considered 
last week.

Under that law, Vermont capped the amount of money a candidate for state 
office could spend. The state limited contributions and also provided 
public financing for campaigns. Candidates would be limited only to the 
amount needed to run an effective campaign, and to ''get out their 
message." But they would no longer be forced to beg on the phone or 
write pleas for money to ensure that they can keep up with their opponent.

It's a good idea -- and one the Supreme Court should accept. Otherwise, 
candidates and lawmakers will continue to plod along on the course that 
requires fund-raising marathons.

Former US representative Bob Edgar of Pennsylvania once commented that 
''80 percent of my events and meetings were fund-raisers. Rather than go 
to a senior center, I would go to a party where I could raise $3,000 or 
$4,000."

The time that elected officials spend to raise money raises questions 
about their ability to be effective and deliberate legislators. When we 
were spending so much time raising money, we simply could not devote 
quality time to thoughtful decisions and debate. It lowered the 
substance of our work.

I liked to feel that I was always doing the best job possible -- but I 
also know well that if I had spent less time fund-raising, I could have 
spent more time learning the ropes about vital legislation.

Given the inflated and excessive cost of campaigns, many of us couldn't 
raise the full chunk for the campaign in our own states. So off we would 
go to New York, Illinois, Texas, or California for our fund-raisers. 
Even if you might think fund-raising to be a fine use of a legislator's 
time, it's pretty hard to see how raising a bundle 2,000 miles from home 
actually helps your constituents too much.

Don't read me wrong. It's not that I think all fund-raising is bad. I've 
had to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars in my political career. 
The important ability to persuade the voters to provide you with 
financial assistance is a sure sign that a candidate has their support. 
But it shouldn't be the only sign, and it shouldn't take up so much 
time. Laws such as the one passed in Vermont could help us right the 
drifting ship. I earnestly hope the Supreme Court upholds this long 
overdue, common-sense campaign reform.

Alan Simpson served in the US Senate from 1979 to 1997. He lives in 
Cody, Wyo.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/10/limit_campaign_fund_raising/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060310/a05a021b/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Fri Mar 10 05:00:04 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 08:00:04 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] SHOULD READ:  In South Dakota,
 at least the pretense is finally over - Ellen Goodman - Boston
 Globe Op-Ed
Message-ID: <44117854.3090305@comcast.net>


  In South Dakota, at least the pretense is finally over

By Ellen Goodman  |  March 10, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

TWO MONTHS AGO, when all eyes were on Samuel Alito's confirmation 
hearings, I traveled 1,300 miles west to Sioux Falls, S.D. I went to see 
the state where the right to abortion had already come down to this: one 
clinic, one day a week, one doctor. The women in the waiting room had 
come from all over the state. The doctor had flown in from Minneapolis.

South Dakota had become a legislative laboratory for abortion 
restrictions. It had followed the blueprint that Alito himself had laid 
out in the 1980s. This was a strategy to add so many restrictions -- one 
law at a time -- that Roe v. Wade would collapse without ever being 
overturned.

As Kate Looby, the head of the state Planned Parenthood, said that day, 
we could end up with a hollow right to abortion that would mean nothing 
to the women of South Dakota.

Now Alito is on the bench and abortion opponents believe, in the words 
of South Dakota state legislator Roger Hunt, ''This is our time." The 
''purists" are in charge now. All the pretense is gone. And the 
laboratory door has closed with a bang. Or, to put it more accurately, a 
ban.

On Monday, Governor Mike Rounds signed a bill that bans all abortions 
except those to protect the life of the woman. No exception for rape. Or 
incest. Or to protect a woman's health.

The purists dropped the old blueprint in favor of a direct, head-on 
battle. The ban passed with the clear, stated intention of overturning 
Roe in a changed Supreme Court. This is a ban so extreme that it 
outflanks the prolife president. It's a confrontation so direct that 
even many in the antiabortion leadership are uneasy with the strategy 
and the timing. Though not, you will note, with the goal.

Nevertheless, is it possible that South Dakota and other states 
following suit have done the country a favor? As Nancy Keenan of NARAL 
Pro-Choice America put it simply: ''They've come out from behind the 
curtain." Forget the political jockeying by prolifers to gain a foothold 
with moderates. Never mind laws on parental notification and consent in 
the name of family involvement. Or attempts to ban one abortion 
procedure at a time. Or laws to mandate misinformation and waiting periods.

Until now the antiabortion right has not only tried to frame itself as 
moderate, it has dressed up in woman-friendly camouflage. It has touted 
research that makes one false claim after another linking abortion with 
depression and breast cancer. It has cast women as the hapless victims 
of abortion and portrayed its own side as protectors.

Even this week, with superb irony, Governor Rounds promised tender care 
for the women he would force to continue their pregnancies. 
Representative Hunt explained that women themselves would not be 
prosecuted under the law because any woman choosing abortion was ''not 
thinking clearly." (Tell that to the US soldier who made a 700-mile 
round trip to the clinic that January day.)

This is what it looks like in front of the curtain. South Dakota's law 
would make felons out of doctors who perform nearly any abortion. The 
government would replace women as moral decision-makers. And it would 
trump doctors as medical decision-makers.

After all, if abortion is legal only when the woman's survival is at 
risk, who makes that decision? If, according to the law, a doctor has to 
''make reasonable medical efforts . . . to preserve both the life of the 
mother and the life of her unborn child," who judges those efforts? A 
cop? A court? One of those activist judges the right so loves to hate?

The ban, slated to go into effect July 1, will be challenged in court 
and possibly by a statewide vote. But hopes of prolife purists are 
clearly pinned on the belief in a Supreme Court majority ready to 
reverse Roe. The hopes of the rest of us are pinned on seeing, really 
seeing, extremists in the spotlights.

''I think the South Dakota issue reflects the divisiveness that 
Americans are tired of," says NARAL's Keenan. Much political chatter 
this year has urged prochoice advocates and politicians to move to the 
right. How many more times are they required to recite the pledge -- 
''We want abortion to be safe, legal, and rare" -- while prolife purists 
fight to make it unsafe and illegal?

On Tuesday, NARAL Pro-Choice America launched a Prevention First Day of 
Action. The press release of the day read optimistically: ''Birth 
Control, Something We Can All Agree On." But the subject of the day was 
the ban and the battle.

Common ground, anyone? South Dakota just put another torch to it.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/10/in_south_dakota_at_least_the_pretense_is_finally_over/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060310/24f4b5a9/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Fri Mar 10 07:41:11 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 15:41:11 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: $25,
	000 to Lobby Group Is Tied to Access to Bush
Message-ID: <20060310154111.C5DF19FD10@lax-gw05.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

WASHINGTON | March 10, 2006
$25,000 to Lobby Group Is Tied to Access to Bush
By PHILIP SHENON
The chief of an Indian tribe met President Bush after Jack Abramoff directed the tribe to donate to a conservative group.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/10/politics/10abramoff.html?ex=1142658000&en=b045e02f5df276a9&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060310/0520515f/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Fri Mar 10 07:43:12 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 15:43:12 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Israel's Tragedy Foretold
Message-ID: <20060310154312.B790613B856@lax-gw04.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

OPINION | March 10, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor: Israel's Tragedy Foretold
By GERSHOM GORENBERG
A memo written in 1967 warned that Israel's settlements in the West Bank were illegal.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/10/opinion/10gorenberg.html?ex=1142658000&en=c0d47d17401710b3&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060310/6b906266/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Fri Mar 10 07:48:15 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 15:48:15 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: O'Higgins the Liberator Is Reclaimed From
	the Military
Message-ID: <20060310154815.7E7CB23724F@lax-gw01.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

INTERNATIONAL / AMERICAS | March 10, 2006
Santiago Journal: O'Higgins the Liberator Is Reclaimed From the Military
By LARRY ROHTER
The tomb of Bernardo O'Higgins, the hero of Chilean independence, has been restored to civilian control.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/10/international/americas/10chile.html?ex=1142658000&en=6f34c95f7e3da723&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060310/6da997bb/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Fri Mar 10 07:50:47 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 15:50:47 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Iraqi Forces Would Handle Any Civil War,
	Rumsfeld Says
Message-ID: <20060310155047.EA565237AB1@lax-gw01.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

you think?


WASHINGTON | March 10, 2006
Iraqi Forces Would Handle Any Civil War, Rumsfeld Says
By THOM SHANKER
The secretary said he believed the unrest was still "controllable by Iraqi security forces and multinational forces."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/10/politics/10military.html?ex=1142658000&en=89b7e204a0c53fd0&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060310/e114b9a0/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Fri Mar 10 07:44:04 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 15:44:04 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: A Dark Cloud Over Disclosure
Message-ID: <20060310154404.42EA824CEF0@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

OPINION | March 10, 2006
Op-Ed Contributors: A Dark Cloud Over Disclosure
By JIM JEFFORDS and JULIE FOX GORTE
President Bush and the Environmental Protection Agency want to make it easier for polluters to hide.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/10/opinion/10jeffords.html?ex=1142658000&en=45312d30548365c0&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060310/2d9619a9/attachment-0001.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Fri Mar 10 07:52:28 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: 10 Mar 2006 15:52:28 -0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] Headlines for March 10, 2006
Message-ID: <20060310155228.31548.qmail@trinity.democracynow.org>

Mike Blaxill  ( mblaxill at yahoo.com )
sent you this story from democracynow.org




+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  Headlines for March 10, 2006
|  http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/10/1451232
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+


- Dubai Firm Pulls Out of U.S. Port Deal
- FBI Opposes Israeli Firm Buying Tech Firm w/ NSA Ties
- 250 Doctors Condemn U.S. Treatment of Prisoners at Guantanamo
- Civil Liberties Groups Seek Court to Shutdown NSA Spy Program
- Ex-Justice Attorney: "Weak Justification" for Warrantless Spying
- Pentagon Denies Report It Will Soon Close Abu Ghraib
- Rumsfeld: Iraq Security Forces Will Deal With Civil War 
- Protester to Condoleeza Rice: "Blood Is On Your Hands"
- Woman Fired Over Air America Bumper Sticker 
This story continues at: 
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/10/1451232


From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Fri Mar 10 08:22:55 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 16:22:55 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: U.S. Contractor Found Guilty of $3 Million
	Fraud in Iraq
Message-ID: <20060310162255.195C78449E@lax-gw03.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

I don't get it. Halliburton "overcharges" by tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions, yet only gets a slap on the wrist. This company "defrauds" the government of $3 million, and it's front-page news. What, exactly, is the difference between "overcharging" and "fraud?" Isn't the first simply a euphemism for the second?


INTERNATIONAL / MIDDLE EAST | March 10, 2006
U.S. Contractor Found Guilty of $3 Million Fraud in Iraq
By ERIK ECKHOLM
In the first whistle-blower case to emerge from Iraq, a federal jury found a contractor guilty of defrauding the U.S.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/10/international/middleeast/10contract.html?ex=1142658000&en=c360244f9dcaa82b&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060310/79e9ed6c/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Fri Mar 10 07:49:03 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 15:49:03 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: In Phoenix,
	Even Cactuses Wilt in Clutches of Record Drought
Message-ID: <20060310154903.1715D24D9D1@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

NATIONAL | March 10, 2006
In Phoenix, Even Cactuses Wilt in Clutches of Record Drought
By MICHAEL WILSON
The city has not had rain for 142 days, wreaking havoc on wildlife and air quality and promising a harsh fire season ahead.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/10/national/10phoenix.html?ex=1142658000&en=d8eedb6f1b6d84cd&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060310/01380c23/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Fri Mar 10 08:23:00 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 16:23:00 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Our Porous Port Protections
Message-ID: <20060310162300.234CD12134C@lax-gw07.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

OPINION | March 10, 2006
Editorial: Our Porous Port Protections

If the DP World debate distracts Congress from the larger issue of securing America's vulnerable ports, it will have only decreased overall homeland security.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/10/opinion/10fri1.html?ex=1142658000&en=ad3b1a18eca84701&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060310/9c77bfc3/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Fri Mar 10 08:23:31 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 16:23:31 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: A Blank Check for the President? (8 Letters)
Message-ID: <20060310162331.6DF001213A1@lax-gw07.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

What we're saying...


OPINION | March 10, 2006
A Blank Check for the President? (8 Letters)

To the Editor:.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/10/opinion/l10abuse.html?ex=1142658000&en=37a563e4e819a572&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060310/240e70ac/attachment.htm 

From hecate at diamonddragon.com  Fri Mar 10 09:46:00 2006
From: hecate at diamonddragon.com (Hecate)
Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 17:46:00 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] BBC E-mail: Italy bid for PM corruption trial
Message-ID: <20060310_174600_038764.hecate@diamonddragon.com>

Hecate saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you
should see it.



** Italy bid for PM corruption trial **
Italian prosecutors ask a judge to indict PM Silvio Berlusconi and a UK lawyer on corruption charges.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/europe/4793070.stm >


** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all
in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/dailyemail/ >


** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have?been verified.

If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm


From michael at michaelbutler.com  Fri Mar 10 10:33:02 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 10:33:02 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] The Conservative Epiphany By PAUL KRUGMAN
Message-ID: <C037065E.29EB6%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 10, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
The Conservative Epiphany
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Bruce Bartlett, the author of "Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted
America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy," is an angry man. At a recent book
forum at the Cato Institute, he declared that the Bush administration is
"unconscionable," "irresponsible," "vindictive" and "inept."

It's no wonder, then, that one commentator wrote of Mr. Bartlett that "if he
were a cartoon character, he would probably look like Donald Duck during one
of his famous tirades, with steam pouring out of his ears."

Oh, wait. That's not what somebody wrote about Mr. Bartlett. It's what Mr.
Bartlett wrote about me in September 2003, when I was saying pretty much
what he's saying now.

Human nature being what it is, I don't expect Mr. Bartlett to acknowledge
his about-face. Nor do I expect any expressions of remorse from Andrew
Sullivan, the conservative Time.com blogger who also spoke at the Cato
forum. Mr. Sullivan used to specialize in denouncing the patriotism and
character of anyone who dared to criticize President Bush, whom he lionized.
Now he himself has become a critic, not just of Mr. Bush's policies, but of
his personal qualities, too.

Never mind; better late than never. We should welcome the recent epiphanies
by conservative commentators who have finally realized that the Bush
administration isn't trustworthy. But we should guard against a conventional
wisdom that seems to be taking hold in some quarters, which says there's
something praiseworthy about having initially been taken in by Mr. Bush's
deceptions, even though the administration's mendacity was obvious from the
beginning.

According to this view, if you're a former Bush supporter who now says, as
Mr. Bartlett did at the Cato event, that "the administration lies about
budget numbers," you're a brave truth-teller. But if you've been saying that
since the early days of the Bush administration, you were unpleasantly
shrill.

Similarly, if you're a former worshipful admirer of George W. Bush who now
says, as Mr. Sullivan did at Cato, that "the people in this administration
have no principles," you're taking a courageous stand. If you said the same
thing back when Mr. Bush had an 80 percent approval rating, you were blinded
by Bush-hatred.

And if you're a former hawk who now concedes that the administration
exaggerated the threat from Iraq, you're to be applauded for your
open-mindedness. But if you warned three years ago that the administration
was hyping the case for war, you were a conspiracy theorist.

The truth is that everything the new wave of Bush critics has to say was
obvious long ago to any commentator who was willing to look at the facts.

Mr. Bartlett's book is mainly a critique of the Bush administration's fiscal
policy. Well, the administration's pattern of fiscal dishonesty and
irresponsibility was clear right from the start to anyone who understands
budget arithmetic. The chicanery that took place during the selling of the
2001 tax cut ? obviously fraudulent budget projections, transparently
deceptive advertising about who would benefit and the use of blatant
accounting gimmicks to conceal the plan's true cost ? was as bad as anything
that followed.

The false selling of the Iraq war was almost as easy to spot. All the
supposed evidence for an Iraqi nuclear program was discredited before the
war ? and it was the threat of nukes, not lesser W.M.D., that stampeded
Congress into authorizing Mr. Bush to go to war. The administration's
nonsensical but insistent rhetorical linkage of Iraq and 9/11 was also a
dead giveaway that we were being railroaded into an unnecessary war.

The point is that pundits who failed to notice the administration's
mendacity a long time ago either weren't doing their homework, or
deliberately turned a blind eye to the evidence.

But as I said, better late than never. Born-again Bush-bashers like Mr.
Bartlett and Mr. Sullivan, however churlish, are intellectually and morally
superior to the Bushist dead-enders who still insist that Saddam was allied
with Al Qaeda, and will soon be claiming that we lost the war in Iraq
because the liberal media stabbed the troops in the back. And reporters
understandably consider it newsworthy that some conservative voices are now
echoing longstanding liberal critiques of the Bush administration.

It's still fair, however, to ask people like Mr. Bartlett the obvious
question: What took you so long?

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From michael at michaelbutler.com  Fri Mar 10 10:36:32 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 10:36:32 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Mr. Nasty,
	Brutish and Short-Tempered By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Message-ID: <C0370730.29EB8%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 10, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Mr. Nasty, Brutish and Short-Tempered
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

I have a job for Dick Cheney.

No, no, really. This is not another hunting joke. It's serious: Iraq is
drifting aimlessly, if not toward civil war then toward a violent political
stalemate. If Iraqis can't produce a minimally effective national unity
government now, America can look forward to baby-sitting this violent
stalemate far into the future.

If we want to avoid that, it's time for some dramatic new thinking and
acting. To put it in a nutshell: It is not time for the U.S. to leave Iraq,
but it is time for the U.S. to start threatening to leave Iraq.

When Iraq was just violent, but the political situation seemed to be
stumbling forward, it was possible to believe that a decent outcome could
still be achieved. But when Iraq is increasingly violent, with ethnic and
religious rivals murdering one another and the politicians squabbling
endlessly, there is no reason for optimism. U.S. forces in Iraq can't be
held hostage by the notion that Iraqis may have a civil war if we leave.
They are already having a little civil war, and if they are determined to
have a big civil war, I prefer that they have it without us. But we need to
make one last big push to find an alternative.

The Bush team needs to stop telling itself that the news media are not
reporting the good news in Iraq. That's utter nonsense. And it needs to stop
acting like a spectator as events there unfold, with the secretaries of
state and defense making one-day stopovers and then disappearing. It is time
for this administration to start taking responsibility for the outcome of
this war, and not just dump it all on the military.

There is no military solution. There is only a political solution, and it
will require some big-time diplomacy to pull off.

We need to bring together all the newly elected Iraqi leaders for a national
reconciliation conference ? outside Baghdad. We should lock them in a room
and not let them out until they either produce a national unity government,
so Americans will want to stay in Iraq, or fail to produce that government,
which would signal that it's time to warm up the bus.

Those choices need to be put to the Iraqis in the most frank, tough-minded
way by the most nasty, brutish and short-tempered senior official we've got
? and that is Dick "Darth Vader" Cheney. Mr. Veep, this Bud's for you.

Richard Holbrooke masterfully played this role in bringing an end to the
Bosnian civil war at the Dayton peace conference, and maybe Mr. Cheney could
do the same for Iraq, with the help of our very skilled ambassador in
Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad. We need an Iraqi Dayton ? now. And we need a
really bad dude to make it work.

Mr. Cheney could open the meeting with his low growl by telling the Sunnis:
"Look, you guys don't want to compromise, fine. Then we'll just leave you to
the tender mercies of the Shiites, who vastly outnumber you."

To the Shiites: "You want to rule Iraq and control the oil without real
regard to the Sunnis? Well, you're going to rule over nothing but a boiling
pot, unless you compromise."

And to the Kurds he could say: "You've behaved most responsibly. Stick with
it. If Iraq falls apart, we will make sure you're taken care of. We won't
ignore the fact that you've built an impressively decent, democratizing
society in your region."

After getting their attention, Mr. Cheney could start cracking heads on the
key issues:

First, the Shiite alliance has to come up with a new candidate for prime
minister, acceptable to all parties.

Second, the constitution has to be revised so the Sunnis do not feel that
the Kurds and Shiites are breaking off their own chunks of Iraq, along with
their oil resources.

Third, the Sunnis need to produce a credible plan for ending their
insurgency.

Fourth, the parties have to agree on an inner cabinet, with ministers from
each community, which will make all key decisions in coordination with the
new prime minister.

Fifth, this inner cabinet has to draw up a plan for governing Iraq from the
center ? and not from any one faction.

Mr. Cheney could then conclude: "Read my lips ? these are the minimum
requirements for a decent government in Iraq. If Iraqis step up, Americans
will want to stick it out. If Iraqis won't step up, Americans will want to
step out. The American people are ready to midwife your democracy, but not
to baby-sit your civil war."

Mr. Cheney, this is your Kodak moment. Iraqis are notoriously difficult and
fractious. You've got the time and the mean streak to deal with them.
They'll get serious if you're in the room. But just in case, bring along
your shotgun. This is a good job for someone with bad aim.

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From michael at intrafi.com  Fri Mar 10 10:47:58 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 18:47:58 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Israel's Tragedy Foretold
Message-ID: <20060310184758.F383683E0E@lax-gw03.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: michael at intrafi.com.

OPINION | March 10, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor: Israel's Tragedy Foretold
By GERSHOM GORENBERG
A memo written in 1967 warned that Israel's settlements in the West Bank were illegal.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/10/opinion/10gorenberg.html?ex=1142658000&en=c0d47d17401710b3&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060310/59e1b692/attachment-0001.htm 

From IHHS at aol.com  Fri Mar 10 07:47:39 2006
From: IHHS at aol.com (IHHS at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 10:47:39 EST
Subject: [Mb-civic] Nine Percent Approval Rating? US Network Television News
	FAILS "Big Pharma"...
Message-ID: <E1FHmyk-0002fG-82@elasmtp-junco.atl.sa.earthlink.net>

Nine  Percent Approval Rating?  US Network Television News FAILS "Big  
Pharma"...  
Opinion by  Consumer Advocate _Tim  Bolen_ 
(mailto:http://www.quackpotwatch.org/opinionpieces/tim%20bolen.htm)   
Saturday,  December 10th, 2005   
In 1999  "Big Pharma" went to the US Food & Drug Administration (FDA) and got 
 permission to advertise drugs, drugs, and more drugs directly to the 
American  consumer.   Their intent, as it became obvious, was two things:  (1)  sell 
more drugs to the American consumer, and, (2) control the media,  especially 
US television.. 
TV network  news, it appears, got the lion's share of advertising dollars.  I 
estimate  that 55% percent of all advertising during the News Hours are paid 
for by  "Big Pharma."  More, about a third of the entire newscast, itself,  is 
focused on how wonderful your "local drug peddler" actually is.   Almost 
every night a new wonder drug (snort) is presented, that will absolutely  save 
humanity - and, of course, this never actually happens.  Network TV  news is just 
about ALL advertising hype - with the occasional brainless "car  chase - 
endlessly documented by the 3.5 million dollar ($3,500,000) network  helicopter." 
Television News departments  have sold out for the money - there is no doubt 
about that.  Even more, the  networks, beyond the news features, couldn't go 
even part of a season without  another boring TV series about life in a 
hospital - without ever mentioning that  those same hospitals are the number one (#1) 
killer of Americans, ahead of heart  disease and cancer. 
Yes, US television has sold out  to "Big Pharma."   There is no doubt about 
it.  But, the  question is "Did TV do 'Big Pharma' any good?"  And the answer 
is  "no, it did not..."  and, we can all laugh about that. 
What do I mean "no, it did  not..?"  There's an easy answer - in two parts:   
(1)  Despite the fact that  "Big Pharma" spent billions of dollars, since 
1999, on television, a  recent Harris poll shows that only nine percent (9%) of 
the American public  believes what the pharmaceutical industry says is the 
truth.  In a  recent article on Common Dreams newswire, titled _"Fact squad on  
prescription Drugs"_ (http://www.commondreams.org/news2005/1207-21.htm)  it is 
explained that: 
WASHINGTON - December 7, 2005- According to a October  2005 Harris Poll, only 
nine percent of the American public considers the  pharmaceutical industry 
generally honest and trustworthy. If perception were  reality, the prescription 
drug industry would be in Chapter 11. 
Whether it is anger at the callous  disregard for human health revealed in 
the Vioxx and SSRI scandals; irritation  with the incessant peddling of drugs 
directly to consumers and giveaways to  doctors; ire at the frustration with the 
concealment of adverse clinical trial  findings; exasperation that safe, 
cheap drugs are barred from importation from  Canada; or disgust with conflicts of 
interest in the drug approval process and  the buying of political influence, 
over 90 percent of the public views the drug  industry with suspicion. A 
majority say they want more, not less, regulation.  Indeed, industry sales are 
down this year and companies are laying off thousands  of workers. But these 
selective factoids can be deceiving: Pfizer is among the  companies cutting its 
workforce, while its profits for 2005 will be $8 billion.  Hold your pity." 
(2)  The television news  industry has hurt itself with its bald faced promo 
of drugs, drugs, and more  drugs.  The image, I think, of the average network 
news channel broadcaster  is very similar to that of those young people, male 
and female, standing on the  corner of Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood every 
night, ready to sell themselves to  anybody who'll give them the money they need 
for clothing, shelter, drugs, and  the slightest bit of approval from their 
strong-arm pimp.   
It's just that the rewards in  TV news are slightly, but not much,  higher.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060310/1eaa5896/attachment.htm 

From grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net  Fri Mar 10 06:28:50 2006
From: grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net (Golsorkhi)
Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 09:28:50 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] FW: BARBARITY
In-Reply-To: <CE28DD1A-2640-4A89-B730-85485422F49A@thesamiis.com>
Message-ID: <E1FHn0u-0004Vb-QP@elasmtp-junco.atl.sa.earthlink.net>

Michael,  I believe I may have sent you the video recently.  Regards,  Reza
------ Forwarded Message
From: Samii Shahla <shahla at thesamiis.com>
Date: Tue, 7 Mar 2006 10:24:48 -0500
Subject: Fwd: BARBARITY


From: Dxxxnet] 
Sent: Tuesday, March 07, 2006 8:33 AM
To: Undisclosed-Recipient:;
Subject: BARBARITY
?

?
?Friends,
?
?I wrote you about this interview, which can be seen courtesy
?of Memri.? But then I thought, some of you perhaps didn't
?go see it, or have older computers,etc. etc. Because I think
?that no more important words have been spoken than those
?of? Arab-American psychologist Wafa Sultan,? I'm sending out
?the transcript of this interview.
?Please read it.Then read it again (the last paragraph is
?the best).? Then print it out and hang in in your
?synagogues,
?churches and mosques (because that's where they need it
?most).? I like it so much, I think I'll send it out every
?few months, as a reminder,
?to help keep us safe from fuzzy thinking, and self-haters,
?and Third-Worlders, and movie star liberals, and newsmen,
?and other tragically and criminally clueless members of? the
?embattled West who are ready to give up and give in and help
?us all lie down in front of the bulldozing barbarism of? our
?age.
?
?Again, thank you Memri!
?http://www.memritv.org/Transcript.asp?P1=1050
<http://www.memritv.org/Transcript.asp?P1=1050>

?Arab-American Psychologist Wafa Sultan: There Is No Clash of
?Civilizations but a Clash between the Mentality of the
?Middle Ages and That of the 21st Century
? <http://www.memritv.org/images/spacer.gif
<http://www.memritv.org/images/spacer.gif>
<http://www.memritv.org/images/spacer.gif >
?
?Following are excerpts from an interview with Arab-American
?psychologist Wafa Sultan. The interview was aired on
?Al-Jazeera TV on February 21, 2006
?
?. 
?
?Wafa Sultan: The clash we are witnessing around the world is
?not a clash of religions, or a clash of civilizations. It is
?a clash between two opposites, between two eras. It is a
?clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages
?and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century. It
?is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between
?the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and
?rationality. It is a clash between freedom and oppression,
?between democracy and dictatorship. It is a clash between
?human rights, on the one hand, and the violation of these
?rights, on other hand. It is a clash between those who treat
?women like beasts, and those who treat them like human
?beings. What we see today is not a clash of civilizations.
?Civilizations do not clash, but compete.
?
?Host: I understand from your words that what is happening
?today is a clash between the culture of the West, and the
?backwardness and ignorance of the Muslims?
?
?Wafa Sultan: Yes, that is what I mean.
?
?[...]
?
?Host: Who came up with the concept of a clash of
?civilizations? Was it not Samuel Huntington? It was not Bin
?Laden. I would like to discuss this issue, if you don't
?mind...
?
?Wafa Sultan: The Muslims are the ones who began using this
?expression. The Muslims are the ones who began the clash of
?civilizations. The Prophet of Islam said: "I was ordered to
?fight the people until they believe in Allah and His
?Messenger." When the Muslims divided the people into Muslims
?and non-Muslims, and called to fight the others until they
?believe in what they themselves believe, they started this
?clash, and began this war. In order to start this war, they
?must reexamine their Islamic books and curricula, which are
?full of calls for takfir and fighting the infidels.
?
?My colleague has said that he never offends other people's
?beliefs. What civilization on the face of this earth allows
?him to call other people by names that they did not choose
?for themselves? Once, he calls them Ahl Al-Dhimma, another
?time he calls them the "People of the Book," and yet another
?time he compares them to apes and pigs, or he calls the
?Christians "those who incur Allah's wrath." Who told you
?that they are "People of the Book"? They are not the People
?of the Book, they are people of many books. All the useful
?scientific books that you have today are theirs, the fruit
?of their free and creative thinking. What gives you the
?right to call them "those who incur Allah's wrath," or
?"those who have gone astray," and then come here and say
?that your religion commands you to refrain from offending
?the beliefs of others?
?
?I am not a Christian, a Muslim, or a Jew. I am a secular
?human being. I do not believe in the supernatural, but I
?respect others' right to believe in it.
?
?Dr. Ibrahim Al-Khouli: Are you a heretic?
?
?Wafa Sultan: You can say whatever you like. I am a secular
?human being who does not believe in the supernatural...
?
?Dr. Ibrahim Al-Khouli: If you are a heretic, there is no
?point in rebuking you, since you have blasphemed against
?Islam, the Prophet, and the Koran...
?
?Wafa Sultan: These are personal matters that do not concern
?you.
?
?[...]
?
?Wafa Sultan: Brother, you can believe in stones, as long as
?you don't throw them at me. You are free to worship whoever
?you want, but other people's beliefs are not your concern,
?whether they believe that the Messiah is God, son of Mary,
?or that Satan is God, son of Mary. Let people have their
?beliefs.
?
?[...]
?
?Wafa Sultan: The Jews have come from the tragedy (of the
?Holocaust), and forced the world to respect them, with their
?knowledge, not with their terror, with their work, not their
?crying and yelling. Humanity owes most of the discoveries
?and science of the 19th and 20th centuries to Jewish
?scientists. 15 million people, scattered throughout the
?world, united and won their rights through work and
?knowledge. We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in
?a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a
?church. We have not seen a single Jew protest by killing
?people. The Muslims have turned three Buddha statues into
?rubble. We have not seen a single Buddhist burn down a
?Mosque, kill a Muslim, or burn down an embassy. Only the
?Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches,
?killing people, and destroying embassies. This path will not
?yield any results. The Muslims must ask themselves what they
?can do for humankind, before they demand that humankind
?respect them
?




------ End of Forwarded Message

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060310/400f9517/attachment.htm 

From grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net  Fri Mar 10 06:24:57 2006
From: grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net (Golsorkhi)
Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 09:24:57 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] FW: ABC News EXCLUSIVE Iraq Weapons -- Made in Iran
In-Reply-To: <000901c6418a$4191bc00$6501a8c0@2r6cx01>
Message-ID: <E1FHn2Q-0005eO-11@elasmtp-junco.atl.sa.earthlink.net>


------ Forwarded Message
From: "Farhad Sepahbody" <sepa at sedona.net>
Date: Mon, 6 Mar 2006 18:55:47 -0700
To: <grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net>
Subject: ABC News EXCLUSIVE Iraq Weapons -- Made in Iran

 

 http://abcnews.go.com/International/IraqCoverage/story?id=1692347

------ End of Forwarded Message

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060310/2a377c68/attachment.htm 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/octet-stream
Size: 203 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060310/2a377c68/attachment.obj 

From geomilman at milman.com  Thu Mar  9 15:33:33 2006
From: geomilman at milman.com (George R. Milman)
Date: Thu, 9 Mar 2006 15:33:33 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] FW: Krugman article re Soros - from 2004
Message-ID: <E1FHmzC-00038D-VL@elasmtp-junco.atl.sa.earthlink.net>

Michael,

 

Thanks again for lunch yesterday.  It is always a treat to hang out with
you, albeit one too infrequently enjoyed.  I came across the below article
by accident today and thought you would be interested.  Note the date it was
published.

 

XO

 

Geo.

 

 

OP-ED COLUMNIST 


Feel the Hate


By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: September 3, 2004


















ARTICLE TOOLS

 








 
<http://ea.nytimes.com/cgi-bin/email?ei=1&en=&ex=1095210331&REFURI=http://ww
w.nytimes.com/2004/09/03/opinion/03krugman.html>
<http://ea.nytimes.com/cgi-bin/email?REFURI=http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/0
3/opinion/03krugman.html&position=> Email This Article

 
<http://ea.nytimes.com/cgi-bin/email?ei=1&en=&ex=1095210331&REFURI=http://ww
w.nytimes.com/2004/09/03/opinion/03krugman.html> E-Mail
<http://ea.nytimes.com/cgi-bin/email?REFURI=http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/0
3/opinion/03krugman.html&position=>  This Article


 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/03/opinion/03krugman.html?ei=1&en=&ex=109521
0331&pagewanted=print&position=> Printer Friendly Format

Printer-Friendly
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/03/opinion/03krugman.html?ei=1&en=&ex=109521
0331&pagewanted=print&position=>  Format


 <http://www.nytimes.com/gst/pop_top.html> Most E-mailed Articles

Most <http://www.nytimes.com/gst/pop_top.html>  E-Mailed Articles


 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/03/opinion/03krugman.html?ei=1&en=&ex=109521
0331&pagewanted=all&position=> 

 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/03/opinion/03krugman.html?ei=1&en=&ex=109521
0331&pagewanted=all&position=> 





 
<http://www.nytimes.com/adx/bin/adx_click.html?type=goto&page=www.nytimes.co
m/yr/mo/day/opinion&pos=Frame4&camp=foxsearch50c-nyt5&ad=huckabees_nytcopy.j
pg&goto=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Efoxsearchlight%2Ecom%2Fhuckabees%2Findex%5Fnyt%2E
html> 















 
<http://www.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/paulkr
ugman/> Columnist Page: Paul Krugman 

 
<http://forums.nytimes.com/top/opinion/readersopinions/forums/editorialsoped
/opedcolumnists/paulkrugman/index.html> Forum: Discuss This Column 

 <mailto:krugman at nytimes.com> E-mail: krugman at nytimes.com


















TIMES NEWS TRACKER










  Topics 


Alerts 









Presidential
<http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=des&v1=PRESIDENTIAL+ELECTIONS+%2
8US%29&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=PRESIDENTIAL+ELECTIONS+%28US%2
9&rt=1%2Cdes%2Corg%2Cper%2Cgeo>  Elections (US)



Create 













Conventions
<http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=des&v1=CONVENTIONS+AND+CONFERENC
ES&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=CONVENTIONS+AND+CONFERENCES&rt=1%2
Cdes%2Corg%2Cper%2Cgeo>  and Conferences



Create 













Demonstrations
<http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=des&v1=DEMONSTRATIONS+AND+RIOTS&
fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=DEMONSTRATIONS+AND+RIOTS&rt=1%2Cdes%2
Corg%2Cper%2Cgeo>  and Riots



Create 













Republican
<http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=org&v1=REPUBLICAN+PARTY&fdq=1996
0101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=REPUBLICAN+PARTY&rt=1%2Cdes%2Corg%2Cper%2Cgeo
>  Party



Create 



 








 

"Idon't know where George Soros gets his money," one man said. "I don't know
where - if it comes from overseas or from drug groups or where it comes
from." George Soros, another declared, "wants to spend $75 million defeating
George W. Bush because Soros wants to legalize heroin." After all, a third
said, Mr. Soros "is a self-admitted atheist; he was a Jew who figured out a
way to survive the Holocaust."

They aren't LaRouchies - they're Republicans.

The suggestion that Mr. Soros, who has spent billions promoting democracy
around the world, is in the pay of drug cartels came from Dennis Hastert,
the speaker of the House, whom the Constitution puts two heartbeats from the
presidency. After standing by his remarks for several days, Mr. Hastert
finally claimed that he was talking about how Mr. Soros spends his money,
not where he gets it. 

The claim that Mr. Soros's political spending is driven by his desire to
legalize heroin came from Newt Gingrich. And the bit about the Holocaust
came from Tony Blankley, editorial page editor of The Washington Times,
which has become the administration's de facto house organ.

For many months we've been warned by tut-tutting commentators about the
evils of irrational "Bush hatred." Pundits eagerly scanned the Democratic
convention for the disease; some invented examples when they failed to find
it. Then they waited eagerly for outrageous behavior by demonstrators in New
York, only to be disappointed again.

There was plenty of hatred in Manhattan, but it was inside, not outside,
Madison Square Garden.

Barack Obama, who gave the Democratic keynote address, delivered a message
of uplift and hope. Zell Miller, who gave the Republican keynote, declared
that political opposition is treason: "Now, at the same time young Americans
are dying in the sands of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, our nation
is being torn apart and made weaker because of the Democrats' manic
obsession to bring down our commander in chief." And the crowd roared its
approval.

Why are the Republicans so angry? One reason is that they have nothing
positive to run on (during the first three days, Mr. Bush was mentioned far
less often than John Kerry).

The promised economic boom hasn't materialized, Iraq is a bloody quagmire,
and Osama bin Laden has gone from "dead or alive" to
he-who-must-not-be-named.

Another reason, I'm sure, is a guilty conscience. At some level the people
at that convention know that their designated hero is a man who never in his
life took a risk or made a sacrifice for his country, and that they are
impugning the patriotism of men who have.

That's why Band-Aids with Purple Hearts on them, mocking Mr. Kerry's war
wounds and medals, have been such a hit with conventioneers, and why senior
politicians are attracted to wild conspiracy theories about Mr. Soros.

It's also why Mr. Hastert, who knows how little the Bush administration has
done to protect New York and help it rebuild, has accused the city of an
"unseemly scramble" for cash after 9/11. Nothing makes you hate people as
much as knowing in your heart that you are in the wrong and they are in the
right.

But the vitriol also reflects the fact that many of the people at that
convention, for all their flag-waving, hate America. They want a controlled,
monolithic society; they fear and loathe our nation's freedom, diversity and
complexity.

The convention opened with an invocation by Sheri Dew, a Mormon publisher
and activist. Early rumors were that the invocation would be given by Jerry
Falwell, who suggested just after 9/11 that the attack was God's punishment
for the activities of the A.C.L.U. and People for the American Way, among
others. But Ms. Dew is no more moderate: earlier this year she likened
opposition to gay marriage to opposition to Hitler.

The party made sure to put social moderates like Rudy Giuliani in front of
the cameras. But in private events, the story was different. For example,
Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas told Republicans that we are in a "culture
war" and urged a reduction in the separation of church and state.

Mr. Bush, it's now clear, intends to run a campaign based on fear. And for
me, at least, it's working: thinking about what these people will do if they
solidify their grip on power makes me very, very afraid. 

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/1e2aa8d9/attachment-0001.htm 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 73 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/1e2aa8d9/attachment-0017.gif 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 73 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/1e2aa8d9/attachment-0018.gif 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 73 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/1e2aa8d9/attachment-0019.gif 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 73 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/1e2aa8d9/attachment-0020.gif 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 73 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/1e2aa8d9/attachment-0021.gif 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 352 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/1e2aa8d9/attachment-0022.gif 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 359 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/1e2aa8d9/attachment-0023.gif 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 964 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/1e2aa8d9/attachment-0024.gif 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 58 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/1e2aa8d9/attachment-0025.gif 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 15410 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/1e2aa8d9/attachment-0001.jpeg 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 73 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/1e2aa8d9/attachment-0026.gif 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 73 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/1e2aa8d9/attachment-0027.gif 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 3823 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/1e2aa8d9/attachment-0028.gif 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 73 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/1e2aa8d9/attachment-0029.gif 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 73 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/1e2aa8d9/attachment-0030.gif 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 73 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/1e2aa8d9/attachment-0031.gif 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 2380 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/1e2aa8d9/attachment-0032.gif 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 242 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060309/1e2aa8d9/attachment-0033.gif 

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Fri Mar 10 11:25:36 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 11:25:36 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] America-Look to your own Backyard
Message-ID: <C03712B1.29ECC%michael@michaelbutler.com>



-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/octet-stream
Size: 62605 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060310/c4b8791b/attachment-0001.obj 

From marylouiseparis at hotmail.com  Fri Mar 10 11:48:47 2006
From: marylouiseparis at hotmail.com (Mary Louise smn)
Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 19:48:47 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] View of Arab World by An Arab
In-Reply-To: <C0279F70.29792%michael@michaelbutler.com>
Message-ID: <BAY107-F11C945CC7CE90CD3B661C3B8ED0@phx.gbl>




     Michael.....This earlier message on Civic may be of added interest to 
those reading on Civic  10  March  Wafa Sultan's remarks on Al-Jazeera TV.   
   Despite living for short periods in the Arab world, I found this article 
to give additional insight.......I read it twice.    Wafa Sultan has 
extraordinary courage.    Marylouise


>From: Michael Butler <michael at michaelbutler.com>
>Reply-To: mb-civic at islandlists.com
>To: SPECIAL from Michael Butler <michael at michaelbutler.com>
>Subject: [Mb-civic] View of Arab World by An Arab
>Date: Sun, 26 Feb 2006 18:09:50 -0800
>
>Reza sent this, pretty interesting.
>Michael
>


><< ViewofArabWorldb_24D0BF.doc >>


>_______________________________________________
>Mb-civic mailing list
>Mb-civic at islandlists.com
>http://www.islandlists.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mb-civic

_________________________________________________________________
FREE pop-up blocking with the new MSN Toolbar - get it now! 
http://toolbar.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200415ave/direct/01/


From grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net  Fri Mar 10 11:46:17 2006
From: grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net (Golsorkhi)
Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 14:46:17 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] FW: Emailing: 62886
In-Reply-To: <000701c64469$ba2a3160$6401a8c0@DF2ZTG61>
Message-ID: <E1FHo7G-0005vs-C1@elasmtp-junco.atl.sa.earthlink.net>


------ Forwarded Message
From: "Farhad Sepahbody" <sepa at sedona.net>
Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 10:40:30 -0700
To: "Golsorkhi" <grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net>
Subject: Emailing: 62886

 
The message is ready to be sent with the following file or link attachments:
Shortcut to: http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/62886.htm

Note: To protect against computer viruses, e-mail programs may prevent
sending or receiving certain types of file attachments.  Check your e-mail
security settings to determine how attachments are handled.

------ End of Forwarded Message

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060310/4268bda1/attachment.htm 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/octet-stream
Size: 111 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060310/4268bda1/attachment.obj 

From autoreply at economist.com  Fri Mar 10 10:50:57 2006
From: autoreply at economist.com (autoreply at economist.com)
Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 13:50:57 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] An article for you from Michael Butler.
Message-ID: <200603101822.NAA17343@stage-web-app.economist.com>


- AN ARTICLE FOR YOU, FROM ECONOMIST.COM -

Dear civic,

Michael Butler (michael at intrafi.com) wants you to see this article on Economist.com.



(Note: the sender's e-mail address above has not been verified.)

Subscribe to The Economist print edition, get great savings and FREE full access to Economist.com.  Click here to subscribe:  http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/email.cfm 

Alternatively subscribe to online only version by clicking on the link below and save 25%:

http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/offer.cfm?campaign=168-XLMT



BOWING TO THE PRESSURE FROM A HOSTILE CONGRESS
Mar 10th 2006  

Dubai-based port operator DP World has said it will divest its American
port operations, in response to the hostile reaction of Congress to its
planned takeover of the facilities as part of a wider acquisition. The
Bush administration, which had backed the deal, has been left looking
embarrassed. America's image as an advocate of free trade has been
tarnished, and it has alienated many in the Muslim world

SINCE the 2004 elections returned them to power, America's Republicans
have been battered by the continuing chaos in Iraq, weak economic data
in critical sectors and a festering lobbying scandal. Yet the
opposition Democrats could not seem to find a way to press their
advantage. In recent weeks, however, the Democrats have been happily
contemplating the potential of a return from exile--and all thanks to a
few ports.

In late February, the Republicans were left reeling when it emerged
that the Bush administration had approved the purchase of British port
operator P&O by DP World, a firm owned by the government of Dubai, in
the United Arab Emirates (UAE)--which would leave DP World operating
six large American ports. A fracas ensued. Many in Congress, including
top Republicans, said the deal posed an unacceptable threat to national
security and vowed to block it. President George Bush threatened to
veto any legislation to that effect. But the lawmakers refused to back
down, and the president saw his approval ratings plummet to new lows.
On Thursday March 9th, those opposed to the deal got their way when DP
World announced (possibly at the behest of the White House) that it had
decided to sell the six ports to an American-owned entity. 

Legislators remain wary, however. It is not clear what sort of deal DP
World envisions; it stressed in its announcement that it was unwilling
to sell its American operations at a loss. It may not be able to avoid
it. All the potential buyers are well aware that Congress means to
block DP World from operating the ports, which presumably means that
bidders can hold out for fire-sale prices. Several legislators have
indicated they will want to make sure that whatever American firm ends
up operating the ports is genuinely independent of DP World. And there
are voices urging Congress to push ahead anyway with blocking
legislation, just to make sure that no foreign state-owned company will
ever again bid for an American port.

This stance seems to be popular with the American public, which has had
all its fears about terrorism and its protectionist instincts aroused
by the prospect of the deal. To be fair, America's ports remain one of
the biggest holes in its security. Two billion tonnes of cargo move
through them every year, tucked inside opaque containers that might
just as easily contain a "dirty bomb" as Chinese electronics. Only
around 5% of these containers are inspected, a higher proportion than
before the September 11th attacks of 2001, but still odds that a
terrorist might favour. 

Nonetheless, opposition to the DP takeover comes across as racist to
much of the Muslim world. It seems unlikely that the American lawmakers
would have kicked up a fuss had Temasek, a state-controlled group from
Singapore, beaten DP World in the bidding war for P&O. On Friday, trade
officials announced that the UAE and America had postponed talks on a
free-trade agreement, scheduled for next week, presumably in reaction
to the unfriendly noises coming from both sides. Nor is the perception
of racism limited to foreigners. General John Abizaid, the commander of
American forces in the Middle East, spoke out publicly against those
who opposed the deal, saying it "really comes down to Arab- and
Muslim-bashing that was totally unnecessary."

Piqued Middle Eastern governments may now turn away from America as
they look for places to stash their petro-profits. This could be a
problem for the world's largest economy, dependent as it is on a flood
of foreign investment to finance its trade deficit, which stood at
$68.5 billion in January alone. America may also find that the
unsavoury episode has tarnished its credibility as an advocate free
trade, at a time when it is trying to salvage the stalled Doha round of
world-trade negotiations. And the damage to America's image abroad will
not help its quest to stabilise Iraq and fight Islamist terrorism. On
Friday, Mr Bush said he was concerned that the deal's collapse would
send out a worrying message, adding that "In order to win the war on
terror, we have got to strengthen our relationships and friendships
with moderate Arab countries."

Yet for all the damage the Bush administration is suffering abroad, it
may not be enough to rescue the Democrats, despite all their hopeful
talk of a congressional comeback akin to that enjoyed by the
Republicans in 1994. Then, Mr Bush's party had the benefit of many
vulnerable seats and a simple, clear policy platform. It also had, in
Newt Gingrich, a charismatic leader in Congress who could push those
goals. The current Democratic leadership is, by contrast, fractured;
and so far, it has not produced anything to rival Mr Gingrich's
Contract with America.

At the very least, however, the ports debacle may help improve the
Democrats' standing on national security, an issue on which they have
trailed the Republicans for decades. And even if they don't retake the
House of Representatives in the mid-term elections due in November,
those Democrats who are genuinely worried about port security can take
comfort that the harassment of DP World may finally have put the issue
on the map.
 

See this article with graphics and related items at http://www.economist.com/agenda/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5620236&fsrc=nwl

Go to http://www.economist.com for more global news, views and analysis from the Economist Group.

- ABOUT ECONOMIST.COM -

Economist.com is the online version of The Economist newspaper, an independent weekly international news and business publication offering clear reporting, commentary and analysis on world politics, business, finance, science & technology, culture, society and the arts.
Economist.com also offers exclusive content online, including additional articles throughout the week in the Global Agenda section.

-	SUBSCRIBE NOW AND SAVE 25% -

Click here: http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/offer.cfm?campaign=168-XLMT

Subscribe now with 25% off and receive full access to:

* all the articles published in The Economist newspaper
* the online archive - allowing you to search and retrieve over 33,000 articles published in The Economist since 1997
* The World in  - The Economist's outlook on the year
* Business encyclopedia - allows you to find a definition and explanation for any business term


- ABOUT THIS E-MAIL -

This e-mail was sent to you by the person at the e-mail address listed
above through a link found on Economist.com.  We will not send you any
future messages as a result of your being the recipient of this e-mail.


- COPYRIGHT -

This e-mail message and Economist articles linked from it are copyright
(c) 2006 The Economist Newspaper Group Limited. All rights reserved.
http://www.economist.com/help/copy_general.cfm

Economist.com privacy policy: http://www.economist.com/about/privacy.cfm



From ean at sbcglobal.net  Fri Mar 10 20:58:39 2006
From: ean at sbcglobal.net (ean at sbcglobal.net)
Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 20:58:39 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Noam Chomsky on Latin America (short and sweet)
Message-ID: <E1FHwKl-0003cO-V0@smtpauth04.mail.atl.earthlink.net>

 http://www.zmag.org/weluser.htm


Latin American Integration

Noam Chomsky Interviewed by Bernie Dwyer

Bernie Dwyer: I am reminded of a great Irish song called "The West's 
Awake" written by Thomas Davis in remembrance of the Fenian 
Uprising of 1798. It is about the west of Ireland asleep under British 
rule for hundreds of years and how it awoke from its slumbers and 
rose up against the oppressor. Could we begin to hope now that the 
South is awake?

Noam Chomsky: What's happening is something completely new in 
the history of the hemisphere. Since the Spanish conquest the 
countries of Latin America have been pretty much separated from one 
another and oriented toward the imperial power. There are also very 
sharp splits between the tiny wealthy elite and the huge suffering 
population. The elites sent their capital; took their trips; had their 
second homes; sent their children to study in whatever European 
country their country was closely connected with. [commas better than 
semi-colons in the preceding sentence.] I mean, even their 
transportation systems were oriented toward the outside for export of 
resources and so on.

For the first time, they are beginning to integrate and in quite a few 
different ways. Venezuela and Cuba is one case. MERCOSUR, which 
is still not functioning very much, is another case. Venezuela, of 
course, just joined MERCOSUR, which is a big step forward for it and 
it was greatly welcomed by the presidents of Argentina, Brazil.
For the first time the Indian population is becoming politically quite 
active. They just won an election in Bolivia which is pretty remarkable. 
There is a huge Indian population in Ecuador, even in Peru, and some 
of them are calling for an Indian nation. Now they want to control their 
own resources. In fact, many don't even want their resources 
developed. Many don't see any particular point in having their culture 
and lifestyle destroyed so that people can sit in traffic jams in New 
York.

Furthermore, they are beginning to throw out the IMF. In the past, the 
US could prevent unwelcome developments such as independence in 
Latin America, by violence; supporting military coups, subversion, 
invasion and so on. That doesn't work so well any more. The last time 
they tried in 2002 in Venezuela, the US had to back down because of 
enormous protests from Latin America, and of course the coup was 
overthrown from within. That's very new.

If the United States loses the economic weapons of control, it is very 
much weakened. Argentina is just essentially ridding itself of the IMF, 
as they say.  They are paying off the debts to the IMF. The IMF rules 
that they followed had totally disastrous effects. They are being helped 
in that by Venezuela, which is buying up part of the Argentine debt.
Bolivia will probably do the same. Bolivia's had 25 years of rigorous 
adherence to IMF rules. Per capita income now is less than it was 25 
years ago. They want to get rid of it. The other countries are doing the 
same. The IMF is essentially the US Treasury Department.  It is the 
economic weapon that's alongside the military weapon for maintaining 
control. That's being dismantled.

All of this is happening against the background of very substantial 
popular movements, which, to the extent that they existed in the past, 
were crushed by violence, state terror, Operation Condor, one 
monstrosity after another. That weapon is no longer available.
Furthermore, there is South-South integration going on, so Brazil, and 
South Africa and India are establishing relations.

And again, the forces below the surface in pressing all of this are 
international popular organizations of a kind that never existed before; 
the ones that meet annually in the world social forums. By now several 
world social forums have spawned lots of regional ones; there's one 
right here in Boston and many other places. These are very powerful 
mass movements of a kind without any precedent in history: the first 
real internationals. Everyone's always talked about internationals on 
the left but there's never been one. This is the beginning of one.

These developments are extremely significant. For US planners, they 
are a nightmare. I mean, the Monroe Doctrine is about 180 years old 
now, and the US wasn't powerful enough to implement it until after the 
2nd World War, except for the nearby region. After the 2nd World War 
it was able to kick out the British and the French and implement it, but 
now it is collapsing. These countries are also diversifying their 
international relations including commercial relations. So there's a lot 
of export to China, and accepting of investment from China. That's 
particularly true of Venezuela, but also the other big exporters like 
Brazil and Chile. And China is eager to gain access to other resources 
of Latin America.

Unlike Europe, China can't be intimidated. Europe backs down if the 
United States looks at it the wrong way. But China, they've been there 
for 3,000 years and are paying no attention to the barbarians and don't 
see any need to. The United States is afraid of China; it is not a military 
threat to anyone; and is the least aggressive of all the major military 
powers. But it's not easy to intimidate it. In fact, you can't intimidate it 
at all. So China's interactions with Latin America are frightening the 
United States. Latin America is also improving economic interactions 
with Europe. China and Europe now are each other largest trading 
partners, or pretty close to it.

These developments are eroding the means of domination of the US 
world system. And the US is pretty naturally playing its strong card 
which is military and in military force the US is supreme. Military 
expenditures in the US are about half of the total world expenditures, 
technologically much more advanced. In Latin America, just keeping to 
that, the number of the US military personnel is probably higher than it 
ever was during the Cold War. There sharply increasing training of 
Latin American officers.

The training of military officers has been shifted from the State 
Department to the Pentagon, which is not insignificant. The State 
department is under some weak congressional supervision. I mean 
there is legislation requiring human rights conditionalities and so on. 
They are not very much enforced, but they are at least there. And the 
Pentagon is free to do anything they want. Furthermore, the training is 
shifting to local control. So one of the main targets is what's called 
radical populism, we know what that means, and the US is establishing 
military bases throughout the region.

Bernie Dwyer: It appears, from what you are saying, that the US is 
losing the ideological war and compensating by upping their military 
presence in the region. Would you see Cuba as being a key player in 
encouraging and perhaps influencing what's coming out Latin America 
right now?

Noam Chomsky: Fidel Castro, whatever people may think of him, is a 
hero in Latin America, primarily because he stood up to the United 
States. It's the first time in the history of the hemisphere that anybody 
stood up to the United States. Nobody likes to be under the jackboot 
but they may not be able to do anything about it. So for that reason 
alone, he's a Latin American hero. Chavez: the same.

The ideological issue that you rightly bring up is the impact of 
neoliberalism. It's pretty striking over the last twenty-five years, 
overwhelmingly it's true, that the countries that have adhered to the 
neo-liberal rules have had an economic catastrophe and the countries 
that didn't pay any intention to the rules grew and developed. East Asia 
developed rapidly pretty much by totally ignoring the rules. Chile is 
claimed as being a market economy but that's highly misleading: its 
main export is a very efficient state owned copper company 
nationalized under Allende. You don't get correlations like this in 
economics very often.  Adherence to the neoliberal rules has been 
associated with economic failure and violation of them with economic 
success: it's very hard to miss that. Maybe some economists can miss 
it but people don't: they live it. Yes, there is an uprising against it. Cuba 
is a symbol. Venezuela is another, Argentina, where they recovered 
from the IMF catastrophe by violating the rules and sharply violating 
them, and then throwing out the IMF. Well, this is the ideological issue. 
The IMF is just a name for the economic weapon of domination, which 
is eroding

Bernie Dwyer: Why do you think that this present movement is 
different from the struggle that went before, in Chile for instance when 
they succeeded in overthrowing the military dictatorship? What gives 
us more hope about this particular stage of liberation for Latin 
America?

Noam Chomsky: First of all, there was hope in Latin America in the 
1960s but it was crushed by violence. Chile was moving on a path 
towards some form of democratic socialism but we know what 
happened. That's the first 9/11 in 1973, which was an utter 
catastrophe. The dictatorship in Chile, which is a horror story also led 
to an economic disaster in Chile bringing about its worst recession in 
its history. The military then turned over power to civilians. Its still there 
so Chile didn't yet completely liberate itself. It has partially liberated 
itself from the military dictatorship; and in the other countries even 
more so.

So for example, I remember traveling in Argentina and Chile a couple 
of years ago and the standard joke in both countries was that people 
said that they wish the Chilean military had been stupid enough to get 
into a war with France or some major power so they could have been 
crushed and discredited and then people would be free the way they 
were in Argentina, where the military was discredited by its military 
defeat.

But there has been a slow process in every one of the countries, 
Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, all the way through, there's been  a process 
of overthrowing the dominant dictatorships - the military dictatorships - 
almost always supported, and sometimes instituted, by the United 
States

Now they are supporting one another and the US cannot resort to the 
same policies.

Take Brazil, if Lula had been running in 1963, the US would have done 
just what it did when Goulart was president in 1963. The Kennedy 
administration just planned a military dictatorship. A military coup took 
place and that got rid of that. And that was happening right through the 
hemisphere.

Now, there's much more hope because that cannot be done and there 
is also cooperation. There is also a move towards a degree of 
independence: political, economic and social policies, access to their 
own resources, instituting social changes of the kind that could 
overcome the tremendous internal problems of Latin America, which 
are awful. And a large part of the problems in Latin America are simply 
internal. In Latin America, the wealthy have never had any 
responsibilities. They do what they want.


-- 
You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, 
option D (up to 3 emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options 
(option A - 1x/week, option B - 3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option D - 
up to 3x/day) please reply and let us know!  If someone forwarded you 
this email and you want to be on our list, send an email to 
ean at sbcglobal.net and tell us which option you'd like.


"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060310/ec17f97f/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Fri Mar 10 22:33:14 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 22:33:14 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] CNN.com - Court backs student's "Bong Hits 4 Jesus"
	banner - Mar 10, 2006
Message-ID: <20408132.1142058794645.JavaMail.tomcat@localhost>



*Please note, the sender's email address has not been verified.



Not exactly the way I might have gone about it, but, hey - I guess it works...LOL



 
********************
 
If you are having trouble with any of the links in this message, or if the URL's are not appearing as links, please follow the instructions at the bottom of this email.
 
Title: CNN.com - Court backs student's "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" banner - Mar 10, 2006
CNN.com will expire this article on 03/24/2006. 
  
Copy and paste the following into your Web browser to access the sent link:
http://www.emailthis.clickability.com/et/emailThis?clickMap=viewThis&etMailToID=854455406&pt=Y
 

Copy and paste the following into your Web browser to SAVE THIS link:
http://www.savethis.clickability.com/st/saveThisPopupApp?clickMap=saveFromET&partnerID=2006&etMailToID=854455406&pt=Y

 
Copy and paste the following into your Web browser to forward this link:
http://www.emailthis.clickability.com/et/emailThis?clickMap=forward&etMailToID=854455406&partnerID=2006&pt=Y

  
 
********************


Email pages from any Web site you visit - add the EMAIL THIS button to your browser, copy and paste the following into your Web browser:
http://www.emailthis.clickability.com/et/emailThis?clickMap=browserButtons&pt=Y"


*********************



Instructions:
-----------------------------------------
If your e-mail program doesn't recognize Web addresses:
1. With your mouse, highlight the Web Address above. Be sure to highlight the entire Web address, even if it spans more than one line in your email. 
2. Select Copy from the Edit menu at the top of your screen. 
3. Launch your Web browser.
4. Paste the address into your Web browser by selecting Paste from the Edit menu.
5. Click Go or press Enter or Return on your keyboard. 
 
********************
 
 
 
 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060310/8d4bdb92/attachment.htm 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Sat Mar 11 04:31:58 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 07:31:58 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Twisted religion of Blair and Bush
Message-ID: <001001c64507$cd4a6410$6a27e440@Harold>

 
The twisted religion of Blair and Bush 
Phillip Blond and Adrian Pabst International Herald Tribune 
FRIDAY, MARCH 10, 2006 
Secular Britain was shocked last weekend when Prime Minister Tony Blair said that God would be his judge over the war in Iraq. Similarly, President George W. Bush has often used God to justify the war on terror as a religiously blessed and righteous campaign against "evil doers." Predictably, those who oppose the war view themselves as secular progressives untainted by religious fundamentalism and the madness it produces.

Unfortunately for liberals, the origins of Bush's and Blair's religious convictions lie not within Christianity but rather within the history of Western modernization and, most important, within contemporary liberalism itself.

Religious fundamentalism has often been used to justify extreme political ideologies. Currently both sides of the war on terror legitimate their actions by perverted theological reasoning.

The neo-cons and their acolytes have launched a unilateral pre-emptive conflict, masquerading as a "just war," with horrendous consequences. In the name of good versus evil, people are being killed, imprisoned and tortured with impunity. Likewise, in a quest to rebuild and expand the imperial Caliphate, Al Qaeda and its henchmen are engaged in a modern variant of jihad: They have removed all traditional Islamic limits on warfare, propagating instead mass civilian death via the suicide of their followers.

The usurpation of the great faiths by secular ideology is not usually recognized. This process has a historical and a contemporary dimension. For all the major monotheistic faiths, their primary historical distortion lies with their utilization for the purposes of state formation and nationalism.

Both Judaism and Islam suffer from being religions that are synonymous with the construction of states and political power. This was recognized within Judaism by a constant tension between the prophets and the kings, with the former always calling the latter back to a true righteousness untouched by the corruption of power and avarice.

Islam had a not dissimilar distinction, with the imams often limiting the political ambit of the caliphs, directing them to a properly configured vision of an Islamic polity. It is disastrous that both of these critical religious legacies have been lost to a secular politics that now has no limits.

Christianity had a better start. For almost three centuries it avoided capture by the logic of the state, and was able to form human beings into a community that transcended class, race and geography. This tradition was eclipsed in A.D. 325, when Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. Since states put a premium on conformity and political allegiance, religion became a primary way to ensure mass compliance with state authority.

This dubious historical legacy was further compromised when, in the so-called wars of religion of the 16th century, European princes competed for power. Notions of race and nation were deployed alongside religion to formulate political identities that were ethnically and culturally exclusive. Historically speaking, secular nationalism and racism undermined religion's universal claims and tied faith to state power.

Contemporary liberalism has championed the secularization of both religion and politics. In the name of tolerance and pluralism, secular liberals relegated religion to the private sphere. By denying religion any public import, this hitherto shared realm became drained of any objective moral beliefs. Society was atomized and culture surrendered to relativism.

Paradoxically, by privatizing religion, secular settlements produced religious fundamentalism. Confined to the personal sphere, religion is deprived of civic engagement that would mitigate fanaticism and foster moderation, and faith answers to no authority other than subjective inner conscience.

Indeed, this is why Blair thinks the invasion of Iraq is consonant with his Christian beliefs: On television he explained, "The only way you can take a decision like that is to do the right thing according to your conscience." The trouble is that once liberalism has surrendered any belief in objective truths, all personal subjective beliefs become true. Once all things are equally valid, the only way to attain supremacy is through war and power. Thus does liberalism make fundamentalists out of us all.

Hence, convinced of their own self-righteousness, Blair and Bush are blind to the reality of their actions. With religious zeal, they pursue their shared project to make Western hegemony irreversible. In so doing, they have embraced a profoundly secular logic - the destruction of traditional religion at home and abroad and the merciless expansion of market democracies across the globe. Blair and Bush seek to create a brave new world in the image of their faith, a vision that just happens to be irreconcilable with Christianity. 

(Phillip Blond lectures in philosophy and religion at St. Martin's College, Lancaster. Adrian Pabst is a doctoral candidate at Peterhouse, Cambridge University, and a research fellow at the Luxembourg Institute for European and International Studies.)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060311/edad01b8/attachment.htm 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 1797 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060311/edad01b8/attachment.gif 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sat Mar 11 06:23:28 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 09:23:28 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Slobodan Milosevic Found Dead in his Prison Cell in The
 Hague - Washington Post
Message-ID: <4412DD60.9060808@comcast.net>

Slobodan Milosevic Found Dead in his Prison Cell in The Hague

The Washington Post (Associated Press)
Saturday, March 11, 2006; 8:15 AM

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands (AP) -- Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav 
leader who orchestrated the Balkan wars of the 1990s and was on trial 
for war crimes, was found dead in his prison cell near The Hague, the 
U.N. tribunal said Saturday.

Milosevic, 64, apparently died of natural causes, a tribunal press 
officer said. He was found dead in his bed at the U.N. detention center.

Milosevic has been on trial since February 2002, defending himself 
against 66 counts of crimes, including genocide, in Croatia, Bosnia and 
Kosovo.

The trial repeatedly was interrupted by Milosevic's poor health and 
chronic heart condition. It was recessed last week until Tuesday to 
await his next defense witness.

His death comes less than a week after the star witness in his trial, 
former Croatian Serb leader Milan Babic, was found dead in the same 
prison. Babic, who was serving a 13-year prison sentence, committed 
suicide. He testified against Milosevic in 2002.

A figure of beguiling charm and cunning ruthlessness, Milosevic was a 
master tactician who turned his country's defeats into personal 
victories and held onto power for 13 years despite losing four wars that 
shattered his nation and impoverished his people.

Milosevic led Serbia, the dominant Yugoslav republic, into four Balkan 
wars, but always managed to emerge politically stronger. The secret of 
his survival was his uncanny ability to exploit what less adroit figures 
would consider a fatal blow.

Each time he would bounce back, skillfully reinventing himself in a 
series of political transformations -- as a devout communist, a 
reform-minded nationalist, and again as a communist at a time when most 
of the world had abandoned Marxist ideology.

He once described himself as the "Ayatollah Khomeini of Serbia," 
assuring his prime minister, Milan Panic, that "the Serbs will follow me 
no matter what." For years, they did -- through wars which dismembered 
Yugoslavia and plunged what was left of the country into social, 
political, moral and economic ruin.

But in the end, his people abandoned him: first in October 2000, when he 
was unable to convince the majority of Yugoslavs that he had staved off 
electoral defeat by his successor, Vojislav Kostunica, and again on 
April 1, 2001, when he surrendered after a 26-hour standoff to face 
criminal charges stemming from his ruinous rule.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/11/AR2006031100463.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060311/9bcd3a81/attachment-0001.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sat Mar 11 06:25:03 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 09:25:03 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Port Deal's Political Fallout Not Over - Washington Post
Message-ID: <4412DDBF.8010703@comcast.net>

Port Deal's Political Fallout Not Over
House GOP Drafting Bill to Require Hill Oversight of Foreign Acquisitions

By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 11, 2006; A03

House Republican leaders will unveil legislation as soon as next week 
demanding a congressional role in reviewing the acquisition of U.S. 
businesses by foreign buyers, suggesting that the controversy over a 
now-abandoned Dubai port deal will continue to roil congressional 
relations with the Bush administration.

House Majority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) is drafting a bill to require 
congressional oversight as the administration reviews such foreign 
acquisitions, a role Congress has not played since the Committee on 
Foreign Investments in the United States (CFIUS) was created three 
decades ago.

A day after United Arab Emirates-based Dubai Ports World abandoned its 
bid to control terminal operations at six major U.S. seaports, lawmakers 
and President Bush made it clear that the issue was not going away. In 
remarks to newspaper editors, Bush said he is "concerned about a broader 
message this issue could send to our friends and allies around the 
world, particularly in the Middle East."

"In order to win the war on terror, we have got to strengthen our 
relationships and friendships with moderate Arab countries in the Middle 
East," Bush said. "UAE is a committed ally in the war on terror. They 
are a key partner for our military in a critical region."

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, speaking to reporters while flying 
to Chile, said: "Of course I think you have to be concerned about the 
perception and the message that this might send. It means that we are 
going to have to work and double our efforts to send a strong message 
that we value our allies, our moderate allies, in the Middle East."

U.S. Trade Representative Rob Portman announced that trade talks between 
the United States and the UAE, set to begin Monday, will be postponed. 
Spokeswoman Neena Moorjani said both sides need more time to prepare.

Flush from what they see as a victory, members of Congress appear 
determined to insert themselves into matters of national security that 
they had previously left exclusively to the president. But their 
aggressive response has left administration officials -- and even some 
colleagues -- concerned that the longer the controversy drags out, the 
more likely it will alienate foreign allies, dampen investment in the 
United States and even slow the economy.

On Capitol Hill, lawmakers from both parties pledged to revise the 
review process for business acquisitions by foreigners while moving 
swiftly on legislation to bolster port security.

Critics of the congressional attack on the port deal said DP World's 
withdrawal will not make the six U.S. ports any safer from terrorist 
attacks. But lawmakers say the controversy will spark action on measures 
to tighten security that have languished in Congress. Both the Senate 
and House homeland security committees said they will draft legislation 
in a matter of weeks.

House leaders have decided to push ahead next week with a full House 
vote on legislation to kill the port deal. The House Appropriations 
Committee had approved the measure 62 to 2 on Wednesday, but 
rank-and-file members outside the committee have asked to go on record 
with their opposition.

Democrats demanded that the White House release all documents related to 
DP World's acquisition of London-based Peninsular and Oriental Steam 
Navigation Co., including the administration's review of the deal and 
documents pertaining to a Coast Guard memo that said investigators could 
not say whether the transaction would heighten terrorist threats.

Despite the assurances of congressional Republicans and the president, 
some Democrats also questioned whether DP World really committed to 
shedding its U.S. port assets Thursday when it pledged to "transfer" 
them to a U.S. entity. Bush himself said the Dubai-owned firm has "made 
the difficult decision to hand over port operations that they had 
purchased from another company."

But company spokesman Mark Dennis again refused to elaborate yesterday 
on the company's official statement, leaving it unclear whether a 
transfer of assets meant a loss of ownership or just management 
responsibilities, and Democrats remain skeptical. Even one knowledgeable 
House Republican aide suggested that the language could mean the company 
might maintain ownership if a buyer could not be found at the right 
price. "The port deal's not dead," said Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio).

Officials from both parties warned that if the statement's intent proves 
to be less than full divestiture, Congress will move swiftly to kill the 
deal. "If nothing else, the company will ignite a thermonuclear 
explosion for itself and the emirate if it falls short of a sale," 
warned one Republican Senate aide.

Even if DP World sells its assets at the ports of Baltimore, New York, 
Newark, Philadelphia, Miami and New Orleans immediately, the underlying 
issues raised by the controversy will remain at the top of Congress's 
political agenda.

Blunt could release his CFIUS legislation as early as next week, a 
highly unusual move for a senior House leader with no seat on the 
committee with jurisdiction. Blunt spokeswoman Burson Taylor said the 
majority whip plans to work with House Republican Conference Chairman 
Deborah Pryce (Ohio) and House Financial Services Committee Chairman 
Michael G. Oxley (R-Ohio) on a final bill. But senior House GOP aides, 
speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of crossing the whip, 
said Blunt is driving the issue as well as the language.

A Senate measure, being drafted by Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), 
chairman of the banking committee, could encroach on the 
administration's turf even further. Committee spokesman Andrew Gray said 
Shelby's bill, due to be completed the week of March 27, would give 
Congress the authority to pass a resolution of disapproval, even if the 
administration has given a deal the green light.

Administration officials struck a conciliatory tone on such legislation. 
"This process for review I think can be done better, and we're going to 
be working with Congress, with people like Chairman Shelby of the 
banking committee, to make sure that we improve the process," Treasury 
Secretary John W. Snow said on MSNBC.

But administration officials and some congressional allies said Congress 
should not be allowed to go too far. The CFIUS review process was set up 
to be confidential and beyond Congress's reach specifically to insulate 
sensitive business investments from political forces, they said. Last 
week, Oxley raised the same concerns when he said the review process "is 
not -- nor should it be -- political in nature. That is a slippery 
slope, and it would be a mistake to take that step."

Even Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), one of the fiercest critics of 
the port deal, said language must be found to ensure that Congress could 
scuttle a deal only in "egregious situations." He added: "We have to 
figure out a way where it's not routine."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/10/AR2006031000749.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060311/38089368/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sat Mar 11 06:30:21 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 09:30:21 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] IMPORTANT: Finding Unity On Terrorism - Wolfgang
 Ischinger - Washington Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <4412DEFD.2030104@comcast.net>

Finding Unity On Terrorism
<>
By Wolfgang Ischinger
The Washington Post
Saturday, March 11, 2006; A19

When I presented my credentials to President Bush in the summer of 2001, 
the Atlantic was quiet. The risks confronting the transatlantic 
community appeared to be few, well defined and manageable. As a new 
ambassador in Washington, I expected to find enough time to refresh my 
pilot's license.

Then came Sept. 11. At first the traumatic events of that day appeared 
to bring the West together. NATO took the initiative to invoke Article 
5, the defense clause of the North Atlantic Treaty, for the first time 
in the 50-year history of the alliance. Shortly thereafter, the German 
government took a step unprecedented in postwar history by dispatching 
troops abroad, to Afghanistan. The transatlantic community defined our 
shared objectives as pursuing international terrorism, and denying 
terrorists safe haven in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Today, as we continue to pursue these objectives, an even more complex 
challenge confronts us: radical Islam and the likelihood of even greater 
terrorist threats and a potential for escalating political, cultural and 
religious tension between the West on the one hand and the Muslim world 
on the other.

The situation is particularly serious because security threats and 
instability in the greater Middle East have continued to grow. In Iraq, 
terrorist violence remains widespread, along with civil strife and 
sectarian political division, with no good end in sight. In Iran, hope 
for a negotiated settlement regarding that country's nuclear ambitions 
has become uncertain. The future of the international nonproliferation 
regime is at risk; a Shiite nuclear capability might lead to Sunni 
nuclear ambitions. At the same time, Iran appears to be the principal 
beneficiary of growing Shiite influence in the region, adding a new 
element of regional instability.

The dream of transforming the entire region by getting rid of Saddam 
Hussein and creating democracy through elections has turned out to be 
elusive. In Iraq, Iran, Egypt and the Palestinian territories, recent 
elections have actually tended to strengthen radical political groups. 
While the very holding of elections in Iraq and the Palestinian 
territories is a success, these developments have so far not contributed 
to regional stability -- on the contrary.

Regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it is difficult, after the 
Hamas victory, to imagine how a negotiating process leading to the 
proposed two-state solution can be conducted and concluded in the near term.

In short, there is more than enough fuel available in the region to 
further stoke the radical fire. What is new is that the battleground of 
this emerging larger conflict will most likely not be in the continental 
United States, as was the case on Sept. 11, but rather in the 
European-Mediterranean space: Europe, or Europe's back yard.

What is also new is the element of personal fear beginning to descend 
upon Europeans -- as it descended upon Americans on Sept. 11. This is 
the fear inspired not only by terrorist train bombings in London and 
Madrid but by political assassinations in the Netherlands and, more 
recently, the dramatic escalation of the cartoon controversy in Denmark. 
It is the fear of being personally threatened. Europe would cease to be 
the Europe we know, love and admire, if its people came to fear that 
insisting on their values and their way of life might put their safety 
and lives at risk.

Will Europeans and Americans find a common answer to this challenge? 
Some appear all too willing to speak of the "clash of civilizations" as 
a self-fulfilling prophecy. Some in Europe might wish to go so far as to 
identify America's war in Iraq as the source of all problems, and some 
might prefer to dissociate themselves from a common transatlantic 
position, believing that the battlefield would then shift away from 
Europe. In America, the old prejudice against a weak Europe with 
inefficient leadership, unable or unwilling to defend itself and to deal 
with the issue of Muslim integration, might be reinforced.

How, then, should we move forward? Here are three simple thoughts:

? First, no serious effort has been undertaken to create a security 
structure for the Middle East -- the most volatile and, because of its 
oil resources, most important of all regions. Incorporating Israel into 
NATO, as has recently been proposed, would satisfy neither Israel's 
security needs nor those of the West. It would only exacerbate tension 
between NATO and the Arab world. Instead, an effective regional security 
arrangement would need to take into account the interests of Israel as 
well as those of Iran and the Arab countries, and it would need to be 
led and supported by the United States, Europe and Russia. As has 
recently been suggested, the U.N. Security Council might provide a 
framework for the elaboration of such an arrangement.

? Second, as repeatedly suggested by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, 
NATO's role as the central forum for discussing and deciding 
transatlantic security issues should be strengthened. Europeans should 
make clear their desire for America to remain a European power. Those in 
Europe who believe that the European Union would be in a better position 
to develop its own defense policy if it were weaned from American 
military support are unwittingly playing into the hands of American 
isolationists -- to the detriment of European security. And those in 
Europe who continue to believe Europe should define its security policy 
independently from the United States have failed to understand that such 
an approach would inevitably divide the European Union.

? Third, the West -- as a political and moral concept -- must remain 
united. This is about more than just NATO, the European Union and free 
trade -- it is about the legacy of the European Enlightenment. Opposing 
absolutism, and believing in people's ability to create self-balancing 
and self-regulating, just, relativist and secular political systems: 
That is the Enlightenment's gift to the world, and it continues to be 
the West's promise.

But the West can lead only if it in turn is led responsibly by the 
United States as the only superpower, and if it can reoccupy the moral 
high ground, which has, in the eyes of many, largely been lost in the 
course of post-Sept. 11 events. One reason for this may be that we are 
not united on the issue of war and peace. Are we at war, as the United 
States claims, or are we just fighting terrorism, as Europeans believe? 
This is a fundamental political issue with the potential to either unite 
or split the West.

Many people in other parts of the world doubt whether our struggle 
against terrorism and for freedom, democracy and human rights is a 
struggle worth joining, a struggle with which they can or should 
identify. If we, the Western countries, are being measured by a higher 
standard than others, we should accept that and lead by example.

This is therefore the central challenge for the West in 2006: how to 
regain the moral high ground. The pursuit of post-Enlightenment ideals 
requires us to demonstrate that even as we fight terrorism we are 
prepared to take into account the interests of the global community, of 
all those whose cooperation we seek, whose values and culture we 
respect, and whose development and prosperity we support.

We must refuse to see that as a false choice; we must refuse to pit one 
religion against another. The choice is between absolutism and 
relativism, between totalitarianism and the dignity of the individual. 
That is the post-Enlightenment lesson the West can offer, and it is a 
legacy worth defending.

As I prepare to leave Washington for London, one thing is clear: There 
will be even less time in the future to take flying lessons.

The writer ended his tour as Germany's ambassador to the United States 
yesterday.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/10/AR2006031001840.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060311/52889ce2/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sat Mar 11 06:32:44 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 09:32:44 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Russia's Shadow Empire - Ana Palacio,
 Daniel Twining - Washington Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <4412DF8C.3000203@comcast.net>

Russia's Shadow Empire

By Ana Palacio and Daniel Twining
The Washington Post
Saturday, March 11, 2006; A19

Since 2003, democratic revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia have dealt 
strategic blows to the ambition of Russia's leaders to reconstitute the 
former Soviet empire by retaining political and military suzerainty over 
their weaker neighbors. But Russia's imperial pretensions along its 
periphery linger.

Calls from the elected presidents of Georgia and Ukraine for a united 
Europe stretching "from the Atlantic to the Caspian" should embolden 
Europe and the United States to help people aspiring to freedom in other 
post-Soviet states end Russia's continuing dominion over them by rolling 
back the corrupting influence of Russian power in regions beyond its 
borders. This task is especially urgent in countries where Russian 
troops and political support sustain secessionist conflicts that 
threaten aspiring new democracies and the security of the West.

Since the Cold War ended, Russian leaders have built a shadow empire on 
the territories of Russia's sovereign neighbors, extending Russian power 
where it is unwarranted and unwelcome by sponsoring "frozen conflicts" 
in southeastern Europe and the South Caucasus. This behavior, designed 
to maintain political and economic influence beyond Russia's borders, 
impedes democratic development in states that aspire to join the West. 
It exports instability, criminality and insecurity into Europe. It 
threatens regional military conflict that could draw in the United 
States and other powers. It also bolsters anti-democratic forces within 
Russia who believe Russia's traditional approach of subverting its 
neighbors' independence is a surer path to security than the democratic 
peace enjoyed by the nations of Europe.

The frozen conflicts in the Georgian provinces of South Ossetia and 
Abkhazia, and in the Moldovan territory of Transdniestria, share many 
characteristics. Russian troops fought on the side of local armies when 
these regions broke away from their mother countries as the Cold War 
ended. Russian officers continue to help train and command the breakaway 
territories' Russian-armed militias. The secessionist leaders are all 
Russian citizens, some sent directly from Moscow, who are maintained in 
power by the continuing presence of members of the Russian military and 
security services. Secessionist political leaders also enjoy the 
sponsorship of powerful criminal elites in Russia, which profit from the 
unregulated smuggling trade -- in consumer goods, drugs, weapons and 
women -- in the conflict zones.

Moscow has granted the people of South Ossetia, Abkhazia and 
Transdniestria Russian citizenship, including Russian passports and the 
right to vote in Russian elections. This effective annexation of 
sovereign peoples is expressly designed to undermine the authority of 
pro-Western governments in Georgia and Moldova.

Russian political and military influence also looms in the shadows of 
the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Opposing 
armies that fought a bloody war over the disputed enclave in the 1990s 
now shoot at each other from trenches across a "no-man's land" more 
reminiscent of Flanders in 1916 than the European neighborhood in 2005. 
This barely frozen conflict threatens a hot war that would devastate the 
region.

It is also the place where a breakthrough is perhaps most likely. 
Western governments could support a settlement there in which Armenia 
returned to Azerbaijan the occupied provinces surrounding the disputed 
territory and allowed Azerbaijani refugees to resettle there. 
Nagorno-Karabakh could enjoy full autonomy until its ultimate status was 
decided by democratic referendum at some future date. In return for 
Azerbaijan's cooperation in ending a conflict that threatens its growing 
prosperity, the West should welcome closer partnership with that country 
as it moves forward with reform, end residual sanctions against 
Azerbaijan dating from the 1991-94 war, require closure of the Russian 
bases on Armenian territory that threaten Azerbaijan, offer a 
mini-Marshall Plan for the entire South Caucasus and put these countries 
on a path to Europe.

In South Ossetia, Europe and the United States should support Georgian 
calls to internationalize the Russian-dominated "peacekeeping" force, 
which now functions chiefly to obstruct changes to the secessionist 
status quo. The United States and the European Union should join 
Georgia, Russia and South Ossetia in a new negotiating framework 
designed to achieve a lasting political settlement consistent with 
international law.

In Abkhazia, the Atlantic democracies should push to transform the U.N. 
observer mission into an armed peacekeeping force, hold Russia to its 
1999 promise on troop withdrawal and pledge assistance to rehabilitate 
Abkhazia's war-torn economy as part of a federation agreement with 
Georgia. With the West, Ukraine can help bring change to neighboring 
Transdniestria by continuing its recent crackdown on cross-border 
smuggling, reinforcing Moldovan demands for a Russian military 
withdrawal and supporting a political settlement upholding Moldova's 
sovereignty and the democratic rights of all its people.

Russia holds the key to any resolution of the frozen conflicts, and the 
Western democracies are surely not powerless to foster a change of 
Russian behavior in Europe's back yard. President Vladimir Putin must 
understand that his country cannot enjoy partnership with the West -- 
including membership in the G-8 club of Western democracies and the 
chance to host their summits -- as long as his policies in the European 
neighborhood, and at home, look less like those of a modern European 
statesman than of a czar.

Ana Palacio is the former foreign minister of Spain. Daniel Twining is 
an Oxford-based consultant to the German Marshall Fund of the United 
States. These are their personal views.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/10/AR2006031001841.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060311/7053f47d/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sat Mar 11 06:39:25 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 09:39:25 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Why Courts Are Adopting Gay Parenting - Dahlia Lithwick
 - Washington Post Sunday Outlook
Message-ID: <4412E11D.8070106@comcast.net>

Why Courts Are Adopting Gay Parenting
<>
By Dahlia Lithwick
The Washington Post Sunday Outlook
Sunday, March 12, 2006; B02

A heads-up to those of you still fretting about the alleged evils of gay 
marriage: The parade has moved on. Try as you may to vote, or legislate 
your way out of a country that solemnizes such relationships, committed 
gay couples are already giving birth to, adopting and fostering 
children. Whether or not same-sex marriage becomes widely legal in 
America, same-sex parenting is a done deal.

Around the country, courts are increasingly recognizing that reality, 
with more generous notions of what "parenting" and "family" mean. 
Critics are launching the predictable counterattack: deriding gay 
parenting with the same claims they use to attack gay marriage and 
dismissing any judge who recognizes such relationships as an 
unprincipled liberal activist. But there's a crucial legal difference 
between claims that liberal judges are inventing a right to same-sex 
marriage and inventing a right to same-sex parents: Judges who do the 
latter are adhering to a bedrock principle of family law.

The Delaware Supreme Court found last week that a gay woman could retain 
joint custody of triplets she co-parented with their biological mother. 
That makes Delaware one of a growing number of jurisdictions unwilling 
to reflexively downgrade involved gay parents to third-party 
interlopers. According to the 2000 Census, 34 percent of female same-sex 
households and 22 percent of male ones include children. The Lambda 
Legal Defense Fund estimates 6 million to 10 million gay parents are 
caring for 6 million to 14 million children.

Adoption laws vary widely by state. Most states allow adoption by single 
parents, including gay parents. Only Florida categorically prohibits gay 
parents from adopting, although Mississippi, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Utah 
and North Dakota do so as a matter of practice. Alabama, Georgia, 
Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio and Missouri are now considering 
constitutional amendments or laws banning gay adoption. Three states 
(Arkansas, Nebraska and Utah) prohibit gay people from even serving as 
foster parents.

These legislative bans fly in the face of both necessity and truth. 
There are 119,000 children waiting to be adopted in this country, about 
half of them racial and ethnic minorities. There are about 588,000 
children in foster care. Legislators -- like a clutch of Ohio 
Republicans -- pushing bans on gay adoption and fostering must argue 
that it's better for these children to languish in state custody, or 
bounce from foster home to foster home, than be raised by gay parents.

Just as there is no data to support the claim that children raised by 
married gay parents fare worse than those raised by heterosexual ones, 
there is no data to suggest that foster care is preferable to gay 
parenting. That's why almost every serious child welfare entity, 
including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Child Welfare League 
of America and the American Psychological Association, recognizes that 
gay parents are no worse than heterosexual ones.

Efforts to prevent gay parents from obtaining joint custody over their 
children crash against the same practical realities. The majority of 
states, by denying gay partners the right to "second-parent" adoptions 
or joint custody with a gay partner, effectively enshrine a legal regime 
in which millions of children have one legal parent and one legal 
stranger. That means that millions of children lack the security of two 
parents for purposes of health insurance, life insurance, inheritance, 
child support payments, emergency medical authorizations or parental 
leave, particularly in the event that their parents separate or their 
primary parent dies.

In order to defend the current adoption and custody regimes, therefore, 
you need to subordinate the practical and emotional interests of 
children to the moral preferences of lawmakers. That is precisely what 
family law prohibits.

The arguments for locking gay parents out of formal parenting 
arrangements include the familiar litany of complaints about health, 
morals and the sanctity of traditional marriage. But when real family 
court judges face real children in real family relationships, those 
arguments are quickly blunted by real concerns. In the Weekly Standard, 
Sara Butler Nardo 
<http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/011/918sohds.asp> 
of the Institute for American Values takes just such a whack at the 
expanding legal notion of parenting. She dismisses "de facto" or 
"psychological" parenthood -- equitable remedies used by judges to 
preserve relationships between children and their gay parents -- as a 
wacky "new concept" invented by reckless judges to "serve adults more 
than children." Nardo warns that while we are loudly and properly 
debating the legal change in the word marriage, the legal definition of 
the word parent is "quietly" changing under our noses.

But where Nardo and social conservatives are dead wrong is just here: If 
judges are increasingly inclined to recognize the validity of same-sex 
parenting arrangements, it's not because they are mangling a 
long-established tradition of family law. Courts that adopt broader 
visions of "parent" and "family" aren't reading radical new rights into 
their state constitutions. They are doing precisely what family courts 
are asked to do: Make a determination about what's in the "best interest 
of the child." That remains the polestar for judicial decision-making in 
both the adoption and custody contexts. As it turns out, children 
usually have more urgent concerns than what their parents do in bed.

The best-interest test reinforces the legal proposition that children 
are not their parents' chattel; the state has an obligation to privilege 
their needs, sometimes even over the needs of their own parents and 
other adults. The test is a not a fixed rule, precisely because judges 
must figure out what's best for kids on a fact-specific basis. And while 
judges can and should be able to make subjective decisions about whether 
two-parent adoptive homes are better than single-parent homes, they also 
need to be free to decide that it's preferable for little Joey to have a 
gay adoptive father than none, or to have two legal mommies rather than one.

Rules rooted in sweeping moral judgments don't generally work in family 
law for the same reason they don't work for families: Kids love and need 
the parents they have, not necessarily the parents we love.

dahlialithwick at hotmail.com <mailto:dahlialithwick at hotmail.com>

Dahlia Lithwick covers legal affairs for Slate, the online magazine at 
www.slate.com.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/10/AR2006031002031.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060311/07a526f6/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sat Mar 11 06:51:20 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 09:51:20 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] EXCELLENT: Globalism, democracy,
 and the ports deal - Robert Kuttner - Boston Globe Op-Ed
Message-ID: <4412E3E8.6070905@comcast.net>


  Globalism, democracy, and the ports deal

By Robert Kuttner  |  March 11, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

THE US POLITICAL elite has finally encountered a situation where 
globalization isn't an unmitigated blessing. President Bush, having used 
the fear factor to trump every other issue, was caught flat-footed when 
public opinion recoiled at a Persian Gulf company taking charge of major 
US ports.

The Dubai case was a genuinely close question. On the one hand, non-US 
companies already own US port operations. And the US Coast Guard is 
responsible for port security, regardless of who owns the facilities. On 
the other hand, it's harder to monitor the executives of a company based 
in the United Arab Emirates, and Al Qaeda might have an easier time 
infiltrating a Dubai company than a domestic one. These details got lost 
in the political uproar.

The Dubai ports affair invites a closer examination of the premise that 
the freest possible commerce in goods and services is all benefit and no 
cost. Let's see whether we are ready to take a serious look at 
complications of globalism.

There have long been national-security exceptions to the supposed ideal 
of free trade. The effort to contain proliferation of nuclear 
technologies and materials is one, but hardly the only one. The Defense 
Department and the corporate community regularly joust over which 
exports of advanced technologies should be constrained because of 
potential military uses.

The United States has an entirely schizophrenic view of trade in other 
weapons. It is the largest exporter of arms; this is presumably good for 
both business and for the project of knitting together other countries' 
military establishments with ours. Then US intelligence officials worry 
about these weapons falling into the wrong hands, which they often do.

But at least in the area of defense, there is a serious conversation 
about the limitations of free trade. When it comes to social and 
economic policy, however, anyone who raises the complications of 
globalism is dismissed as an economic imbecile.

However, we are citizens of the United States of America. There is no 
world government for us to be citizens of. In this country, civic 
decisions are made by the political process, not by the marketplace. 
Some of these decisions necessarily constrain the marketplace. To the 
extent that commerce is privileged over all other values, it erodes 
those other values.

As Americans, for instance, we have benefited from a social compact of 
protections enacted by our democratically elected representatives -- 
minimum wage laws, safety and health laws, social insurance, consumer 
safeguards, the right of workers to unionize, and so on. When we trade 
with nations that have no such protections, we run the risk of importing 
the absence of a social compact along with the products. That doesn't 
mean we should seal up our borders, but it does mean we should look 
harder at the terms of engagement.

Shouldn't we insist on certain social minimums in nations that want to 
trade freely with us? Should we allow the exploitation of foreign labor 
to lead to the battering down of wages and standards at home?

Business insists that trading nations respect its property rights. What 
about human rights and social rights?

Not only are we are importing restrictions on rights and liberties. In 
the Bush era -- witness the US government's kidnapping of terrorism 
suspects to countries that flagrantly use torture -- we are also 
exporting despotism. The same thing is happening in the private sector, 
where software companies have happily exported Internet censorship kits 
to several dictatorships.

Immigration is also complicated by the ideal of free global trade. Freer 
movement of products and services invites freer movement of people. Yet 
America remains a civic community, not just a marketplace; and there is 
a limit to how many immigrants can be absorbed at any one time.

The Bush administration is completely whipsawed between the desire of 
its business constituency to have as many cheap, vulnerable workers as 
possible and the backlash in the heartland, where such nationalists as 
US Representative Tom Tancredo of Colorado are leading a revolt not just 
against illegal immigration but against all immigration. The United 
States needs to gain control of its borders, precisely to remain a 
liberal democracy where the working class gets to have normal rights and 
to vote. A hugely inflated and undocumented immigrant population does 
neither.

The question of how to engage with the global economy and remain a 
secure democracy is anything but simple. The Dubai debate had its share 
of demagoguery. But maybe it will get us thinking about some 
long-deferred, hard questions.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/11/globalism_democracy_and_the_ports_deal/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060311/d87a3b0e/attachment-0001.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sat Mar 11 06:55:01 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 09:55:01 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] SHOULD READ: US Army in jeopardy in Iraq - Gary Hart -
 Boston Globe Op-Ed
Message-ID: <4412E4C5.8060604@comcast.net>


  US Army in jeopardy in Iraq

By Gary Hart  |  March 11, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

IN 1812, Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Russia and, after success at the 
battle of Borodino, marched on and occupied Moscow. Napoleon and his 
generals took over the palaces of the court princes and great houses of 
the mighty boyars.

Sadly for Napoleon, the Russians had different plans for their nation. 
Within days after abandoning their city to the French army, they torched 
their own palaces, homes, enterprises, and cathedrals. They burned 
Moscow down around Napoleon. Denied his last great triumph, the 
disappointed emperor abandoned Moscow and started home. Along the way, 
he lost the world's most powerful army.

Recently one of Islamic Shi'ites' most revered sites, the golden mosque 
in Baghdad, was destroyed by sectarian enemies. By this act and the 
reprisals that followed, Iraq moved a substantial step closer to civil 
war. Though a remote, but real, possibility, an Iraqi civil war could 
cost the United States its army.

Hopefully, leaders are planning for this possibility. If sectarian 
violence escalates further, US troops must be withdrawn from patrol and 
confined to their barracks and garrisons. Mass transport must be 
mustered for rapid withdrawal of those troops from volatile cities in 
the explosive central region of Iraq. Intensive diplomatic efforts must 
be focused on preventing an Iraqi civil war from spreading to Iran, 
Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria. Such a potential could make the greater 
Middle East a tinder box for years, if not decades, to come.

But the first concern must be the safety of US forces. It is strange to 
contemplate the possibility that the greatest army in world history 
could be slaughtered in a Middle East conflagration. But prudent 
commanders have no choice but to plan for this danger.

In greatest danger are the units in the Sunni central region cities. 
They are in real jeopardy if tens of thousands of angry Sunni and 
Shi'ite citizens, supported by their sectarian militias, surround and 
then overrun those units before they can be withdrawn.

The United States lost one war not too long ago in Vietnam. Conditions 
are taking shape that could result in the same outcome in Iraq. Not to 
plan now for this apocalyptic possibility would be tantamount to 
criminal neglect on the part of our political and military leadership.

A major part of the dilemma we have created is the result of failure to 
know the history and complex culture of Iraq. As we refused to learn 
from the French experience in Indochina, we also failed to learn from 
the British experience in Iraq. We are on the cusp of religion and 
antique hatred overtaking whatever latent instincts toward democracy we 
may have relied on or tried to instill. We face the reemergence of 
11th-century Assassins and 17th-century ethnic fundamentalism arising to 
replace a century of ideology -- imperialism, fascism, and communism.

The character of warfare and violence is being transformed. The warfare 
of the future is not World War II, or even Korea or Vietnam. It is 
Mogadishu and Fallujah -- low-intensity conflict among tribes, clans, 
and gangs. We are not prepared for that kind of warfare.

The United States is in danger of finding combat forces trapped in a 
civil war that they cannot prevent, control, or win.

America's army is in danger, and that danger is possibly just around the 
corner.

Gary Hart, a former US senator, lives in Kittredge, Colo. 

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/11/us_army_in_jeopardy_in_iraq/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060311/c3c83723/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Sat Mar 11 07:45:12 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 15:45:12 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Symbol of Abu Ghraib Seeks to Spare Others
	His Nightmare
Message-ID: <20060311154512.3D3E983D5A@lax-gw03.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

INTERNATIONAL / MIDDLE EAST | March 11, 2006
Symbol of Abu Ghraib Seeks to Spare Others His Nightmare
By HASSAN M. FATTAH
Ali Shalal Qaissi tells of his six-month stay at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the story behind a scandalous picture of him hooded.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/11/international/middleeast/11ghraib.html?ex=1142744400&en=d1981760f8ea3a33&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060311/dfa54389/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Sat Mar 11 07:46:10 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 15:46:10 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Muslim's Blunt Criticism of Islam Draws
	Threats
Message-ID: <20060311154610.C94EB24AFA3@lax-gw02.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

INTERNATIONAL / MIDDLE EAST | March 11, 2006
The Saturday Profile: Muslim's Blunt Criticism of Islam Draws Threats
By JOHN M. BRODER
A provocative interview on Al Jazeera has turned Wafa Sultan, a Syrian-American psychiatrist, into an international sensation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/11/international/middleeast/11sultan.html?ex=1142744400&en=68943d085edf8d61&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060311/2b1c56a1/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Sat Mar 11 07:51:02 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 15:51:02 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Famous Hawks Try Again to Fill a Familiar
	Empty Nest
Message-ID: <20060311155102.ECAF113B7DA@lax-gw04.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

fyi..the person on the co-op board responsible for taking down the nest was the spouse of Eva Brau..(cough) Paula Zahn


NEW YORK REGION | March 10, 2006
Famous Hawks Try Again to Fill a Familiar Empty Nest
By THOMAS J. LUECK
As New Yorkers were about to be wrapped in a balmy coat of springlike warmth, the sight of Lola and Pale Male could not have been more welcome.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/10/nyregion/10hawk.html?ex=1142744400&en=e7343e7c67a75684&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060311/d4e25f9a/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Sat Mar 11 07:52:09 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 15:52:09 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: How About a Fresh Helping of Secrecy?
Message-ID: <20060311155209.AB66224AF9D@lax-gw02.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

OPINION | March 11, 2006
Editorial: How About a Fresh Helping of Secrecy?

It is heartening to find the National Archives inviting critical notice of the way intelligence agencies have been secretly reclassifying documents.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/11/opinion/11sat4.html?ex=1142744400&en=b3b12cb564443167&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060311/b0afc6c8/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Sat Mar 11 07:54:46 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 15:54:46 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Open Doors Don't Invite Criminals
Message-ID: <20060311155446.7108824AF77@lax-gw02.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

the skin-head index is down


OPINION | March 11, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor: Open Doors Don't Invite Criminals
By ROBERT J. SAMPSON
Is increased immigration behind the drop in crime?
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/11/opinion/11sampson.html?ex=1142744400&en=a62b13c7b0589e5c&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060311/3efc97b6/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Sat Mar 11 07:56:41 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 15:56:41 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Chile's Socialist President Exits Enjoying
	Wide Respect
Message-ID: <20060311155641.9C2A03AF1EC@lax-gw06.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

INTERNATIONAL / AMERICAS | March 11, 2006
Chile's Socialist President Exits Enjoying Wide Respect
By LARRY ROHTER
Ricardo Lagos combined cautious economic policies with advances in social equality and human rights.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/11/international/americas/11chile.html?ex=1142744400&en=34e6773b99a66ea0&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060311/92c01325/attachment-0001.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Sat Mar 11 09:09:11 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (Ian)
Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 12:09:11 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] The Conservative Epiphany By PAUL KRUGMAN
References: <C037065E.29EB6%michael@michaelbutler.com>
Message-ID: <004b01c6452e$84db1400$99ca6c42@iancn2ccrvzt0j>

Here is my letter in response:

Paul Krugman says that "The truth is that everything the new wave of Bush 
critics has to say was obvious long ago to any commentator who was willing 
to look at the facts" (Op-Ed, Mar. 10).  Those of us in the 9/11 truth 
movement are saying the same thing.

Re the Pentagon: A plane with a wingspan of 124 feet and a height of 44 feet 
does not leave a hole only 60 feet wide and 30 feet high in a building.  Re 
the Twin Towers: 110-story buildings with 47-beam solid steel inner cores do 
not collapse at "free fall" speed perfectly into their own footprints.  Re 
WTC 7: The explosive charges for the controlled demolition of a 57-story 
building cannot be set in less than eight hours, especially when there are 
two active fires in the building.  Re Flight 93: An airplane crashing 
directly into the ground does not leave debris over an area of eight miles.

These and many other facts have been available for quite some time.  Yet no 
one - Democrats, Republicans, or even savvy pundits like Mr. Krugman - seems 
to have the wherewithal to do significant research on this issue, much less 
the courage to join the movement.

Mr. Krugman makes a solid case that this Administration has lied, 
obfuscated, dissembled, stonewalled and spun on issues ranging from WMDs to 
a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, from torture of prisoners at Abu 
Gharib to placing propaganda in Arab newspapers, from spying on Americans to 
its horrendous, unconcionable failure in New Orleans.

Why then is it so difficult for Mr. Krugman and others to "connect the dots" 
re 9/11, and question whether the "official story" as laid out in The 9/11 
Commission Report is just as flawed, if not "spun," as almost everything 
else this Administration has done?

Rev. Ian Alterman
New York City


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Michael Butler" <michael at michaelbutler.com>
To: "Civic" <mb-civic at islandlists.com>; "HAIR List" 
<mb-hair at islandlists.com>
Sent: Friday, March 10, 2006 1:33 PM
Subject: [Mb-civic] The Conservative Epiphany By PAUL KRUGMAN


The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 10, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
The Conservative Epiphany
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Bruce Bartlett, the author of "Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted
America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy," is an angry man. At a recent book
forum at the Cato Institute, he declared that the Bush administration is
"unconscionable," "irresponsible," "vindictive" and "inept."

It's no wonder, then, that one commentator wrote of Mr. Bartlett that "if he
were a cartoon character, he would probably look like Donald Duck during one
of his famous tirades, with steam pouring out of his ears."

Oh, wait. That's not what somebody wrote about Mr. Bartlett. It's what Mr.
Bartlett wrote about me in September 2003, when I was saying pretty much
what he's saying now.

Human nature being what it is, I don't expect Mr. Bartlett to acknowledge
his about-face. Nor do I expect any expressions of remorse from Andrew
Sullivan, the conservative Time.com blogger who also spoke at the Cato
forum. Mr. Sullivan used to specialize in denouncing the patriotism and
character of anyone who dared to criticize President Bush, whom he lionized.
Now he himself has become a critic, not just of Mr. Bush's policies, but of
his personal qualities, too.

Never mind; better late than never. We should welcome the recent epiphanies
by conservative commentators who have finally realized that the Bush
administration isn't trustworthy. But we should guard against a conventional
wisdom that seems to be taking hold in some quarters, which says there's
something praiseworthy about having initially been taken in by Mr. Bush's
deceptions, even though the administration's mendacity was obvious from the
beginning.

According to this view, if you're a former Bush supporter who now says, as
Mr. Bartlett did at the Cato event, that "the administration lies about
budget numbers," you're a brave truth-teller. But if you've been saying that
since the early days of the Bush administration, you were unpleasantly
shrill.

Similarly, if you're a former worshipful admirer of George W. Bush who now
says, as Mr. Sullivan did at Cato, that "the people in this administration
have no principles," you're taking a courageous stand. If you said the same
thing back when Mr. Bush had an 80 percent approval rating, you were blinded
by Bush-hatred.

And if you're a former hawk who now concedes that the administration
exaggerated the threat from Iraq, you're to be applauded for your
open-mindedness. But if you warned three years ago that the administration
was hyping the case for war, you were a conspiracy theorist.

The truth is that everything the new wave of Bush critics has to say was
obvious long ago to any commentator who was willing to look at the facts.

Mr. Bartlett's book is mainly a critique of the Bush administration's fiscal
policy. Well, the administration's pattern of fiscal dishonesty and
irresponsibility was clear right from the start to anyone who understands
budget arithmetic. The chicanery that took place during the selling of the
2001 tax cut < obviously fraudulent budget projections, transparently
deceptive advertising about who would benefit and the use of blatant
accounting gimmicks to conceal the plan's true cost < was as bad as anything
that followed.

The false selling of the Iraq war was almost as easy to spot. All the
supposed evidence for an Iraqi nuclear program was discredited before the
war < and it was the threat of nukes, not lesser W.M.D., that stampeded
Congress into authorizing Mr. Bush to go to war. The administration's
nonsensical but insistent rhetorical linkage of Iraq and 9/11 was also a
dead giveaway that we were being railroaded into an unnecessary war.

The point is that pundits who failed to notice the administration's
mendacity a long time ago either weren't doing their homework, or
deliberately turned a blind eye to the evidence.

But as I said, better late than never. Born-again Bush-bashers like Mr.
Bartlett and Mr. Sullivan, however churlish, are intellectually and morally
superior to the Bushist dead-enders who still insist that Saddam was allied
with Al Qaeda, and will soon be claiming that we lost the war in Iraq
because the liberal media stabbed the troops in the back. And reporters
understandably consider it newsworthy that some conservative voices are now
echoing longstanding liberal critiques of the Bush administration.

It's still fair, however, to ask people like Mr. Bartlett the obvious
question: What took you so long?

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top



_______________________________________________
Mb-civic mailing list
Mb-civic at islandlists.com
http://www.islandlists.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mb-civic



From michael at intrafi.com  Sat Mar 11 10:54:37 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 18:54:37 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] BBC E-mail: Alaska hit by 'massive' oil spill
Message-ID: <20060311_185437_069573.michael@intrafi.com>

Michael Butler saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you
should see it.



** Alaska hit by 'massive' oil spill **
An oil spill at Prudhoe Bay field is confirmed by US officials as the largest ever on Alaska's North Slope region.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/americas/4795866.stm >


** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all
in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/dailyemail/ >


** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have?been verified.

If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm


From grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net  Sat Mar 11 11:04:27 2006
From: grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net (Golsorkhi)
Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 14:04:27 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] FW: Muslim's Blunt Criticism of Islam Draws Threats
In-Reply-To: <A28A8C3D-B7B1-471D-BAE2-80055D31B260@thesamiis.com>
Message-ID: <E1FI9eG-0005er-J6@elasmtp-mealy.atl.sa.earthlink.net>

Michael,  

This is the same lady who was on the tape I sent you.

Regards.  

Reza
------ Forwarded Message
From: Samii Shahla <shahla at thesamiis.com>
Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 10:27:41 -0500
Subject: Muslim's Blunt Criticism of Islam Draws Threats


NY Times
March 11, 2006
The Saturday Profile

Muslim's Blunt Criticism of Islam Draws Threats

By JOHN M. BRODER

LOS ANGELES, March 10 ? Three weeks ago, Dr. Wafa Sultan was a largely
unknown Syrian-American psychiatrist living outside Los Angeles, nursing a
deep anger and despair about her fellow Muslims.

Today, thanks to an unusually blunt and provocative interview on Al Jazeera
television on Feb. 21, she is an international sensation, hailed as a fresh
voice of reason by some, and by others as a heretic and infidel who deserves
to die.

In the interview, which has been viewed on the Internet more than a million
times and has reached the e-mail of hundreds of thousands around the world,
Dr. Sultan bitterly criticized the Muslim clerics, holy warriors and
political leaders who she believes have distorted the teachings of Muhammad
and the Koran for 14 centuries.

She said the world's Muslims, whom she compares unfavorably with the Jews,
have descended into a vortex of self-pity and violence.

Dr. Sultan said the world was not witnessing a clash of religions or
cultures, but a battle between modernity and barbarism, a battle that the
forces of violent, reactionary Islam are destined to lose.

In response, clerics throughout the Muslim world have condemned her, and her
telephone answering machine has filled with dark threats. But Islamic
reformers have praised her for saying out loud, in Arabic and on the most
widely seen television network in the Arab world, what few Muslims dare to
say even in private.

"I believe our people are hostages to our own beliefs and teachings," she
said in an interview this week in her home in a Los Angeles suburb.

Dr. Sultan, who is 47, wears a prim sweater and skirt, with fleece-lined
slippers and heavy stockings. Her eyes and hair are jet black and her modest
manner belies her intense words: "Knowledge has released me from this
backward thinking. Somebody has to help free the Muslim people from these
wrong beliefs."

Perhaps her most provocative words on Al Jazeera were those comparing how
the Jews and Muslims have reacted to adversity. Speaking of the Holocaust,
she said, "The Jews have come from the tragedy and forced the world to
respect them, with their knowledge, not with their terror; with their work,
not with their crying and yelling."

She went on, "We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German
restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen
a single Jew protest by killing people."

She concluded, "Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down
churches, killing people and destroying embassies. This path will not yield
any results. The Muslims must ask themselves what they can do for humankind,
before they demand that humankind respect them."

Her views caught the ear of the American Jewish Congress, which has invited
her to speak in May at a conference in Israel. "We have been discussing with
her the importance of her message and trying to devise the right venue for
her to address Jewish leaders," said Neil B. Goldstein, executive director
of the organization.

She is probably more welcome in Tel Aviv than she would be in Damascus.
Shortly after the broadcast, clerics in Syria denounced her as an infidel.
One said she had done Islam more damage than the Danish cartoons mocking the
Prophet Muhammad, a wire service reported.


DR. SULTAN is "working on a book that ? if it is published ? it's going to
turn the Islamic world upside down."

"I have reached the point that doesn't allow any U-turn. I have no choice. I
am questioning every single teaching of our holy book."

The working title is, "The Escaped Prisoner: When God Is a Monster."

Dr. Sultan grew up in a large traditional Muslim family in Banias, Syria, a
small city on the Mediterranean about a two-hour drive north of Beirut. Her
father was a grain trader and a devout Muslim, and she followed the faith's
strictures into adulthood.

But, she said, her life changed in 1979 when she was a medical student at
the University of Aleppo, in northern Syria. At that time, the radical
Muslim Brotherhood was using terrorism to try to undermine the government of
President Hafez al-Assad. Gunmen of the Muslim Brotherhood burst into a
classroom at the university and killed her professor as she watched, she
said.

"They shot hundreds of bullets into him, shouting, 'God is great!' " she
said. "At that point, I lost my trust in their god and began to question all
our teachings. It was the turning point of my life, and it has led me to
this present point. I had to leave. I had to look for another god."

She and her husband, who now goes by the Americanized name of David, laid
plans to leave for the United States. Their visas finally came in 1989, and
the Sultans and their two children (they have since had a third) settled in
with friends in Cerritos, Calif., a prosperous bedroom community on the edge
of Los Angeles County.

After a succession of jobs and struggles with language, Dr. Sultan has
completed her American medical licensing, with the exception of a hospital
residency program, which she hopes to do within a year. David operates an
automotive-smog-check station. They bought a home in the Los Angeles area
and put their children through local public schools. All are now American
citizens.


BUT even as she settled into a comfortable middle-class American life, Dr.
Sultan's anger burned within. She took to writing, first for herself, then
for an Islamic reform Web site called Annaqed (The Critic), run by a Syrian
expatriate in Phoenix.

An angry essay on that site by Dr. Sultan about the Muslim Brotherhood
caught the attention of Al Jazeera, which invited her to debate an Algerian
cleric on the air last July.

In the debate, she questioned the religious teachings that prompt young
people to commit suicide in the name of God. "Why does a young Muslim man,
in the prime of life, with a full life ahead, go and blow himself up?" she
asked. "In our countries, religion is the sole source of education and is
the only spring from which that terrorist drank until his thirst was
quenched."

Her remarks set off debates around the globe and her name began appearing in
Arabic newspapers and Web sites. But her fame grew exponentially when she
appeared on Al Jazeera again on Feb. 21, an appearance that was translated
and widely distributed by the Middle East Media Research Institute, known as
Memri.

Memri said the clip of her February appearance had been viewed more than a
million times.

"The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions or
a clash of civilizations," Dr. Sultan said. "It is a clash between two
opposites, between two eras. It is a clash between a mentality that belongs
to the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century.
It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized
and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality."

She said she no longer practiced Islam. "I am a secular human being," she
said.

The other guest on the program, identified as an Egyptian professor of
religious studies, Dr. Ibrahim al-Khouli, asked, "Are you a heretic?" He
then said there was no point in rebuking or debating her, because she had
blasphemed against Islam, the Prophet Muhammad and the Koran.

Dr. Sultan said she took those words as a formal fatwa, a religious
condemnation. Since then, she said, she has received numerous death threats
on her answering machine and by e-mail.

One message said: "Oh, you are still alive? Wait and see." She received an
e-mail message the other day, in Arabic, that said, "If someone were to kill
you, it would be me."

Dr. Sultan said her mother, who still lives in Syria, is afraid to contact
her directly, speaking only through a sister who lives in Qatar. She said
she worried more about the safety of family members here and in Syria than
she did for her own.

"I have no fear," she said. "I believe in my message. It is like a
million-mile journey, and I believe I have walked the first and hardest 10
miles."


Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
---
URL:?http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/11/international/middleeast/11sultan.htm
l?th&emc=th


------ End of Forwarded Message

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060311/1d9745e9/attachment.htm 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Sat Mar 11 11:56:25 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 14:56:25 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Iraqi death squads
Message-ID: <000801c64545$e4ab0130$123fe440@Harold>


Iraqi Death Squads Engage in Dirty War
Gunmen, Militias Allegedly Part of Interior Ministry, Police
By JAKE TAPPER and SONIA GALLEGO 
BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 10, 2006 ? - Gunmen came to Yassir Mohsen's home in western Baghdad last month, he recalled, crying. Despite the ensuing violence, he did not call the police. 

He said the ones who harmed his family are the police. 

"While we were sleeping, Iraqi National Guard troops and police commandos stormed into our house," Mohsen said. "They killed my uncle." 

Sunni political leaders accuse the Interior Ministry, which is controlled by Shiite Muslims, of playing a role in death squads. Shiite gunmen dressed in police uniforms allegedly have been raiding the homes of Sunnis, handcuffing them, executing them, and attacking Sunni mosques, such as the al-Noor mosque, which was raided this week. 

"The gunmen drove police cars and wore police uniforms," said Shakir Mahmoud, the imam at the al-Noor mosque. 

In its annual report on human rights this week, the U.S. State Department reported that in Iraq, "Members of sectarian militias dominated police units ... there were a number of deaths either at police hands or at the hands of militia members and criminals wearing police uniforms." 

Dirty War or Politics?
Some Sunnis call it a dirty war. While many Americans may be under the impression that most violence here is from car bombs and improvised explosive devices, experts say most murders are executions. John Pace, the former director of the United Nations' human rights office in Baghdad, said up to 2,000 are being executed a month -- handcuffed, shot in the head. Six more were discovered in Baghdad this morning. 

"Certainly, the Ministry of Interior is well-known to be responsible for this kind of summary execution and torture," Pace said, "and also the militias." 

Militias, such as the Badr Brigades, work within the Interior Ministry. 

The U.S. ambassador to Iraq has pushed the Shiites in power here to end the violence, but Bayan Jabr, a former commander in the Badr Brigades militia, is minister of the interior -- and he denies there is a problem. 

"About the death group, it's a big, big lie," Jabr told ABC News. "Big lie. A really big lie." 

Jabr said charges against the police force were just attempts to smear him. 

"Our force is doing very well fighting the terrorists," he said. "The rule of law is our main goal, human rights. But you know, it is a political issue." 

It's political in the sense that many Sunni and Kurd political leaders are angry at Shiite Prime Minister Ibrhaim al-Jaafari for either not doing enough to stop these death squads, or for actually permitting them. 

But it's a very complicated issue. One thing this destabilized, crime-ridden country surely needs is a police force. But many American officials are increasingly concerned the United States is funding a training a police force that could become a Shiite army in a pending civil war. 

Zoe Magee and David Kerley contributed to this report.

Copyright ? 2006 ABC News Internet Ventures
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060311/512e754c/attachment.htm 

From hotprojects at nyc.rr.com  Sat Mar 11 12:16:03 2006
From: hotprojects at nyc.rr.com (richard haase)
Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 15:16:03 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] FW: Muslim's Blunt Criticism of Islam Draws Threats
References: <E1FI9eG-0005er-J6@elasmtp-mealy.atl.sa.earthlink.net>
Message-ID: <035101c64548$9fb83810$f1476c42@hotprojects>

FW: Muslim's Blunt Criticism of Islam Draws Threatswasnt that an amazing article sir?
i read it this morning myself
what a brave brave woman
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Golsorkhi 
  To: Michael Butler 
  Sent: Saturday, March 11, 2006 2:04 PM
  Subject: [Mb-civic] FW: Muslim's Blunt Criticism of Islam Draws Threats


  Michael,  

  This is the same lady who was on the tape I sent you.  

  Regards.  

  Reza
  ------ Forwarded Message
  From: Samii Shahla <shahla at thesamiis.com>
  Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 10:27:41 -0500
  Subject: Muslim's Blunt Criticism of Islam Draws Threats


  NY Times
  March 11, 2006
  The Saturday Profile


  Muslim's Blunt Criticism of Islam Draws Threats


  By JOHN M. BRODER

  LOS ANGELES, March 10 - Three weeks ago, Dr. Wafa Sultan was a largely unknown Syrian-American psychiatrist living outside Los Angeles, nursing a deep anger and despair about her fellow Muslims.

  Today, thanks to an unusually blunt and provocative interview on Al Jazeera television on Feb. 21, she is an international sensation, hailed as a fresh voice of reason by some, and by others as a heretic and infidel who deserves to die.

  In the interview, which has been viewed on the Internet more than a million times and has reached the e-mail of hundreds of thousands around the world, Dr. Sultan bitterly criticized the Muslim clerics, holy warriors and political leaders who she believes have distorted the teachings of Muhammad and the Koran for 14 centuries.

  She said the world's Muslims, whom she compares unfavorably with the Jews, have descended into a vortex of self-pity and violence.

  Dr. Sultan said the world was not witnessing a clash of religions or cultures, but a battle between modernity and barbarism, a battle that the forces of violent, reactionary Islam are destined to lose.

  In response, clerics throughout the Muslim world have condemned her, and her telephone answering machine has filled with dark threats. But Islamic reformers have praised her for saying out loud, in Arabic and on the most widely seen television network in the Arab world, what few Muslims dare to say even in private.

  "I believe our people are hostages to our own beliefs and teachings," she said in an interview this week in her home in a Los Angeles suburb.

  Dr. Sultan, who is 47, wears a prim sweater and skirt, with fleece-lined slippers and heavy stockings. Her eyes and hair are jet black and her modest manner belies her intense words: "Knowledge has released me from this backward thinking. Somebody has to help free the Muslim people from these wrong beliefs."

  Perhaps her most provocative words on Al Jazeera were those comparing how the Jews and Muslims have reacted to adversity. Speaking of the Holocaust, she said, "The Jews have come from the tragedy and forced the world to respect them, with their knowledge, not with their terror; with their work, not with their crying and yelling."

  She went on, "We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen a single Jew protest by killing people."

  She concluded, "Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people and destroying embassies. This path will not yield any results. The Muslims must ask themselves what they can do for humankind, before they demand that humankind respect them."

  Her views caught the ear of the American Jewish Congress, which has invited her to speak in May at a conference in Israel. "We have been discussing with her the importance of her message and trying to devise the right venue for her to address Jewish leaders," said Neil B. Goldstein, executive director of the organization.

  She is probably more welcome in Tel Aviv than she would be in Damascus. Shortly after the broadcast, clerics in Syria denounced her as an infidel. One said she had done Islam more damage than the Danish cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammad, a wire service reported.


  DR. SULTAN is "working on a book that - if it is published - it's going to turn the Islamic world upside down."

  "I have reached the point that doesn't allow any U-turn. I have no choice. I am questioning every single teaching of our holy book."

  The working title is, "The Escaped Prisoner: When God Is a Monster."

  Dr. Sultan grew up in a large traditional Muslim family in Banias, Syria, a small city on the Mediterranean about a two-hour drive north of Beirut. Her father was a grain trader and a devout Muslim, and she followed the faith's strictures into adulthood.

  But, she said, her life changed in 1979 when she was a medical student at the University of Aleppo, in northern Syria. At that time, the radical Muslim Brotherhood was using terrorism to try to undermine the government of President Hafez al-Assad. Gunmen of the Muslim Brotherhood burst into a classroom at the university and killed her professor as she watched, she said.

  "They shot hundreds of bullets into him, shouting, 'God is great!' " she said. "At that point, I lost my trust in their god and began to question all our teachings. It was the turning point of my life, and it has led me to this present point. I had to leave. I had to look for another god."

  She and her husband, who now goes by the Americanized name of David, laid plans to leave for the United States. Their visas finally came in 1989, and the Sultans and their two children (they have since had a third) settled in with friends in Cerritos, Calif., a prosperous bedroom community on the edge of Los Angeles County.

  After a succession of jobs and struggles with language, Dr. Sultan has completed her American medical licensing, with the exception of a hospital residency program, which she hopes to do within a year. David operates an automotive-smog-check station. They bought a home in the Los Angeles area and put their children through local public schools. All are now American citizens.


  BUT even as she settled into a comfortable middle-class American life, Dr. Sultan's anger burned within. She took to writing, first for herself, then for an Islamic reform Web site called Annaqed (The Critic), run by a Syrian expatriate in Phoenix.

  An angry essay on that site by Dr. Sultan about the Muslim Brotherhood caught the attention of Al Jazeera, which invited her to debate an Algerian cleric on the air last July.

  In the debate, she questioned the religious teachings that prompt young people to commit suicide in the name of God. "Why does a young Muslim man, in the prime of life, with a full life ahead, go and blow himself up?" she asked. "In our countries, religion is the sole source of education and is the only spring from which that terrorist drank until his thirst was quenched."

  Her remarks set off debates around the globe and her name began appearing in Arabic newspapers and Web sites. But her fame grew exponentially when she appeared on Al Jazeera again on Feb. 21, an appearance that was translated and widely distributed by the Middle East Media Research Institute, known as Memri.

  Memri said the clip of her February appearance had been viewed more than a million times.

  "The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions or a clash of civilizations," Dr. Sultan said. "It is a clash between two opposites, between two eras. It is a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century. It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality."

  She said she no longer practiced Islam. "I am a secular human being," she said.

  The other guest on the program, identified as an Egyptian professor of religious studies, Dr. Ibrahim al-Khouli, asked, "Are you a heretic?" He then said there was no point in rebuking or debating her, because she had blasphemed against Islam, the Prophet Muhammad and the Koran.

  Dr. Sultan said she took those words as a formal fatwa, a religious condemnation. Since then, she said, she has received numerous death threats on her answering machine and by e-mail.

  One message said: "Oh, you are still alive? Wait and see." She received an e-mail message the other day, in Arabic, that said, "If someone were to kill you, it would be me."

  Dr. Sultan said her mother, who still lives in Syria, is afraid to contact her directly, speaking only through a sister who lives in Qatar. She said she worried more about the safety of family members here and in Syria than she did for her own.

  "I have no fear," she said. "I believe in my message. It is like a million-mile journey, and I believe I have walked the first and hardest 10 miles."


  Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
  ---
  URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/11/international/middleeast/11sultan.html?th&emc=th


  ------ End of Forwarded Message



------------------------------------------------------------------------------


  _______________________________________________
  Mb-civic mailing list
  Mb-civic at islandlists.com
  http://www.islandlists.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mb-civic
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060311/0f60759e/attachment.htm 

From TSawyer456 at aol.com  Sat Mar 11 12:21:07 2006
From: TSawyer456 at aol.com (TSawyer456 at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 15:21:07 EST
Subject: [Mb-civic] The Conservative Epiphany By PAUL KRUGMAN
Message-ID: <286.6f51f3d.31448b33@aol.com>

Ian:
 
While I find your citation of the collapse of the twin towers interesting,  
and your suggestion that Flight 93 was actually shot down by USAF fighter 
planes  absolutely on the money, I'd like to point out that my new novel, No Place  
to Run, also cites the highly suspect timelines from 9/11, which document  
(and were brushed off in the Commission Report) when it was known that the  
planes out of Boston had been hijacked, when it was reported and to whom, and  the 
timing of when the two F-15s were scrambled from Cape Cod (they took off  
after the first tower was hit, and at least a half-hour after it was  known the 
planes had been hijacked -- and their courses were being tracked on  radar), 
and then these fighter planes circled over the ocean, still 71  miles from NY 
City while the second tower was struck. And similarly hardly  accidental, there 
"happened to be" no fighter planes within 100 miles  of DC that day. I 
researched this and other anomalies for 6 months before  writing the novel. 
 
That the editor at Putnam was, two weeks ago, "offended"  (his word) by my 
novel's suggestion that there was collusion with highly placed  people and 
agencies in the US that enabled all of it to happen, should tell  you a lot about 
why nobody has gone near this. 
 
America, my friend, is the World Capitol of Denial.
 
Sincerely,
Tom
_www.ThomasBSawyer.com_ (http://www.thomasbsawyer.com/)  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060311/adb81484/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Sat Mar 11 12:22:03 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (Ian)
Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 15:22:03 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Famous Hawks Try Again to Fill a
	FamiliarEmpty Nest
References: <20060311155102.ECAF113B7DA@lax-gw04.mroute.net>
Message-ID: <008c01c64549$76ede870$99ca6c42@iancn2ccrvzt0j>

E-Mail ThisMike:

As a fellow NYer, I'm sure that you, like me, have had the privilege of actually seeing these incredible creatures.  Indeed, there is a man who sets up a high-powered, long-range telescope in Central Park (near the Boat Pond), and he allows anyone who wants to to view these amazing birds.  The male has flown over us a few times, as close as perhaps 100 feet.  When one sees nature in action like this - "close up and personal" - it increases one's respect for all living things.

BTW, the board member who fought back in strong support of the hawks and their nest was Mary Tyler Moore....

Peace.


----- Original Message ----- 
  From: mblaxill at yahoo.com 
  To: mb-civic at islandlists.com 
  Sent: Saturday, March 11, 2006 10:51 AM
  Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Famous Hawks Try Again to Fill a FamiliarEmpty Nest


            
                
                   
                
                
             
              This page was sent to you by:  mblaxill at yahoo.com 
              Message from sender:
              fyi..the person on the co-op board responsible for taking down the nest was the spouse of Eva Brau..(cough) Paula Zahn 

              NEW YORK REGION   | March 10, 2006 
              Famous Hawks Try Again to Fill a Familiar Empty Nest 
              By THOMAS J. LUECK 
              As New Yorkers were about to be wrapped in a balmy coat of springlike warmth, the sight of Lola and Pale Male could not have been more welcome. 

             
             
                 
                     
                    1. The Saturday Profile: Muslim's Blunt Criticism of Islam Draws Threats 
                    2. For Trader Joe's, a New York Taste Test 
                    3. SAT Errors Raise New Qualms About Testing 
                    4. Famous Hawks Try Again to Fill a Familiar Empty Nest 
                    5. Gentrification Changing Face of New Atlanta 

                    ?  Go to Complete List 
                     
                   
                   
                          Advertisement 
                                Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

                                Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.
                                http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/   


                         
                   
                   
                     
                          Do you love NY? Get the insider's guide to where to stay, what to do and where to eat. Go to www.nytimes.com/travel for your NYC Guide now. Click here. 



                   
             
             
                
              Copyright 2006  The New York Times Company | Privacy Policy    
                 
       



------------------------------------------------------------------------------


  _______________________________________________
  Mb-civic mailing list
  Mb-civic at islandlists.com
  http://www.islandlists.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mb-civic
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060311/edf8cf2a/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Sat Mar 11 12:34:00 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (Ian)
Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 15:34:00 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] The Conservative Epiphany By PAUL KRUGMAN
References: <286.6f51f3d.31448b33@aol.com>
Message-ID: <00a401c6454b$222ee440$99ca6c42@iancn2ccrvzt0j>

Tom:

Thank you so much for your comments and support.  I can't wait to read your novel - and you will almost certainly have an immediate "cult" following (although I hate that phrase...) in the 9/11 truth movement, which is both global and growing.

Yes, the 9/11 timeline is yet another element of the "omissions and distortions" in The 9/11 Commission Report, most notably discussed in David Ray Griffin's book of that title ("The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions").  BTW, are you aware that the Report also completely omits the existence of the 47-column support structure of the twin towers in order to support its theory of how the towers collapsed (the so-called "pancake theory")?  That is, the existence of the support structures essentially negates the pancake theory entirely.

If you have not read "The Terror Timeline" by Paul Thompson, you must.  He basically undermines the government's "official story" using only mainstream media headlines and articles to create a far more accurate timeline of facts.

Anyway, I look forward to your book.

Peace.
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: TSawyer456 at aol.com 
  To: mb-civic at islandlists.com 
  Sent: Saturday, March 11, 2006 3:21 PM
  Subject: Re: [Mb-civic] The Conservative Epiphany By PAUL KRUGMAN


  Ian:

  While I find your citation of the collapse of the twin towers interesting, and your suggestion that Flight 93 was actually shot down by USAF fighter planes absolutely on the money, I'd like to point out that my new novel, No Place to Run, also cites the highly suspect timelines from 9/11, which document (and were brushed off in the Commission Report) when it was known that the planes out of Boston had been hijacked, when it was reported and to whom, and the timing of when the two F-15s were scrambled from Cape Cod (they took off after the first tower was hit, and at least a half-hour after it was known the planes had been hijacked -- and their courses were being tracked on radar), and then these fighter planes circled over the ocean, still 71 miles from NY City while the second tower was struck. And similarly hardly accidental, there "happened to be" no fighter planes within 100 miles of DC that day. I researched this and other anomalies for 6 months before writing the novel. 

  That the editor at Putnam was, two weeks ago, "offended" (his word) by my novel's suggestion that there was collusion with highly placed people and agencies in the US that enabled all of it to happen, should tell you a lot about why nobody has gone near this. 

  America, my friend, is the World Capitol of Denial.

  Sincerely,
  Tom
  www.ThomasBSawyer.com 


------------------------------------------------------------------------------


  _______________________________________________
  Mb-civic mailing list
  Mb-civic at islandlists.com
  http://www.islandlists.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mb-civic
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060311/cd836643/attachment.htm 

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Sat Mar 11 12:35:02 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 12:35:02 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] W.'s Mixed Messages By MAUREEN DOWD
Message-ID: <C0387476.29F5B%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 11, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
W.'s Mixed Messages
By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

The good news is the Arabs aren't going to run our ports.

The bad news is the Americans are going to run our ports.

Homeland Security's protection of the ports is a joke. The goof-off Michael
Chertoff is remarkably still in charge. The swaggering of the president and
vice president on national security has been exposed as a sham, with
millions spent shoring up our defenses wasted, with the Iraq war aggravating
our danger, and with anti-Muslim feeling swelling among Americans and
anti-American feeling swelling among Muslims.

A Washington Post-ABC News Poll this week found that a growing percentage of
Americans have unfavorable opinions of Islam. A majority now think Muslims
are disproportionately prone to violence.

The creepy John Grisham-style Washington firm called the Carlyle Group,
suffused with Arab connections and money, and seeded with Saudi money
(including bin Laden family money until after 9/11), even gave some thought
to investing in the ports, before backing off.

The nakedness of the ports is so obvious it was a "Sopranos" plot point. A
source called Deep Water, who helped check out new hires for the New Jersey
port before and after 9/11, told the F.B.I. a couple of years ago about what
he saw as gaps in security practices on the waterfront and a "suspicious"
flow of recent Arab immigrants, some speaking little English, being hired as
port watchmen. Deep Water said he'd recently been interviewed by New York
detectives.

President Bush does not seem to understand that it was his bumbling ? rather
than our bigotry ? that led Americans to gulp and yelp at the idea of an
Arab government running our ports. When the president said yesterday that
"my administration was satisfied that port security would not have been
undermined by the agreement," he seemed oblivious to the fact that ? after
W.M.D., Katrina and Iraq ? many Americans no longer trust this
administration to protect them.

Still shaken by his first rebellion by Republicans fed up with White House
hubris and hamhandedness, W. chastised lawmakers about xenophobia. "I'm
concerned about a broader message this issue could send to our friends and
allies around the world, particularly in the Middle East," he said. He said
that we had to cultivate moderate Arabs, but that moderate Muslims were
shrinking back as violent Islamists pushed ahead.

American skepticism about the Dubai government running our ports is not
prejudice. As Denny Hastert put it, "It's counterintuitive." There is
nothing wrong with wanting Americans to be responsible for American
security. That's not nativism or jingoism or bigotry. It's self-reliance and
prudence. Of course, such an attitude can be exploited by bigots. And some
bigotry is being fed by scenes on the news every day of Arab fighters
blowing things up, leading to the same stereotype of Arabs that existed in
the 70's, a caricature limned from terrorism, oil and the petrodollar.

The president also does not seem to understand that he spurred the
dissonance that led to this vote of no-confidence. Since Sept. 11, he has
been anti-terror but pro-Mideast, a position that has left Americans
confused. His enemy is a tactic that's too vague to pinpoint, too vast to
ever defeat. In some ways, the country seems more alive to the true origins
of the fiends who attacked us than the president.

His nuclear deals have so jumbled up the carrots and sticks that American
threats on nuclear proliferation have lost all meaning.

W. and General Rove present the war on terror as Armageddon and World War
VIII, yet in every other aspect of foreign policy, it's business as usual.
One minute they're scaring Americans into supporting their power grabs by
essentially yelling, "They're coming to kill us!" The next minute, the
Persian Gulf is still the great nexus for capitalist deals by the likes of
Treasury Secretary John Snow, Dick Cheney, Halliburton and the Carlyle
Group.

The president preaches that we are seriously threatened by autocratic Arab
societies that won't modernize and become free markets, but then his cozy
relationship with autocratic Arab regimes, including the Saudis, continues
basically unchanged.

As Michael Hirsh of Newsweek summed up in a recent column: "How then did we
arrive at this day, with anti-American Islamist governments rising in the
Mideast, bin Laden sneering at us, Qaeda lieutenants escaping from prison,
Iran brazenly enriching uranium, and America as hated and mistrusted as it
ever has been? The answer, in a word, is incompetence."

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From hotprojects at nyc.rr.com  Sat Mar 11 12:36:05 2006
From: hotprojects at nyc.rr.com (richard haase)
Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 15:36:05 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] The Conservative Epiphany By PAUL KRUGMAN
References: <286.6f51f3d.31448b33@aol.com>
	<00a401c6454b$222ee440$99ca6c42@iancn2ccrvzt0j>
Message-ID: <002701c6454b$6be807b0$f1476c42@hotprojects>

i love ian because hes another born again christian with a jewish face like me
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Ian 
  To: mb-civic at islandlists.com 
  Sent: Saturday, March 11, 2006 3:34 PM
  Subject: Re: [Mb-civic] The Conservative Epiphany By PAUL KRUGMAN


  Tom:

  Thank you so much for your comments and support.  I can't wait to read your novel - and you will almost certainly have an immediate "cult" following (although I hate that phrase...) in the 9/11 truth movement, which is both global and growing.

  Yes, the 9/11 timeline is yet another element of the "omissions and distortions" in The 9/11 Commission Report, most notably discussed in David Ray Griffin's book of that title ("The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions").  BTW, are you aware that the Report also completely omits the existence of the 47-column support structure of the twin towers in order to support its theory of how the towers collapsed (the so-called "pancake theory")?  That is, the existence of the support structures essentially negates the pancake theory entirely.

  If you have not read "The Terror Timeline" by Paul Thompson, you must.  He basically undermines the government's "official story" using only mainstream media headlines and articles to create a far more accurate timeline of facts.

  Anyway, I look forward to your book.

  Peace.
    ----- Original Message ----- 
    From: TSawyer456 at aol.com 
    To: mb-civic at islandlists.com 
    Sent: Saturday, March 11, 2006 3:21 PM
    Subject: Re: [Mb-civic] The Conservative Epiphany By PAUL KRUGMAN


    Ian:

    While I find your citation of the collapse of the twin towers interesting, and your suggestion that Flight 93 was actually shot down by USAF fighter planes absolutely on the money, I'd like to point out that my new novel, No Place to Run, also cites the highly suspect timelines from 9/11, which document (and were brushed off in the Commission Report) when it was known that the planes out of Boston had been hijacked, when it was reported and to whom, and the timing of when the two F-15s were scrambled from Cape Cod (they took off after the first tower was hit, and at least a half-hour after it was known the planes had been hijacked -- and their courses were being tracked on radar), and then these fighter planes circled over the ocean, still 71 miles from NY City while the second tower was struck. And similarly hardly accidental, there "happened to be" no fighter planes within 100 miles of DC that day. I researched this and other anomalies for 6 months before writing the novel. 

    That the editor at Putnam was, two weeks ago, "offended" (his word) by my novel's suggestion that there was collusion with highly placed people and agencies in the US that enabled all of it to happen, should tell you a lot about why nobody has gone near this. 

    America, my friend, is the World Capitol of Denial.

    Sincerely,
    Tom
    www.ThomasBSawyer.com 


----------------------------------------------------------------------------


    _______________________________________________
    Mb-civic mailing list
    Mb-civic at islandlists.com
    http://www.islandlists.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mb-civic



------------------------------------------------------------------------------


  _______________________________________________
  Mb-civic mailing list
  Mb-civic at islandlists.com
  http://www.islandlists.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mb-civic
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060311/f6daba73/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Sat Mar 11 12:39:10 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 20:39:10 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Push to Tighten Lobbying Rules Loses
	Strength
Message-ID: <20060311203910.5DE769FC1B@lax-gw05.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

Are we surprised?


WASHINGTON | March 11, 2006
Push to Tighten Lobbying Rules Loses Strength
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
The drive for a tighter lobbying law is losing momentum, a victim of shifting political interests and infighting among Republicans.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/11/politics/11lobby.html?ex=1142744400&en=2c24d76743b10fa2&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060311/8f8b99d1/attachment.htm 

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Sat Mar 11 12:39:43 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 12:39:43 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Who's Afraid of Polygamy? By JOHN TIERNEY
Message-ID: <C038758F.29F5E%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 11, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Who's Afraid of Polygamy?
By JOHN TIERNEY

If gay marriage becomes legal, its opponents have been warning, the next
step in America's moral deterioration will be legalized polygamy. These
conservatives won't be happy with "Big Love," the HBO series starting
tomorrow night.

This story of a husband with three wives in Utah will not terrify Americans.
Polygamy doesn't come off as a barbaric threat to the country's moral
fabric. It looks more like what it really is: an arrangement that can make
sense for some people in some circumstances, but not one that could ever be
a dangerous trend in America.

After watching the husband on the show struggle to pay for three households
and watching his three wives struggle for his attention, the question that
comes to mind is not how to keep polygamy illegal. The question is why we
bother to ban something that takes so much work these days.

When polygamy was outlawed in the 19th century, the Supreme Court upheld the
ban by citing the "evil consequences" of a practice that "has always been
odious among the northern and western nations of Europe." It dismissed
polygamy as "a feature of the life of Asiatic and of African people," as if
that were reason enough to damn it.

Yet an institution that has been around for so long must have had something
going for it. Humans aren't as inclined to polygamy as some apes are ? we
probably evolved as hunter-gatherers who mostly had one mate at a time ? but
some form of polygamy has existed in the vast majority of cultures.

Some opponents of polygamy call it the exploitation of women by rich men,
and that's true if the wives are coerced into the marriages. But many wives
have willingly chosen it, like the three women on "Big Love," who have
married a successful businessman.

These three wives, who live in adjacent houses, sound much like the women in
polygamous marriages I've talked to in rural Africa. The African wives told
me they had mixed feelings about the arrangement ? and their fellow wives ?
but over all, they figured it was better to share one prosperous husband
than to marry someone else without land, cows or a job.

That's the way social scientists figure it, too. Polygamy isn't the cause of
women's low status in traditional societies, but rather a consequence of
their trying to move up. The biggest losers from polygamy are the poorer men
who end up with no wives. Women benefit because polygamy increases their
number of marriage prospects ? and in traditional societies, marriage is
often the only way for a woman to improve her status.

Even in those societies, polygamy is practiced by just a small minority
because few men have enough resources to entice more than one wife. As a
society modernizes and women become educated, they gain other economic
options and become less and less willing to share a husband. Eventually
polygamy is out of question for practically everyone, men and women. At that
point, the monogamous majority can safely proclaim its moral superiority and
outlaw the practice for everyone else.

Critics say children would be better off growing up in a home with a
full-time father, but a part-time one is better than what's in many homes
today. The father in "Big Love" is more like Ward Cleaver than today's alpha
males who've dumped a series of wives and families.

Polygamy isn't necessarily worse than the current American alternative:
serial monogamy.

Elizabeth Joseph, a lawyer and journalist who was married to a polygamist in
Utah, says her experience handling divorce cases made her appreciate the
stability of her marriage. She also appreciated other perks, like the
round-the-clock day care that enabled her to keep an unpredictable schedule
at work and to relax when she came home.

"If I'm dog-tired and stressed out, I can be alone and guilt-free," she
explained in a speech to the National Organization for Women. "It's a rare
day when all eight of my husband's wives are tired and stressed at the same
time." She told the NOW audience that polygamy "offers an independent women
a real chance to have it all" and represented "the ultimate feminist
lifestyle."

She won't persuade many American women, feminists or otherwise. But if a few
consenting adults like her still want to practice polygamy, there's no
reason to stop them. And if the specter of legalized polygamy is the best
argument against gay marriage, let the wedding bells ring.

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Sat Mar 11 12:41:16 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 20:41:16 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: About That Rebellion ...
Message-ID: <20060311204116.D4BD8237078@lax-gw01.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

OPINION | March 11, 2006
Editorial: About That Rebellion ...

We keep hearing that the Republicans in Congress are in revolt against the president. Some rebellion.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/11/opinion/11sat1.html?ex=1142744400&en=dc45fce117793a79&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060311/5ccf4d6b/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Sat Mar 11 12:41:16 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 20:41:16 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Study Describes the Circumstances for a
	Levee Failure
Message-ID: <20060311204116.CDA2E11FA22@lax-gw07.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

The original title was "Study Describes Factors Unforeseen in Levee Breach," which really should have read "Study Describes Factors Newly Made Up To Avert At Least SOME of the Blame From the Bush Administration."


NATIONAL / NATIONAL SPECIAL | March 11, 2006
Study Describes the Circumstances for a Levee Failure
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
The report pointed to weak soils behind one of New Orleans's major levees during Hurricane Katrina.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/11/national/nationalspecial/11levees.html?ex=1142744400&en=3ad51c5a20fe9e3c&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060311/66cb0b9a/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Sat Mar 11 12:41:44 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 20:41:44 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: The Collapse of the Port Deal (8 Letters)
Message-ID: <20060311204144.3179D249BBE@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

What we're saying...


OPINION | March 11, 2006
The Collapse of the Port Deal (8 Letters)

To the Editor:.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/11/opinion/l11ports.html?ex=1142744400&en=094bf5a58c04be73&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060311/74c493f4/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Sat Mar 11 12:47:10 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (Ian)
Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 15:47:10 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] The Conservative Epiphany By PAUL KRUGMAN
References: <286.6f51f3d.31448b33@aol.com>
	<00a401c6454b$222ee440$99ca6c42@iancn2ccrvzt0j>
	<002701c6454b$6be807b0$f1476c42@hotprojects>
Message-ID: <00da01c6454c$f900fb60$99ca6c42@iancn2ccrvzt0j>

I resemble that remark...LOL

Peace.
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: richard haase 
  To: mb-civic at islandlists.com 
  Sent: Saturday, March 11, 2006 3:36 PM
  Subject: Re: [Mb-civic] The Conservative Epiphany By PAUL KRUGMAN


  i love ian because hes another born again christian with a jewish face like me
    ----- Original Message ----- 
    From: Ian 
    To: mb-civic at islandlists.com 
    Sent: Saturday, March 11, 2006 3:34 PM
    Subject: Re: [Mb-civic] The Conservative Epiphany By PAUL KRUGMAN


    Tom:

    Thank you so much for your comments and support.  I can't wait to read your novel - and you will almost certainly have an immediate "cult" following (although I hate that phrase...) in the 9/11 truth movement, which is both global and growing.

    Yes, the 9/11 timeline is yet another element of the "omissions and distortions" in The 9/11 Commission Report, most notably discussed in David Ray Griffin's book of that title ("The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions").  BTW, are you aware that the Report also completely omits the existence of the 47-column support structure of the twin towers in order to support its theory of how the towers collapsed (the so-called "pancake theory")?  That is, the existence of the support structures essentially negates the pancake theory entirely.

    If you have not read "The Terror Timeline" by Paul Thompson, you must.  He basically undermines the government's "official story" using only mainstream media headlines and articles to create a far more accurate timeline of facts.

    Anyway, I look forward to your book.

    Peace.
      ----- Original Message ----- 
      From: TSawyer456 at aol.com 
      To: mb-civic at islandlists.com 
      Sent: Saturday, March 11, 2006 3:21 PM
      Subject: Re: [Mb-civic] The Conservative Epiphany By PAUL KRUGMAN


      Ian:

      While I find your citation of the collapse of the twin towers interesting, and your suggestion that Flight 93 was actually shot down by USAF fighter planes absolutely on the money, I'd like to point out that my new novel, No Place to Run, also cites the highly suspect timelines from 9/11, which document (and were brushed off in the Commission Report) when it was known that the planes out of Boston had been hijacked, when it was reported and to whom, and the timing of when the two F-15s were scrambled from Cape Cod (they took off after the first tower was hit, and at least a half-hour after it was known the planes had been hijacked -- and their courses were being tracked on radar), and then these fighter planes circled over the ocean, still 71 miles from NY City while the second tower was struck. And similarly hardly accidental, there "happened to be" no fighter planes within 100 miles of DC that day. I researched this and other anomalies for 6 months before writing the novel. 

      That the editor at Putnam was, two weeks ago, "offended" (his word) by my novel's suggestion that there was collusion with highly placed people and agencies in the US that enabled all of it to happen, should tell you a lot about why nobody has gone near this. 

      America, my friend, is the World Capitol of Denial.

      Sincerely,
      Tom
      www.ThomasBSawyer.com 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------


      _______________________________________________
      Mb-civic mailing list
      Mb-civic at islandlists.com
      http://www.islandlists.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mb-civic



----------------------------------------------------------------------------


    _______________________________________________
    Mb-civic mailing list
    Mb-civic at islandlists.com
    http://www.islandlists.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mb-civic



------------------------------------------------------------------------------


  _______________________________________________
  Mb-civic mailing list
  Mb-civic at islandlists.com
  http://www.islandlists.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mb-civic
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060311/ce4231e6/attachment-0001.htm 

From hotprojects at nyc.rr.com  Sat Mar 11 12:49:39 2006
From: hotprojects at nyc.rr.com (richard haase)
Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 15:49:39 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] The Conservative Epiphany By PAUL KRUGMAN
References: <286.6f51f3d.31448b33@aol.com>
	<00a401c6454b$222ee440$99ca6c42@iancn2ccrvzt0j>
	<002701c6454b$6be807b0$f1476c42@hotprojects>
	<00da01c6454c$f900fb60$99ca6c42@iancn2ccrvzt0j>
Message-ID: <001601c6454d$50b008b0$f1476c42@hotprojects>

IN FACT NEXT TO IAN I LOOK GENTILE
LOL
I LOVE YOU IAN
PEACE
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Ian 
  To: mb-civic at islandlists.com 
  Sent: Saturday, March 11, 2006 3:47 PM
  Subject: Re: [Mb-civic] The Conservative Epiphany By PAUL KRUGMAN


  I resemble that remark...LOL

  Peace.
    ----- Original Message ----- 
    From: richard haase 
    To: mb-civic at islandlists.com 
    Sent: Saturday, March 11, 2006 3:36 PM
    Subject: Re: [Mb-civic] The Conservative Epiphany By PAUL KRUGMAN


    i love ian because hes another born again christian with a jewish face like me
      ----- Original Message ----- 
      From: Ian 
      To: mb-civic at islandlists.com 
      Sent: Saturday, March 11, 2006 3:34 PM
      Subject: Re: [Mb-civic] The Conservative Epiphany By PAUL KRUGMAN


      Tom:

      Thank you so much for your comments and support.  I can't wait to read your novel - and you will almost certainly have an immediate "cult" following (although I hate that phrase...) in the 9/11 truth movement, which is both global and growing.

      Yes, the 9/11 timeline is yet another element of the "omissions and distortions" in The 9/11 Commission Report, most notably discussed in David Ray Griffin's book of that title ("The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions").  BTW, are you aware that the Report also completely omits the existence of the 47-column support structure of the twin towers in order to support its theory of how the towers collapsed (the so-called "pancake theory")?  That is, the existence of the support structures essentially negates the pancake theory entirely.

      If you have not read "The Terror Timeline" by Paul Thompson, you must.  He basically undermines the government's "official story" using only mainstream media headlines and articles to create a far more accurate timeline of facts.

      Anyway, I look forward to your book.

      Peace.
        ----- Original Message ----- 
        From: TSawyer456 at aol.com 
        To: mb-civic at islandlists.com 
        Sent: Saturday, March 11, 2006 3:21 PM
        Subject: Re: [Mb-civic] The Conservative Epiphany By PAUL KRUGMAN


        Ian:

        While I find your citation of the collapse of the twin towers interesting, and your suggestion that Flight 93 was actually shot down by USAF fighter planes absolutely on the money, I'd like to point out that my new novel, No Place to Run, also cites the highly suspect timelines from 9/11, which document (and were brushed off in the Commission Report) when it was known that the planes out of Boston had been hijacked, when it was reported and to whom, and the timing of when the two F-15s were scrambled from Cape Cod (they took off after the first tower was hit, and at least a half-hour after it was known the planes had been hijacked -- and their courses were being tracked on radar), and then these fighter planes circled over the ocean, still 71 miles from NY City while the second tower was struck. And similarly hardly accidental, there "happened to be" no fighter planes within 100 miles of DC that day. I researched this and other anomalies for 6 months before writing the novel. 

        That the editor at Putnam was, two weeks ago, "offended" (his word) by my novel's suggestion that there was collusion with highly placed people and agencies in the US that enabled all of it to happen, should tell you a lot about why nobody has gone near this. 

        America, my friend, is the World Capitol of Denial.

        Sincerely,
        Tom
        www.ThomasBSawyer.com 


------------------------------------------------------------------------


        _______________________________________________
        Mb-civic mailing list
        Mb-civic at islandlists.com
        http://www.islandlists.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mb-civic



--------------------------------------------------------------------------


      _______________________________________________
      Mb-civic mailing list
      Mb-civic at islandlists.com
      http://www.islandlists.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mb-civic



----------------------------------------------------------------------------


    _______________________________________________
    Mb-civic mailing list
    Mb-civic at islandlists.com
    http://www.islandlists.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mb-civic



------------------------------------------------------------------------------


  _______________________________________________
  Mb-civic mailing list
  Mb-civic at islandlists.com
  http://www.islandlists.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mb-civic
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060311/af653f2c/attachment.htm 

From hotprojects at nyc.rr.com  Sat Mar 11 12:50:31 2006
From: hotprojects at nyc.rr.com (richard haase)
Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 15:50:31 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] kudos to tom sawyer
Message-ID: <001f01c6454d$7049a230$f1476c42@hotprojects>

for being so brave on his new novel
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060311/668cd17c/attachment.htm 

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Sat Mar 11 11:55:28 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 11:55:28 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] VERY, VERY INTERESTING ABOUT THE SHAH
Message-ID: <C0386B30.29F49%michael@michaelbutler.com>

Reza sent me this. It should be read with great interest. It will give
background on my concern of our abysmal record of another debacle in the
Middle East where I spent so much time.
Michael

 Subject: What Really Happed to the Shah of Iran (MustRead)

 
What Really Happed to the Shah of Iran
By Ernst Schroeder <mailto:eschrod60 at hotmail.com>
http://www.payvand.com/news/06/mar/1090.html
<http://www.payvand.com/news/06/mar/1090.html>  My name is Ernst Schroeder,
and since I have some Iranian friends from school and review your online
magazine occasionally, I thought I'd pass on the following three page quote
from a book I read a few months ago entitled, "A Century Of War :
Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/074532309X/netnative> ", which was
written by William Engdahl, a German historianm .  This is a book about how
oil and politics have been intertwined for the past 100 years. I submit the
below passage for direct publishing on your website, as I think the quote
will prove to be significant for anyone of Persian descent.
  

order from amazon 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/074532309X/netnative>  "In November
1978, President Carter named the Bilderberg group's George Ball, another
member of the Trilateral Commission, to head a special White House Iran task
force under the National Security Council's Brzezinski.  Ball recommended
that Washington drop support for the Shah of Iran and support the
fundamentalistic Islamic opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini.  Robert Bowie
from the CIA was one of the lead 'case officers' in the new CIA-led coup
against the man their covert actions had placed into power 25 years earlier.
Their scheme was based on a detailed study of the phenomenon of Islamic
fundamentalism, as presented by British Islamic expert, Dr. Bernard Lewis,
then on assignment at Princeton University in the United States.  Lewis's
scheme, which was unveiled at the May 1979 Bilderberg meeting in Austria,
endorsed the radical Muslim Brotherhood movement behind Khomeini, in order
to promote balkanization of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and
religious lines.  Lewis argued that the West should encourage autonomous
groups such as the Kurds, Armenians, Lebanese Maronites, Ethiopian Copts,
Azerbaijani Turks, and so forth.  The chaos would spread in what he termed
an 'Arc of Crisis,' which would spill over into Muslim regions of the Soviet
Union.  The coup against the Shah, like that against Mossadegh in 1953, was
run by British and American intelligence, with the bombastic American,
Brzezinski, taking public 'credit' for getting rid of the 'corrupt' Shah,
while the British characteristically remained safely in the background.
During 1978, negotiations were under way between the Shah's government and
British Petroleum for renewal of the 25-year old extraction agreement.  By
October 1978, the talks had collapsed over a British 'offer' which demanded
exclusive rights to Iran's future oil output, while refusing to guarantee
purchase of the oil.  With their dependence on British-controlled export
apparently at an end, Iran appeared on the verge of independence in its oil
sales policy for the first time since 1953, with eager prospective buyers in
Germany, France, Japan and elsewhere.  In its lead editorial that September,
Iran's Kayhan International stated: In retrospect, the 25-year partnership
with the [British Petroleum] consortium and the 50-year relationship with
British Petroleum which preceded it, have not been satisfactory ones for
Iran ? Looking to the future, NIOC [National Iranian Oil Company] should
plan to handle all operations by itself. London was blackmailing and putting
enormous economic pressure on the Shah's regime by refusing to buy Iranian
oil production, taking only 3 million or so barrels daily of an agreed
minimum of 5 million barrels per day.  This imposed dramatic revenue
pressures on Iran, which provided the context in which religious discontent
against the Shah could be fanned by trained agitators deployed by British
and U.S.intelligence.  In addition, strikes among oil workers at this
critical juncture crippled Iranian oil production. As Iran's domestic
economic troubles grew, American 'security' advisers to the Shah's Savak
secret police implemented a policy of ever more brutal repression, in a
manner calculated to maximize popular antipathy to the Shah.  At the same
time, the Carter administration cynically began protesting abuses of 'human
rights' under the Shah. British Petroleum reportedly began to organize
capital flight out of Iran, through its strong influence in Iran's financial
and banking community.  The British Broadcasting Corporation's
Persian-language broadcasts, with dozens of Persian-speaking BBC
'correspondents' sent into even the smallest village, drummed up hysteria
against the Shah.  The BBC gave Ayatollah Khomeini a full propaganda
platform inside Iran during this time.  The British government-owned
broadcasting organization refused to give the Shah's government an equal
chance to reply.  Repeated personal appeals from the Shah to the BBC yielded
no result.  Anglo-American intelligence was committed to toppling the Shah.
The Shah fled in January, and by February 1979, Khomeini had been flown into
Tehran to proclaim the establishment of his repressive theocratic state to
replace the Shah's government.  Reflecting on his downfall months later,
shortly before his death, the Shah noted from exile, I did not know it then
? perhaps I did not want to know ? but it is clear to me now that the
Americans wanted me out.  Clearly this is what the human rights advocates in
the State Department wanted ? What was I to make of the Administration's
sudden decision to call former Under Secretary of State George Ball to the
White House as an adviser on Iran? ? Ball was among those Americans who
wanted to abandon me and ultimately my country.[1] <#_ftn1> [1][1] With the
fall of the Shah and the coming to power of the fanatical Khomeini adherents
in Iran, chaos was unleashed.  By May 1979, the new Khomeini regime had
singled out the country's nuclear power development plans and announced
cancellation of the entire program for French and German nuclear reactor
construction. Iran's oil exports to the world were suddenly cut off, some 3
million barrels per day.  Curiously, Saudi Arabian production in the
critical days of January 1979 was also cut by some 2 million barrels per
day.  To add to the pressures on world oil supply, British Petroleum
declared force majeure and cancelled major contracts for oil supply.  Prices
on the Rotterdam spot market, heavily influenced by BP and Royal Cutch Shell
as the largest oil traders, soared in early 1979 as a result.  The second
oil shock of the 1970s was fully under way. Indications are that the actual
planners of the Iranian Khomeini coup in London and within the senior ranks
of the U.S. liberal establishment decided to keep President Carter largely
ignorant of the policy and its ultimate objectives.  The ensuing energy
crisis in the United States was a major factor in bringing about Carter's
defeat a year later. There was never a real shortage in the world supply of
petroleum.  Existing Saudi and Kuwaiti production capacities could at any
time have met the 5-6 million barrels per day temporary shortfall, as a U.S.
congressional investigation by the General Accounting Office months later
confirmed. Unusually low reserve stocks of oil held by the Seven Sisters oil
multinationals contributed to creating a devastating world oil price shock,
with prices for crude oil soaring from a level of some $14 per barrel in
1978 towards the astronomical heights of $40 per barrel for some grades of
crude on the spot market.  Long gasoline lines across America contributed to
a general sense of panic, and Carter energy secretary and former CIA
director, James R. Schlesinger, did not help calm matters when he told
Congress and the media in February 1979 that the Iranian oil shortfall was
'prospectively more serious' than the 1973 Arab oil embargo.[2] <#_ftn2>
[2][2] The Carter administration's Trilateral Commission foreign policy
further ensured that any European effort from Germany and France to develop
more cooperative trade, economic and diplomatic relations with their Soviet
neighbor, under the umbrella of d?nte and various Soviet-west European
energy agreements, was also thrown into disarray. Carter's security adviser,
Zbigniew Brzezinski, and secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, implemented their
'Arc of Crisis' policy, spreading the instability of the Iranian revolution
throughout the perimeter around the Soviet Union.  Throughout the Islamic
perimeter from Pakistan to Iran,U.S. initiatives created instability or
worse." -- William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics
and the New World Order, ? 1992, 2004.  Pluto Press Ltd. Pages 171-174.
 

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060311/b7228268/attachment.htm 

From TSawyer456 at aol.com  Sat Mar 11 16:06:53 2006
From: TSawyer456 at aol.com (TSawyer456 at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 19:06:53 EST
Subject: [Mb-civic] More Re:  The Conservative Epiphany By PAUL KRUGMAN
Message-ID: <23e.86ee630.3144c01d@aol.com>

Hi, Ian:  

Re: your suggestion that my novel will find a ready following among the  
skeptics: From your lips... First, however, my agent has to find a publishing  
house that isn't afraid of the topic.
 
Interestingly, the titles you mentioned (I've seen pieces of them) and  
others that I used as research (my personal favorite: The War on  Freedom, by 
Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed) -- and discounting a number of them that  were kind of 
nutcase-fringe -- all are nonfiction. To my knowledge there is  not a single novel 
yet published that posits what I believe happened. My  hope is that via 
fiction, No Place to Run might "reach" even  a few people who aren't already 
doubters, and make them think (not a popular  pastime these days).   
 
All best,
Tom
_www.ThomasBSawyer.com_ (http://www.ThomasBSawyer.com)  
 
Tom:

Thank you so much for your comments  and support.  I can't wait to read your 
novel - and you will almost  certainly have an immediate "cult" following 
(although I hate that phrase...) in  the 9/11 truth movement, which is both global 
and growing.

Yes,  the 9/11 timeline is yet another element of the "omissions and 
distortions" in  The 9/11 Commission Report, most notably discussed in David Ray 
Griffin's book  of that title ("The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and 
Distortions").   BTW, are you aware that the Report also completely omits the existence 
of the  47-column support structure of the twin towers in order to support 
its theory of  how the towers collapsed (the so-called "pancake theory")?  That 
is, the  existence of the support structures essentially negates the pancake 
theory  entirely.

If you have not read "The Terror Timeline" by Paul  Thompson, you must.  He 
basically undermines the government's "official  story" using only mainstream 
media headlines and articles to create a far more  accurate timeline of facts.

Anyway, I look forward to your  book.

Peace.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060311/19ffa8e1/attachment.htm 

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Sat Mar 11 17:08:35 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 17:08:35 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Lap Dogs of the Press By Helen Thomas The Nation
Message-ID: <C038B493.29F7F%michael@michaelbutler.com>

    Go to Original

    Lap Dogs of the Press
    By Helen Thomas
    The Nation

    Friday 10 March 2006

    Of all the unhappy trends I have witnessed - conservative swings on
television networks, dwindling newspaper circulation, the jailing of
reporters and "spin" - nothing is more troubling to me than the obsequious
press during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. They lapped up everything
the Pentagon and White House could dish out - no questions asked.

    Reporters and editors like to think of themselves as watchdogs for the
public good. But in recent years both individual reporters and their
ever-growing corporate ownership have defaulted on that role. Ted Stannard,
an academic and former UPI correspondent, put it this way: "When watchdogs,
bird dogs, and bull dogs morph into lap dogs, lazy dogs, or yellow dogs, the
nation is in trouble."

    The naive complicity of the press and the government was never more
pronounced than in the prelude to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The
media became an echo chamber for White House pronouncements. One example: At
President Bush's March 6, 2003, news conference, in which he made it
eminently clear that the United States was going to war, one reporter
pleased the "born again" Bush when she asked him if he prayed about going to
war. And so it went.

    After all, two of the nation's most prestigious newspapers, the New York
Times and the Washington Post, had kept up a drumbeat for war with Iraq to
bring down Dictator Saddam Hussein. They accepted almost unquestioningly the
bogus evidence of weapons of mass destruction, the dubious White House
rationale that proved to be so costly on a human scale, not to mention a
drain on the Treasury. The Post was much more hawkish than the Times -
running many editorials pumping up the need to wage war against the Iraqi
dictator - but both newspapers played into the hands of the Administration.

    When Secretary of State Colin Powell delivered his ninety-minute "boffo"
statement on Saddam's lethal toxic arsenal on February 5, 2003, before the
United Nations, the Times said he left "little question that Mr. Hussein had
tried hard to conceal" a so-called smoking gun or weapons of mass
destruction. After two US special weapons inspection task forces, headed by
chief weapons inspector David Kay and later by Charles Duelfer, came up
empty in the scouring of Iraq for WMD, did you hear any apologies from the
Bush Administration? Of course not. It simply changed its rationale for the
war - several times. Nor did the media say much about the failed weapons
search. Several newspapers made it a front-page story but only gave it
one-day coverage. As for Powell, he simply lost his halo. The newspapers
played his back-pedaling inconspicuously on the back pages.

    My concern is why the nation's media were so gullible. Did they really
think it was all going to be so easy, a "cakewalk," a superpower invading a
Third World country? Why did the Washington press corps forgo its
traditional skepticism? Why did reporters become cheerleaders for a
deceptive Administration? Could it be that no one wanted to stand alone
outside Washington's pack journalism?

    Tribune Media Services editor Robert Koehler summed it up best. In his
August 20, 2004, column in the San Francisco Chronicle Koehler wrote, "Our
print media pacesetters, the New York Times, and just the other day, the
Washington Post, have searched their souls over the misleading pre-war
coverage they foisted on the nation last year, and blurted out qualified
Reaganesque mea culpas: 'Mistakes were made.'"

    All the blame cannot be laid at the doorstep of the print media. CNN's
war correspondent, Christiane Amanpour, was critical of her own network for
not asking enough questions about WMD. She attributed it to the competition
for ratings with Fox, which had an inside track to top Administration
officials.

    Despite the apologies of the mainstream press for not having vigilantly
questioned evidence of WMD and links to terrorists in the early stages of
the war, the newspapers dropped the ball again by ignoring for days a
damaging report in the London Times on May 1, 2005. That report revealed the
so-called Downing Street memo, the minutes of a high-powered confidential
meeting that British Prime Minister Tony Blair held with his top advisers on
Bush's forthcoming plans to attack Iraq. At the secret session Richard
Dearlove, former head of British intelligence, told Blair that Bush "wanted
to remove Saddam Hussein through military action, justified by the
conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being
fixed around the policy."

    The Downing Street memo was a bombshell when discussed by the bloggers,
but the mainstream print media ignored it until it became too embarrassing
to suppress any longer. The Post discounted the memo as old news and pointed
to reports it had many months before on the buildup to the war. Los Angeles
Times editorial page editor Michael Kinsley decided that the classified
minutes of the Blair meeting were not a "smoking gun." The New York Times
touched on the memo in a dispatch during the last days leading up to the
British elections, but put it in the tenth paragraph.

    All this took me back to the days immediately following the unraveling
of the Watergate scandal. The White House press corps realized it had fallen
asleep at the switch - not that all the investigative reporting could have
been done by those on the so-called "body watch," which travels everywhere
with the President and has no time to dig for facts. But looking back, they
knew they had missed many clues on the Watergate scandal and were determined
to become much more skeptical of what was being dished out to them at the
daily briefings. And, indeed, they were. The White House press room became a
lion's den.

    By contrast, after the White House lost its credibility in rationalizing
the pre-emptive assault on Iraq, the correspondents began to come out of
their coma, yet they were still too timid to challenge Administration
officials, who were trying to put a good face on a bad situation.

    I recall one exchange of mine with press secretary Scott McClellan last
May that illustrates the difference, and what I mean by the skeptical
reporting during Watergate.

    Helen: The other day, in fact this week, you [McClellan] said that we,
the United States, are in Afghanistan and Iraq by invitation. Would you like
to correct that incredible distortion of American history?

    Scott: No. We are ... that's where we are currently.

    Helen: In view of your credibility, which is already mired ... how can
you say that?

    Scott: Helen, I think everyone in this room knows that you're taking
that comment out of context. There are two democratically elected
governments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    Helen: Were we invited into Iraq?

    Scott: There are democratically elected governments now in Iraq and
Afghanistan, and we are there at their invitation. They are sovereign
governments, but we are there today.

    Helen: You mean, if they asked us out, that we would have left?

    Scott: No, Helen, I'm talking about today. We are there at their
invitation. They are sovereign governments.

    Helen: I'm talking about today, too.

    Scott: We are doing all we can to train and equip their security forces
so that they can provide their own security as they move forward on a free
and democratic future.

    Helen: Did we invade those countries?

    At that point McClellan called on another reporter.

    Those were the days when I longed for ABC-TV's great Sam Donaldson to
back up my questions as he always did, and I did the same for him and other
daring reporters. Then I realized that the old pros, reporters whom I had
known in the past, many of them around during World War II and later the
Vietnam War, reporters who had some historical perspective on government
deception and folly, were not around anymore.

    I honestly believe that if reporters had put the spotlight on the flaws
in the Bush Administration's war policies, they could have saved the country
the heartache and the losses of American and Iraqi lives.

    It is past time for reporters to forget the party line, ask the tough
questions and let the chips fall where they may.

 


From nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca  Sat Mar 11 18:37:01 2006
From: nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca (CBC News Online)
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 02:37:01 UT
Subject: [Mb-civic] CBC News - ISRAEL WILL ESTABLISH BORDERS IN 4 YEARS:
	OLMERT
Message-ID: <20060312023701.2082E32F85@web05.nm.cbc.ca>

An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Url: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060312/a97b21ff/attachment.diff 

From ean at sbcglobal.net  Sat Mar 11 18:12:39 2006
From: ean at sbcglobal.net (ean at sbcglobal.net)
Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 18:12:39 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Norman Finkelstein Speaks + Cheney, Bush and AIPAC
Message-ID: <E1FIHvV-0007MT-AG@smtpauth02.mail.atl.earthlink.net>



http://www.columbiaspectator.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2006/03/08/440e74
fd1c36 e Columbia Spectator (Columbia University?s Newspaper) March 08, 
2006

Active Subject

Norman Finkelstein Speaks

By Nell Geiser

As a Jewish student who is looking forward to Norman Finkelstein?s speech
on campus tonight, titled ?Israel & Palestine: Misuse of Anti-Semitism,
Abuse of History,? I am disappointed there?s been such misinformed debate
about his visit. Maryum Saifee and Athar Abdul-Quader explained Monday 
on
this page (?In Defense of Professor Finkelstein,? March 6) that inaccurate
accusations hurled at Finkelstein only stifle productive dialogue. Since
many of the charges levied against him seemed to be based on emotional
appeals and not on facts, I decided to talk to professor Finkelstein
myself to clarify his argument in his new book Beyond Chutzpah.

I asked Finkelstein to talk about the misuses of anti-Semitism in relation
to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He explained, ?If you look at the
historical record on the Israel-Palestine conflict, the past, if you look
at the human rights record, the present, or if you look at the diplomatic
record, the future, on how to resolve the conflict?if you look at those
three records, it?s quite striking how broad is the consensus and how
uncontroversial the record is. ... In fact, it?s hard to think of another,
as it were, trouble spot in the world where the record is so unambiguous
and so straightforward.?

?An obvious question arises?namely, how do you account for so much
controversy, which, once you enter the public arena, swirls around the
conflict that, if you look at the actual documentary record, is not
controversial at all. And that?s the question I pose in the introduction
to my book. And the answer I suggest is that most of the controversy
surrounding the Israel-Palestine conflict is fabricated, contrived. And
the purpose of that fabrication and contrivance is to divert attention
from the actual factual record and to sow confusion about the real
record.?

?Let?s look at the issue of the New Anti-Semitism. That?s been a term
that?s been bandied about since roughly 2000, and there are two things to
say about that New Anti-Semitism. Number one, it?s not new. Every time
Israel faces a public relations debacle or comes under pressure from the
international community to resolve the conflict, it orchestrates this
extravaganza called ?The New Anti-Semitism.? It?s very easy to
demonstrate. Any Columbia student, all that he or she has to do, is go to
Butler Library and look for a book that came out in 1974 by the same
organization that?s orchestrating the hysteria now, namely the
Anti-Defamation League, and they?ll find a book called The New
Anti-Semitism. And they?ll find similar publications being putting
periodically by the ADL and kindred organizations. There?s nothing new
about the New Anti-Semitism. That hysteria is whipped up periodically in
the U.S. The problem is that people have short memories. They forget.?

?Number two, it has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. There?s no evidence
whatsoever of a New Anti-Semitism in the United States or in Europe. ...
The purpose of the New Anti-Semitism is basically twofold: number one, and
most obviously, it?s to turn the perpetrators and their apologists ...
into the victims. So instead of focusing attention on the cruel
occupation, our attention is supposed to be focused on the suffering of
those who are perpetrating the occupation: the victims of this alleged New
Anti-Semitism. And the second purpose is to discredit any criticism of
Israel as being motivated by anti-Semitism. The claim of the New
Anti-Semitism is that, whereas in the past it was aimed at Jews
individually, it?s now being directed at the collective Jew?Israel. And
therefore, anyone who criticizes Israel is guilty of anti-Semitism. So the
purpose is to exploit the very real suffering that Jews endured in the
past in order to discredit any of Israel?s critics as being, in fact,
motivated by anti-Semitism, and to discredit any criticism of Israel as
being anti-Semitic. That?s its purpose; there?s no basis for the claim in
reality.?

I also asked Finkelstein what he would like to see discussed in a
productive conversation about Israel-Palestine.

?I think the right answer is to steer away from slogan, steer away from
ideological obfuscations, steer away from hot-button issues, and stick to
the facts. In my opinion, what we now ought to be discussing has nothing
to do with your position on Zionism. I don?t care if you?re a Zionist or
not a Zionist, that?s not the issue. The issue is fairly straightforward.
It?s as uncomplicated as an issue can be. Where do you stand on
international law? Where do you stand on human rights law??

?This is what the record shows: Israel has no right to any of the
territory it occupied in the June 1967 war. The settlements Israel has
built in the occupied territories are illegal under international law.
Under international law, Israel has to fully withdraw. Israel?s human
rights record in the occupied territories is an abomination. Each
statement I just uttered to you is completely uncontroversial. Every
mainstream source, bar none, every one, will validate each of the
statements I just made to you. And then the question to be put to a
rational, sane human being is, ?Where do you stand on that?? ?Do you
support the violations or do you oppose them?? ?Do you support
international law or do you oppose it?? And everything else is beside the
point.?

I, too, hope that Columbia students can discuss the issues at hand rather
than avoiding them through false accusations. Given that the General
Assembly of the United Nations has voted time after time in overwhelming
support of Palestinian self-determination and withdrawal of all Israeli
settlements from the territories occupied in 1967, my stance is that
Israel should abide by international consensus and international law.
Finkelstein is doing a service by cutting away the obfuscating layers and
making clear what constitutes the real issues in this debate.


Nell Geiser is a Columbia College senior majoring in anthropology and
comparative ethnic studies. Active Subject runs alternate Wednesdays.

***

http://www.forward.com/articles/7458

Forward     March 10, 2006

Pro-Israel activists cheer Cheney

Embattled Bush team gets boost at AIPAC parley

By E.J. Kessler

Washington ? Even as President Bush's popularity dropped to record lows,
his administration was embraced warmly this week by the thousands of
delegates at the most influential annual gathering of American Jewish
activists.

In recent weeks Bush has seen his approval ratings drop to around 35%,
leading some analysts to the conclusion that his poll numbers were putting
him perilously close to a "failed presidency" ? one unable to effectuate
its policies because of a lack of popular support. But this week, at the
annual policy conference of the main pro-Israel lobby, the American Israel
Public Affairs Committee, several of the most hard-line administration
officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney and Ambassador to the
United Nations John Bolton, drew a resounding response.

The hard-line mood of the audience also extended to Israeli politics.

Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu, who, like the two other candidates for
prime minister in Israel's coming election, spoke on a video link from
Jerusalem, was cheered enthusiastically when he called for building "an
iron wall" around Hamas. Labor leader Amir Peretz and Kadima's candidate,
Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, were not as warmly received, as they
talked about a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Olmert spoke about unilaterally redrawing Israel's border in the West Bank
through further pullouts, and received polite applause. Former premier
Netanyahu, however, was cheered enthusiastically when he spoke about the
need to push the West Bank security fence eastward, deeper into the
Palestinian territory, to create a broader buffer against Palestinian
terrorism.

The enthusiastic support for Netanyahu and Bush administration hawks
underscores what appears to be a widening gap between pro-Israel activists
in Washington on the one hand and the Israeli and American publics on the
other. Polls show Netanyahu trailing Olmert and Peretz in Israel at the
same time that support for Bush and the Iraq War are plummeting in
America. Some political observers have suggested that Bush's declining
political fortunes would make it harder for him to follow through on the
hawkish rhetoric cheered by pro-Israel activists, but participants at the
AIPAC conference who were interviewed by the Forward voiced no such
concerns.

AIPAC also appears to be out of step with the American Jewish community 
on
Iraq. Like many other American Jewish organizations, it supported the Iraq
war. But 70% of American Jews oppose the Iraq war, according to a poll
commission by the American Jewish Committee at the end of 2005.

Jewish organizations, most of which have a liberal political orientation,
recently have taken a unified hard line against Iran and Hamas.

"AIPAC members tend to be more hard line and defensive when it comes to
Israel's security than the mainstream of the American Jewish community,"
said analyst Doug Bloomfield, a former AIPAC legislative director. "They
see themselves as Israel's first line of defense against unwanted
pressure."

Cheney ? a bugaboo of the left for his role in the Iraq War ? spoke for
more than 35 minutes at the conference Tuesday. He stressed the need to
stand firm against Islamic extremists, including the newly formed Hamas
government in the Palestinian territories, and Iran, whose president has
vowed to "wipe Israel off the map."

"The United States will not be a party to the establishment of a
Palestinian state that sponsors terror and violence," the vice president
said, adding, "We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon."

Cheney's personal approval ratings have dropped to below 20%. But the vice
president was received enthusiastically at the AIPAC conference, drawing
48 rounds of applause from the 4,500 assembled delegates ? including eight
standing ovations. When he took the podium, the crowd stood and cheered
for almost a minute. It displayed similar warmth toward Bolton, a leading
administration hawk on Iraq and Iran, who spoke Sunday morning. Even
Senator Susan Collins ? a Maine Republican known as an archmoderate ?
garnered loud applause, when she called the Iranian government "a racist,
death-worshipping cult."

The delegates' reactions to the Republicans showed that despite its
sagging support nationwide, the administration still can garner vocal
support among pro-Israel activists for its support for Israel and its
hawkish rhetoric on Islamic terrorism ? even as large sections of the
public apparently feel disenchanted by its handling of some related
issues, such as the Dubai ports deal and the war in Iraq.

Owing to his unpopular handling of the ports deal and to a deterioration
of Iraqi security that started with the attack on the country's main
Shi'ite shrine ? events that strike at the core of Bush's competence on
national security ? Bush has seen his personal popularity slip to about
35% in recent polls. The drop comes after he only recently had recovered
some of his standing after taking a beating last fall for his
administration's seemingly slow response to Hurricane Katrina.

Now, however, Bush is "back deep in the danger zone," Stratfor, a leading
security consulting agency, argued in an analysis published March 1. "He
is losing part of his core constituency.... A failed presidency was on the
table and then off the table. It is suddenly back on, and in a more
serious form than before."

Even the office of the presidency has suffered a diminution of support
under Bush. A recent Harris Interactive survey found that only 25% of
respondents say they have "a great deal of confidence" in the White House,
down from 31% last year.

None of this disenchantment appeared to resonate with the AIPAC delegates,
who in interviews frequently praised Bush's resolve and character, as well
as his positions.

"I still think George Bush gets it," said one delegate, Dr. Daniel Storch,
a Phoenix cardiologist and registered Democrat who voted for Bush in 2004.
"I've been impressed all along that he sees the world in the way that the
Israelis do in terms of terrorism and security."

Storch said he opposes the ports deal, which Bush supports strongly. But
Storch contrasted the administration's general approach to the Middle East
favorably with that of Democrats ? who suffer among some AIPAC activists
from a perceived softness on national security matters.

"The Iranians take the threat of military action from George Bush more
seriously than they would have from John Kerry," he said.

Democrats have scored points among pro-Israel activists recently by
highlighting the issue of the Arab boycott of Israel in the ports
controversy. At the same time, however, Democrats, pressing the issue of
lobbying reform in the Republican-dominated Congress, have proposed
stringent rules on interest-group-funded overseas trips for lawmakers,
like the ones frequently sponsored by AIPAC as part of its Israel
advocacy.

Some conference attendees said that the hard-line foreign policy outlined
by administration officials would help Bush rally his base, which polls
suggest is starting to abandon him for the first time.

Pastor John Hagee, a popular national evangelical leader who attended the
conference, said that Bush would succeed in his Middle East policies
because "he has set a moral agenda in support of Israel."

"It's not a matter of political clout," Hagee said. "It's a matter of
right and wrong. It is right to support Israel."

Others said that the Bush administration's tough talk on Iran would
catalyze support internationally.

"There is such unanimity on Iran, both domestically and internationally,
that the president will enjoy strong support for his policy," said William
Feinstone, a delegate from Skokie, Ill. "This support will supersede
whatever weakness ? real or perceived ? this administration may be
suffering from."

Delegates voiced only muted criticism of Bush's Middle East policies ? and
what complaints did emerge generally seemed to come from the president's
right flank. They privately debated whether the administration should
cease discussing the establishment of a Palestinian state while Hamas is
in power and whether humanitarian aid to the Palestinians should be cut
off in order to shorten the life of the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority.

Frequent Bush critic Morton Klein ? national president of the Zionist
Organization of America, which strongly opposed the Gaza pullout ? said
that the president likely would seek an even harder line, given his
political troubles.

"President Bush and his advisers believe that if he would relent in this
crucial fight against Islamic terrorism, his poll numbers would fall even
further," Klein said. "Not only would it be wrong for America, it would
hurt him politically. The American people want this evil to be crushed."

? With reporting by Ori Nir.


-- 
You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, 
option D (up to 3 emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options 
(option A - 1x/week, option B - 3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option D - 
up to 3x/day) please reply and let us know!  If someone forwarded you 
this email and you want to be on our list, send an email to 
ean at sbcglobal.net and tell us which option you'd like.


"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060311/a596eda6/attachment-0001.htm 

From ean at sbcglobal.net  Sat Mar 11 18:15:36 2006
From: ean at sbcglobal.net (ean at sbcglobal.net)
Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 18:15:36 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Enough of the D.C. Dems
Message-ID: <E1FIHzz-0000pq-6z@smtpauth02.mail.atl.earthlink.net>

Enough of the D.C. Dems

By Molly Ivins
March 2006 Issue
<http://progressive.org/mag_ivins0306>

Mah fellow progressives, now is the time for all good
men and women to come to the aid of the party. I don't
know about you, but I have had it with the D.C.
Democrats, had it with the DLC Democrats, had it with
every calculating, equivocating, triangulating,
straddling, hair-splitting son of a bitch up there, and
that includes Hillary Rodham Clinton.

I will not be supporting Senator Clinton because: a)
she has no clear stand on the war and b) Terri Schiavo
and flag-burning are not issues where you reach out to
the other side and try to split the difference. You
want to talk about lowering abortion rates through
cooperation on sex education and contraception, fine,
but don't jack with stuff that is pure rightwing
firewater.

I can't see a damn soul in D.C. except Russ Feingold
who is even worth considering for President. The rest
of them seem to me so poisonously in hock to this
system of legalized bribery they can't even see
straight.

Look at their reaction to this Abramoff scandal.
They're talking about 'a lobby reform package.' We
don't need a lobby reform package, you dimwits, we need
full public financing of campaigns, and every single
one of you who spends half your time whoring after
special interest contributions knows it. The Abramoff
scandal is a once in a lifetime gift-a perfect lesson
on what's wrong with the system being laid out for
people to see. Run with it, don't mess around with
little patches, and fix the system.

As usual, the Democrats have forty good issues on their
side and want to run on thirty-nine of them. Here are
three they should stick to:

1) Iraq is making terrorism worse; it's a breeding
ground. We need to extricate ourselves as soon as
possible. We are not helping the Iraqis by staying.

2) Full public financing of campaigns so as to drive
the moneylenders from the halls of Washington.

3) Single-payer health insurance.

Every Democrat I talk to is appalled at the sheer
gutlessness and spinelessness of the Democratic
performance. The party is still cringing at the thought
of being called, ooh-ooh, 'unpatriotic' by a bunch of
rightwingers.

Take 'unpatriotic' and shove it. How dare they do this
to our country? 'Unpatriotic'? These people have ruined
the American military! Not to mention the economy, the
middle class, and our reputation in the world.
Everything they touch turns to dirt, including Medicare
prescription drugs and hurricane relief.

This is not a time for a candidate who will offend no
one; it is time for a candidate who takes clear stands
and kicks ass.

Who are these idiots talking about Warner of Virginia?
Being anodyne is not sufficient qualification for being
President. And if there's nobody in Washington and we
can't find a Democratic governor, let's run Bill
Moyers, or Oprah, or some university president with
ethics and charisma.

What happens now is not up to the has-beens in
Washington who run this party. It is up to us. So let's
get off our butts and start building a progressive
movement that can block the nomination of Hillary
Clinton or any other candidate who supposedly has 'all
the money sewed up.'

I am tired of having the party nomination decided
before the first primary vote is cast, tired of having
the party beholden to the same old Establishment money.

We can raise our own money on the Internet, and we know
it. Howard Dean raised $42 million, largely on the web,
with a late start when he was running for President,
and that ain't chicken feed. If we double it, it gives
us the lock on the nomination. So let's go find a good
candidate early and organize the shit out of our side.

[Molly Ivins writes in this space every month. Her
latest book is 'Who Let the Dogs In?']
-- 
You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, 
option D (up to 3 emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options 
(option A - 1x/week, option B - 3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option D - 
up to 3x/day) please reply and let us know!  If someone forwarded you 
this email and you want to be on our list, send an email to 
ean at sbcglobal.net and tell us which option you'd like.


"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060311/e7690927/attachment.htm 

From ean at sbcglobal.net  Sat Mar 11 18:15:36 2006
From: ean at sbcglobal.net (ean at sbcglobal.net)
Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 18:15:36 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Robert Fisk:  Middle East in crisis
Message-ID: <E1FIIAl-0004pT-F9@smtpauth02.mail.atl.earthlink.net>


http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12213.htm

Fisk Paints a Middle East in crisis

By ABC Australia 03/06/06

Robert Fisk says that in his three decades of reporting from the Middle
East for British newspapers, he's never seen it more dangerous, and that
he's certain another major crisis, possibly even another September 11, is
coming.

The World Today - Monday, 6 March , 2006 12:34:00
Reporter: Eleanor Hall

ELEANOR HALL: One of the Middle East's most experienced observers is
warning today that we should prepare for another major catastrophe in the
region.

Robert Fisk says that in his three decades of reporting from the Middle
East for British newspapers, he's never seen it more dangerous, and that
he's certain another major crisis, possibly even another September 11, is
coming.

The veteran war reporter also says he remains baffled by just who is
trying to generate civil war in Iraq.

Robert Fisk is in Australia this week to promote his latest book, The
Great War for Civilization, and he joined me in The World Today studio a
short time ago.

Now, you've been a bit of an optimist about Iraq and civil war, but do you
think what's going on now is already civil war?

ROBERT FISK: Well, it's perfect proof that somebody wants a civil war. Um,
but the problem for me is that the narrative is that the Shi'ites are
being attacked by the Sunnis and their mosques are being blown up and now
the Shi'ites are attacking the Sunni mosques and the Shi'ites and the
Sunnis are going to fight each other.

I think that's far too simple a version of events. There's never been a
civil war in Iraq. Sunnis and Shi'ites, despite the fact that the Sunnis
as a minority have always effectively ruled Iraq, have never had this
sectarian instinct. It's not a sectarian society, it's a tribal society.
People are intermarried.

You know, I was at the funeral of a Sunni and asked his brother, you know,
he'd been murdered - probably by Shi'ites, I think - I asked his brother
if there was going to be a civil war and he said look, I'm married to a
Shi'ite. You want me to kill my wife? Why do you westerners always want
civil war?

The first people to mention civil war were the occupation authorities. The
Iraqis were not. Some.

ELEANOR HALL: But the Iraqis are now. I mean, Al-Jaafari's talking about
civil war.

ROBERT FISK: They're not talking about civil war, they're talking about
being frightened of who's doing the bombing. But, you see, we still don't
know who's doing the bombings. How many names have we been given of the
suicide bombers? Two out of, what, 320 suicide bombings now. Where do 
they
come from, these people?

I mean, we keep hearing about kidnaps. In every case they were kidnapped
by people, quote, "wearing police uniforms," unquote. There's a police
station on the airport road, it was overrun and all the policemen executed
by men wearing, quote, "army uniforms," unquote.

Now, we used to have this phenomenon in Algeria, when I was covering the
Islamist government war there, and it took a while before we realised that
they were policemen and they were soldiers.

In other words, they were being paid by the authorities. These were not
people. there's not a huge wardrobe factory in Fallujah with, you know,
8,000 policemen's uniforms, waiting for the next suicide bomber. It's not
like that. What we've got is death squads, and some of them are clearly
working for government institutions within Baghdad.

ELEANOR HALL: So you're saying there are death squads, there's chaos, but
it's not civil war?

ROBERT FISK: Well, it's certainly chaos, and it's certainly death squads.
But I don't regard this as a civil war at the moment. As I said, somebody
wants a civil war. I mean, if you really try hard and you kill enough
people you may be able to produce this.

ELEANOR HALL: So somebody wants a civil war?

ROBERT FISK: Yes.

ELEANOR HALL: You must have some clues about who.

ROBERT FISK: I don't have. I have suspicions, I don't have clues. I spend
a lot of time, when I'm in Baghdad, trying to find out who this is and
what this is. Clearly, the Interior Ministry have been torturing people to
death, and clearly the Interior Ministry have people who do operate death
squads.

But you've got to remember something, that a very prominent figure in
politics, and a close friend of the United States, was accused just before
the first elections of executing, quote, "insurgents," unquote, in a
police station, a police station I know very well. This was reported in
Australia at the time.

I suspect the story is true. I think he was a murderer, and he was working
for the Americans, and he was a former CIA operative, as we know. I'm not
saying the CIA are doing the death squads and this is an American plot -
no, I'm not.

But I think that there are all kinds of tendencies and fractures within
the current authorities, who all live in the green zone in the former
Republican palace of Saddam, surrounded by American barbed wire and
American protection.

ELEANOR HALL: What's the rationale of this though? I mean, if these 
people
are in government, why do they want a civil war?

ROBERT FISK: I think what they want to do is to produce a situation in
which their side, or their party, will control Iraq.

You've got to realise the insurgents too, most of whom but not all are
Sunni, we keep seeing the insurgents as people who want to get the
Americans out. But that's a very short-sighted view of it. That's our view
of it.

It's quite clear the insurgents want to get the Americans out, but they
want to get the Americans out so they can say afterwards, we liberated our
country, we want a place in power. That is what this is about. This is
about securing political power after the withdrawal of the United States.

ELEANOR HALL: What about the political negotiations that are going on at
the moment though? I mean, is there no faith placed in those?

ROBERT FISK: Look, I'm sorry to sound so pessimistic, but all the
political negotiations are going on within a few square acres, guarded by
American tanks, from which nobody emerges. These people who are
negotiating, they don't go into the streets of Baghdad, they don't see the
people, they don't see the bombs.

ELEANOR HALL: But the people voted for them.

ROBERT FISK: Yes, the Shi'ites voted for them mostly.

Look, people want to vote. People would like freedom. But they'd also
freedom from us, and that we will not accept, because we want to go on
controlling Iraq and making sure Iraq does what we want. We want to
control the government of Iraq.

I mean, they have a democratic election, and what happens? Bush comes on
the telephone and says come on, we want some unity, get moving.

ELEANOR HALL: You say the US will have to get out of Iraq, but it will
need the help of Iran and Syria to do so.

ROBERT FISK: Of course, of course it will.

ELEANOR HALL: Now, how would that work?

ROBERT FISK: It'll need the help of Iran to make sure that all Shi'ite
resistance to the United States ends during the withdrawal, and it'll need
the help of the Syrians, who do have a lot of influence along the border
with Iraq, to make sure that there is some kind of deal with the
insurgents that the Americans can leave not under fire.

You see, I mean I've said this before, but the terrible equation, of
course politically, from an American political point of view as well, in
Iraq, is that the Americans must leave, and they will leave, and they
can't leave.

And that's the equation that turns sand into blood. And that remains the
case. It's very easy to invade other people's countries; it's very
difficult to get out of them. It should be the other way around, but
unfortunately it's not. That's how it happens.

And the Brits found that, you know, all over the Middle East. And every
time, every time, every time the authorities of the occupying power say
the same things - we will not talk to terrorists. The Americans say it
too. And they don't read history books, because at the end of the day the
Americans will have to talk to the insurgents in Iraq, and they will, they
will.

ELEANOR HALL: Now, the victory for Hamas, in the Palestinian elections,
how closely is the West's reaction to this being watched in the Arab
world?

ROBERT FISK: With its usual cynicism, yes. It's the same old story - we
demand democracy, we demand they have freedom to vote, and they vote for
the wrong people, so we try to destroy the government that's been freely
elected. We love democracy, providing the Muslim nations elect the people
we want.

I mean, we keep hearing the Israelis will not deal with Hamas. The
Israelis created Hamas. When the PLO were in Beirut, and the Israelis
wanted to counteract the PLO, they urged Hamas to set up more mosques and
social institutions in Gaza.

Even after Oslo a senior Israeli officer, and this was reported on the
front page of The Jerusalem Post, held official talks with Hamas officials
in Jerusalem. Israel won't deal with Hamas. this is just a facade of
narrative, for us, the press.

There is a narrative being set down for us where there will not be
negotiations, but there can be any time the Israelis want, and if they
find it in their interest, they will.

ELEANOR HALL: And yet you're in no doubt that Hamas, or certain 
members of
Hamas, are terrorists?

ROBERT FISK: Look, I don't use the word terrorist about anybody. This has
become a semantically meaningless word. Look, there are people in the
Hamas movement who support the murder of innocent people, yes, of course.

There are. I'm not trying to make equivalences here, but when you have an
Israeli air force officer, as we did at one occasion in Gaza, who bombs a
block of apartments, knowing that he will kill innocent children, as well
as a man who is believed to be behind suicide bombings, what is that man?
What goes on in his brain too?

ELEANOR HALL: Now, you make the point in your book about the targeted
killing of Hamas leaders coming back .

ROBERT FISK: The murder. I don't say targeted killing.

ELEANOR HALL: Okay.

ROBERT FISK: The murder.

ELEANOR HALL: The killing of leaders of Hamas will come back to haunt 
the
leaders of the West. What do you mean.

ROBERT FISK: Well, we already did have - a year and a half ago I think -
the murder of an Israeli Government minister in Jerusalem.

Um, you see, once you start going for leaderships, you're opening a door
that can come back at you. And the great danger is once you say, you know,
we might kill Yasser Arafat, well he died of his own accord, but I mean
that was constantly said, so then you open the door to someone saying
well, let's kill the Israeli leadership, or let's kill the British
leadership.

Once you say we're going to kill Osama Bin Laden, what does that allow him
to do? He doesn't need permission of course. But what doors are you
opening.

ELEANOR HALL: Aren't these doors already open?

ROBERT FISK: Oh, they've been opened now, yes.

ELEANOR HALL: But weren't they already open for people like.

ROBERT FISK: The moment we turned our back on international law and 
gave
up on justice and wanted revenge, that was the end.

ELEANOR HALL: Now, you describe in your book, you were there for Rafiq
Hariri's killing in Lebanon.

ROBERT FISK: I was 400 metres away, yes.

ELEANOR HALL: After that you write you're increasingly stunned by the
growing tragedy of the Middle East. Now, I would've thought that's a big
statement from someone who's been reporting from the Middle East for 30
years.

ROBERT FISK: Yes, but the Middle East has never been in such a terrible
situation, it's never been so dangerous. I've never found myself going on
assignments of such danger as I do now. Iraq's the worst assignment I've
ever been on, ever.

I think that our hypocrisy towards the Middle East, and the ruthlessness
of its own leaders, Arab leaders, has reached such a stage now that
there's some kind of. I mean, some kind of explosion is going to come.

Over. I did a CBC interview in Toronto, which I've got a copy of, three
years before 2001, and I said an explosion is coming. And obviously.

ELEANOR HALL: But do you think an explosion is still coming?

ROBERT FISK: Oh yes. I don't. it doesn't have to be a real physical one
like 'bang'. It might be. But something is coming. I mean, I feel it very
strongly.

When I go back, when I went back for the book, I realised I was feeling it
because I live there, I live in a Muslim society, I live in the Middle
East, and all the people around me are Muslims.

And, clearly, living there, breathing that environment, I knew something
was going to happen. And I still think something's going to happen. I
don't mean September 11, but something.

ELEANOR HALL: But like what?

ROBERT FISK: Well, I mean, the Americans being driven out of Iraq is one,
isn't it?

ELEANOR HALL: But if the Americans leave Iraq the suggestion is that that
will create more stability there. Is that not likely to.

ROBERT FISK: Well, I hope it would, yes. Um, yeah but, you see, if the
Americans leave Iraq it's an enormous blow to US military and political
and strategic prestige throughout the world, there's no doubt about it.

ELEANOR HALL: So you've been warned. That's the Middle East 
Correspondent
for the British newspaper, The Independent, Robert Fisk, who's been
reporting on the Middle East for 30 years and is in Australia this week to
promote his latest book, The Great War for Civilization. He was speaking
to me earlier this morning.

***



-- 
You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, 
option D (up to 3 emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options 
(option A - 1x/week, option B - 3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option D - 
up to 3x/day) please reply and let us know!  If someone forwarded you 
this email and you want to be on our list, send an email to 
ean at sbcglobal.net and tell us which option you'd like.


"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060311/2391ac98/attachment.htm 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Sun Mar 12 07:21:33 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 10:21:33 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Mitch Potter on the ground in Afghanistan
Message-ID: <001801c645e8$a97cb790$6127e440@Harold>


The following is an article in 8 parts by my friend Mitch Potter on the Canadian soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan


Pt 1  

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_PrintFriendly&c=Article&cid=1142118641253&call_pageid=1140433364397


Pt 2

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_PrintFriendly&c=Article&cid=1142118641589&call_pageid=971358637177

Pt 3

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_PrintFriendly&c=Article&cid=1142118641259&call_pageid=1140433364397


Pt 4

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_PrintFriendly&c=Article&cid=1142118641262&call_pageid=1140433364397

Pt 5

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_PrintFriendly&c=Article&cid=1142118641265&call_pageid=1140433364397


Pt 6

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_PrintFriendly&c=Article&cid=1142118641681&call_pageid=1140433364397

Pt 7

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_PrintFriendly&c=Article&cid=1142118641285&call_pageid=1140433364397


Pt 8

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_PrintFriendly&c=Article&cid=1142118641306&call_pageid=1140433364397



Afghan special

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Render&c=Page&cid=1140433364397
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060312/67e1832a/attachment-0001.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Sun Mar 12 07:32:52 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 15:32:52 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Bush's Troubles Weigh Heavily as
	Republicans Meet
Message-ID: <20060312153252.242629FCF2@lax-gw05.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

WASHINGTON | March 12, 2006
Bush's Troubles Weigh Heavily as Republicans Meet
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
Prospective presidential candidates are wrestling with how much to associate with an increasingly unpopular sitting president.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/12/politics/12repubs.html?ex=1142830800&en=2ac8ed6a763f532c&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060312/65200948/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Sun Mar 12 07:33:22 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 15:33:22 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: A Sharp Debate Erupts in China Over
	Ideologies
Message-ID: <20060312153322.6121A236FF0@lax-gw01.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

INTERNATIONAL / ASIA PACIFIC | March 12, 2006
A Sharp Debate Erupts in China Over Ideologies
By JOSEPH KAHN
China's rising income gap has raised doubts about what some see as the country's headlong pursuit of private wealth.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/12/international/asia/12china.html?ex=1142830800&en=daacfd934cf71907&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060312/a17a2e5a/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Sun Mar 12 07:37:34 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 15:37:34 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Bloggers at the Gates: What Was Good for
	EBay Should Be Good for Politics
Message-ID: <20060312153734.EF28311FA96@lax-gw07.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

OPINION | March 12, 2006
Editorial Observer: Bloggers at the Gates: What Was Good for EBay Should Be Good for Politics
By ADAM COHEN
The authors of "Crashing the Gate" argue for the importance of the "netroots," or Internet grass roots, in political organization.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/12/opinion/12sun4.html?ex=1142830800&en=3b5b920d5855f72a&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060312/ce00b1ce/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Sun Mar 12 07:39:00 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 15:39:00 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: A Warning From South Dakota
Message-ID: <20060312153900.87BCA3AE692@lax-gw06.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

OPINION | March 12, 2006
Editorial: A Warning From South Dakota

South Dakota's law banning most abortions should serve as a warning that the threat to abortion rights has reached a new level.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/12/opinion/12sun1.html?ex=1142830800&en=4f81a12903fcb423&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060312/5f1bfe15/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Sun Mar 12 07:44:46 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 15:44:46 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: The Fallback
Message-ID: <20060312154446.24AFF11F807@lax-gw07.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

MAGAZINE | March 12, 2006
The Fallback
By MATT BAI
For those Democrats who think Hillary Clinton is not electable in 2008? Meet Mark Warner of Virginia.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/12/magazine/312bwarner.html?ex=1142830800&en=c1e700d0b19b8137&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060312/c3c390c4/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Sun Mar 12 07:46:45 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 15:46:45 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Chile Inaugurates First Woman to Serve as
	Its President
Message-ID: <20060312154645.E8C9123700F@lax-gw01.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

INTERNATIONAL / AMERICAS | March 12, 2006
Chile Inaugurates First Woman to Serve as Its President
By LARRY ROHTER
Michelle Bachelet pledged a program of economic reform, respect for human rights and sexual equality in government.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/12/international/americas/12chile.html?ex=1142830800&en=21a49fb404fb9747&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060312/ecf48b9a/attachment-0001.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sun Mar 12 07:48:49 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 10:48:49 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Crusader for Serb Honor Was Defiant Until the End -
	Washington Post
Message-ID: <441442E1.9010404@comcast.net>

Crusader for Serb Honor Was Defiant Until the End
As a Leader and a Defendant, Milosevic Exuded Pride and Rage

By Daniel Williams and R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, March 12, 2006; A16

ROME, March 11 -- Slobodan Milosevic rode nationalist pride and rage to 
power and led his Serb compatriots into four ethnic wars.

He lost them all.

Yet until the end, Milosevic played the defiant master of his own fate 
and defender of Serb honor. He insisted on managing his defense at the 
U.N. international war crimes tribunal and reveled in ridiculing 
prosecution witnesses even as his ruddy face belied the high blood 
pressure that may have contributed to his death Saturday at age 64.

At the tribunal, which was underway at The Hague, in the Netherlands, 
Milosevic was charged with overseeing the worst wartime atrocities 
against civilians in Europe since World War II. Among them was the 
massacre of about 8,000 Bosnian men and boys who were taken to the 
Bosnian town of Srebrenica and herded off for execution in areas 
throughout the mountainous region.

The trial of the former leader was in its fifth year, and he had been 
urged by the presiding judge to wrap up his defense by May.

Milosevic was one of the driving forces behind the breakup of 
Yugoslavia, a multi-ethnic state held together by the charisma and 
repression of Josip Broz, the World War II fighter and Communist leader 
known as Tito. The Balkan wars of the 1990s ended with the creation of 
five new states: Serbia and Montenegro, Croatia, Bosnia, Slovenia and 
Macedonia.

Only Slovenia and Macedonia broke off from Yugoslavia with relatively 
little bloodshed, while the wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo cost 
200,000 lives, created 3 million refugees and left damages estimated at 
$20 billion to $60 billion. The province of Kosovo is awaiting 
independence through talks aimed at finally determining its status. 
Montenegro, which is still joined with Serbia, is set to vote soon on 
whether to declare independence.

Milosevic was one of four Yugoslav political leaders at the end of the 
Tito era who sought more political control through the formation of an 
ethnically-based state. In Croatia, it was Franjo Tudjman. In Bosnia, 
Alija Izetbegovic. In Kosovo, Ibrahim Rugova.

Milosevic, who spoke in short, sharp sentences, appealed to the Serb 
sense of history and victimization. One phrase, delivered in 1987 on an 
historic battlefield in Kosovo, then a province of Serbia, set his 
career on a path of destruction. "No one will ever beat you again," he 
told a throng of Serbs who were complaining that the majority ethnic 
Albanians in the province were persecuting them.

Nearly three years later, he was elected president of Serbia in its 
first democratic elections held since World War II. He then tried to 
gain Serbian domination of the eight-member Yugoslav presidency, 
prompting resistance by the leaders of the other republics. As they 
sought political independence, he incited the Serbs in Croatia and 
Bosnia to revolt.

His pledge to unify all Serbs in one state turned into an ironic 
promise. Hundreds of thousands of Serbs were driven out of Croatia and 
Kosovo into Serbia proper. Many Bosnian Serbs now live in northern 
Bosnia, in a tense political coexistence with Croats and Muslims living 
in the country's south. Milosevic was born in the central Serbian town 
of Pozarevac to a Serbian Orthodox priest and a teacher. At different 
points in his career, he headed Yugoslavia's state-run natural gas 
company and the state-operated United Bank of Belgrade. In 1986, the 
communist apparatchik was named to head the party.

His wife, Mirjana Markovic, was a theoretician for Milosevic's Socialist 
Party. Serb authorities have charged Markovic and their son, Marko, with 
abuse of power and corruption. Marko is reported to have earned millions 
of dollars through cigarette smuggling. Both are in exile in Russia. 
Milosevic and his wife also had a daughter, Marija.

Critics say Milosevic benefited royally from power. Mladen Dinkic, Serb 
finance minister until earlier this year, wrote that Yugoslavia under 
Milosevic was a country in which "paranormal economic phenomena are an 
everyday occurrence." More than half the country's revenue was deposited 
in so-called special accounts not listed in its budget.

"This is why Serbia is poor," said Milorad Savicevic, who at the end of 
the Milosevic era managed two state-owned corporations. "We had low 
production, no investment and lots of corruption. The result is a nation 
with 4 million really poor people, and 10,000 really rich people" in a 
total population of 10 million, living on agriculturally fertile land.

Milosevic also held power through manipulation of the state-run media. 
His underlings often faxed scripts to state television and radio that 
condemned his local and foreign enemies in foul language, with orders to 
read every word on air. Milosevic appointees reviewed all news 
broadcasts and literally ripped news copy from reporters' hands if 
deemed incorrect.

Milosevic also effectively used his secret police to undermine 
opponents, and even ordered the assassination of several of his 
political rivals, according to criminal charges brought by Serb courts 
after his ouster.

The worst conflict of his years, in Bosnia, ended in 1995, when 
Milosevic signed the U.S.-brokered peace agreement in Dayton, Ohio. 
Nominally, the accord guaranteed Bosnia's statehood within its old 
borders but left the warring populations largely inhabiting separate 
areas of the country.

The Kosovo war climaxed with U.S.-led airstrikes in 1999 of Serb army 
positions in Kosovo and towns and cities in Serbia. The Serb withdrawal 
from the province opened the way to NATO-led occupation. Kosovo refugees 
returned to the province and Serbs fled in fear.

After the conclusion of each war, Milosevic faced political crises that 
he tried to put down with police repression and occasional 
assassinations. In 1996, he overturned local elections and resisted 
protest rallies that threatened his rule.

In September 2000, he lost the first direct vote for president, although 
the election commission declared the need for a runoff. Mobs attacked 
parliament, but police and the army stood by idly. On Oct. 5, Milosevic 
was ousted. The revolt was engineered in part by youthful political 
dissidents who benefited from an infusion of Western cash and training, 
but it was sustained by key military and political leaders who had 
become weary of his increasingly oppressive rule.

A successor and longtime rival, Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic, 
engineered Milosevic's extradition to The Hague in April 2001, under 
international pressure. A secret police sniper assassinated Djindjic on 
March 12, 2003, as the Djindjic government began to crack down on the 
Milosevic-era alliance between criminals and security forces. Serbia is 
now ruled by a fractious coalition that includes Milosevic's former 
Socialist Party.

Prosecutors at The Hague called 294 witnesses against Milosevic. 
Milosevic, in turn, named 1,400 people he wanted to question in his 
defense, among them former president Clinton, British Prime Minister 
Tony Blair and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, none of whom has 
been subpoenaed.

In his jail cell, Milosevic read Hemingway and John Updike, a biographer 
has reported, and listened to the music of Celine Dion and Frank 
Sinatra. Sinatra's "My Way" was a favorite.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/11/AR2006031101397.html?referrer=email
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060312/787a835c/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Sun Mar 12 07:51:33 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 15:51:33 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: A Cool Ride That Saves Gas
Message-ID: <20060312155133.B501224AF7E@lax-gw02.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

SCIENCE | March 7, 2006
Findings: A Cool Ride That Saves Gas
By JIM MOTAVALLI
Some government researchers have come up with a new idea for improving fuel economy ? the cool seat.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/07/science/07findings.html?ex=1142830800&en=5374c094b053da94&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060312/9ccb1005/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sun Mar 12 07:50:18 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 10:50:18 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] IMPORTANT PIECE: Vietnam and Iraq: Looking Back and
 Looking Ahead - Washington Post
Message-ID: <4414433A.70200@comcast.net>

Vietnam and Iraq: Looking Back and Looking Ahead

By David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 12, 2006; A04

BOSTON, March 11 -- They were talking about a guerrilla war in Asia. Or, 
fairly often, more than one.

"You cannot win against an insurgency that springs from the population," 
said Jack Valenti, former special assistant to President Lyndon B. 
Johnson. "There's never been an insurgency that doesn't prevail against 
a mighty power."

"How much reform can you do," former secretary of state Henry A. 
Kissinger wondered later, "simultaneously with fighting a war?"

The banner on their dais read "Vietnam and the Presidency" -- 
ostensibly, the subject of a high-powered conference that brought 
historians and former policymakers to the John F. Kennedy Presidential 
Library for two days ending Saturday.

But, as the speakers talked about anti-American insurgents and faulty 
U.S. intelligence and the search for an honorable way out in Southeast 
Asia, nearly all found bitter parallels to the current conflict in Iraq.

"It appears to me we haven't learned very much," said Alexander M. Haig 
Jr., Kissinger's assistant in the Nixon White House and secretary of 
state under President Ronald Reagan.

The conference's stated subject -- Vietnam's history -- was captivating 
and wrenching enough on its own. Timothy Naftali, director of the 
Presidential Recordings Program at the University of Virginia, played 
recordings of Johnson's conversations, including one from 1965 where he 
asked Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara how the war was going.

"The current battle is going very well," McNamara said, and then 
continued with a sentence whose Catch-22 logic made the audience laugh. 
"The problem is that it's not producing the conditions that will almost 
certainly win for us."

In one from 1966, Johnson said that "I know we oughtn't to be there [in 
Vietnam], but I can't get out." He never would: Thousands more troops 
would die before Johnson left office.

Throughout the weekend, there were signs that even today, more than 30 
years after the last U.S. troops left Vietnam, many of the most basic 
questions about that war remain politicized and unsettled -- questions 
as basic as: What happened there?

"The Vietnamese won," Marilyn B. Young, a professor of history at New 
York University, said after she appeared in a panel Friday.

"We defeated ourselves, with the divisions" among the American people, 
Kissinger said Saturday.

"We didn't lose Vietnam," said Haig, sitting next to Kissinger. "We quit 
Vietnam."

And there were flashes of the strong emotions that Vietnam still brings 
up. One audience member's question, submitted anonymously and read by 
the moderator, NBC news anchor Brian Williams, told the panelists, "You 
policymakers ripped the heart and soul out of . . . American families."

Another question asked Kissinger, who remains a lightning rod because of 
the Nixon administration's secret bombing of Cambodia, if he felt he had 
anything to apologize for.

"This is not the occasion for this sort of a question," Kissinger said. 
Later, though, Kissinger detailed the rationale behind the bombings, and 
told the audience, "I have no regrets" about his time in government.

For all the debates about Vietnam, there was one thing that most every 
speaker agreed on. "The sorry odor of the same aromas that we found in 
Vietnam" can be detected in Iraq today, Valenti said.

Sometimes, there were echoes of Iraq in references to Vietnam. Young 
said President Harry S. Truman's secretary of state, Dean Acheson, 
rejected intelligence reports that contradicted his belief that 
Vietnamese communist leader Ho Chi Minh was no more than a pawn of the 
Soviet Union.

"Acheson told them to keep looking, in a model of the use of 
intelligence with which we've become familiar," Young said in an oblique 
reference to criticisms that President Bush manipulated intelligence 
before the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Other speakers took on the issue directly.

"I think [Vietnam] sent a cautionary signal . . . that we should be more 
cautious in military adventurism," former president Jimmy Carter said in 
a videotaped interview played Saturday. "These lessons that were learned 
I think have been forgotten or ignored in the present Iraq war."

At times, the conference seemed to demonstrate a serious shift in at 
least some sectors of public thinking. Where just a few years ago it was 
debated whether Iraq could be called a "quagmire" such as Vietnam, here 
the question seemed to be: Could it be worse?

"There is not an adequate sense of nationhood," Kissinger said, 
contrasting Iraq's ethnic and sectarian divisions with what he called a 
more homogeneous population in Vietnam.

All told, the speakers spent two days sketching bitter parallels between 
the two fights -- comparing the Cold War "Domino Theory" of communist 
expansion with the Bush administration's ambitions to spread democracy 
in the Middle East, and comparing the Iraqi insurgents to the Viet Cong.

Eventually, some of the panelists were asked: So what should the country 
do now about Iraq?

"I'm not smart enough to figure out how to get out of Iraq," Valenti 
said, "any more than I was smart enough to figure out how to get out of 
Vietnam."

Kissinger, the man whose administration eventually did withdraw U.S. 
troops, had no solutions either.

"I know the problem," he said, "better than the answer."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/11/AR2006031101101.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060312/7374a32d/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sun Mar 12 07:52:59 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 10:52:59 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] MUST READ: Look Who's Running the World Now - David J.
 Rothkopf - Washington Post Sunday Outlook
Message-ID: <441443DB.60400@comcast.net>

Look Who's Running the World Now
By David J. Rothkopf
The Washington Post Sunday Outlook Magazine
Sunday, March 12, 2006; B01

The Dick Cheney era of foreign policy is over.


From swiggard at comcast.net  Sun Mar 12 08:00:08 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 11:00:08 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] A Rising Tide? - Washington Post Editorial
Message-ID: <44144588.2080302@comcast.net>

A Rising Tide?
Sunday, March 12, 2006; B06
Editorial
The Washington Post

THIS NATION prefers not to discuss inequality. Lacking a unifying 
religion, ethnicity or even language, it is held together by an 
appealing faith: that anyone who works hard and plays by the rules can 
attain the American dream, sharing the fruits of economic progress. But 
the trends of the past quarter-century compel a reexamination of this 
creed. When President Kennedy promised that "a rising tide lifts all 
boats," he was correct. Today that claim could be disputed.

A few numbers show why. In the 25 years from 1980 to 2004, a period 
during which U.S. gross domestic product per person grew by almost 
two-thirds, the wages of the typical worker actually fell slightly after 
accounting for inflation. So, too, did wages for the 50 percent of the 
work force that earned less than the typical, or median, employee. The 
rising tide helped only workers at the top. Wages for workers in the 
90th percentile -- that is, workers who earned more than 90 percent of 
their peers -- jumped by more than a quarter.

Other measures tell variants on this story. More women are working, so 
household income, as distinct from individual wages, has risen. The 
value of health benefits has increased, so counting these plus other 
non-wage income from investments also paints a brighter picture. Between 
1980 and 2003, total after-tax income for the bottom fifth of households 
rose 8 percent, and the second-bottom fifth gained 17 percent; in other 
words, all boats did rise, albeit by less than 1 percent per year. But 
it's hard to celebrate such modest gains when the top fifth advanced 59 
percent over the 24-year period.

Depending on which statistics you choose, the tide is either not lifting 
most boats or lifting many of them modestly. At times over the past 
quarter-century, commentators have hoped that this disappointing 
performance was temporary. Perhaps it was caused by a one-time shock 
from the arrival of the personal computer, which made junior clerical 
workers less valuable? Perhaps it reflected a one-time jump in 
competition from foreign workers following the creation of the World 
Trade Organization and the North American Free Trade Agreement? Or maybe 
it reflected social pathologies among the poor that could be changed by 
welfare reform? All these theories had their day; but after a 
quarter-century of disappointment, the struggles of Americans in the 
bottom half of the income distribution cannot be viewed as temporary.

Many argue that, as long as most households are not retreating, 
inequality shouldn't be a worry. The rich are entitled to the fruits of 
their labor: These reflect talent, hard work, risk-taking and 
innovation, and only an economy that rewards such things can be dynamic. 
This is true up to a point. But when big rewards for high achievers 
don't produce an economy that helps ordinary folk, the case for big 
rewards loses some of its appeal.

Moreover, Americans have tolerated divisions between rich and poor 
because they believed that anyone could get ahead, given enough talent 
and determination. But the truth is that rags-to-riches stories have 
never been the norm: One study of people reaching adulthood between 1968 
and 1998 found that 42 percent of those born into the poorest fifth 
ended up there also. As the distance between the top and bottom grows 
wider, it becomes harder to traverse the gulf. Family background has a 
larger impact on people's prospects. The talent of people born into poor 
families goes wasted.

The idea that everyone should start life with decent opportunities 
helped to inspire the American Revolution and the civil rights movement; 
it is an idea that this nation forsakes at its peril. But there are 
other reasons to worry about inequality. Surveys find that if you ask 
people whether they'd prefer to earn $100,000 in a society in which the 
average pay is $80,000, or $110,000 in a society in which average pay is 
$130,000, respondents pick the lower salary in order to feel rich in 
relative terms.

This isn't just irrational. Riches and poverty are partly relative 
concepts. The more unequal a society, the more citizens in the bottom 
half will experience hardship. When people at the top gain more 
disposable income, they bid up the prices of goods in limited supply -- 
homes in top school districts, or places at top colleges. Tuitions at 
four-year colleges have more than doubled since 1980, with the result 
that gaps in enrollment by class and race, which declined in the 1960s 
and 1970s, are as wide now as 30 years ago. The wealth of people in the 
top half also bids up the common understanding of what a middle-class 
lifestyle entails. People feel obliged to spend more on birthday gifts, 
children's sneakers or a suit for the next job interview. Since 1980, 
the median size of a newly built house has increased by a third -- even 
while the household savings rate has fallen to about zero.

So it's not quite true that the rich can enjoy their riches without 
harming anyone; their money changes life for people lower down. This 
might not matter if inequality brought compensating gains: if the growth 
of relative disadvantage were offset by absolute wage rises or by social 
mobility. But increases in wages have been small or negative, and the 
United States has become less socially mobile than nations such as 
Sweden and Germany.

This editorial marks the start of an occasional series about inequality. 
We do not believe that reducing it should become the sole priority for 
economic policy, as the next installment will explain, and we recognize 
that trends in the global economy may make some rise in inequality 
inevitable. But the quest for a more equal society should not be 
smothered by protests of "class warfare." Yes, some popular remedies for 
inequality would backfire, stifling growth or wasting money. But there 
are promising policies out there, too: policies that would reduce 
inequality without damaging growth; in fact, policies that might boost it.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/11/AR2006031101051.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060312/dfb71ffc/attachment-0001.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Sun Mar 12 08:04:34 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (Mike Blaxill)
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 08:04:34 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] Lap Dogs of the Press - by Helen Thomas
Message-ID: <20060312160435.87370.qmail@web53007.mail.yahoo.com>

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/031106G.shtml

Lap Dogs of the Press
    By Helen Thomas
    The Nation

    Friday 10 March 2006

    Of all the unhappy trends I have witnessed -
conservative swings on television networks,
dwindling newspaper circulation, the jailing of
reporters and "spin" - nothing is more troubling
to me than the obsequious press during the run-up
to the invasion of Iraq. They lapped up
everything the Pentagon and White House could
dish out - no questions asked.

    Reporters and editors like to think of
themselves as watchdogs for the public good. But
in recent years both individual reporters and
their ever-growing corporate ownership have
defaulted on that role. Ted Stannard, an academic
and former UPI correspondent, put it this way:
"When watchdogs, bird dogs, and bull dogs morph
into lap dogs, lazy dogs, or yellow dogs, the
nation is in trouble."

    The naive complicity of the press and the
government was never more pronounced than in the
prelude to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
The media became an echo chamber for White House
pronouncements. One example: At President Bush's
March 6, 2003, news conference, in which he made
it eminently clear that the United States was
going to war, one reporter pleased the "born
again" Bush when she asked him if he prayed about
going to war. And so it went.

    After all, two of the nation's most
prestigious newspapers, the New York Times and
the Washington Post, had kept up a drumbeat for
war with Iraq to bring down Dictator Saddam
Hussein. They accepted almost unquestioningly the
bogus evidence of weapons of mass destruction,
the dubious White House rationale that proved to
be so costly on a human scale, not to mention a
drain on the Treasury. The Post was much more
hawkish than the Times - running many editorials
pumping up the need to wage war against the Iraqi
dictator - but both newspapers played into the
hands of the Administration.

    When Secretary of State Colin Powell
delivered his ninety-minute "boffo" statement on
Saddam's lethal toxic arsenal on February 5,
2003, before the United Nations, the Times said
he left "little question that Mr. Hussein had
tried hard to conceal" a so-called smoking gun or
weapons of mass destruction. After two US special
weapons inspection task forces, headed by chief
weapons inspector David Kay and later by Charles
Duelfer, came up empty in the scouring of Iraq
for WMD, did you hear any apologies from the Bush
Administration? Of course not. It simply changed
its rationale for the war - several times. Nor
did the media say much about the failed weapons
search. Several newspapers made it a front-page
story but only gave it one-day coverage. As for
Powell, he simply lost his halo. The newspapers
played his back-pedaling inconspicuously on the
back pages.

    My concern is why the nation's media were so
gullible. Did they really think it was all going
to be so easy, a "cakewalk," a superpower
invading a Third World country? Why did the
Washington press corps forgo its traditional
skepticism? Why did reporters become cheerleaders
for a deceptive Administration? Could it be that
no one wanted to stand alone outside Washington's
pack journalism?

    Tribune Media Services editor Robert Koehler
summed it up best. In his August 20, 2004, column
in the San Francisco Chronicle Koehler wrote,
"Our print media pacesetters, the New York Times,
and just the other day, the Washington Post, have
searched their souls over the misleading pre-war
coverage they foisted on the nation last year,
and blurted out qualified Reaganesque mea culpas:
'Mistakes were made.'"

    All the blame cannot be laid at the doorstep
of the print media. CNN's war correspondent,
Christiane Amanpour, was critical of her own
network for not asking enough questions about
WMD. She attributed it to the competition for
ratings with Fox, which had an inside track to
top Administration officials.

    Despite the apologies of the mainstream press
for not having vigilantly questioned evidence of
WMD and links to terrorists in the early stages
of the war, the newspapers dropped the ball again
by ignoring for days a damaging report in the
London Times on May 1, 2005. That report revealed
the so-called Downing Street memo, the minutes of
a high-powered confidential meeting that British
Prime Minister Tony Blair held with his top
advisers on Bush's forthcoming plans to attack
Iraq. At the secret session Richard Dearlove,
former head of British intelligence, told Blair
that Bush "wanted to remove Saddam Hussein
through military action, justified by the
conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the
intelligence and facts were being fixed around
the policy."

    The Downing Street memo was a bombshell when
discussed by the bloggers, but the mainstream
print media ignored it until it became too
embarrassing to suppress any longer. The Post
discounted the memo as old news and pointed to
reports it had many months before on the buildup
to the war. Los Angeles Times editorial page
editor Michael Kinsley decided that the
classified minutes of the Blair meeting were not
a "smoking gun." The New York Times touched on
the memo in a dispatch during the last days
leading up to the British elections, but put it
in the tenth paragraph.

    All this took me back to the days immediately
following the unraveling of the Watergate
scandal. The White House press corps realized it
had fallen asleep at the switch - not that all
the investigative reporting could have been done
by those on the so-called "body watch," which
travels everywhere with the President and has no
time to dig for facts. But looking back, they
knew they had missed many clues on the Watergate
scandal and were determined to become much more
skeptical of what was being dished out to them at
the daily briefings. And, indeed, they were. The
White House press room became a lion's den.

    By contrast, after the White House lost its
credibility in rationalizing the pre-emptive
assault on Iraq, the correspondents began to come
out of their coma, yet they were still too timid
to challenge Administration officials, who were
trying to put a good face on a bad situation.

    I recall one exchange of mine with press
secretary Scott McClellan last May that
illustrates the difference, and what I mean by
the skeptical reporting during Watergate.

    Helen: The other day, in fact this week, you
[McClellan] said that we, the United States, are
in Afghanistan and Iraq by invitation. Would you
like to correct that incredible distortion of
American history?

    Scott: No. We are ... that's where we are
currently.

    Helen: In view of your credibility, which is
already mired ... how can you say that?

    Scott: Helen, I think everyone in this room
knows that you're taking that comment out of
context. There are two democratically elected
governments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    Helen: Were we invited into Iraq?

    Scott: There are democratically elected
governments now in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we
are there at their invitation. They are sovereign
governments, but we are there today.

    Helen: You mean, if they asked us out, that
we would have left?

    Scott: No, Helen, I'm talking about today. We
are there at their invitation. They are sovereign
governments.

    Helen: I'm talking about today, too.

    Scott: We are doing all we can to train and
equip their security forces so that they can
provide their own security as they move forward
on a free and democratic future.

    Helen: Did we invade those countries?

    At that point McClellan called on another
reporter.

    Those were the days when I longed for
ABC-TV's great Sam Donaldson to back up my
questions as he always did, and I did the same
for him and other daring reporters. Then I
realized that the old pros, reporters whom I had
known in the past, many of them around during
World War II and later the Vietnam War, reporters
who had some historical perspective on government
deception and folly, were not around anymore.

    I honestly believe that if reporters had put
the spotlight on the flaws in the Bush
Administration's war policies, they could have
saved the country the heartache and the losses of
American and Iraqi lives.

    It is past time for reporters to forget the
party line, ask the tough questions and let the
chips fall where they may. 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sun Mar 12 08:02:18 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 11:02:18 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] India Is Not a Precedent - Robert Kagan - Washington
	Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <4414460A.2030702@comcast.net>

India Is Not a Precedent
Circumstances Justify the 'Double Standard' of Our Nuclear Deal

By Robert Kagan
The Washington Post
Sunday, March 12, 2006; B07

Imagine a huge nation, a huge democracy, increasingly prosperous, 
increasingly powerful and increasingly sympathetic to the ideological 
and strategic objectives of the United States and its democratic allies 
around the world. Imagine that this powerful, prosperous, democratic 
nation sits on the same continent with Russia and China, two huge 
geopolitical problems waiting to happen. Imagine that this nation 
possesses a navy capable of helping patrol strategically vital waterways 
and a military force capable of acting as a deterrent against powerful 
neighbors. Finally, imagine that this nation, despite its power, has no 
record of using it for aggressive purposes but has been a remarkably 
peaceful and often constructive member of the global community.

Would we or would we not want to have the closest possible relationship, 
partnership, even alliance with such a country as we head into an 
uncertain future?

The answer, as Bismarck would have said, is a no-brainer. That is why 
earlier this month the Bush administration made a deal with this nation, 
India, to provide it with civilian nuclear technology. In the process, 
the administration effectively let India off the hook for its 
decades-old nuclear weapons program and made an exception to its 
otherwise strict refusal to provide civilian nuclear technology to 
nations that do not abide by certain international guidelines. The 
result, critics have asserted, is that other nations may be encouraged 
to follow India's path and that the nuclear nonproliferation "regime" 
has therefore been damaged.

No doubt it has been damaged. But the question is whether the benefits 
outweigh the costs. I will leave to others the matter of whether this 
deal will really encourage, say, Brazil or South Africa to resume 
nuclear weapons programs they long ago abandoned, though I'm inclined to 
doubt it. The bigger question likely to consume endless hours of 
hearings on Capitol Hill in coming weeks is what effect the deal will 
have on the problem of Iran. Some will argue that the Indian nuclear 
deal harms efforts to halt Iran's nuclear weapons program because it 
erects a double standard: We are willing to let India do what we are not 
willing to let Iran do.

The question is interesting in theory. In the real world, it's not that 
interesting. The notion that the Indian deal will set back prospects for 
a diplomatic deal with Iran assumes that such prospects exist. All 
available evidence suggests otherwise. The Iranian government appears 
committed to building nuclear weapons and will not be deterred by 
threats -- except possibly the threat of removal by military means -- or 
won over by blandishments. It has risked international isolation and 
economic sanctions and even the remote threat of U.S. air and missile 
strikes to keep its program going. Are we supposed to believe that the 
main obstacle standing in the way of a happy resolution to the Iranian 
nuclear crisis is now the Indian deal?

As for double standards, yes, we have double standards. The nuclear 
Non-Proliferation Treaty erected a gargantuan double standard. It 
declared that possession of the world's most devastating and militarily 
decisive weapons would be limited to the five nations that already 
possessed them. And this was a particularly mindless kind of double 
standard, since membership in the nuclear "club" was not based on 
justice or morality or strategic judgment or politics but simply on 
circumstance: Whoever had figured out how to build nuclear weapons by 
1968 was in. At least our double standard for India makes strategic, 
diplomatic, ideological and political sense.

Nor should we delude ourselves that the nuclear double standard has been 
preserved over the years by a treaty. If other nations have denied 
themselves nuclear weapons programs it is because (a) they did not 
believe they needed them, (b) they did not have the wherewithal to build 
them or (c) they feared punishment at the hands of the nuclear powers if 
they tried to build them. To the degree that nonproliferation has 
succeeded, it has been due less to the treaty than to the concerted 
actions of the nuclear powers. And to the degree that it has failed, 
that is also due to the actions of the nuclear powers, which provided 
materials and technologies to states such as Pakistan, North Korea and Iran.

In fact, the nonproliferation "regime" may now be collapsing. That 
doesn't mean we should precipitously abandon it. We have an interest in 
slowing the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and the nonproliferation 
regime remains one tool of persuasion. But as in the past, and as always 
in international affairs, there must be some adjustment to reality. One 
aspect of the present reality is that India has long been a nuclear 
power, and this deal doesn't make it more of one. Another part of the 
present reality is that North Korea and Iran are probably going to be 
nuclear powers, too, and in any case the nonproliferation "regime" is 
not going to stop them.

Were Congress somehow to reject the administration's deal in some effort 
to maintain a consistent principle on nonproliferation, it would have no 
effect on Iran's decisions. But that futile gesture would have a 
devastating effect on U.S. relations with India. In our less-than-ideal 
world, where, we are often told, America needs good friends and allies, 
that would be a terrible bargain.

Robert Kagan, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for 
International Peace and transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall 
Fund, writes a monthly column for The Post.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/10/AR2006031001865.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060312/f2658562/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sun Mar 12 08:05:13 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 11:05:13 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] WORTH A LOOK: The politics of female voters - The Boston
	Globe
Message-ID: <441446B9.3030009@comcast.net>


  The politics of female voters

By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist  |  March 12, 2006

ONE OF the myths that Kate O'Beirne skewers in ''Women Who Make the 
World Worse," her shrewd and refreshing new book on the modern women's 
movement, is the myth of the gender gap -- the potent edge that 
Democrats are supposed to have over Republicans when it comes to 
attracting women's votes.

For decades, writes O'Beirne, feminists have been brandishing the gender 
gap. Eleanor Smeal, a former president of the National Organization for 
Women, published a triumphant book about it in 1984: ''Why and How Women 
Will Elect the Next President." But on Election Day that November, 
Democrat Walter Mondale was flattened by Ronald Reagan's 49-state 
landslide, despite Mondale's historic choice of a female running mate, 
New York congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro. Reagan won 62 percent of the 
male vote and 56 percent of the female vote -- a six-point gender gap, 
but probably not what Smeal had in mind.

Of the last seven presidential elections, Republicans have won five -- 
three times with more women's votes than the Democrats. For all the 
rhetoric about the mighty gender gap -- Democratic strategist Ann Lewis 
once called it ''the Grand Canyon of American politics" -- Republicans 
seem to bridge it without difficulty.

That's because women aren't monolithic voters, as O'Beirne emphasizes, 
and they don't march in lockstep to the beat of liberal drums. The best 
evidence of that is the electoral gap that really does matter in 
American politics -- the gap separating married women from those who are 
single.

Unlike the gender gap, there is nothing illusory about the marriage gap. 
Married women are more likely to vote Republican; unmarried women are 
more likely to vote Democratic. In the most recent presidential 
election, unmarried women voted for John Kerry by a 25-point margin, 
while President Bush won the votes of married women by an 11-point 
margin -- a marriage gap of 36 points.

''Want to know which candidate a woman is likely to support for 
president?" asked USA Today in 2004, as the Kerry-Bush race was heading 
into the home stretch. ''Look at her ring finger."

Why? What is it about wedlock that makes women more Republican -- or 
about the absence of wedlock that makes them more Democratic? Here are 
three hypotheses:

Financial protection. Single women, especially if they have children, 
are more likely to be dependent on the government for welfare, Social 
Security, and other economic benefits. A majority of unmarried women, 54 
percent, have household incomes below $30,000, double the percentage of 
married women with incomes that low. With greater reason to be anxious 
about economic security, single women tend to support a more active and 
paternalistic role for government -- the traditional Democratic view. 
Married women, by contrast, are much less likely to depend on government 
support. Instead, many come to see the welfare state and its tax burden 
as a threat to the well-being of their family, making them more likely 
to vote Republican.

Children and cultural values. Married parents with children are less 
likely to support the party whose policies make it harder to shield 
their children from corrosive cultural influences. ''Kerry did not have 
a single message that resonated with married parents," the scholar 
Barbara Dafoe Whitehead wrote after the 2004 election. ''He opposed the 
right to parental notification for minors' abortions, condoned 
partial-birth abortion, and said not a single word about television's 
graphic depictions of sex, violence, [and] murder." Democratic leaders, 
too, often seem bemused by the kind of Americans who ''put religious 
bumper-stickers on their cars and struggle to 'work on their marriage' 
while keeping their kids away from sex, drugs, and alcohol, as well as 
the lesser lures of body piercings, tattoos, gangsta clothes, and other 
pop fashion."

Male influence. Women are significantly less likely than men to follow 
national and international affairs, a knowledge gap that researchers 
have documented for decades. In a new survey conducted for Women's 
Voices, Women Vote by the Democratic polling firm of GQR Research, a 
large majority of nonvoting single women -- 70 percent -- said they 
''find politics and elections so complicated that it is hard to 
understand what is really going on." That helps explain why single women 
are much less likely to vote. It also explains why married women more 
often adopt their husband's political outlook -- which tends to be more 
conservative -- than the other way around.

Of course there are many voters who don't fit these patterns. But this 
much seems clear: Democrats gain when women stay single, Republicans 
benefit when they marry. Marriage may be good for society as a whole. 
But only the GOP has a political incentive to say so.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/12/the_politics_of_female_voters/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060312/408fe532/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sun Mar 12 08:06:44 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 11:06:44 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] The buzz on Hillary Clinton - Joan Vennochi - Boston
	Globe Op-Ed
Message-ID: <44144714.3040209@comcast.net>


  The buzz on Hillary Clinton

By Joan Vennochi  |  March 12, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

CAN HILLARY Clinton make it to the White House?

She has money, support from party insiders, and nonstop political buzz. 
The Democratic presidential nomination is considered hers for the 
taking. But there is still reason to doubt that the junior senator from 
New York, who is also Bill Clinton's wife, will make it to the Oval Office.

Recent political surveys taken in New York and California show voters 
who say they are ready for a female president, but less ready for 
Hillary Clinton to be the first. Last month, a survey by the Marist 
College Institute for Public Opinion indicated that two-thirds of 
Americans believe another Clinton will run for president, but only 
one-third believe this one can win. The latest national ABC/Washington 
Post poll shows that Clinton garners a 52 percent favorability rating, 
and 46 percent unfavorability rating.

Clinton's political problem is usually described as ''divisiveness." 
Gender bias also plays a role. Republicans are trying to paint her as 
''too angry" to be president.

But conviction might be the biggest obstacle: Does Clinton have it about 
anything other than a desire to be the first female president?

In mathematics, the shortest distance between two points is a straight 
line. In politics, Bill and Hillary Clinton traditionally rely on the 
triangle to get them where they need to go.

In the past, Clinton ''triangulation" meant positioning oneself between 
the Democrats and Republicans in Congress. This time around, the 
Clintons are giving triangulation a new meaning. On controversial 
issues, they are in opposite corners, essentially covering all the bases.

Take the Dubai ports deal. In February, Hillary Clinton denounced the 
deal to allow the state-owned Dubai company to manage some terminal 
operations at six American ports. In March, the Financial Times revealed 
that Bill Clinton, former president and first husband-in-waiting, was 
advising the United Arab Emirates about landing the deal. Last week, the 
Dubai company dropped out of the deal, under pressure from Republicans 
and Democrats who relentlessly attacked the premise that some US port 
terminals should be sold to an Arab state company.

The Clintons are doing the same thing regarding Iraq. Hillary Clinton 
voted for the Iraq war resolution, defends her vote, and says the United 
States must finish what it started. Last November, Bill Clinton told an 
Arab student audience that the US invasion of Iraq had been a ''big 
mistake."

Husbands and wives are free to disagree on politics. But with the 
Clintons, when does a policy disagreement become a strategy to straddle 
both sides of the issue? Should voters take Hillary Clinton's policy 
statements at face value? Or should they see Bill Clinton winking and 
conclude what he says out loud is what Hillary is really thinking?

Most important for the 2008 presidential campaign, how does the 
Clintonian practice of covering all the bases measure up against a 
prospective opponent such as Senator John McCain?

The Arizona Republican cultivates the image of a straight talker. He 
backed President Bush on the ports deal and criticized ''the near 
hysteria" of critics, including Hillary Clinton. He endorses the Iraq 
war policy, although he criticizes aspects of its execution.

McCain happily exploits the image of a man unafraid to say what he 
believes, even if those beliefs are at odds with public opinion. That 
latest ABC/Washington Post poll shows that Americans hold McCain in 
exceptionally high regard. Fifty-nine percent of those polled had a 
favorable opinion of him; 29 percent had an unfavorable view. McCain 
also has broad bipartisan appeal.

Conviction and strength are two ingredients vital to a winning 
presidential campaign strategy. They helped reelect Bush, although over 
the last year, those once-perceived presidential qualities have devolved 
to stubbornness and ineptness.

The 2004 presidential campaign showed that voters don't always have to 
agree with a candidate, but they want to be reasonably clear about what 
a candidate believes. That was part of John Kerry's downfall, and it is 
Hillary Clinton's biggest challenge. What does she believe?

As Mrs. Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton showed strength in the face of 
political and personal adversity. As a presidential contender, she must 
demonstrate it in a different context.

Together, Hillary and Bill Clinton can win the presidential nomination; 
but they both can't win the presidency. Voters must believe Hillary 
Clinton has the strength to do the job on her own, and the convictions 
to deserve it.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/12/the_buzz_on_hillary_clinton/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060312/b89f63bc/attachment.htm 

From hecate at diamonddragon.com  Sun Mar 12 08:49:23 2006
From: hecate at diamonddragon.com (Hecate)
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 16:49:23 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] BBC E-mail: Internet blows CIA agents' cover
Message-ID: <20060312_164923_064501.hecate@diamonddragon.com>

Hecate saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you
should see it.



** Internet blows CIA agents' cover **
The Chicago Tribune says it has compiled a list of 2,653 CIA employees, just by searching the internet.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/americas/4799174.stm >


** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all
in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/dailyemail/ >


** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have?been verified.

If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm


From michael at michaelbutler.com  Sun Mar 12 10:45:29 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 10:45:29 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] A Village Waiting for Rape and Murder By NICHOLAS D.
	KRISTOF
Message-ID: <C039AC49.29FBB%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 12, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
A Village Waiting for Rape and Murder
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

KOLOY, Chad

Politely but insistently, the people in this town explained that they were
about to be massacred.

"The janjaweed militias have already destroyed all the villages east of
Koloy," Adam Omar, a local sheik, explained somberly. "Any moment, they will
attack us here.

This remote market town of thatch-roof mud huts near the Chad-Sudan border
is on the front line of the genocidal fury that Sudan has unleashed on
several black African tribes. After killing several hundred thousand people
in its own Darfur region, Sudan's government is now sending its brutal
janjaweed militias to kill the same tribes here in Chad.

President Bush is showing signs that he may be ready to stand up to the
thugs in Sudan, but China is protecting Sudan, Europe is inert, and the
African Union can't even muster the courage to call for immediate U.N.
peacekeepers. So the people here are probably right to resign themselves to
be slaughtered ? if not sooner, then later.

Koloy has no electricity and no phones, so the people could not call for
help. But even if they could, no one could help them. Chad's small army had
sent a few trucks of troops the previous day, but after learning that they
faced more than 500 janjaweed armed with heavy machine guns, the Chadian
soldiers had dashed away again. As I drove into town, the town's police
force was fleeing on horseback.

I visited the "hospital" ? an open-sided tent that lacked any medical
personnel but was filled with gunshot victims. Local leaders told me that
the janjaweed were only three miles away and had sent word that they would
attack Koloy that day.

"When they see you, they shoot you," said Adam Zakaria, the sheik of a
nearby village, Gindeiza, that had been attacked the day before. Mr. Adam
had one bullet wound in his foot and another in his thigh.

"I know the man who shot me," Mr. Adam said. "He used to be my friend." That
man, Hussein al-Beheri, is an Arab neighbor. But last year, according to Mr.
Adam's account, Mr. Hussein joined the janjaweed and now regularly attacks
non-Arabs.

"I told him, 'Don't shoot me!' " Mr. Adam recalled. "Three or four times, I
pleaded, 'Don't shoot me.' And then he shot me."

Ten people are known dead in his village, Mr. Adam said, but many others are
missing ? and no one has been able to look for dead bodies because the
janjaweed still occupy the village. Among those missing, he said, are his
two wives and four children.

"I have not seen them since yesterday, when they were in the village," he
said. "In my heart, I think they are dead."

This entire area gets no visits from diplomats and no help from the U.N. or
aid groups, because it is too risky. Only one organization, Doctors Without
Borders, sticks it out, sending in a convoy of intrepid doctors three days a
week to pull bullets out of victims.

It was nerve-racking to be in Koloy, and my local interpreter kept insisting
that we rush away. But I've never felt more helpless than the moment I
pulled away in my Toyota Land Cruiser, waving goodbye to people convinced
that they would soon be murdered.

In the end, there was no janjaweed attack that day. Perhaps that's because
the janjaweed have found that it is inconvenient to drive away absolutely
all Africans; now the janjaweed sometimes leave market towns alone so that
their own families can still have places to shop.

The people of Koloy are still waiting to be massacred. Think for a moment
what it would be like to huddle with your family every day, paralyzed by
fear, waiting for the end.

And then remember that all this can be stopped. You can go to
www.millionvoicesfordarfur.org and send a postcard to President Bush,
encouraging him to do more. At www.genocideintervention.net, you can find a
list of "10 things you can do right now."

Maybe it seems that you have no real power to change anything in Koloy, but,
frankly, right now you're the only hope that the people in Koloy have.
?

Bill O'Reilly refused to join me on this trip, passing up the $727,000 that
my readers had pledged to sponsor his trip to Darfur. But Ann Curry of the
"Today" show and a top-notch NBC crew did travel with me on this trip.
Unlike Bill, Ann didn't flinch at traveling in janjaweed-infested areas or
at staying in a primitive $4-a-night "hotel" with no plumbing. (O.K., she
did shudder just a little at the wildlife in the hotel's outhouse.) If you
want to break your heart, watch her reports beginning tomorrow ? and ABC and
CBS, where are you?

In the meantime, watch my Op-Ed special report from this trip, "The Genocide
Spreads."

Frank Rich is on a book leave.

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From michael at michaelbutler.com  Sun Mar 12 10:52:40 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 10:52:40 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Hillary and the Ports By DAVID BROOKS
Message-ID: <C039ADF8.29FBD%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 12, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Hillary and the Ports
By DAVID BROOKS

A couple of years ago I watched Hillary Clinton enter a Munich hotel with a
delegation of fellow senators. Clinton came in first. There were about 50
paparazzi by the doors. Cameras flashed, people screamed. There was general
pandemonium as she walked through the lobby, like Elizabeth Taylor in her
prime descending upon Cannes. The hotel manager escorted her into a waiting
elevator and whisked her to her suite.

Then the other senators came in the doors. The camera crews started packing
up. The crowd dispersed. No hotel manager awaited them. They pushed the
button for the elevator and milled about until it came.

United States senators are not entirely lacking in vanity. So I thought
there might be a tinge of resentment at Clinton's diva treatment. But not at
all. Other senators like traveling with her. She's down to earth and fun to
be around, they say. At work, she's serious, diligent and respectful.

So when I've been asked if I think Hillary Clinton can win a general
election campaign, I've always answered yes. I figure if she can win over
Republican senators (and Bush staffers), she can probably win over 30,000
more voters in Ohio.

She's also got a key voting bloc disposed in her favor. Ten percent of the
electorate are what Pew Research Center pollsters call pro-government
conservatives: mostly white, working-class women who attend church weekly
but support government welfare programs. Only 12 percent of these voters
supported John Kerry in 2004, but 51 percent say they have a positive view
of Clinton. These voters alone could put her over the top.

But campaigns reveal character, and force us to adjust our views. The Dubai
ports deal ? a politically unpopular measure that almost all experts agree
was justified on the merits ? was a test of character. John McCain and Chuck
Hagel passed. Clinton, though, joined the ranks of the nakedly ambitious
demagogues.

Clinton didn't seem to mind when officials of the United Arab Emirates
kicked in up to a million dollars into her husband's presidential library.
She didn't seem alarmed when Dubai poured at least $450,000 into her family
bank accounts through her husband's speaking business. She didn't object
when the Clinton administration approved a deal for a Chinese government
firm to run the Port of Long Beach. But when the Dubai ports deal set off
Know-Nothing mobs, she made sure she had the biggest pitchfork.

"The White House is trying to hand over U.S. ports," Clinton charged.

"We cannot afford to surrender our port operations to foreign governments,"
she roared.

"We cannot cede sovereignty over critical infrastructure like our ports,"
she insisted.

All of these statements were deliberately misleading, since there was never
any question of ceding sovereignty or security. They played to the rawest
form of xenophobia.

The consequences for the war on terror will be significant. As David
Ignatius wrote in The Washington Post, the government of Dubai has done what
we've asked all Arab governments to do. It has challenged Al Qaeda;
supported U.S. forces; modernized the educational system to combat
extremism. It even gave $100 million in hurricane relief. We've proved that
we may be inept in combating our foes, but we're ruthlessly efficient in
betraying our friends.

But my subject is Clinton's political prospects. This episode ? which
combines buckraking with pandering ? brings back the Clinton years at their
worst: the me-me-me selfishness, the occasional presumption that humanity
exists to serve Team Clinton.

It also shows Clinton doesn't understand her political weaknesses. First,
nobody, not even among her friends, is totally sure she actually believes in
anything, or whether she just coldly calculates political advantage. This
episode reinforces that sense.

Second, Clinton is the only presidential candidate who does not offer a
break from the current polarization and bitter partisanship. A McCain or
Mark Warner presidency would shuffle the political deck. But if Clinton is
elected, American politics over the next years will be as brutal and
stagnant as now. The 1960's Bush-Clinton psychodrama would go on and on.

A lot of the bitterness would not be Clinton's fault. But over the past
weeks, she has shown that far from behaving in an unorthodox manner, or
flummoxing hatred, she is happy to be a crude partisan, and egg on prejudice
and paranoia.

In the short run, Clinton did the popular thing. But over the long run,
people vote on character. After a rehabilitating few years, Hillary Clinton
just reminded us of her ugly side.

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From michael at michaelbutler.com  Sun Mar 12 11:00:16 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 11:00:16 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Defenders of the Faith By SLAVOJ ZIZEK
Message-ID: <C039AFC0.29FBE%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 12, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
Defenders of the Faith
By SLAVOJ ZIZEK

London

FOR centuries, we have been told that without religion we are no more than
egotistic animals fighting for our share, our only morality that of a pack
of wolves; only religion, it is said, can elevate us to a higher spiritual
level. Today, when religion is emerging as the wellspring of murderous
violence around the world, assurances that Christian or Muslim or Hindu
fundamentalists are only abusing and perverting the noble spiritual messages
of their creeds ring increasingly hollow. What about restoring the dignity
of atheism, one of Europe's greatest legacies and perhaps our only chance
for peace?

More than a century ago, in "The Brothers Karamazov" and other works,
Dostoyevsky warned against the dangers of godless moral nihilism, arguing in
essence that if God doesn't exist, then everything is permitted. The French
philosopher Andr? Glucksmann even applied Dostoyevsky's critique of godless
nihilism to 9/11, as the title of his book, "Dostoyevsky in Manhattan,"
suggests.

This argument couldn't have been more wrong: the lesson of today's terrorism
is that if God exists, then everything, including blowing up thousands of
innocent bystanders, is permitted ? at least to those who claim to act
directly on behalf of God, since, clearly, a direct link to God justifies
the violation of any merely human constraints and considerations. In short,
fundamentalists have become no different than the "godless" Stalinist
Communists, to whom everything was permitted since they perceived themselves
as direct instruments of their divinity, the Historical Necessity of
Progress Toward Communism.

During the Seventh Crusade, led by St. Louis, Yves le Breton reported how he
once encountered an old woman who wandered down the street with a dish full
of fire in her right hand and a bowl full of water in her left hand. Asked
why she carried the two bowls, she answered that with the fire she would
burn up Paradise until nothing remained of it, and with the water she would
put out the fires of Hell until nothing remained of them: "Because I want no
one to do good in order to receive the reward of Paradise, or from fear of
Hell; but solely out of love for God." Today, this properly Christian
ethical stance survives mostly in atheism.

Fundamentalists do what they perceive as good deeds in order to fulfill
God's will and to earn salvation; atheists do them simply because it is the
right thing to do. Is this also not our most elementary experience of
morality? When I do a good deed, I do so not with an eye toward gaining
God's favor; I do it because if I did not, I could not look at myself in the
mirror. A moral deed is by definition its own reward. David Hume, a
believer, made this point in a very poignant way, when he wrote that the
only way to show true respect for God is to act morally while ignoring God's
existence.

Two years ago, Europeans were debating whether the preamble of the European
Constitution should mention Christianity as a key component of the European
legacy. As usual, a compromise was worked out, a reference in general terms
to the "religious inheritance" of Europe. But where was modern Europe's most
precious legacy, that of atheism? What makes modern Europe unique is that it
is the first and only civilization in which atheism is a fully legitimate
option, not an obstacle to any public post.

Atheism is a European legacy worth fighting for, not least because it
creates a safe public space for believers. Consider the debate that raged in
Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, my home country, as the constitutional
controversy simmered: should Muslims (mostly immigrant workers from the old
Yugoslav republics) be allowed to build a mosque? While conservatives
opposed the mosque for cultural, political and even architectural reasons,
the liberal weekly journal Mladina was consistently outspoken in its support
for the mosque, in keeping with its concern for the rights of those from
other former Yugoslav republics.

Not surprisingly, given its liberal attitudes, Mladina was also one of the
few Slovenian publications to reprint the infamous caricatures of Muhammad.
And, conversely, those who displayed the greatest "understanding" for the
violent Muslim protests those cartoons caused were also the ones who
regularly expressed their concern for the fate of Christianity in Europe.

These weird alliances confront Europe's Muslims with a difficult choice: the
only political force that does not reduce them to second-class citizens and
allows them the space to express their religious identity are the "godless"
atheist liberals, while those closest to their religious social practice,
their Christian mirror-image, are their greatest political enemies. The
paradox is that Muslims' only real allies are not those who first published
the caricatures for shock value, but those who, in support of the ideal of
freedom of expression, reprinted them.

While a true atheist has no need to boost his own stance by provoking
believers with blasphemy, he also refuses to reduce the problem of the
Muhammad caricatures to one of respect for other's beliefs. Respect for
other's beliefs as the highest value can mean only one of two things: either
we treat the other in a patronizing way and avoid hurting him in order not
to ruin his illusions, or we adopt the relativist stance of multiple
"regimes of truth," disqualifying as violent imposition any clear insistence
on truth.

What, however, about submitting Islam ? together with all other religions ?
to a respectful, but for that reason no less ruthless, critical analysis?
This, and only this, is the way to show a true respect for Muslims: to treat
them as serious adults responsible for their beliefs.

Slavoj Zizek, the international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the
Humanities, is the author, most recently, of "The Parallax View."

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net  Sun Mar 12 11:35:09 2006
From: grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net (Golsorkhi)
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 14:35:09 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] FW: Iran builds a secret underground complex as nuclear
	tensions	rise
In-Reply-To: <37817BBF-41CC-4965-95DD-31762209F2E2@thesamiis.com>
Message-ID: <E1FIWPx-0001NI-3d@smtpauth02.mail.atl.earthlink.net>


------ Forwarded Message
From: Samii Shahla <shahla at thesamiis.com>
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 12:37:25 -0500
Subject: Iran builds a secret underground complex as nuclear tensions rise

Telegraph

Iran builds a secret underground complex as nuclear tensions rise

By Philip Sherwell in Washington

12/03/2006

Iran's leaders have built a secret underground emergency command centre in
Teheran as they prepare for a confrontation with the West over their illicit
nuclear programme, the Sunday Telegraph has been told.

The complex of rooms and offices beneath the Abbas Abad district in the
north of the capital is designed to serve as a bolthole and headquarters for
the country's rulers as military tensions mount.

The recently completed command centre is connected by tunnels to other
government compounds near the Mossala prayer ground, one of the city's most
important religious sites.

Offices of the state security forces, the energy department and the
Organisation of Islamic Culture and Communications are all located in the
same area.

The construction of the complex is part of the regime's plan to move more of
its operations beneath ground. The Revolutionary Guard has overseen the
development of subterranean chambers and tunnels - some more than half a
mile long and an estimated 35ft high and wide - at sites across the country
for research and development work on nuclear and rocket programmes.

The opposition National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) learnt about
the complex from its contacts within the regime. The same network revealed
in 2002 that Iran had been operating a secret nuclear programme for 18
years.

The underground strategy is partly designed to hide activities from
satellite view and international inspections but also reflects a growing
belief in Teheran that its showdown with the international community could
end in air strikes by America or Israel. "Iran's leaders are clearly
preparing for a confrontation by going underground," said Alireza
Jafarzadeh, the NCRI official who made the 2002 announcement.

America and Europe believe that Iran is secretly trying to acquire an atomic
bomb, although the regime insists that its nuclear programme is for civilian
energy purposes.

As the United Nations Security Council prepares to discuss Iran's nuclear
operations this week, Teheran has been stepping up plans for confrontation.
Its chief delegate on nuclear talks last week threatened that Iran would
inflict "harm and pain" on America if censured by the Security Council.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the hardline president who has called for Israel to be
"wiped off the map", also said that the West would "suffer" if it tried to
thwart Iran's nuclear ambitions. As the war of words intensified, President
George W Bush said that Teheran represents a "grave national security
concern" for America.

In Iraq, which Mr Ahmadinejad hopes will develop into a fellow Shia Islamic
state, Iran is already using its proxy militia to attack British and
American forces, often with Iranian-made bombs and weapons. As tensions
grow, Teheran could order Hizbollah - the Lebanese-based terror faction that
it created and arms - to attack targets in Israel.

The regime is also reviewing its contingency plans to attack tankers and
American naval forces in the Persian Gulf and to mine the Strait of Hormuz,
through which about 15 million barrels of oil (about 20 per cent of world
production) passes each day. Any action in the Gulf would send oil prices
soaring - a weapon that Iran has often threatened to wield.

The Pentagon's strategic planning is focused on the danger that Iran might
try to mine the strait and deploy explosive-packed suicide boats against its
warships. In May, American vessels in the Gulf will take part in the Arabian
Gauntlet training exercise that deals with clearing mines from the strait,
which has a navigable channel just two miles wide.

The naval wing of the Revolutionary Guard has in recent years practised
"swarming" raids, using its flotilla of small rapid-attack boats to simulate
assaults on commercial vessels and United States warships, according to Ken
Timmerman, an American expert on Iran.

The Pentagon is particularly sensitive to the dangers of such attacks after
al-Qaeda hit the USS Cole off the Yemen with a suicide boat in 2000, killing
17 American sailors. Last month the White House listed two foiled al-Qaeda
plots to attack ships in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz.

US intelligence believes that if Iranian nuclear facilities were attacked by
either America or Israel, then Teheran would respond by trying to close the
Strait of Hormuz with naval forces, mines and anti-ship cruise missiles.

"When these systems become fully operational, they will significantly
enhance Iran's defensive capabilities and ability to deny access to the
Persian Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz," Michael Maples, the director of
the Defence Intelligence Agency testified before the Senate armed services
committee last month.

A senior American intelligence officer said that the US navy would be able
to reopen the strait but that it would be militarily costly. Hamid Reza
Zakeri, a former Iranian intelligence officer, recently told Mr Timmerman
that the Iranian navy's Strategic Studies Centre has produced an updated
battle plan for the strait.

Its most devastating options would be to use its long-range Shahab-3
missiles to attack Israeli or American bases in the region or to deploy
suicide bombers in Western cities under its strategy of "asymmetric"
response.

"The price to the West for standing up to Iran is clear," Gen Moshe Ya'alon,
the former Israeli defence chief said last month in Washington. "It includes
terror attacks, economic hardship? and consequences resulting from
fluctuations in Iranian oil production. Indeed, the regime believes that the
West - including Israel - is afraid to deal with it."
---

Information appearing on telegraph.co.uk is the copyright of Telegraph Group
Limited and must not be reproduced in any medium without licence. For the
full copyright statement see Copyright

URL:? 
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/03/12/wiran12.xml&
sSheet=/portal/2006/03/12/ixportal.html?


------ End of Forwarded Message

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060312/2e554c82/attachment-0001.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Sun Mar 12 14:55:21 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (Ian)
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 17:55:21 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Bloggers at the Gates: What Was Good
	for	EBay Should Be Good for Politics
References: <20060312153734.EF28311FA96@lax-gw07.mroute.net>
Message-ID: <015001c64628$0bbd9d90$99ca6c42@iancn2ccrvzt0j>

E-Mail ThisPersonally, I think this is a refreshing sign for democracy in general.  Although I would not want any one group or method to monopolize the discourse or concentrate or wield too much power, certainly bloggers, and the Internet in general, is better than political spinmeisters.

Peace.
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: mblaxill at yahoo.com 
  To: mb-civic at islandlists.com 
  Sent: Sunday, March 12, 2006 10:37 AM
  Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Bloggers at the Gates: What Was Good for EBay Should Be Good for Politics


            
                 
                
             
              This page was sent to you by:  mblaxill at yahoo.com 

              OPINION   | March 12, 2006 
              Editorial Observer:  Bloggers at the Gates: What Was Good for EBay Should Be Good for Politics 
              By ADAM COHEN 
              The authors of "Crashing the Gate" argue for the importance of the "netroots," or Internet grass roots, in political organization. 
             
             
                 
                     
                    1. The Saturday Profile: For Muslim Who Says Violence Destroys Islam, Violent Threats 
                    2. Gentrification Changing Face of New Atlanta 
                    3. A Sharp Debate Erupts in China Over Ideologies 
                    4. For Trader Joe's, a New York Taste Test 
                    5. Next Stop: M?rida: Finding a Home (Cheerios Included) in Mexico 

                    ?  Go to Complete List 
                     
                   
             
             
                
              Copyright 2006  The New York Times Company | Privacy Policy    
                 
       



------------------------------------------------------------------------------


  _______________________________________________
  Mb-civic mailing list
  Mb-civic at islandlists.com
  http://www.islandlists.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mb-civic
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060312/147736b0/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Sun Mar 12 14:59:08 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 22:59:08 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: The Senate Takes a Look at All Those Happy
	Pamphleteers
Message-ID: <20060312225908.275CB11FA9C@lax-gw07.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

WEEK IN REVIEW | March 12, 2006
The Nation: The Senate Takes a Look at All Those Happy Pamphleteers
By KATE PHILLIPS
A proposal requiring the disclosure of fake grassroots operations laid bare the conflict between public disclosure and free speech.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/12/weekinreview/12phillips.html?ex=1142830800&en=7892ea38ee45f4a5&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060312/36141341/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Sun Mar 12 14:59:06 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 22:59:06 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: NYTimes.com: Globalization Offered Two Ways: à la Carte and Prix Fixe
Message-ID: <20060312225906.91C3111F973@lax-gw07.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

WEEK IN REVIEW | March 12, 2006
The Nation: Globalization Offered Two Ways: ? la Carte and Prix Fixe
By DANIEL GROSS
The Dubai controversy is merely the latest manifestation of a new condition: Selective Globalization Syndrome.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/12/weekinreview/12gross.html?ex=1142830800&en=0444cbef21017523&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060312/8f945a93/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Sun Mar 12 14:59:46 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 22:59:46 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Invisible Danger? Parents Look Inside the
	Lunchbox
Message-ID: <20060312225946.E925D13B73A@lax-gw04.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

For all you parents out there...


BUSINESS / YOUR MONEY | March 12, 2006
Spending: Invisible Danger? Parents Look Inside the Lunchbox
By JULIE BICK
Many parents are changing their buying habits to try to protect their children from what they see as chemical hazards.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/12/business/yourmoney/12organic.html?ex=1142830800&en=f3a6cd81de87a034&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060312/a5c6bb2c/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Sun Mar 12 15:00:17 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 23:00:17 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Gale Norton Resigns
Message-ID: <20060312230017.675E73AE68E@lax-gw06.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

And it's about time!!


OPINION | March 12, 2006
Editorial: Gale Norton Resigns

Gale Norton, the former secretary of the Interior Department, has been an extraordinarily faithful steward of the Bush agenda ? but not of the lands she was obliged to protect.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/12/opinion/12sun2.html?ex=1142830800&en=c0abb66b0b5d378a&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060312/0582481c/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Sun Mar 12 15:00:55 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 23:00:55 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: The Conservative Beat: Is It Working?
Message-ID: <20060312230055.59CE611FAB0@lax-gw07.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

OPINION | March 12, 2006
The Public Editor: The Conservative Beat: Is It Working?
By BYRON CALAME
The New York Times's new beat covering conservatives has provided readers with insights and perspectives they weren't getting before in the news columns.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/12/opinion/12pubed.html?ex=1142830800&en=bd354bdff400b7ba&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060312/c1dfd957/attachment-0001.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Sun Mar 12 15:15:43 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 23:15:43 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: A Wrongful Birth?
Message-ID: <20060312231543.4144813B7F8@lax-gw04.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

Here is fodder for a polemical debate: This article is one of the most cogent arguments I have seen for the elimination of SOME abortions, and more particularly a dangerously rationalized form of eugenics. Peace.


MAGAZINE | March 12, 2006
A Wrongful Birth?
By ELIZABETH WEIL
Legally, and morally, what does it mean to say that a child should not have existed?
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/12/magazine/312wrongful.1.html?ex=1142830800&en=acd207f73506f3c8&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060312/40c79c18/attachment.htm 

From nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca  Sun Mar 12 15:38:25 2006
From: nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca (CBC News Online)
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 23:38:25 UT
Subject: [Mb-civic] CBC News - HARPER MAKES SURPRISE VISIT TO KANDAHAR
Message-ID: <20060312233825.3FBA632F85@web05.nm.cbc.ca>

An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Url: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060312/08863f61/attachment.diff 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Sun Mar 12 15:58:27 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 18:58:27 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Katherine Harris
Message-ID: <000801c64630$de96d800$5e27e440@Harold>

Katherine Harris gave Bush his win, because she was for sale, now it has caught up to her at the expense of the American people.

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/local/state/orl-harris1206mar12,0,3198780.story?track=rss

The world would be different today if Gore had won, how different I do not know, but I am sure that America would not be in Iraq, Bin laden would be dead or captured, who knows, 9/11 may never have happened!  Oil would be at $40 a barrel, the middle east would be calmer and the American economy would be better .... the list is long.

Later H

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060312/80382303/attachment.htm 

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Sun Mar 12 16:00:28 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 16:00:28 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] SENDING AGAIN - SO IMPORTANT - MICHAEL
In-Reply-To: <200603122143.QAA18880@stage-web-app.economist.com>
Message-ID: <C039F61C.29FFA%michael@michaelbutler.com>

Sending again-so important
Michael
------ Forwarded Message
From: autoreply at economist.com
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 17:11:28 -0500
To: michael at intrafi.com
Subject: An article for you from Michael Butler.


- AN ARTICLE FOR YOU, FROM ECONOMIST.COM -

Dear Michael Butler,

Michael Butler (michael at intrafi.com) wants you to see this article on
Economist.com.



(Note: the sender's e-mail address above has not been verified.)

Subscribe to The Economist print edition, get great savings and FREE full
access to Economist.com.  Click here to subscribe:
http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/email.cfm

Alternatively subscribe to online only version by clicking on the link below
and save 25%:

http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/offer.cfm?campaign=168-XLMT



HOW THE OTHER 800M LIVE
Mar 9th 2006  

China's leaders are aware of the problem in its rural areas. They are
terrified of the solution

A SPECTRE is haunting China--the spectre of rural unrest. The leaders
of the Communist Party know it, and fear it as only the inheritors of a
revolution born of rural desperation can. This week, as China's supreme
legislative body (aka the rubber-stamping National People's Congress)
met for its annual ten-day session, addressing the plight of the
country poor was at the top of its agenda. But worrying about something
and curing it are two very different things.

It is not just that China's farmers have missed out on the double-digit
growth that has transformed urban China and turned its richest cities
into some of the most dynamic in Asia. The real problem for the
leadership is that, in some ways, the lot of the rural poor has got
worse. The old communist system offered a life of terrible drabness,
but at least it guaranteed certain basics, including free or nearly
free health care and education. As China has become more of a market
economy, those support systems have largely collapsed.


At the same time, many farmers have lost their livelihoods. The rapid
growth of the cities has resulted in their land being seized for
development with little or no compensation. Many of the most violent
disturbances in recent months have come not from laid-off factory
workers, as in the past, but from farmers protesting about these
depredations. Communism may be nearly dead in all but name in China,
but it survives in the form of one last taboo: the fact that the right
of individuals to own agricultural land is tenuous at best. And the
local governments that control most of that land do not administer it
well. Perennially strapped for cash, because so much of it is consumed
in the long bureaucratic trickle-down from the central government to
the counties, they are more or less forced to squeeze farmers as hard
as they can.

Beyond recognising the problem (China's prime minister, Wen Jiabao,
called it a "deep-seated conflict" that "cannot be ignored"), this
week's congress approved a 15% increase in the money earmarked for
agricultural development, rural services and the like. But even though
the amount to be spent has now risen to 340 billion yuan ($42 billion),
or 8.9% of the entire budget, China's vastness makes it trivial. Some
800m people still live in the countryside, so the new spending amounts
to less than an additional $7 a year each.

What more could the central government do? Most obviously, it could
introduce a proper system of land rights. If that remains an
ideological bridge too far, for the time being at least, it could at
least fund its provinces adequately, which would mean that the poorer,
more rural ones could afford to treat farmers better. That would
involve inter-province transfers at a much higher rate than now.

Finally, it could do a lot more to encourage efficient government by
provincial and local governments. A big part of the problem is that
these lower tiers of government are run incompetently. The reason is
hardly a mystery. With a press that is muzzled (and, if anything,
getting tamer, thanks to a media crackdown directed from the very top),
officials are in no sense accountable to the people whose lives they
control.

THE REMEDY THAT DARES NOT SPEAK ITS NAME
How, though, to make officials accountable? China does hold some highly
constrained elections for village councils. For many years, it has
talked of extending the election system upwards to townships, to
counties and perhaps higher. There have even been some electoral
experiments at township level. For the present, however, the Communist
Party, intent on retaining its monopoly of political power, will try to
spend and manage its way out of trouble. History suggests that it will
fail. The spectre in China's countryside will not be laid to rest until
Chinese leaders accept the need for democracy.
 

See this article with graphics and related items at
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_VGDPQRQ

Go to http://www.economist.com for more global news, views and analysis from
the Economist Group.

- ABOUT ECONOMIST.COM -

Economist.com is the online version of The Economist newspaper, an
independent weekly international news and business publication offering
clear reporting, commentary and analysis on world politics, business,
finance, science & technology, culture, society and the arts.
Economist.com also offers exclusive content online, including additional
articles throughout the week in the Global Agenda section.

-    SUBSCRIBE NOW AND SAVE 25% -

Click here: 
http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/offer.cfm?campaign=168-XLMT

Subscribe now with 25% off and receive full access to:

* all the articles published in The Economist newspaper
* the online archive - allowing you to search and retrieve over 33,000
articles published in The Economist since 1997
* The World in  - The Economist's outlook on the year
* Business encyclopedia - allows you to find a definition and explanation
for any business term


- ABOUT THIS E-MAIL -

This e-mail was sent to you by the person at the e-mail address listed
above through a link found on Economist.com.  We will not send you any
future messages as a result of your being the recipient of this e-mail.


- COPYRIGHT -

This e-mail message and Economist articles linked from it are copyright
(c) 2006 The Economist Newspaper Group Limited. All rights reserved.
http://www.economist.com/help/copy_general.cfm

Economist.com privacy policy: http://www.economist.com/about/privacy.cfm



------ End of Forwarded Message


From nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca  Sun Mar 12 16:08:36 2006
From: nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca (CBC News Online)
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 00:08:36 UT
Subject: [Mb-civic] CBC News - JAPANESE CITY VOTES AGAINST U.S. AIR BASE
	EXPANSION
Message-ID: <20060313000836.11F4B32F85@web05.nm.cbc.ca>

An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Url: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060313/19948e12/attachment.diff 

From nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca  Sun Mar 12 16:09:52 2006
From: nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca (CBC News Online)
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 00:09:52 UT
Subject: [Mb-civic] CBC News - CANADIAN HELD FOR DESERTING U.S. MARINES IN
	1968
Message-ID: <20060313000952.A296A32F85@web05.nm.cbc.ca>

An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Url: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060313/1d940ede/attachment.diff 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Sun Mar 12 16:19:13 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 19:19:13 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] ACCOONA
Message-ID: <000801c64633$c5112770$5e27e440@Harold>

A new search engine

http://accoona.com/about/about_accoona.jsp

Says it is going after Google

See for yourself

H
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060312/d400681f/attachment.htm 

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Sun Mar 12 13:16:53 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 13:16:53 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] MORE ABOUT THE SHAH
Message-ID: <C039CFC7.29FE2%michael@michaelbutler.com>

Robert sent a reply to the book report. I thought I might share my response.
This is such a hot subject.
Michael

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/msword
Size: 43008 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060312/60dcde25/attachment-0001.wiz 

From autoreply at economist.com  Sun Mar 12 14:03:23 2006
From: autoreply at economist.com (autoreply at economist.com)
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 17:03:23 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] An article for you from Michael Butler.
Message-ID: <200603122135.QAA18757@stage-web-app.economist.com>


- AN ARTICLE FOR YOU, FROM ECONOMIST.COM -

Dear civic,

Michael Butler (michael at intrafi.com) wants you to see this article on Economist.com.



(Note: the sender's e-mail address above has not been verified.)

Subscribe to The Economist print edition, get great savings and FREE full access to Economist.com.  Click here to subscribe:  http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/email.cfm 

Alternatively subscribe to online only version by clicking on the link below and save 25%:

http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/offer.cfm?campaign=168-XLMT



NUCLEAR ARMS CONTROL
Mar 9th 2006  

Congress should veto George Bush's nuclear agreement with India

TEN years from now, will George Bush's determination to rewrite nuclear
rules for preventing the bomb's spread be judged to have been
courageously right or dangerously wrong? In striking his deal with
India, allowing it to import nuclear fuel and technology despite its
weapons-building, Mr Bush has not for the first time seemed readier to
favour a friend than to stick to a principle. He is gambling that the
future benefits of accepting a rising India in all but name as a member
of the nuclear club will outweigh the shock to the global
anti-proliferation regime, already under severe strain from the nuclear
dealings of North Korea and Iran. His gamble is a dangerous one.
Meanwhile, in his rush to accommodate India, Mr Bush is missing a
chance to win wider nuclear restraint in one of the world's tougher
neighbourhoods. 

New thinking is needed in the anti-proliferation game. North Korea has
broken every rule of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and
boasts proudly of its bomb. Iran claims to have no use for one, yet
demands the "right" to pursue dangerous nuclear fuel-making
technologies--as others may do in future unless creative solutions are
found to deflect them--that could be abused for weapons-making. This
week America and others were insisting at the International Atomic
Energy Agency that Iran not be allowed to bend the anti-nuclear rules
out of shape to further what are assumed to be its weapons ambitions
(see article[1]). So why does Mr Bush propose doing just that for
already nuclear-armed India?


NOT JUST OLD THINKING
You have to deal with the world as it is, comes the reply. India needs
to import nuclear fuel and technology, hitherto denied it by a
combination of the NPT, the informal rules of the Nuclear Suppliers
Group (NSG) and by American law, to support its fast-growing energy
needs. And India is not Iran or North Korea. They signed the NPT and
cheated. Like Pakistan and Israel, India never joined the treaty and
its weapons-making breaks no laws. India is also a responsible
democracy; it does not support terrorist groups or threaten to wipe
neighbours off the map, as Iran did recently with Israel. Meanwhile, in
return for America's bending the rules of nuclear trade, India will put
more civilian nuclear reactors under international safeguards, and
stiffen its anti-proliferation resolve.

Leave aside whether nuclear power best serves Indians' needs--that is
India's choice, made knowing the anti-nuclear rules it was up against.
And while India's nukes broke no laws, in practice it got its start in
the weapons business, rather as North Korea and Iran did, by misusing
technologies and materials provided for civilian purposes. Mr Bush is
nonetheless right that no one expects India to give up its weapons now.

 But it is one thing to have as broad and close a friendship with a
nuclear India as the anti-nuclear rules allow. That is already in both
countries' interests. It is quite another to knock aside the rules for
India's sake. To be sure, Mr Bush is not proposing that other nuclear
dabblers be given a welcome if they are persistent enough to
succeed--though that will be the message Iran prefers to hear this
week. Rather, he wants democratic, friendly, law-abiding India to be
treated as an exception by Congress, which must first amend America's
own laws if the deal is to go through, and by others in the NSG.

The problem here is that India could instead prove the exception that
fatally weakens the rules. The devil is both in the deal's troubling
detail, and in its likely knock-on effects. 

India may not have signed the NPT, but America has. In doing so, it
promised not to help other countries with their nuclear-weapons
tinkering. It also pioneered the reinforcing principle that only
countries that have all their nuclear facilities under international
safeguards (India doesn't now and won't in future) should benefit from
trade in civilian nuclear technology. If countries were going to sign
the NPT and renounce nuclear weapons themselves, they needed assurance
that as many others as possible would follow suit. To encourage them,
treaty rights--help in enjoying the benefits of civilian nuclear
power--were withheld from those that shrugged off or ignored its
obligations.

Allowing nuclear trade with India breaks that bargain in a particularly
damaging way. The rules had started to bite: India was running short of
supplies of uranium for both civilian and military purposes. By
allowing it to import nuclear fuel for its civilian reactors, America
will be directly easing the bottlenecks in its weapons programme
(bizarrely, also agreeing to keep up fuel supplies even if India breaks
America's other anti-proliferation laws, as some of its companies have
in the past). Worse, India's experimental fast-breeder reactor
programme, ideally suited to produce plutonium for warheads though
previously claimed to be for civilian purposes, is to be exempted from
all safeguards. That will allow India in future to produce scores of
weapons a year, not just a handful. 

 Then add insult to injury. Not only is nuclear-armed India being
offered all of the civilian benefits available to countries that have
accepted the NPT's anti-nuclear restrictions. It has also accepted few,
if any, of the real obligations of the five official nuclear powers
recognised by the treaty, America, Russia, China, Britain and France.
All at least signed the treaty banning all nuclear tests; India
declined. All have ended the production of plutonium and highly
enriched uranium for weapons purposes (only China has yet to say so
publicly); India flatly refused America's request to do likewise. 

A CASCADE OF PROBLEMS
Rule-bending for India is bound to encourage some other countries to
rethink their nuclear options too. But less damage might have been done
if the non-proliferation gains had been real ones. In particular, India
should have been pressed to stop making fissile material as a condition
of any bargain. Pakistan, already signalling interest, could have
joined such a moratorium. With China--India's preferred measure of its
nuclear prowess--having stopped producing the stuff too, there was a
good opportunity to try to spin a wider web of restraint.

 Both South Asia and East Asia urgently need to explore such ambitious
confidence-building measures to take the sting out of dangerous
regional rivalries. This one could have acted as a catalyst in the
Middle East too. Israel in the past has had a stronger claim than most
for its deterrent, surrounded for much of its short history by large
neighbours aiming to drive it in to the sea. Yet its nuclear edge is
fast eroding. With an American nudge, shutting down its Dimona reactor
(it no longer needs its plutonium) could spark new thinking about a
weapons-of-mass-destruction-free Middle East that could someday help
finesse the Iran problem too. 

Instead of a virtuous anti-nuclear cycle, there is now more likely to
be a vicious nuclear one. China can be expected to insist on doing for
proliferation-prone Pakistan what America wants to do for India, adding
to a regional arms race that has led to a cascade of proliferation in
the past. Giving India a freer ride is also likely to embolden Iran and
North Korea in their defiance, with potential repercussions for the
security of all their neighbours, from Saudi Arabia and Egypt to Japan,
South Korea and Taiwan. 

No one doubts that the world's richest democracy and its largest one
have lots to offer each other as friends and partners. But assisting
India's nuclear weapons ambitions ought not to be in Mr Bush's gift.
When Congress is asked to change America's anti-proliferation laws, it
should say no. 

-----
[1] http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_ID=5605667
 

See this article with graphics and related items at http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5603449

Go to http://www.economist.com for more global news, views and analysis from the Economist Group.

- ABOUT ECONOMIST.COM -

Economist.com is the online version of The Economist newspaper, an independent weekly international news and business publication offering clear reporting, commentary and analysis on world politics, business, finance, science & technology, culture, society and the arts.
Economist.com also offers exclusive content online, including additional articles throughout the week in the Global Agenda section.

-	SUBSCRIBE NOW AND SAVE 25% -

Click here: http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/offer.cfm?campaign=168-XLMT

Subscribe now with 25% off and receive full access to:

* all the articles published in The Economist newspaper
* the online archive - allowing you to search and retrieve over 33,000 articles published in The Economist since 1997
* The World in  - The Economist's outlook on the year
* Business encyclopedia - allows you to find a definition and explanation for any business term


- ABOUT THIS E-MAIL -

This e-mail was sent to you by the person at the e-mail address listed
above through a link found on Economist.com.  We will not send you any
future messages as a result of your being the recipient of this e-mail.


- COPYRIGHT -

This e-mail message and Economist articles linked from it are copyright
(c) 2006 The Economist Newspaper Group Limited. All rights reserved.
http://www.economist.com/help/copy_general.cfm

Economist.com privacy policy: http://www.economist.com/about/privacy.cfm



From autoreply at economist.com  Sun Mar 12 14:11:28 2006
From: autoreply at economist.com (autoreply at economist.com)
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 17:11:28 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] An article for you from Michael Butler.
Message-ID: <200603122143.QAA18877@stage-web-app.economist.com>


- AN ARTICLE FOR YOU, FROM ECONOMIST.COM -

Dear civic,

Michael Butler (michael at intrafi.com) wants you to see this article on Economist.com.



(Note: the sender's e-mail address above has not been verified.)

Subscribe to The Economist print edition, get great savings and FREE full access to Economist.com.  Click here to subscribe:  http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/email.cfm 

Alternatively subscribe to online only version by clicking on the link below and save 25%:

http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/offer.cfm?campaign=168-XLMT



HOW THE OTHER 800M LIVE
Mar 9th 2006  

China's leaders are aware of the problem in its rural areas. They are
terrified of the solution

A SPECTRE is haunting China--the spectre of rural unrest. The leaders
of the Communist Party know it, and fear it as only the inheritors of a
revolution born of rural desperation can. This week, as China's supreme
legislative body (aka the rubber-stamping National People's Congress)
met for its annual ten-day session, addressing the plight of the
country poor was at the top of its agenda. But worrying about something
and curing it are two very different things.

It is not just that China's farmers have missed out on the double-digit
growth that has transformed urban China and turned its richest cities
into some of the most dynamic in Asia. The real problem for the
leadership is that, in some ways, the lot of the rural poor has got
worse. The old communist system offered a life of terrible drabness,
but at least it guaranteed certain basics, including free or nearly
free health care and education. As China has become more of a market
economy, those support systems have largely collapsed.


At the same time, many farmers have lost their livelihoods. The rapid
growth of the cities has resulted in their land being seized for
development with little or no compensation. Many of the most violent
disturbances in recent months have come not from laid-off factory
workers, as in the past, but from farmers protesting about these
depredations. Communism may be nearly dead in all but name in China,
but it survives in the form of one last taboo: the fact that the right
of individuals to own agricultural land is tenuous at best. And the
local governments that control most of that land do not administer it
well. Perennially strapped for cash, because so much of it is consumed
in the long bureaucratic trickle-down from the central government to
the counties, they are more or less forced to squeeze farmers as hard
as they can.

Beyond recognising the problem (China's prime minister, Wen Jiabao,
called it a "deep-seated conflict" that "cannot be ignored"), this
week's congress approved a 15% increase in the money earmarked for
agricultural development, rural services and the like. But even though
the amount to be spent has now risen to 340 billion yuan ($42 billion),
or 8.9% of the entire budget, China's vastness makes it trivial. Some
800m people still live in the countryside, so the new spending amounts
to less than an additional $7 a year each.

What more could the central government do? Most obviously, it could
introduce a proper system of land rights. If that remains an
ideological bridge too far, for the time being at least, it could at
least fund its provinces adequately, which would mean that the poorer,
more rural ones could afford to treat farmers better. That would
involve inter-province transfers at a much higher rate than now.

Finally, it could do a lot more to encourage efficient government by
provincial and local governments. A big part of the problem is that
these lower tiers of government are run incompetently. The reason is
hardly a mystery. With a press that is muzzled (and, if anything,
getting tamer, thanks to a media crackdown directed from the very top),
officials are in no sense accountable to the people whose lives they
control.

THE REMEDY THAT DARES NOT SPEAK ITS NAME
How, though, to make officials accountable? China does hold some highly
constrained elections for village councils. For many years, it has
talked of extending the election system upwards to townships, to
counties and perhaps higher. There have even been some electoral
experiments at township level. For the present, however, the Communist
Party, intent on retaining its monopoly of political power, will try to
spend and manage its way out of trouble. History suggests that it will
fail. The spectre in China's countryside will not be laid to rest until
Chinese leaders accept the need for democracy. 
 

See this article with graphics and related items at http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_VGDPQRQ

Go to http://www.economist.com for more global news, views and analysis from the Economist Group.

- ABOUT ECONOMIST.COM -

Economist.com is the online version of The Economist newspaper, an independent weekly international news and business publication offering clear reporting, commentary and analysis on world politics, business, finance, science & technology, culture, society and the arts.
Economist.com also offers exclusive content online, including additional articles throughout the week in the Global Agenda section.

-	SUBSCRIBE NOW AND SAVE 25% -

Click here: http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/offer.cfm?campaign=168-XLMT

Subscribe now with 25% off and receive full access to:

* all the articles published in The Economist newspaper
* the online archive - allowing you to search and retrieve over 33,000 articles published in The Economist since 1997
* The World in  - The Economist's outlook on the year
* Business encyclopedia - allows you to find a definition and explanation for any business term


- ABOUT THIS E-MAIL -

This e-mail was sent to you by the person at the e-mail address listed
above through a link found on Economist.com.  We will not send you any
future messages as a result of your being the recipient of this e-mail.


- COPYRIGHT -

This e-mail message and Economist articles linked from it are copyright
(c) 2006 The Economist Newspaper Group Limited. All rights reserved.
http://www.economist.com/help/copy_general.cfm

Economist.com privacy policy: http://www.economist.com/about/privacy.cfm



From autoreply at economist.com  Sun Mar 12 14:12:51 2006
From: autoreply at economist.com (autoreply at economist.com)
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 17:12:51 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] An article for you from Michael Butler.
Message-ID: <200603122145.QAA18948@stage-web-app.economist.com>


- AN ARTICLE FOR YOU, FROM ECONOMIST.COM -

Dear civic,

Michael Butler (michael at intrafi.com) wants you to see this article on Economist.com.



(Note: the sender's e-mail address above has not been verified.)

Subscribe to The Economist print edition, get great savings and FREE full access to Economist.com.  Click here to subscribe:  http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/email.cfm 

Alternatively subscribe to online only version by clicking on the link below and save 25%:

http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/offer.cfm?campaign=168-XLMT



MACHO MOMS AND DEADBEAT DADS
Mar 9th 2006  

The Democrats are finally invading the Republicans' national-security
turf

"PRESIDENT BUSH wants to sell [six American ports] to the United Arab
Emirates--a country that had diplomatic ties with the Taliban," says
Harold Ford, a bright young Democratic congressman from Tennessee. In a
television ad promoting his bid for a Senate seat, he says that, unlike
George Bush, he believes that "we shouldn't outsource our national
security to anyone."

At last, the Democrats have found a national-security issue they can
agree to sound tough on. DP World, a firm owned by the Dubai
government, is buying P&O, a British firm that operates six American
ports. The public are outraged. Never mind that the UAE is an American
ally, or that port security will remain in federal hands, or that a
port-management firm has a financial interest in not blowing up the
ports it manages. Some two-thirds of Americans oppose the deal.

For the Democrats, this is a great opportunity. For years, they have
enjoyed a consistent advantage over Republicans on "mommy" issues, such
as education and health care. But Republicans have trounced them on
"daddy" issues, such as killing terrorists and defending the homeland.
The Democrats have lost a lot of elections because they are easy to
caricature as the party that thinks "there are no enemies, just friends
whose grievances we haven't yet accommodated," as Mark Steyn, a
conservative columnist, once put it. 

To turn this around, the Democrats need to sound both resolute and
united. And the fortuitous thing about the Dubai ports deal is that it
unites disparate strands of Democratic thought. Opposing the deal is
not just about protecting American ports from Islamist terrorists. It
also appeals to the party's protectionist wing--hence Mr Ford's use of
that dog-whistle word "outsource". And it appeals to those who see the
Bush administration as a conspiracy to benefit rapacious corporations. 

Democratic blogs are going wild about the fact that John Snow, Mr
Bush's treasury secretary and also the chairman of the committee that
approved the Dubai deal, used to be head of CSX, an American firm that
sold its port operations to DP World in 2004. That was after Mr Snow
had left CSX, and no one has managed to explain how he might have
profited from approving the Dubai deal, but it sounds fishy, at least
to those who have written off the Bush team as a bunch of crooks. 

There are three further reasons why Democrats have seized on the ports
issue. It gives them a soundbite--"Arab hands off our ports"--that even
the dimmest voter can understand. (Such soundbites have traditionally
been a Republican strong point.) It allows them to pander to racist
voters with plausible deniability. (Again, this is usually Republican
turf.) And it looks like an opportunity to defeat the hated Mr Bush,
not least because Republicans are nearly as suspicious of the deal as
Democrats are. On March 8th, a House panel dominated by Republicans
voted 62-2 to block the DP World deal--even though Mr Bush has promised
to veto any such attempt. 

All this hoohah comes at a time when Mr Bush's national-security
credentials are already looking tarnished. Terrorists continue to blow
up mosques in Iraq (and a Hindu temple in India). The administration
does not know how to stop Iran from building a nuclear bomb (see
article[1]). Hamas's electoral victory casts doubt on the notion that
spreading democracy in the Middle East will curb terrorism. Could it be
that the Daddy party is not, in fact, keeping Americans safe? Will
Americans turn to Mommy instead? 

Recent polls suggest the Republicans are indeed losing their lead on
national security. A recent Gallup poll found 40% of respondents
thought the Democrats would do a better job of protecting America
against terrorism and military threats, while 45% preferred the
Republicans. So the GOP's advantage has not disappeared, but it is half
what it was in September and only a third as large as it was in 2003,
when Republicans led Democrats by 51% to 36% on this issue (see chart). 

If this trend were to continue, the Democrats could reasonably expect
to start winning elections. But Michael O'Hanlon, a security analyst at
the Brookings Institution, warns against complacency. "Mr Bush has
taken a short-term hit. But it is wishful thinking for Democrats to
suppose that one month of bad news has wiped out 30 years of Republican
advantage on national security," he says. 

Republicans may have lost some of their lustre, but Democrats haven't
gained much, argues Mr O'Hanlon. Mr Bush may not have shown much skill,
but he has shown resolve in Iraq. And at home, his Department of
Homeland Security has done as good a job "as you could reasonably
expect". Databases have been integrated and border security tightened
to the extent that al-Qaeda has a hard time getting into America. 

 There remain serious weaknesses, of course. America's borders are
still porous, its chemical plants vulnerable, and it is a long way from
winning the battle for Muslim hearts and minds, as a young man named
Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar demonstrated last week by allegedly driving a
Jeep Cherokee across a college campus in North Carolina running down
students. 

Since Mr Taheri-azar was born in Iran, his one-man JIHAD has
strengthened the hand of those who think that America's chief
national-security problem is unassimilated immigrants. This view is
most common among Republicans. The Senate Judiciary Committee was
trying this week to cobble together an immigration bill that combined
stricter controls with a guest-worker programme, as Mr Bush wants. But
Republicans on the committee are divided, and if they cannot agree, an
enforcement-only bill might pass. 

Meanwhile, the Democratic National Committee has published a list of
Republican "failures on homeland security", which consists mostly of
Republican failures to back Democrat-sponsored extra spending. The
Democrats have struggled to offer a coherent alternative. On Iraq, the
party is divided between those who think America should pull out now
and those who would prefer to stabilise the place first. The former
course would probably spark an Iraqi civil war (which, to be fair, most
Americans expect to happen anyway), while the latter approach is the
same as Mr Bush's. 

One problem for the Democrats is that since Saddam Hussein's weapons of
mass destruction were not found, Mr Bush has justified his war on
idealistic grounds: replacing tyranny with democracy. Other
Republicans, such as Senator Sam Brownback, take an even more
moralistic line on foreign policy (see article[2]).

TRUST US, WE'RE REALISTS
 Since the days of Woodrow Wilson, such liberal internationalism has
traditionally been a Democratic position. Democrats who oppose Mr Bush
find themselves arguing for a more "realist" approach--that America
should be more cautious about trying to democratise the Islamic world.
Many old liberals are uncomfortable with sounding so Kissingerian,
which is one reason why the party now struggles to find a platform it
can unite around, argues Peter Beinart, author of "The Good Fight", a
forthcoming book on liberals and foreign policy. 

Both at home and abroad, the Democrats' best bet is probably to harp on
about the Bush administration's undoubted incompetence. Bumper stickers
of the "I've fixed Iraq, now I'll fix New Orleans" type will doubtless
help. From her perch in the Senate, Hillary Clinton, the party's
current frontrunner in the 2008 presidential stakes, is doing a fair
job of sounding both hawkish and competent. For every threat, from
terrorism to bird flu, she issues a timely, carefully-worded press
release. She is also mastering the art of the empty patriotic gesture,
long a Republican speciality: for example, co-sponsoring a bill to ban
flag-burning. 

Other Democrats think the party should go further. Steve Jarding and
Dave "Mudcat" Saunders, two Democratic consultants, want to "hold the
Republicans' feet to the fire" on national security, by pointing out
how many top Republicans have dodged military service. The pair has an
impressive record of wooing elusive rural, white male votes for
Democrats, such as when they helped Mark Warner win the governorship of
Virginia, a Republican stronghold, in 2001. But both sides can play
hardball: Republicans gleefully point out that Bill Clinton was
advising Dubai officials on the ports deal even as his wife was
denouncing it. 

For the foreseeable future, the Democrats will find it hard to supplant
the Republicans as the party of national security. But to win
elections, they don't need to beat them; only to neutralise their
advantage. And that could happen. 

-----
[1] http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_ID=5605667
[2] http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_ID=5603475
 

See this article with graphics and related items at http://www.economist.com/world/na/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_VGDJPJN

Go to http://www.economist.com for more global news, views and analysis from the Economist Group.

- ABOUT ECONOMIST.COM -

Economist.com is the online version of The Economist newspaper, an independent weekly international news and business publication offering clear reporting, commentary and analysis on world politics, business, finance, science & technology, culture, society and the arts.
Economist.com also offers exclusive content online, including additional articles throughout the week in the Global Agenda section.

-	SUBSCRIBE NOW AND SAVE 25% -

Click here: http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/offer.cfm?campaign=168-XLMT

Subscribe now with 25% off and receive full access to:

* all the articles published in The Economist newspaper
* the online archive - allowing you to search and retrieve over 33,000 articles published in The Economist since 1997
* The World in  - The Economist's outlook on the year
* Business encyclopedia - allows you to find a definition and explanation for any business term


- ABOUT THIS E-MAIL -

This e-mail was sent to you by the person at the e-mail address listed
above through a link found on Economist.com.  We will not send you any
future messages as a result of your being the recipient of this e-mail.


- COPYRIGHT -

This e-mail message and Economist articles linked from it are copyright
(c) 2006 The Economist Newspaper Group Limited. All rights reserved.
http://www.economist.com/help/copy_general.cfm

Economist.com privacy policy: http://www.economist.com/about/privacy.cfm



From autoreply at economist.com  Sun Mar 12 14:15:10 2006
From: autoreply at economist.com (autoreply at economist.com)
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 17:15:10 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] An article for you from Michael Butler.
Message-ID: <200603122147.QAA18967@stage-web-app.economist.com>


- AN ARTICLE FOR YOU, FROM ECONOMIST.COM -

Dear civic,

Michael Butler (michael at intrafi.com) wants you to see this article on Economist.com.



(Note: the sender's e-mail address above has not been verified.)

Subscribe to The Economist print edition, get great savings and FREE full access to Economist.com.  Click here to subscribe:  http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/email.cfm 

Alternatively subscribe to online only version by clicking on the link below and save 25%:

http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/offer.cfm?campaign=168-XLMT



JILTED
Mar 9th 2006  

George Bush comes and goes. And a nation goes into a sulk

AFTER George Bush's "historic" visit to India, his brief stop in
Pakistan on March 3rd-4th was bound to be an anticlimax. But it turned
out worse than that. It left Pakistan's large anti-American lobby with
plenty of grist to mill into accusations of hypocrisy, fickleness and
untrustworthiness. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's president, champion of
the alliance with the United States, and a man Mr Bush calls "my
buddy", found himself looking more beleaguered than ever. 

Mr Bush made history in India by rewriting the global rules governing
nuclear power and weapons to make an exception for his hosts. Pakistan,
which, like India, exploded nuclear bombs in 1998 and has never joined
the global non-proliferation regime, is receiving no such favour. Of
course, its record on proliferation is so nefarious that this was never
on the cards. But there could be no starker example of the higher
priority America now attaches to its relations with India. 

Pakistani officials argue that, in substance, Mr Bush's visit brought
them almost all that had been planned for it. The only failure was in
not signing an intended "Bilateral Investment Treaty", because of some
outstanding differences. (So, wags said, India got a great nuclear
deal; Pakistan not even a little BIT.) 


However, even Tasnim Aslam, who speaks for Pakistan's foreign ministry,
concedes that public perception of the visit was "extremely negative".
There was already a long list of popular grievances with America: the
wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and an American air-strike in January
inside Pakistan's territory, aimed at alleged terrorists, but also
killing civilians. Against this background, big popular demonstrations
last month over the publication in Europe of cartoons of the prophet
Muhammad, whipped up by Pakistan's Islamist parties, were transformed
into alarming protests against General Musharraf and America. 

In Islamabad, Mr Bush said he had come to see if General Musharraf was
as committed as before to bringing "terrorists to justice". "And he
is," he concluded. Pakistan says it has 80,000 soldiers deployed across
the remote, rugged and lawless Afghan border region, where many believe
Osama bin Laden to be hiding. But this week has seen a bitter row with
the Afghan government. It complained that Pakistan was not doing enough
to stop militants from mounting cross-border attacks. General Musharraf
furiously made exactly the same accusation in reverse. 

So Mr Bush's visit, instead of celebrating Pakistan's staunch
friendship and military help, highlighted its ambiguous role in the
"war against terrorism". Just before Mr Bush arrived, a bomb attack on
the American consulate in Karachi killed four people. During the
president's stay, Pakistan's army was fighting one of its biggest
battles yet, in which more than 140 people were killed, against
pro-Taliban fighters in the tribal area of North Waziristan, next to
Afghanistan. 

For America, which says it wants to spread democracy, it is an
embarrassment that General Musharraf remains army chief, and has only
ever won rigged elections and referendums. So this week the Americans
talked about the importance of free and fair elections being held when
they are due, in 2007. But the leaders of the two main secular
opposition parties remain in exile. The opposition, including even the
Islamist parties, say they have had enough of General Musharraf, and
are campaigning for a caretaker government to oversee proper elections. 

The general himself is also facing a dangerous insurgency in
Baluchistan, one of Pakistan's four provinces, and looks rather
isolated. Mr Bush, however, offered little help. He made it clear that
he would not do much to push India to make concessions on the general's
great foreign-policy endeavour: the search for a just settlement of the
dispute over Kashmir. From Pakistan's perspective, the peace process
with India already looks as though it has stalled. If, as seems
increasingly likely, a Pakistan-based group is blamed for the bombings
in Varanasi this week (see article[1]), it may now go into reverse. 

-----
[1] http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_ID=5609075
 

See this article with graphics and related items at http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_VGDJDGG

Go to http://www.economist.com for more global news, views and analysis from the Economist Group.

- ABOUT ECONOMIST.COM -

Economist.com is the online version of The Economist newspaper, an independent weekly international news and business publication offering clear reporting, commentary and analysis on world politics, business, finance, science & technology, culture, society and the arts.
Economist.com also offers exclusive content online, including additional articles throughout the week in the Global Agenda section.

-	SUBSCRIBE NOW AND SAVE 25% -

Click here: http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/offer.cfm?campaign=168-XLMT

Subscribe now with 25% off and receive full access to:

* all the articles published in The Economist newspaper
* the online archive - allowing you to search and retrieve over 33,000 articles published in The Economist since 1997
* The World in  - The Economist's outlook on the year
* Business encyclopedia - allows you to find a definition and explanation for any business term


- ABOUT THIS E-MAIL -

This e-mail was sent to you by the person at the e-mail address listed
above through a link found on Economist.com.  We will not send you any
future messages as a result of your being the recipient of this e-mail.


- COPYRIGHT -

This e-mail message and Economist articles linked from it are copyright
(c) 2006 The Economist Newspaper Group Limited. All rights reserved.
http://www.economist.com/help/copy_general.cfm

Economist.com privacy policy: http://www.economist.com/about/privacy.cfm



From autoreply at economist.com  Sun Mar 12 14:18:58 2006
From: autoreply at economist.com (autoreply at economist.com)
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 17:18:58 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] An article for you from Michael Butler.
Message-ID: <200603122150.QAA19022@stage-web-app.economist.com>


- AN ARTICLE FOR YOU, FROM ECONOMIST.COM -

Dear civic,

Michael Butler (michael at intrafi.com) wants you to see this article on Economist.com.



(Note: the sender's e-mail address above has not been verified.)

Subscribe to The Economist print edition, get great savings and FREE full access to Economist.com.  Click here to subscribe:  http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/email.cfm 

Alternatively subscribe to online only version by clicking on the link below and save 25%:

http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/offer.cfm?campaign=168-XLMT



CHILE
Mar 9th 2006  

A brave new dawn for Latin America's most conservative country

THERE is no doubting the star quality of Michelle Bachelet. The woman
who will be sworn in as president on March 11th has already altered
Chile's idea of itself. The great economic success story of Latin
America has also long been seen as its most socially conservative
country. Ms Bachelet, however, is an agnostic separated mother of three
children who hails from the left-wing of the Socialist Party and spent
years of exile in East Germany. Can she strike a successful balance
between change and continuity? 

Ms Bachelet will head the fourth successive government of the
four-party centre-left Concertacion coalition, which has ruled since
the end of the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. The
Concertacion kept the dictatorship's free-market policies which,
eventually, brought rapid economic growth, but matched them with more
effective social policy. Chile enjoys policy stability and political
consensus of a kind that is rare in Latin America, so radical change is
not in store. But the new president has promised to govern in a more
open way, with more say for citizens' groups and less for political
parties.

That spirit of openness is reflected in the composition of her cabinet.
This belies her political origins. Only two of its members--Andres
Zaldivar in the interior ministry and Alejandro Foxley, the foreign
minister--have previous ministerial experience. Half are women,
fulfilling an election promise. Several ministers do not belong to a
party. They include Andres Velasco, a Harvard economics professor, at
the finance ministry. He is one of several liberal technocrats in the
cabinet who, like Ms Bachelet, speak fluent English. The new team has
more PhDs, MBAs and business experience than its predecessors. "They're
global citizens," says Gonzalo Larraguibel of McKinsey, a management
consultancy. 

Ms Bachelet herself is a relative newcomer to politics. She became the
Concertacion's candidate not as a result of a traditional slog through
the party machine, but of the sudden popularity she acquired as health
and then defence minister under Ricardo Lagos, the outgoing president.
She is likely to rely heavily on Mr Zaldivar, a Christian Democrat who
held his first government job in the 1960s and who may, in practice,
play the role of prime minister. 

The new president inherits many advantages. Helped by the high world
price of copper, which accounts for 45% of exports, the economy is
growing at 6% a year. In winning the election in January, Ms Bachelet
was helped greatly by the popularity of Mr Lagos, another socialist.
Unlike her predecessors, she will have a slim majority in both houses
of Congress, thanks to a reform which abolished nine non-elected
senators bequeathed by General Pinochet. But that reform also cut the
presidential term from six years to four. 

The question now is whether her clever technocrats have the experience
and patience to work with a leisurely civil service, which is only just
starting to be professionalised. Or to sit through public debates on
issues to which they already have the answers--or indeed to work
effectively with the Concertacion's professional politicians, many of
whom, like Ms Bachelet, spent years of exile in socialist countries.

For all Chile's successes, these new and untested politicians face
several complex challenges. To sustain economic growth as well as to
create a fairer society Chile needs to improve its education system,
which currently fails the poor. Another priority is reform of the
privatised pension system. That involves striking a balance between the
economic liberalism of her technocrats, who favour more competition
among pension providers, and the demand of some Concertacion
politicians for harsher regulation. 

A third challenge is to secure the energy Chile needs for growth.
Argentina has cut its exports of natural gas to its neighbour. One
alternative involves building four hydroelectric dams in a pristine
area in the south. That would guarantee a clash with greens. Ms
Bachelet courted them during the election campaign with the promise of
a new environment ministry with regulatory teeth. Another possibility
would be to import gas from Bolivia. But that requires an ambitious
effort to settle a century-old demand by Bolivia for access to the sea.

The new president has said that she would like to be remembered both
for what she achieves and for how she achieves it. That is a tall
order. To secure change, boldness will have to be tempered by
compromise, and citizen democracy with professional politics.
 

See this article with graphics and related items at http://www.economist.com/world/la/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5609367

Go to http://www.economist.com for more global news, views and analysis from the Economist Group.

- ABOUT ECONOMIST.COM -

Economist.com is the online version of The Economist newspaper, an independent weekly international news and business publication offering clear reporting, commentary and analysis on world politics, business, finance, science & technology, culture, society and the arts.
Economist.com also offers exclusive content online, including additional articles throughout the week in the Global Agenda section.

-	SUBSCRIBE NOW AND SAVE 25% -

Click here: http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/offer.cfm?campaign=168-XLMT

Subscribe now with 25% off and receive full access to:

* all the articles published in The Economist newspaper
* the online archive - allowing you to search and retrieve over 33,000 articles published in The Economist since 1997
* The World in  - The Economist's outlook on the year
* Business encyclopedia - allows you to find a definition and explanation for any business term


- ABOUT THIS E-MAIL -

This e-mail was sent to you by the person at the e-mail address listed
above through a link found on Economist.com.  We will not send you any
future messages as a result of your being the recipient of this e-mail.


- COPYRIGHT -

This e-mail message and Economist articles linked from it are copyright
(c) 2006 The Economist Newspaper Group Limited. All rights reserved.
http://www.economist.com/help/copy_general.cfm

Economist.com privacy policy: http://www.economist.com/about/privacy.cfm



From michael at intrafi.com  Sun Mar 12 16:58:30 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (Michael)
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 19:58:30 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Article from Tom Dispatch
Message-ID: <200603130058.k2D0wU6D014240@thor.thenation.com>

An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060312/66b9f62d/attachment.htm 

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Sun Mar 12 17:20:04 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 17:20:04 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] MORE ABOUT THE SHAH
Message-ID: <C03A08C4.2A014%michael@michaelbutler.com>

Sorry gather many could not open in earlier in Civic.

Here is the top with the copy of the first notice deleted:

I knew from the get go that this was a terrible mistake. The Shah was trying
to modernize Iran too fast, taking on the big landlords and the mullahs at
the same time. As if Henry VIII had taken on, at the same time, the church
and the barons. He would have advised the Shah to take from the landlords
and give to the mullahs or the reverse.
Of course Carter tossed the Iranians from the frying pan into the fire. And
we are paying for it today.
My point of view was then considered questionable because of my friendship
with the royal family (continues with his twin sister). Sure I liked them
but my opinion was/is mostly pragmatic.
I think the son is a player with moderate following.
My wish is they had a constitutional monarchy with a parliament. Many
historians agree that is the best form of government.
Michael
 > 
> Figuratively, dynamite! I'd heard what I thought was groundless rumors about
> CIA involvement under Carter,
> but dismissed it as unlikely.  In his final years, Carter and Jay became quite
> close; the former staying with Jay
> and Bella at their wilderness home on Lake Clark.  This throws an entirely new
> light on history. Do you know
> if the Shah's son is prepared to reclaim his family's heritage?
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Michael Butler
> Sent: Saturday, March 11, 2006 2:57 PM
> To: SPECIAL from Michael Butler
> Subject: VERY, VERY INTERESTING ABOUT THE SHAH
> 


From barbarasiomos38 at msn.com  Sun Mar 12 19:34:18 2006
From: barbarasiomos38 at msn.com (Barbara Siomos)
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 03:34:18 GMT
Subject: [Mb-civic] SENDING AGAIN - SO IMPORTANT - MICHAEL
Message-ID: <BAY114-DAV11109714CD41CB1C701CEEABE00@phx.gbl>

To make a long long story short...... I suppose this is their excuse for running over the Tibetan people.

peace,
barbara


-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Butler
Sent: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 16:00:28 -0800
To: Civic
Subject: [Mb-civic] SENDING AGAIN - SO IMPORTANT - MICHAEL

Sending again-so important
Michael
------ Forwarded Message
From: autoreply at economist.com
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 17:11:28 -0500
To: michael at intrafi.com
Subject: An article for you from Michael Butler.


- AN ARTICLE FOR YOU, FROM ECONOMIST.COM -

Dear Michael Butler,

Michael Butler (michael at intrafi.com) wants you to see this article on
Economist.com.



(Note: the sender's e-mail address above has not been verified.)

Subscribe to The Economist print edition, get great savings and FREE full
access to Economist.com.  Click here to subscribe:
http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/email.cfm

Alternatively subscribe to online only version by clicking on the link below
and save 25%:

http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/offer.cfm?campaign=168-XLMT



HOW THE OTHER 800M LIVE
Mar 9th 2006  

China's leaders are aware of the problem in its rural areas. They are
terrified of the solution

A SPECTRE is haunting China--the spectre of rural unrest. The leaders
of the Communist Party know it, and fear it as only the inheritors of a
revolution born of rural desperation can. This week, as China's supreme
legislative body (aka the rubber-stamping National People's Congress)
met for its annual ten-day session, addressing the plight of the
country poor was at the top of its agenda. But worrying about something
and curing it are two very different things.

It is not just that China's farmers have missed out on the double-digit
growth that has transformed urban China and turned its richest cities
into some of the most dynamic in Asia. The real problem for the
leadership is that, in some ways, the lot of the rural poor has got
worse. The old communist system offered a life of terrible drabness,
but at least it guaranteed certain basics, including free or nearly
free health care and education. As China has become more of a market
economy, those support systems have largely collapsed.


At the same time, many farmers have lost their livelihoods. The rapid
growth of the cities has resulted in their land being seized for
development with little or no compensation. Many of the most violent
disturbances in recent months have come not from laid-off factory
workers, as in the past, but from farmers protesting about these
depredations. Communism may be nearly dead in all but name in China,
but it survives in the form of one last taboo: the fact that the right
of individuals to own agricultural land is tenuous at best. And the
local governments that control most of that land do not administer it
well. Perennially strapped for cash, because so much of it is consumed
in the long bureaucratic trickle-down from the central government to
the counties, they are more or less forced to squeeze farmers as hard
as they can.

Beyond recognising the problem (China's prime minister, Wen Jiabao,
called it a "deep-seated conflict" that "cannot be ignored"), this
week's congress approved a 15% increase in the money earmarked for
agricultural development, rural services and the like. But even though
the amount to be spent has now risen to 340 billion yuan ($42 billion),
or 8.9% of the entire budget, China's vastness makes it trivial. Some
800m people still live in the countryside, so the new spending amounts
to less than an additional $7 a year each.

What more could the central government do? Most obviously, it could
introduce a proper system of land rights. If that remains an
ideological bridge too far, for the time being at least, it could at
least fund its provinces adequately, which would mean that the poorer,
more rural ones could afford to treat farmers better. That would
involve inter-province transfers at a much higher rate than now.

Finally, it could do a lot more to encourage efficient government by
provincial and local governments. A big part of the problem is that
these lower tiers of government are run incompetently. The reason is
hardly a mystery. With a press that is muzzled (and, if anything,
getting tamer, thanks to a media crackdown directed from the very top),
officials are in no sense accountable to the people whose lives they
control.

THE REMEDY THAT DARES NOT SPEAK ITS NAME
How, though, to make officials accountable? China does hold some highly
constrained elections for village councils. For many years, it has
talked of extending the election system upwards to townships, to
counties and perhaps higher. There have even been some electoral
experiments at township level. For the present, however, the Communist
Party, intent on retaining its monopoly of political power, will try to
spend and manage its way out of trouble. History suggests that it will
fail. The spectre in China's countryside will not be laid to rest until
Chinese leaders accept the need for democracy.
 

See this article with graphics and related items at
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_VGDPQRQ

Go to http://www.economist.com for more global news, views and analysis from
the Economist Group.

- ABOUT ECONOMIST.COM -

Economist.com is the online version of The Economist newspaper, an
independent weekly international news and business publication offering
clear reporting, commentary and analysis on world politics, business,
finance, science & technology, culture, society and the arts.
Economist.com also offers exclusive content online, including additional
articles throughout the week in the Global Agenda section.

-    SUBSCRIBE NOW AND SAVE 25% -

Click here: 
http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/offer.cfm?campaign=168-XLMT

Subscribe now with 25% off and receive full access to:

* all the articles published in The Economist newspaper
* the online archive - allowing you to search and retrieve over 33,000
articles published in The Economist since 1997
* The World in  - The Economist's outlook on the year
* Business encyclopedia - allows you to find a definition and explanation
for any business term


- ABOUT THIS E-MAIL -

This e-mail was sent to you by the person at the e-mail address listed
above through a link found on Economist.com.  We will not send you any
future messages as a result of your being the recipient of this e-mail.


- COPYRIGHT -

This e-mail message and Economist articles linked from it are copyright
(c) 2006 The Economist Newspaper Group Limited. All rights reserved.
http://www.economist.com/help/copy_general.cfm

Economist.com privacy policy: http://www.economist.com/about/privacy.cfm



------ End of Forwarded Message

_______________________________________________
Mb-civic mailing list
Mb-civic at islandlists.com
http://www.islandlists.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mb-civic


From ean at sbcglobal.net  Sun Mar 12 19:39:03 2006
From: ean at sbcglobal.net (ean at sbcglobal.net)
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 19:39:03 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] statement by ACLU director
Message-ID: <E1FIgRn-0004Ws-OS@smtpauth02.mail.atl.earthlink.net>

Something is wrong in our country. The president is overreaching his 
authority with a vast program of illegal spying on Americans, and 
Congress, which is supposed to check executive power, is preparing to 
ratify his illegal surveillance program after the fact. 
In a backroom deal announced this week, key Senate 
Republicans met with Vice President Dick Cheney and agreed 
to create legislation that would rewrite our laws by requiring 
less disclosure and less judicial power to check wiretaps than 
current law demands. 
The message these partisans are sending to the people and 
thecountry is clear: partisans are willing to put party loyalty 
over fundamental and timeless values, such as the 
preservation of the Constitution and the rightful power of 
Congress as a check on the president. Many Americans are 
appalled that our President has not only ordered warrantless 
spying on Americans, but has unapologetically claimed that 
he has the power to break the law.
The question for us now is: What message will we the people 
send Congress?
The ACLU is asking you to join with us in declaring 
unequivocally that warrantless spying on innocent Americans 
is unacceptable.
It?s at moments like these that our system of checks and 
balances matters most. When the president asserts absolute 
power and the legislative branch abdicates its responsibilities, 
we must turn to the courts: the third pillar of our democracy.
Yesterday, the ACLU asked the judge in our NSA lawsuit to 
immediately block the illegal NSA spying program in order to 
prevent ?concrete harm?to our plaintiffs? journalists, non-
profit groups and other advocates ? and to the American 
way of life. The ACLU v. NSA lawsuit aggressively challenges 
the Bush Administration?s abuse of power, charging that the 
spying violates all Americans' rights to free speech and 
privacy under the First and Fourth Amendments of the 
Constitution.
White House allies in Congress may be willing to help cover 
up this illegal program, and other lawmakers may be willing 
to stand on the sidelines, but when the president breaks the 
law, neither Congress nor the courts should give him a get-
out-of-jail free card.
I urge you to stay involved as we work to end illegal 
government spying and restore the rule of law. The debate in 
Congress is far from over, and our legal challenge to the NSA 
has only just begun. We must stay vigilant if we want to 
preserve a democracy where the people are both safe and 
free.
Sincerely,

Anthony D. Romero
Executive Director


-- 
You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, 
option D (up to 3 emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options 
(option A - 1x/week, option B - 3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option D - 
up to 3x/day) please reply and let us know!  If someone forwarded you 
this email and you want to be on our list, send an email to 
ean at sbcglobal.net and tell us which option you'd like.


"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060312/bbf37fa1/attachment.htm 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Mon Mar 13 00:51:45 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 03:51:45 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] The war dividend - companies making a fortune out of Iraq
Message-ID: <000b01c6467b$5ea52200$5b27e440@Harold>

The War Dividend: The British companies making a fortune out of conflict-riven Iraq 
By Robert Verkaik 
Published: 13 March 2006 
British businesses have profited by at least ?1.1bn since coalition forces toppled Saddam Hussein three years ago, the first comprehensive investigation into UK corporate investment in Iraq has found. 

The company roll-call of post-war profiteers includes some of the best known names in Britain's boardrooms as well many who would prefer to remain anonymous. They come from private security services, banks, PR consultancies, urban planning consortiums, oil companies, architects offices and energy advisory bodies.

Among the top earners is the construction firm Amec, which has made an estimated ?500m from a series of contracts restoring electrical systems and maintaining power generation facilities during the past two years. Aegis, which provides private security has earned more than ?246m from a three-year contract with the Pentagon to co-ordinate military and security companies in Iraq. Erinys, which specialises in the same area, has made more than ?86m, a substantial portion from the protection of oilfields.

The evidence of massive investments and the promise of more multimillion-pound profits to come was discovered in a joint investigation by Corporate Watch, an independent watchdog, and The Independent.

The findings show how much is stake if Britain were to withdraw military protection from Iraq. British company involvement at the top of Iraq's new political and economic structures means Iraq will be forced to rely on British business for many years to come.

A total of 61 British companies are identified as benefiting from at least ?1.1bn of contracts and investment in the new Iraq. But that figure is just the tip of the iceberg; Corporate Watch believes it could be as much as five times higher, because many companies prefer to keep their relationship secret.

The waters are further muddied by the Government's refusal to release the names of companies it has helped to win contracts in Iraq.

Many of the companies enjoy long-standing relationships with Labour and now have a financial stake in the reconstruction of Iraq in Britain's image. Of the total profits published in the report, the British taxpayer has had to meet a bill for ?78m while the US taxpayer's contribution to UK corporate earnings in Iraq is nearly nine times that. Iraqis themselves have paid British company directors ?150m.

The report acknowledges that British business still lags behind the huge profits paid to American companies. But, in two fields, Britain is playing a critical and leading role.

The threat from the Iraqi insurgency means British private security companies are in great demand. Corporate Watch estimates there are between 20,000 and 30,000 security personnel working in Iraq, half of whom are employed by companies run by retired senior British officers and at least two former defence ministers.

The biggest British player, Aegis - run by Tim Spicer, the former British army lieutenant colonel who founded the security company Sandline - has a workforce the size of a military division and may rank as the largest corporate military group ever assembled, according to the report. Other private security companies have sprung up overnight to protect British and American civilians.

Britain is also playing a leading role in advising on the creation of state institutions and the business of government. PA Consulting, which has also received a contract for advising on the Government's ID cards scheme, worth around ?19m, is now a key adviser in Iraq.

Adam Smith International, a body closely linked to the right-wing think-tank used by Margaret Thatcher, has been heavily involved in the foundation of the Iraqi government and continues to influence its newly formed ministries. According to the Tory MP Quentin Davies, who visited Iraq, the advisers are "reordering Iraqi government operations at the most basic level, to help restructure some of the Iraqi ministries, in fact physically restructure them, even suggesting how the minister's office should be laid out".

Another favourite of the Thatcher governments, now involved in Iraq, is Tim Bell, who ran the Tories' election campaigns in 1979, 1983 and 1987. His PR firm Bell-Pottinger has been involved in advising on the 2004 elections and a strategic campaign to promote bigger concepts such as the return of sovereignty, reconstruction, support for the army and police, minority rights and public probity.

Loukas Christodoulou, of Corporate Watch, has been monitoring British business relations with Iraq since the invasion. He says in his conclusion to our joint report: "The presence of these consultants in Iraq is arguably a part of the UK government's policy to push British firms as lead providers of privatisation support. The Department for International Development has positioned itself as a champion of privatisation in developing countries. The central part UK firms are playing in reshaping Iraq's economy and society lays the ground for a shift towards a corporate-dominated economy. This will have repercussions lasting decades."

In five years, the ?1.1bn of contracts identified in the report will be dwarfed by what Britain and the US hope to reap from investments. Highly lucrative oil contracts have yet to be handed out
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060313/1cf5ba90/attachment.htm 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Mon Mar 13 01:09:06 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (harry.sifton at sympatico.ca)
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 04:09:06 -0500 (EST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] ACCOONA
Message-ID: <6259899.1142240946835.JavaMail.dynamo@app004.cmpnet.com>



AI-based Accoona search engine aims at Google

Dwarfed by better-known search engines such as Google and Yahoo, Accoona is taking steps to outwit the big boys.

Read More @ http://www.eetuk.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=181502201


From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Mon Mar 13 01:49:39 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (harry.sifton at sympatico.ca)
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 09:49:39 GMT
Subject: [Mb-civic] Guardian Unlimited: Former top judge says US risks
	edging near to dictatorship
Message-ID: <20060313094939.9448F5423D@mullet.gul3.gnl>

HS spotted this on the Guardian Unlimited site and thought you should see it.

To see this story with its related links on the Guardian Unlimited site, go to http://www.guardian.co.uk

Former top judge says US risks edging near to dictatorship
&#183; Sandra Day O'Connor warns of rightwing attacks&#183; Lawyers 'must speak up' to protect judiciary
Julian Borger in Washington
Monday March 13 2006
The Guardian


Sandra Day O'Connor, a Republican-appointed judge who retired last month after 24 years on the supreme court, has said the US is in danger of edging towards dictatorship if the party's rightwingers continue to attack the judiciary.

In a strongly worded speech at Georgetown University, reported by National Public Radio and the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin, Ms O'Connor took aim at Republican leaders whose repeated denunciations of the courts for alleged liberal bias could, she said, be contributing to a climate of violence against judges.

Ms O'Connor, nominated by Ronald Reagan as the first woman supreme court justice, declared: "We must be ever-vigilant against those who would strong-arm the judiciary."

She pointed to autocracies in the developing world and former Communist countries as lessons on where interference with the judiciary might lead. "It takes a lot of degeneration before a country falls into dictatorship, but we should avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings."

In her address to an audience of corporate lawyers on Thursday, Ms O'Connor singled out a warning to the judiciary issued last year by Tom DeLay, the former Republican leader in the House of Representatives, over a court ruling in a controversial "right to die" case.

After the decision last March that ordered a brain-dead woman in Florida, Terri Schiavo, removed from life support, Mr DeLay said: "The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behaviour."

Mr DeLay later called for the impeachment of judges involved in the Schiavo case, and called for more scrutiny of "an arrogant, out-of-control, unaccountable judiciary that thumbed their nose at Congress and the president".

Such threats, Ms O'Connor said, "pose a direct threat to our constitutional freedom", and she told the lawyers in her audience: "I want you to tune your ears to these attacks ... You have an obligation to speak up.

"Statutes and constitutions do not protect judicial independence - people do," the retired supreme court justice said.

She noted death threats against judges were on the rise and added that the situation was not helped by a senior senator's suggestion that there might be a connection between the violence against judges and the decisions they make.

The senator she was referring to was John Cornyn, a Bush loyalist from Texas, who made his remarks last April, soon after a judge was shot dead in an Atlanta courtroom and the family of a federal judge was murdered in Illinois.

Senator Cornyn said: "I don't know if there is a cause and effect connection, but we have seen some recent episodes of courthouse violence in this country ... And I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters, on some occasions, where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in violence."

Although appointed by a Republican, Ms O'Connor voted with the supreme court's liberals on some divisive issues, including abortion, making her a frequent target for criticism from the right. After announcing that she intended to retire last year at the age of 75, she was replaced in February this year by Samuel Alito, who is generally regarded as being more consistently conservative.

In her speech, Ms O'Connor said that if the courts did not occasionally make politicians mad they would not be doing their jobs, and their effectiveness "is premised on the notion that we won't be subject to retaliation for our judicial acts".

Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited


From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Mon Mar 13 02:01:25 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 05:01:25 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Clinton in Canada, recieves standing ovations....
Message-ID: <000901c64685$1a56d210$5b27e440@Harold>





Former US president Clinton talks climate change, security in Canada 
Sat Mar 11, 11:46 AM ET 

To standing ovations and thunderous applause, former US president Bill Clinton ended a Canadian speaking tour joking about his popular role in America's northern neighbor.

Clinton quipped that he has been to Canada so often that if he comes "once more in this calendar year, I will be obliged to pay taxes."

The national Globe and Mail newspaper joked that Canadians would get "the idea that Bill Clinton is running for political office" in Canada.

Even "Freakonomics" author Stephen Dubner, who spoke before Clinton took the stage Friday at a day-long conference of motivational speakers, jested: "Its really great to be in a country where Bill Clinton is the president again."

But beneath the joviality America's 42nd president, who runs charitable foundations and has a lucrative career as a popular speakers, spent the week delivering sharp messages about the threat of climate change, human security, and Canada-US relations as a global model for cooperation.

Clinton predicted that climate change will cause global crises unless its curbed now. Oceans will rise if Greenland's ice cap melts, he said, and changes in ocean currents could cause severe cold spells in the northern hemisphere.

"We are only 15,000 years away from the last ice age on a planet millions of years old," noted Clinton, and said those who ignore the signs of climate change are forgetting that human civilizations are relatively new.

Climate change could erase some coastal areas including part of Manhatten, he said. Worldwide, "there will be tens of millions of food refugees, lots more violence, lots more trouble, lots more call for the soldiers of Canada and the US to go solve problems we could have prevented in the first place."

Clinton wrapped up his seven-city Canadian tour before a Vancouver audience of about 7,000 business people, at a motivational conference called "The Power Within."

The Vancouver audience applauded when Clinton thanked Canada for sending soldiers to Afghanistan, where in the past week two Canadians were killed and several others injured. "Thank you, as a citizen," he said. "This is important work, I know its hard for you."

Clinton urged rich countries to reduce disparity between rich and poor, and stressed that in a globalized world human security is complex. "Security is about more than terrorism and weapons of mass destruction," he said, adding that economic development would allow people worldwide to live peacefully "for a fraction of what it takes to fight militarily, in Iraq, Afghanistan."

In Vancouver and earlier stops in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Saskatoon, Regina and Edmonton, Clinton leveled his trade-mark stare at his audience and each person has a responsibility to try to understand and better a world so complex its "like the political equivalent of the chaos theory in physics."

To create a worldwide commitment to peaceful democracy, social justice and market economics, he said in Vancouver, "You have more power to deal with all these issues, as private citizens, than any group of private citizens in history -- and you have more responsibility to do it."

Clinton downplayed the souring of Canada-US relations in recent years. Polls suggest that Canadians strongly disapprove of current US President George W. Bush; Canada and the United States are embroiled in a bitter trade war over softwood lumber, and hot-headed politicians on both sides have been enraged over Canada's refusal to join America's Iraq invasion.

But Clinton said the problems are minor. "We have the (worlds) longest unguarded border, the biggest bilateral trade relationship, the most complex interconnections ... if our only problems are softwood and a difference of opinion over the invasion of Iraq, I'd say were doing pretty well."

He said the Canada-US relationship, which survives despite different political and economic systems, is a model for cooperation in the rest of the world. "Our relationship is mostly good ... its interdependent. Were like married people who occasionally have an argument, except we don't have divorce as an option."

Clinton called the Canadian-US "marriage" an economic and cultural "metaphor for the larger world (which) is increasingly interdependent."
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060313/e60f2243/attachment.htm 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Mon Mar 13 02:28:17 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 05:28:17 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] and you thought the ports were threatened by
	terrorists.........wrong!
Message-ID: <000901c64688$dadf6d50$5b27e440@Harold>

Criminal Records, Bogus Licenses Among Truckers at Key U.S. Port
Thousands of Port Truckers Go Unscreened, Yet Many Have Criminal Records
By PIERRE THOMAS
WASHINGTON, March 7, 2006 ? - In Washington today, House Republicans vowed to defy President Bush's effort to have a Dubai company take over six major U.S. ports. But ABC News has learned about a port threat from within -- a major security breach at the ports of New York and New Jersey. 

The two ports handle millions of tons of cargo, with scores of cruise ships passing through each year. Truckers who transport much of the cargo are issued ID cards, which give them access to all areas of the port. 

ABC News has learned that the cards, given to thousands of truckers by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, were issued with virtually no background checks. The Department of Homeland Security recently investigated the New York and New Jersey ports, and found stunning gaps in security. 

The new DHS report, obtained by ABC News, shows that of the 9,000 truckers checked, nearly half had evidence of criminal records. More than 500 held bogus driver's licenses, leaving officials unsure of their real identities. 

"We have no idea who's in the ports. And many of the folks who come in to service the ports, that drive the trucks back and forth, are people who don't have very distinguished backgrounds. May have criminal backgrounds," said Stephen Flynn, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonpartisan think tank. 

The intelligence report found truck drivers had been convicted of homicide, assault, weapons charges, sex offenses, arson, drug dealing, identity theft and cargo theft. 

According to the report, a review of incident logs involving truck drivers at the Newark Seaport in late 2005 revealed one who was identified as an MS-13 gang member. MS-13 has been described as one of the most dangerous gangs in the United States. The logs also highlighted an incident involving "four cabs without containers [which] exited the terminal without stopping at the red light and ignored verbal commands to stop." 


Truckers Involved in Drugs and Money Laundering
The report also says 33 ID cardholders were identified in narcotics-related offenses, including people arrested for the possession of cocaine and heroin. Others were involved in drug smuggling. In one incident, according to the report, authorities found 13 pounds of cocaine concealed under a truck's sleeper cab. 

Money laundering and counterfeiting pose other security problems, the report points out. Authorities once seized almost half a million dollars, which was concealed inside a truck's rocker panels. 

The report concludes port "security gaps" expose "vulnerabilities that could be capitalized by terrorist organizations." It also found similar problems at other major U.S. ports. 

"It has to be a wake-up call," said Rep. Peter King, R- N.Y. "I strongly believe that, from any number of levels, the ports are our greatest vulnerability." 

Security analysts say terrorists working with truck drivers could plant a bomb aboard a cruise ship and detonate it once it's at sea, or they could pack a 40-foot cargo container full of explosives and blow up part of a port. 

"If a bomb went off in a sea port," said Flynn, "we would likely see a closing of the sea ports, bringing the global trade system to a halt and potentially putting our economy into a recession." 

Homeland Security officials tell ABC News they are trying to improve port security and have recently tested a national program that will vet truckers before they are issued identification cards. 

ABC News' Pierre Thomas filed this report for "World News Tonight."
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060313/d7c0dceb/attachment.htm 

From marylouiseparis at hotmail.com  Mon Mar 13 02:56:31 2006
From: marylouiseparis at hotmail.com (Mary Louise smn)
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 10:56:31 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] [Mb-civic SO IMPORTANT - MICHAEL    re TIBET
In-Reply-To: <BAY114-DAV11109714CD41CB1C701CEEABE00@phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <BAY107-F356C0DCA1B29572A8F0039B8E00@phx.gbl>



           Barbara        "Tournament of Shadows"  Meyer/Bryser   You may 
find  this book of interest.  Tibet is a focal point in the race to win "The 
Great Game."  in Central Asia.     "The Game" began  in the 1800's and 
continues, even to this very day.     Marylouise  (Sillman)

>From: "Barbara Siomos" <barbarasiomos38 at msn.com>
>Reply-To: mb-civic at islandlists.com
>To: mb-civic at islandlists.com
>Subject: Re: [Mb-civic] SENDING AGAIN - SO IMPORTANT - MICHAEL
>Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 03:34:18 GMT
>
>To make a long long story short...... I suppose this is their excuse for 
>running over the Tibetan people.
>
>peace,
>barbara
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Michael Butler
>Sent: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 16:00:28 -0800
>To: Civic
>Subject: [Mb-civic] SENDING AGAIN - SO IMPORTANT - MICHAEL
>
>Sending again-so important
>Michael
>------ Forwarded Message
>From: autoreply at economist.com
>Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 17:11:28 -0500
>To: michael at intrafi.com
>Subject: An article for you from Michael Butler.
>
>
>- AN ARTICLE FOR YOU, FROM ECONOMIST.COM -
>
>Dear Michael Butler,
>
>Michael Butler (michael at intrafi.com) wants you to see this article on
>Economist.com.
>
>
>
>(Note: the sender's e-mail address above has not been verified.)
>
>Subscribe to The Economist print edition, get great savings and FREE full
>access to Economist.com.  Click here to subscribe:
>http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/email.cfm
>
>Alternatively subscribe to online only version by clicking on the link 
>below
>and save 25%:
>
>http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/offer.cfm?campaign=168-XLMT
>
>
>
>HOW THE OTHER 800M LIVE
>Mar 9th 2006
>
>China's leaders are aware of the problem in its rural areas. They are
>terrified of the solution
>
>A SPECTRE is haunting China--the spectre of rural unrest. The leaders
>of the Communist Party know it, and fear it as only the inheritors of a
>revolution born of rural desperation can. This week, as China's supreme
>legislative body (aka the rubber-stamping National People's Congress)
>met for its annual ten-day session, addressing the plight of the
>country poor was at the top of its agenda. But worrying about something
>and curing it are two very different things.
>
>It is not just that China's farmers have missed out on the double-digit
>growth that has transformed urban China and turned its richest cities
>into some of the most dynamic in Asia. The real problem for the
>leadership is that, in some ways, the lot of the rural poor has got
>worse. The old communist system offered a life of terrible drabness,
>but at least it guaranteed certain basics, including free or nearly
>free health care and education. As China has become more of a market
>economy, those support systems have largely collapsed.
>
>
>At the same time, many farmers have lost their livelihoods. The rapid
>growth of the cities has resulted in their land being seized for
>development with little or no compensation. Many of the most violent
>disturbances in recent months have come not from laid-off factory
>workers, as in the past, but from farmers protesting about these
>depredations. Communism may be nearly dead in all but name in China,
>but it survives in the form of one last taboo: the fact that the right
>of individuals to own agricultural land is tenuous at best. And the
>local governments that control most of that land do not administer it
>well. Perennially strapped for cash, because so much of it is consumed
>in the long bureaucratic trickle-down from the central government to
>the counties, they are more or less forced to squeeze farmers as hard
>as they can.
>
>Beyond recognising the problem (China's prime minister, Wen Jiabao,
>called it a "deep-seated conflict" that "cannot be ignored"), this
>week's congress approved a 15% increase in the money earmarked for
>agricultural development, rural services and the like. But even though
>the amount to be spent has now risen to 340 billion yuan ($42 billion),
>or 8.9% of the entire budget, China's vastness makes it trivial. Some
>800m people still live in the countryside, so the new spending amounts
>to less than an additional $7 a year each.
>
>What more could the central government do? Most obviously, it could
>introduce a proper system of land rights. If that remains an
>ideological bridge too far, for the time being at least, it could at
>least fund its provinces adequately, which would mean that the poorer,
>more rural ones could afford to treat farmers better. That would
>involve inter-province transfers at a much higher rate than now.
>
>Finally, it could do a lot more to encourage efficient government by
>provincial and local governments. A big part of the problem is that
>these lower tiers of government are run incompetently. The reason is
>hardly a mystery. With a press that is muzzled (and, if anything,
>getting tamer, thanks to a media crackdown directed from the very top),
>officials are in no sense accountable to the people whose lives they
>control.
>
>THE REMEDY THAT DARES NOT SPEAK ITS NAME
>How, though, to make officials accountable? China does hold some highly
>constrained elections for village councils. For many years, it has
>talked of extending the election system upwards to townships, to
>counties and perhaps higher. There have even been some electoral
>experiments at township level. For the present, however, the Communist
>Party, intent on retaining its monopoly of political power, will try to
>spend and manage its way out of trouble. History suggests that it will
>fail. The spectre in China's countryside will not be laid to rest until
>Chinese leaders accept the need for democracy.
>
>
>See this article with graphics and related items at
>http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_VGDPQRQ
>
>Go to http://www.economist.com for more global news, views and analysis 
>from
>the Economist Group.
>
>- ABOUT ECONOMIST.COM -
>
>Economist.com is the online version of The Economist newspaper, an
>independent weekly international news and business publication offering
>clear reporting, commentary and analysis on world politics, business,
>finance, science & technology, culture, society and the arts.
>Economist.com also offers exclusive content online, including additional
>articles throughout the week in the Global Agenda section.
>
>-    SUBSCRIBE NOW AND SAVE 25% -
>
>Click here:
>http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/offer.cfm?campaign=168-XLMT
>
>Subscribe now with 25% off and receive full access to:
>
>* all the articles published in The Economist newspaper
>* the online archive - allowing you to search and retrieve over 33,000
>articles published in The Economist since 1997
>* The World in  - The Economist's outlook on the year
>* Business encyclopedia - allows you to find a definition and explanation
>for any business term
>
>
>- ABOUT THIS E-MAIL -
>
>This e-mail was sent to you by the person at the e-mail address listed
>above through a link found on Economist.com.  We will not send you any
>future messages as a result of your being the recipient of this e-mail.
>
>
>- COPYRIGHT -
>
>This e-mail message and Economist articles linked from it are copyright
>(c) 2006 The Economist Newspaper Group Limited. All rights reserved.
>http://www.economist.com/help/copy_general.cfm
>
>Economist.com privacy policy: http://www.economist.com/about/privacy.cfm
>
>
>
>------ End of Forwarded Message
>
>_______________________________________________
>Mb-civic mailing list
>Mb-civic at islandlists.com
>http://www.islandlists.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mb-civic
>
>_______________________________________________
>Mb-civic mailing list
>Mb-civic at islandlists.com
>http://www.islandlists.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mb-civic

_________________________________________________________________
Express yourself instantly with MSN Messenger! Download today it's FREE! 
http://messenger.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200471ave/direct/01/


From swiggard at comcast.net  Mon Mar 13 03:55:43 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 06:55:43 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] IMPORTANT: U.S. Campaign Is Aimed at Iran's Leaders -
 Washington Post
Message-ID: <44155DBF.6060102@comcast.net>

U.S. Campaign Is Aimed at Iran's Leaders
Uneasy About Tehran's Nuclear Plans, Bush Administration Tries to Build 
Opposition to Theocracy

By Peter Baker and Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, March 13, 2006; A01

As the dispute over its nuclear program arrives at the U.N. Security 
Council today, Iran has vaulted to the front of the U.S. national 
security agenda amid Bush administration plans for a sustained campaign 
against the ayatollahs of Tehran.

President Bush and his team have been huddling in closed-door meetings 
on Iran, summoning scholars for advice, investing in opposition 
activities, creating an Iran office in Washington and opening listening 
posts abroad dedicated to the efforts against Tehran.

The internal administration debate that raged in the first term between 
those who advocated more engagement with Iran and those who preferred 
more confrontation appears in the second term to be largely settled in 
favor of the latter. Although administration officials do not use the 
term "regime change" in public, that in effect is the goal they outline 
as they aim to build resistance to the theocracy.

"We may face no greater challenge from a single country than from Iran," 
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in Senate testimony last week. 
"We do not have a problem with the Iranian people. We want the Iranian 
people to be free. Our problem is with the Iranian regime."

In private meetings, Bush and his advisers have been more explicit. 
Members of the Hoover Institution's board of overseers who met with 
Bush, Vice President Cheney and national security adviser Stephen J. 
Hadley two weeks ago emerged with the impression that the administration 
has shifted to a more robust policy aimed at the Iranian government.

"The message that we received is that they are in favor of separating 
the Iranian people from the regime," said Esmail Amid-Hozour, an Iranian 
American businessman who serves on the Hoover board.

"The upper hand is with those who are pushing regime change rather than 
those who are advocating more diplomacy," said Richard N. Haass, who as 
State Department policy planning director in Bush's first term was among 
those pushing for engagement.

But as the administration gears up, the struggle with Iran remains 
shadowed by Iraq. The botched intelligence on Saddam Hussein's weapons 
has left a credibility challenge in convincing the public and the world 
that the administration is right this time about Iran. After alienating 
European allies in the rush to war in Iraq, the administration is 
following a slower, multilateral approach. And with U.S. forces 
stretched, analysts wonder how feasible a military option would be if it 
came to that.

The focus on Iran inside the administration lately has been striking. 
Bush, according to aides, has been spending more time on the issue, and 
advisers have invited 30 to 40 specialists for consultations in recent 
months.

In the past week, the State Department created an Iran desk. Last year, 
only two people in the department worked full time on Iran; now there 
will be 10. The department is launching more training in the Farsi 
language and is planning an Iranian career track, which has been 
difficult without an embassy there.

Undersecretary of State R. Nicholas Burns said in an interview that the 
department will also add staff in Dubai, which is part of the United 
Arab Emirates, as well as at other embassies in the vicinity of Iran, 
all assigned to watch Tehran. He called the new Dubai outpost the "21st 
century equivalent" of the Riga station in Latvia that monitored the 
Soviet Union in the 1930s when the United States had no embassy in Moscow.

The administration also has launched a $75 million program to advance 
democracy in Iran by expanding broadcasting into the country, funding 
nongovernmental organizations and promoting cultural exchanges. Voice of 
America broadcasts one hour a day into Iran; by April, that will grow to 
four hours a day, and the administration plans to go to 24 hours a day. 
But the administration suffered a setback last week when lawmakers 
slashed $19 million, mainly from broadcast operations.

The administration got to this point after a year of deliberately 
staying on the sidelines. After the United States took the lead on Iraq, 
the British told Bush administration officials that Washington should 
let the Europeans go first on dealing with Iran's alleged nuclear 
weapons program.

During her first trip to Europe as secretary of state, in February 2005, 
Rice was surprised that most questions from European officials concerned 
Iran, not Iraq, and was sobered by the realization that they viewed 
Washington as the problem, not Tehran.

When Bush went to Europe a few weeks later, French President Jacques 
Chirac and then-Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder of Germany pushed him to 
support a British-French-German diplomatic effort dubbed the EU-3. Bush 
agreed, and Rice announced the decision a year ago last weekend. With 
the Europeans in the lead, it became easier to persuade Russia and China 
as well to take a tougher line with Iran.

"We have taken the position from the get-go that we believed it was 
important to work with as many countries as possible," Burns said. "We 
wanted to have the entire international community on our side in order 
to pressure Iran."

The biggest help bringing the international community together, though, 
came from Iran. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad proved so incendiary -- in 
dismissing the Holocaust and talking about wiping Israel off the map -- 
that the prospect of a negotiated solution faded. The statements 
underscored the danger posed by Tehran and, according to Burns, led Rice 
"to say we need to fire on all pistons on Iran." Ultimately, the 
Europeans, Russia and China agreed to send Iran to the Security Council.

Bush decided to push more overtly for a democratic Iran. "Tonight," he 
said in his State of the Union address on Jan. 31, "let me speak 
directly to the citizens of Iran: America respects you, and we respect 
your country. We respect your right to choose your own future and win 
your own freedom. And our nation hopes one day to be the closest of 
friends with a free and democratic Iran."

Now that the nuclear issue is at the Security Council, the U.S. strategy 
is to escalate gradually rather than force an immediate climax. The 
first step would be a statement by the council president declaring Iran 
in violation of nuclear treaty obligations and demanding it suspend 
uranium enrichment. If that fails, the council could be asked to impose 
economic sanctions or pass a resolution allowing military force to 
enforce compliance. Russia and China, which have veto power, seem 
unlikely to support either move.

"There's a clear desire to have a broad coalition," a senior U.S. 
official said. "The question is, how do you get any action out of it?"

Some analysts believe this year will lead to a decision point for Bush 
whether to use a military option. For now, Bush and his aides say all 
options are on the table, but as a practical matter no armed strike is 
likely until diplomacy has been exhausted.

Many military specialists doubt a strike would be effective because 
Iran's nuclear facilities are scattered in dozens of locations, and 
would require hundreds of sorties first to disrupt Iranian air defenses. 
Such an attack, they say, could inflame the Muslim world and alienate 
reformers within Iran.

Haass, now president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said 
Washington should instead try direct negotiations with Tehran: "The 
United States ought to make a major diplomatic push in part because it 
might succeed, in part because none of the other options are attractive 
and in part because if you're going to escalate you want to demonstrate 
that you tried." The current policy, he said, "looks to me more like a 
hope than a strategy."

Some Republicans, though, say a military attack may be required if only 
to set back Iran's nuclear program a few years.

"Every year that we wait, the risk increases," said former House speaker 
Newt Gingrich, a member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board. "I would 
hope that the administration would decide to do something decisive. . . 
. We have the military power in the region if we need it. It's a 
question of whether we have the will."

Such a decision could prompt deep skepticism after the Iraq intelligence 
failure. "As far as Congress, they're certainly going to do their 
homework more this time and demand more from the intelligence community 
before they go along with this," said a Senate Republican leadership 
aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The way things are going now, the aide said, "It's hard to see this 
getting resolved under the Bush administration."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/12/AR2006031201016.html?referrer=email
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060313/073ad967/attachment-0001.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Mon Mar 13 03:57:04 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 06:57:04 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Senior White House Staff May Be Wearing Down -
	Washington Post
Message-ID: <44155E10.3040006@comcast.net>

Senior White House Staff May Be Wearing Down

By Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 13, 2006; A04

Andrew H. Card Jr. wakes at 4:20 in the morning, shows up at the White 
House an hour or so later, convenes his senior staff at 7:30 and then 
proceeds to a blur of other meetings that do not let up until long after 
the sun sets. He gets home at 9 or 10 at night and sometimes fields 
phone calls until 11 p.m. Then he gets up and does it all over again.

Of all the reasons that President Bush is in trouble these days, not to 
be overlooked are inadequate REM cycles. Like chief of staff Card, many 
of the president's top aides have been by his side nonstop for more than 
five years, not including the first campaign, recount and transition. 
This is a White House, according to insiders, that is physically and 
emotionally exhausted, battered by scandal and drained by political 
setbacks.

"By the time you get to year six, there's never a break . . . and you 
get tired," said Ed Rollins, who served five years in President Ronald 
Reagan's White House. "There's always a crisis. It wears you down. This 
has been a White House that hasn't really had much change at all. There 
is a fatigue factor that builds up. You sometimes don't see the crisis 
approaching. You're not as on guard as you once were."

To Rollins, the uproar over an Arab-owned firm taking over management of 
some American ports represents a classic example. Bush and his staff did 
not know about the arrangement approved by his administration, and after 
congressional Republicans revolted, issued an ineffective veto threat 
that only exacerbated the dispute, which climaxed with the collapse of 
the deal last week. "This White House would not have made this mistake 
two years ago," Rollins said.

Bush's problems go beyond the fatigue factor. An unpopular foreign war, 
high energy prices and the nation's worst natural disaster in decades 
have dragged his poll ratings down to the lowest level of any 
second-term president, other than Richard M. Nixon, in the last 
half-century. Lately it seems to many in the White House that they 
cannot catch a break -- insurgents blow up a holy shrine in Iraq, 
tipping the country toward civil war; Vice President Cheney accidentally 
shoots a hunting partner; a former top Bush adviser is arrested on theft 
charges.

But at a time when Bush needs his staff to be sharp to help steer past 
these political shoals and find ways to turn things around, he still has 
the same core group working since he turned his sights toward the White 
House. That group includes Card, deputy chief of staff Karl Rove, senior 
adviser Michael J. Gerson, counselor Dan Bartlett, budget director 
Joshua B. Bolten, press secretary Scott McClellan and national security 
adviser Stephen J. Hadley.

The succession of crisis after crisis has taken its toll. Some in the 
White House sound frazzled. While there are few stories of aides nodding 
off in meetings, some duck outside during the day so the fresh air will 
wake them up. "We're all burned out," said one White House official who 
did not want to be named for fear of angering superiors. "People are 
just tired."

White House officials are never genuinely away from the job. Tied to 
their BlackBerrys and cellular telephones, they are often called to duty 
even during rare vacations. Weekends are often just another workday. 
Hadley, for one, schedules a full day of meetings every Saturday. Card 
comes to the White House on days off to go bicycle riding with Bush.

While other professions demand 14-hour days and six- or seven-day weeks, 
few involve as much consequence, much less the intense scrutiny of the 
Internet age. A former Bush aide said, "You don't really realize until 
you're gone" just how exhausting it really is.

For the record, White House officials reject the suggestion that 
exhaustion has dulled their political instincts or contributed to the 
spate of trouble. "People work very, very hard," said White House 
communications director Nicolle Wallace, and "I'd be lying to say that 
there aren't some people on some days" who are weary. But "the other 
side of being here six years is incredible wisdom and steadiness and 
experience." Moreover, she added, "there's been enough turnover that 
there's new energy."

Any discussion of the fatigue factor in Republican circles invariably 
turns to Card, a low-key, self-effacing and well-liked Washington 
veteran who has been managing Bush's White House team since three weeks 
after the November 2000 election. Card brought considerable experience 
to the task, having worked in the Reagan White House, then serving 
President George H.W. Bush as deputy White House chief of staff and 
later transportation secretary.

In his current role, Card has proved to be a marathon man, capable of 
enduring the most brutal hours in perhaps the most brutal job in 
Washington for longer than anyone in modern times. Only one other person 
has served as White House chief of staff longer, Sherman Adams, the top 
aide to President Dwight D. Eisenhower in a far less frenetic, wired 
era. And if Card makes it to Nov. 1, he will surpass Adams's record, 
according to the Eisenhower library.

Card retains enormous respect inside and outside the White House, but 
some Republicans whisper about his judgment in the ill-fated selection 
of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court and the handling of Hurricane 
Katrina, to name two examples. Card declined to be interviewed, but has 
publicly dismissed concerns that his schedule has sapped his energy.

"All my life I have worked kind of this schedule," he told C-SPAN last 
fall. "When I was in college, I delivered newspapers early in the 
morning and worked at McDonald's late at night. So even when I was in 
high school, I would get up in the morning and get the newspapers ready 
for the paper boys early in the morning. So I've had this kind of 
lifestyle of early-to-bed and early-to-rise -- and so far seem to be 
doing pretty well."

Speculation among Republicans that Card would leave at the beginning of 
the year proved false or premature. Bush has resisted emulating Reagan, 
who brought in a fresh team led by Howard H. Baker Jr. when his second 
term was threatened by the Iran-contra scandal. Reagan and Clinton 
accepted Washington figures outside their own circles, and each had four 
chiefs of staff during their tenures. Bush emphasizes loyalty and 
surrounds himself mainly with people he knows.

Many Republicans were struck by the relative lack of ambition of Bush's 
State of the Union address, a program including alternative energy 
research, science education funding and health care tax breaks but 
nothing of the scope of last year's plan to reinvent Social Security. 
But some saw that as a reasonable response to the death of the Social 
Security effort, a recognition that it would be hard to enact dramatic 
domestic initiatives in a time of war. Others wondered if the White 
House was running out of ideas.

Grover G. Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform and an adviser to 
Rove, said he thinks the situation owes not to fatigue but to political 
realism at the White House. "What they don't have are unreasonable 
expectations of what can be moved through Congress," he said. "It's not 
a question of coming up with new ideas. Sometimes you just don't have 
the votes."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/12/AR2006031200821.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060313/9a8b308e/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Mon Mar 13 03:59:24 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 06:59:24 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] A Corrupt French Connection - Sebastian Mallaby -
 Washington Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <44155E9C.8000909@comcast.net>

A Corrupt French Connection
<>
By Sebastian Mallaby
The Washington Post
Monday, March 13, 2006; A15

Last year was celebrated as the "Year of Africa." Tony Blair proposed a 
doubling of aid to the continent; the world's rich nations promised debt 
elimination; and the Bush administration talked up its remarkably good 
record in boosting foreign assistance. But 2006 is shaping up as the 
year of "What to do with Africa?" as donors grapple with the challenge 
of making aid work. And unless the development institutions demonstrate 
that they can spend the money effectively, 2007 may be the year in which 
Africa is once again abandoned.

Just look at the Republic of the Congo, a small oil state that lies to 
the west of the other, bigger Congo, which used to be Zaire. The Congo 
we're talking about has mountains of debt and canyons of poverty, so 
it's a candidate for the debt cancellation that was trumpeted last year. 
But it's also rotten with corruption, rendering most aid efforts 
pointless. When the matter of Congo's debt relief came before the boards 
of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund recently, there 
was a chance to confront this dilemma. Instead, the institutions tried 
to have it both ways. Last week they acknowledged Congo's corruption but 
cut the country's debt payments anyway.

If the bank and the IMF aren't careful, Congo could emerge as their 
version of the oil-for-food scandal that discredited the United Nations 
last year. Congo's oil rogues are in cahoots with some of the same 
operators who cropped up in the Volcker report on Iraq's oil rip-offs. 
Both cases make the French establishment look odious. Both involve 
multilateral institutions whose staffs might want to blow the whistle on 
corruption but who are discouraged from doing so by political masters in 
Western capitals.

The workings of the Congolese kleptocracy have emerged thanks to three 
forces: Earlier efforts by the IMF and World Bank to demand 
transparency; court cases brought by frustrated creditors; and the 
investigative efforts of Global Witness, a British development group. 
The star of the story is Denis Gokana, the head of the state oil 
company, who has arranged for more than $400 million worth of Congo's 
oil to be sold to shell companies owned by none other than himself, 
according to British court records. Just as in the Iraq oil scam, these 
sales were discounted, enabling the shell companies to sell the oil at a 
nice profit to firms such as Glencore -- which, according to the Volcker 
report, was a leading provider of kickbacks to Saddam Hussein under the 
oil-for-food program.

Sales at suspiciously low prices were just one method for draining 
profits from Congo's national oil company and, therefore, from the 
Congolese people. Gokana's shell companies also lent money to the state 
oil firm at interest rates higher than 80 percent per year, according to 
Global Witness. Meanwhile, one of the Gokana firms acquired a tenth of a 
promising Congolese oil bloc known as Marine XI, at a price that has 
never been published. The lead investor in Marine XI is a company 
controlled by an oilman named Patrick Maugein, who also appears in the 
Volcker report. Maugein's company is reported to have bid considerably 
less for the concession than a Canadian rival but won it anyway with 
what the company describes as the "best" offer.

Last year Gokana appeared in a British court to answer some of these 
charges. The judge ruled that his testimony was riddled with lies. The 
creditor that brought that court case, Kensington International, has 
also brought a racketeering case in New York, alleging that BNP Paribas, 
a major French bank, has colluded with Congolese officials to hide oil 
revenue. BNP was the leading financier of Iraq's oil-for-food deals, and 
it was accused in the Volcker report of turning a blind eye to the use 
of front companies to hide the real identities of Hussein's oil 
partners. BNP disputes Kensington's allegations and has described the 
case as an "abuse."

Whatever the French bank's role, Congo's corruption appears not to 
offend the French government, which has led the charge to grant Congo 
debt relief even though the evidence of its unworthiness has been 
reported in the French press. In a detailed article in December, the 
French daily La Tribune explained how millions had been siphoned out of 
the national oil company and how yet more millions failed to make it 
from the national oil company to the national treasury. But, as La 
Tribune noted, President Jacques Chirac and Congo's ruling strongman are 
old friends.

This is a scandal, and it's hard to see why the rich world's taxpayers 
should tolerate even a hint of debt relief for Congo. Last year the 
country earned more than $2 billion from oil, or $600 per person; if it 
spent that money competently, it would not have two-thirds of its people 
living below the $1-a-day line. But rather than send that message, the 
World Bank and the IMF have cut Congo's debt payments and held out the 
hope of outright debt cancellation, provided that the country meets 
various anti-corruption conditions. In the past, Congo has mocked such 
conditions. It would probably mock them in the future the day after full 
debt cancellation went through.

Why does this seem likely? Because you don't have to guess what Congo's 
president thinks of the fight for transparent government. In an 
interview in February, he dismissed the critics of corruption as "people 
who search for lice in the heads of this country's authorities."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/12/AR2006031201109.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060313/2ff6d0e5/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Mon Mar 13 04:02:41 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 07:02:41 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Our Opportunity With India - Condoleezza Rice -
	WashingtonPost Op-Ed
Message-ID: <44155F61.2040408@comcast.net>

Our Opportunity With India

By Condoleezza Rice
The WashingtonPost
Monday, March 13, 2006; A15

The week before last President Bush concluded a historic agreement on 
civilian nuclear cooperation with India, a rising democratic power in a 
dynamic Asia. This agreement is a strategic achievement: It will 
strengthen international security. It will enhance energy security and 
environmental protection. It will foster economic and technological 
development. And it will help transform the partnership between the 
world's oldest and the world's largest democracy.

First, our agreement with India will make our future more secure, by 
expanding the reach of the international nonproliferation regime. The 
International Atomic Energy Agency would gain access to India's civilian 
nuclear program that it currently does not have. Recognizing this, the 
IAEA's director general, Mohamed ElBaradei, has joined leaders in France 
and the United Kingdom to welcome our agreement. He called it "a 
milestone, timely for ongoing efforts to consolidate the 
non-proliferation regime, combat nuclear terrorism and strengthen 
nuclear safety."

Our agreement with India is unique because India is unique. India is a 
democracy, where citizens of many ethnicities and faiths cooperate in 
peace and freedom. India's civilian government functions transparently 
and accountably. It is fighting terrorism and extremism, and it has a 
30-year record of responsible behavior on nonproliferation matters.

Aspiring proliferators such as North Korea or Iran may seek to draw 
connections between themselves and India, but their rhetoric rings 
hollow. Iran is a state sponsor of terrorism that has violated its own 
commitments and is defying the international community's efforts to 
contain its nuclear ambitions. North Korea, the least transparent 
country in the world, threatens its neighbors and proliferates weapons. 
There is simply no comparison between the Iranian or North Korean 
regimes and India.

The world has known for some time that India has nuclear weapons, but 
our agreement will not enhance its capacity to make more. Under the 
agreement, India will separate its civilian and military nuclear 
programs for the first time. It will place two-thirds of its existing 
reactors, and about 65 percent of its generating power, under permanent 
safeguards, with international verification -- again, for the first time 
ever. This same transparent oversight will also apply to all of India's 
future civilian reactors, both thermal and breeder. Our sale of nuclear 
material or technology would benefit only India's civilian reactors, 
which would also be eligible for international cooperation from the 
Nuclear Suppliers Group.

Second, our agreement is good for energy security. India, a nation of a 
billion people, has a massive appetite for energy to meet its growing 
development needs. Civilian nuclear energy will make it less reliant on 
unstable sources of oil and gas. Our agreement will allow India to 
contribute to and share in the advanced technology that is needed for 
the future development of nuclear energy. And because nuclear energy is 
cleaner than fossil fuels, our agreement will also benefit the 
environment. A threefold increase in Indian nuclear capacity by 2015 
would reduce India's projected annual CO2emissions by more than 170 
million tons, about the current total emissions of the Netherlands.

Third, our agreement is good for American jobs, because it opens the 
door to civilian nuclear trade and cooperation between our nations. 
India plans to import eight nuclear reactors by 2012. If U.S. companies 
win just two of those reactor contracts, it will mean thousands of new 
jobs for American workers. We plan to expand our civilian nuclear 
partnership to research and development, drawing on India's 
technological expertise to promote a global renaissance in safe and 
clean nuclear power.

Finally, our civilian nuclear agreement is an essential step toward our 
goal of transforming America's partnership with India. For too long 
during the past century, differences over domestic policies and 
international purposes kept India and the United States estranged. But 
with the end of the Cold War, the rise of the global economy and 
changing demographics in both of our countries, new opportunities have 
arisen for a partnership between our two great democracies. As President 
Bush said in New Delhi this month, "India in the 21st century is a 
natural partner of the United States because we are brothers in the 
cause of human liberty."

Under the president's leadership, we are beginning to realize the full 
promise of our relationship with India, in fields as diverse as 
agriculture and health, commerce and defense, science and technology, 
and education and exchange. Over 65,000 Americans live in India, 
attracted by its growing economy and the richness of its culture. There 
are more than 2 million people of Indian origin in the United States, 
many of whom are U.S. citizens. More Indians study in our universities 
than students from any other nation. Our civilian nuclear agreement is a 
critical contribution to the stronger, more enduring partnership that we 
are building.

We are consulting extensively with Congress as we seek to amend the laws 
needed to implement the agreement. This is an opportunity that should 
not be missed. Looking back decades from now, we will recognize this 
moment as the time when America invested the strategic capital needed to 
recast its relationship with India. As the nations of Asia continue 
their dramatic rise in a rapidly changing region, a thriving, democratic 
India will be a pillar of Asia's progress, shaping its development for 
decades. This is a future that America wants to share with India, and 
there is not a moment to lose.

The writer is Secretary of State.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/12/AR2006031200978.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060313/cd02abf5/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Mon Mar 13 04:05:29 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 07:05:29 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] What the Military Shouldn't Preach - Scott Poppleton -
 Washington Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <44156009.1010604@comcast.net>

What the Military Shouldn't Preach

By Scott Poppleton
The Washington Post
Monday, March 13, 2006; A15

As the military wrestles with the proper place of religion in its ranks 
it is important to remember that the freedom of the Stars and Stripes 
applies to everyone -- not just those who believe what the majority of 
the United States believes.

I am no stranger to the military. In my 26 years in the Air Force, I 
listened to lunch prayers as an exchange cadet in Bancroft Hall at the 
Naval Academy, and every month I read the chaplain's Bible quotations 
next to our commander's comments in the base paper. I have often asked 
myself as I listened to the "official prayers": What essential military 
need for good order and discipline does this religious program fulfill 
that outweighs my individual beliefs? What gives the U.S. military the 
right or the wisdom to preach in uniform?

Every fighter squadron bulletin board I have ever seen proudly states 
that it is illegal to discriminate based upon a person's race, gender or 
creed (religion). How then do we justify paying one of our commander's 
advisers to preach and write his or her religious views to all the troops?

Many insist that our military clergy have the right to their own freedom 
of religion in their positions. The First Amendment states, "Congress 
shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or 
prohibiting the free exercise thereof." The First Amendment wasn't meant 
to allow a military officer or a government institution the free 
exercise of religion; on the contrary, it was designed to allow the 
individual to be free of the government -- military -- established 
religion. President James Madison thought that paying congressional 
chaplains out of the public treasury was "a palpable violation of equal 
rights as well as of constitutional principles." He went on to say, 
"Even military chaplains are a mistake, mixing as they do political, 
military and ecclesiastical authority."

The Air Force's interim revised religious guidelines, released Feb. 9, 
state: "Public prayer should not imply government endorsement of 
religion and should not usually be a part of routine official business." 
This is vague, at best. When an officer (i.e., chaplain) is in uniform, 
being paid to stand next to the commander and say a prayer at a required 
military formation, what part of that does not imply a full government 
endorsement?

When the commander gives the order to combat, is that optional, too? The 
policy that public prayer should not usually be a part of routine 
official business means the commander can force everyone only "on 
occasion" to listen to the chaplain's prayers.

We are well past the point where we need to reset the baseline of 
individual religious freedom in our military. The first step is to 
provide clear-cut regulatory guidance to our commanders and chaplains 
requiring them to keep their religious views to themselves other than in 
personal settings or at church. If a solemn occasion is appropriate at a 
military ceremony, implement a moment of silence, as we do at every 
public school in our nation.

The next essential step is to reform our dedicated and government-paid 
chaplain corps into a nondenominational and non-religious counseling 
service to aid our commanders in helping everyone under their 
leadership. Let the counselors help with the drug, alcohol and family 
problems that face our forces. Give civilian clergy the right to preach 
and teach in the chapel. In deployed locations, provide time and space 
for service members to conduct services.

We ask members of our military to give up many of their freedoms when 
they serve -- their personal freedom of religion should not be one of them.

The writer is a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/12/AR2006031200994.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060313/ba5f6b3e/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Mon Mar 13 04:07:44 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 07:07:44 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Educating the Taliban at Yale - Cathy Young - Boston
	Globe Op-Ed
Message-ID: <44156090.6010008@comcast.net>


  Educating the Taliban at Yale

By Cathy Young  |  March 13, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

IMAGINE IF you were in college and found out that the guy next to you in 
class had worked as a propagandist for one of the most oppressive 
regimes of modern times.

For some Yale students, this is not a theoretical question. Sayed 
Rahmatullah Hashemi, a former spokesman for Afghanistan's Taliban 
government, was admitted to the university last year as a special 
student in a nondegree program; this spring, he plans to apply as a 
regular student.

Hashemi's story came to light after he was profiled in an article in The 
New York Times Magazine. In 2001, not long before the destruction of the 
World Trade Center and the subsequent removal of the Taliban regime by 
the US military, Hashemi visited the United States on a speaking tour 
defending the Taliban.

Now, the 27-year-old Hashemi's presence at Yale is the center of a 
controversy. Is his admission an example of bridge-building or diversity 
gone mad?

A person with a bad past may deserve a second chance. Yet Hashemi's 
recent statements show a consistent tendency to whitewash his former 
masters. He suggests that the Taliban regime went bad because ''the 
radicals were taking over and doing crazy stuff" -- as opposed, 
presumably, to the sane and moderate early days. On the public 
executions of adulterous women, he explains to the Times of London that 
''there were also executions happening in Texas."

On his 2001 trip to the United States, Hashemi had a public exchange 
with a woman who tore off a burqa and denounced the plight of Afghan 
women. His response (preserved for posterity in Michael Moore's 
''Fahrenheit 9/11") was, ''I'm really sorry for your husband. He might 
have a very difficult time with you." What does he think of that 
incident today? To the Times of London reporter, he noted that the woman 
did get divorced.

One striking aspect of this controversy is the reaction from Yale's 
liberal community. Della Sentilles, a Yale senior, recently wrote a 
piece for the Yale Daily News denouncing such manifestations of rampant 
misogyny at Yale as the shortage of tenured female professors and poor 
childcare options. On her blog, a reader asked Sentilles about the 
presence at Yale of a former spokesman for one of the world's most 
misogynistic regimes. Her reply: ''As a white American feminist, I do 
not feel comfortable making statements or judgments about other 
cultures, especially statements that suggest one culture is more sexist 
and repressive than another. American feminism is often linked to and 
manipulated by the state in order to further its own imperialist ends."

John Fund of The Wall Street Journal, who has been following the story, 
writes that the Yale students he interviewed were unanimous in their 
opinion that the reaction to Hashemi would have been more hostile if he 
had been associated with, say, the apartheid regime of South Africa. One 
senior told Fund that the general feeling was that it wasn't appropriate 
to be as judgmental toward non-Western regimes.

And the reaction from faculty? Jim Sleeper, a journalist and political 
science lecturer at Yale, has responded in the online edition of The 
American Prospect by attacking Fund (whom I know personally) instead of 
addressing the issues.

Sleeper also suggests that Hashemi's ''enrollment was facilitated less 
by the 'diversity' ethos than by yet another of Yale conservatives' 
recent, bumbling efforts to revive the university's old conduit to 
national intelligence."' (To this end, he gratuitously insinuates that 
Hashemi's American patron, filmmaker Mike Hoover, may have intelligence 
ties.) Perhaps that was a part of the motive. Either way, the fact is 
that Yale officials thought that Hashemi was someone who, in the words 
of one former dean, ''could educate us about the world." Whether coming 
from conservatives or liberals, that's a severely blinkered mentality.

If there is a justification for Hashemi's admission, it's that he can 
learn something from us. Chip Brown, the author of The New York Times 
Magazine story, tells the Hartford Courant that ''America would be a lot 
safer from terrorists if there were thousands of Rahmatullahs being 
educated in the US instead of the madrassas of Pakistan." Good point. 
But surely, these educational efforts could be directed toward young 
Muslims who don't have a record of collaboration with a brutal extremist 
regime -- and don't make excuses for that regime.

Cathy Young is a contributing editor at Reason magazine.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/13/educating_the_taliban_at_yale/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060313/3be82d77/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Mon Mar 13 04:10:12 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 07:10:12 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] The coming new wave of jihad - Rita Katz - Boston Globe
	Op-Ed
Message-ID: <44156124.9040305@comcast.net>


  The coming new wave of jihad

By Rita Katz  |  March 13, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

WASHINGTON

ABU MUSAB AL-ZARQAWI has suddenly disappeared. As briskly as he has 
emerged, the Jordanian high school dropout who became the undisputed 
leader of the Iraqi insurgency has descended into obscurity. Where is 
the man who singlehandedly created from scratch a formidable guerrilla 
army in occupied Iraq and whom Osama bin Laden called the Emir of Al 
Qaeda in Iraq?

A year after it assumed the name Al Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers 
(Iraq), Zarqawi's group took a back seat. In an Internet message posted 
Jan. 15, Abu Maysara al-Iraqi, the group's spokesman, announced the 
establishment of the Mujahideen Shura Council in Iraq, an alliance of 
six Salafi jihadi groups created to lead the ''fight to face the 
infidels and their followers of the converters," unify the mujahideen as 
per Sharia [Islamic law], and ''clear the mist off people's eyes."

A few days after the council was established, Al Qaeda in Iraq ceased to 
post communiques. Abu Maysarah temporarily signed the new council's 
communiques, but then he, too, stopped. The baffled jihadi community 
initially believed that Zarqawi headed the new council. But on Jan. 20, 
the council posted a communique crowning its emir: Abdullah Rashid 
al-Baghdadi.

Why, then, did Zarqawi's group surrender its position and succumb to the 
integration? The answers may be found in a letter from Ayman al-Zawahri, 
Al Qaeda's second in command, to Zarqawi, from July 2005.

After congratulating Zarqawi for his jihad in Iraq, Zawahri described Al 
Qaeda's plans: ''The jihad in Iraq requires several incremental goals. 
The first stage: Expel the Americans from Iraq. The second stage: 
Establish an Islamic authority or emirate . . . a caliphate -- over as 
much territory as you can to spread its power in Iraq, i.e., in Sunni 
areas. The third: Extend the jihad wave. . ."

The first stage is a result of the US invasion of Iraq. The second 
stage, it appears, is beginning. The establishment of the council may 
well be its opening bell. Zawahri also describes how and by whom the 
plan will unfold: ''Americans will exit soon, Allah willing, and the 
establishment of a governing authority . . . does not depend on force 
alone. Indeed, it's imperative that, in addition to force, there be an 
appeasement of Muslims and a sharing with them in governance and in the 
Shura [consulting] council and in promulgating what is allowed and what 
is not allowed . . . This must be achieved through the people of the 
Shura and who possess authority to determine issues and make them 
binding, and who are endowed with the qualifications for working in Sharia."

Therefore, to advance the plan, Iraqis must be in leadership positions; 
so must be their emir.

''And it does not appear that the mujahideen, much less Al Qaeda in the 
Land of the Two Rivers, will lay claim to governance without the Iraqi 
people. Not to mention that that would be in contravention of the Shura 
methodology . . ."

Thus Zawahri explained why Zarqawi must give up his position. He then 
addressed the timing of the changes: ''Things may develop faster than we 
imagine . . . we must be ready to start now, before events overtake us, 
and before we are surprised by the conspiracies of the Americans and the 
United Nations and their plans to fill the void behind them. We must 
take the initiative. . . . This is the most vital part. This authority, 
or the Sharia emirate that is necessary, requires fieldwork starting 
now, alongside combat and war."

Following these instructions, Zarqawi abdicated his position. He had not 
intended to remain in Iraq forever anyway; he used Iraq only as a 
springboard for his long-term goal -- establishment of a global caliphate.

Zarqawi said in a January 2005 audio message: ''The caliphate is the 
entrustment [of Allah] on Earth, the guidance of people to the path of 
Allah, and the implementation of His world in life. . . . This group has 
no other choice but to be patient and endure [the hardship of] the path 
it has followed, and consider with Allah, the leaders and members it has 
lost, and must follow their path; for Allah has chosen this Ummah 
[Muslim nation], therefore it must not be impatient, as victory is 
inevitable."

Toward that goal, attacks by Zarqawi's group have expanded beyond Iraq's 
borders. His group participated in the rocket attack on US Navy ships at 
the Jordanian port of Aqaba on Aug. 19, 2005, the rocket attack on the 
Israeli city of Kiryat Shmona on Dec. 27, 2005, and the suicide attack 
on Western hotels in Amman on Nov. 9, 2005. Thus, Zarqawi and his Al 
Qaeda in Iraq are not gone; they have simply moved to the next stage of 
their jihad against the West.

Rita Katz is director of the SITE Institute, an international 
terrorist-investigation and information group.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/13/the_coming_new_wave_of_jihad/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060313/79b3b321/attachment-0001.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Mon Mar 13 04:13:14 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 07:13:14 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Jill Carroll's ordeal - James Carroll - Boston Globe
	Op-Ed
Message-ID: <441561DA.3020207@comcast.net>


  Jill Carroll's ordeal

By James Carroll  |  March 13, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

HOW LONG is 10 weeks? How long is 65 days? How long is 1,560 hours? For 
Jill Carroll, the American journalist who was kidnapped in Iraq on Jan. 
7, the passage of time must be excruciating.

What can her life have been like? What is it like today? Who is holding 
her? Where is she being held? How are they treating her? Is she witness 
to the brutalization of other captives? Does she live in a stupor of 
exhausted fear? Or are her senses alive with perception, alert to every 
moment's possibility for ill or good? Has anyone been kind to her? Do 
her captors argue with one another about what to do now? Is she alive, 
despite earlier threats, because someone took her side?

After her capture, a beautiful photograph was published, showing her 
irresistible smile. Her head was covered, a hint of her respectful 
attitude. That picture was an emblem of her goodness. Then, on Jan. 31, 
another photograph appeared, taken from a videotape broadcast on 
Al-Jazeera. In this image, which is before me as I write, Carroll looks 
simply terrified, and her eyes are full of questions. No response 
suggests itself, except other questions.

Does Carroll know what has been happening in Iraq since her capture? How 
the devils of religious and sectarian violence have been loosed? Does 
she know that security forces she might have looked to for rescue have 
been turning into rampaging death squads? Does she know of the regional 
escalations, with Iran and the Palestinian territories more in the grip 
of nihilist Islamist fervor than ever? What would she make of the Muslim 
uproar at Danish cartoons? Was her punishment therefore increased for 
being a Western journalist?

Last week, the Christian Science Monitor launched a media campaign in 
Iraq, pressing for her release. Is it held against her that the 
newspaper has the word ''Christian" in its name? Does the word 
''science" offend as well?

Will those holding Carroll mark the third anniversary of the war's 
beginning as it falls this week? In these three years, an average of two 
American soldiers have been killed in Iraq each day; an average of 15 
have been wounded. By that calculus, staying with averages, 130 GIs have 
died since Carroll was taken prisoner; almost 1,000 have been wounded. 
What is the passage of time for them?

As savage civil war shows signs of closing in on US forces, have 
American soldiers been taken hostage, in effect, by the failed policies 
of their own government? What of the ''enemy combatants" being held by 
our side? Do the dreads of the imprisoned transcend identity, politics, 
guilt or innocence?

And what of gender? Yet again the propensity for mad violence shows 
itself as overwhelmingly male. As friends help me to ask, has Carroll's 
being a woman put her in a position of special vulnerability? Her 
captors began by demanding the release of Iraqi women being held by the 
''coalition." What of that? Have women been released? Why were they 
being held? Is the prudential principle of never dealing with kidnappers 
(lest they be encouraged in their kidnapping) an absolute? Can't a way 
be found to free other women for the sake of this one?

The brutality of Jill Carroll's captors goes without saying. The 
apparent indifference to her fate across an otherwise enflamed Muslim 
world is mystifying. It seems impossible to exaggerate the gravity of 
her jeopardy. But is there really nothing her fellow citizens can do but 
worry and plead? What exactly is the US government doing for her? Where 
is the pressure from Congress? What if constituents of every politician 
in Washington demanded to know what is being done to obtain Jill 
Carroll's release? The war in Iraq threatens to spin out of control. 
Iran has been invited to do its worst, and is responding accordingly. 
Meanwhile, the fearsome gulf between politicized Muslims and the West, 
including a newly politicized Christianity, grows ever larger. We the 
American people have rarely felt so powerless. But today, what if we put 
a single human face on these vast problems? This column became a litany 
of questions, but finally there are only two questions: How would we be 
organizing our lives on her behalf if Jill Carroll were our sister and 
our daughter? But isn't that is exactly who she is?

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/13/jill_carrolls_ordeal/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060313/bdbec29c/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Mon Mar 13 08:05:53 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 16:05:53 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Dash to Baghdad Left Top U.S. Generals
	Divided
Message-ID: <20060313160553.1E3AD13B802@lax-gw04.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

INTERNATIONAL / MIDDLE EAST | March 13, 2006
Inside the Command | The American generals' debate: Dash to Baghdad Left Top U.S. Generals Divided
By MICHAEL R. GORDON and BERNARD E. TRAINOR
The U.S. command had deep disagreements about the Iraqi military threat and what would be required to defeat it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/13/international/middleeast/13command.html?ex=1142917200&en=433b397e04e4ce03&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060313/7355460e/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Mon Mar 13 08:06:39 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 16:06:39 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Acquittal in Killing Unleashes Ire at
	India's Rich
Message-ID: <20060313160639.9AABE9FD3B@lax-gw05.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

INTERNATIONAL / ASIA PACIFIC | March 13, 2006
Acquittal in Killing Unleashes Ire at India's Rich
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
The acquittal raised questions about the course of justice in a society polarized between the well-heeled and the rest.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/13/international/asia/13india.html?ex=1142917200&en=51acaf0f1a7e356f&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060313/3c0c3d3d/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Mon Mar 13 08:10:39 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 16:10:39 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Newspaper Chain Agrees to a Sale for $4.5
	Billion
Message-ID: <20060313161039.297CA9FD9E@lax-gw05.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

knight ridder was one of the few media sources that actually reported in the lead up to the war...(sigh)


BUSINESS / MEDIA & ADVERTISING | March 13, 2006
Newspaper Chain Agrees to a Sale for $4.5 Billion
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE and ANDREW ROSS SORKIN
Knight Ridder, the nation's second-largest newspaper company, officially agreed to sell itself to the McClatchy Company.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/13/business/media/13knight.html?ex=1142917200&en=409fabf7ca182df5&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060313/0e426645/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Mon Mar 13 08:07:34 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 16:07:34 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Advocates Hope Ruling Renews Focus on
	'Don't Ask, Don't Tell'
Message-ID: <20060313160734.C623224B1C5@lax-gw02.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

WASHINGTON | March 13, 2006
Advocates Hope Ruling Renews Focus on 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell'
By JOHN FILES
One advocate said the "silver lining" in a decision preventing universities from barring recruiters to protest the military's gay ban is that it focused attention on the ban itself.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/13/politics/13gays.html?ex=1142917200&en=1a408fe07959d19e&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060313/3e795f82/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Mon Mar 13 08:11:38 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 16:11:38 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Senator to Propose Censure of Bush Over Spy
	Program
Message-ID: <20060313161138.25B40249E3C@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

WASHINGTON | March 13, 2006
Senator to Propose Censure of Bush Over Spy Program
By JOHN FILES
Republicans dismissed the move by Russell D. Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, as politically motivated.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/13/politics/13censure.html?ex=1142917200&en=ae6cdb9a89a58d3a&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060313/7e358b1a/attachment-0001.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Mon Mar 13 08:12:51 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: 13 Mar 2006 16:12:51 -0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] Headlines for March 13, 2006
Message-ID: <20060313161251.17009.qmail@trinity.democracynow.org>

Mike Blaxill  ( mblaxill at yahoo.com )
sent you this story from democracynow.org




+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  Headlines for March 13, 2006
|  http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/13/1429225
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+


- Kidnapped Peace Activist Tom Fox Found Dead in Iraq-
Michele Bachelet Becomes First Female Chilean President -
80 Die in Violence on Sunday in Iraq-
Elite UK Soldier Refuses to Fight w/ U.S. in Iraq- Sen. Feingold to Introduce Resolution to Censure Bush-
Charges Droppsed Against U.S. Troops in Jose Couso Killing- 
State Department Expands Iranian Operations-
Report: Donald Rumsfeld Makes $5M on Stock of Tamiflu Company-
U. of Miami Janitors Enter Second Week on Strike-
Latino War Resisters Begin 241-Mile March For Peace
This story continues at: 
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/13/1429225


From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Mon Mar 13 09:08:44 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (HS)
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 12:08:44 -0500 (EST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] Story from Palm Beach Daily News
Message-ID: <200603131708.k2DH8iI19931@apache53.iad.cimedia.net>

       
http://backend-palmbeachdailynews.iad.cimedia.net(none)

From lindahassler at sbcglobal.net  Mon Mar 13 11:20:18 2006
From: lindahassler at sbcglobal.net (Linda Hassler)
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 13:20:18 -0600
Subject: [Mb-civic] Excellent: Why Civilizations Decline
Message-ID: <41843c17411a7f3a7a8f19a1ce5c3ff6@sbcglobal.net>

 From Linda Hassler


WHY CIVILIZATIONS DECLINE

By Peter Montague

The year 2005 began with an interesting choice by the editors of the
New York Times -- the first op ed of the year was a long essay by
Jared Diamond called "The ends of the world as we know them."
Diamond won the Pulitzer prize for his non-fiction book, "Guns,
Germs, and Steel" and later in 2005 he published "Collapse; How
Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed."

Diamond's op-ed offers an analysis of why civilizations collapse. It
is an essay obviously intended to make us ask, "Does our civilization
have what it takes to survive?" In the opening paragraph he says, "In
this fresh year, with the United States seemingly at the height of its
power and at the start of a new presidential term, Americans are
increasingly concerned and divided about where we are going. How long
can America remain ascendant? Where will we stand 10 years from now,
or even next year?"

Diamond goes on: "Such questions seem especially appropriate this
year. History warns us that when once-powerful societies collapse,
they tend to do so quickly and unexpectedly. That shouldn't come as
much of a surprise: peak power usually means peak population, peak
needs, and hence peak vulnerability. What can be learned from history
that could help us avoid joining the ranks of those who declined
swiftly?"

Diamond tells the stories of a few past civilizations that collapsed
and rapidly disappeared -- the Maya of the Yucatan Peninsula in
Mexico; the Polynesian societies on Henderson and Pitcairn islands
in the tropical Pacific Ocean; the Anasazi in the American
southwest; the ancient societies of the Fertile Crescent; the
Khmer at Angkor Wat; and the Moche society of Peru, among others.

Diamond then offers a long list of other societies that followed a
different trajectory and survived for very long periods in Japan,
Tonga, Tikopia, the New Guinea Highlands, and Central and
Northwest Europe, among others. So collapse is not inevitable.
Collapse is the result of choices.

Diamond asserts that collapse results from 5 inter-woven factors:

1. The damage that people have inflicted on their environment;

2. Climate change;

3. Enemies;

4. Changes in friendly trading partners;

5. Society's political, economic, and social responses to those
shifts.

After telling the stories of particular societies that collapsed or
prospered, Diamond asks pointedly, "What lessons can we draw from
history?"

Take environmental problems seriously

He answers bluntly: "The most straightforward [lesson from history]:
take environmental problems seriously. They destroyed societies in the
past, and they are even more likely to do so now. If 6,000 Polynesians
with stone tools were able to destroy Mangareva Island, consider
what six billion people with metal tools and bulldozers are doing
today. Moreover, while the Maya collapse affected just a few
neighboring societies in Central America, globalization now means that
any society's problems have the potential to affect anyone else. Just
think how crises in Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq have shaped
the United States today."

The second reasons for collapse is "failure of group decision-making."

Diamond then offers three kinds of failure of decision-making:

Decision-making failure #1: "One reason involves conflicts of
interest, whereby one group within a society (for instance, the pig
farmers who caused the worst erosion in medieval Greenland and
Iceland) can profit by engaging in practices that damage the rest of
society," Diamond writes.

Examples of this in contemporary society might include

** The petrochemical industry that reaps mountainous profits by
selling products that are heating up the planet, contaminating our
bodies with biologically-active industrial poisons, and leaving tens
of thousands of chemically-contaminated waste sites for taxpayers to
try to deal with.

** Another example might be the tobacco industry that is now hawking
its cancer-causing wares to unsuspecting children world-wide.

This list could be readily extended because the U.S. pays only lip
service to the important principle that "the polluter shall pay."
More often than not, in the U.S. the polluter is subsidized by the
federal government to evade paying.

Decision-making failure #2: "... [T]he pursuit of short-term gains at
the expense of long-term survival, as when fishermen overfish the
stocks on which their livelihoods ultimately depend."

** We might include in this category, unsustainable logging practices;
industrialized agriculture, which depletes topsoil and contaminates
water with fertilizer and pesticides; and waste-treatment plants that
discharge wastes into waters that must then be cleaned for drinking
and other essential purposes.

Decision failure #3: "History also teaches us two deeper lessons about
what separates successful societies from those heading toward
failure."

Deep lesson #1: "A society contains a built-in blueprint for failure
if the elite insulates itself from the consequences of its actions."

** With 10% of the U.S. population owning 71% of all private wealth,
we do not have to look far to see this principle at work in the U.S.

-- The Walmartization of the economy is one example -- getting rid
of good, family-sustaining jobs and substituting low-wage jobs with no
benefits and no job security. This does not hurt the 10%, but
ultimately it weakens the social fabric that sustains the other 90% of
us.

-- The privatization of public services is another example --
depleting the ranks of the civil service that provides continuity and
expertise to government from one administration to the next. The firms
that run the private prisons, the privatized public schools, the
private water-supplies, the private highways, the privatized
environmental services -- those firms can make out like bandits but
the rest of us stand by helplessly as the capacity of our governmental
institutions withers and our common wealth disappears.

-- The refusal to provide pensions for workers would be a third
example -- when a Reagan-appointed judge allows United Airlines to
walk away from its pension obligations, it's good for the company's
bottom line, and other firms quickly follow suit. Renouncing pension
responsibilities is now epidemic. Meanwhile, government -- dominated
as it is by the 10% -- is working mightily to cut back Medicare and
Medicaid. The 10% do not have to ask who will care for them in their
old age, but the other 90% of us do and for many the answer is nothing
but an empty question mark.

Deep lesson #2: "The other deep lesson involves a willingness to re-
examine long-held core values, when conditions change and those values
no longer make sense."

Here, Jared Diamond provides his own examples of the U.S. clinging to
dangerously outmoded ideas:

"In this New Year, we Americans have our own painful reappraisals to
face. Historically, we viewed the United States as a land of unlimited
plenty, and so we practiced unrestrained consumerism, but that's no
longer viable in a world of finite resources. We can't continue to
deplete our own resources as well as those of much of the rest of the
world.

"Historically, oceans protected us from external threats; we stepped
back from our isolationism only temporarily during the crises of two
world wars. Now, technology and global interconnectedness have robbed
us of our protection. In recent years, we have responded to foreign
threats largely by seeking short-term military solutions at the last
minute.

"But how long can we keep this up? Though we are the richest nation on
earth, there's simply no way we can afford (or muster the troops) to
intervene in the dozens of countries where emerging threats lurk --
particularly when each intervention these days can cost more than $100
billion and require more than 100,000 troops. [The Iraq war has cost
the U.S. $244 billion so far, with no end in sight.--PM]

"A genuine reappraisal would require us to recognize that it will be
far less expensive and far more effective to address the underlying
problems of public health, population and environment that ultimately
cause threats to us to emerge in poor countries. In the past, we have
regarded foreign aid as either charity or as buying support; now, it's
an act of self-interest to preserve our own economy and protect
American lives."

To me the most important point in Jared Diamond's essay is this one:

"A society contains a built-in blueprint for failure if the elite
insulates itself from the consequences of its actions." This is surely
the case in the United States today.

The remedy for this problem is more democratic decision-making.
Decisions should be made with real participation by the people who
will be affected. (For information about how this is working now
in some places, see here and here).

If this simple principle were practised to a greater extent that it is
today, most of the problems that threaten our civilization could be
reversed or considerably diminished. On the other hand, if we continue
to allow a tiny elite to manage the economy and run the government for
their own narrow, selfish purposes, the outlook for long-term success
is dim.

==============



Jared Diamond is the author of The Third Chimpanzee; The Evolution and
the Future of the Human Animal (N.Y. Harper Perennial, 1992; ISBN
0060183071); Guns, Germs and Steel (N.Y.: W.W. Norton, 1999; ISBN
0393317552); and Collapse; How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
(N.Y. Penguin, 2005; ISBN 0670033375).


:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

From: New York Times, Feb. 21, 2006


------ End of Forwarded Message


From IHHS at aol.com  Mon Mar 13 06:55:03 2006
From: IHHS at aol.com (IHHS at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 09:55:03 EST
Subject: [Mb-civic] jury duty and identity theft
Message-ID: <E1FIswc-000714-LC@smtpauth04.mail.atl.earthlink.net>

 
snopes verifies this
 
Subject: Fraud involving jury service

Most of us  take those summons for jury duty seriously, but enough people 
skip out on their  civic duty, that a new and ominous kind of scam has surfaced. 
Fall for it and  your identity could be stolen, reports CBS news. 

In this con, someone  calls pretending to be a court official who 
threateningly says a warrant has  been issued for your arrest because you didn't show up 
for jury duty. The caller  claims to be a jury coordinator. 

If you protest that you never received  a summons for jury duty, the scammer! 
asks you for your Social Security number  and date of birth so he or she can 
verify the information and cancel the arrest  warrant. Sometimes they even ask 
for credit card numbers. Give out any of this  information and bingo! Your 
identity just got stolen. 

The scam has been  reported so far in 11 states, including Oklahoma, 
Illinois, and  Colorado. 

This (scam) is particularly insidious because they use  intimidation over the 
phone to try and bully people into giving information by  pretending they're 
with the court system. 

The FBI and the federal court  system have issued nationwide alerts on their 
websites, warning consumers about  the fraud. 

This link takes you to a related notice on the FBI website.  
http://www.fbi.gov/majcases/fraud/fraudschemes.htm
 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Mon Mar 13 11:56:49 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 14:56:49 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] SAS soldier leaves army over 'illegal' iraq war
Message-ID: <001301c646d8$46b0ccf0$6e3fe440@Harold>

SAS soldier leaves army over 'illegal' Iraq war
CHRIS GREENWOOD 
AN SAS soldier has refused to go into combat in Iraq alongside United States forces after branding their tactics "illegal". 

Ben Griffin, 28, left the army after three months in Baghdad over the behaviour of US troops and the policies of coalition forces. He is believed to be the first SAS soldier to refuse to go into combat and quit the army on moral grounds. 

Mr Griffin said at the weekend that he witnessed dozens of illegal acts by US fighters who viewed Iraqis as "sub-human". He said: "I saw a lot of things in Baghdad that were illegal or just wrong. 

  I saw a lot of things in Baghdad that were illegal or just wrong... I did not join the British Army to conduct American foreign policy.

"I knew, so others must have known, that this was not the way to conduct operations if you wanted to win the hearts and minds of the local population. 

"And if you can't win the hearts and minds of the people, you can't win the war." 

Mr Griffin, who was born in London and raised in Wales, said he told his commanders in Hereford that he could no longer take part in a war that was "illegal". 

"I did not join the British Army to conduct American foreign policy," he said. 

Expecting to be reprimanded, court-martialled and branded a coward, he was instead discharged from the army and given a reference describing him as a "balanced, honest, loyal and determined individual who possesses the strength of character to have the courage of his convictions". 

A spokeswoman for the Ministry of Defence said that the department did not comment on matters involving SAS personnel. 

Kim Howells, the Foreign Office minister, this weekend admitted that Iraq was "a mess" during a visit to the country to inspect the oil industry. 

However, he played down the prospects of civil war and praised the enthusiasm of ordinary Iraqis for change. 

"People describe Iraq as a mess," he said. "But it is a mess that can't launch an attack now on Iran; a mess that won't be able to march into Kuwait; a mess that can't develop nuclear weapons. 

"So yes, it's a mess, but it's starting to look like the sort of mess that most of us live in." 

The SAS has served alongside its American equivalent, Delta Force, in all parts of Iraq, targeting al-Qaeda cells and insurgents. The Hereford-based unit, formed in 1941 to conduct raids behind enemy lines during the Second World War, is the principal special forces unit of the British Army
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060313/7a75abd4/attachment.htm 

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Mon Mar 13 11:58:46 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 11:58:46 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Gross Neglect By BOB HERBERT
Message-ID: <C03B0EF6.2A097%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 13, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Gross Neglect
By BOB HERBERT

When it comes to providing desperately needed services for children who have
been beaten, starved, sexually abused or otherwise mistreated, the state of
Mississippi offers what is probably the worst-case scenario.

Mississippi gets more than 25,000 allegations of abuse and neglect each
year, and it can't handle them.

Way back in 1992 the Child Welfare League of America issued a blistering
report about the backward state of affairs in Mississippi. The league warned
that vulnerable children would suffer irreparable harm if steps weren't
taken to reduce caseloads, increase staffing and locate additional foster
care and adoptive homes.

In 2001, Sue Perry, the state's director of family and children's services,
warned top state officials that "the crisis needs to be addressed by
whomever has the power to rectify the situation ? before a tragedy occurs."

She quit the following year, saying in a letter to then-Governor Ronnie
Musgrove that the system was starved for resources and had deteriorated so
badly that protecting the children had become "an impossible task." At the
time she wrote the letter, Ms. Perry was being directed to abolish 88
additional full-time positions.

She told the governor that Mississippi's children had been placed at such
great risk that some would die. "I am sorry to inform you," she said, "that
this has already happened in DeSoto County. A 19-month-old child was
brutally beaten by his stepfather in a case known to this agency."

Warnings don't get much louder, but the honchos in Mississippi were in no
mood to listen. These were poor kids, after all. What claim did they have on
the state's resources?

Two years after Ms. Perry resigned, Gov. Haley Barbour acknowledged that the
state's Department of Human Services had "collapsed for lack of management
and a lack of leadership." Collapsed. That was the governor's word. Was he
serious? Was he planning to do something about it? You must be joking. He
made the comment as he was announcing additional budget cuts for the agency.

When a state abandons its obligation to care for its vulnerable residents,
the last best hope has tended to be the courts. Enter Children's Rights, an
advocacy organization based in New York. Over the years, it has filed
lawsuits in a number of states that have led to the overhaul of failing
child welfare systems, and it is currently pressing a class-action suit on
behalf of abused and neglected children in Mississippi.

The situation in Mississippi has become so bad, said Marcia Robinson Lowry,
the executive director of Children's Rights, that the state deliberately
(and unlawfully) diverts children from the child welfare system by failing
to investigate reports of abuse and neglect.

"Mississippi has one of the worst child welfare systems we have ever seen,"
Ms. Lowry said.

Mississippi doesn't even try to fully staff its Division of Family and
Children Services. Caseloads for child protective workers are absurdly high.
Where national standards call for a maximum of 12 to 17 cases per worker
(depending on the types of cases involved), there are counties in
Mississippi where the average caseload for workers is 100 and beyond.
According to the lawsuit, the average caseload in Lamar County is 130.

In that kind of system, kids suffer and may even die without ever coming
close to the attention of the authorities.

The kids who do come to the attention of the system frequently get short
shrift. Some are placed in settings that are as dangerous ? or more
dangerous ? than their original environments.

How bad is Mississippi? In the papers compiled by Children's Rights for its
lawsuit is a reference to testimony by a key official of the Department of
Human Services, who said the state would "not necessarily investigate"
whether sexual abuse had occurred if a "little girl" contracted a sexually
transmitted disease.

If you don't understand that a "little girl" with a sexually transmitted
disease is a raging signal to take immediate steps to protect the child and
to launch a criminal investigation, then you should not be allowed anywhere
near vulnerable children.

This is the sort of thing Children's Rights is trying to correct with its
lawsuit. It seeks nothing less than to compel the governor and other
officials to meet their obligation to protect and care for the most
vulnerable children in their state. And that can only be done by
transforming a system that at the moment can best be described as grotesque.

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From michael at michaelbutler.com  Mon Mar 13 12:05:53 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 12:05:53 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] The Right's Man By PAUL KRUGMAN
Message-ID: <C03B10A1.2A098%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 13, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
The Right's Man
By PAUL KRUGMAN

It's time for some straight talk about John McCain. He isn't a moderate.
He's much less of a maverick than you'd think. And he isn't the straight
talker he claims to be.

Mr. McCain's reputation as a moderate may be based on his former opposition
to the Bush tax cuts. In 2001 he declared, "I cannot in good conscience
support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate
among us."

But now ? at a time of huge budget deficits and an expensive war, when the
case against tax cuts for the rich is even stronger ? Mr. McCain is happy to
shower benefits on the most fortunate. He recently voted to extend tax cuts
on dividends and capital gains, an action that will worsen the budget
deficit while mainly benefiting people with very high incomes.

When it comes to foreign policy, Mr. McCain was never moderate. During the
2000 campaign he called for a policy of "rogue state rollback," anticipating
the "Bush doctrine" of pre-emptive war unveiled two years later. Mr. McCain
called for a systematic effort to overthrow nasty regimes even if they posed
no imminent threat to the United States; he singled out Iraq, Libya and
North Korea. Mr. McCain's aggressive views on foreign policy, and his
expressed willingness, almost eagerness, to commit U.S. ground forces
overseas, explain why he, not George W. Bush, was the favored candidate of
neoconservative pundits such as William Kristol of The Weekly Standard.

Would Mr. McCain, like Mr. Bush, have found some pretext for invading Iraq?
We'll never know. But Mr. McCain still thinks the war was a good idea, and
he rejects any attempt to extricate ourselves from the quagmire. "If success
requires an increase in American troop levels in 2006," he wrote last year,
"then we must increase our numbers there." He didn't explain where the
overstretched U.S. military is supposed to find these troops.

When it comes to social issues, Mr. McCain, who once called Pat Robertson
and Jerry Falwell "agents of intolerance," met with Mr. Falwell late last
year. Perhaps as a result, he is now taking positions friendly to the
religious right. Most notably, Mr. McCain's spokesperson says that he would
have signed South Dakota's extremist new anti-abortion law.

The spokesperson went on to say that the senator would have taken "the
appropriate steps under state law" to ensure that cases of rape and incest
were excluded. But that attempt at qualification makes no sense: the South
Dakota law has produced national shockwaves precisely because it prohibits
abortions even for victims of rape or incest.

The bottom line is that Mr. McCain isn't a moderate; he's a man of the hard
right. How far right? A statistical analysis of Mr. McCain's recent voting
record, available at www.voteview.com, ranks him as the Senate's third most
conservative member.

What about Mr. McCain's reputation as a maverick? This comes from the fact
that every now and then he seems to declare his independence from the Bush
administration, as he did in pushing through his anti-torture bill.

But a funny thing happened on the way to Guant?namo. President Bush, when
signing the bill, appended a statement that in effect said that he was free
to disregard the law whenever he chose. Mr. McCain protested, but there are
apparently no hard feelings: at the recent Southern Republican Leadership
Conference he effusively praised Mr. Bush.

And I'm sorry to say that this is typical of Mr. McCain. Every once in a
while he makes headlines by apparently defying Mr. Bush, but he always
returns to the fold, even if the abuses he railed against continue unabated.

So here's what you need to know about John McCain.

He isn't a straight talker. His flip-flopping on tax cuts, his call to send
troops we don't have to Iraq and his endorsement of the South Dakota
anti-abortion legislation even while claiming that he would find a way
around that legislation's central provision show that he's a politician as
slippery and evasive as, well, George W. Bush.

He isn't a moderate. Mr. McCain's policy positions and Senate votes don't
just place him at the right end of America's political spectrum; they place
him in the right wing of the Republican Party.

And he isn't a maverick, at least not when it counts. When the cameras are
rolling, Mr. McCain can sometimes be seen striking a brave pose of
opposition to the White House. But when it matters, when the Bush
administration's ability to do whatever it wants is at stake, Mr. McCain
always toes the party line.

It's worth recalling that during the 2000 election campaign George W. Bush
was widely portrayed by the news media both as a moderate and as a
straight-shooter. As Mr. Bush has said, "Fool me once, shame on ? shame on
you. Fool me ? you can't get fooled again."

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net  Mon Mar 13 12:20:33 2006
From: grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net (Golsorkhi)
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 15:20:33 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] FW: Iranians wish that Islam had never arrived
In-Reply-To: <000f01c646bf$8d373060$6401a8c0@DF2ZTG61>
Message-ID: <E1FItc7-0003cw-0g@smtpauth04.mail.atl.earthlink.net>


------ Forwarded Message
From: "Farhad Sepahbody" <sepa at sedona.net>
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 09:59:54 -0700
To: "Golsorkhi" <grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net>
Subject: Iranians wish that Islam had never arrived

GRG QUITE INTERESTING
The message is ready to be sent with the following file or link attachments:
Shortcut to: http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/009702.php

Note: To protect against computer viruses, e-mail programs may prevent
sending or receiving certain types of file attachments.  Check your e-mail
security settings to determine how attachments are handled.

------ End of Forwarded Message

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060313/db671afb/attachment.htm 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/octet-stream
Size: 110 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060313/db671afb/attachment.obj 

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Mon Mar 13 12:54:40 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 12:54:40 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Today's from Financial Times
Message-ID: <C03B1C14.2A0B1%michael@michaelbutler.com>



-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/octet-stream
Size: 85487 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060313/5819edbb/attachment-0002.obj 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/octet-stream
Size: 79555 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060313/5819edbb/attachment-0003.obj 

From michaelgbanuelos at aol.com  Mon Mar 13 14:45:55 2006
From: michaelgbanuelos at aol.com (michael banuelos)
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 22:45:55 +0000 GMT
Subject: [Mb-civic] Mb-civic Digest, Vol 21, Issue 80
In-Reply-To: <mailman.5.1142280005.20338.mb-civic@islandlists.com>
References: <mailman.5.1142280005.20338.mb-civic@islandlists.com>
Message-ID: <31097492.1142289972724.JavaMail.teamon@bda008-cell00.bisx.prod.on.blackberry>

No way starting at 5. Between 4:30 and 6 we are the busiest.  Starting at 6, we could it. And they could work in 3 different areas of the clinic to avoid interfernce.  Let me know?


Sent wirelessly via BlackBerry from T-Mobile.

-----Original Message-----
From: mb-civic-request at islandlists.com
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 12:00:05 
To:mb-civic at islandlists.com
Subject: Mb-civic Digest, Vol 21, Issue 80

Send Mb-civic mailing list submissions to
    mb-civic at islandlists.com

To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
    http://www.islandlists.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mb-civic
or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
    mb-civic-request at islandlists.com

You can reach the person managing the list at
    mb-civic-owner at islandlists.com

When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
than "Re: Contents of Mb-civic digest..."


Today's Topics:

   1. Headlines for March 13, 2006 (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
   2. Story from Palm Beach Daily News (HS)
   3. Excellent: Why Civilizations Decline (Linda Hassler)
   4. jury duty and identity theft (IHHS at aol.com)


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: 13 Mar 2006 16:12:51 -0000
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com
Subject: [Mb-civic] Headlines for March 13, 2006
To: mb-civic at islandlists.com
Message-ID: <20060313161251.17009.qmail at trinity.democracynow.org>
Content-Type: text/plain

Mike Blaxill  ( mblaxill at yahoo.com )
sent you this story from democracynow.org




+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  Headlines for March 13, 2006
|  http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/13/1429225
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+


- Kidnapped Peace Activist Tom Fox Found Dead in Iraq-
Michele Bachelet Becomes First Female Chilean President -
80 Die in Violence on Sunday in Iraq-
Elite UK Soldier Refuses to Fight w/ U.S. in Iraq- Sen. Feingold to Introduce Resolution to Censure Bush-
Charges Droppsed Against U.S. Troops in Jose Couso Killing- 
State Department Expands Iranian Operations-
Report: Donald Rumsfeld Makes $5M on Stock of Tamiflu Company-
U. of Miami Janitors Enter Second Week on Strike-
Latino War Resisters Begin 241-Mile March For Peace
This story continues at: 
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/13/1429225



------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 12:08:44 -0500 (EST)
From: HS <harry.sifton at sympatico.ca>
Subject: [Mb-civic] Story from Palm Beach Daily News
To: Mb Civic <mb-civic at islandlists.com>
Message-ID: <200603131708.k2DH8iI19931 at apache53.iad.cimedia.net>

       
http://backend-palmbeachdailynews.iad.cimedia.net(none)


------------------------------

Message: 3
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 13:20:18 -0600
From: Linda Hassler <lindahassler at sbcglobal.net>
Subject: [Mb-civic] Excellent: Why Civilizations Decline
To: CIVIC <MB-Civic at islandlists.com>, HAIR mail-list
    <mb-hair at islandemail.com>
Message-ID: <41843c17411a7f3a7a8f19a1ce5c3ff6 at sbcglobal.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed

 From Linda Hassler


WHY CIVILIZATIONS DECLINE

By Peter Montague

The year 2005 began with an interesting choice by the editors of the
New York Times -- the first op ed of the year was a long essay by
Jared Diamond called "The ends of the world as we know them."
Diamond won the Pulitzer prize for his non-fiction book, "Guns,
Germs, and Steel" and later in 2005 he published "Collapse; How
Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed."

Diamond's op-ed offers an analysis of why civilizations collapse. It
is an essay obviously intended to make us ask, "Does our civilization
have what it takes to survive?" In the opening paragraph he says, "In
this fresh year, with the United States seemingly at the height of its
power and at the start of a new presidential term, Americans are
increasingly concerned and divided about where we are going. How long
can America remain ascendant? Where will we stand 10 years from now,
or even next year?"

Diamond goes on: "Such questions seem especially appropriate this
year. History warns us that when once-powerful societies collapse,
they tend to do so quickly and unexpectedly. That shouldn't come as
much of a surprise: peak power usually means peak population, peak
needs, and hence peak vulnerability. What can be learned from history
that could help us avoid joining the ranks of those who declined
swiftly?"

Diamond tells the stories of a few past civilizations that collapsed
and rapidly disappeared -- the Maya of the Yucatan Peninsula in
Mexico; the Polynesian societies on Henderson and Pitcairn islands
in the tropical Pacific Ocean; the Anasazi in the American
southwest; the ancient societies of the Fertile Crescent; the
Khmer at Angkor Wat; and the Moche society of Peru, among others.

Diamond then offers a long list of other societies that followed a
different trajectory and survived for very long periods in Japan,
Tonga, Tikopia, the New Guinea Highlands, and Central and
Northwest Europe, among others. So collapse is not inevitable.
Collapse is the result of choices.

Diamond asserts that collapse results from 5 inter-woven factors:

1. The damage that people have inflicted on their environment;

2. Climate change;

3. Enemies;

4. Changes in friendly trading partners;

5. Society's political, economic, and social responses to those
shifts.

After telling the stories of particular societies that collapsed or
prospered, Diamond asks pointedly, "What lessons can we draw from
history?"

Take environmental problems seriously

He answers bluntly: "The most straightforward [lesson from history]:
take environmental problems seriously. They destroyed societies in the
past, and they are even more likely to do so now. If 6,000 Polynesians
with stone tools were able to destroy Mangareva Island, consider
what six billion people with metal tools and bulldozers are doing
today. Moreover, while the Maya collapse affected just a few
neighboring societies in Central America, globalization now means that
any society's problems have the potential to affect anyone else. Just
think how crises in Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq have shaped
the United States today."

The second reasons for collapse is "failure of group decision-making."

Diamond then offers three kinds of failure of decision-making:

Decision-making failure #1: "One reason involves conflicts of
interest, whereby one group within a society (for instance, the pig
farmers who caused the worst erosion in medieval Greenland and
Iceland) can profit by engaging in practices that damage the rest of
society," Diamond writes.

Examples of this in contemporary society might include

** The petrochemical industry that reaps mountainous profits by
selling products that are heating up the planet, contaminating our
bodies with biologically-active industrial poisons, and leaving tens
of thousands of chemically-contaminated waste sites for taxpayers to
try to deal with.

** Another example might be the tobacco industry that is now hawking
its cancer-causing wares to unsuspecting children world-wide.

This list could be readily extended because the U.S. pays only lip
service to the important principle that "the polluter shall pay."
More often than not, in the U.S. the polluter is subsidized by the
federal government to evade paying.

Decision-making failure #2: "... [T]he pursuit of short-term gains at
the expense of long-term survival, as when fishermen overfish the
stocks on which their livelihoods ultimately depend."

** We might include in this category, unsustainable logging practices;
industrialized agriculture, which depletes topsoil and contaminates
water with fertilizer and pesticides; and waste-treatment plants that
discharge wastes into waters that must then be cleaned for drinking
and other essential purposes.

Decision failure #3: "History also teaches us two deeper lessons about
what separates successful societies from those heading toward
failure."

Deep lesson #1: "A society contains a built-in blueprint for failure
if the elite insulates itself from the consequences of its actions."

** With 10% of the U.S. population owning 71% of all private wealth,
we do not have to look far to see this principle at work in the U.S.

-- The Walmartization of the economy is one example -- getting rid
of good, family-sustaining jobs and substituting low-wage jobs with no
benefits and no job security. This does not hurt the 10%, but
ultimately it weakens the social fabric that sustains the other 90% of
us.

-- The privatization of public services is another example --
depleting the ranks of the civil service that provides continuity and
expertise to government from one administration to the next. The firms
that run the private prisons, the privatized public schools, the
private water-supplies, the private highways, the privatized
environmental services -- those firms can make out like bandits but
the rest of us stand by helplessly as the capacity of our governmental
institutions withers and our common wealth disappears.

-- The refusal to provide pensions for workers would be a third
example -- when a Reagan-appointed judge allows United Airlines to
walk away from its pension obligations, it's good for the company's
bottom line, and other firms quickly follow suit. Renouncing pension
responsibilities is now epidemic. Meanwhile, government -- dominated
as it is by the 10% -- is working mightily to cut back Medicare and
Medicaid. The 10% do not have to ask who will care for them in their
old age, but the other 90% of us do and for many the answer is nothing
but an empty question mark.

Deep lesson #2: "The other deep lesson involves a willingness to re-
examine long-held core values, when conditions change and those values
no longer make sense."

Here, Jared Diamond provides his own examples of the U.S. clinging to
dangerously outmoded ideas:

"In this New Year, we Americans have our own painful reappraisals to
face. Historically, we viewed the United States as a land of unlimited
plenty, and so we practiced unrestrained consumerism, but that's no
longer viable in a world of finite resources. We can't continue to
deplete our own resources as well as those of much of the rest of the
world.

"Historically, oceans protected us from external threats; we stepped
back from our isolationism only temporarily during the crises of two
world wars. Now, technology and global interconnectedness have robbed
us of our protection. In recent years, we have responded to foreign
threats largely by seeking short-term military solutions at the last
minute.

"But how long can we keep this up? Though we are the richest nation on
earth, there's simply no way we can afford (or muster the troops) to
intervene in the dozens of countries where emerging threats lurk --
particularly when each intervention these days can cost more than $100
billion and require more than 100,000 troops. [The Iraq war has cost
the U.S. $244 billion so far, with no end in sight.--PM]

"A genuine reappraisal would require us to recognize that it will be
far less expensive and far more effective to address the underlying
problems of public health, population and environment that ultimately
cause threats to us to emerge in poor countries. In the past, we have
regarded foreign aid as either charity or as buying support; now, it's
an act of self-interest to preserve our own economy and protect
American lives."

To me the most important point in Jared Diamond's essay is this one:

"A society contains a built-in blueprint for failure if the elite
insulates itself from the consequences of its actions." This is surely
the case in the United States today.

The remedy for this problem is more democratic decision-making.
Decisions should be made with real participation by the people who
will be affected. (For information about how this is working now
in some places, see here and here).

If this simple principle were practised to a greater extent that it is
today, most of the problems that threaten our civilization could be
reversed or considerably diminished. On the other hand, if we continue
to allow a tiny elite to manage the economy and run the government for
their own narrow, selfish purposes, the outlook for long-term success
is dim.

==============



Jared Diamond is the author of The Third Chimpanzee; The Evolution and
the Future of the Human Animal (N.Y. Harper Perennial, 1992; ISBN
0060183071); Guns, Germs and Steel (N.Y.: W.W. Norton, 1999; ISBN
0393317552); and Collapse; How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
(N.Y. Penguin, 2005; ISBN 0670033375).


:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

From: New York Times, Feb. 21, 2006


------ End of Forwarded Message



------------------------------

Message: 4
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 09:55:03 EST
From: IHHS at aol.com
Subject: [Mb-civic] jury duty and identity theft
To: IHHS at aol.com
Message-ID: <E1FIswc-000714-LC at smtpauth04.mail.atl.earthlink.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

 
snopes verifies this
 
Subject: Fraud involving jury service

Most of us  take those summons for jury duty seriously, but enough people 
skip out on their  civic duty, that a new and ominous kind of scam has surfaced. 
Fall for it and  your identity could be stolen, reports CBS news. 

In this con, someone  calls pretending to be a court official who 
threateningly says a warrant has  been issued for your arrest because you didn't show up 
for jury duty. The caller  claims to be a jury coordinator. 

If you protest that you never received  a summons for jury duty, the scammer! 
asks you for your Social Security number  and date of birth so he or she can 
verify the information and cancel the arrest  warrant. Sometimes they even ask 
for credit card numbers. Give out any of this  information and bingo! Your 
identity just got stolen. 

The scam has been  reported so far in 11 states, including Oklahoma, 
Illinois, and  Colorado. 

This (scam) is particularly insidious because they use  intimidation over the 
phone to try and bully people into giving information by  pretending they're 
with the court system. 

The FBI and the federal court  system have issued nationwide alerts on their 
websites, warning consumers about  the fraud. 

This link takes you to a related notice on the FBI website.  
http://www.fbi.gov/majcases/fraud/fraudschemes.htm
 
>From  the FBI site 
Press  Release
     
For Immediate  Release
September 28,  2005
Washington  D.C.
FBI  National Press Office
(202)  324-3691
TELEPHONE FRAUD INVOLVING JURY  DUTY 
Washington,  D.C. - The FBI  today is providing a warning to the public 
against an ongoing scheme  involving jury service. The public needs to be aware 
that individuals  identifying themselves as U.S. court employees have been 
telephonically  contacting citizens and advising them that they have been selected 
for  jury duty. These individuals ask to verify names and Social Security  
numbers, then ask for credit card numbers. If the request is refused,  citizens 
are then threatened with fines.  
The judicial system does not contact  people telephonically and ask for 
personal information such as your Social  Security number, date of birth or credit 
card numbers. If you receive one  of these phone calls, do not provide any 
personal or confidential  information to these individuals. This is an attempt to 
steal or to use  your identity by obtaining your name, Social Security number 
and  potentially to apply for credit or credit cards or other loans in your  
name. It is an attempt to defraud you.  
If you have already been contacted  and have already given out your personal 
information, please monitor your  account statements and credit reports, and 
contact your local FBI office.  Local FBI field office telephone numbers can be 
found in the front of your  local telephone directory or on _www.fbi.gov_ 
(http://www.fbi.gov/) . For further information,  please review the warnings 
posted on the U.S. Courts website at _www.uscourts.gov_ (http://www.uscourts.gov/) 
, "Newsroom" news  article "WARNING: Bogus Phone Calls on Jury Service May 
lead to Fraud,"  August 19, 2005.   


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060313/d5edd580/attachment.htm 

------------------------------

_______________________________________________
Mb-civic mailing list
Mb-civic at islandlists.com
http://www.islandlists.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mb-civic

End of Mb-civic Digest, Vol 21, Issue 80
****************************************


From hecate at diamonddragon.com  Mon Mar 13 16:53:03 2006
From: hecate at diamonddragon.com (Hecate)
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2006 00:53:03 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] BBC E-mail: Sharp rise in CO2 levels recorded
Message-ID: <20060314_005303_043049.hecate@diamonddragon.com>

Hecate saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you
should see it.



** Sharp rise in CO2 levels recorded **
US scientists record a significant rise in CO2 levels in the atmosphere, pushing them to a new record.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/4803460.stm >


** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all
in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/dailyemail/ >


** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have?been verified.

If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm


From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Mon Mar 13 17:08:18 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 20:08:18 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Arab central bank to move to Eruo's
Message-ID: <000801c64703$caaa24e0$6e3fe440@Harold>

I think this is pretty much the kick start of the decline of the American empire

Like Nero, Bush is playing the fiddle in Washington while America burns......

http://news.independent.co.uk/business/news/article351127.ece

Later H

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060313/00b8ab67/attachment.htm 

From activist at democrats.com  Mon Mar 13 13:58:24 2006
From: activist at democrats.com (Democrats.com)
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 16:58:24 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Expose Religious Right Ties to Abramoff's Dirty Work
Message-ID: <20060313165824.576871@democrats.com>

HTML Message - Expose Religious Right Ties to Abramoff's Dirty Work
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060313/5bec00f2/attachment.htm 

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Mon Mar 13 19:16:41 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 19:16:41 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Feingold Proposes Bush Censure Over Spying By Douglass
	K.	Daniel
Message-ID: <C03B7599.2A0F2%michael@michaelbutler.com>

    Go to Original

    Feingold Proposes Bush Censure Over Spying
    By Douglass K. Daniel
    The Associated Press

    Monday 13 March 2006

    Washington - A liberal Democrat and potential White House contender is
proposing censuring President Bush for authorizing domestic eavesdropping,
saying the White House misled Americans about its legality.

    "The president has broken the law and, in some way, he must be held
accountable," Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., told The Associated Press in an
interview.

    A censure resolution, which simply would scold the president, has been
used just once in U.S. history - against Andrew Jackson in 1834.

    Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., called the proposal "a crazy
political move" that would weaken the U.S. during wartime.

    The five-page resolution to be introduced on Monday contends that Bush
violated the law when, on his own, he set up the eavesdropping program
within the National Security Agency in the months following the attacks of
Sept. 11, 2001.

    Bush claims that his authority as commander in chief as well as a
September 2001 congressional authorization to use force in the fight against
terrorism gave him the power to authorize the surveillance.

    The White House had no immediate response on Sunday.

    The resolution says the president "repeatedly misled the public" before
the disclosure of the NSA program last December when he indicated the
administration was relying on court orders to wiretap terror suspects inside
the U.S.

    "Congress has to reassert our system of government, and the cleanest and
the most efficient way to do that is to censure the president," Feingold
said. "And, hopefully, he will acknowledge that he did something wrong."

    The Wisconsin Democrat, considered a presidential contender for 2008,
said he had not discussed censure with other senators but that, based on
criticism leveled at Bush by both Democrats and Republicans, the resolution
makes sense.

    The president's action were "in the strike zone" in terms of being an
impeachable offense, Feingold said. The senator questioned whether
impeaching Bush and removing him from office would be good for the country.

    In the House, Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, the top Democrat on the
House Judiciary Committee, is pushing legislation that would call on the
Republican-controlled Congress to determine whether there are grounds for
impeachment.

    The program granted intelligence officers the power to monitor - without
court approval - the international calls and e-mails of U.S. residents, when
those officers suspect terrorism may be involved.

    Frist, appearing on ABC's "This Week," said that he hoped al-Qaida and
other enemies of the U.S. were not listening to the infighting.

    "The signal that it sends, that there is in any way a lack of support
for our commander in chief who is leading us with a bold vision in a way
that is making our homeland safer, is wrong," Frist said.

    Sen. John Warner, R-Va., said on CNN's "Late Edition" that Feingold's
announcement on a Sunday talk show was "political grandstanding. And it
tends to weaken our president."

    A longtime critic of the administration, Feingold was the first senator
to urge a withdrawal timetable for U.S. troops in Iraq and was the only
senator to vote in 2001 against the USA Patriot Act, the post-Sept. 11 law
that expanded the government's surveillance and prosecutorial powers. He
also voted against the 2002 resolution authorizing Bush to use force in
Iraq.

    Jackson was censured by the Senate in 1834 after he removed the nation's
money from a private bank in defiance of the Whig Party, which controlled
the Senate.

    On Feb. 12, 1999, the Senate failed to gain enough votes to bring a
censure resolution against President Clinton. The Senate had just acquitted
Clinton after the House impeached him in December 1998, accusing him of
committing perjury and obstructing justice in the Monica Lewinsky affair.

    Impeachment is the only punishment outlined in the Constitution for a
president. But the Constitution says the House and Senate can punish their
own members through censure.

 


From michael at intrafi.com  Mon Mar 13 19:18:00 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 19:18:00 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] Alternet: Bigotry From Cradle to Grave
Message-ID: <20060314031800.79EA7B82DF@alternet.org>


This story has been forwarded to you from
http://www.alternet.org by michael at intrafi.com



-------------------------------------
Bigotry From Cradle to Grave
http://www.alternet.org/story/31941

In the world view of the Religious Right, there is no place for gay people and their 'homosexual agenda.'
-------------------------------------


From grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net  Mon Mar 13 11:01:47 2006
From: grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net (Golsorkhi)
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 14:01:47 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] FW: Straw speech to focus on Iranians
In-Reply-To: <65D379ED-01A1-4343-82E1-B427C42FBD73@thesamiis.com>
Message-ID: <E1FJ06Q-00085a-6i@smtpauth04.mail.atl.earthlink.net>

Michael,  

The F...ing British.

What an insult, now they are attempting to ?connect directly with the
people?.  Regretfully there is no court to try these major countries and
their statesmen for gross incompetence resulting in mass murders and loss of
basic human rights.  Instead it is they who sit in judgment of us.  What a
joke.  

Regards.  

Reza


------ Forwarded Message
From: Samii Shahla <shahla at thesamiis.com>
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 00:00:23 -0500
Subject: Straw speech to focus on Iranians

BBC News
03/13/06

Straw speech to focus on Iranians

Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, is to call for Europe to communicate
better with the Iranian people.
In an International Institute for Strategic Studies speech, he will say Iran
is going in the wrong direction and its people deserve better.

He will call for more information to be provided for Iranians in their own
language, from around the world.

The UN Security Council will this week discuss how to encourage Iran's
regime to suspend its nuclear programme.

Denies accusations

Mr Straw is expected to say pressure on Iran is aimed only at preventing it
from developing nuclear weapons, rather than stopping the development of
peaceful nuclear energy.

BBC Security Correspondent Gordon Corera said Mr Straw's attempt to connect
directly with people in Iran will mark "a shift in approach" after years of
Britain seeking constructive engagement with the Iranian regime.

On Wednesday, UN nuclear watchdog the International Atomic Energy Agency
referred Iran to the UN Security Council after months of growing tension
over the country's nuclear programme. The security council has the power to
impose sanctions.

Iran has vowed to resist international pressure, insisting it has the right
to civilian nuclear technology. It denies US and EU accusations that it is
seeking to develop nuclear weapons.

On Sunday, Iran said Moscow's compromise proposal on its nuclear programme
was "off the agenda" after the security council referral.

But ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said his country was still open to
negotiations with Russia, as long as Iran's right to conduct nuclear fuel
research on its own soil was recognised.

Russia had sought to persuade Iran to move its enrichment programme to
Russian territory, which would allow closer international monitoring.
---

URL:?http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/4800276.stm?


------ End of Forwarded Message

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060313/61cf9453/attachment.htm 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Mon Mar 13 23:19:36 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (HS)
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2006 18:19:36 +1100 (EST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] EnergyBulletin.net | US Army: Peak Oil and the Army's
	future
Message-ID: <20060314071936.27AF324478@mail.brunny.com>

Note: images, links and other non-text elements may have been removed from this article.  Click below for full version:
http://www.energybulletin.net/13737.html

US Army: Peak Oil and the Army's future
By Adam Fenderson and Bart Anderson, Energy Bulletin
Published March 13, 2006

&ldquo;The days of inexpensive, convenient, abundant energy sources are quickly drawing to a close,&rdquo; according to a recently released US Army strategic report. The report posits that a peak in global oil production looks likely to be imminent, with wide reaching implications for the US Army and society in general. 

The report was sent to Energy Bulletin by a reader, and does not appear to be available elsewhere on the internet. However it is marked as unclassified and approved for public release.  

[ UPDATE: Since we wrote those words several hours ago we've been informed that a reference to the document now appears on a Google search, including a link to the full PDF on a .mil server.  "Somebody must be watching you guys!" writes reader SG.  Before we wrote this report we sent out copies of the abbreviated report to several associates including PeakOil.net who published it on their website.  So who knows?  I've updated the links to the report in this article to the location on the government servers. -AF]

The report, Energy Trends and Their Implications for U.S. Army Installations (PDF &ndash 1.2mb), was conducted by the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC), U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and is dated September 2005.  

Author Eileen Westervelt, PE, CEM, is a mechanical engineer at the Engineer Research and Development Center (US Army Corps of Engineers) in Champaign, Ill. Author Donald Fournier is a senior research specialist at the University of Illinois? Building Research Council and has worked with the Corps in the past.

Westervelt and Fournier give special credence to the work of independent energy experts, such as the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas (ASPO) and the Oil Depletion Analysis Center (ODAC). They seem to place very little credibility on the more optimistic oil production forecasts of the international energy agencies. They reproduce ASPO graphs and quote ASPO member Jean Laherrere on why the US Geological Survey (USGS) future oil availability estimates are clearly overly optimistic:The USGS estimate implies a five-fold increase in discovery rate and reserve addition, for which no evidence is presented. Such an improvement in performance is in fact utterly implausible, given the great technological achievements of the industry over the past twenty years, the worldwide search, and the deliberate effort to find the largest remaining prospects. The authors warn that in order to sustain its mission, &ldquo;the Army must insulate itself from the economic and logistical ene
 rgy-related problems coming in the near to mid future. This requires a transition to modern, secure, and efficient energy systems, and to building technologies that are safe and environmental friendly.&rdquo; The best energy options they conclude are &ldquo;energy efficiency and renewable sources.&rdquo;  However, "currently, there is no viable substitute for petroleum." 

They do not expect that any transition will be easy: &ldquo;energy consumption is indispensable to our standard of living and a necessity for the Army to carry out its mission. However, current trends are not sustainable. The impact of excessive, unsustainable energy consumption may undermine the very culture and activities it supports. There is no perfect energy source; all are used at a cost.&rdquo; 

The report includes what looks like a solid overview of the pros and cons of all major renewable and non-renewable energy options. They consider problems associated with hydrogen, shale oil, biofuels and tar sands.  On nuclear energy they note that "our current throw-away nuclear cycle uses up the world reserve of low-cost uranium in about 20 years."  They hold more hope for certain solar technologies and wind turbines, however, "renewables tend to be a more local or regional commodity and except for a few instances, not necessarily a global resource that is traded between nations."  

Overall this is surprisingly green sounding advice, and one might think out of left field for one of the most environmentally destructive and energy consuming institutions on the planet. And yet the report does not seem to be at odds with the Army's new Energy Strategy which sets out five major initiatives:Eliminate energy waste in existing facilities Increase energy efficiency in new construction and renovationsReduce dependence on fossil fuelsConserve water resourcesImprove energy security(See: hqda-energypolicy.pnl.gov/programs/plan.asp) 

Westervelt and Fournier assert that changes must be made with urgency. However they express concerns that "we have a large and robust energy system with tremendous inertia, both from a policy perspective and a great resistance to change." In light of this, &ldquo;the Army needs to present its perspective to higher authorities and be prepared to proceed regardless of the national measures that are taken.&rdquo; 

Westervelt and Fournier suggest "it is time to think strategically about energy and how the Army
should respond to the global and national energy picture. A path of enlightened self-interest is encouraged."  As we approach Peak Oil, what is ecologically sound and what is perceived to be to in an institution's practical benefit might tend to converge, at least in some respects - even those of an institution such as the US Army.  

Links:  An 8 page summary of the report (PDF &ndash; 75kb) Energy Trends and Their Implications for U.S. Army Installations - full report (PDF &ndash; 1.2mb) A related powerpoint presentation by Donald Fournier( PDF &ndash  1mb) Sustainable energy demands decisions that look beyond cost (one-page commentary by Westervelt and Fournier in Public Works Digest, p. 16; PDF &ndash; 723kb) A Candidate Army Energy and Water Management Strategy by Westervelt and Fournier (118 pages, PDF &ndash  2mb) 

Some extended quotations from the document:
Energy Implications for Army Installations 

The days of inexpensive, convenient, abundant energy sources are quickly drawing to a close. Domestic natural gas production peaked in 1973. The proved domestic reserve lifetime for natural gas at current consumption rates is about 8.4 yrs. The proved world reserve lifetime for natural gas is about 40 years, but will follow a traditional rise to a peak and then a rapid decline. Domestic oil production peaked in 1970 and continues to decline. Proved domestic reserve lifetime for oil is about 3.4 yrs. World oil production is at or near its peak and current world demand exceeds the supply. Saudi Arabia is considered the bellwether nation for oil production and has not increased production since April 2003. After peak production, supply no longer meets demand, prices and competition increase. World proved reserve lifetime for oil is about 41 years, most of this at a declining availability. Our current throw-away nuclear cycle will consume the world reserve of low-cost uranium in 
 about 20 years. Unless we dramatically change our consumption practices, the Earth&rsquo;s finite resources of petroleum and natural gas will become depleted in this century. Coal supplies may last into the next century depending on technology and consumption trends as it starts to replace oil and natural gas. 

We must act now to develop the technology and infrastructure necessary to transition to other energy sources. Policy changes, leap ahead technology breakthroughs, cultural changes, and significant investment is requisite for this new energy future. Time is essential to enact these changes. The process should begin now. 

Our best options for meeting future energy requirements are energy efficiency and renewable sources. Energy efficiency is the least expensive, most readily available, and environmentally friendly way to stretch our current energy supplies. ... For efficiency and renewables, the intangible and hard to quantify benefits &mdash; such as reduced pollution and increased security &mdash; yield indisputable economic value. 

Many of the issues in the energy arena are outside the control of the Army. Several actions are in the purview of the national government to foster the ability of all groups, including the Army, to optimize their natural resource management. The Army needs to present its perspective to higher authorities and be prepared to proceed regardless of the national measures that are taken.

...  

Petroleum 

Historically, no other energy source equals oil&rsquo;s intrinsic qualities of extractability, transportability, versatility, and cost. The qualities that enabled oil to take over from coal as the front-line energy source for the industrialized world in the middle of the 20th century are as relevant today as they were then. Oil&rsquo;s many advantages provide 1.3 to 2.45 times more economic value per MBtu than coal (Gever, Kaufman et al. 1991). Currently, there is no viable substitute for petroleum. 

In summary, the outlook for petroleum is not good. This especially applies to conventional oil, which has been the lowest cost resource. Production peaks for non-OPEC conventional oil are at hand; many nations have already past their peak, or are now producing at peak capacity.


...

Conventional Oil Resources 

In general, all nonrenewable resources follow a natural supply curve. Production increases rapidly, slows, reaches a peak, and then declines (at a rapid pace, similar to its initial increase). The major question for petroleum is not whether production will peak, but when. There are many estimates of recoverable petroleum reserves giving rise to many estimates of when peak oil will occur and how high the peak will be. A careful review of all the estimates leads to the conclusion that world oil production may peak within a few short years, after which it will decline (Campbell and Laherrere 1998; Deffeyes 2001; Laherrere 2003). Once peak oil occurs, then the historic patterns of world oil demand and price cycles will cease. 

Notes from BA

The military's commitment to energy policy

A notice in the report says, "The findings of this report are not to be construed as an official Department of the Army position unless so designated by other authorized documents."   However, as AF notes, other U.S. Army planning documents seem to share the concern about energy supply.  And as USA TODAY reports:Spurred by a 57% increase in fuel costs, the Pentagon is speeding up its efforts to save energy and develop new sources of power. ...All military bases and facilities have been ordered to cut energy use by 2% per year and pursue alternative energy sources, such as solar and wind.
 The recent spate of articles about the military and energy policy bespeaks a more comprehensive outlook than either that of the Democratic or Republican parties, or most environmental organizations. For example, see: 
America?s strategic imperative: a ?Manhattan Project? for energy (Joint Forces Quarterly)
Toward a Long-Range Energy Security Policy - Parameters (US Army War College).

Energy efficiency

The report only surveys energy sources, and does not cover efficiency or conservation.   Nonetheless, the report notes that energy efficiency is "the cheapest, fastest, cleanest source of new energy." (p.58).  In other publications, the authors do cover energy efficiency in detail, for example in A Candidate Army Energy and Water Management Strategy (118 pages, PDF &ndash  2mb).

Many of the projects pursued by author Fournier are related to sustainability and energy efficiency (also see article in Green Biz).

Online accessibility

The fact that the document does not seem to be online is puzzling. Searching with Google yielded no results.  According to a note on page 4 of the report, the report should be available at http://www.cecer.army.mil/, a URL which seems to be obsolete or inaccessible.  

Possibility for an alliance

I'm more sanguine about the role of the military than AF.  Within the military and intelligence communities, there seems to be a lack of enthusiasm for unproductive resource wars. See the talks by Ex-CIA directors James R. Schlesinger and James Woolsey as well as the work of Gal Luft at the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security (IAGS).

Is the unlikely alliance described in the following article more widely possible?You wouldn't have thought it possible: a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency drawing a standing ovation from a room full of left-leaning environmentalists right here in Eugene.

But that's exactly what happened at the University of Oregon's Public Interest Environmental Law Conference Saturday afternoon as R. James Woolsey - the nation's chief "spook" under President Bill Clinton from 1993-1995 - spoke passionately about the need to reduce America's dependence on foreign oil.

"There is a moral dimension to this," Woolsey said. "We should be good custodians of the Earth.

 And if that means creating an unlikely alliance between national security hawks, American farmers, Christian evangelicals, liberal do-gooders and tree-hugging environmentalists, Woolsey said, that's just fine with him.

"All these groups are starting to come around on this set of issues," he said...

"Speaker inspires no-oil thinking" in the Eugene Register Guard, March 5, 2006.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Editorial Notes ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
UPDATE: Sohbet Karbuz points out this much earlier discussion of Peak Oil in military circles from 2002:


From jameshburns at webtv.net  Tue Mar 14 01:05:09 2006
From: jameshburns at webtv.net (Jim Burns)
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2006 04:05:09 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Our Black Ops Space Plane?
Message-ID: <22872-44168745-9348@storefull-3271.bay.webtv.net>


Jim Burns:

For the uninitiated, "Black Ops" are government programs, that don't
exist...

Get it?

Good.

Now swallow that secret capsule.

;-)

I happen to think if this story is accurate, and it comes from one of
the legit aviation trade magazines, this is pretty neat--

That we had an operational "space plane," years ago.

But also, a reminder, that for the nonce, we will never know where all
our money is being spent...


 
Two-Stage-to-Orbit 'Blackstar' System Shelved at Groom Lake? 
By William B. Scott 
Aviation Week & Space Technology
SPACEPLANE SHELVED? 

For 16 years, Aviation Week & Space Technology has investigated myriad
sightings of a two-stage-to-orbit system that could place a small
military spaceplane in orbit. 

Considerable evidence supports the existence of such a highly classified
system, and top Pentagon officials have hinted that it's "out there,"
but iron-clad confirmation that meets AW&ST standards has remained
elusive. Now facing the possibility that this innovative "Blackstar"
system may have been shelved, we elected to share what we've learned
about it with our readers, rather than let an intriguing technological
breakthrough vanish into "black world" history, known to only a few
insiders. 

U.S. intelligence agencies may have quietly mothballed a highly
classified two-stage-to-orbit spaceplane system designed in the 1980s
for reconnaissance, satellite-insertion and, possibly, weapons delivery.
It could be a victim of shrinking federal budgets strained by war costs,
or it may not have met performance or operational goals. 

This two-vehicle "Blackstar" carrier/orbiter system may have been
declared operational during the 1990s. 

A large "mothership," closely resembling the U.S. Air Force's historic
XB-70 supersonic bomber, carries the orbital component conformally under
its fuselage, accelerating to supersonic speeds at high altitude before
dropping the spaceplane. The orbiter's engines fire and boost the
vehicle into space. If mission requirements dictate, the spaceplane can
either reach low Earth orbit or remain suborbital. 

The manned orbiter's primary military advantage would be surprise
overflight. There would be no forewarning of its presence, prior to the
first orbit, allowing ground targets to be imaged before they could be
hidden. In contrast, satellite orbits are predictable enough that
activities having intelligence value can be scheduled to avoid
overflights. 

Exactly what missions the Blackstar system may have been designed for
and built to accomplish are as yet unconfirmed, but U.S. Air Force Space
Command (AFSPC) officers and contractors have been toying with similar
spaceplane-operational concepts for years. Besides reconnaissance, they
call for inserting small satellites into orbit, and either retrieving or
servicing other spacecraft. Conceivably, such a vehicle could serve as
an anti-satellite or space-to-ground weapons-delivery platform, as well. 

Once a Blackstar orbiter reenters the atmosphere, it can land
horizontally at almost any location having a sufficiently long runway.
So far, observed spaceplane landings have been reported at Hurlburt AFB,
Fla.; Kadena AB, Okinawa; and Holloman AFB, N.M. 

The spaceplane is capable of carrying an advanced imaging suite that
features 1-meter-aperture adaptive optics with an integral
sodium-ion-sensing laser. By compensating in real-time for atmospheric
turbulence-caused aberrations sensed by the laser, the system is capable
of acquiring very detailed images of ground targets or in-space objects,
according to industry officials familiar with the package. 

THE SPACEPLANE'S SMALL CARGO or "Q-bay" also could be configured to
deliver specialized microsatellites to low Earth orbit or, perhaps, be
fitted with no-warhead hypervelocity weapons--what military visionaries
have called "rods from god." Launched from the fringes of space, these
high-Mach weapons could destroy deeply buried bunkers and weapons
facilities. 

While frequently the subject of advanced studies, such as the Air
Force's "Spacecast 2020," actual development and employment of a
transatmospheric spaceplane have not been confirmed officially (AW&ST
Sept. 5, 1994, p. 101). However, many sightings of both an XB-70-like
carrier and a spaceplane have been reported, primarily in the western
U.S. Only once have they been seen together, though. 
On Oct. 4, 1998, the carrier aircraft was spotted flying over Salt Lake
City at about 2:35 p.m. local time. James Petty, the president of JP
Rocket Engine Co., saw a small, highly swept-winged vehicle nestled
under the belly of the XB-70-like aircraft. The vehicle appeared to be
climbing slowly on a west-southwest heading. The sky was clear enough to
see both vehicles' leading edges, which Petty described as a dark gray
or black color. 

For whatever reason, top military space commanders apparently have never
been "briefed-in"--never told of the Blackstar system's existence--even
though these are the "warfighters" who might need to employ a spaceplane
in combat. Consequently, the most likely user is an intelligence agency.
The National Reconnaissance Office may have played a role in the
program, but former senior NRO officials have denied any knowledge of
it. 

One Pentagon official suggests that the Blackstar system was "owned" and
operated by a team of aerospace contractors, ensuring government
leaders' plausible deniability. When asked about the system, they could
honestly say, "we don't have anything like that." 

Aerospace industry contractors suggest that a top secret Blackstar
system could explain why Pentagon leaders readily offered the Air
Force's nascent unclassified spaceplane project, the briefly resurrected
SR-71 program and the Army's anti-satellite program for elimination from
budgets in the late 1990s. At the time, an industry official said, "if
we're flying a spaceplane, it makes sense to kill these cover programs
and stop wasting money on things we can already do." 

U.S. and European aerospace companies have pushed two-stage-to-orbit
(TSTO) spaceplane concepts for decades. Most large U.S. airframe
manufacturers designed spaceplane-type vehicles during the 1950s and
'60s, and XB-70 program documents include a concept for carrying and
launching a low-Earth orbiter. Two former test pilots and executives for
North American Aviation (later, Rockwell) said the company had a
technically viable plan for such a system in the 1950s (AW&ST Aug. 24,
1992, p. 25). 

Boeing is believed to be one of several major aerospace companies
involved in the Blackstar program. On Oct. 14, 1986, Boeing filed a U.S.
patent application for an advanced two-stage space transportation
system. Patent No. 4,802,639, awarded on Feb. 7, 1989, details how a
small orbiter could be air-dropped from the belly of a large
delta-winged carrier at Mach 3.3 and 103,800-ft. altitude. The
spaceplane would be boosted into orbit by its own propulsion system,
perform an intended mission, then glide back to a horizontal landing. 
Although drawings of aircraft planforms in the Boeing patent differ from
those of the Blackstar vehicles spotted at several USAF bases, the
concepts are strikingly similar. 

One logical explanation given for why a Blackstar system is developed
says that, after the shuttle Challenger disaster in January 1986, and a
subsequent string of expendable-booster failures, Pentagon leaders were
stunned to learn they no longer had "assured access to space." Suddenly,
the U.S. needed a means to orbit satellites necessary to keep tabs on
its Cold War adversaries. 

A team of contractors apparently stepped forward, offering to build a
quick-reaction TSTO system in record time. The system could ensure
on-demand overflight reconnaissance/surveillance from low Earth orbit,
and would require minimal development time. Tons of material--including
long-lead structural items--for a third XB-70 Valkyrie had been stored
in California warehouses years before, and a wealth of data from the
X-20 DynaSoar military spaceplane program was readily available for
application to a modern orbiter. 

DYNASOAR WAS TERMINATED shortly after President John F. Kennedy was
assassinated in 1963, after $430 million had been spent on the
spaceplane's development. Political opposition and the fatal crash of
XB-70 No. 2 on June 8, 1966, contributed to the bomber program's being
canceled before Air Vehicle No. 3 could be built. However, at one time,
there had been plans to mate the two vehicles. 

In XB-70 Valkyrie: The Ride to Valhalla, Jeannette Remak and Joe
Ventolo, Jr., wrote: "One version of the B-70 could have been used as a
recoverable booster system to launch things into low-Earth orbit. . .. .
The DynaSoar program, the first effort by the [U.S.] to use a manned
boost-glider to fly in near-orbital space and return, was considered in
this context in November 1959. The B-70 was to carry the 10,000-lb.
DynaSoar glider and a 40,000-lb. liquid rocket booster to 70,000 ft. and
release them while traveling at Mach 3. With this lofty start, the
booster could then push the glider into its final 300-mi. orbit." 

The two-stage U.S. spaceplane concept apparently has undergone several
iterations since then, but the basic idea remained--launch a manned
boost-glide vehicle from an XB-70-like platform (AW&ST Dec. 24, 1990, 
p. 48; Sept. 24, 1990, p. 28). An aerospace industry source said the Air
Force once used the "Blackstar" moniker, but others suggested the
intelligence community referred to this TSTO combination as the
"SR-3/XOV" system. The SR-3 is the large, XB-70-like carrier aircraft,
while the small orbital vehicles drop-launched at high speed are called
XOV-1, XOV-2 and so forth. At one time, the XOV designator meant
"experimental orbital vehicle." 
Based on information gleaned from multiple industry sources, the SR-3
features: 
*A roughly 200-ft.-long, clipped-delta-winged planform resembling that
of the North American Aviation XB-70 trisonic bomber. The forward
fuselage is believed to be more oval-shaped than was depicted in a 1992
artist's rendering (AW&ST Aug. 24, 1992, p. 23). 

*Canards that extend from the forward fuselage. These lifting surfaces
may sweep both fore and aft to compensate for large center-of-gravity
changes after dropping the spaceplane, based on multiple sighting
reports. 

*Large, outward-canted vertical tail surfaces at the clipped-delta's
wingtips. 

*At least four engine exhaust ports, grouped as two well-separated banks
on either side of the aircraft centerline. 

*Very loud engines. One other classified military aircraft may have used
the same type of powerplant. 

*Operation at supersonic speeds and altitudes up to 90,000 ft. 

During the system's development cycle, two types of spaceplane orbiters
may have been flown. Both were a blended wing/fuselage lifting-body
design, but differed in size. The smaller version was about 60-65 ft.
long and may have been unmanned or carried a crew of two, some say.
Industry engineers said this technology demonstrator was "a very
successful program." 

The larger orbiter is reportedly 97.5 ft. long, has a highly swept,
blended wing/body planform and a short vertical fin. This bulky fin
apparently doubles as a buried pylon for conformal carriage of the
spaceplane beneath the large SR-3. The "Q-bay" for transporting an
optics-system pallet or other payloads may be located aft of the
cockpit, with payload doors on top of the fuselage. 

Outboard sections of the spaceplane's wing/body cant slightly downward,
possibly for shock-wave control and compression lift at high speeds
while in the atmosphere, whether on ascent or reentry. The only visible
control surfaces are flap- or drag-type panels on the wing's trailing
edge, one section on each side of the stubby vertical fin. A relatively
large, spade-shaped section forward of the cockpit--which gives the
orbiter a "shark-nose" appearance--may provide some pitch stability, as
well. 

The orbiter's belly appears to be contoured with channels, riblets or
"strakelets" that direct airflow to engine inlets and help dissipate
aerodynamic heating. These shallow channels may direct air to a complex
system of internal, advanced composite-material ducts, according to an
engineer who says he helped build one version of the orbiter in the
early 1990s. Air is directed to what is believed to be aerospike engines
similar to those once planned for use on the NASA/Lockheed Martin X-33. 

A former Lockheed Skunk Works official once expressed confidence in the
X-33 prototype orbiter's powerplants, noting that "they have history."
Whether this implies the aerospikes had flown before, perhaps on an XOV,
or simply referred to ground test-firings is unknown. The X-33 was a
prototype of what was to be the single-stage-to-orbit Venture Star
(AW&ST Nov. 10, 1997, p. 50). 

Technicians who worked at a McDonnell Douglas plant in St. Louis in the
late 1980s and early 1990s said much of the XOV's structure was made of
advanced composite materials. Some wing skin panels measured 40 ft. long
and 16 ft. wide, yet were only 3/8 in. to 1/2 in. thick. 

"Two people could pick them up; they were very light," one said. These
panels were stacked in a sandwich structure to obtain the required
thickness, then machined to shape. Although much of the structure was
honeycomb, it was "incredibly strong, and would handle very high
temperatures," he noted. Inside skin surfaces "were ungodly
complicated," though. 

WORK ON THE ORBITER moved at a relatively slow pace until a "fuel
breakthrough" was made, workers were told. Then, from 1990 through 1991,
"we lived out there. It was a madhouse," a technician said. The new fuel
was believed to be a boron-based gel having the consistency of
toothpaste and high-energy characteristics, but occupying less volume
than other fuels. 

Regardless of where they land, spaceplane orbiters usually are retrieved
by one or more "fat" C-5 Galaxy transports. Three of the oversized
aircraft were modified with 8-ft.-wide "chipmunk cheek" extensions on
each side of the cargo compartment aft of the nose hinge point; an extra
six-wheel set of landing gear that partially retracts up against the aft
fuselage, forward of the ramp; a shortened upper deck, and two internal
harness/cradle supports. These alterations originally were made to
enable carriage of dome-topped containers measuring 61.2 ft. long, 17.2
ft. wide (maximum) and 16.7 ft. tall at the highest point. The
containers normally protected satellites during transit to launch sites. 

In 1994, NASA sources confirmed that two of the C-5s (Tail Nos. 00503
and 00504) were listed on NASA's inventory--although the aircraft did
not "officially" exist, according to the agency's public records. Both
transports apparently were deployed only upon orders from the
administrator's office. The third oversized C-5 once had a red "CL" on
its tail, and supposedly was used by the Central Intelligence Agency.
All three C-5s may have been retired in recent years, according to a
NASA contractor. 

CRITICS ARGUE that there was never enough money hidden in intelligence
and military budgets to fund a small fleet of spaceplanes and carrier
aircraft. However, those who worked on the system's development at
several contractor sites say they charged time-and-materials costs to a
number of well-funded programs. Lockheed was the lead contractor for
Blackstar orbiters being fabricated at McDonnell Douglas in the early
1990s, and workers there typically logged their time against a specific
Lockheed charge number associated with that project. But their time
might also have been charged to the National Aero-Space Plane (NASP) and
the Navy's A-12 fighter accounts, they say. Both multibillion-dollar
programs were canceled with little but technology development gains to
show for massive expenditures. 

"At first, [supervisors] said we were working on NASP, but this thing
never looked like anything the public was shown," a McDonnell Douglas
technician who worked in the company's "black hole" facility said.
"Later, we were just told, 'Clock it to NASP and don't ask questions.'
We never did anything that was really NASP--and money was never a
problem." 

Whether the Blackstar system was ever declared operational or not is
unknown, but several orbiters may have flown over the years. A former
program manager at a major aerospace company once declared, "There's no
question; Lockheed is flying a two-stage space vehicle." 

Interestingly, after both Lockheed and Boeing pulled out of the NASP
competition (or were "eliminated") in the 1980s, they may have
collaborated to develop the two-stage-to-orbit Blackstar system under a
highly classified "fast-track" program. However, many other contractors'
"deep-black" teams probably also were involved in order to bring the
nation's best expertise to bear on what must have been daunting
technical challenges. 

AWST STORY
http://www.aviationnow.com/avnow/news/channel_awst_story.jsp?id=news/030606p1.xml 


? Copyright 2006 AVIATION WEEK AND SPACE TECHNOLOGY



From swiggard at comcast.net  Tue Mar 14 03:53:44 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2006 06:53:44 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Judge Halts Terror Trial - Washington Post
Message-ID: <4416AEC8.4090009@comcast.net>

Judge Halts Terror Trial
Lawyer E-Mailed Court Transcripts To 7 Witnesses

By Jerry Markon and Timothy Dwyer
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, March 14, 2006; A01

A federal judge halted the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui yesterday and 
threatened to remove the death penalty as a possible sentence for the 
Sept. 11 conspirator after a veteran government aviation lawyer 
improperly shared testimony and communicated with witnesses.

U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema, clearly exasperated by the new 
problems in the oft-delayed case, called the conduct of Carla J. Martin, 
a Transportation Security Administration lawyer, "the most egregious 
violation of the court's rules on witnesses" she had seen "in all the 
years I've been on the bench."

Even prosecutors were stunned by Martin's actions, calling them 
"reprehensible" in court papers and adding, "We frankly cannot fathom 
why she engaged in such conduct."

Martin violated a court order by e-mailing trial transcripts to seven 
witnesses -- all current and former federal aviation employees -- and 
coaching them on their upcoming testimony, court papers say. She also 
shared the e-mails among the witnesses.

Brinkema had ruled earlier that most witnesses could not attend or 
follow the trial and could not read transcripts. She told jurors 
yesterday that the ruling was "meant to prevent witnesses from comparing 
their testimony or listening to what other witnesses said and changing 
their own testimony."

The judge ordered a hearing today to find out how the incident happened. 
To sanction the government for the error, she could remove the death 
penalty, forbid the witnesses from testifying or declare a mistrial. The 
government could appeal either of the first two sanctions.

Further embarrassing the government, Martin's e-mails sharply criticized 
prosecutors' case, saying, among other things, that their opening 
statement "has created a credibility gap that the defense can drive a 
truck through."

Martin did not return calls to her home or office yesterday and did not 
answer the door at her apartment.

Moussaoui, 37, has pleaded guilty for conspiring with al-Qaeda in the 
Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. 
Prosecutors in Alexandria are seeking his execution. If Brinkema were to 
forbid the death penalty, the case would end and Moussaoui would be 
sentenced to life in prison. It would be a huge setback for the government.

"This is the only opportunity for the government to make a Sept. 11 
case. This is it. There isn't another," said Juliette Kayyem, a 
terrorism expert at Harvard University. "The government has to cross 
every t and dot every i to ensure that the Sept. 11 families finally 
have their day in court. If it gets messed up over a technicality . . . 
there is no excuse."

Duke University law professor Robert P. Mosteller said ethical 
restrictions against speaking with witnesses are drilled into every 
attorney. "Lawyers don't do things like this," he said. "The federal 
rule on witnesses is elegant in its simplicity, and it's usually not 
something people get wrong."

TSA officials referred calls to the Justice Department. Justice 
Department officials declined to comment.

Martin, an aviation security expert, had served as a liaison between 
prosecutors and witnesses expected to testify about airport security. 
She was working with government and defense witnesses and was not a 
member of the prosecution team. Brinkema told jurors before dismissing 
them for the day that prosecutors deserved "great credit" for reporting 
the error to her.

Defense attorneys accused Martin of trying to shape the testimony of key 
witnesses. "This is not going to be a fair trial anymore . . . because 
of what a lawyer did in an absolute abrogation of your rules," defense 
attorney Edward B. MacMahon Jr. said as he urged Brinkema to strike the 
death penalty.

Brinkema has removed the death penalty once, in 2003, after the 
government disobeyed her order to allow Moussaoui's attorneys to 
interview captured al-Qaeda leaders who they said could clear him. 
Eventually, she was overruled by a higher court.

Fordham Law School professor James Cohen, an expert in witness 
tampering, said dismissing the death penalty this time "might be too 
harsh a penalty." Other legal specialists said Brinkema might strike the 
testimony of the witnesses with whom Martin communicated. Those 
witnesses, three for the government and four for the defense, are 
expected to testify about what the government might have done to boost 
airport security if Moussaoui had confessed his knowledge of the Sept. 
11 plot when he was arrested in August 2001.

Even that would be a severe blow to the government because that is the 
crux of its argument for execution: If Moussaoui had not lied to the 
FBI, the attacks could have been prevented. Assistant U.S. Attorney 
David J. Novak said in court yesterday that the testimony of the 
contacted witnesses constituted "half the evidence in this case."

Prosecutors urged Brinkema last night to throw out neither the death 
penalty nor the testimony of the seven witnesses, saying defense 
attorneys can address any problems caused by Martin's e-mails during 
direct or cross-examination. "Dismissal of the death notice is simply 
too extreme a sanction and the public should not be deprived of its 
right to see this trial proceed to verdict," the prosecution filing 
said. The filing, however, acknowledged that Martin had intended "to 
better prepare the witnesses for questions by the defense."

Court papers said the government learned of Martin's e-mails when one of 
the witnesses who received them, Lynne Osmus, approached prosecutors 
Friday night. Osmus, who is assistant administrator for security and 
hazardous materials at the Federal Aviation Administration, declined to 
comment yesterday.

Novak then learned that Martin had also e-mailed the other witnesses. 
Court documents say they include Robert White, a former FAA liaison to 
the CIA's Counterterrorism Center who works at the TSA, and Pat 
McDonnell, the FAA's retired director of aviation security and intelligence.

Martin's e-mails were highly critical of the government's case, 
especially an assertion by prosecutors that the government could have 
stopped the Sept. 11 terror attacks if Moussaoui had not lied to the FBI 
by, among other things, having the FAA focus airport security on 
short-bladed knives. The Sept. 11 hijackers used such knives to take 
over four airplanes.

"There is no way anyone could say that the carriers could have prevented 
all short bladed knives from going through -- Dave [Novak] MUST elicit 
that from you and the airline witnesses on direct, and not allow the 
defense to cut your credibility on cross," Martin wrote.

Defense attorneys noted that Martin has been present from the beginning 
at almost every proceeding in the Moussaoui case, including sensitive 
hearings.

She was a career FAA attorney who moved to the new Transportation 
Security Administration in 2002, largely because of her work on the case 
of the 1988 explosion of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, 
officials familiar with her work said. Martin represented the government 
at a civil trial in which victims' families sued the airline. She was 
there to make sure that sensitive information was not discussed in open 
court.

Several officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the 
sensitivity of the case, said Martin often served as a liaison with 
Justice Department lawyers in aviation security cases.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/13/AR2006031300506.html?referrer=email
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060314/8b2e04d6/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Tue Mar 14 03:58:21 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2006 06:58:21 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] The Dangers of Ports (and Politicians) - Robert J.
 Samuelson - Washington Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <4416AFDD.6030603@comcast.net>

The Dangers of Ports (and Politicians)

By Robert J. Samuelson
The Washington Post
Tuesday, March 14, 2006; A19

The idea of letting an Arab-owned company, Dubai Ports World, run 
container terminals at some major U.S. ports struck many Americans as an 
absurdity. Why not just turn control over to al-Qaeda? In late February 
a CBS News poll found that 70 percent of respondents were against the 
deal and only 21 percent in favor. The company's withdrawal last week 
can be seen as a triumph of public opinion. Or it can be acknowledged 
for what it is: a major defeat for the United States, driven by 
self-indulgent politicians of both parties who enthusiastically fanned 
public fears.

Leadership in a democratic society requires a willingness and ability to 
challenge and change public opinion when it is based on misinformation, 
no information, prejudice or stupidity -- as it was in this case. There 
never was a genuine security problem. The Dubai company wouldn't have 
"taken over" the U.S. ports. It simply would have run some terminals. 
Cargo would still have been handled by American, unionized longshoremen. 
The Coast Guard and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency would 
still have been responsible for port security.

To be sure, the 9 million or so containers arriving annually in the 
United States do pose security threats. In congressional testimony, 
Stephen Flynn of the Council on Foreign Relations outlined one danger: a 
truck driver, sympathetic to al-Qaeda, picks up a container of sneakers 
in Indonesia; on the way to the port, he diverts the trucks so 
terrorists can load the container with a "dirty" nuclear device; and the 
container is shipped to Chicago, where it's detonated. Flynn urged more 
worldwide electronic and radiation scanning of containers at ports of 
departure. He estimated that screening would require about a $20 fee per 
container.

"We need to know what's in the box more than we need to know who is 
moving them around a container yard," Flynn testified. Both Flynn and 
James Jay Carafano of the Heritage Foundation testified that Congress 
had underfunded the Coast Guard. No matter. It was a free-for-all on 
Capitol Hill. Democratic Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Charles 
Schumer of New York led the fearmongering. Republicans joined the 
chorus, some frightened of being cast as "soft" on terrorism. In a 
typical comment, House Speaker Dennis Hastert said: "We want to protect 
the American people."

As political theater, the posturing may be harmless. But all the 
grandstanding -- precisely because the criticisms were overblown -- 
damages American interests. It's a public relations disaster in the 
Middle East. The United Arab Emirates -- of which Dubai is a part -- has 
been a strong American ally, permitting the use of its ports and 
airfields for U.S. ships and military aircraft. Dubai's ruler, Sheik 
Mohammad bin Rashid al-Maktoum, is trying to integrate his city-state 
into the world economy. There's been a building boom of offices, malls 
and luxury hotels. Dubai has also gone on a global investment binge, 
buying the Essex House in New York, Madame Tussauds wax museum in London 
and (of course) the port operations of Britain's Peninsular & Oriental 
Steam Navigation Co.

If this isn't what we want from Arab countries, what do we want? Much 
bitterness is reported in Dubai, especially among those who are 
pro-Western. They blame racism. That's understandable and perhaps 
correct. A Post poll last week found that 46 percent of Americans had a 
negative view of Islam -- a crude proxy for Arabs. (Yes, not all Arabs 
are Muslim, and not all Muslims are Arabs. But the poll is still 
suggestive of American opinion about Arabs.) The ports furor also hurts 
the United States in another way. It weakens confidence in the dollar as 
the major global currency. The U.S. trade deficit now spews more than 
$700 billion into the world annually. To some extent, global economic 
stability depends on foreigners' keeping most of those dollars. Mass 
dollar sales could trigger turmoil on the world's currency, stock and 
bond markets.

People outside the United States hold dollars because they believe the 
currency maintains its value and offers a wide menu of investment 
choices. The message from Congress is that the menu is shorter than 
people thought. Once any investment is stigmatized -- rightly or wrongly 
-- as a "security problem," Congress may act against foreigners.

Every country has the right to protect its security interests. But those 
interests must be defined coherently and not simply as the random 
expression of political expediency. That's what happened here, as it did 
last year when Congress pressured a Chinese oil company (China National 
Offshore Oil Corp.) to withdraw its bid for a U.S. firm (Unocal Corp.). 
The more this process continues, the more it corrodes confidence in the 
dollar.

It will be said that other countries are equally nationalistic and 
political, so their currencies aren't realistic alternatives to the 
dollar. Not true. If we imitate the French or Malaysians, the dollar 
will have compromised its special status. The irony is that the people 
who are creating all these risks are the very same members of Congress 
who claim to be protecting us.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/13/AR2006031301352.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060314/d3a2349d/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Tue Mar 14 04:00:36 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2006 07:00:36 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] GOP's Improbable Pair - Ruth Marcus - Washington Post
	Op-Ed
Message-ID: <4416B064.90204@comcast.net>

GOP's Improbable Pair

By Ruth Marcus
The Washington Post
Tuesday, March 14, 2006; A19

MEMPHIS -- John McCain and Trent Lott aren't the strangest of political 
bedfellows, but the two Republican senators aren't the most obviously 
compatible couple either: The politics version of Match.com wouldn't 
likely fix up the iconoclast from Arizona with the Ol' Miss cheerleader. 
Though their family political ties stretch back to 1889, when a McCain 
ancestor backed Lott's great-great-uncle for state treasurer, Lott 
acknowledges, "John and I fight like cats and dogs."

During the 2000 campaign, McCain relentlessly flayed a Lott-backed, 
Mississippi-based ship as pork barrel spending at its worst; Lott 
returned the compliment by endorsing George W. Bush over his fellow 
senator. Over the years, they've clashed on everything from campaign 
finance reform to telecommunications policy.

So Lott's current labors on behalf of the emerging McCain presidential 
campaign are telling -- both about the careful political groundwork 
McCain is laying for 2008 and about the growing unease among party 
activists that they will lose the White House. Behind the scenes -- and 
quite openly at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference here over 
the weekend -- Lott has been working to burnish the Arizona senator's 
standing among the Republican faithful who remain skeptical of, or even 
hostile to, McCain.

Lott's support for McCain may contain more than a little element of 
payback and self-interest -- after all, Lott was ousted from his job as 
majority leader by one of McCain's presidential rivals, Tennessee's Bill 
Frist, and McCain could help Lott regain a leadership post.

But it also reflects an unsentimental assessment that McCain is, as Lott 
puts it, "our best horse this time around." Thus, some leaders such as 
Lott and, perhaps more important, some big-money men, are placing early 
bets on McCain. That trend may continue, but it remains unclear whether 
a skeptical base -- still angry at McCain over his disputes with 
President Bush in 2000, chafing at his championing of campaign finance 
reform, or unconvinced of his social conservative credentials -- will 
follow.

"I must say I think they're somewhat leery of him," Lott says. "But we 
want to win the next election. Pragmatism is a powerful force in politics."

As a result, the once-conventional political wisdom -- that McCain would 
be a formidable general election candidate but can't make it past the 
gantlet of Republican primary voters -- is crumbling along with Bush's 
approval ratings. And though McCain is working hard to help the party in 
2006, the paradox is that a rout in November would do wonders for McCain 
2008.

If the base -- at least some of the base -- is starting to think about 
electability, McCain is thinking base, and has been for some time. He 
moved to make amends for the 2000 campaign in 2004, campaigning on 
Bush's behalf, and he's been at it nonstop since -- helping raise money 
across the country and holding fence-mending meetings with social 
conservatives. After voting against the original Bush tax cuts in 2001, 
and again in 2003, McCain backed extending cuts on capital gains and 
dividend taxes last month -- a switch that won praise from an ordinarily 
unfriendly Wall Street Journal editorial page.

"I think he's helped himself a lot," Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour says 
of McCain's relations with Republican voters. Speaking at the 
conference, Barbour, the former party chairman, did his part to help, 
plugging McCain as a "hard-nosed deficit hawk."

Nonetheless, McCain, as Lott puts it, "has got work to do. He knows 
that." Iowans, for instance, are still smarting over McCain's decision 
to spurn their caucuses in 2000 -- and, even if they forgave that sin, 
they still might not be takers. "I don't think they think he's a real 
Republican," says Rep. Steven King (R-Iowa).

Indeed, for a man who needs to assuage those doubts -- and who is 
opposed to abortion rights and gay marriage -- McCain's speech here was 
notably devoid of the red-meat social issues tossed out by the other 
prospective candidates: He was the only one of the six who didn't 
mention those sure crowd-pleasers.

"I wanted to discuss the important salient issues that we are facing at 
this moment -- they are the corruption, the earmarking, Iran and Iraq," 
McCain said in an interview afterward. "Those are the challenges that we 
as a party and a nation are facing. If this had been the year 2008 maybe 
I would have focused more on general overall themes and basic issues 
that are the pillars of our party."

If McCain runs in 2008, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, a supporter, 
told reporters the race will be different than the 2000 campaign: This 
time, McCain will be trying "to become the leader of the party, not the 
leader of a movement" and one who is "sensitive to the idea that . . . 
social and economic conservative groups are the heart and soul of this 
party."

The conference was held at Memphis's Peabody Hotel, famous for the ducks 
that parade in stately formation each day to and from the lobby's marble 
fountain, waddling to the strains of a Sousa march. The party that 
McCain now seeks to lead would prefer a primary campaign as orderly and 
predictable as the daily procession in the Peabody lobby. The test for 
McCain is whether -- with the help of Lott and others -- he can manage 
to get the GOP ducks in a row, marching smartly behind him and not 
quacking too loudly.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/13/AR2006031301485.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060314/8e757840/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Tue Mar 14 04:03:52 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2006 07:03:52 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] How's This for Satire? - Richard Cohen - Washington Post
	Op-Ed
Message-ID: <4416B128.3030209@comcast.net>

How's This for Satire?

By Richard Cohen
The Washington Post
Tuesday, March 14, 2006; A19

The movie version of Christopher Buckley's book "Thank You for Smoking" 
opens Friday and in conjunction with that, Buckley was interviewed on 
National Public Radio. Buckley mentioned the difficulty of writing 
satire in Washington, where the most outrageous idea is trumped by the 
next day's headline. I heard the interview just as I was reading in the 
newspaper that Republicans were "distressed by the White House's 
performance since President Bush's reelection." As the old saying goes, 
can you top that, Chris?

Republicans were not "distressed," mind you, by the war in Iraq, which 
turns out to have been waged for no good reason. Republicans were not 
distressed by the massive intelligence failure that preceded the war. 
Republicans were not distressed, either, by the intelligence failure 
that produced the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, more than seven 
months after our MBA president took over as CEO of the federal government.

Republicans were not distressed by a war plan that envisioned an 
enthusiastic welcome for U.S. troops by the people of Iraq. They were 
not distressed by a faulty battle plan that relied on too few troops and 
enabled the sacking and vandalizing of Baghdad by the local barbarians. 
They were not distressed by a war that has gone on two years past the 
point where George W. Bush pronounced it substantially over. Republicans 
are a cheerful bunch.

Republicans are not distressed by a war that is costing many billions of 
dollars more than estimated. They are not distressed by what that has 
done to the federal budget, the deficit and the debt, and how we as a 
nation are in hock to China and Japan, not to mention the odd 
billionaire in Dubai. They are not distressed by General Motors and Ford 
sinking into a witch's brew of ineptitude, greed, pension obligations 
and high costs. This is distressing, but mostly if you happen to be an 
autoworker. Most of them are not Republicans anyway.

Republicans are not distressed by the deaths of more than 2,300 
Americans in Iraq, many of whom ( most of whom) lost their lives 
needlessly fighting a war that should have been over long ago. 
Republicans are not distressed by the wounded or the widowed or the 
orphaned or the merely haunted who will, on account of combat, never get 
another good night's sleep.

No. Republicans are distressed because Bush suddenly has made their 
lives a tad more difficult. His ratings are down. Their elections are 
coming up. Oy, what distress!

Lest you think I am a partisan hack, let me tell you what distresses the 
Democrats: an innocuous port deal that lent itself to demagogic 
mischief. This reprehensible exercise in Arab-bashing was led by New 
York's two senators, Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton, both of whom 
revealed themselves to be ill-suited to fill the Senate seats once 
occupied by the likes of Jacob Javits, Pat Moynihan, Bobby Kennedy, 
Herbert Lehman and Robert Wagner. They wound up taking the same side as 
Bill Frist, the Senate's most nimble opportunist, a physician who took 
one look at a videotape of Terri Schiavo and rendered a medical opinion 
so wrong and so irresponsible that he violated the physician's paramount 
obligation to "First do no harm" by simply getting out of bed that 
morning. If Frist is your doctor, seek a second opinion.

Truly, we -- you and I -- should be the ones distressed. This country 
has a bunch of fools for leaders. Almost daily, they flock to one press 
availability or another, yakking spin at us all. They hurl press 
releases back and forth, like kids throwing spitballs at one another, 
trudging from one photo-op to another and never neglecting to invoke 
"the American people" to justify their own selfish interests. If the 
fraudulent phrase, "Frankly I don't think the American people . . . " 
was banned in Washington, the town would fall mute and long-extinct 
birds would return. Just banning "frankly" alone would do wonders.

Buckley, take note. The other day, a spokesman for the military in Iraq 
refused to confirm the identity of the Abu Ghraib prisoner photographed 
wearing a hood with his arms extended by electrical wiring. The 
spokesman said it would violate the Geneva Conventions to identify the 
guy. These are the very Geneva Conventions that the current attorney 
general, Alberto Gonzales, had characterized as "obsolete." I guess it 
was once considered okay to abuse the prisoner and scare him half (or 
three-quarters) to death but not to identify him.

You cannot top this, Chris -- which is why, frankly, I'm distressed.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/13/AR2006031301484.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060314/0f48457f/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Tue Mar 14 04:09:34 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2006 07:09:34 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Tehran's dangerous influence on Iraqi politics - H.D.S.
 Greenway - Boston Globe Op-Ed
Message-ID: <4416B27E.4060506@comcast.net>


  Tehran's dangerous influence on Iraqi politics

By H.D.S. Greenway  |  March 14, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

AS THE WAR of ever-escalating threats between Iran and the United States 
rages, the rest of the world watches with growing alarm as the battle of 
wills over uranium enrichment moves on into the UN Security Council.

Washington growls about the serious consequences and the dire price that 
Iran will pay if it refuses to bow. Israel says an Iranian nuclear bomb 
is out of the question, while Iran says America ''is also susceptible to 
harm and pain."

There is a sense of ''deja vu," as Russia's foreign minister, Sergei 
Lavrov, put it, harking back to the buildup to the Iraq war in 2002. ''I 
don't believe we should engage in something which might become a 
self-fulfilling prophecy," he said.

Americans have studied their military options. Reconnaissance teams have 
infiltrated into Iran looking for targets and opportunities, and 
pilotless planes have been over-flying Iran to probe Iranian air 
defenses. Few think that Iran's nuclear facilities could be knocked out 
overnight, however, and the regime changers in the Pentagon no longer 
have the voice they once had after the failure of Iraq.

In the meantime Iran is strengthening its ties with Syria and Lebanon, 
and promises to help Hamas escape the restrictions the United States and 
Israel hope to impose on it after its victory in Palestinian elections. 
And then there is always the oil weapon.

The irony is that the United States has played a role in enabling Iran. 
Consider that only four years ago Taliban-ruled Afghanistan was a thorn 
in Iran's eastern flank until that thorn was drawn by American military 
action.

On Iran's western border not only did America get rid of archenemy 
Saddam Hussein, but also empowered Iraq's downtrodden Shi'ites, who have 
long had close relations with Iran. Iraq's prime minister, Ibrahim 
al-Jaafari, spent the Iran-Iraq war in Tehran, and some of the Shi'ite 
militias now operating in Iraq actually fought for Iran against Iraq. 
And the most powerful religious figure in Iraq today, Ayatollah Ali 
al-Sistani, is an Iranian.

An incident when I was in Baghdad last autumn underlined the growing 
influence of Iran in Iraqi politics. A de-Ba'athification committee 
ruled that a monument to Iraqi prisoners of war during the Iran-Iraq war 
should be removed from a Baghdad street because it might cause bad 
feelings toward Iran. The only equivalent I could think of is what the 
reaction in the United States would be if citizens were told they had to 
take down the Iwo Jima memorial outside Washington.

One of America's growing nightmares is that the low-level civil war 
going on just beneath the surface in Iraq will escalate to drag in 
neighboring countries rushing to support their co-religionists.

It wasn't supposed to happen this way. The architects of America's 
invasion of Iraq envisioned a stable, secular, pro-Western democracy in 
Iraq that would undermine Iran's theocracy next door. Instead it is 
Iran's theocracy next door that holds the key to undermining anything 
the United States may still plan to do with its disaster in Iraq. At the 
very least, Iran has the power to make sure that American troops are 
tied down between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers indefinitely.

Those who planned our Iraq adventure seemed to think that empowering 
Iraq's Shi'ites would play to their advantage. George Packer, in his 
authoritative book on America in Iraq, ''The Assassins' Gate," tells of 
a curious belief among some neo-conservatives that the Shia of Iraq were 
somehow more malleable than their Sunni brethren, and that traditional 
Iraqi Shi'ism could ''lead the way to reorienting the Arab world toward 
America and Israel.

''This thinking ran high up the policy chain at the Pentagon," Packer 
writes, influencing Douglas Feith, who was supposed to be in charge of 
postwar planning. ''You Shia in Iraq have a historical opportunity, " 
Feith told an Iraqi exile before the war. ''Do whatever you can, but 
don't speak about it." Few things could alarm our traditional Sunni 
allies in the Middle East more.

Today Americans in Iraq are less encouraged by what they have seen of 
Shia politics, and today Americans are threatening the Shi'ites with 
withdrawing American support if they fail to include Sunnis in a 
government of national unity.

But since there is no national unity in Iraq, a unity government could 
only be a triumph of appearances over reality, and the big winner in 
America's Iraq war is likely to be Iran.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/14/tehrans_dangerous_influence_on_iraqi_politics/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060314/97411582/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Tue Mar 14 03:55:29 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2006 06:55:29 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Magazine: Bradlee Knows Woodward's Source on Plame -
	Washington Post
Message-ID: <4416AF31.8020800@comcast.net>

Magazine: Bradlee Knows Woodward's Source on Plame

By Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 14, 2006; A02

Vanity Fair is reporting that former Washington Post executive editor 
Ben Bradlee says it is reasonable to assume former State Department 
official Richard L. Armitage is likely the source who revealed CIA 
operative Valerie Plame's name to Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob 
Woodward.

In an article to be published in the magazine today, Bradlee is quoted 
as saying: "That Armitage is the likely source is a fair assumption." 
Armitage was deputy secretary of State in President Bush's first term.

In an interview yesterday, Bradlee said he does know the identity of 
Woodward's source but does not recall making that precise statement to a 
Vanity Fair reporter. He said he has no interest in unmasking the 
official who first told Woodward about Plame in June 2003.

"I don't think I said it," Bradlee said. "I know who his source is, and 
I don't want to get into it. . . . I have not told a soul who it is."

The identity of Woodward's source emerged as one of the big mysteries of 
the CIA case after he disclosed last year that a government official 
with no ax to grind had told him about Plame, an undercover operative, a 
month before her name was revealed by columnist Robert D. Novak. Since 
then, guessing Woodward's source has been a Washington parlor game.

Plame is at the center of an investigation by a special prosecutor into 
whether White House officials knowingly disclosed her name to the media 
to discredit allegations made by her husband, former ambassador Joseph 
C. Wilson IV, that the administration twisted intelligence in the run up 
to the Iraq war. The probe has resulted in charges of perjury, making 
false statements and obstructing justice against I. Lewis "Scooter" 
Libby, Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff.

Beth Kseniak, spokeswoman for Vanity Fair, said the reporter who wrote 
the story, Marie Brenner, was traveling in India and was unavailable for 
comment.

Bradlee, currently Post vice president at large, said he learned the 
source's name from someone other than Woodward. Woodward said he did not 
reveal the source to his friend and former boss.

"He is not in the management loop on this," Woodward said. "Maybe he was 
alerted from somebody else, if he in fact did learn" the source's name.

Woodward and Bradlee refused to disclose the source's name. Armitage did 
not return phone calls requesting comment.

Bradlee's brief comments about the source are included in a lengthy 
article about the Plame case. Bradlee is the longtime Post editor who 
rose to prominence when his reporting team of Woodward and Carl 
Bernstein broke the Watergate story. Woodward and Bradlee refused for 
many years to reveal the identity of Deep Throat, a key source.

Bradlee defended Woodward after thejournalist disclosed in November that 
a senior Bush administration official had told him about Plame and her 
CIA ties a month before her identity was revealed.

At the time, Woodward was criticized by Leonard Downie Jr., The Post's 
executive editor, and others for not telling the newspaper about his 
knowledge of Plame until after Libby was indicted.

In the course of writing a book on Bush, Woodward said, he had 
discovered mention of Plame in his notes just as the grand jury in the 
leak case was expiring last October. Woodward contacted prosecutor 
Patrick J. Fitzgerald and later testified under oath about his 
conversations with the source, whom he has refused to name publicly.

Woodward's testimony changed key elements in the chronology Fitzgerald 
laid out in his investigation and announced when indicting Libby. It 
made Woodward's source -- not Libby -- the first known government 
official to disclose Plame's CIA employment to a reporter. Woodward has 
said he does not recall ever discussing Plame with Libby.

It also apparently made Woodward the first reporter to learn about Plame 
from a government source. Libby's legal team has cited Woodward's 
testimony as evidence that there are holes in Fitzgerald's version of 
events and hinted it might call the reporter to testify at the trial.

The identity of Woodward's source is one of several mysteries that 
remain in the leak case. Lawyers involved in the case have suggested 
Woodward's source and Novak's source are the same person. Novak has 
refused to discuss the sources for his column but suggested in a speech 
in December that he and Woodward shared the source. Novak and his lawyer 
declined to comment yesterday.

Fitzgerald has not concluded his investigation, but people involved in 
the case said he has not shown interest in Woodward or his source since 
Woodward testified last year.

Fitzgerald has not closed the investigation of whether White House 
Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove provided false statements about his role 
in the disclosure of Plame's identity, according to lawyers in the case.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/13/AR2006031301904.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060314/c88ef347/attachment-0001.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Tue Mar 14 04:11:44 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2006 07:11:44 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] No judgment at The Hague - Cara Robertson - Boston Globe
	Op-Ed
Message-ID: <4416B300.2010504@comcast.net>


  No judgment at The Hague

By Cara Robertson  |  March 14, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

WITH JUST 50 hours of his trial remaining, Slobodan Milosevic died in 
his cell. Carla Del Ponte, the chief prosecutor at the UN War Crimes 
Tribunal, lamented the justice denied to the victims of the Balkan wars. 
Eluding a guilty verdict, Milosevic, the former president of Yugoslavia, 
goes to his grave shrouded in his presumption of innocence.

Still reeling from the suicide of former Croatian Serb leader turned 
prosecution witness Milan Babic, the Tribunal now confronts a much more 
serious blemish on its record. After 466 court days spread out over four 
years, the Milosevic trial remains permanently unresolved. Given the 
resources expended to try Milosevic on 66 counts of war crimes, crimes 
against humanity, and genocide, it is hard not to see his death as a 
disaster for the Tribunal's legacy.

Indeed, the abrupt end to the proceedings gives credence to the typical 
range of complaints about the sluggish pace of justice at The Hague. 
Because the prosecution chose to combine separate indictments for 
Milosevic's alleged crimes in Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo, his trial 
became ''the trial," emblematic of the Tribunal's entire docket. This, 
plus the short attention span of the media, contributed to the false 
sense that the UN War Crimes Tribunal -- on those occasions when it was 
correctly identified and not confused with the International Court of 
Justice down the road -- was set up simply to try Milosevic. And, in his 
role as central actor in the drama, Milosevic did not disappoint. He 
arrived unbowed, challenged the legitimacy of the court and, until 
compelled for health reasons to accept counsel, conducted his own 
defense. He belittled the judges, hectored witnesses, and ranted for the 
cameras. When bored by the proceedings, he examined the spectators 
behind the bulletproof glass with imperial disdain. Given the minimal 
coverage of the Tribunal's other work, punctuated by the occasional 
snippet of Milosevic behaving badly, it is not surprising that people 
believed that nothing much beside Teatro Slobo was going on.

But Milosevic's case was far from the only game in town. The UN War 
Crimes Tribunal, officially called the International Criminal Tribunal 
for the former Yugoslavia, was established in 1993 by UN Security 
Council Resolution 827 to prosecute serious violations of international 
law committed on the territory of the former Yugoslavia since 1991. 
Functionally, it covers crimes committed over a 10-year period. More 
than 130 accused people (Serbs, Croats, and Muslims) have appeared 
before the Tribunal. Thousands of witnesses have testified in their 
trials. In addition to the defendants currently on trial or awaiting the 
outcome of appeals, 85 have had all proceedings concluded against them. 
Six were acquitted and the rest are serving or have served their sentences.

But more important than raw numbers, the Tribunal's jurisprudence has 
made it clear that individual criminal responsibility for crimes against 
humanity, war crimes, and genocide extends to the highest reaches of 
command and into the civilian leadership. For in addition to assigning 
culpability for past crimes, the Tribunal's mission is to deter future 
crimes and contribute to peaceful reconciliation, goals that can be 
served only by clarifying the contours of international criminal law and 
by creating a detailed historical record. One difficult case at a time, 
it has assembled a record of inhumanity that should hamper attempts at 
revisionism and outright denial in the region.

Against this background, it is worth reconsidering the significance of 
Milosevic's death.

Milosevic's prosecution depended upon the evidence gathered in the 
course of the other prosecutions and built upon the findings -- for 
example, that the Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys was 
indeed genocide -- of earlier judgments. And the evidence presented at 
his trial is not lost. It remains part of the historical record.

Perhaps most importantly, the international community held a head of 
state accountable, piercing the veil of impunity. The world has been 
denied a verdict, but Slobodan Milosevic spent his final years in a cell 
in Scheveningen, not a villa in Belgrade. Called to answer for his 
actions, he is now -- as he so often claimed -- beyond the court's 
jurisdiction and must await the judgment of a higher tribunal.

Cara Robertson, a fellow at the National Humanities Center, was a legal 
adviser to the UN War Crimes Tribunal.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/14/no_judgment_at_the_hague/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060314/2ac2a416/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Tue Mar 14 08:49:53 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2006 16:49:53 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Drop Out of the College
Message-ID: <20060314164953.80EFB3AE5A4@lax-gw06.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

OPINION | March 14, 2006
Editorial: Drop Out of the College

Legislatures across the country should get behind an innovative new proposal to undo the Electoral College.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/14/opinion/14tue1.html?ex=1143003600&en=f9c591497359c083&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060314/6834bdcf/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Tue Mar 14 08:50:37 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2006 16:50:37 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Defenders of the Faith
Message-ID: <20060314165037.0547D24AF0A@lax-gw02.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

OPINION | March 12, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor: Defenders of the Faith
By SLAVOJ ZIZEK
Why Europe's Muslims should be grateful for Europe's atheists.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/12/opinion/12zizek.html?ex=1143003600&en=06926f662ad10235&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060314/4e9d97e9/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Tue Mar 14 08:52:46 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2006 16:52:46 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: The Ghost of Purim Past
Message-ID: <20060314165246.793E524AFC0@lax-gw02.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

OPINION | March 14, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor: The Ghost of Purim Past
By JEFFREY GOLDBERG
It is possible to imagine that Iran's Jews might see Purim not as a story of tragedy averted but as one of tragedy foretold.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/14/opinion/14goldberg.html?ex=1143003600&en=744c01e41c087d58&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060314/e81e600e/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Tue Mar 14 08:54:15 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2006 16:54:15 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Showdown at U.N.? Iran Seems Calm
Message-ID: <20060314165415.A2D00249D51@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

INTERNATIONAL / MIDDLE EAST | March 14, 2006
News Analysis: Showdown at U.N.? Iran Seems Calm
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
Far from resisting nuclear scrutiny, Tehran may welcome it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/14/international/middleeast/14iran.html?ex=1143003600&en=b7c71d14f1b5939e&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060314/42a174c6/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Tue Mar 14 08:55:53 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2006 16:55:53 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Democrats Beat Quick Retreat on Call to
	Censure President
Message-ID: <20060314165553.7498E9FDCF@lax-gw05.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

WASHINGTON | March 14, 2006
Democrats Beat Quick Retreat on Call to Censure President
By CARL HULSE
Senate Democrats blocked an immediate vote after Republicans said they were eager to pass judgment on the proposal.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/14/politics/14censure.html?ex=1143003600&en=2f0bafa157b11234&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060314/884f40c3/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Tue Mar 14 08:58:45 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: 14 Mar 2006 16:58:45 -0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] Headlines for March 14, 2006
Message-ID: <20060314165845.27190.qmail@trinity.democracynow.org>

Mike Blaxill  ( mblaxill at yahoo.com )
sent you this story from democracynow.org




+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  Headlines for March 14, 2006
|  http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/14/1456223
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+


- Sen. Feingold Introduces Resolution to Censure Bush- 
Slobodan Milosevic's Son: My Father Was Killed- 
Mass Student Protests Continue In France- 
UK Envoy on U.S. in Iraq: "No Leadership, No Strategy, No Coordination"- 
Iranian Human Activists Say Bush Is Endangering Their Lives- 
Sandra Day O'Connor Warns About U.S. Edging Towards 'Dictatorship'- 
Watchdog Groups Warn About Sale of Knight Ridder- 
Historian: Israel Warned Settlements Were Illegal in 1967- 
UK Gives Visa to Architect of Darfur Genocide
This story continues at: 
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/14/1456223


From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Tue Mar 14 10:07:37 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (Ian)
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2006 13:07:37 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Drop Out of the College
References: <20060314164953.80EFB3AE5A4@lax-gw06.mroute.net>
Message-ID: <024d01c64792$2e328d20$99ca6c42@iancn2ccrvzt0j>

E-Mail ThisAll I can say is: Bravo!  And it's about time!!

Peace.
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: mblaxill at yahoo.com 
  To: mb-civic at islandlists.com 
  Sent: Tuesday, March 14, 2006 11:49 AM
  Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Drop Out of the College


            
                 
                
             
              This page was sent to you by:  mblaxill at yahoo.com 

              OPINION   | March 14, 2006 
              Editorial:  Drop Out of the College 
              Legislatures across the country should get behind an innovative new proposal to undo the Electoral College. 
             
             
                 
                     
                    1. Silent Struggle: A New Theory of Pregnancy 
                    2. The Saturday Profile: For Muslim Who Says Violence Destroys Islam, Violent Threats 
                    3. Colleges Open Minority Aid to All Comers 
                    4. Op-Ed Contributor: Defenders of the Faith 
                    5. Study Links Ambien Use to Unconscious Food Forays 

                    ?  Go to Complete List 
                     
                   
             
             
                
              Copyright 2006  The New York Times Company | Privacy Policy    
                 
       



------------------------------------------------------------------------------


  _______________________________________________
  Mb-civic mailing list
  Mb-civic at islandlists.com
  http://www.islandlists.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mb-civic
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060314/98898a49/attachment-0001.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Tue Mar 14 10:08:55 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2006 18:08:55 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Campaign Doubts Arise for a Divisive
	Candidate
Message-ID: <20060314180855.3B1FC249C03@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

WASHINGTON | March 14, 2006
Campaign Doubts Arise for a Divisive Candidate
By ABBY GOODNOUGH
Representative Katherine Harris of Florida said that she would make a "major announcement" about her Senate campaign this week.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/14/politics/14harris.html?ex=1143003600&en=4d96b08a21145481&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060314/5707afaa/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Tue Mar 14 10:09:13 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2006 18:09:13 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: When a Muslim Speaks Her Mind (5 Letters)
Message-ID: <20060314180913.1B8A213B7FC@lax-gw04.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

What we're saying...


OPINION | March 14, 2006
When a Muslim Speaks Her Mind (5 Letters)

To the Editor:.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/14/opinion/l14muslim.html?ex=1143003600&en=7733ce18fe78d0a3&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060314/91890beb/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Tue Mar 14 10:10:30 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2006 18:10:30 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Supporter's Voice Now Turns on Bush
Message-ID: <20060314181030.A3CBA249D8C@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

IMPORTANT. Given Fukuyama's "status" in the conservative movement, this is truly a case of "better late than never..."


BOOKS | March 14, 2006
Books of The Times | 'America at the Crossroads': Supporter's Voice Now Turns on Bush
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Francis Fukuyama, once a star neoconservative theorist, serves up a powerful indictment of the Bush administration's war in Iraq.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/14/books/14kaku.html?ex=1143003600&en=3014b3ba8bee6c14&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060314/44cac8dd/attachment.htm 

From ean at sbcglobal.net  Mon Mar 13 21:14:18 2006
From: ean at sbcglobal.net (ean at sbcglobal.net)
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 21:14:18 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] John McCain--he's no moderate
Message-ID: <E1FJF0U-0008EJ-Ur@elasmtp-junco.atl.sa.earthlink.net>

The New York Times

March 13, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
The Right's Man
By PAUL KRUGMAN

It's time for some straight talk about John McCain. He isn't a moderate.
He's much less of a maverick than you'd think. And he isn't the straight
talker he claims to be.

Mr. McCain's reputation as a moderate may be based on his former opposition
to the Bush tax cuts. In 2001 he declared, "I cannot in good conscience
support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate
among us."

But now ? at a time of huge budget deficits and an expensive war, when the
case against tax cuts for the rich is even stronger ? Mr. McCain is happy to
shower benefits on the most fortunate. He recently voted to extend tax cuts
on dividends and capital gains, an action that will worsen the budget
deficit while mainly benefiting people with very high incomes.

When it comes to foreign policy, Mr. McCain was never moderate. During the
2000 campaign he called for a policy of "rogue state rollback," anticipating
the "Bush doctrine" of pre-emptive war unveiled two years later. Mr. McCain
called for a systematic effort to overthrow nasty regimes even if they posed
no imminent threat to the United States; he singled out Iraq, Libya and
North Korea. Mr. McCain's aggressive views on foreign policy, and his
expressed willingness, almost eagerness, to commit U.S. ground forces
overseas, explain why he, not George W. Bush, was the favored candidate of
neoconservative pundits such as William Kristol of The Weekly Standard.

Would Mr. McCain, like Mr. Bush, have found some pretext for invading Iraq?
We'll never know. But Mr. McCain still thinks the war was a good idea, and
he rejects any attempt to extricate ourselves from the quagmire. "If success
requires an increase in American troop levels in 2006," he wrote last year,
"then we must increase our numbers there." He didn't explain where the
overstretched U.S. military is supposed to find these troops.

When it comes to social issues, Mr. McCain, who once called Pat Robertson
and Jerry Falwell "agents of intolerance," met with Mr. Falwell late last
year. Perhaps as a result, he is now taking positions friendly to the
religious right. Most notably, Mr. McCain's spokesperson says that he would
have signed South Dakota's extremist new anti-abortion law.

The spokesperson went on to say that the senator would have taken "the
appropriate steps under state law" to ensure that cases of rape and incest
were excluded. But that attempt at qualification makes no sense: the South
Dakota law has produced national shockwaves precisely because it prohibits
abortions even for victims of rape or incest.

The bottom line is that Mr. McCain isn't a moderate; he's a man of the hard
right. How far right? A statistical analysis of Mr. McCain's recent voting
record, available at www.voteview.com, ranks him as the Senate's third most
conservative member.

What about Mr. McCain's reputation as a maverick? This comes from the fact
that every now and then he seems to declare his independence from the Bush
administration, as he did in pushing through his anti-torture bill.

But a funny thing happened on the way to Guant?namo. President Bush, when
signing the bill, appended a statement that in effect said that he was free
to disregard the law whenever he chose. Mr. McCain protested, but there are
apparently no hard feelings: at the recent Southern Republican Leadership
Conference he effusively praised Mr. Bush.

And I'm sorry to say that this is typical of Mr. McCain. Every once in a
while he makes headlines by apparently defying Mr. Bush, but he always
returns to the fold, even if the abuses he railed against continue unabated.

So here's what you need to know about John McCain.

He isn't a straight talker. His flip-flopping on tax cuts, his call to send
troops we don't have to Iraq and his endorsement of the South Dakota
anti-abortion legislation even while claiming that he would find a way
around that legislation's central provision show that he's a politician as
slippery and evasive as, well, George W. Bush.

He isn't a moderate. Mr. McCain's policy positions and Senate votes don't
just place him at the right end of America's political spectrum; they place
him in the right wing of the Republican Party.

And he isn't a maverick, at least not when it counts. When the cameras are
rolling, Mr. McCain can sometimes be seen striking a brave pose of
opposition to the White House. But when it matters, when the Bush
administration's ability to do whatever it wants is at stake, Mr. McCain
always toes the party line.

It's worth recalling that during the 2000 election campaign George W. Bush
was widely portrayed by the news media both as a moderate and as a
straight-shooter. As Mr. Bush has said, "Fool me once, shame on ? shame on
you. Fool me ? you can't get fooled again."

* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
*

-- 
You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, option D (up 
to 3 emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options (option A - 1x/week, 
option B - 3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option D - up to 3x/day) please reply 
and let us know!  If someone forwarded you this email and you want to be on 
our list, send an email to ean at sbcglobal.net and tell us which option you'd like.


"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060313/922d57e3/attachment.htm 

From ean at sbcglobal.net  Mon Mar 13 21:15:28 2006
From: ean at sbcglobal.net (ean at sbcglobal.net)
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 21:15:28 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] The price of cheap chicken is bird flu
Message-ID: <E1FJF8n-0007Ro-MC@elasmtp-junco.atl.sa.earthlink.net>

The price of cheap chicken is bird flu
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/commentary/la-op-
orent12mar12,0,6380375.story?coll=la-sunday-commentary
By Wendy Orent, WENDY ORENT is the author of "Plague: The 
Mysterious Past and Terrifying Future of the World's Most Dangerous 
Disease."
March 12, 2006 
CHICKEN HAS never been cheaper. A whole one can be bought for 
little more than the price of a Starbucks cup of coffee. But the industrial 
farming methods that make ever-cheaper chicken possible may also 
have created the lethal strain of bird flu virus, H5N1, that threatens to 
set off a global pandemic.

According to Earl Brown, a University of Ottawa flu virologist, lethal bird 
flu is entirely man-made, first evolving in commercially produced 
poultry in Italy in 1878. The highly pathogenic H5N1 is descended from 
a strain that first appeared in Scotland in 1959. 

ADVERTISEMENT 
 
People have been living with backyard flocks of poultry since the dawn 
of civilization. But it wasn't until poultry production became 
modernized, and birds were raised in much larger numbers and 
concentrations, that a virulent bird flu evolved. When birds are packed 
close together, any brakes on virulence are off. Birds struck with a fatal 
illness can still easily pass the disease to others, through direct contact 
or through fecal matter, and lethal strains can evolve. Somehow, the 
virus that arose in Scotland found its way to China, where, as H5N1, it 
has been raging for more than a decade.

Industrial poultry-raising moved from the West to Asia in the last few 
decades and has begun to supplant backyard flocks there. According 
to a recent report by Grain, an international nongovernmental 
organization, chicken production in Southeast Asia has jumped 
eightfold in 30 years to about 2.7 million tons. The Chinese annually 
produce about 10 million tons of chickens. Some of China's factory 
farms raise 5 million birds at a time. Charoen Pokphand Group, a huge 
Thai enterprise that owns a large chunk of poultry production 
throughout Thailand and China as well as in Indonesia, Cambodia, 
Vietnam and Turkey, exported about 270 million chickens in 2003 
alone.

Since then, the C.P. Group, which styles itself as the "Kitchen of the 
World," has suffered enormous losses from bird flu. According to bird-
flu expert Gary Butcher of the University of Florida, the company has 
made a conscientious effort to clean up. But the damage has been 
done.

Virulent bird flu has left the factories and moved into the farmyards of 
the poor, where it has had devastating effects. Poultry may represent a 
family's greatest wealth. The birds are often not eaten until they die of 
old age or illness. The cost of the virus to people who have raised 
birds for months or years is incalculable and the compensation risible: 
In Thailand, farmers have been offered one-third of their birds' value 
since the outbreak of bird flu.

Sometimes farmers who don't want to lose their investments illicitly 
trade their birds across borders. In Nigeria, virus-infected chickens 
threatened with culling are sold by the poor to even poorer people, who 
see nothing unusual in eating a sick or dead bird. So the birds ? and 
the bird flu virus ? slip away to other villages and other countries. 

The Southeast Asian country without rampant bird flu is Laos, where 
90% of poultry production is still in peasant hands, according to the 
U.S. Department of Agriculture. About 45 small outbreaks in or near 
commercial farms from January to March 2004 were quickly stamped 
out by culling birds from contaminated farms. 

Some researchers still blame migratory birds for the relentless spread 
of the bird flu virus. But Martin Williams, a conservationist and bird 
expert in Hong Kong, contends that wild birds are more often victims 
than carriers. Last spring, for instance, about 5,000 wild birds died at 
Qinghai Lake in western China, probably from exposure to disease at 
commercial poultry farms in the region, according to Grain. The virus 
now in Turkey and Nigeria is essentially identical to the Qinghai strain.

Richard Thomas of Birdlife International, a global alliance of 
conservation organizations, and others dispute the idea that wild birds 
carried the flu virus from Qinghai to Russia and beyond. They point out 
that the disease spread from Qinghai to southern Siberia during the 
summer months when birds do not migrate, and that it moved east to 
west along railway lines, roads and international boundaries ? not 
along migratory flyways.

What evidence there is for migratory birds as H5N1 carriers is 
contained in a study published in the Proceedings of the National 
Academy of Sciences. Researchers examined 13,115 wild birds and 
found asymptomatic bird flu in six ducks from China. Analysis showed 
that these ducks had been exposed earlier to less virulent strains of H5 
and thus were partly immunized before they were infected with H5N1. 
On this slender basis, coupled with the fact that some domestic ducks 
infected for experimental purposes don't get sick, the study's authors 
contend that the findings "demonstrate that H5N1 viruses can be 
transmitted over long distances by migratory birds."

Even so, the researchers conceded that the global poultry trade, much 
of which is illicit, plays a far larger role in spreading the virus. The 
Nigerian government traced its outbreak to the illegal importation of 
day-old chicks. Illegal trading in fighting cocks brought the virus from 
Thailand to Malaysia in fall 2005. And it is probable that H5N1 first 
spread from Qinghai to Russia and Kazakhstan last summer through 
the sale of contaminated poultry. 

But an increasingly hysterical world targets migratory birds. In early 
February, a flock of geese, too cold and tired to fly, rested on the 
frozen waters of the Danube Delta in Romania. A group of 15 men set 
upon them, tossed some into the air, tore off others' heads and used 
still-living birds as soccer balls. They said they did this because they 
feared the bird flu would enter their village through the geese. Many 
conservationists worry that what happened in Romania is a 
foreshadowing of the mass destruction of wild birds. 

Meanwhile, deadly H5N1 is washing up on the shores of Europe. 
Brown says the commercial poultry industry, which caused the 
catastrophe in the first place, stands to benefit most. The 
conglomerates will more and more dominate the poultry-rearing 
business. Some experts insist that will be better for us. Epidemiologist 
Michael Osterholm at the University of Minnesota, for instance, 
contends that the "single greatest risk to the amplification of the H5N1 
virus, should it arrive in the U.S. through migratory birds, will be in free-
range birds 
 often sold as a healthier food, which is a great ruse on 
the American public." 

The truly great ruse is that industrial poultry farms are the best way to 
produce chickens ? that Perdue Farms and Tyson Foods and 
Charoen Pokphand are keeping the world safe from backyard poultry 
and migratory birds. But what's going to be on our tables isn't the 
biggest problem. The real tragedy is what's happened in Asia to people 
who can't afford cheap, industrial chicken. And the real victims of 
industrially produced, lethal H5N1 have been wild birds, an ancient way 
of life and the poor of the Earth, for whom a backyard flock has always 
represented a measure of autonomy and a bulwark against starvation. 


-- 
You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, 
option D (up to 3 emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options 
(option A - 1x/week, option B - 3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option D - 
up to 3x/day) please reply and let us know!  If someone forwarded you 
this email and you want to be on our list, send an email to 
ean at sbcglobal.net and tell us which option you'd like.


"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060313/05e86fd0/attachment-0001.htm 
-------------- next part --------------
The following section of this message contains a file attachment
prepared for transmission using the Internet MIME message format.
If you are using Pegasus Mail, or any other MIME-compliant system,
you should be able to save it or view it from within your mailer.
If you cannot, please ask your system administrator for assistance.

   ---- File information -----------
     File:  DEFAULT.BMP
     Date:  11 Nov 2004, 12:39
     Size:  358 bytes.
     Type:  Unknown
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: DEFAULT.BMP
Type: application/octet-stream
Size: 358 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060313/05e86fd0/attachment-0001.obj 

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Tue Mar 14 11:38:41 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2006 11:38:41 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Africa's Brutal Lebensraum By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Message-ID: <C03C5BC1.2A143%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 14, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Africa's Brutal Lebensraum
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

BILDIQ, Chad

The villagers in this hamlet of thatch-roof mud huts told me that they had
shot dead a member of the brutal janjaweed militia and pointed to his body.
I walked over to look at the corpse ? and his eyes opened.

He was a teenager, perhaps 16, shot down as he and four other raiders
attacked this village along the Chad-Sudan border. Most of these villages
near the town of Ad? are unarmed, and it is easy for members of the Arab
janjaweed to kill, rape and pillage with impunity, while yelling racial
epithets against the black African tribes they attack. But someone in this
village had an AK-47 and used it to fend off the attack.

The boy on the ground was slight and wearing old and filthy clothes. He
followed me with his eyes for 10 seconds and then closed them, moaning
softly. He had been shot in the waist and could not move.

The janjaweed are the brutes, armed and paid by the Sudanese government, who
have engaged in a genocidal campaign to destroy villages of African tribes
in the Darfur region of Sudan. Now Sudan, encouraged by the feebleness of
the international community's response, is expanding the genocide by sending
the raiders to attack the same tribes in neighboring Chad.

The villagers vowed not to kill the boy (they were indignant that I thought
they might), and promised to turn him over to the government. And then they
showed me someone still more interesting: another captured janjaweed youth
who was able to tell his story.

This young man was tied up, not particularly harshly, in a hut. He had a
bloody gash on his forehead where he had been hit with a machete, and it
seemed he might lose his eye, but he was easily able to answer questions.

"My name is Isak Muhammad," he began. "I am 21 years old." Video of him, of
the boy who was shot and of other scenes from my journey along the
Chad-Sudan border, can be viewed here.

Video: The Captured Raider
An excerpt from "The Genocide Spreads," Nicholas D. Kristof's Op-Ed special
report. Watch the complete report.

Mr. Isak was not driven by racist abhorrence for the Wadai tribe of this
village, for he is a Wadai himself. He said a militia leader had simply
promised the raiders $250 if they succeeded in killing the sheik, as a way
to terrorize villagers and drive them away.

Where did the militia leader get his money? Almost certainly from the
Sudanese government.

The Sudanese authorities may not have the money to feed their people, but
they are spending lavishly on arming proxy forces to invade Chad, in hopes
of destabilizing tribes and installing a pro-Sudanese pawn as the leader of
Chad.

So the genocide is not just driven by hatred, but also by opportunistic
mercenaries. Consider the founder of the janjaweed, Sheik Musa Hilal, a
ferocious Arab nationalist who has shown particular vigor in slaughtering
members of the Zaghawa tribe. According to a longtime acquaintance of Mr.
Musa, the sheik's own mother is Zaghawa.

As in Rwanda or even during the Holocaust, racist ideologies sometimes
disguise greed, insecurity and other pathologies. Indeed, one of the
genocide's aims is to drive away African tribes to achieve what Hitler
called Lebensraum: "living space" for nomadic Arabs and their camels.

So this village is simply a window into an entire region drenched in fear.
Men walk about carrying homemade spears and machetes, and parents tie
amulets around their children's necks.

As we left the village, I met a search party looking for six men who had
disappeared after an attack by other raiders. "We heard gunshots over there
a couple of minutes ago," said one man, pointing to a nearby hill. "We'll
wait two hours and then go over and see who was shot."

As the local county leader, Saudi Hassan, puts it, "The janjaweed are using
humans as targets ? they kill a person as if he were a chicken." Whether the
offenders are Nazis or Hutu extremists or Sudan's janjaweed, that is a crime
not only against the victims but also against all humanity. You can get
ideas about what you can do at www.savedarfur.org, the Web site of the Save
Darfur Coalition, which is planning a major rally on the Washington Mall on
April 30.

It is brutally demoralizing for people in these villages to be hunted down
as if they were wild beasts, to have their children pulled from their arms
and thrown into burning huts. But we should be just as demoralized by our
own indifference. The shame belongs not to the good people of Darfur and
Chad, but to ourselves.

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Tue Mar 14 11:44:13 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (HS)
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2006 14:44:13 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Tehran Elite turning on extremist presidency
Message-ID: <200603141944.k2EJiDVC011253@margaret7.newsworld.net>


HS has sent you an article from The Washington Times.

HS's comments: 
-----------------------------------------------------------
TEHRAN ELITE TURNING ON EXTREMIST PRESIDENCY
By John R. Bradley
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
-----------------------------------------------------------
TEHRAN -- Iran's clerical and business establishments, deeply concerned by what they see as reckless spending and needlessly aggressive foreign policies, are increasingly turning against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

    Within this context, many see the president's long-running confrontation with the United States and Europe over Tehran's nuclear program as an attempt to demonize the West and distract the Iranian public from pressing domestic problems.

    A relatively small group of extremists "at the top of the government around the president" are seeking to benefit from a crisis with the West, because "that way they will be able once again to blame the West for all of their problems," said Mousa Ghaninejad, the editor of Iran's best-selling economics daily newspaper, Dunya Al-Eqtisad.

    Millions of low-income Iranians voted for the new president last year, motivated by his firm stand against corruption and pledges to give financial priority to their needs.

    "His appeal was to those for whom class discrimination is important, and his simple lifestyle gave an air of credibility to his claims," said Nasser Hadian, a political analyst at Tehran University who attended high school with Mr. Ahmadinejad.

    Mr. Hadian predicted that senior Iranian clerics would continue to support Mr. Ahmadinejad -- or at least not move against him -- for about a year because of that popular support. But privately, he said, they feel he is isolating Iran internationally and putting its economy at risk.

    Also at the back of their minds is the fear that his anti-corruption drive ultimately threatens their own considerable privileges.

    Mr. Ghaninejad was one of 13 experts in economics who warned, in two petitions to the government just before Mr. Ahmadinejad was elected, that his populist, short-term policies would spell disaster for Iran in the long term.

    "Now he's throwing money at complex problems and just doesn't care about the long term. He thinks he should help the poor today and leave everything else to the Hidden Imam," the newspaper editor said, referring to a character whom Shi'ites believe will one day emerge to bring justice to the world.

    The critics say Mr. Ahmadinejad's budget, which has just been approved by parliament after prolonged wrangling, flouts economic doctrines sanctioned by the powerful Expediency Council, which is under the supervision of the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

    Iran's long-term planning calls for vigorous efforts to reduce the size of government and to curb subsidies to state-owned entities, which account for an estimated 75 percent of the economy. But the Ahmadinejad budget boosts spending by 25 percent and envisions a 31 percent increase in spending on state enterprises.

    The 2006 budget also calls on the government to use up to $40 billion of its foreign cash reserves -- generated from oil sales -- to meet the fiscal year's spending needs, in spite of long-term plans calling for restraint.

    The value of Tehran's stock market had fallen by $10 billion under Mr. Ahmadinejad as of February, the Los Angeles Times reported. Other recent Western news reports say that the nation's vibrant real-estate market has withered and that capital outflows are increasing.

    Mr. Ahmadinejad's spending has pushed the inflation rate to an estimated 13.5 percent, and several estimates say it could go as high as 30 percent this year.

    Economic analysts note that inflation will be felt most acutely by the poor, undermining the president's support among his most important constituency.

    Parliament has challenged the president on other issues, most notably by rejecting three successive candidates for oil minister. Mr. Ahmadinejad declared angrily after the second rejection that "no other president has ever been subject to such negative propaganda and treatment."

    Mr. Ahmadinejad's detractors say the broad coalition against him is attracting many of the regime's powerful personalities and may include even the supreme leader himself, despite his superficial statements in support of the president.

    They point to a recent decree by Ayatollah Khamenei giving the Expediency Council, headed by former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, oversight of the presidency.

    The clerical establishment has close ties with the capitalist class and is said to be appalled at the rapid slide of the economy since Mr. Ahmadinejad's inauguration. The clerics are also thought to be deeply apprehensive about the president's aggressive foreign policy.

    Mr. Ghaninejad said that by confronting Iran over its nuclear program, the West was in fact throwing a lifeline to Mr. Ahmadinejad.

    "If they keep piling on the pressure, Ahmadinejad will become a national hero," the newspaper editor said.

    "Let the Iranians deal with him. If you leave him alone, he will become a bankrupt politician within a year. With greater pressure, only the extremists will benefit."

    







-----------------------------------------------------------
This article was mailed from The Washington Times (http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20060314-125702-7713r.htm)
For more great articles, visit us at http://www.washingtontimes.com

Copyright (c) 2006 News World Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.


From marylouiseparis at hotmail.com  Tue Mar 14 11:44:31 2006
From: marylouiseparis at hotmail.com (Mary Louise smn)
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2006 19:44:31 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] Africa's Brutal Lebensraum By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
In-Reply-To: <C03C5BC1.2A143%michael@michaelbutler.com>
Message-ID: <BAY107-F67A9BD399180D79A20DCFB8E10@phx.gbl>




>From: Michael Butler <michael at michaelbutler.com>
>Reply-To: mb-civic at islandlists.com
>To: Civic <mb-civic at islandlists.com>
>Subject: [Mb-civic] Africa's Brutal Lebensraum By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
>Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2006 11:38:41 -0800
>
>The New York Times
>Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By
>
>March 14, 2006
>Op-Ed Columnist
>Africa's Brutal Lebensraum
>By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
>
>BILDIQ, Chad
>
>The villagers in this hamlet of thatch-roof mud huts told me that they had
>shot dead a member of the brutal janjaweed militia and pointed to his body.
>I walked over to look at the corpse ? and his eyes opened.
>
>He was a teenager, perhaps 16, shot down as he and four other raiders
>attacked this village along the Chad-Sudan border. Most of these villages
>near the town of Ad? are unarmed, and it is easy for members of the Arab
>janjaweed to kill, rape and pillage with impunity, while yelling racial
>epithets against the black African tribes they attack. But someone in this
>village had an AK-47 and used it to fend off the attack.
>
>The boy on the ground was slight and wearing old and filthy clothes. He
>followed me with his eyes for 10 seconds and then closed them, moaning
>softly. He had been shot in the waist and could not move.
>
>The janjaweed are the brutes, armed and paid by the Sudanese government, 
>who
>have engaged in a genocidal campaign to destroy villages of African tribes
>in the Darfur region of Sudan. Now Sudan, encouraged by the feebleness of
>the international community's response, is expanding the genocide by 
>sending
>the raiders to attack the same tribes in neighboring Chad.
>
>The villagers vowed not to kill the boy (they were indignant that I thought
>they might), and promised to turn him over to the government. And then they
>showed me someone still more interesting: another captured janjaweed youth
>who was able to tell his story.
>
>This young man was tied up, not particularly harshly, in a hut. He had a
>bloody gash on his forehead where he had been hit with a machete, and it
>seemed he might lose his eye, but he was easily able to answer questions.
>
>"My name is Isak Muhammad," he began. "I am 21 years old." Video of him, of
>the boy who was shot and of other scenes from my journey along the
>Chad-Sudan border, can be viewed here.
>
>Video: The Captured Raider
>An excerpt from "The Genocide Spreads," Nicholas D. Kristof's Op-Ed special
>report. Watch the complete report.
>
>Mr. Isak was not driven by racist abhorrence for the Wadai tribe of this
>village, for he is a Wadai himself. He said a militia leader had simply
>promised the raiders $250 if they succeeded in killing the sheik, as a way
>to terrorize villagers and drive them away.
>
>Where did the militia leader get his money? Almost certainly from the
>Sudanese government.
>
>The Sudanese authorities may not have the money to feed their people, but
>they are spending lavishly on arming proxy forces to invade Chad, in hopes
>of destabilizing tribes and installing a pro-Sudanese pawn as the leader of
>Chad.
>
>So the genocide is not just driven by hatred, but also by opportunistic
>mercenaries. Consider the founder of the janjaweed, Sheik Musa Hilal, a
>ferocious Arab nationalist who has shown particular vigor in slaughtering
>members of the Zaghawa tribe. According to a longtime acquaintance of Mr.
>Musa, the sheik's own mother is Zaghawa.
>
>As in Rwanda or even during the Holocaust, racist ideologies sometimes
>disguise greed, insecurity and other pathologies. Indeed, one of the
>genocide's aims is to drive away African tribes to achieve what Hitler
>called Lebensraum: "living space" for nomadic Arabs and their camels.
>
>So this village is simply a window into an entire region drenched in fear.
>Men walk about carrying homemade spears and machetes, and parents tie
>amulets around their children's necks.
>
>As we left the village, I met a search party looking for six men who had
>disappeared after an attack by other raiders. "We heard gunshots over there
>a couple of minutes ago," said one man, pointing to a nearby hill. "We'll
>wait two hours and then go over and see who was shot."
>
>As the local county leader, Saudi Hassan, puts it, "The janjaweed are using
>humans as targets ? they kill a person as if he were a chicken." Whether 
>the
>offenders are Nazis or Hutu extremists or Sudan's janjaweed, that is a 
>crime
>not only against the victims but also against all humanity. You can get
>ideas about what you can do at www.savedarfur.org, the Web site of the Save
>Darfur Coalition, which is planning a major rally on the Washington Mall on
>April 30.
>
>It is brutally demoralizing for people in these villages to be hunted down
>as if they were wild beasts, to have their children pulled from their arms
>and thrown into burning huts. But we should be just as demoralized by our
>own indifference. The shame belongs not to the good people of Darfur and
>Chad, but to ourselves.
>
>     * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
>     * Home
>     * Privacy Policy
>     * Search
>     * Corrections
>     * XML
>     * Help
>     * Contact Us
>     * Work for Us
>     * Site Map
>     * Back to Top
>
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Mb-civic mailing list
>Mb-civic at islandlists.com
>http://www.islandlists.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mb-civic

_________________________________________________________________
Don't just search. Find. Check out the new MSN Search! 
http://search.msn.com/


From michael at michaelbutler.com  Tue Mar 14 11:45:47 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2006 11:45:47 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Supreme Home Makeover By JOHN TIERNEY
Message-ID: <C03C5D6B.2A145%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 14, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Supreme Home Makeover
By JOHN TIERNEY

WEARE, N.H.

When we reached Justice David Souter's home, a ramshackle old farmhouse
along a dirt road, Keith Lacasse explained his plans for it if he's voted
onto the town's Board of Selectmen in the election today.

The first plan, which Lacasse and his friends drew up right after hearing of
Souter's vote in the Kelo eminent-domain case last year, was for the town to
seize Souter's property and turn it into a park with a monument to the
Constitution. But then Lacasse, a local architect, switched to an idea
proposed by an activist from California: turning it into the Lost Liberty
Hotel.

"Actually, it would be more like a bed and breakfast," Lacasse said. "We'd
use the front of the house for a cafe and a little museum. There'd be nine
suites, with a black robe in each of the closets."

So far Souter has not joined the local debate on the proposal, something
that makes him fairly unusual in this country town near Manchester. The Lost
Liberty Hotel has dominated the campaign debate and the pages of The Weare
Free Press. There seem to be two main factions: those who oppose the Kelo
decision and want to punish Souter by taking his property, and those who
oppose the Kelo decision but want to leave him alone.

"I don't agree with the decision, but I love David to death," said Matt
Compagna, a mechanic. "When our barn burned down, he was there at 3 a.m.
helping us. Coldest night of the year. He's a decent man. Why should he lose
his house even if he made the wrong decision?"

The answer from Lacasse and a fellow candidate running on the same issue is
that taking the house would serve a larger "public use" ? the same reason
given in the Kelo decision for taking people's homes in New London, Conn.
That 5-to-4 decision set off a revolt in Weare and across the country
because of the way Souter and the rest of the justices in the majority
interpreted the Fifth Amendment phrase.

Most Americans have the traditional idea that property can be taken for
"public use" if it is actually going to be used by the public as, for
example, a road or a park. But that definition gradually expanded over the
last half-century as the Supreme Court ruled that property could be seized
and turned over to private parties if there were special circumstances and
an overriding public benefit, like eliminating "blight" in a poor Washington
neighborhood or breaking up an land oligopoly in Hawaii.

The Kelo case, however, went way beyond those decisions, allowing the town
of New London to seize property that wasn't blighted simply because it
thought it could find a developer to make better use of the property. It was
a new version of the field of dreams theory: if you tear it down, they will
come.

"The Kelo decision wasn't compelled by legal precedents," says Richard
Epstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago. "It wasn't a case of
eliminating blight or breaking up an oligopoly. There was no precedent for
kicking people out of their private homes just to warehouse the land for
future development."

The Kelo case was an opportunity for the justices to put limits on the use
of eminent domain ? and to look at how the power had been abused since
cities had begun using expanded powers of eminent domain half a century ago.
As Clarence Thomas pointed out in his dissenting opinion in Kelo, "In cities
across the country, urban renewal came to be known as 'Negro removal.' "

Activists of all political stripes have been fighting to preserve
neighborhoods and complaining that eminent domain is unfairly destroying
homes and displacing small businesses to make room for large retailers and
corporations.

If Souter and the other four concurring justices had ever thought that they
could be lose their own homes, they would probably have paid more attention
to the critics of eminent domain. I doubt that they would have worked so
hard to reinterpret the Fifth Amendment. But as much as I admire Lacasse's
plans for the Lost Liberty Hotel, at this point I think it would be
overkill.

However the vote comes out today, Lacasse and his allies have succeeded in
embarrassing Souter, and that's enough. Compagna is right: a judge should be
able to make a bad or unpopular decision without losing his home. But he
does deserve a reality check, and Souter's neighbors have obliged.

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From michael at intrafi.com  Tue Mar 14 11:48:53 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2006 19:48:53 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: The Ghost of Purim Past
Message-ID: <20060314194853.7D9B3249D19@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: michael at intrafi.com.

OPINION | March 14, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor: The Ghost of Purim Past
By JEFFREY GOLDBERG
It is possible to imagine that Iran's Jews might see Purim not as a story of tragedy averted but as one of tragedy foretold.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/14/opinion/14goldberg.html?ex=1143003600&en=744c01e41c087d58&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060314/44f244f3/attachment.htm 

From nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca  Tue Mar 14 13:23:00 2006
From: nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca (CBC News Online)
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2006 21:23:00 UT
Subject: [Mb-civic] CBC News - ARAB LEAGUE, MUSLIM GROUPS BLAME U.S.,
	BRITAIN FOR JERICHO RAID
Message-ID: <20060314212300.548787DBC@web04.nm.cbc.ca>

An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Url: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060314/73150c2a/attachment.diff 

From nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca  Tue Mar 14 17:01:43 2006
From: nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca (CBC News Online)
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 01:01:43 UT
Subject: [Mb-civic] CBC News - U.S. TRADE DEFICIT HITS RECORD $804.9 BILLION
Message-ID: <20060315010143.274EA61DA2@nmweb05.nm.cbc.ca>

An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Url: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060315/2546f683/attachment.diff 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Tue Mar 14 17:57:46 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2006 20:57:46 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] IPod ear damage
Message-ID: <001f01c647d3$dea5d7c0$3f27e440@Harold>

IPod generation study/poll risks permanent ear damage

http://www.cbc.ca/story/science/national/2006/03/14/hearing-loss060314.html

Does Apple and other like product companies have the insurance to deal with the onslaught of Class Action type lawsuits for loss of hearing via a commercial product?

Later H

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060314/037714a6/attachment.htm 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Tue Mar 14 18:39:49 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2006 21:39:49 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Noise-induced hearing loss
Message-ID: <001101c647d9$beae5810$3f27e440@Harold>

I posted this because of the cultural phenomena of this commercial product and it's underlying physical health issue concerning hearing loss.

The following link discusses some of the issues.  (American Speech Hearing Language Association)

http://www.asha.org/pressevent/

Later H

PS The following is a site/product of one of the higher quality IPod (or similar product) hearing alternatives if you are going to use an IPod anyway.

http://www.headphone.com/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060314/20d80316/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Wed Mar 15 02:57:41 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 05:57:41 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] A Senate Maverick Acts to Force an Issue - Washington
	Post
Message-ID: <4417F325.3000804@comcast.net>

A Senate Maverick Acts to Force an Issue
Democrat Feingold's Motion to Censure the President Roils Both Parties

By Shailagh Murray
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 15, 2006; A01

For months the Democrats have resisted calls from their liberal base to 
more aggressively challenge President Bush. Now a maverick Democratic 
senator from Wisconsin has forced his party and Congress to confront 
head-on the question of whether Bush should somehow be punished for 
secretly ordering warrantless wiretaps of U.S. citizens.

Sen. Russell Feingold's call this week to formally censure Bush for what 
some say was a clear violation of a federal statute regulating domestic 
surveillance has touched off a fierce debate on Capitol Hill that is 
likely to persist throughout the congressional campaign season.

GOP leaders who had been reeling from the impact of Republican political 
scandals, an unpopular war and Bush's mishandling of the port-security 
issue sensed that Feingold overplayed his hand and denounced the censure 
resolution as a political stunt by an ambitious lawmaker positioning 
himself to run for president in 2008. Many Democrats, while sympathetic 
to Feingold's maneuver, appeared to be distancing themselves from his 
resolution yesterday, wary of polls showing that a majority of Americans 
side with the president on wiretapping tactics.

Feingold, 53, says he is convinced that Bush broke the law in ordering 
National Security Agency wiretaps of overseas telephone calls and 
e-mails of U.S. citizens that involved people suspected of terrorist 
activities without first obtaining special court approval, and that his 
party must take a firm stand in protest. Unless Democrats make the case 
that they are more trustworthy than Republicans on national security 
issues, Feingold says, the party cannot win control of the White House 
or Congress.

"We have a great case that they have done a poor job of fighting the war 
against terrorism," Feingold said of the Republicans in an interview 
yesterday. "We need a different strategy, one that shows we stand for 
something."

Feingold's resolution, formally introduced Monday, would censure Bush 
for approving an "illegal program to spy on American citizens on 
American soil." The senator's intention was to refer the matter to the 
Judiciary Committee for hearings and a vote before consideration by the 
full Senate. Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) tried to force an 
immediate vote, to put the Democrats on the spot, but Democratic leaders 
objected, and for now the censure measure appears to be stalled.

Censure, or official Senate condemnation, is a rare tool that has been 
used against only one president -- Andrew Jackson, in March 1834. 
Jackson ignored the censure, and it was expunged three years later. 
Censuring is a symbolic act compared with impeachment -- an indictment 
by the House permitted under the Constitution, which, if approved, leads 
to a Senate vote on acquittal or removal from office. Feingold has not 
called for Bush's impeachment, although the senator called the 
wiretapping case "right in the strike zone of the concept of high crimes 
and misdemeanors."

In the past two years, liberal groups have urged Congress to take action 
against Bush for various alleged misdeeds in the waging of war in Iraq 
and efforts to combat terrorism. In February 2004, MoveOn.org and other 
liberal groups called for Bush's censure because he used what proved to 
be false intelligence about weapons of mass destruction in justifying 
the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Last December, Rep. John Conyers Jr. 
(D-Mich.) called for an investigation of the administration's prewar use 
of intelligence and offered motions to censure Bush and Vice President 
Cheney for failing to respond to Democratic inquiries about the planning 
and execution of the war. Feingold's censure motion specifically 
addresses the issue of illegal wiretaps.

Republicans seized on Feingold's presidential ambitions as the 
motivation behind his bid. Feingold "should be ashamed of this political 
ploy," said Frist, who also has presidential ambitions.

Democratic views were mixed . Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (Conn.) dismissed 
the proposed censure as "getting way down the road on this issue." When 
asked on NBC's "Today" show yesterday morning whether Feingold was 
"grandstanding for 2008," Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.), himself a 
2008 prospect and a leading Democratic voice on foreign policy, replied: 
"No, I think it's more of an intense frustration. Do any of you in the 
news media or any of us have any idea what the president is doing?"

Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said he hoped the Feingold 
measure would spur the intelligence committee to complete an 
investigation of the wiretapping program, to determine whether Bush 
broke the law. "Senator Feingold is a man of principle," said Reid. "I 
think that people should cool their jets and let the process takes its 
course."

When Feingold first ran for the Senate in 1992, he was much the same 
person he is today: a Democratic outsider and iconoclast and a darling 
of progressives.

While other Democrats speak more colorfully, or show up more often on 
television, Feingold has carved a niche as one of the least-predictable 
senators. As he contemplates a presidential bid, he is emerging as an 
anti-establishment maverick, a blend of Howard Dean, John McCain and the 
late Wisconsin progressive senator William Proxmire.

The Rhodes scholar and Harvard Law School graduate was elected at age 29 
to the Wisconsin legislature, defeating an incumbent by a handful of 
votes. He turned back two better-known Democratic challengers in the 
1992 Senate primary by ignoring their mudslinging and running humorous 
ads, including one in which he conducted a tour of his Madison area 
home, noting the closet space and saying, "Look, no skeletons."

Feingold has shown little of that humor in the Senate. He rarely engages 
in small talk with colleagues and is so independent that fellow 
Democrats rarely seek his help in legislative battles or include him in 
public events. He irritated many colleagues in his long crusade for 
campaign finance reform, which Democrats feared would put them at a 
fundraising disadvantage; by his opposition to dropping all charges 
against President Bill Clinton during impeachment proceedings; and with 
his support for the confirmation of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.

But it is Feingold's national security views that have stirred the most 
controversy, vaulting him into the national spotlight. Before the 
censure bid, he was the first Senate Democrat to call for a troop 
withdrawal from Iraq, and he waged a solo filibuster against the renewal 
of the USA Patriot Act.

The left wing of the party has greeted Feingold's censure call 
ecstatically. He was the front-runner in a Jan. 31 survey of 2008 
presidential candidates by the liberal blog Daily Kos. Feingold garnered 
30 percent support among the more than 11,000 respondents, eclipsing 
retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark, who dropped to second place after leading 
in the previous five bimonthly polls.

Feingold said he is "extremely pleased with the way this is going." He 
said he is particularly buoyed the barrage of criticism from 
Republicans. "If such a crazy idea has such limited appeal, why do they 
have the attack dogs calling all over the country about this?" Feingold 
asked. "It touches a nerve."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/14/AR2006031401752.html?referrer=email
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060315/e5d18c06/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Wed Mar 15 03:01:35 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 06:01:35 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Writing by Suicidal Detainee Reveals Depths of His
 Despair - Washington Post
Message-ID: <4417F40F.6050400@comcast.net>

Writing by Suicidal Detainee Reveals Depths of His Despair

By Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 15, 2006; A05

Just before Jumah al-Dossari tried to kill himself by fashioning a 
makeshift noose and opening a gash in his right arm, the Guantanamo Bay 
detainee handed his lawyer an envelope containing pages of tidily 
handwritten Arabic, some stained with dried blood. Dossari had told his 
lawyer they could discuss the letter at a later time.

"The detainees are suffering from the bitterness of despair, the 
detention humiliation and the vanquish of slavery and suppression," 
Dossari wrote, according to a translation. "I hope you will always 
remember that you met and sat with a 'human being' called 'Jumah' who 
suffered too much and was abused in his belief, self, dignity and also 
in his humanity. He was imprisoned, tortured and deprived from his 
homeland, his family and his young daughter who is in the most need of 
him for four years . . . with no reason or crime committed."

The letter is a rare personal glimpse into the desperation some 
detainees at the U.S. detention facility in Cuba feel, and an emotional 
account of one man's turmoil and ultimate decision to die rather than 
stay in prison another day. Dossari's October suicide attempt -- one of 
nearly a dozen times he has tried to kill himself in his four years on 
the island -- failed because his lawyer, Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, 
discovered him bleeding and hanging limp in a cell where he was supposed 
to be on a bathroom break.

Dossari, 32, a Bahraini national, tried to kill himself twice after the 
October attempt, telling his lawyers that the indefinite nature of his 
detention and his lack of interaction with other people were causing him 
a deepening depression.

"There was no other alternative to make our voice heard by the world 
from the depths of the detention centers except this way in order for 
the world to reexamine its standing and for the fair people of America 
to look again at the situation and try to have a moment of truth with 
themselves," Dossari wrote. "When you remember me in my last gasps of 
life before dying, while my soul is leaving my body to rise to its 
creator, remember that the world let us and our case down. Remember that 
our governments let us down."

Dossari wrote that he believes he and other detainees "were captured, 
tortured and detained with no offense or reason."

The U.S. military, however, thinks Dossari is a terrorist with ties to 
al-Qaeda, and he has been deemed an enemy combatant. U.S. officials cite 
Dossari's alleged ties to terrorist cells in the United States and they 
think he was at Tora Bora, an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, 
before his arrest.

Lt. Col. Jeremy Martin, a Guantanamo Bay spokesman, said Dossari can 
interact with other detainees and exercise, and has access to religious 
items, books, magazines and writing material as well as medical and 
behavioral professionals. Martin also emphasized that abuse is not 
tolerated at the facility.

"Claims of detainee abuse and torture are documented al-Qaeda tactics, 
used to manipulate the media and bring pressure on the United States 
Government for their release," Martin said in an e-mail response to 
questions.

Colangelo-Bryan said Dossari handed him the envelope during their 
October meeting and tried to kill himself moments later in another room. 
After the suicide attempt, the lawyer opened the letter, which included 
another sheet of paper covered in dried blood that the government has 
not cleared for release.

"I think it expresses his utter lack of hope and his sense of complete 
powerlessness, and that he decided that the only way he could reclaim 
himself at all as a human being was by killing himself," Colangelo-Bryan 
said.

Dossari ended his letter by saying that he saw "death looming."

"Farewell . . . farewell with no hope of seeing me again," he wrote. "I 
thank you for everything you have done for me, but I have a final 
request. Show the world the letters I gave you, let the world read them, 
let the world know the agony of the detainees in Cuba."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/14/AR2006031401517.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060315/1afb4692/attachment-0001.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Wed Mar 15 03:03:26 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 06:03:26 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] The Feingold Resolution and the Sound of Silence - Dana
 Milbank - Washington Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <4417F47E.8080603@comcast.net>

The Feingold Resolution and the Sound of Silence
<>
By Dana Milbank
The Washington Post
Wednesday, March 15, 2006; A02

Democratic senators, filing in for their weekly caucus lunch yesterday, 
looked as if they'd seen a ghost.

"I haven't read it," demurred Barack Obama (Ill.).

"I just don't have enough information," protested Ben Nelson (Neb.). "I 
really can't right now," John Kerry (Mass.) said as he hurried past a 
knot of reporters -- an excuse that fell apart when Kerry was forced 
into an awkward wait as Capitol Police stopped an aide at the magnetometer.

Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) brushed past the press pack, shaking her 
head and waving her hand over her shoulder. When an errant food cart 
blocked her entrance to the meeting room, she tried to hide from 
reporters behind the 4-foot-11 Barbara Mikulski (Md.).

"Ask her after lunch," offered Clinton's spokesman, Philippe Reines. But 
Clinton, with most of her colleagues, fled the lunch out a back door as 
if escaping a fire.

In a sense, they were. The cause of so much evasion was S. Res. 398, the 
resolution proposed Monday by Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) calling for 
the censure of President Bush for his warrantless wiretapping program. 
At a time when Democrats had Bush on the ropes over Iraq, the budget and 
port security, Feingold single-handedly turned the debate back to an 
issue where Bush has the advantage -- and drove another wedge through 
his party.

So nonplused were Democrats that even Sen. Charles Schumer (N.Y.), known 
for his near-daily news conferences, made history by declaring, "I'm not 
going to comment." Would he have a comment later? "I dunno," the 
suddenly shy senator said.

Republicans were grateful for the gift. The office of Sen. John Cornyn 
(Tex.) put a new "daily feature" on its Web site monitoring the censure 
resolution: "Democrat co-sponsors of Feingold Resolution: 0."

Many of Feingold's Democratic colleagues agree that Bush abused his 
authority with the NSA spying program. And they know liberal Democratic 
activists are eager to see Bush censured, or worse. But they also know 
Feingold's maneuver could cost them seats in GOP states.

Hence the elaborate efforts to avoid comment. Five Democratic senators 
called a news conference yesterday to talk about the Bush budget's 
"dangerously irresponsible priorities" -- but three of them fled the 
room before allowing questions. The other two were stuck.

"Was it a good idea for Senator Feingold to bring up this resolution?" 
came the first question, from CNN's Ed Henry.

"He brings up some very important issues," Debbie Stabenow (Mich.) ventured.

Henry was unsatisfied. "So do you support censure, or not?

Stabenow took another stab. "It needs to have hearings," she said.

Mary Landrieu (La.) pursed her lips. "Senator Feingold has a point that 
he wants to make," she said. "We have a point that we want to make, 
talking about the budget."

"Senators," an aide interrupted, "we need to go."

Next in the Senate TV gallery came Schumer. An aide hung up a poster 
showing a port. The senator called the ports situation "extremely 
troubling." The aide hung up a poster of an Exxon cartoon. "Obscene 
profits," decreed Schumer, equally passionately.

CNN's Henry asked the Feingold question. Schumer ended the news conference.

Outside the Democrats' lunch downstairs, the senators were similarly 
agile. The number two Democratic leader, Richard Durbin (Ill.), darted 
out of an elevator and into lunch when he thought nobody was looking.

"I haven't made any judgment," said Jeff Bingaman (N.M.). Two minutes 
later, he reappeared. "I will support an alternative that would call for 
an investigation," he amended.

The one Democrat happy to talk was Feingold, who, in a pre-lunch chat 
with reporters, seemed to enjoy his colleagues' squirms. "I'm concerned 
about the approach Democrats are taking, which is too often cowering," 
he said.

Feingold, seeking liberals' support for the 2008 presidential 
nomination, said he wasn't motivated by politics. But then he slipped. 
"If there's any Democrat out there who can't say . . . the president has 
no right to make up his own laws, I don't know if that Democrat really 
is the right candidate," he said of his likely primary opponents.

After an hour of closed-door negotiations, Democrats were no closer to 
resolving the Feingold rift.

"Most of us feel at best it's premature," announced Sen. Christopher 
Dodd (Conn.). "I don't think anyone can say with any certainty at this 
juncture that what happened is illegal."

Dodd must not have checked with Sen. Tom Harkin (Iowa). "The president 
broke the law and he needs to be held accountable," he said. "Talk about 
high crimes and misdemeanors!" Harkin said he'll vote for the Feingold 
resolution -- if it comes up.

That gives Feingold two solid votes, including his own. The rest: 
avowedly undecided.

Schumer, leaving the lunch, still hadn't found his voice. " He's gonna 
talk about it," Schumer said, pointing to Senate Democratic leader Harry 
Reid (Nev.).

Reporters, as instructed, asked Reid where he stood. "It's a question 
that's been asked 33 times in the last few hours," he said. "And so, for 
the 34th time, I'm going to say the same thing: I'm going to wait . . .''

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/14/AR2006031401519.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060315/20025c0a/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Wed Mar 15 03:05:56 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 06:05:56 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] IMPORTANT: 'Critically' Inadequate - Anne Applebaum -
 Washington Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <4417F514.2050506@comcast.net>

'Critically' Inadequate
<>
By Anne Applebaum
The Washington Post
Wednesday, March 15, 2006; A19

"I'd like to see us move toward really focusing on critical 
infrastructure that is controlled, owned or operated by any foreign 
government."

-- Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.)

"It's important that the secretary of defense, in consultation with 
Homeland Security, identifies what is critical infrastructure. . . . And 
having identified that, that that infrastructure be owned, operated and 
managed by Americans."

-- Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.)

At last we have a genuine bipartisan consensus. A Congress whose members 
cannot work together to prevent the coming Social Security crisis, to 
keep the nation out of debt or to fix the health care system has finally 
agreed on something: Foreigners shouldn't be allowed to own or manage 
our critical infrastructure. Amazingly, this consensus has even outlived 
the Dubai ports deal that created it. This week Duncan Hunter, chairman 
of the House Armed Services Committee, said he's still looking to pass a 
bill forbidding foreign-owned companies from possessing or operating any 
"asset that is included on the national defense critical infrastructure 
list." Hillary Clinton says she still wants to pass a narrower bill that 
would prevent state-owned foreign companies from "managing, controlling 
or owning U.S. port operations."

Unfortunately, the consensus on critical infrastructure isn't 
accompanied by a willingness to define what, exactly, "critical 
infrastructure" might be. A spokesman for Hunter told me that "critical 
infrastructure" meant anything whose destruction "would have a 
debilitating effect on national security, economic security or public 
health and safety." A spokesman for Clinton said the senator's 
legislation concerns only ports, but added that she still thinks that 
"in the post-9/11 world, we need fresh thinking on how to protect our 
critical infrastructure."

Since this pretty much leaves the field open for anyone to make up his 
or her own definition, I'm going to avail myself of the opportunity. 
After all, at last count, foreign direct investment in the United States 
amounted to $486 billion. That means there are many thousands of 
foreign-owned properties whose destruction might have a debilitating 
effect on "national security, economic security and public health" and 
whose protection may require "fresh thinking." Here are a few:

? The sanitation system of Laredo, Tex. Along with plants in more than a 
dozen other U.S. cities, the wastewater treatment plant in this critical 
border city is managed by Suez, a French firm. Suez -- which also owns a 
liquefied natural gas "port operation" in Massachusetts and makes 
regular gas deliveries at ports in Maryland and Louisiana -- is 
negotiating a merger with a state-owned company, Gaz de France. Thus 
will the government of France -- one of whose citizens, Zacarias 
Moussaoui, is on trial for terrorism in a U.S. court -- be in a position 
to poison Texans' water, interfere with border control and blow up gas 
terminals, too.

? The highways of Indiana. With great fanfare, the Indiana authorities 
earlier this year announced that a Spanish company and an Australian 
firm would jointly manage the state's main toll road. The two firms will 
also complete the unfinished "Hoosier highway" -- presumably giving them 
access to all kinds of information about bridge and tunnel 
vulnerabilities. Spain, like Dubai, is a country that harbored 
terrorists, in advance of the Madrid bombings.

? The refineries of Toledo, Texas City, Tex., and Carson, Calif., among 
others. All are owned by British Petroleum, a British company based in 
London. But even if all were sold to U.S. companies, BP would still own 
some $41 billion worth of fixed assets in the United States and would 
still be the largest marketer of natural gas liquids in North America 
and one of the largest distributors of gasoline as well. Britain, also 
like Dubai, has harbored terrorists: the London bombers, the shoe 
bomber, the IRA.

? The pilots, tugs and dockworkers of New York, New Jersey and San 
Francisco, along with a dozen other U.S. ports. They all work for a 
company, Inchcape Shipping Services, that has a contract with the U.S. 
Navy. The company used to be British and was sold for $285 million in 
January to -- the royal family of Dubai. Need I say more?

As I say, those are just random examples. Foreign investors also own and 
operate power plants, chemical plants and railroad tracks, and more 
refineries and natural gas facilities than I've got space to mention. 
The process of confiscating, nationalizing or otherwise forcing the sale 
of "critical infrastructure," or even "port operations," broadly 
defined, could go on for years, would cost billions and would certainly 
destroy this country's reputation as a safe place in which to invest.

Instead of doing so, it might make more sense to institute a secure 
system of identity and background checks for all port or refinery 
employees, especially since it's not necessarily more difficult to 
penetrate a U.S. company than a French or Arab one. It might also make 
sense to sit down and define "critical infrastructure" and to set 
priorities and think harder about which objects, American or 
foreign-owned, pose genuine dangers. But that would be complicated, 
expensive and time-consuming. It could only succeed with the support of 
a bipartisan Congress, one willing to devote the time and money to 
genuine security, and one whose leaders were willing to explain to the 
American public that in the globalized economy -- a system whose rules 
we essentially wrote -- it's no longer possible to pick and choose whose 
investments we want. That sort of bipartisanship, alas, is still very 
far away.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/14/AR2006031401106.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060315/baba287d/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Wed Mar 15 03:09:40 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 06:09:40 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] EXCELLENT: What Kind of Hater Are You? - E. J. Dionne -
 Washington Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <4417F5F4.3030108@comcast.net>

What Kind of Hater Are You?
<>
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
The Washington Post
Wednesday, March 15, 2006; A19

Consider the portraits that Republicans and Democrats paint of each 
other. They explain much of the loathing in our politics.

Democrats see Republicans as a collection of pampered rich people who 
selfishly seek to cut their own taxes, allied with religious 
fundamentalists who want to use government power to impose a narrow 
brand of Christianity on everyone else.

Republicans see Democrats as godless, overeducated elitists who sip 
lattes as they look down their noses at the moral values of "real 
Americans" in "the heartland" and ally themselves with "special interest 
groups" that benefit from "big government."

Notice that each side is waging a class war in condemning the other as 
nauseatingly privileged. Yes, these are both parodies. But parodies are 
weapons in political battles, so it's important to assess the relative 
truth of each side's claims.

Begin by dismissing the claim that the economically privileged have 
become Democrats. In the 2004 election, according to the main media exit 
poll, President Bush won 63 percent of the votes cast by Americans in 
households earning over $200,000 a year, and 57 percent from those in 
the $100,000 to $200,000 range. All things being equal, wealthier people 
vote Republican.

But conservatives counter that Democrats are the party of choice in 
swank, well-educated latte enclaves: suburban Boston, New York and 
Philadelphia; Montgomery County, Md.; and Microsoftland around Seattle, 
Silicon Valley and Hollywood. John Kerry's blue states are, on the 
whole, richer than George Bush's red states.

All true -- meaning what, exactly? One of the hottest political science 
papers floating around the political world and the Web comes close to 
solving the mystery of how Democrats can do so well in certain well-off 
places and still not be the party of the rich.

The paper has a fetching title: "Rich state, poor state, red state, blue 
state: What's the matter with Connecticut?" Dr. Seuss, who wrote "One 
Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish," meets Tom Frank, the author of the 
influential book "What's the Matter With Kansas?"

The authors -- Andrew Gelman of Columbia University, Boris Shor of the 
University of Chicago, Joseph Bafumi of Dartmouth and David Park of 
Washington University in St. Louis -- show, through careful statistical 
analysis, how several things can be true at the same time.

Yes, Bush carried a lot of poor states -- but with heavy support from 
the rich people who lived in them. The class war is being waged more 
fiercely in the Republican states than in the Democratic states. The 
income divide is especially sharp in the South, where it is reinforced 
by a strong racial divide.

"In poor states," Gelman and his colleagues write, "rich people are much 
more likely than poor people to vote for the Republican presidential 
candidate, but in rich states (such as Connecticut), income has almost 
no correlation with vote preference. . . . In poor states, rich people 
are very different from poor people in their political preferences. But 
in rich states, they are not."

This suggests that our country may be even more polarized and divided 
than we thought. Not only do red and blue states vote differently, but 
they cast their votes according to different patterns.

The paper's authors also take a nice swipe at the media, arguing that 
reporters tend to overemphasize the role of rich Democrats in elections. 
Why? Journalists, they write, "noticed a pattern (richer counties 
supporting the Democrats) that is concentrated in the states where the 
journalists live," notably the environs of Washington and New York. The 
class polarization in such deep red states as Oklahoma, Texas and 
Mississippi goes largely unreported.

Gelman and his colleagues help us understand why southern Democrats such 
as Bill Clinton and John Edwards may be more attuned to the power of 
populism than Northern Democrats such as John Kerry -- and, perhaps, 
Hillary Rodham Clinton. Their paper also helps explain why Southern 
Republicans such as President Bush pursue policies that are hugely 
beneficial to their wealthy base even as they try to diminish the 
political impact of class warfare by shifting the argument to other 
subjects: religion, values or national security.

The divide in American politics is about more than the ideological 
distance between the two parties. Right now red-staters and blue-staters 
live in two different political universes. It's no wonder that political 
moderation is out of fashion -- though the winner of the 2008 round may 
be the person who can scramble the patterns of Dr. Seussian politics.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/14/AR2006031401116.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060315/5b0e3011/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Wed Mar 15 03:13:04 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 06:13:04 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Israel raids prison, takes 6 militants - Boston Globe
Message-ID: <4417F6C0.2050806@comcast.net>


  Israel raids prison, takes 6 militants


    Palestinians lash back for 'provocation'

By Thanassis Cambanis  |  March 15, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

JERICHO, West Bank -- Israeli forces stormed a Palestinian prison 
yesterday, capturing six radical militants and provoking a wave of 
retaliatory attacks and hostage-takings in the first major security 
crisis since Hamas won Palestinian elections.

Tanks and bulldozers surrounded the Jericho prison shortly after 9 a.m. 
just minutes after a team of US and British advisers walked away from 
their posts as monitors at the prison, saying that Palestinian officials 
had failed to provide adequate security under a complex international 
agreement.

Israel's government, just two weeks away from elections, laid siege to 
the Jericho prison for nine hours, lobbing shells and demolishing parts 
of the complex with bulldozers until the wanted men inside surrendered 
shortly after nightfall.

An adviser to Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said the strike on the 
prison showed the governing Kadima party was tough on security.

The Israeli raid in Jericho prompted violent protests and unrest 
throughout the Palestinian territories.

Gunmen rampaged in Gaza, shooting at American, European Union, and 
British buildings, kidnapping foreigners, and prompting the United 
Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the EU to 
evacuate foreign officials, including those who monitor border crossings.

''I cannot begin to understand why Israel would want all-out war. 
Today's military assault would seem to suggest that intent," Palestinian 
negotiator Saeb Erekat said, calling the raid a ''massive provocation."

The raid and ensuing chaos appeared to galvanize the Palestinian 
leadership, and especially those who have criticized Israel for adopting 
a unilateral course and refusing negotiations.

For Olmert, the prison raid provided the first major security test since 
Hamas won Palestinian parliamentary elections in January. A showdown 
over the most prominent prisoner, Ahmed Saadat, leader of the Popular 
Front for the Liberation of Palestine, had been brewing for some time.

Along with five other high-value detainees, Saadat had been held in a 
Palestinian prison in Jericho -- rather than in an Israeli jail -- for 
the last four years. The unusual arrangement came about from efforts in 
2002 to resolve the siege of Yasser Arafat's compound in Ramallah during 
the deadliest fighting between Israelis and Palestinians in years. The 
wanted men had been hiding with Arafat, and Israel agreed to let them 
move to the Palestinian prison in Jericho so long as British and 
American officials monitored their detention.

After the January elections, Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal declared that a 
Hamas government would free Saadat -- going a step further than 
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who had already angered Israel by 
saying he would consider releasing the militant, considered the 
mastermind of the 2001 assassination of Israel's tourism minister, 
Rehavam Ze'evi.

British monitors who were on duty at the prison left their posts 
yesterday morning around 9 a.m.

The United States and Britain had said in a March 8 letter to Abbas that 
they would withdraw the monitors unless the Palestinian Authority 
offered them adequate protection and began to enforce the agreement 
governing the Jericho detainees, who were given unfettered phone use and 
visits that were formally barred under the agreement.

The election of Hamas, which has repeatedly called for the release of 
the detainees, ''calls into question the political sustainability of the 
monitoring mission," the letter said.

Israeli officials said they had no advance warning that the monitors 
would withdraw, but Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said they were 
on ''high alert" because of the Palestinian proposals to free the men.

Micaela Schweitzer-Bluhm, a spokeswoman for the US consulate in 
Jerusalem, said the pullout of US and British guards was not coordinated 
in advance with Israelis or the Palestinians.

She said the United States and Britain had been concerned for the 
guards' safety ''over several months" and had warned the Palestinian 
Authority in January and again in March that if security at the prison 
did not improve, they would pull out.

Minutes after the guards left, Israeli troops surrounded the prison, and 
Israel rejected any arrangement that depended on Palestinian officials 
to guarantee the six men's captivity.

Televisions across the Arab world were tuned to the standoff. Sadaat 
called in live to Al-Jazeera satellite television, declaring: ''Our 
choice is to fight or to die. We will not surrender."

Explosions and gunfire punctuated the afternoon, sending black clouds 
into the dusty sky of Jericho.

Enraged Palestinian militants, blaming the United States and Britain for 
the standoff, kidnapped at least seven foreigners in the West Bank and 
Gaza, later releasing two Australians and an American. The American was 
identified as Douglas Johnson, an English professor at the American 
University in the West Bank town of Jenin.

Israeli officials said they had no choice but to act to prevent the 
Palestinians from freeing the militant cell that assassinated an Israeli 
Cabinet minister.

''We couldn't take the risk of letting the Palestinian Authority have 
complete control over these terrorists," Israeli Defense Forces Captain 
Yishai David told reporters near the siege yesterday afternoon.

Kadima has faced criticism from the right that it won't be tough enough 
on Palestinians. Yesterday's response appeared tailored to defuse such 
political attacks.

''This government was strong on security before, it's strong on security 
now," Lior Chorev, Kadima's campaign manager, said as the siege 
unfolded, describing it as proof that his party would not bend to 
Palestinian demands. ''People today have seen what's going on today, as 
we speak, in Jericho, as a sign of the way this government is heading."

As the afternoon wore on, more than 170 Palestinian prisoners and police 
left the compound in their underwear, to show they were not armed, 
leaving only a core group of detainees and members of the Palestinian 
security forces who stayed with them in solidarity. Near nightfall, 
those holdouts also surrendered.

Israeli military officials said throughout the day that they were 
determined to avoid a replay of the emblematic sieges of Arafat's 
Ramallah compound and of the historic church in Bethlehem in 2002, two 
standoffs that proved both deadly for Palestinians and costly for Israel.

More important, Israeli officials said, was the political message 
delivered to Palestinians who wanted to release the prisoners.

''We wanted to send a clear message that this incoming Palestinian 
leadership cannot unilaterally abrogate signed agreements," said Regev, 
the foreign ministry spokesman. ''Our action was responsive, and 
designed to maintain the status quo, and to keep these killers under 
lock and key."

Hamas has said it will not honor prior treaties between the Palestinian 
Authority and Israel, which are the cornerstone of current security 
arrangements.

Israel took custody last night of Sadaat and four other men connected to 
the killing of Ze'evi, a right-wing politician whose hard-line approach 
to Palestinians earned him the affectionate but ironic nickname ''Gandhi."

They also arrested Fuad Shobaki, the Palestinian official held 
responsible for financing an arms shipment intercepted by Israel.

Hamas leader Mashaal alluded to further violence with a promise of 
unspecified ''consequences" for Israel, while the Popular Front for the 
Liberation of Palestine vowed revenge against Israel after Saadat, who 
was elected to the Palestinian legislature in January, gave himself up.

Incoming Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, a Hamas leader, told 
the Associated Press that the raid was ''a dangerous escalation against 
the Palestinian leaders and freedom fighters."

http://www.boston.com/news/world/middleeast/articles/2006/03/15/israel_raids_prison_takes_6_militants/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060315/dabd2487/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Wed Mar 15 03:15:19 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 06:15:19 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Kids take back seat to gay agenda - Boston Globe Op-Ed
Message-ID: <4417F747.3040201@comcast.net>


  Kids take back seat to gay agenda

By Jeff Jacoby  |  March 15, 2006  |   The Boston Globe

IN PSYCHOLOGY, ''projection" occurs when someone attributes to others 
his own unpleasant beliefs or motivations. It is projection, for 
instance, when a liar assumes that everyone he deals with is dishonest, 
or when a man tempted by adultery accuses his spouse of planning to 
deceive him. Projection occurs in the public arena as well, as when 
supporters of racial preferences label ''racist" those who believe the 
law should be strictly colorblind.

A fresh example of projection arrived the other day by way of a news 
release from the Human Rights Campaign, one of the nation's largest gay 
and lesbian political organizations.

On March 10, Catholic Charities of Boston had announced that it was 
being forced to shut down its highly regarded adoption services, since 
it could not in good conscience comply with the government's demand that 
it place children for adoption with homosexual couples. Caught between 
the rock of Catholic teaching, which regards such adoptions as ''gravely 
immoral," and Massachusetts regulations, which bar adoption agencies 
from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation, the Boston 
Archdiocese had hoped to obtain a waiver on religious-freedom grounds. 
But when legislative leaders refused to consider the request, the 
archdiocese was left with no option but to end a ministry it had been 
performing for a century.

Whereupon the Human Rights Campaign issued its news release. It was 
headlined ''Boston Catholic Charities Puts Ugly Political Agenda Before 
Child Welfare," and a more perfect illustration of psychological 
projection would be hard to imagine.

For the political agenda driving this affair is the one favored by the 
Human Rights Campaign and its many allies in the media and state 
government: the normalization of homosexual adoption. So important is 
that agenda to its supporters that they will allow nothing to stand in 
its way -- not even the well-being of children in dire need of safe and 
loving families. Catholic Charities excels at arranging adoptions for 
children in foster care, particularly those who are older or 
handicapped, or who bear the scars of abuse or addiction. Yet the Human 
Rights Campaign and its friends would rather see this invaluable work 
come to an end than allow Catholic Charities to decline gay adoptions.

Note well: Catholic Charities made no effort to block same-sex couples 
from adopting. It asked no one to endorse its belief that homosexual 
adoption is wrong. It wanted only to go on finding loving parents for 
troubled children, without having to place any of those children in 
homes it deemed unsuitable. Gay or lesbian couples seeking to adopt 
would have remained free to do so through any other agency. In at least 
one Massachusetts diocese, in fact, the standing Catholic Charities 
policy had been to refer same-sex couples to other adoption agencies.

The church's request for a conscience clause should have been 
unobjectionable, at least to anyone whose priority is rescuing kids from 
foster care. Those who spurned that request out of hand must believe 
that adoption is designed primarily for the benefit of adults, not 
children. The end of Catholic Charities' involvement in adoption may 
suit the Human Rights Campaign. But it can only hurt the interests of 
the damaged and vulnerable children for whom Catholic Charities has long 
been a source of hope.

Is this a sign of things to come? In the name of nondiscrimination, will 
more states force religious organizations to swallow their principles or 
go out of business? Same-sex adoption is becoming increasingly common, 
but it is still highly controversial. Millions of Americans would 
readily agree that gay and lesbian couples can make loving parents, yet 
insist nevertheless that kids are better off with loving parents of both 
sexes. That is neither a radical view nor an intolerant one, but if the 
kneecapping of Catholic Charities is any indication, it may soon be 
forbidden.

''As much as one may wish to live and let live," Harvard Law professor 
Mary Ann Glendon wrote in 2004, during the same-sex marriage debate in 
Massachusetts, ''the experience in other countries reveals that once 
these arrangements become law, there will be no live-and-let-live policy 
for those who differ. Gay-marriage proponents use the language of 
openness, tolerance, and diversity, yet one foreseeable effect of their 
success will be to usher in an era of intolerance and discrimination . . 
. Every person and every religion that disagrees will be labeled as 
bigoted and openly discriminated against. The ax will fall most heavily 
on religious persons and groups that don't go along. Religious 
institutions will be hit with lawsuits if they refuse to compromise 
their principles."

The ax fell on Catholic Charities just two years after those words were 
written. Where will it have fallen two years hence?

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/15/kids_take_back_seat_to_gay_agenda/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060315/c01f88fe/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Wed Mar 15 03:19:06 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 06:19:06 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Insurance industry feels the heat of global warming -
 Derrick Z. Jackson - Boston Globe Op-Ed
Message-ID: <4417F82A.20409@comcast.net>


  Insurance industry feels the heat of global warming

By Derrick Z. Jackson  |  March 15, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

NEITHER TIM WAGNER nor Mike Kreidler imagined how climate change would 
intrude into state insurance regulation. Wagner, the director of the 
Nebraska Department of Insurance, said the reality is literally pelting him.

''While you can't correlate it directly, in the Plains states we've had 
severe droughts," Wagner, 63, said over the telephone. ''We've had fires 
in Texas and Oklahoma. There's a terrible drought in Arizona right now. 
When we get rain, we seem to get more and more severe hail. I just drove 
to Kansas City. My nephew is in Iraq and we went to see his family. Our 
brand-new car got pummeled while it was parked in north Kansas City. We 
didn't lose any glass, but plastic parts of the car rack and a piece of 
the bumper was hanging off. I don't think I remember being in a hail 
storm like that in my lifetime."

Kreidler, 62, the Washington state insurance commissioner, has seen his 
Pacific Northwest weather go from a drought emergency last winter to 
floods this winter. ''Obviously a trigger for the threshold of getting 
our attention was Katrina and the number of hurricanes we've been 
having," Kreidler said in a phone interview. ''But even in Washington 
the vagaries in weather patterns make you suspicious."

The suspicions moved Kreidler, a former Democratic congressman, and 
Wagner, a registered Republican, to form a task force for the National 
Association of Insurance Commissioners to assess the impact of climate 
change on the American insurance industry. They hope to join a 
discussion that has been going on for years in Europe, where insurers 
Swiss Re and Munich Re have warned of massive financial losses from 
storm patterns aggravated by global warming.

''When you couple changes in climate with changes in demographics where 
at this point 70 percent of our population resides within 50 miles of a 
coastline, and the fact that property values of those areas have 
increased significantly, it just seemed that we had to recognize the 
issue," Wagner said.

Munich Re calculated that last year was the most expensive on record for 
natural catastrophes, with losses of over $210 billion. Windstorm 
destruction in just the United States, the Caribbean, and Mexico cost 
$83 billion, most of it, of course, coming from Hurricane Katrina.

Swiss Re, in a joint report done with Harvard Medical School's Center 
for Health and the Global Environment and the United Nations Development 
Program, said, ''Many in the business community have begun to understand 
the risks that lie ahead. Insurers and reinsurers find themselves on the 
front lines of this challenge since the very viability of their industry 
rests on the proper appreciation of risk."

The insurance giant AIG, estimates that both Florida and New York have 
nearly $2 trillion each of insured coastal property exposure. 
Massachusetts is in fourth place in AIG's estimates at $662 billion. AIG 
said last October that six of the 10 most expensive hurricanes in US 
history occurred in just the prior 13 months.

''People are getting the idea that there is nowhere to hide on this 
issue," said Andrew Logan insurance program director for the 
Boston-based Ceres, which promotes corporate environmentalism and has 
been advising Wagner, Kreidler, and NAIC. Ceres says that insured losses 
due to weather have grown 10 times faster than premiums since 1971, and 
the percentage of total economic losses from catastrophic weather has 
grown from a ''negligible fraction in the 1950s to 25 percent in the 
past decade."

Wagner and Kreidler said they do not know yet what their task force will 
recommend. They do say that the time for Americans to hide from global 
warming is over. ''I don't want to have to get to the point where we 
have to ask, 'Do you pump water for vineyards, or run water for 
turbines, or save it for salmon in the Columbia?' " Kreidler said.

Wagner said, ''I don't know what, from a regulatory standpoint, we can 
do in terms of building codes being enforced and changes in land-use 
policy. We cannot change the weather. But it would be nice if the 
insurance industry played a role of some type."

He added, ''I'm a financial guy, not an activist. But we heard about 
storm models where it would not be unheard of to have a $120 billion 
storm . . . I don't know if we're prepared to be another Netherlands. 
But it does seem that we are too often in the position of cleaning up 
after the elephants run by."

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/15/insurance_industry_feels_the_heat_of_global_warming/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060315/a3302cd9/attachment-0001.htm 

From activist at democrats.com  Tue Mar 14 22:53:19 2006
From: activist at democrats.com (Democrats.com)
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 01:53:19 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Support Feingold - Censure Bush - Stop Cowering!
Message-ID: <20060315015319.590410@democrats.com>

On 3/13/06, Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) introduced a resolution to censure George Bush for illegally wiretapping American citizens.

Of course we believe Bush deserves far more than censure. Feingold said Bush's illegal wiretapping "is right in the strike zone of the concept of high crimes and misdemeanors" - so impeachment is "an option that we could look at." You go, Russ!

Naturally, Republicans went ballistic. Sen. Bill Frist (R-TN) called Feingold "crazy" and tried to strangle his resolution in the crib. But Democrats wouldn't let him, so now the bill will go to the Judiciary Committee for further consideration.

Feingold's gutsy action has forced a debate on a topic that has been taboo in Washington: how to hold George Bush accountable for his innumerable crimes. Obviously this is a debate Republicans are desperate to avoid at all costs. But why are Democrats (other than Feingold) avoiding it too?

Feingold himself is baffled. He told Fox News "I'm amazed at Democrats, cowering with this president's numbers so low. The administration just has to raise the specter of the war and the Democrats run and hide... Too many Democrats are going to do the same thing they did in 2000 and 2004. In the face of this, they'll say we'd better just focus on domestic issues... [Democrats shouldn't] cower to the argument, that whatever you do, if you question the administration, you're helping the terrorists."

We couldn't agree more. The time has come for Senate Democrats to stand up to George Bush and the Republican thugs in Congress and the Media.

Call your Senators at 202-224-3121 and deliver a simple message:
"I urge you to support Senator Feingold's bill to censure George Bush."
And for Democratic Senators, add this:
"And stop cowering in fear of Republican thugs!"

This is not a one-day issue. We're going to keep after all 100 Senators until they censure Bush - and ultimately impeach him. Let us know the answers you get when you call by posting below, and we will update our tally below.
http://democrats.com/senate-censure

_______________ Sponsored Message 

SMILE, LAUGH & CRY WITH ODE 


From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Wed Mar 15 06:24:04 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 09:24:04 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Iran, Oil and Euros: The War Scenario
Message-ID: <000801c6483c$20dba120$5527e440@Harold>



                                                          
17 February 2006

Iran, Oil and Euros: The War Scenario

By Gwynne Dyer

        Here's the scenario.  On 20 March Iran opens a new "bourse"
(exchange) on which countries all over the world can buy and sell oil and
gas not only for dollars but also for euros.  It also establishes a new oil
"marker" (oil pricing standard) based on Iranian crude and denominated in
euros, in open rivalry to the existing West Texas Intermediate, Norway
Brent and UAE Dubai markers, all of which are calculated in US dollars.

        The Iranian bourse is a instant success with countries and
companies that are unhappy about having to hold huge amounts of overvalued
US dollars to finance their oil transactions, all of which must presently
be conducted in that currency. Very large sums start to shift from the
dollar to the euro, although exactly how much is unknown because the US
Federal Reserve System (by pure coincidence, of course) has chosen late
March as the time to stop publishing the data that would make it easy to
know how fast the haemorrhage was.

        But the US government knows, and is deeply alarmed by the danger
that the dollar may be losing its status as the world's only reserve
currency. Given the huge deficits that plague the US economy, the US
dollar's value would collapse if other countries began to see it as just
another currency, so the euro must be prevented from emerging as an
alternative reserve currency.  In practice, that means the Iranian
experiment with a euro-denominated oil bourse must be stopped -- and the
only way to do that is to attack Iran.

        Some of the scenario-mongers would change the sequence of events
and have the US launch a "preventive" attack against Iran before it even
opens the bourse.  An alternative scenario has Washington persuading Israel
to do the dirty work of actually launching air strikes against Iran. But a
lot of people are genuinely worried that the whole crisis over Iran's
alleged nuclear weapons programme is being whipped up to give Washington
cover for a strike against Iran that is really meant to halt the bourse.

        In support of this thesis, they argue that a similar initiative by
Saddam Hussein, who began insisting that Iraq's oil exports be paid for in
euros in 2000, led directly to the US invasion of 2003. The Iranians are
going much further, and they will be punished too. How seriously should we
take this argument?

        Although final details on the way the Iranian oil bourse will
operate are still lacking, it's clear that a euro-denominated oil exchange
could catch on, and would indeed challenge the US dollar's unique
advantages as the world's sole reserve currency. However, it is less clear
that the Bush administration actually knows or cares about this.

        There is no real evidence linking Saddam Hussein's demand to be
paid in euros for Iraq's oil with the subsequent US invasion of Iraq. Those
two events occurred almost three years apart, and in any case Saddam merely
asked to have the cheques made out in euros, so to speak. Iraq's actual oil
sales continued to go through the New York or London exchanges and to be
conducted in dollars.

        Besides, those were the early years of the Bush administration, and
US dollar was much less vulnerable because the twin US deficits on the
federal budget and the foreign trade account had not yet had time to swell
to their present massive size.  The euros-for-oil story is just one of many
motives that people have proposed to explain the Bush administration's
attack on Iraq, given that Saddam had neither terrorist ties nor weapons of
mass destruction, but it fails to convince.

        The rapidly deteriorating financial position of the United States
probably does explain the Federal Reserve's announcement that on 24 March
it will stop publishing data on the M3 money supply, which tracks how many
US dollars are held by foreigners.  If you are worried about a panic flight
from the dollar, then you want to keep any downward trend in overseas
holdings of US dollars out of public sight.  But the Fed might well be
doing this around now even if no Iranian oil bourse were on the horizon,
and no dramatic conclusions need to be drawn from it.

        In order to believe that the US government is planning an attack on
Iran to head off the challenge to the dollar that a euro-based Iranian oil
bourse would represent, you must first believe that the Bush administration
actually worries about such things, and there is little proof that it does.
It certainly should, but if it truly did, would it have pushed through the
biggest tax cuts in American history?

        The Bush administration is reckless enough to contemplate an attack
on Iran, but it is too ignorant about fiscal and monetary matters to worry
about such esoteric matters as the potential connections between a shift to
euros in the oil market, foreign investor confidence in the US dollar, and
the sustainability of the massive US budget and trade deficits.  As
Vice-President Dick Cheney said to former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill
when the latter protested over the huge Bush tax cuts (an issue on which he
later resigned): "Ronald Reagan proved that budget deficits don't matter."

        If the US does attack Iran, it will be for other motives
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060315/25a50113/attachment.htm 

From Rhaerther at aol.com  Wed Mar 15 09:34:55 2006
From: Rhaerther at aol.com (Rhaerther at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 12:34:55 EST
Subject: [Mb-civic] Gov. Bush wants to stress career-oriented education over
	arts, PE
Message-ID: <26f.786fd9b.3149aa3f@aol.com>

Gov. Bush wants to stress career-oriented education over arts,  PE
--------------------

By Chris Kahn
South Florida Sun-Sentinel  Education Writer

March 13, 2006

Tallahassee * Gov. Jeb Bush's  proposal to dramatically overhaul
Florida's education system would give him a  much stronger hand in
turning around struggling schools, force educators to  rethink their
priorities for fine arts and physical education and  require
middle-schoolers to pick college-like majors.

The sweeping  changes are starting to make their way through the
Legislature, generating  controversy, but already gaining a key
endorsement from the House Pre-K-12  Committee.

"We're taking it up a notch," said Rep. Ralph Arza, the  Hialeah
Republican who is shepherding the legislation through the  House.

In their 107-page bill, the governor and his supporters say they  want to
mold Florida schools into a tougher, more career-oriented system  that
gives children "relevant learning opportunities."

Opponents have  drawn their own battle lines, focusing on the bill's
intent to eliminate  physical education and fine arts courses from high
school graduation  requirements, and its plan to let the governor usurp
school districts and  reform chronically failing schools on his own.

Bush's plan would tweak  middle and high schools in numerous other ways.
For example, it  would:

Establish a uniform school start date, prohibiting districts  from
opening more than a week earlier than Labor Day.

Keep districts  from assigning a disproportionately high number of
first-time teachers to  schools with a "D" or "F" rating and schools with
an above average population  of minorities or low-income students.

Force principals to recommend  corrective actions for low performing
staff members.

Force high  schools with an F grade to post their graduation rate by
ethnicity on the  school's Web site.

Create a uniform state "individual education plan" for  every student
with a disability, to avoid confusion if the students move to  other
counties. Districts must allow parents access to those plans on  the
Internet.

Perhaps the most controversial part of Arza's bill is  the authority it
gives the governor to take over struggling  schools.

The plan calls for a state "community assessment team" to check  on
schools that receive a D or F and make suggestions for doing better.  If
the school continues to fail, the bill would allow the governor to  take
over.

The state might focus on only the failing schools, but it  could also
suggest policy changes for an entire county, Arza  said.

"The problems with one school might be district-wide," he  said.

Palm Beach County Superintendent Art Johnson criticized the idea.  He
said it would be foolish to think the state could do a better  job
running a struggling school from afar.

"They don't want this  problem," Johnson said. "The simplest thing would
be to direct the school  district to put higher performing principals and
teachers in the schools and  pay them more."

Janet Hodgman, a mother of three in Plantation, said she  liked the idea
of crafting a student's curriculum based on the student's  interests,
"but that's what magnet schools already do."

Asking kids to  choose an additional college-like major would be
stressful, Hodgman said, and  it might keep kids from getting a
well-rounded education.

"We pressure  kids too young and too soon to figure out what they want to
do, when in fact  they don't have a clue," she said.

Chris Coombs, 44, a parent and math  teacher at the Alexander W. Dreyfoos
Jr. School of the Arts in West Palm  Beach, said he thought it would be a
good idea to ask high school students to  pick a major, but middle school
was too soon.

"I see my eighth-grader  right now, she doesn't know what she wants to
do," Coombs said. "Most of them  don't know what they want to do."

The Senate hasn't finished its  education reform plan yet, but Education
Committee Chairwoman Evelyn Lynn,  R-Ormond Beach, said it would be
different in at least a few key  areas.

For example, Lynn promised to fight for an arts graduation  requirement.

"Art opens the door to history of not only our nation, but  nations
throughout the world," said Lynn, a former teacher. "It's an avenue  for
learning every single subject matter."

She also wondered why the  House bill would cut physical education as a
graduation requirement "at a  time when we're concerned with obesity and
poor health among our  youngsters."

Arza agreed that the plan does cut the arts requirement in  favor of
boosting the math requirement from three to four credits, but he  said
students who are interested in the performing arts can still take  those
courses as electives.

"To say we're eliminating the arts, that's  a lie," Arza said.

But without arts as a general requirement for  graduation, a lot of
students could go through school without the experience  of a theater,
band or dance class, said Lori Sessions, a drama teacher at  J.P.
Taravella High in Coral Springs, who is Broward County's Arts Teacher  of
the Year.

Sessions said many of her students don't discover their  passion for the
arts until they've spent time in her classroom.

"A lot  of these kids never had any prior exposure to the arts," she
said. "They  don't even know whether they have a talent for it."

Chris Kahn can be  reached at 954-356-4550 or cmkahn at sun-sentinel.com

INSIDE

Property  taxes

Homeowners feel trapped in their houses because they can't  transfer
breaks to new properties. 1B 

Copyright (c) 2006, South  Florida Sun-Sentinel 

Visit Sun-Sentinel.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060315/aded3ef1/attachment.htm 

From hecate at diamonddragon.com  Wed Mar 15 09:37:43 2006
From: hecate at diamonddragon.com (Hecate)
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 17:37:43 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] BBC E-mail: UN creates new human rights body
Message-ID: <20060315_173743_074035.hecate@diamonddragon.com>

Hecate saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you
should see it.



** UN creates new human rights body **
The UN votes overwhelmingly to create a new, more effective human rights body, despite US objections.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/europe/4810538.stm >


** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all
in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/dailyemail/ >


** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have?been verified.

If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm


From grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net  Tue Mar 14 12:11:59 2006
From: grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net (Golsorkhi)
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2006 15:11:59 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] FW: FOREIGN SECRETARY SPEECH 13 MARCH
In-Reply-To: <0d1e268af6da10cbb32659da7f7c3045@mac.com>
Message-ID: <E1FJbKU-0003RE-BX@smtpauth04.mail.atl.earthlink.net>


------ Forwarded Message
From: Abbas Ghaffari <avidehghaffari at mac.com>
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2006 08:16:24 -0500
To: Reza Golsorkhi <grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net>
Subject: Fwd: FOREIGN SECRETARY SPEECH 13 MARCH



Begin forwarded message:



------ End of Forwarded Message

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/octet-stream
Size: 48128 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060314/028dc6d4/attachment-0001.obj 

From grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net  Tue Mar 14 12:11:16 2006
From: grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net (Golsorkhi)
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2006 15:11:16 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] FW: FYI:  PANEL ON IRAN
In-Reply-To: <51604252-C453-4DDD-B3E8-42B2F8041462@thesamiis.com>
Message-ID: <E1FJbLe-0004zM-GP@smtpauth04.mail.atl.earthlink.net>

Michael,  In case you happen to be in the neighbourhood.  Regards.  Reza
------ Forwarded Message
From: Samii Shahla <shahla at thesamiis.com>
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 20:22:21 -0500
Subject: FYI:  PANEL ON IRAN



Begin forwarded message:

> From: ISAA Board <i_saa at yahoo.com>
> Date: March 13, 2006 3:39:01 PM EST
> To: isaa at isaa.berkeley.edu
> Subject: PANEL ON IRAN
> 
>  
> You are cordially invited to a panel discussion
> entitled
> 
> ?Iran on the World Stage: Domestic Challenges and
> Nuclear Ambitions?
> 
> Maude Fife room, 315 Wheeler Hall
> Thursday, March 16, 2006
> 5 pm -7 pm
> 
> The panel discussion will feature:
> 
> Ahmad Ghoreishi, Former Chancellor, National
> University of Iran
> Omid Memarian, Iranian journalist and blogger,
> Visiting Scholar, UCB School of Journalism
> Abbas Milani, Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford
> University
> Daruish Zahedi, Lecturer, Peace and Conflict Studies,
> UC Berkeley
> 
> Sponsored by the UC Berkeley Religion, Politics, and
> Globalization Program
> 
> This event is free and open to the public.
> 
> 
> For more information contact:
> Sara Heitler Bamberger, Program Coordinator
> Religion, Politics and Globalization Program, UC
> Berkeley
> Stephens Hall 107-B
> Berkeley, California 94720
> phone 510.642.9418
> sbamberger at berkeley.edu
> 
> __________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
> Tired of spam?? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around?
> http://mail.yahoo.com?
> 
>  



------ End of Forwarded Message

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060314/468df115/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Wed Mar 15 11:43:33 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 19:43:33 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Working It Out
Message-ID: <20060315194333.57B6F83DD2@lax-gw03.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

OPINION | March 15, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor: Working It Out
By CLAUDIA GOLDIN
Anecdotes aside, highly educated women aren't "opting out" of careers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/15/opinion/15goldin.html?ex=1143090000&en=fea1ab4559aa23b5&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060315/d8dbf4b3/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Wed Mar 15 11:45:27 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 19:45:27 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Far Out, Man. But Is It Quantum Physics?
Message-ID: <20060315194534.7A1F09FD8E@lax-gw05.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

SCIENCE | March 14, 2006
Essay: Far Out, Man. But Is It Quantum Physics?
By DENNIS OVERBYE
The quantum mysticism industry raises a disturbing question: Do we have to indulge in bad physics to feel good?
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/14/science/14essa.html?ex=1143090000&en=9c9eb427672aac5a&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060315/82d7d0b4/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Wed Mar 15 11:46:53 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 19:46:53 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Silent Struggle: A New Theory of Pregnancy
Message-ID: <20060315194653.1CBD024AF0D@lax-gw02.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

HEALTH | March 14, 2006
Silent Struggle: A New Theory of Pregnancy
By CARL ZIMMER
A Harvard biologist argues that a mother and her unborn child engage in an unconscious struggle over the nutrients she will provide it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/14/health/14preg.html?ex=1143090000&en=e6b0dd519a56d728&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060315/e41e6c4b/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Wed Mar 15 11:49:27 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 19:49:27 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: In Iran,
	Dissenting Voices Rise on Its Leaders' Nuclear Strategy
Message-ID: <20060315194927.EA97F11F97C@lax-gw07.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

INTERNATIONAL / MIDDLE EAST | March 15, 2006
In Iran, Dissenting Voices Rise on Its Leaders' Nuclear Strategy
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
While the top leaders remain resolute in their course, cracks are opening both inside and outside the circles of power.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/15/international/middleeast/15iran.html?ex=1143090000&en=d75a2f6505100729&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060315/c347fe12/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Wed Mar 15 11:52:22 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 19:52:22 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Large Oil Spill in Alaska Went Undetected
	for Days
Message-ID: <20060315195227.9867D9FD78@lax-gw05.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

NATIONAL | March 15, 2006
Large Oil Spill in Alaska Went Undetected for Days
By FELICITY BARRINGER
Up to 267,000 gallons of oil were deposited over two acres on the tundra of Alaska's North Slope, forcing cleanup crews to work in temperatures far below zero.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/15/national/15spill.html?ex=1143090000&en=41c2824b8f45fd70&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060315/cdf7486a/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Wed Mar 15 11:53:40 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: 15 Mar 2006 19:53:40 -0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] Headlines for March 15, 2006
Message-ID: <20060315195340.21057.qmail@trinity.democracynow.org>

Mike Blaxill  ( mblaxill at yahoo.com )
sent you this story from democracynow.org




+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  Headlines for March 15, 2006
|  http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/15/158245
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+


- Israeli Raid on Palestinian Prison Leads to Deaths, Kidnappings 
- 87 Bodies Found in Iraq
- Rumsfeld Hints At US Troop Increase
- Top US Military Commander: No Evidence of Iran Links
- Report: US Airstrikes Up 50% in Iraq 
- Feingold Criticizes Fellow Dems Over Bush Measure 
- NAACP Calls on New Orleans To Delay Upcoming Mayoral Election
This story continues at: 
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/15/158245


From michael at michaelbutler.com  Wed Mar 15 11:54:02 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 11:54:02 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Dubai and Dunces By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Message-ID: <C03DB0DA.2A1CB%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 15, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Dubai and Dunces
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

When it came to the Dubai ports issue, the facts never really had a chance ?
not in this political season. Still, it's hard to imagine a more ignorant,
bogus, xenophobic, reckless debate than the one indulged in by both
Republicans and Democrats around this question of whether an Arab-owned
company might oversee loading and unloading services in some U.S. ports. If
you had any doubts before, have none now: 9/11 has made us stupid.

We don't need any more pre-9/11 commissions. We need a post-9/11 commission,
one that looks at all the big and little things we are doing ? from
sanctioning torture to warrantless wiretaps to turning our embassies abroad
into fortresses ? that over time could eat away at the core DNA of America.

What is so crazy about the Dubai ports issue is that Dubai is precisely the
sort of decent, modernizing model we should be trying to nurture in the
Arab-Muslim world. But we've never really had an honest discussion about
either the real problems out there or the real solutions, have we?

The real problem was recently spelled out by an Arab-American psychiatrist,
Dr. Wafa Sultan, in a stunning interview with Al Jazeera. Speaking about the
Arab-Muslim world, Dr. Sultan said: "The clash we are witnessing ... is not
a clash of religions, or a clash of civilizations. It is a clash between two
opposites, between two eras. It is a clash between a mentality that belongs
to the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century.
It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized
and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality. It is a clash between
freedom and oppression, between democracy and dictatorship. It is a clash
between human rights, on the one hand, and the violation of these rights, on
the other hand. It is a clash between those who treat women like beasts, and
those who treat them like human beings."

The Jazeera host then asked: "I understand from your words that what is
happening today is a clash between the culture of the West, and the
backwardness and ignorance of the Muslims?"

Dr. Sultan: "Yes, that is what I mean."

Dr. Sultan voiced truths that many Muslims know: their civilization is, in
many places, in turmoil, falling further and further behind the world in
science, education, industry and innovation, while falling deeper and deeper
into the grip of crackpot clerics, tin-pot dictators, violent mobs and
madmen like bin Laden and Saddam.

President Bush keeps talking about Iraq and the Arab world as if democracy
alone is the cure and all we need to do is get rid of a few bad apples. The
problem is much deeper ? we're dealing with a civilization that is still
highly tribalized and is struggling with modernity. Mr. Bush was right in
thinking it is important to help Iraq become a model where Arab Muslims
could freely discuss their real problems, the ones identified by Dr. Sultan,
and chart new courses. His crime was thinking it would be easy.

I don't know how Iraq will end, but I sure know that we aren't going to
repeat the Iraq invasion elsewhere anytime soon. Yet the need for reform in
this region still cries out. Is there another way? Yes ? nurturing
internally generated Arab models for evolutionary reform, and one of the
best is Dubai, the Arab Singapore.

Dubai is not a democracy, and it is not without warts. But it is a bridge of
decency that leads away from the failing civilization described by Dr.
Sultan to a much more optimistic, open and self-confident society. Dubaians
are building a future based on butter not guns, private property not
caprice, services more than oil, and globally competitive companies, not
terror networks. Dubai is about nurturing Arab dignity through success not
suicide. As a result, its people want to embrace the future, not blow it up.

What's ironic is that if Democrats who hate the Bush war in Iraq actually
had a peaceful alternative policy for promoting transformation in the
Arab-Muslim world, it would be called "the Dubai policy": supporting
internally driven Arab engines of change.

That's why Arab progressives are stunned by our behavior. As an Arab
businessman friend said to me of the Dubai saga: "This deal has left a real
bad taste in many mouths. I mean this was Dubai, for God's sake! You could
not have a better friend and more of a symbol of globalization and openness.
If they are a security danger to the U.S., then who is not?"

So whatever happens with the Iraq experiment ? but especially if it fails ?
we need Dubai to succeed. Dubai is where we should want the Arab world to
go. Unfortunately, we just told Dubai to go to hell.

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From michael at michaelbutler.com  Wed Mar 15 11:58:39 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 11:58:39 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] What's Better? His Empty Suit or Her Baggage? By MAUREEN
	DOWD
Message-ID: <C03DB1EF.2A1CC%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 15, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
What's Better? His Empty Suit or Her Baggage?
By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

There's only one reason I continue to brave Washington's dreary formal press
dinners, which are so calcified they're a bad cross between a zombie movie
and those little Mexican Day of the Dead sculptures.

I find it highly instructive to hear politicians make humor speeches. It's
difficult, and few pols do it well.

It took Bill Clinton almost two terms to make a funny speech. He kept
letting a petulant tone creep in. Even though W. would probably rather spend
the night in Baghdad than go to a banquet, way past his bedtime, where he's
getting lampooned by reporters still able to drink, he was a master right
from the start.

Lynne Cheney is a practiced speaker, but a bit tone-deaf on humor. At the
Gridiron dinner here on Saturday, she said of her husband: "He has a great
sense of humor. Just the other day I asked him, 'Do you know how many
terrorists it takes to paint a wall?' And he answered right back, 'It
depends on how hard you throw them.' "

People laughed, but it felt creepy, the kind of humor that makes more
terrorists.

Everyone was curious to hear Barack Obama, the Democratic speaker. He
arrived last year as a star, then lapsed into a cipher, even getting punk'd
by John McCain last month. In the capital's version of "Dancing With the
Stars," Senator Obama won, turning in a smooth, funny performance that
lifted him from his tyro track.

He tweaked fellow Democrats, telling the white-tie crowd: "Men in tails.
Women in gowns. An orchestra playing, as folks reminisce about the good old
days. Kind of like dinner at the Kerrys."

He mocked the president's unauthorized snooping, saying he'd "asked my staff
to conduct all phone conversations in the Kenyan dialect of Luo." He advised
W. to "spy on the Weather Channel, and find out when big storms are coming."

After saying he'd enjoyed the Olympic biathlon of shooting and skiing, he,
deadpan, turned to Dick Cheney: "Probably not your sport, Mr. Vice
President."

It may be true that Americans, as one Democrat told me, "will never elect a
guy as president who has a name like a Middle East terrorist." And it may be
true that Democrats are racing like lemmings toward a race where, as one
moaned, "John McCain will dribble Hillary Clinton's head down the court like
a basketball."

But the clever, elegant performance by Mr. Obama ? who is intent on keeping
his head down in the Senate until he, too, can be a tedious insider ?
underscored the Democratic vacuum. Not only do the Democrats "stand for
anything," as Mr. Obama semijoked, but they have no champion at a time when
people are hungry for an exciting leader, when the party should be roaring
and soaring against the Bushies' power-mad stumbles. They should groom an
'08 star who can run on the pledge of doing what's right instead of only
what's far right.

The Republicans won with Ronald Reagan and W. by taking guys with more
likeability and sizzle than experience. They figure they'll win in a
McCain-Hillary duel by running a conservative beloved by the media and many
Democrats against a polarizing Northerner who can't win any red states
despite pandering to conservatives.

The weak and pathetic Democrats seem to move inexorably toward candidates
who turn a lot of people off. They should find someone captivating with an
intensely American success story ? someone like Senator Obama, Tom Brokaw or
some innovative business mogul who's less crazy than Ross Perot ? and shape
the campaign around that leader. Barack Obama is 44. J.F.K., who had a
reputation as a callow playboy and lawmaker who barely knew his way around
the Hill, was 43 when he became president.

With seniority comes dullness. And unless you can draw on it in desperate
times, promise is merely a curse.

Democrats think Senator Potential's experience does not match Senator
Pothole's. Much of hers is as a first lady who bollixed up chunks of
domestic policy. They also suspect she may be more macho than he is. They
fret that the freshman Illinois senator would wilt against the Arizona
senator's foreign policy experience ? and he probably would. But Mr. McCain,
a big hawk on Iraq, has talked of sending more troops, and his mentor was
Henry Kissinger. These are not recommendations.

W. had the foreign policy "dream team," and it shattered our foreign policy,
ideals and self-image. Despite hundreds of years of combined experience, the
Bushies rammed through cronies and schemes that were so destructive, it will
take hundreds of years to straighten out the mistakes.

The Democrats should not dismiss a politically less experienced but
personally more charismatic prospect as "an empty vessel." Maybe an empty
vessel can fill the room.

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From ean at sbcglobal.net  Tue Mar 14 17:56:30 2006
From: ean at sbcglobal.net (ean at sbcglobal.net)
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2006 17:56:30 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Why Did Bush Destroy Iraq? + Peace March
Message-ID: <E1FJcig-00007q-2Z@smtpauth04.mail.atl.earthlink.net>

Following this overview of what Bush has accomplished in Iraq is a brief 
announcement of a march to stand against the war on its 3rd anniversary this 
Saturday...followed by an important online alert you can participate in to tell 
AOL not to implement internet censorship...


http://counterpunch.org/roberts03112006.html

Weekend Edition
March 11 / 12, 2006

Every Reason Put Forward Has Been Proven False

Why Did Bush Destroy Iraq?

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

March 20 is the third anniversary of the Bush regime's invasion of Iraq.
US military casualties to date are approximately 20,000 killed, wounded,
maimed, and disabled. Iraqi civilian casualties number in the tens of
thousands. Iraq's infrastructure is in ruins. Tens of thousands of homes
have been destroyed. Fallujah, a city of 300,000 people had 36,000 of its
50,000 homes destroyed by the US military. Half of the city's former
population are displaced persons living in tents.

Thousands of Iraqis have been detained in prisons and hundreds have been
brutally tortured. America's reputation in the Muslim world is ruined.

The Bush regime expected a short "cakewalk" war to be followed by the
imposition of a puppet government and permanent US military bases.
Instead, US military forces are confronted with an insurgency that has
denied control over Iraq to the US military. Chaos rules, and civil war
may be coming on top of the insurgency.

On March 9, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the man who has been
totally wrong about Iraq, told Congress that if the unprecedented violence
in Iraq breaks out in civil war, the US will rely primarily on Iraq's
security forces to put down civil war.

What Iraqi security forces? Iraq does not have a security force.
The Shia have a security force. The Sunnis have a security force, and the
Kurds have a security force. The sectarian militias control the streets,
towns and cities. If civil war breaks out, the "Iraqi security force" will
dissolve into the sectarian militias, leaving the US military in the
middle of the melee.

Is this what "support the troops" means?

President Bush's determination to remain in Iraq despite the obvious
failure of the attempted occupation puts Bush at odds with the American
public and with our troops. Polls show that a majority of Americans
believe that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake and that our troops should
be withdrawn. An even larger majority of the troops themselves believe
they should be withdrawn.

Yet Bush, who is incapable of admitting a mistake, persists in a strategic
blunder that is turning into catastrophe.

Bush's support has fallen to 34 percent.

The war's out of pocket cost to date is approximately $300 billion--every
dollar borrowed from foreigners. Economic and budgetary experts have
calculated that the ultimate cost of Bush's Iraq war in terms of long-term
care for veterans, interest on borrowed money, and resources diverted from
productive uses will be between $1 trillion and $2 trillion.

What is being achieved for this enormous sacrifice?

No one knows.

Every reason we have been given for the Iraqi invasion has proved to be
false. Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. Reports from UN
weapons inspectors, top level US intelligence officials, Secretary of the
Treasury Paul O'Neill, and leaked top secret documents from the British
Cabinet all make it unequivocally clear that the Bush regime first decided
to invade Iraq and then looked around for a reason.

Saddam Hussein had no terrorist connection to Osama bin Laden and no role
in the 9/11 attack. Hussein was a secular ruler totally at odds with bin
Laden's Islamist aims. Every informed person in the world knew this.

When the original justifications for the US invasion collapsed, Bush said
that the reason for the invasion was to rid Iraq of a dictator and to put
a democracy in its place. Despite all the hoopla about democracy and
elections, no Iraqi government has been able to form, and the country is
on the brink of civil war. Some Middle East experts believe that violence
will spread throughout the region.

The brutal truth is that America's responsibility is extreme. We have
destroyed a country and created political chaos for no reason whatsoever.

Seldom in history has a government miscalculated as badly as Bush has in
Iraq. More disturbingly, Bush shows no ability to recover from his
mistake. All we get from our leader is pig-headed promises of victory that
none of our military commanders believe.

Our entire government is lost in confusion. One day Vice President Cheney
and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld tell us that we are having great success in
training an Iraqi military and will be able to begin withdrawing our
troops in a year. The next day they tell us that we will be fighting the
war for decades.

Bush's invasion of Iraq was a mistake. Bush's attempt to cover up his
mistake with patriotism will ultimately discredit patriotism.

America has to be big enough to admit a mistake and to bring it to an end.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan
administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal
editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor
of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at:
paulcraigroberts at yahoo.com

--------


March 18 Mass March & Rally in Los Angeles
Stop the War! Bring the Troops Home Now!

Saturday, March 18, 12 noon
Gather Hollywood and Vine
March to Hollywood and Highland

For more info call 323-464-1636 or e-mail answerla at answerla.org.

On Saturday, March 18 at 12 noon, thousands of people will gather at the
corner of Hollywood and Vine in Los Angeles for a mass march and rally
against the war on Iraq. This protest will commemorate the third
anniversary of the criminal U.S. "shock and awe" invasion of Iraq, in
which more than 100,000 Iraqis and 2,200 U.S. troops have died.

Now is the time to speak out loudly against imperialist war and
repressive, racist policies at home. Popular opinion in the U.S. has
turned dramatically against the war. Let's channel the popular outrage
against Bush and the war into a powerful people's movement for peace and
social justice. Get involved today!

Initiated by A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition-LA: Alliance for Just and Lasting
Peace in the Philippines, Free Palestine Alliance, Palestinian American
Women's Association, Haiti Support Network, Party for Socialism and
Liberation, GABRIELA Network, Latino Movement USA and 
MINDULLAE.

Media sponsors: Air America Radio, Progressive Talk 1150 AM;
Minjok-Tongshin Korean Online Daily

Co-sponsors and endorsers include

Coalition for World Peace, Global Resistance Network, Global Women's
Strike, International Socialist Organization, Iraq Veterans Against War,
KMB Pro-People Youth, Korean Americans for Peace, National Council of 
Arab
Americans, U.S. Labor Against War, Veterans for Peace, Youth & Student
ANSWER, Office of the Americas, Out Against War, MSA-West, Riverside 
Area
Peace and Justice Action; Paul Haggis, Academy Award winning
writer/director ("Crash"); Gloria Romero, California Senate Majority
Leader; Ron Kovic, Vietnam War veteran; Harry Belafonte, Singer and Film
star; Martin Sheen, Film and TV star ("The West Wing"); Dolores Huerta,
Co-founder United Farm Workers; Laura Dern, Film star ("Jurassic Park");
Maria Bello, Golden Globe nominated actress ("A History of Violence"); Mia
St. John, IFBA Lightweight Boxing Champion; Ed Begley Jr., Film and TV
star ("Six Feet Under"); Amy Brenneman, Film and TV star ("Judging Amy");
Fernando Suarez del Solar, Guerrero Azteca; Pablo Paredes, war resister;
Tom Ortenborg, President of Lion's Gate Films Releasing; Shiva Rose, Film
star ("David & Layla"); Travis Wilkerson, Award winning director ("An
Injury to One"); Peter Horton, TV star and producer ("Grey's Anatomy");
Jeffrey Tambor, Film and TV star ("Arrested Development") and more.

Youth & Student Anti-War Calendar
March 18 Protest & March 20 Day of Resistance to Imperialism
Organize to Stop the War & Military Recruiters!

Join the Youth & Student Contingent at March 18
Saturday, March 18, gather at 11:30 am

NW corner of Hollywood & Argyle (look for the Youth Anti-War banner)


***


-- 
You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, 
option D (up to 3 emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options 
(option A - 1x/week, option B - 3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option D - 
up to 3x/day) please reply and let us know!  If someone forwarded you 
this email and you want to be on our list, send an email to 
ean at sbcglobal.net and tell us which option you'd like.


"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060314/5e5b316d/attachment-0001.htm 

From michael at intrafi.com  Wed Mar 15 12:45:03 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (Michael)
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 15:45:03 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Article from Tom Dispatch
Message-ID: <200603152045.k2FKj3Qn026912@thor.thenation.com>

An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060315/2574b698/attachment.htm 

From michael at intrafi.com  Wed Mar 15 12:47:48 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael butler)
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 15:47:48 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] TruthDig: Bush's Fantasy of
Message-ID: <44187d741c02b@intrafi.com>

Hi,

 I read this on Truthdig and thought you would find it interesting.

 =-=-=-=-=-=-=
Bush's Fantasy of "Progress" in Iraq

"If such constant mayhem is taken as a sign of progress, three years after 
the U.S. invasion, then Bush will surely be thrilled by what the future 
holds.? 

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060314_robert_scheer_iraq/

 Copyright ? 2006 Truthdig, L.L.C. All rights reserved.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=
This is a one-time mailing from
TruthDig.com
on behalf of the sender.
Please report any misuse to editor-at-truthdig.com

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060315/26d078ab/attachment.htm 

From michael at intrafi.com  Wed Mar 15 12:49:16 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael butler)
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 15:49:16 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] TruthDig: Fishing for a Pretext to Squeeze Iran
Message-ID: <44187dcc51b8c@intrafi.com>

Hi,

 I read this on Truthdig and thought you would find it interesting.

 =-=-=-=-=-=-=
Fishing for a Pretext to Squeeze Iran

Truthdig?s Middle Eastern affairs expert argues that the Iranian nuclear 
issue ?has not reached the point of crisis, and therefore other motivations 
must be sought for the Bush administration?s breathless rhetoric.? 

UPDATE: Cole says that Bush?s recent linking of Iran to Iraqi roadside bombs 
is ?wholly implausible.? 

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060313_fishing_for_a_pretext_in_iran/

 Copyright ? 2006 Truthdig, L.L.C. All rights reserved.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=
This is a one-time mailing from
TruthDig.com
on behalf of the sender.
Please report any misuse to editor-at-truthdig.com

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060315/5805276d/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Wed Mar 15 12:52:03 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 20:52:03 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Ice Retreats in Arctic for 2nd Year;
	Some Fear Most of It Will Vanish
Message-ID: <20060315205203.B435B13B76F@lax-gw04.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

SCIENCE / ENVIRONMENT | March 15, 2006
Ice Retreats in Arctic for 2nd Year; Some Fear Most of It Will Vanish
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
The Arctic Ocean's ice cover shrunk this winter, leading climate experts to predict a record expansion of open water there this summer.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/15/science/earth/15ice.html?ex=1143090000&en=72ace425863987de&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060315/35d7a9ea/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Wed Mar 15 12:52:38 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 20:52:38 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: U.S. to Vote No on a New U.N. Rights Council
Message-ID: <20060315205238.C419113B7F3@lax-gw04.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

We were right to fear Bolton's appointment.


INTERNATIONAL / EUROPE | March 15, 2006
U.S. to Vote No on a New U.N. Rights Council
By WARREN HOGE
The U.S. will call for a General Assembly vote on the proposed Human Rights Council and vote against it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/15/international/europe/15rights.html?ex=1143090000&en=c22f2a84d4aaf537&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060315/5ac94cbc/attachment-0001.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Wed Mar 15 12:53:11 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 20:53:11 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Who's Afraid of Banking at Wal-Mart?
Message-ID: <20060315205311.E070A3AE5B9@lax-gw06.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

BUSINESS | March 15, 2006
David Leonhardt: Who's Afraid of Banking at Wal-Mart?

For all the criticism of Wal-Mart you simply cannot argue with the fact that the company saves its customers money.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/15/business/15leonhardt.html?ex=1143090000&en=62113a4d50f8a580&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060315/adcd4e63/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Wed Mar 15 12:53:22 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 20:53:22 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: U.S. Limits Demands on Google
Message-ID: <20060315205322.4A37513B72B@lax-gw04.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

TECHNOLOGY | March 15, 2006
U.S. Limits Demands on Google
By KATIE HAFNER
Google is now likely to be required to comply with a subpoena, but the amount of data is far less than previously demanded.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/15/technology/15google.html?ex=1143090000&en=0c8858143f6a8041&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060315/ef9e825e/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Wed Mar 15 12:54:01 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 20:54:01 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: A Stumble a Day ...
Message-ID: <20060315205401.D99BE3AE640@lax-gw06.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

OPINION | March 15, 2006
Editorial: A Stumble a Day ...

These days, when so many big things are going so very wrong, smaller errors seem like an echo of overall ineptitude.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/15/opinion/15wed1.html?ex=1143090000&en=d22b16e55e9ec7e4&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060315/e840d9d7/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Wed Mar 15 12:54:16 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 20:54:16 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: The Violence in Iraq Resists the Spin (7
	Letters)
Message-ID: <20060315205416.6AF00237064@lax-gw01.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

What we're saying...


OPINION | March 15, 2006
The Violence in Iraq Resists the Spin (7 Letters)

To the Editor:.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/15/opinion/l15iraq.html?ex=1143090000&en=f2abc6148986ac3c&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060315/df252c36/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Wed Mar 15 12:54:32 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 20:54:32 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Hillary Clinton: Politics as Usual? (5
	Letters)
Message-ID: <20060315205432.5C20D249D51@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

What we're saying (2)...


OPINION | March 15, 2006
Hillary Clinton: Politics as Usual? (5 Letters)

To the Editor:.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/15/opinion/l15brooks.html?ex=1143090000&en=da93cfda197a287a&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060315/05ca013a/attachment.htm 

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Wed Mar 15 14:39:55 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 14:39:55 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Censure President Bush
Message-ID: <C03DD7BB.2A1EA%michael@michaelbutler.com>

Hi,

On Monday, Senator Russ Feingold introduced a resolution to censure
President Bush for breaking the law by illegally wiretapping American
citizens. 

When the president misleads the public and the Congress and
willfully and repeatedly breaks the law, there need to be some consequences
--that's how the law works for everybody else.

Censuring the president is a
reasonable first step in condemning the president's actions. Now it's up to
us to show broad public support for Senator Feingold's resolution. Can you
sign this petition asking Congress to join the call for
censure?

http://political.moveon.org/censure/

Thanks!




From autoreply at economist.com  Wed Mar 15 14:41:32 2006
From: autoreply at economist.com (autoreply at economist.com)
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 17:41:32 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] An article for you from Michael Butler.
Message-ID: <200603152213.RAA28939@stage-web-app.economist.com>


- AN ARTICLE FOR YOU, FROM ECONOMIST.COM -

Dear civic,

Michael Butler (michael at intrafi.com) wants you to see this article on Economist.com.



(Note: the sender's e-mail address above has not been verified.)

Subscribe to The Economist print edition, get great savings and FREE full access to Economist.com.  Click here to subscribe:  http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/email.cfm 

Alternatively subscribe to online only version by clicking on the link below and save 25%:

http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/offer.cfm?campaign=168-XLMT



GERMANY'S ECONOMY
Mar 14th 2006  

Germany issues its first inflation-linked bond

OF ALL the world's cities, Frankfurt is perhaps the most likely to have
a museum devoted to money. Granted, it lacks the scale and buzz of New
York, and it has abandoned any serious pretensions to rivalling London
as Europe's prime financial centre; but it is nevertheless the
birthplace of the Rothschild banking dynasty, the city of the euro and
the home to both the European Central Bank and the once-mighty
Bundesbank (OMB), which dominated European monetary policy until the
euro came along in 1999.

Since then the OMB has had to face up to its loss of clout by painful
stages. Last week it witnessed the slaughter of another sacred cow when
for the first time the Federal Republic of Germany issued a bond
indexed to inflation. Indexation of financial contracts had been
outlawed in Germany in 1948, with a few exceptions that needed the
Bundesbank's say-so. Britain has been issuing inflation-linked bonds
since 1981 and America since 1997. Other issuers include France and
Italy. Some $830 billion of index-linked government bonds are
outstanding. There is increasing demand for these bonds, not least to
meet the pension requirements of baby-boomers in both Europe and
America.

Some exhibits in Frankfurt's Money Museum, a fine building tucked
beside the OMB's monstrous home in suburban Frankfurt, help to explain
why forbidding indexation was such a sacred cow in Germany. But this is
not the only lesson that visitors learn. The first item you see is a
real member of the bovine species--a beautiful, stuffed
example--because cows were an early form of money. (The Latin word for
money, PECUNIA, is derived from that for cattle, PECUS.) The PIeCE DE
RESISTANCE is an impressive-looking game console. With a joystick that
controls the money supply you can play at being a central banker. The
more money there is in circulation, represented by a tide of light
rising up one column, the greater the velocity and price of goods and
services, represented by light rising up another column, until
inflation takes hold. Then you must race to dampen the money supply
ahead of rising prices, without setting off a deflationary spiral (all
too easy). After a few roller-coaster rides, you have a certain respect
for Alan Greenspan, Jean-Claude Trichet and the gang.

During the Weimar Republic the Reichsbank, then Germany's central bank,
played this game for real and sensationally lost control. The
acceptance of constantly rising prices, known as inflationary
expectations, seized the minds of the people and the entire world of
commerce. Indexing prices to inflation only made things worse: it
reached 1,024% in 1922, which was just about bearable, but galloped to
105,700,000,000% during 1923. Paper money became the cheapest form of
heating fuel. By October 1923, 4.2 billion Reichsmarks could (or might)
have bought you a dollar. Anyone who had supported Germany's effort in
the first world war by buying government bonds got almost nothing in
return when a new currency, the Rentenmark, was introduced in November.
But inflation was halted.

That is the background which prompted the 1948 currency law to forbid
indexation clauses without the Bundesbank's permission. This was always
refused, except for some long-term rental agreements. The indexation
taboo caused a problem in the run-up to European monetary union,
because the ecu, the currency basket that was the forerunner of the
euro, was classed as an index, not a currency, by the suspicious
Bundesbank. Only after 1987 were German citizens grudgingly allowed to
hold private accounts in ecus.

So last week's issue of EURO5.5 billion of bonds linked to the
harmonised index of consumer prices in the euro zone (excluding
tobacco) is a landmark for Germany. Unfortunately not many German
investors were interested: about 16% of the bonds were sold nationally;
most were placed elsewhere in Europe, especially France. But it's a
start. Gerhard Schleif, co-head of the German Finance Agency which
handles government borrowing, intends to add another EURO5 billion-10
billion to the same issue over the next two years. While interest rates
and inflationary expectations are low this is the cheapest way for
governments to borrow money.

Curiously, Germany may have ditched its aversion to
indexation--acknowledging that inflation is no longer the monster it
once was--just as central banks are making markets think about
inflation once again. With official interest rates already rising in
America and Europe and with the Bank of Japan's announcement last week
that "quantitative easing" would end, markets have begun to think that
money will not be ultracheap for ever. Governments and other borrowers,
after a few years in which credit has been almost ridiculously slack,
may now find investors a little more demanding.

The immediate losers from this might not be borrowers, but pension-fund
managers and life-insurance companies, especially those supporting
defined-benefit schemes or those which have guaranteed investors'
returns. Such funds have been trying to limit their downside risk by
running out of equities into bonds (and in the process helping to push
bond yields down). Some companies have even been offloading their
pension liabilities to big insurers in return for "bulk annuities".

From nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca  Wed Mar 15 17:51:48 2006
From: nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca (CBC News Online)
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 01:51:48 UT
Subject: [Mb-civic] CBC News - U.S. PUTS MACHINE-GUNS ON GREAT LAKES COAST
	GUARD VESSELS
Message-ID: <20060316015148.98C7F7DBC@web04.nm.cbc.ca>

An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Url: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060316/bded879c/attachment.diff 

From michael at intrafi.com  Wed Mar 15 18:00:55 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 18:00:55 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] Alternet: Impeachment Talk Reaches the Mainstream
Message-ID: <20060316020055.1C9AEB81C8@alternet.org>


This story has been forwarded to you from
http://www.alternet.org by michael at intrafi.com



-------------------------------------
Impeachment Talk Reaches the Mainstream
http://www.alternet.org/story/33373


From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Wed Mar 15 19:33:40 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 22:33:40 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] I cry for the Iraqi people
Message-ID: <000a01c648aa$6e30cd10$3e27e440@Harold>

 Email     Print


I cry for the Iraqi people, for the terror/madness Bush has unleashed upon their homeland. 
HS

Posted on Mar. 14, 2006

       
     
      Khalid Mohammed / AP 
      An Iraqi woman wails after a raid by U.S. soldiers in Baghdad 
      on Tuesday, March 14. U.S. soldiers late Monday night raided 
      a house in west Baghdad, broke doors and windows and 
      arrested one person, police said. In a 24-hour period, police 
      found the bodies of at least 85 men killed execution-style 
      in a gruesome wave of apparent sectarian violence, the Interior 
      Ministry said Tuesday. The dead included at least 27 bodies 
      stacked in a mass grave in an eastern Shiite neighborhood. 

     
By Robert Scheer

What is he thinking? 

On a day when Shiite vigilantes conducted hangings in Sadr City in reprisal for the killing of scores of their co-religionists in a market bombing, President Bush continued to insist that progress in Iraq justified staying the course. 

?By their response over the past two weeks, Iraqis have shown the world that they want a future of freedom and peace,? he said Monday. ?We?re helping Iraqis build a strong democracy so that old resentments will be eased and the insurgency marginalized.? 

Contrast that fantasy with the same day?s harsh news: ?In Sadr City, the Shiite section in Baghdad where the terrorist suspects were executed, government forces vanished,? reported the New York Times. ?The streets are ruled by aggressive teenagers with shiny soccer jerseys and machine guns. They set up roadblocks and poke their heads into cars and detain whomever they want. Mosques blare warnings on loudspeakers for American troops to stay out. Increasingly, the Americans have been doing just that.? 

The next day, 87 corpses, all male, were found scattered throughout the city, shot or strangled after being bound and blindfolded. This, in turn, was in apparent reprisal for a series of bombings on Sunday targeting Shiite civilians that killed 58 and wounded 300, according to Iraq?s Health Ministry. 

Of course, the drip-drip of American troop deaths continues, as Lance Cpl. Bunny Long, 22, of Modesto, Calif., will be coming home in a flag-draped casket after being killed Friday by a suicide bomber with a vehicle-borne IED. 

If such constant mayhem is taken as a sign of progress, three years after the U.S. invasion, then Bush surely will be thrilled by what the future holds. The British, on the other hand, have seen the handwriting on the wall and once again have begun to flee an imperial disappointment in Mesopotamia, announcing they are reducing their forces by 10%. Clearly, London has grasped what Bush cannot: The three-year occupation by Western armies is an incitement to guerrilla violence, not an impediment. 

Of course, Bush would have us believe this expanding civil war is the work of insidious foreigners rather than of competing agendas arising from within an Iraq society long stunted by colonialism and dictatorship. It does not occur to him that he is the foreigner whom the majority of Iraqis hold responsible for the country?s despair, and whose occupation immeasurably strengthens the hand of extremists on all sides. Bush?s neoconservative Svengalis apparently failed to alert him to the possibility that religious, ethnic and nationalist sentiments might trump his plans for a Western-imposed ?democracy,? subservient to U.S. interests. Or that U.S.-engineered elections would be won by allies and disciples of the radical Shiite government in the ?evil axis? capital of Tehran. 

Such bright contradictions were on display in Bush?s latest strategically bankrupt ?plan? for victory: spending $3.3 billion to fight the improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that Bush now claims Iran is smuggling into Iraq ? to the very Shiite forces that won the U.S.-engineered election and are positioned to form the first real post-Hussein government. The IEDs, mentioned a whopping 26 times in the president?s speech, have obviously come to replace that nonexistent WMD threat as the centerpiece of Bush?s Iraq policy. We will stop them, he says, by bumping anti-IED-related spending by a factor of 22, from $150 million in 2004 to $3.3 billion. ?We?re putting the best minds in America to work on this effort,? Bush said. 

Why not put a few of them to work on figuring how to extract the U.S. military from Iraq instead? After all, that is where all the IEDs happen to be exploding. 

But, of course, this alternative, to stop making U.S. troops targets in the midst of a raging civil war in a Muslim country that the United States has no business occupying, was summarily dismissed by our president. 

?[M]y decisions on troop levels will be made based upon the conditions on the ground and on the recommendations of our military commanders, not artificial timetables set by politicians here in Washington, D.C.,? he said. 

Has the president never read our Constitution, which mandates civilian control over the military? Does he not grasp that he is himself a Washington politician? How can you effectively sell democracy to the world when you mock it so contemptuously at home? 

You can?t. Not until the public and its representatives force this administration to change its disastrous course can we begin to restore international respect for the American political system that Bush has so masterfully subverted. 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060315/8b4d26c0/attachment.htm 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 69 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060315/8b4d26c0/attachment.gif 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 70 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060315/8b4d26c0/attachment-0001.gif 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 20368 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060315/8b4d26c0/attachment.jpeg 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Wed Mar 15 19:40:09 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 22:40:09 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Abu Ghraib Files ....
Message-ID: <000701c648ab$565cfd20$3e27e440@Harold>

Not for the squeamish

http://www.salon.com/news/abu_ghraib/2006/03/14/introduction/

H
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060315/e2a2c1ee/attachment.htm 

From TSawyer456 at aol.com  Wed Mar 15 15:08:06 2006
From: TSawyer456 at aol.com (TSawyer456 at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 18:08:06 EST
Subject: [Mb-civic] History Lessons
Message-ID: <E1FJjgk-0004D4-6l@smtpauth04.mail.atl.earthlink.net>

This is a brilliant piece -- as far as he goes with it. Keep in mind as you  
read it that he omits a few important examples, such as Roosevelt's lies that  
enabled Pearl Harbor to take place, albeit with only our obsolete ships still 
at  anchor there. And he omits the fact that Vietnam was also about 
protecting the  oil in Indonesia from the "godless commies", as well as all of our  
wars since WWII enabling the buildup of the Military/Industrial Complex  that now 
runs our lives.
 
Nonetheless, the heart of it is, sadly, absolutely on the mark.  Would that 
there was a politician out there who was willing to say  it...
Tom
_www.ThomasBSawyer.com_ (http://www.ThomasBSawyer.com)  
 
Lessons of Iraq War Start  With US History
By Howard  Zinn
The Progressive  
Tuesday 14 March  2006 
On the third anniversary of  President Bush's Iraq debacle, it's important to 
consider why the administration  so easily fooled so many people into 
supporting the  war. 
I believe there are two reasons,  which go deep into our national culture. 
One is an absence of historical  perspective. The other is an inability to 
think outside the boundaries of  nationalism. 
If we don't know history, then we  are ready meat for carnivorous politicians 
and the intellectuals and journalists  who supply the carving knives. But if 
we know some history, if we know how many  times presidents have lied to us, 
we will not be fooled  again. 
President Polk lied to the nation  about the reason for going to war with 
Mexico in 1846. It wasn't that Mexico  "shed American blood upon the American 
soil" but that Polk, and the slave-owning  aristocracy, coveted half of Mexico. 
President McKinley lied in 1898  about the reason for invading Cuba, saying 
we wanted to liberate the Cubans from  Spanish control, but the truth is that 
he really wanted Spain out of Cuba so  that the island could be open to United 
Fruit and other American corporations.  He also lied about the reasons for our 
war in the Philippines, claiming we only  wanted to "civilize" the Filipinos, 
while the real reason was to own a valuable  piece of real estate in the far 
Pacific, even if we had to kill hundreds of  thousands of Filipinos to 
accomplish that. 
President Wilson lied about the  reasons for entering the First World War, 
saying it was a war to "make the world  safe for democracy," when it was really 
a war to make the world safe for the  rising American power. 
President Truman lied when he  said the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima 
because it was "a military  target." 
And everyone lied about Vietnam -  President Kennedy about the extent of our 
involvement, President Johnson about  the Gulf of Tonkin and President Nixon 
about the secret bombing of Cambodia.  They all claimed the war was to keep 
South Vietnam free of communism, but really  wanted to keep South Vietnam as an 
American outpost at the edge of the Asian  continent. 
President Reagan lied about the  invasion of Grenada, claiming falsely that 
it was a threat to the United  States. 
The elder Bush lied about the  invasion of Panama, leading to the death of 
thousands of ordinary citizens in  that country. And he lied again about the 
reason for attacking Iraq in 1991 -  hardly to defend the integrity of Kuwait, 
rather to assert U.S. power in the  oil-rich Middle East. 
There is an even bigger lie: the  arrogant idea that this country is the 
center of the universe, exceptionally  virtuous, admirable, superior. 
If our starting point for  evaluating the world around us is the firm belief 
that this nation is somehow  endowed by Providence with unique qualities that 
make it morally superior to  every other nation on Earth, then we are not 
likely to question the president  when he says we are sending our troops here or 
there, or bombing this or that,  in order to spread our values - democracy, 
liberty, and let's not forget free  enterprise - to some God-forsaken (literally) 
place in the  world. 
But we must face some facts that  disturb the idea of a uniquely virtuous 
nation. 
We must face our long history of  ethnic cleansing, in which the U.S. 
government drove millions of Indians off  their land by means of massacres and forced 
 evacuations. 
We must face our long history,  still not behind us, of slavery, segregation 
and  racism. 
And we must face the lingering  memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 
It is not a history of which we  can be proud. 
Our leaders have taken it for  granted, and planted the belief in the minds 
of many people that we are  entitled, because of our moral superiority, to 
dominate the world. Both the  Republican and Democratic Parties have embraced this 
 notion. 
But what is the idea of our moral  superiority based on? 
A more honest estimate of  ourselves as a nation would prepare us all for the 
next barrage of lies that  will accompany the next proposal to inflict our 
power on some other part of the  world. 
It might also inspire us to  create a different history for ourselves, by 
taking our country away from the  liars who govern it, and by rejecting 
nationalist arrogance, so that we can join  people around the world in the common cause 
of peace and  justice. 
--------   
Howard Zinn, who served as a  bombardier in the Air Force in World War II, is 
the author of "A People's  History of the United States" (HarperCollins, 
1995). He is also the co-author,  with Anthony Arnove, of "Voices of a People's 
History of the United States"  (Seven Stories Press, 2004). 
------- 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060315/33863ba5/attachment.htm 

From nemo1043 at yahoo.com  Wed Mar 15 20:11:51 2006
From: nemo1043 at yahoo.com (Allison Burnett)
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 20:11:51 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] <no subject>
Message-ID: <E1FJjuY-0005ub-Ns@smtpauth04.mail.atl.earthlink.net>

Salon.com has published the government files of video and stills from Abu
Ghraib.  

See your tax dollars at work.

http://salon.com/news/abu_ghraib/2006/03/14/introduction/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060315/9596df6f/attachment.htm 

From aaronrusso at msn.com  Sun Mar 12 18:06:30 2006
From: aaronrusso at msn.com (AARON RUSSO)
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 18:06:30 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Fw: Guantanamo on the Mississippi/unreal
Message-ID: <E1FJjw3-000730-ME@smtpauth04.mail.atl.earthlink.net>

I opened the file.. thanks.. look at this.. what has happened to america?..aaron
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Mar06/Flaherty11.htm<http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Mar06/Flaherty11.htm>

Guantanamo on the Mississippi 
by Jordan Flaherty 
www.dissidentvoice.org<http://www.dissidentvoice.org/>
March 11, 2006

Sometimes the injustices here in New Orleans leave me numb.  But the
continuing debacle of our criminal justice system inspires in me a sense of
indignation I thought was lost to cynicism long ago.  Ursula Price, a staff
investigator for the indigent defense organization A Fighting Chance, has
met with several thousand hurricane survivors who were imprisoned at the
time of the hurricane, and her stories chill me. "I grew up in small town
Mississippi," she tells me.  "We had the Klan marching down our main
street. But still, I've never seen anything like this." 

Safe Streets, Strong Communities, a New Orleans-based criminal justice
reform coalition that Price also works with, has just released a report
based on more than a hundred recent interviews with prisoners who have been
locked up since pre-Katrina and are currently spread across thirteen
prisons and hundreds of miles. They found the average number of days people
had been locked up without a trial was 385 days. One person had been locked
up for 1,289 days.  None of them have been convicted of any crime. 

"I've been working in the system for the while, I do capital cases and I've
seen the worst that the criminal justice system has to offer," Price told
me. "But even I am shocked that there has been so much disregard for the
value of these peoples lives, especially people who have not been proved to
have done anything wrong." As lawyers, advocates, and former prisoners
stressed to me in interviews over the last couple of weeks, arrest is not
the same as conviction. According to a pre-Katrina report from the
Metropolitan Crime Commission, 65% of those arrested in New Orleans are
eventually released without ever having been charged with any crime. 

Samuel Nicholas (his friends call him Nick) was imprisoned in Orleans
Parish Prison (OPP) on a misdemeanor charge, and was due to be released
August 31.  Instead, after a harrowing journey of several months, he was
released February 1. Nick told me he still shudders when he thinks of those
days in OPP. 

"We heard boats leaving, and one of the guys said 'hey man, all the
deputies gone,'" Nick relates. "We took it upon ourselves to try to
survive. They left us in the gym for two days with nothing. Some of those
guys stayed in a cell for or five days. People were hollering, 'get me out,
I don't want to drown, I don't want to die,' we were locked in with no
ventilation, no water, nothing to eat. Its just the grace of god that a lot
of us survived." 

Benny Flowers, a friend of Nick's from the same Central City neighborhood,
was on a work release program, and locked in a different building in the
sprawling OPP complex. In his building there were, by his count, about 30
incarcerated youth, some as young as 14 years old. "I don't know why they
left the children like that. Locked up, no food, no water. Why would you do
that? They couldn't swim; most of them were scared to get into the water.
We were on work release, so we didn't have much time left. We weren't
trying to escape, we weren't worried about ourselves, we were worried about
the children. The guards abandoned us, so we had to do it for ourselves. We
made sure everyone was secured and taken care of. The deputies didn't do
nothing. It was inmates taking care of inmates, old inmates taking care of
young inmates. We had to do it for ourselves." 

Benny Hitchens, another former inmate, was imprisoned for unpaid parking
tickets. "They put us in a gym, about 200 of us, and they gave us three
trash bags, two for defecation and one for urination. That was all we had
for 200 people for two days." 

State Department of Corrections officers eventually brought them, and
thousands of other inmates, to Hunts Prison, in rural Louisiana, where
evacuees were kept in a field, day and night, with no shelter and little or
no food and water. "They didn't do us no kind of justice," Flowers told me.
"We woke up early in the morning with the dew all over us, then in the
afternoon we were burning up in the summer sun. There were about 5,000 of
us in three yards." 

Nick was taken from Hunts prison to Oakdale prison. "At Oakdale they had us
on lockdown 23 hours, on Friday and Saturday it was 24 hours. We hadn't
even been convicted yet. Why did we have to be treated bad? Twenty-three
and one ain't nothing nice, especially when you ain't been convicted of a
crime yet. But here in New Orleans you're guilty 'til you're proven
innocent. Its just the opposite of how its supposed to be." 


From grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net  Tue Mar 14 11:58:55 2006
From: grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net (Golsorkhi)
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2006 14:58:55 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] FW: Quote
In-Reply-To: <398B6BB8-1140-4E72-AAAD-A0433C603A42@thesamiis.com>
Message-ID: <E1FJjxH-0007qG-OX@smtpauth04.mail.atl.earthlink.net>


------ Forwarded Message
From: Samii Shahla <shahla at thesamiis.com>
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 13:47:52 -0500
Subject: Quote

THE GIPPER

"'One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.' That's a
catchy phrase but also misleading. Freedom fighters do not need to
terrorize a population into submission. Freedom fighters target
the military forces and the organized instruments of repression
keeping dictatorial regimes in power. Freedom fighters struggle to
liberate their citizens from oppression and to establish a form
of government that reflects the will of the people... [O]ne has
to be blind, ignorant, or simply unwilling to see the truth if
he or she is unable to distinguish between those I just described
and terrorists." ---Ronald Reagan



------ End of Forwarded Message

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060314/21bc8ff1/attachment.htm 

From michael at intrafi.com  Wed Mar 15 20:43:07 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (Michael Butler)
Date: 16 Mar 2006 04:43:07 -0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] Fed up with the religious right's hypocrisy?
Message-ID: <20060316044307.31432.10.qmail@web8.getactive.com>

Dear Friend,

I'm fed up with the religious right's hypocrisy. I'm doing
something about it. Take a minute and join me. Click here:
http://www.defconamerica.org/abramoff

Former Christian Coalition Director Ralph Reed took money from
gambling interests to rally religious opposition to projects
opposed by Abramoff's casino and lottery clients. Focus on the
Family's James Dobson recorded ads at Reed's request that
benefited gambling interests -- at the same time he was
preaching against gambling. Lou Sheldon of the Traditional
Values Coalition was paid $25,000 by the online gambling outfit
eLottery to lobby Congress.

Reed, Sheldon and Dobson have formed an unholy alliance with the
Bush Administration to wage war against our Constitution, to
intrude in our personal lives. They led the fight to involve
government in the Terry Schiavo case. They're among the leading
opponents of stem cell research. All that time, they must have
been betting they wouldn't get caught taking their thirty pieces
of silver and selling out the millions who believed in them. 

Don't let them get away with it. Take action now -- tell them to
practice what they preach:
http://ga3.org/campaign/abramoff?rk=312r2n41vRrWW

***************************************
Powered by GetActive Software, Inc.
Member Relationship Management Solutions
That Recruit, Engage, and Retain (tm)
http://www.getactive.com
***************************************





From michael at michaelbutler.com  Wed Mar 15 20:45:40 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 20:45:40 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Carlyle Group Explores Acquisition of Port Operations By
	Ben	Hammer The Washington Business Journal
Message-ID: <C03E2D74.2A223%michael@michaelbutler.com>

    Go to Original

    Carlyle Group Explores Acquisition of Port Operations
    By Ben Hammer
    The Washington Business Journal

    Friday 10 March 2006

    Private equity firm The Carlyle Group established a team to acquire
public-purpose facilities such as ports a day after a United Arab Emirates
company said it would transfer newly acquired operations at American ports
to a U.S. organization.

    D.C.-based Carlyle Group announced an eight-person team would invest in
public-purpose infrastructure projects such as ports, transportation and
water facilities, airports, bridges and stadiums. The team will begin work
March 13.

    The new infrastructure team had been planned for six months, but the
Carlyle Group decided Thursday to launch it.

    DP World, a company owned by the United Arab Emirates, acquired a
British company that manages operations at six U.S. ports, but the House
Appropriations Committee voted 62-2 on March 8 to prevent it from taking
control of the ports.

    DP World will transfer the operations to a "U.S. entity," Sen. John
Warner, R-Va., said Thursday.

    The Carlyle Group, however, doesn't want to be that entity, says
spokesman Chris Ullman. "We have zero interest in that deal, and we will
continue to have no interest."

    Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., and others in Congress are considering
legislation that would block any foreign company from operating ports and
other key U.S. infrastructure. If that legislation is approved, it could
give The Carlyle Group and other private equity firms opportunities to buy
foreign-owned operations at a discount.

    The new public infrastructure investment group is co-headed by Robert
Dove, former executive vice president at Bechtel Enterprises, and Barry
Gold, former managing director and co-head of the structured finance group
at Citigroup/Salomon Smith Barney.

    "We are at a crossroads of the right market, right private equity firm
and right team with complementary skills and experience," Gold says in a
statement. "As a U.S. firm with exceptional experience in government
contracting, Carlyle is now well positioned to invest in U.S. and other
infrastructure either alone or as part of a consortium."

    Carlyle's infrastructure team will invest primarily in U.S.
infrastructure in transactions ranging from $100 million to more than $1
billion. It will enter into public-private partnerships with federal, state
and local governments by purchasing projects outright or through long-term
concessions.

 


From michael at intrafi.com  Wed Mar 15 20:48:00 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (Michael)
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 23:48:00 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] 'The Democrats: Still Ducking' from The Nation
Message-ID: <200603160448.k2G4m0Cx023457@thor.thenation.com>

If you like this article, please consider subscribing to The Nation at special
discounted rates. You can order online https://ssl.thenation.com or call our
toll-free number at 1-800-333-8536.

Thought you would be interested in this article from The Nation.

   The Democrats: Still Ducking 
   by Ari Berman


Iraq returned as a central theme in George W. Bush's State of the Union
address this year. With the war on the minds of many members of the
public and with the 2006 midterm elections approaching, it seemed
natural that the opposition party would forcefully challenge the
President's policy. Instead, the Democrats ducked and covered. Virginia
Governor Tim Kaine devoted a mere three sentences to the Iraq War in his
official Democratic response to Bush. Representative Rahm Emanuel, a
leading party strategist, didn't even mention Iraq when asked on
television what his party would do differently from the Republicans--a hint of how the Democrats have downplayed the issue internally. 

On the advice of top party consultants, the Democrats in the run-up to
the 2006 midterm vote are either ignoring Iraq and shifting to domestic
issues (the strategy in the 2002 midterm elections) or supporting the
war while criticizing Bush's handling of it (the strategy in the 2004
presidential election). Three years into the conflict most Democrats can
finally offer a cogent critique of how the Bush Administration misled
the American people and mismanaged the Iraqi occupation, but they're
unwilling or unable to suggest clearly how the United States should
extricate itself from that mess. 

To be sure, some highly visible leaders of the party, including
Democratic National Committee chair Howard Dean and House minority
leader Nancy Pelosi, have publicly advocated an end to the war. "We do
need to make it clear to the American people that after this savaging
we've taken at the hands of [Karl] Rove, we are going to stand up for
the country and that we have a better plan," Dean told The Nation.
"We're not going to make a permanent commitment to a failed strategy,
which is what Bush has actually done." But even Dean and Pelosi have
done little within party channels to push for a change in position among
their prowar colleagues. For now, many prominent Democrats continue to
follow the advice of the party's risk-averse consultants and foreign
policy intelligentsia--a cautious tack that is unlikely to satisfy
voters' desire for change on the crucial issue of the day.

For more than a year Iraq has topped the list of voter concerns in poll
after poll. Asked what should be the highest priority for America this
year, the largest number of respondents in the latest NBC/Wall Street
Journal poll chose bringing most of the troops home. Sixty-six percent
of the public want the United States to "reduce its number of troops,"
with those respondents favoring a timeline for withdrawal by a margin of
2 to 1. Some 72 percent of American troops serving in Iraq think the
United States should exit the country in the next year, a recent Zogby
poll found. "The elites in Washington are thinking a hell of a lot
different than the people right now," says Joe Trippi, Dean's former
campaign manager. "And someone's really wrong."

Democratic officials' decision to listen to the political elites is
proving costly. This past September a Pew Research poll found that while
only 30 percent of voters thought Bush had a "clear plan" on Iraq, a
mere 18 percent believed that Democrats in Congress promised a
"clear alternative." For a moment on November 17, when
Representative Jack Murtha boldly called on Bush to bring the troops
home, the Democrats seemed to have found such a voice--and with it an
opportunity to shift the debate to how to exit Iraq, not whether to
stay. Sure, plans to redeploy US troops within a year or two, sponsored
by Russ Feingold in the Senate, the Out of Iraq Caucus in the House and
the Center for American Progress (CAP), were already on the table. But
none brought with it the standing and sense of urgency of Murtha, who
previously had been known on Capitol Hill as the dean of the defense
hawks.

Yet with the exception of Pelosi, who endorsed his plan, Murtha was kept
at arm's length by the rest of the Democratic leadership. "Jack Murtha
speaks for Jack Murtha," Emanuel, chair of the Democratic Congressional
Campaign Committee, which recruits and supports prospective House
candidates, said on the day of Murtha's announcement. "As for Iraq
policy, at the right time, we'll have a position." 

Steny Hoyer, number-two House Democrat and unabashed war supporter, said
that "a precipitous withdrawal" could lead to "disaster." A Washington
Post survey of eight prominent foreign policy advisers found that
only one, former Carter Administration National Security Adviser
Zbigniew Brzezinski, proposed a clear plan for how to get out. The
resulting headlines--DEMOCRATIC LAWMAKERS SPLINTER ON IRAQ, DEMOCRATS FIND IRAQ ALTERNATIVE IS ELUSIVE, DEMOCRATS FEAR BACKLASH AT POLLS FOR ANTIWAR REMARKS--reflected the disarray. As prominent
Democrats shied away from the fight, Bush went on the offensive
with a series of Iraq speeches, allowing Republicans to caricature
Murtha's plan as "cut and run." Pollster Mark Penn and Democratic
Leadership Council founder Al From warned that foes of the war "could be
playing with political dynamite" and needed to be "extremely careful."
These Democrats seemed transfixed by the ghost of George McGovern,
instead of reacting to the mounting unease with Bush's policies.
"Democrats are so obsessed with not looking 'weak' on defense that they
end up making themselves look weak, period, by the way they respond to
Republican attacks on their alleged weakness," Washington Post columnist
E.J. Dionne noted in mid-December. 

Democrats in Congress subsequently went mute on the war. By mid-February
even Pelosi was reassuring nervous party strategists that there would be
no specific talk of Iraq when the Democrats unveiled their own version
of the GOP's Contract With America later this year. The bulk of
Democratic strategists approved of the no-details-on-Iraq approach.

"You can't hope the Democrats will ever have a unified message, other
than a unified critique of how Bush mishandled the war," says Steve
Elmendorf, a former chief of staff to Representative Dick
Gephardt and senior adviser to the Kerry campaign who's helping plan the
Democratic agenda for '06. "The point of an agenda is to be unified, and
the party clearly won't be." Nor is it realistic to expect they should
be, says longtime political adviser Paul Begala: "I don't think a
Congressional candidate ought to presume to be able to solve unsolvable
problems." As an example Begala praises Bob Casey Jr., a conservative
Democrat from Pennsylvania who's criticized his opponent, Senator
Rick Santorum, for his allegiance to President Bush but has also
indicated that he would have voted for the Iraq War and has ruled out
any plan for troop withdrawals. Karl Struble, a media consultant to
Kaine and former Senator Tom Daschle who'll produce campaign spots for
Democratic Senate candidates in Arizona, Nebraska, Washington and West
Virginia, says that Iraq "can't or shouldn't be the primary thing
Democrats talk about" in '06 campaigns. "When the tree's gonna fall, the
best thing to do is stay out of the way," he says.

The Democrats' prospective nominees for the presidency, who often
dictate the public image of the party even during midterm elections,
have largely heeded Struble's advice. "I do not believe that we
should allow this to be an open-ended commitment without limits or end,"
Senator Hillary Clinton, the most recognizable Democrat, wrote in a
letter to her constituents in late November. "Nor do I believe that we
can or should pull out of Iraq immediately." If the Iraqi elections were
successful, Clinton said, troops could begin coming home this year,
though she didn't specify when or how. When asked if the outcome of the
December elections met Clinton's criteria, her spokesperson Philippe
Reines answered, "The jury's still out." Clinton continues to speak
about Iraq only when she has to, in the most measured tones. Contenders
such as Joe Biden, Evan Bayh and Wesley Clark have charted a similarly
fuzzy approach.

"The tone, unfortunately for the Democratic majority, has been set by
the two Clintons," says Brzezinski, a longstanding hawk and vocal critic
of the Iraq War, "who have decided that Senator Clinton's chances would
be improved if she can manage to appear as a kind of quasi-Margaret
Thatcher, and therefore she's been loath to come out with a decisive,
strong, unambiguous criticism of the war, with some straightforward
recommendations as to what ought to be done. And I'm afraid that has
contaminated the attitude of the other Democratic political leaders." 

It may be impossible to assume that discussion of the war can wait until
after November, given the recent events on the ground. If most
Democratic strategists have continued to counsel caution on Iraq, a few
do not--for moral and pragmatic reasons. "I think the Democrats are
afraid of the issue, but I don't think they should be," says Democratic
pollster Celinda Lake. Lake had previously fallen into the camp of
consultants who advised Democrats to ignore the war and pivot to
domestic issues. Now she says that approach is no longer possible, and
that Democrats must talk about a plan to bring troops home. "Iraq is the
essential factor in the voters' landscape," Lake says, the number-one
issue feeding distrust of the President and a desire for change.

And contrary to conventional wisdom, the public is much closer to Murtha
than most strategists realize, adds public opinion expert Ruy Teixeira.
"There is a big bloc of centrist voters dissatisfied with the President
who don't believe in Iraq, detest it and want to get out," Teixeira
says. Independent voters in particular favor a timeline for withdrawal
by 54 to 36 percent in a January CBS News poll. "There's an awful lot of
people in the party who think Jack Murtha was right," Dean says. "They
may not be saying so, but we know that they agree." 

A growing number of Democratic politicians, like their strategists, are
slowly beginning to realize that Democrats cannot focus on national
security without highlighting Iraq. Murtha has nearly 100 co-sponsors in
the House. Prominent Democrats, including Dean, former Senate majority
leader Tom Daschle and Senator Dianne Feinstein, have endorsed a
moderate version of Murtha's plan, sponsored by CAP, that would redeploy
all US troops by the end of 2007.

Dean personally believes that Democrats can, and may, coalesce around
the CAP plan. "My argument is that we need to be specific, because we
need to show strength and brainpower on defense," Dean says. "I think
having a clear plan to redeploy our troops, which would result in a much
smaller footprint in Iraq, makes sense." Democrats can win back the
House, Dean says, only with a "broad, clearly differentiated strategy"
from the Republicans, including on Iraq. Democratic candidates ranging
from Montana to Ohio to Rhode Island have bucked the permanent
Washington establishment and made ending the war a crucial part of their
campaigns.

"Prolonging the war is damaging us in every respect," says Brzezinski.
"The costs are quite extensive and if you add the economic costs [$1
trillion] and the costs in blood [roughly 20,000 US casualties], staying
the course is not a very attractive solution or definition of victory.
And I think Democrats could make that case intelligently and
forcefully."

With eight months to go until the 2006 elections, there's certainly time
for Democrats to push for a course correction on the war. Fiddling while
Iraq burns will likely only reinforce Republican stereotypes of
Democrats as calculating, gutless and unable to develop a strong and
sensible foreign policy that will protect Americans in a post-9/11
world. If Democrats once again fall into what Lake calls an "absence of
articulation," the midterm voting--despite all the Republican
scandals--could bring a replay of other years, proof of a party that has
become so afraid of losing it has forgotten what it takes to win.



This article can be found on the web at:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060327/berman



Visit The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/

Subscribe to The Nation:
https://ssl.thenation.com/

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Wed Mar 15 20:52:08 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (Ian)
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 23:52:08 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Carlyle Group Explores Acquisition of Port
	Operations ByBen	Hammer The Washington Business Journal
References: <C03E2D74.2A223%michael@michaelbutler.com>
Message-ID: <00fc01c648b5$626f2750$99ca6c42@iancn2ccrvzt0j>

Sometimes I really hate being right...

Peace.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Michael Butler" <michael at michaelbutler.com>
To: "Civic" <mb-civic at islandlists.com>
Sent: Wednesday, March 15, 2006 11:45 PM
Subject: [Mb-civic] Carlyle Group Explores Acquisition of Port Operations 
ByBen Hammer The Washington Business Journal


>    Go to Original
>
>    Carlyle Group Explores Acquisition of Port Operations
>    By Ben Hammer
>    The Washington Business Journal
>
>    Friday 10 March 2006
>
>    Private equity firm The Carlyle Group established a team to acquire
> public-purpose facilities such as ports a day after a United Arab Emirates
> company said it would transfer newly acquired operations at American ports
> to a U.S. organization.
>
>    D.C.-based Carlyle Group announced an eight-person team would invest in
> public-purpose infrastructure projects such as ports, transportation and
> water facilities, airports, bridges and stadiums. The team will begin work
> March 13.
>
>    The new infrastructure team had been planned for six months, but the
> Carlyle Group decided Thursday to launch it.
>
>    DP World, a company owned by the United Arab Emirates, acquired a
> British company that manages operations at six U.S. ports, but the House
> Appropriations Committee voted 62-2 on March 8 to prevent it from taking
> control of the ports.
>
>    DP World will transfer the operations to a "U.S. entity," Sen. John
> Warner, R-Va., said Thursday.
>
>    The Carlyle Group, however, doesn't want to be that entity, says
> spokesman Chris Ullman. "We have zero interest in that deal, and we will
> continue to have no interest."
>
>    Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., and others in Congress are considering
> legislation that would block any foreign company from operating ports and
> other key U.S. infrastructure. If that legislation is approved, it could
> give The Carlyle Group and other private equity firms opportunities to buy
> foreign-owned operations at a discount.
>
>    The new public infrastructure investment group is co-headed by Robert
> Dove, former executive vice president at Bechtel Enterprises, and Barry
> Gold, former managing director and co-head of the structured finance group
> at Citigroup/Salomon Smith Barney.
>
>    "We are at a crossroads of the right market, right private equity firm
> and right team with complementary skills and experience," Gold says in a
> statement. "As a U.S. firm with exceptional experience in government
> contracting, Carlyle is now well positioned to invest in U.S. and other
> infrastructure either alone or as part of a consortium."
>
>    Carlyle's infrastructure team will invest primarily in U.S.
> infrastructure in transactions ranging from $100 million to more than $1
> billion. It will enter into public-private partnerships with federal, 
> state
> and local governments by purchasing projects outright or through long-term
> concessions.
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Mb-civic mailing list
> Mb-civic at islandlists.com
> http://www.islandlists.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mb-civic
> 



From IHHS at aol.com  Wed Mar 15 14:14:47 2006
From: IHHS at aol.com (IHHS at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 17:14:47 EST
Subject: [Mb-civic] Swami Beyondananda
Message-ID: <E1FJkqf-0005aj-O3@smtpauth04.mail.atl.earthlink.net>

Swami Beyondananda's 2006 State of the  Universe
Address

By Swami Beyondananda

For years now, we've  been hearing "shift happens," and
wondering when, where and how. Now finally,  it looks
as if the shift is about to hit the fan. This is good
news for  all those shift fans who've been wondering if
the new age will arrive before  old age does. Of
course, if you're looking for signs in the news,  you
won't find them. At least, not yet. The news might as
well be called  the "olds," because the world still
seems stuck in greedlock, ruled by  fossilized fools
fueled by fossil fuels. But I have been  receiving
encouraging intelligence reports that say indeed,
humans are  becoming more intelligent. Yes, people
everywhere are wising up. And that's  great, because we
could sure use an up-wising!

The evolution has  begun. But before we see changes in
the old needy-greedy, we humans must  change our
consciousness -- and the first step is becoming
conscious of  how unconscious we've been. As the saying
goes, the truth shall upset you  free, and last year
saw lots of disillusionment. But what better to  free
us from the far more dangerous condition of
illusionment? If we want  to stop the abuse of power,
the first step is to disabuse ourselves. So,  here's
some good news: Despite a massive media impropaganda
machine that  feeds the public "babblum" (strained
bullshit made digestible for a simple  child's mind),
more and more Americans are reading between the lyins'
and  peering behind the Irony Curtain.

In 2005, Americans had to face the sad  realization
that the Bush Administration's "pro-life" stance
appears to be  limited to the unborn and the
brain-dead. Despite being panned by  critics
everywhere, the Iraqi Horror Picture Show continued
its run, as  thousands and thousands of born fetuses -
ours and theirs -- lost their right  to life. While we
may or may not have saved face by staying there, we
have  most definitely lost ass. And we've been assured
we'll be stuck in that  morass until -- well, until
there's no more ass to lose. Meanwhile, more and  more
Americans reached another sad conclusion: We're not in
Iraq to keep  the peace, we're there to keep the
pieces.

The signs of up-wising are  everywhere. Even the most
unpleasant stories are beginning to break through  the
soundless barrier and defy the President's "don't ask,
don't tell"  policy: "You promise not to ask us what
we're doing, and we promise not to  tell you." Although
we've been inundated with "fear-gnomes" and  ominously
warned we have to protect ourselves in this
dogma-eat-dogma  world, a majority of Americans are no
longer comfortable with the notion that  the only way
to defeat the "evil-doers" in the world is to out
evil-do  them. Although our President has assured us
that "we don't torture," it is  now common knowledge
that we simply send detainees to countries that  do
torture when we want them to "testify under oaf."

As for those  progressives who've been whining that
the President "never listens" to them,  well it turns
out he's been listening all along. And thanks to  the
so-called Patriot Act (which, I understand, is about
to be renamed the  Eternal Insecurity Act), it looks
like he'll be able to listen in even more  -- all in
the name of making us safe. But now even some
Republicans are  beginning to see that there's a
difference between protection and the  "protection
racket." And with the recent revelations about Tom
DeLay, Jack  Abramoff and other gold collar criminals,
some of the more devout  conservatives have come to
realize that the "family values" they voted for  bear
an uncanny resemblance to Soprano Family values. 

If there was  any warm feeling in 2005, chalk it up to
climate change. Katrina hit, and in  the government's
response we saw a future when at last all Americans
will  be equal -- where everyone regardless of race or
creed will be treated like  Black folks. 

Alarming Policies Have Awakened  Millions!

Fortunately this is the State of the Universe Address,
and  from a universal perspective, things are humming
along quite nicely. It turns  out that the Earth is the
talk of the Universe these days. In fact,  the
odds-makers at the Intergalactic Enquirer say the odds
are actually in  our favor: "We're betting on the human
race to reach critical mass before  they get to
critical massacre." And we could beat the odds, if we
finally  gave up our addiction to getting even and got
odd instead. It stands to  reason. If each of us used
our unique oddness to improve the odds for  everyone,
there would be no need for getting even. 

Yes, the up-wising  has begun, and intergalactic
observers are saying that we have none other  than
George W. Bush to thank. How is that, you may ask?
Well, I am  reminded of a story my guru Harry Cohen
Baba used to tell. A well-known  minister died and
arrived at the Pearly Gates at the same time as  a
cab-driver from New York. The cabbie was ushered in,
but the clergyman  was left waiting outside. After
waiting and waiting and waiting, he finally  called
over the attending angel. "Excuse me, but I'm a
renowned minister.  How come you let that cab-driver
in, and I'm left waiting out  here?"
"Well," the angel said, "when you preached, everyone
slept. But  when he drove, everyone prayed."

For millennia, spiritual teachers have  been calling
on us to go for the highest common denominator, but
we've  always seemed to end up with the lowest common
dominator instead. And now,  George W. Bush has done
what preachers, teachers and other  far-sighted
visionaries have failed to do up until now: His
policies have  been so alarming, that he has awakened a
slumbering body politic that slept  through all
previous alarms. Where others have failed, he has
people all  across the world praying, "God help us!"
And instead of waiting for an  intervention from above
-- after all, we cannot expect to be fed  intervenously
forever -- people are beginning to help themselves,
and even  more importantly, help each other.

Sure, there are still plenty of  Not-Sees out there
who insist on not seeing that we humans are all in  the
same boat. The good news is, more and more Americans
are getting that  sinking feeling that there's only one
Earthship, and ignoring a leak because  it's "on the
other side of the boat," is a mistake of  titanic
proportions.

We Are the Leaders We've Been Waiting  For

America, the world's only super-power, doesn't need a
revolution.  We've already had one, thank you. What is
needed now -- and what has already  begun -- is the
American Evolution where enough of us wake up and see
that  those two political parties have been partying on
our dime, and we the people  haven't been invited. Time
to go beyond choosing the lesser of two weasels.  If we
want to evolve the dream of our Founding Fathers --
instead of  devolve into the nightmare of Big Brother
-- we must become the leaders we've  been waiting for.
I've said it before. The only force more powerful than
a  super-power is a Super-Duper Power -- the power of
the people plus the power  of love. And anyone who
doesn't believe we are a Super-Duper Power, well  they
have been super-duped!

It's true, many people still feel that the  affairs of
the world should be left to the bolder and badder
among us. But  look what that leaves us with: Are you
satisfied choosing between Saddam  Hussein and George
Who's-Not-Sane? Now I know those "God, guns and  guts"
Old Testament Christians might have forgotten, but
Jesus did say  that the meek shall inherit the earth.
In all undue immodesty, maybe it's  time for us meek
folks to boldly step forth and accept our  inheritance.

For just as 2000 years ago Jesus stood up to a class
that  placed the rule of gold above the Golden Rule,
today we face the modern  version of the Pharisees --
the Phallusees, I think they are called.  They
cynically cloak themselves in religious robes, but the
only power  they trust is the power of the stick. Well,
there's another old saying: It  doesn't matter how big
your stick is, if you stick your stick where  it
doesn't belong, you're stuck. 

Another sign of the up-wising and  coming evolution is
that people are growing dissatisfied with  the
positionality of "my side vs. your side," and are
seeing the whole  issue of sides from a new angle: 
Maybe we're all on the same side. For  example, this
argument between creationism and evolution is just
another  way for dueling dualities to steal our energy.
I believe in both. I believe  the Creator created us to
evolve, otherwise Jesus would have said, "Now don't  do
a thing till I return." I have it on good authority
that the Creator is  pulling for us: "Come on, you
children of God. Time to grow up and become  adults of
God instead."

Time to Overgrow the System From the  Grassroots Up

The time for revolution and overthrowing has past.  Now
we need an evolution where we "overgrow" the current
dysfunctional  system from the grassroots up. You are
probably familiar with the story of  the Native
American grandfather who tells his grandson that there
are two  wolves fighting inside all of us: The wolf of
fear and anger, and the wolf of  love and peace.
"Which wolf will win?" asks the young boy.
"Whichever one  we feed," replies the grandfather.

And so when people ask me to predict  what will
happen, I tell them the only thing I can predict with
certainty  is the uncertainty of any prediction. The
future's just too unpredictable  these days. This is a
Universe of infinite possibilities, so it all  depends
on which futures we invest in. 

There is something far more  empowerful than
predictions, and that is Tell-A-Vision. If you're fed
up  with the current programming, my advice is turn off
your TV and tell a vision  instead. That way, we will
have healing and functional visions to step into  --
and that beats what we've been stepping into. So I
will tell my vision  for 2006: This is the year of the
American Evolution, where all those who  prefer the
Golden Rule to the rule of gold get past left and
right, and  come front and center. 

I see Americans of all political stripes, plaids  and
polka dots (not to mention solids), choosing to face
the music and  dance together. Sure, we'll have to
learn some new steps, but it's time for a  new dance -
A-Bun-Dance. That is where we get up off our assets,
move our  buns, and dance together in rhythm and flow.
And what better way to turn the  funk into function,
and leave the junk at the junction? 

I see us in a  new reality show -- Extreme Planetary
Makeover -- where everyone can play and  everyone can
win. Just think. Something more compelling than
reality TV  ... it's called reality!

I know, I know. Only a crazy person would dare  to
propose anything that sane. But maybe it's time to
declare the current  institutionalized insanity
illegally insane, and set about building a sane  asylum
big enough for all six and a half billion of us. As my
guru Harry  Cohen Baba has said, "Life is like a good
deli. Even if something isn't on  the menu, if enough
people order it they have to make it." So what kind  of
new world order are we ordering up? Do we feed the
wolf of fear and buy  into the "it's every man for
himself" story? Or do we nourish the wolf of  love and
evolve into the "we're all in it together" story? 

If we're  going to be a Super-Duper Power, we have to
be super-duper powerful in  activating the power of
love, and cultivating the power of joy. So laugh  more.
Why not? We all know there's something funny going on.
The wall of  lies cannot withstand the vibration of
laughter. All seriousness aside, only  a farce field
that combines truth and laughter can bring down the
Irony  Curtain once and for all.

Release the old story -- been there, done that  -- and
speak the new story into the world. Dare to imagine
what we could  be doing if we weren't spending so much
of our livelihood on weapons of  deadlihood. Think
about it ... think tanks where they think  about
something other than tanks. Young people living for
their country  instead of dying for it. Health and
education fully funded, and the Air Force  having to
run a bake sale so they can buy a new bomber.

Can we change  the course of history? Can we shift our
karma into surpassing gear? I cannot  say for sure, but
if we choose to give up that old Dodge and trade it  in
for an Evolvo, that's a good first step. So ... let
the Evolution  begin. We don't have to wait until the
first Big Shot is fired. If we create  a powerful
enough field, the Big Shots will end up  firing
themselves.

May the FARCE -- as always -- be with  us.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060315/853008bb/attachment.htm 

From jameshburns at webtv.net  Thu Mar 16 01:04:49 2006
From: jameshburns at webtv.net (Jim Burns)
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 04:04:49 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] What If They Gave a Nuclear Explosion, and Nobody Came?
In-Reply-To: mb-hair-request@islandlists.com's message of Wed, 15 Mar 2006
	12:00:03 -0800
Message-ID: <11178-44192A31-8155@storefull-3273.bay.webtv.net>


Now, here's a thought.

(And remember, I hate that particular kind of paranoid think-speak,
whether it's from the right, or the left, of our political spectrum.

(Really.0

:-)

So, check this off to just, not even thinking out loud, but a random,
really bizarre, sudden notion, I had the other day.

Kind of like one of those absurist pieces of doggerels some of you have
heard me do, on radio (and elsewhere), every once in a long while.

Although, of course, this wouldn't be funny.

But with our strange weather patterns, it occured to me, that what if
everthing's been thrown off--

By some nuclear incident, of the last year.

Theoretically, all the crap that would have been put in the atmosphere,
might have been enough to, months later, change patterns...

And if there had been an atomic conflagration--

Whether a dropped bomb, a meltdown somewhere, or some other accident--

And, if it had happened in a country where such information would be
easy to conceal--

Think China, or elsewhere--

A news blackout, is conceivable.

(With the way things have been going, a blackout on information is
conceivable, for other areas, as well.)


I've been stunned, the last few months, at the number of even bright
people who have beeen happy about the absurdly, pleasant weather, here
in the North East, not realizing that in all likelihood, its cause is
something not entirely pleasant, at all.


The nuclear scenario is unlikely.

But imagine if a part of the planet had been destroyed.

And no one was the wiser.


Maybe we're just doing it, far more slowly.


Jim Burns


From grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net  Tue Mar 14 12:05:06 2006
From: grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net (Golsorkhi)
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2006 15:05:06 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] FW: Why Carter Sold Out Iran?
In-Reply-To: <F464987F-6526-4977-BE65-38D24D9DB0CB@thesamiis.com>
Message-ID: <E1FJjyU-00009x-7h@smtpauth04.mail.atl.earthlink.net>


------ Forwarded Message
From: Samii Shahla <shahla at thesamiis.com>
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 14:04:30 -0500
Subject: Why Carter Sold Out Iran?



> ?
> 
> Carter Sold out Iran 1977-1978
> Chuck Morse
> As if a light were switched off, the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlevi,
> portrayed for 20 years as a progressive modern ruler by Islamic standards, was
> suddenly, in 1977-1978, turned into this foaming at the mouth monster by the
> international left media. Soon after becoming President in 1977, Jimmy Carter
> launched a deliberate campaign to undermine the Shah. The Soviets and their
> left-wing apparatchiks would coordinate with Carter by smearing the Shah in a
> campaign of lies meant to topple his throne. The result would be the
> establishment of a Marxist/Islamic state in Iran headed by the tyrannical
> Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The Iranian revolution, besides enthroning one of
> the worlds most oppressive regimes, would greatly contribute to the creation
> of the Marxist/Islamic terror network challenging the free world today.
> 
> ?At the time, a senior Iranian diplomat in Washington observed, President
> Carter betrayed the Shah and helped create the vacuum that will soon be filled
> by Soviet-trained agents and religious fanatics who hate America. Under the
> guise of promoting human rights, Carter made demands on the Shah while
> blackmailing him with the threat that if the demands weren?t fulfilled, vital
> military aid and training would be withheld. This strange policy, carried out
> against a staunch, 20 year Middle East ally, was a repeat of similar policies
> applied in the past by US governments to other allies such as pre Mao China
> and pre Castro Cuba.
> 
> ?Carter started by pressuring the Shah to release political prisoners
> including known terrorists and to put an end to military tribunals. The newly
> released terrorists would be tried under civil jurisdiction with the
> Marxist/Islamists using these trials as a platform for agitation and
> propaganda. This is a standard tactic of the left then and now. The free world
> operates at a distinct disadvantage to Marxist and Islamic nations in this
> regard as in those countries, trials are staged to show the political faith of
> the ruling elite. Fairtrials, an independent judiciary, and a search for
> justice is considered to be a western bourgeois prejudice.
> 
> ?Carter pressured Iran to allow for free assembly which meant that groups
> would be able to meet and agitate for the overthrow of the government. It goes
> without saying that such rights didn?t exist in any Marxist or Islamic nation.
> The planned and predictable result of these policies was an escalation of
> opposition to the Shah, which would be viewed by his enemies as a weakness. A
> well-situated internal apparatus in Iran receiving its marching orders from
> the Kremlin egged on this growing opposition.
> 
> ?By the fall of 1977, university students, working in tandem with a Shiite
> clergy that had long opposed the Shahs modernizing policies, began a well
> coordinated and financed series of street demonstrations supported by a media
> campaign reminiscent of the 1947-1948 campaign against Chinas Chiang Ki Shek
> in favor of the agrarian reformer Mao tse Tung. At this point the Shah was
> unable to check the demonstrators, who were instigating violence as a means of
> inflaming the situation and providing their media stooges with atrocity
> propaganda. Rumors were circulating amongst Iranians that the CIA under the
> orders of President Carter organized these demonstrations.
> 
> ?In November 1977, the Shah and his Empress, Farah Diba, visited the White
> House where they were met with hostility. They were greeted by nearly 4,000
> Marxist-led Iranian students, many wearing masks, waving clubs, and carrying
> banners festooned with the names of Iranian terrorist organizations. The
> rioters were allowed within 100 feet of the White House where they attacked
> other Iranians and Americans gathered to welcome the Shah. Only 15 were
> arrested and quickly released. Inside the White House, Carter pressured the
> Shah to implement even more radical changes. Meanwhile, the Soviets were
> mobilizing a campaign of propaganda, espionage, sabotage, and terror in Iran.
> The Shah was being squeezed on two sides.
> 
> ?In April 1978, Moscow would instigate a bloody coup in Afghanistan and
> install the communist puppet Nur Mohammad Taraki. Taraki would proceed to call
> for a jihad against the Ikhwanu Shayateen which translates into brothers of
> devils, a label applied to opponents of the new red regime in Kabul and to the
> Iranian government. Subversives and Soviet-trained agents swarmed across the
> long Afghanistan/Iran border to infiltrate Shiite mosques and other Iranian
> institutions. By November 1978, there was an estimated 500,000 Soviet backed
> Afghanis in Iran where, among other activities, they set up training camps for
> terrorists.
> 
> ?Khomeini, a 78-year-old Shiite cleric whose brother had been imprisoned as a
> result of activities relating to his Iranian Communist party affiliations, and
> who had spent 15 years in exile in Bath Socialist Iraq, was poised to return.
> In exile, Khomeini spoke of the creation of a revolutionary Islamic republic,
> which would be anti-Western, socialist, and with total power in the hands of
> an ayatollah. In his efforts to violently overthrow the government of Iran,
> Khomeini received the full support of the Soviets.
> 
> ?Nureddin Klanuri, head of the Iranian Communist Tudeh Party, in exile in East
> Berlin, stated, The Tudeh Party approves Ayatollah Khomeinis initiative in
> creating the Islamic Revolutionary Council. The ayatollahs program coincides
> with that of the Tudeh Party.? Khomeinis closest advisor, Sadegh Ghothzadeh,
> was well known as a revolutionary with close links to communist intelligence.
> In January 1998, Pravda, the official Soviet organ, officially endorsed the
> Khomeini revolution.
> 
> ?American leaders were also supporting Khomeini. After the Pravda endorsement,
> Ramsey Clark, who served as Attorney General under President Lyndon B.
> Johnson, held a press conference where he reported on a trip to Iran and a
> Paris visit with Khomeini. He urged the US government to take no action to
> help the Shah so that Iran could determine its own fate. Clark played a behind
> the scenes role influencing members of Congress to not get involved in the
> crisis. Perhaps UN Ambassador Andrew Young best expressed the thinking of the
> left at the time when he stated that, if successful, Khomeini would eventually
> be hailed as a saint.
> 
> ?Khomeini was allowed to seize power in Iran and, as a result, we are now
> reaping the harvest of anti-American fanaticism and extremism. Khomeini
> unleashed the hybrid of Islam and Marxism that has spawned suicide bombers and
> hijackers. PresidentJimmy Carter, and the extremists in his administration are
> to blame and should be held accountable.
> 
> 
> Chuck Morse Is the author of Why I?m a Right-Wing Extremist
> 
> 
> www.chuckmorse.com <http://www.chuckmorse.com/>
> 



------ End of Forwarded Message

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060314/287d1af4/attachment-0001.htm 

From newsletter at villagevoice.com  Wed Mar 15 21:41:01 2006
From: newsletter at villagevoice.com (Village Voice Newsletter)
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 00:41:01 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Today's 'Voice': 'V for Vendetta'--Anarchy in the U.K.
Message-ID: <20060316054101.7706.qmail@www3.villagevoice.com>

An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060316/527b6311/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Thu Mar 16 06:30:26 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 09:30:26 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Bush to Restate Terror Strategy - Washington Post
Message-ID: <44197682.2090003@comcast.net>

Bush to Restate Terror Strategy
2002 Doctrine of Preemptive War To Be Reaffirmed

By Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 16, 2006; A01

President Bush plans to issue a new national security strategy today 
reaffirming his doctrine of preemptive war against terrorists and 
hostile states with chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, despite the 
troubled experience in Iraq.

The long-overdue document, an articulation of U.S. strategic priorities 
that is required by law, lays out a robust view of America's power and 
an assertive view of its responsibility to bring change around the 
world. On topics including genocide, human trafficking and AIDS, the 
strategy describes itself as "idealistic about goals and realistic about 
means."

The strategy expands on the original security framework developed by the 
Bush administration in September 2002, before the invasion of Iraq. That 
strategy shifted U.S. foreign policy away from decades of deterrence and 
containment toward a more aggressive stance of attacking enemies before 
they attack the United States.

The preemption doctrine generated fierce debate at the time, and many 
critics believe the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq 
fatally undermined an essential assumption of the strategy -- that 
intelligence about an enemy's capabilities and intentions can be 
sufficient to justify preventive war.

In his revised version, Bush offers no second thoughts about the 
preemption policy, saying it "remains the same" and defending it as 
necessary for a country in the "early years of a long struggle" akin to 
the Cold War. In a nod to critics in Europe, the document places a 
greater emphasis on working with allies and declares diplomacy to be 
"our strong preference" in tackling the threat of weapons of mass 
destruction.

"If necessary, however, under long-standing principles of self defense, 
we do not rule out use of force before attacks occur, even if 
uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy's attack," the 
document continues. "When the consequences of an attack with WMD are 
potentially so devastating, we cannot afford to stand idly by as grave 
dangers materialize."

Such language could be seen as provocative at a time when the United 
States and its European allies have brought Iran before the U.N. 
Security Council to answer allegations that it is secretly developing 
nuclear weapons. At a news conference in January, Bush described an Iran 
with nuclear arms as a "grave threat to the security of the world."

Some security specialists criticized the continued commitment to 
preemption. "Preemption is and always will be a potentially useful tool, 
but it's not something you want to trot out and throw in everybody's 
face," said Harlan Ullman, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic 
and International Studies. "To have a strategy on preemption and make it 
central is a huge error."

A military attack against Iran, for instance, could be "foolish," Ullman 
said, and it would be better to seek other ways to influence its 
behavior. "I think most states are deterrable."

Thomas Donnelly, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute 
who has written on the 2002 strategy, said the 2003 invasion of Iraq in 
the strict sense is not an example of preemptive war, because it was 
preceded by 12 years of low-grade conflict and was essentially the 
completion of the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Still, he said, recent problems 
there contain lessons for those who would advocate preemptive war 
elsewhere. A military strike is not enough, he said; building a 
sustainable, responsible state in place of a rogue nation is the real 
challenge.

"We have to understand preemption -- it's not going to be simply a 
preemptive strike," he said. "That's not the end of the exercise but the 
beginning of the exercise."

The White House plans to release the 49-page National Security Strategy 
today, starting with a speech by national security adviser Stephen J. 
Hadley to the U.S. Institute of Peace. The White House gave advance 
copies to The Washington Post and three other newspapers.

The strategy has no legal force of its own but serves as a guidepost for 
agencies and officials drawing up policies in a range of military, 
diplomatic and other arenas. Although a 1986 law requires that the 
strategy be revised annually, this is the first new version since 2002. 
"I don't think it's a change in strategy," Hadley said in an interview. 
"It's an updating of where we are with the strategy, given the time 
that's passed and the events that have occurred."

But the new version of the strategy underscores in a more thematic way 
Bush's desire to make the spread of democracy the fundamental 
underpinning of U.S. foreign policy, as he expressed in his second 
inaugural address last year. The opening words of the strategy, in fact, 
are lifted from that speech: "It is the policy of the United States to 
seek and support democratic movements and institutions in every nation 
and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world."

The strategy commits the administration to speaking out against human 
rights abuses, holding high-level meetings at the White House with 
reformers from repressive nations, using foreign aid to support 
elections and civil society, and applying sanctions against oppressive 
governments. It makes special mention of religious intolerance, 
subjugation of women and human trafficking.

At the same time, it acknowledges that "elections alone are not enough" 
and sometimes lead to undesirable results. "These principles are tested 
by the victory of Hamas candidates in the recent elections in the 
Palestinian territories," the strategy says, referring to the radical 
group designated as a terrorist organization by the United States.

Without saying what action would be taken against them, the strategy 
singles out seven nations as prime examples of "despotic systems" -- 
North Korea, Iran, Syria, Cuba, Belarus, Burma and Zimbabwe. Iran and 
North Korea receive particular attention because of their nuclear 
programs, and the strategy vows in both cases "to take all necessary 
measures" to protect the United States against them.

"We may face no greater challenge from a single country than from Iran," 
the document says, echoing a statement made by Secretary of State 
Condoleezza Rice last week. It recommits to efforts with European allies 
to pressure Tehran to give up any aspirations of nuclear weapons, then 
adds ominously: "This diplomatic effort must succeed if confrontation is 
to be avoided."

The language about confrontation is not repeated with North Korea, which 
says it already has nuclear bombs, an assertion believed by U.S. 
intelligence. But Pyongyang is accused of a "bleak record of duplicity 
and bad-faith negotiations," as well as of counterfeiting U.S. currency, 
trafficking in drugs and starving its own people.

The strategy offers a much more skeptical view of Russia than in 2002, 
when the glow of Bush's friendship with President Vladimir Putin was 
still bright.

"Recent trends regrettably point toward a diminishing commitment to 
democratic freedoms and institutions," it says. "We will work to try to 
persuade the Russian Government to move forward, not backward, along 
freedom's path."

It also warns China that "it must act as a responsible stakeholder that 
fulfills its obligations" and guarantee political freedom as well as 
economic freedom. "Our strategy," the document says, "seeks to encourage 
China to make the right strategic choices for its people, while we hedge 
against other possibilities."

To assuage allies antagonized by Bush's go-it-alone style in his first 
term, the White House stresses alliance and the use of what it calls 
"transformational diplomacy" to achieve change. At the same time, it 
asserts that formal structures such as the United Nations or NATO may at 
times be less effective than "coalitions of the willing," or groups 
responding to particular situations, such as the Asian tsunami of 2004.

Beyond the military response to terrorism, the document emphasizes the 
need to fight the war of ideas against Islamic radicals whose 
anti-American rhetoric has won wide sympathy in parts of the world.

The strategy also addresses topics largely left out of the 2002 version, 
including a section on genocide and a new chapter on global threats such 
as avian influenza, AIDS, environmental destruction and natural 
disasters. Critics have accused the administration of not doing enough 
to stop genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan, responding too slowly to 
the Asian tsunami and disregarding global environmental threats such as 
climate change.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/15/AR2006031502297.html?referrer=email
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060316/01c8494d/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Thu Mar 16 06:32:50 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 09:32:50 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Prosecutors Scramble to Salvage 9/11 Case After Ruling -
 Washington Post
Message-ID: <44197712.2070904@comcast.net>

Prosecutors Scramble to Salvage 9/11 Case After Ruling

By Jerry Markon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 16, 2006; A10

Federal prosecutors yesterday implored a judge to reverse her decision 
banning key witnesses from testifying at the death penalty trial of 
Zacarias Moussaoui, saying the misconduct of a government lawyer they 
labeled a "lone miscreant" should not imperil the case.

Calling it unprecedented and "grossly punitive," prosecutors said her 
ruling devastates their argument that Moussaoui should be executed for 
the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. U.S. District Judge Leonie M. 
Brinkema on Tuesday barred seven witnesses and all aviation security 
evidence from the trial, saying the actions of Transportation Security 
Administration lawyer Carla J. Martin had tainted the process beyond repair.

At a minimum, prosecutors urged Brinkema to let them present a portion 
of the disputed evidence through a new witness who had no contact with 
Martin. A veteran government lawyer, Martin shared testimony and 
communicated with the seven witnesses in violation of a court order and 
committed what Brinkema called other "egregious errors."

"The evidence goes to the very core of our theory of the case," the 
prosecutors wrote in a motion for reconsideration, filed late yesterday. 
"Accordingly, the public has a strong interest in seeing and hearing it, 
and the court should not eliminate it from the case."

After her ruling Tuesday, prosecutors told Brinkema in a teleconference 
that she had threatened the sentencing phase of the only person 
convicted in the United States on charges stemming from the Sept. 11 
attacks. Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert A. Spencer told her that 
resuming the proceedings, which began last week in U.S. District Court 
in Alexandria and are on hold until Monday, would "waste the jury's time."

"We don't know whether it is worth us proceeding at all, candidly, under 
the ruling you made today," he told Brinkema, according a transcript 
obtained yesterday. "Without some relief, frankly, I think that there's 
no point for us to go forward."

In their filing late yesterday, however, prosecutors tried to salvage 
their case against Moussaoui, who pleaded guilty last year to conspiring 
with al-Qaeda in the Sept. 11 attacks. Prosecutors urged Brinkema to 
allow them to present the limited aviation evidence about how the 
Federal Aviation Administration issues "no fly" lists to keep suspected 
terrorists off airplanes.

"Permitting the government to offer this evidence will allow us to 
present our complete theory of the case, albeit in imperfect form," the 
filing concluded.

The filing said that scores of government officials have interviewed 
thousands of witnesses and compiled millions of documents in the 
Moussaoui case. "In this sea of government attorneys and agents who have 
assiduously played by the rules, Ms. Martin stands as the lone 
miscreant,'' the prosecutors wrote.

Prosecutors said Martin's misconduct may have risen to the level of 
criminal behavior, and they singled out an instance in which she told 
Assistant U.S. Attorney David J. Novak that witnesses sought by defense 
attorneys had refused to meet with them. Novak then relayed Martin's 
information, which Brinkema called "a baldfaced lie," to the defense.

Brinkema's ruling makes it highly unlikely that the jury would vote for 
death. The case has been challenging from the start because Moussaoui 
was sitting in jail when the planes were hijacked and flown into the 
World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Federal law allows executions only 
for those who kill someone or directly cause a death.

Prosecutors are trying to overcome that hurdle by saying that if 
Moussaoui had not lied to the FBI about his knowledge of the Sept. 11 
plot, the hijackings could have been prevented. Their argument has two 
key components. If Moussaoui had told the truth, the government says, 
the FBI would have scrambled to stop the hijackings -- and the Federal 
Aviation Administration would have increased security at the nation's 
airports.

With Brinkema's ruling, the entire second half of their case is lost, 
prosecutors said. The barred witnesses are federal airline security 
experts who would have testified about the measures the government would 
have taken based on Moussaoui's information, such as putting the 
hijackers on no-fly lists and scouring passengers for the small-bladed 
knives the hijackers used.

"Without aviation, they have no chance of showing that one of those four 
hijacked planes could have been stopped," said Andrew McBride, a former 
federal prosecutor in Alexandria closely following the case. "They 
promised the jury two parts: The FBI gets the right information if he 
blows the whistle, and steps are then taken at the airports. That second 
piece is now gone."

Complicating the situation further, it appeared questionable yesterday 
whether the government has a realistic chance of persuading a higher 
court to overturn Brinkema's decision if she declines to reverse it. 
Federal law says rulings that throw out evidence or testimony can be 
appealed only before trial.

The government could, legal experts said, take an unusual route by 
asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit to issue what is 
known as a writ of mandamus, which would order Brinkema to restore all 
or part of the disputed evidence.

But experts said that even the 4th Circuit, which tends to strongly 
support the government on national security issues and which overturned 
an earlier Brinkema ruling in the Moussaoui case, would be hesitant to 
intervene here. "It's a very high hurdle. They have to show a clear 
error in the law by Brinkema," McBride said. "I don't think they have an 
appeal."

The legal maneuvering was another twist in the often convoluted case 
against Moussaoui, 37, who pleaded guilty in April. A French citizen, 
Moussaoui said Osama bin Laden had personally instructed him to fly an 
airplane into the White House, but he denied involvement in the Sept. 11 
attacks. Moussaoui was first charged in December 2001, and the case has 
been delayed numerous times.

The latest problem emerged Monday, when prosecutors informed Brinkema 
that Martin had violated a court order by e-mailing trial transcripts to 
the seven aviation witnesses and coaching them on their testimony. 
Brinkema had earlier ruled that most witnesses could not attend or 
follow the trial and could not read transcripts.

Martin, who had been a liaison between prosecutors and the aviation 
witnesses, offered an extraordinary criticism of the prosecution case in 
her e-mails. She said the government's opening statement "has created a 
credibility gap that the defense can drive a truck through." And she 
questioned the core government argument that the Sept. 11 attacks could 
have been prevented by heightened security at airports.

Brinkema issued her ruling at the close of a hearing Tuesday that 
explored Martin's actions.

In their motion yesterday, prosecutors said the testimony of five of the 
witnesses at the hearing showed that they "were not the least bit 
affected by Ms. Martin's e-mails and comments, other than to be annoyed 
by them. They learned no fact from Ms. Martin that they had not already 
known for years."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/15/AR2006031501121.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060316/62c13ec3/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Thu Mar 16 06:37:42 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 09:37:42 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] More Rallies,
	No Sale - David S. Broder - Washington Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <44197836.7020407@comcast.net>

More Rallies, No Sale
Bush Fails to Resolve Public Doubts About War

By David S. Broder
The Washington Post
Thursday, March 16, 2006; A23

On the third anniversary of the war in Iraq, President Bush once again 
finds himself trying to rally American public opinion to support that 
costly venture. The series of speeches that began this week comes 
against a background of deepening skepticism on the part of voters about 
the effort that began in March 2003 with a lightning strike against 
Saddam Hussein's forces.

A CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll, taken just as Bush began this latest 
oratorical push, found 57 percent of those surveyed said it was a 
mistake to start the war and 60 percent believe the struggle for 
democracy and order in that country is going badly. Only 1 voter in 3 
believes Bush has a clear plan for winning or ending the war.

It was that sense of futility that Bush sought once again to overcome in 
his speech Monday at George Washington University. Acknowledging that 
with sectarian violence raging, "we still have difficult work ahead in 
Iraq," the president nonetheless found "signs of a hopeful future." He 
predicted that the power struggle among factions of the Shiite, Sunni 
and Kurdish populations would give way to a government that "represents 
the will of the Iraqi people."

"We have a comprehensive strategy for victory in Iraq," he said, 
describing a victory that would enable American troops to leave the 
country in a position where terrorists no longer threaten and Iraqi 
forces can provide their own security.

That is a consummation devoutly to be wished for. But, as retired Marine 
Gen. Anthony Zinni, the former head of Central Command, which includes 
the Middle East, argues, the United States may be greatly mistaken in 
believing that it can determine the future of Iraq.

In his new book, "The Battle for Peace: A Frontline Vision of America's 
Power and Purpose," Zinni and co-author Tony Koltz recall the general's 
testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Feb. 11, 
2003, just a few weeks before Bush took the nation to war.

Zinni knew, he says, that many of his military colleagues believed 
Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld was underestimating the manpower needs 
for an occupation of Iraq. "And I had heard interpretations of 
intelligence that many of us with deep experience in the region felt 
were far off the mark from the true threat."

So when Sen. Norm Coleman, a Republican from Minnesota, asked Zinni if 
he did not agree that anything would be an improvement on Hussein, the 
general demurred. Recalling that the ouster of the Soviets from 
Afghanistan had left that country in the hands of the Taliban, Zinni 
said, "Anyone who has to live in this region and has to stay there and 
protect our interests, year in, year out, does not look at this as a 
start and end, as an exit strategy, as a two-year tenure. As long as you 
are going to have a U.S. Central Command, you are going to be out there 
and have to deal with whatever you put down on the ground."

Later in the book, Zinni says that "ignoring this reality, the United 
States and a handful of its allies forcibly evicted the Saddam Hussein 
regime, with no plans for a new order to replace it. Today, U.S. 
military forces in Iraq are mired in an ever-worsening insurgency. Civil 
war is an ever-growing danger. Disorder and chaos grow ever more 
entrenched."

This is not latter-day wisdom from the general. In the summer of 2002, 
seven months before the war began, he told an audience in Florida what 
would be required if the United States invaded Iraq. "You could inherit 
the country of Iraq, if you're willing to do it," he said. "If our 
economy is so great that you're willing to put billions of dollars into 
reforming Iraq. If you want to put soldiers that are already stretched 
so thin all around the world and add them into a security force there 
forever, like we see in places like the Sinai. If you want to fight with 
other countries in the region to try to keep Iraq together, as Kurds and 
Shiites try and split off, you're going to have to make a good case for 
that."

Now it is 2006, and Bush is still trying to make that case.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/15/AR2006031502182.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060316/feeccec5/attachment-0001.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Thu Mar 16 06:51:58 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 09:51:58 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] The Vexing Qualities of a Veto - George F. Will -
 Washington Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <44197B8E.6000704@comcast.net>

The Vexing Qualities of a Veto

By George F. Will
The Washington Post
Thursday, March 16, 2006; A23

In spite of President Bush's almost unprecedented reluctance to use the 
veto power conferred by the Constitution -- on March 23, Bush will have 
served longer without issuing a veto than any president since Thomas 
Jefferson, who vetoed nothing in two full terms -- he says the nation 
needs, and implies that he would robustly use, a line-item veto power 
that Congress can and should give him. But both the "can" and the 
"should" are problematic.

The word "veto" is not in the Constitution. It says "every bill" passed 
by both houses of Congress must be "presented" to the president, who 
must sign "it" or return "it" to Congress. The antecedent of the pronoun 
is the entire bill, not bits of it. As President George Washington 
understood: "I must approve all the parts of a bill, or reject it in toto."

That did not matter then: The only appropriations bill passed by the 
First Congress in 1789 was just 142 words. Besides, early presidents, 
according to historian Forrest McDonald, considered appropriations 
"permissive, not mandatory," and effectively exercised a line-item veto, 
as when Jefferson refused to spend $50,000 for gunboats he deemed 
unnecessary.

Forty-three governors have, and many presidents have coveted, the power 
to veto line items. And the presidential veto power has been partially 
vitiated by big government -- by Congress's presenting presidents with 
11 elephantine appropriations bills that make vetoes messy.

In 1996 a Republican-controlled Congress gave President Bill Clinton the 
power to cancel items that Congress could repass in a stand-alone 
measure. If the president then rejected that, Congress had to muster 
two-thirds majorities in each house to override him. But in 1998 the 
Supreme Court frowned. It said canceling is indistinguishable from 
repealing, which is legislating -- writing, not executing laws.

Indeed, the 1996 act made the president the potentially dominant 
legislator, able to treat a bill as a cafeteria from which he could take 
whatever he liked. The Constitution does not empower Congress to yield 
its powers. And a perhaps insoluble and hence disqualifying problem with 
the line-item veto is this: Legislation, as truncated by a president 
using a line-item veto, might never have attracted a congressional majority.

Not only is the constitutionality of the line-item veto questionable, 
so, too, is the veto's utility as a restraint on spending. Arming 
presidents with a line-item veto might increase federal spending, for 
two reasons.

First, Josh Bolten, director of the Office of Management and Budget, may 
be exactly wrong when he says the veto would be a "deterrent" because 
legislators would be reluctant to sponsor spending that was then singled 
out for a veto. It is at least as likely that, knowing the president can 
veto line items, legislators might feel even freer to pack them into 
legislation, thereby earning constituents' gratitude for at least trying 
to deliver.

Second, presidents would buy legislators' support on other large matters 
in exchange for not vetoing the legislators' favorite small items. 
During the two-year life of the line-item veto, Vice President Al Gore 
promised that Clinton would use the bargaining leverage it gave him to 
get legislators to increase welfare spending.

The line-item veto's primary effect might be political, and inimical to 
a core conservative value. It would aggravate an imbalance in our 
constitutional system that has been growing for seven decades: the 
expansion of executive power at the expense of the legislature. This 
ongoing development has been driven by wars hot and cold, and by 
today's, which is without a foreseeable end.

Time, and perhaps the Supreme Court, will tell whether the president's 
proposed line-item veto -- Congress would have 10 days to ratify or 
oppose his proposed cancellations -- passes constitutional muster. Sen. 
Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) thinks the president can unilaterally erase much 
"earmark" spending -- $52.1 billion in fiscal 2005 -- by directing 
executive branch officials to ignore spending that is ordered by 
congressional committee reports but is not included in the text of the 
actual appropriation bills.

In any case, about 62 cents of every dollar the federal government 
spends goes automatically to entitlements (54 cents) and debt service (8 
cents). An additional 21 cents is for defense and homeland security. The 
line-item veto concerns the remaining 17 cents. That is not trivial: 
Savings always come at the margin. As California's governor, Ronald 
Reagan used his line-item veto to cut an average of 2 percent from 
spending bills. The governor of Texas from 1995 through 2000 used his 
line-item veto on bills totaling $265.1 billion -- cutting just .043 
percent from those bills that he said reflected his state's conservatism.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/15/AR2006031502177.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060316/ed10ea05/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Thu Mar 16 07:03:46 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 10:03:46 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Steps Toward Unity in Iraq - David Ignatius - Washington
	Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <44197E52.2090405@comcast.net>

Steps Toward Unity in Iraq

By David Ignatius
The Washington Post
Thursday, March 16, 2006; A23

BAGHDAD -- There has been so much bad news out of Iraq lately that you 
have to pinch yourself when good things seem to be happening. But there 
are unmistakable signs here this week that Iraq's political leaders are 
taking the first tentative steps toward forming a broad government of 
national unity that could reverse the country's downward slide.

What has brought Iraq's political factions together is the crisis that 
followed the Feb. 22 bombing of the Samarra mosque, which raised the 
danger that Iraq might tumble into a full-scale civil war. The country's 
political leaders seemed to realize, as they stood at the brink, that 
they would either come together or Iraq would fall apart. So far they 
seem to be choosing unity -- or at least serious talks about unity.

The venue has been a series of meetings this week that have included all 
of the country's major political factions. This conclave was proposed a 
week ago by U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad. His idea was that the 
political leaders should all gather, in rural Iraq or perhaps at a 
Baghdad hotel, and keep meeting until they hammered out a new government.

The factional leaders promptly endorsed these "make or break" 
negotiations, though they decided to meet on each other's turf. The 
first meeting of about two dozen political leaders and aides took place 
Sunday at the Baghdad headquarters of Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani, 
followed by a session Tuesday at the headquarters of Shiite leader Abdul 
Aziz al-Hakim and a gathering Wednesday at the house of Iraqi President 
Jalal Talabani. Khalilzad has attended all of the sessions and has 
played a role like that of a mediator in a labor dispute.

Khalilzad told me in an interview in his office after Wednesday's 
session that the talks had produced tentative agreement on two basic 
points: First, the parties endorsed the idea of a unity government that 
would include all the major factions. Second, they agreed that this 
government should have a top-level "national security commission" that 
would include representatives of all the major political parties. 
Operating by consensus, this body would frame the broad outlines of 
policy, subject to the Iraqi constitution.

This week's dialogue broke the deadlock over the composition of the 
coalition. A month ago, radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr was 
refusing to endorse any government that included the party of Ayad 
Allawi, a close ally of the United States who, as interim prime 
minister, had ordered a military strike against Sadr and his Mahdi Army 
militia. Khalilzad said Wednesday that the logjam was broken "because 
people realized that if one side has red lines, all sides will have red 
lines." He said of this week's gatherings: "These are the best meetings 
of Iraqis I've seen since I've been here."

The U.S. ambassador's upbeat account is believable because it is echoed 
by Iraqi political leaders. Adel Abdul Mahdi, Iraq's vice president and 
a representative of Hakim and his powerful Shiite party known as the 
Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, told me Wednesday: 
"We have a common understanding on major issues -- on the need for 
consensus and on a national security commission. What makes me confident 
is that I think we are building up a sense of understanding among 
different communities." He said the message of the new government must 
be: "No one is outside of the law, whether the Badr Organization [the 
Supreme Council's militia], the Mahdi Army or the insurgency."

One seeming obstacle to unity has been fear about the role of Iran. To 
finesse that issue, Hakim said he is urging Iran to talk with the United 
States about Iraq's political future. Khalilzad himself has been quietly 
exploring what he calls the "modalities" for such U.S.-Iran talks on Iraq.

One hint of the new spirit of accord (and also of the political 
jockeying taking place) emerged when I visited Ahmed Chalabi, a Shiite 
politician who has allied himself over the past year with Sadr and with 
Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jafari. With Chalabi Wednesday was Sheik 
Khalaf Elayan, one of the leaders of the biggest Sunni party. Chalabi 
seems to be seeking Sunni political allies, believing that they will be 
a crucial part of the next government. He also believes that Sunni 
tribal leaders such as Khalaf are working to stop the al-Qaeda leader 
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

The Iraqi political dialogue will move into a new and potentially 
fractious stage soon, when the leaders begin bargaining over who will 
hold top positions in the new government. Those negotiations could blow 
apart the fragile hopes for a unity government. But, for a change, 
pessimism isn't necessarily the right bet for Iraq.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/15/AR2006031502180.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060316/afd7639a/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Thu Mar 16 07:06:35 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 10:06:35 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] 20 minutes for science - Donna Lucki - Boston Globe Op-Ed
Message-ID: <44197EFB.6090305@comcast.net>


  20 minutes for science

By Donna Lucki  |  March 16, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

WHILE MANY educators across the country are scrambling to prepare for 
standardized tests in reading and math this spring, it is easy to 
overlook the fact that time is running out not only for reading and math 
instruction, but also now for science instruction. In less than 12 
months, the stakes for national scholastic achievement will be raised 
even higher as teachers and students will face standardized tests in 
science.

In 2002, the federal legislation No Child Left Behind established 
benchmarks for academic achievement, as well as penalties for those 
schools that do not meet annual yearly progress in improving the 
performance of every student. In its first two phases, the No Child Left 
Behind law focused on reading and math skills. Widely considered core 
life skills, these two subject areas are what most schools spend the 
majority of their day focusing on. However, under the law's newest 
phase, schools must also focus on improving student achievement in the 
field of science.

Starting in 2007, the No Child Left Behind law will require that all 
schools measure students' progress in science every year at least once 
in each of three grade spans (grades 3 through 5, 6 through 9, and 10 
through 12). In Massachusetts, the MCAS exam currently tests students in 
grades 5 and 8. Within two years, in order to graduate, sophomores must 
pass a competency exam in one of four science content areas: biology, 
chemistry, introductory physics, or technology/engineering.

The question becomes: Is your school district ready? How rigorous is 
your district's science curriculum? How much time do the district's 
elementary, middle, and high school students spend on science 
instruction? These are the questions we should be asking our educators, 
especially if students' diplomas hang in the balance.

If you ask teachers to list their most significant challenges, they will 
undoubtedly include not having enough instructional time among the top 
issues they face. While reading, math, science, social studies, and 
other classes compete for time in each student's day, reading and 
language arts always garner the greatest amount of instructional time. 
Many elementary schools spend at least one third of their day on reading 
and language arts. Second to reading, mathematics instruction receives a 
significant share of the daily schedule as well. When the remaining time 
in the day is divided among the other subject areas, science and social 
studies typically receive only 20 minutes of instructional time per day.

Twenty minutes. What can a teacher accomplish in 20 minutes? Perhaps the 
teacher can introduce the class to one new concept. Perhaps there is 
some discussion; perhaps some exploration, or in some cases students 
participate in a hands-on experiment. However, in today's classrooms, 
there is rarely time in the daily science lesson to include all of the 
above.

The second challenge many teachers face is a lack of background of 
science content. If you were to ask those teachers how comfortable they 
are teaching science, the question is sure to be met with hesitation. 
Many teachers admit that science is not their area of expertise and say 
they feel somewhat unprepared to teach science lessons.

As we look for solutions to these problems, we need to think about the 
best way to get students motivated to want to learn science and to 
involve them in their own learning experiences. This begins by giving 
teachers the materials and tools they need to make science exciting. 
When teachers can stimulate a classroom environment of curiosity, the 
classroom will come alive as students have the ability to discover and 
unlock the answers to their questions through real world science content 
and experiences.

As our nation approaches the latest high-stakes chapter under federal 
law, it must first begin by ensuring that teachers are well equipped 
with the tools they need to help students be successful in the field of 
science. While science education may never have the luxury of receiving 
as much class time as reading and math, teachers must have the 
appropriate level of support in helping them craft and deliver their 
lessons.

Donna Lucki is president of the school division at Houghton Mifflin 
Company.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/16/20_minutes_for_science/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060316/b7bcaaa6/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Thu Mar 16 07:22:45 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 10:22:45 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Lessons of life and death - The Boston Globe
Message-ID: <441982C5.9070308@comcast.net>


  Lessons of life and death


    Afghan schools under siege as Taliban maintain grip

By Declan Walsh  |  March 16, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

SARKH DOZ, Afghanistan -- Remnants of the ousted Taliban regime have 
launched a campaign of arson, intimidation, and assassination targeting 
schools and teachers in southern Afghanistan, forcing some 200 schools 
to close in recent months, local officials say.

Five teachers have been killed, said Hayat Allah Rafiqi, head of the 
education department in Helmand province. Hundreds more teachers have 
received ''night letters" -- threatening notices nailed to their houses 
under darkness, warning them to quit teaching or die.

''Our teachers are helpless because security is so weak," Rafiqi said. 
''By day the government rules, but by night it is the hand of the Taliban."

The attacks, which President Hamid Karzai estimated have idled 100,000 
students in the south, have undermined attempts by the government to 
revive the country's educational system and teach both boys and girls -- 
a key to Afghanistan's recovery from decades of war. Girls were barred 
from attending school when the fundamentalist Islamic regime ruled the 
country in the 1990s.

While schools in Kandahar and Zabol provinces also have been targeted, 
Helmand has been particularly hard hit. Sixty-six of Helmand's 224 
schools -- many of them built or repaired with American aid -- have 
closed, and others have reduced classes as parents move pupils to the 
safety of the main towns. Even there, protection is uncertain.

In one of the Helmand attacks, assassins dragged a teacher from his 
classroom in the village of Nad Ali and shot him at the school gate. His 
crime: teaching girls.

Two days later, gunmen burst into Karte Laghan secondary school in the 
provincial capital, Laskhar Gah, killing a watchman and a student. The 
attack occurred less than a mile from the new British military base.

''We are always afraid of being shot or attacked on our way home," said 
Gul Ali, a female teacher of chemistry and biology at the school.

In rural areas, schools are particularly vulnerable.

An arson attack in January destroyed the lone school in the sleepy 
settlement of Sarkh Doz, near the sluggish Helmand river. Now the 
playground is ghostly quiet, the gate is bolted shut, and all that 
remains of the yellow classrooms is a charred shell of cinders and ash.

Residents say militants in a station wagon pulled up, doused the 
building in gasoline, and struck a match. Then the car roared up the 
rutted road to the next village, Mangalzai, and torched a school there, too.

The attacks on the schools have dealt a blow to aid efforts in Helmand, 
the volatile southern province where US troops are currently handing 
control to a 3,300-strong British force.

''Terrible," said police chief Ahmed Samonwal, shaking his head as he 
walked past the blackened building in Sarkh Doz. ''This is the work of 
our enemies."

While some teachers have quit, most of Helmand's 1,500 teachers are 
defying the threats. For some, it is a matter of patriotism; for others, 
the security of a $50 monthly salary.

''Of course we are afraid," said one teacher, Abdul Hakim. ''But this is 
our duty. For the sake of the next generation, our country, and our 
children, we cannot quit our jobs."

Hakim, a man with piercing gray eyes under a dark turban, teaches 
12-year-old boys at a school in Garmser district, a 90-minute drive 
south of Laskhar Gah. An atmosphere of fear pervades the town.

The police station is peppered with bullet holes since an attack by the 
Taliban in December that left nine dead. The town's school for girls is 
shut, Hakim said, and one of his colleagues who had received a night 
letter fled to Laskhar Gah. But the boys' school has not been targeted 
by the Taliban and remains open.

The Taliban's anti-education offensive is consistent with its virulent 
opposition to schooling for girls. But the campaign also serves a 
broader purpose -- to erode the tenuous authority of Karzai's government.

''This is not just about girls. The Taliban are against all education," 
said Sardar Muhammad of Mercy Corps, one of just five relief agencies 
operating in Helmand. ''Ignorant people are easier to control. When they 
were fighting their way to power [in the mid-1990s], only the uneducated 
were sent to the front."

The climate of terror also suits the province's drug barons with whom 
the Taliban have allied in recent months, local officials say. As a 
result, heroin and opium flow across the border into neighboring 
Pakistan and freshly trained insurgents travel from Pakistan in the 
opposite direction.

At his office, the newly appointed governor of Garmser, Haji Abdullah 
Jan, displayed an antitank mine rigged to a remote control device 
intended to kill him along a roadside earlier this month. ''Some 
villagers called me with a warning. Otherwise I would have driven into 
it," he said.

As NATO forces prepare to assume control in the south, securing the 
schools of Helmand will soon be a task for British paratroopers, about 
2,500 of whom are expected to start arriving in early May, backed up 
with Apache attack helicopters. But the British commander in Laskhar 
Gah, Colonel Henry Worsley, said their principal role was to train and 
support the fledgling Afghan security forces. ''In a place like Garmser 
we might help mount a check post, put a soldierly look on it, and tell 
them how to defend it," he said.

Haji Karim Khan, 65, considered his family's educational history. Four 
decades ago, he graduated from Kabul University, he said. During the 
bloody Soviet occupation, just one of his sons completed secondary school.

Now his six grandsons may not even make it that far -- they have just 
been moved to the town of Goreshk since all four local schools closed 
down. The people of Helmand say the Karzai government has abandoned 
them, he said.

''You just hear a small item at the end of the news saying the situation 
in the southwest is bad these days. But that is not enough. They need to 
tell us what they are going to do," he said. 

http://www.boston.com/news/world/middleeast/articles/2006/03/16/lessons_on_life_and_death/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060316/3407c1ef/attachment.htm 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: dingbat_story_end_icon.gif
Type: image/gif
Size: 49 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060316/3407c1ef/attachment.gif 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: spacer.gif
Type: image/gif
Size: 43 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060316/3407c1ef/attachment-0001.gif 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Thu Mar 16 09:53:11 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 17:53:11 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Hop on My Bandwidth
Message-ID: <20060316175312.1DBFD249EB0@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

OPINION | March 16, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor: Hop on My Bandwidth
By TIMOTHY B. LEE
The increasing ubiquity of free wireless Internet access is something to celebrate.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/16/opinion/16lee.html?ex=1143176400&en=df32848d8fbc74ba&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060316/40d2713c/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Thu Mar 16 09:56:11 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 17:56:11 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: A Candid Dutch Film May Be Too Scary for
	Immigrants
Message-ID: <20060316175612.02F1024AFB2@lax-gw02.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

INTERNATIONAL / EUROPE | March 16, 2006
Nijmegen Journal: A Candid Dutch Film May Be Too Scary for Immigrants
By GREGORY CROUCH
Potential immigrants must prove they are aware of the Netherlands' liberal values.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/16/international/europe/16dutch.html?ex=1143176400&en=8e63283d69a9ecbe&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060316/24f54098/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Thu Mar 16 09:57:08 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 17:57:08 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Once a Vision of Water,
	Mexico's Capital Now Thirsts for It
Message-ID: <20060316175708.8DAF63AE3A6@lax-gw06.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

INTERNATIONAL / AMERICAS | March 16, 2006
Once a Vision of Water, Mexico's Capital Now Thirsts for It
By ELISABETH MALKIN
The city serves as an arresting example of the effects on water supplies of unchecked urban growth.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/16/international/americas/16mexico.html?ex=1143176400&en=057bc414965dc363&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060316/3183532d/attachment-0001.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Thu Mar 16 10:00:16 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 18:00:16 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Bush Picks F.D.A. Chief,
	but Vote Is Unlikely Soon
Message-ID: <20060316180016.9948913B836@lax-gw04.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

WASHINGTON | March 16, 2006
Bush Picks F.D.A. Chief, but Vote Is Unlikely Soon
By GARDINER HARRIS
A vote on Dr. Andrew C. von Eschenbach will almost certainly be delayed by a dispute over the "morning after" contraceptive pill.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/16/politics/16fda.html?ex=1143176400&en=89f159c470f8e3b8&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060316/75dabbac/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Thu Mar 16 10:01:59 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: 16 Mar 2006 18:01:59 -0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] Headlines for March 16, 2006
Message-ID: <20060316180159.13066.qmail@trinity.democracynow.org>

Mike Blaxill  ( mblaxill at yahoo.com )
sent you this story from democracynow.org




+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  Headlines for March 16, 2006
|  http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/16/157255
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+


- Updated NSR Reaffirms Preemptive War, Singles Out Iran 
- UN Approves New Human Rights Council Over US Objections
- Saddam Condemns Civil Violence, Urges Attacks on Foreign Troops
- Top US General in Iraq Says Bases May Be Permanent
- Thousands of Ecuadorians Protest US Trade Talks
- Anniversary of Rachel Corrie Killing Marked World-Wide 
This story continues at: 
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/16/157255


From hecate at diamonddragon.com  Thu Mar 16 10:25:36 2006
From: hecate at diamonddragon.com (Hecate)
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 18:25:36 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] BBC E-mail: US backs first-strike attack plan
Message-ID: <20060316_182536_046321.hecate@diamonddragon.com>

Hecate saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you
should see it.

** Message **
Samarra today, Iran next week ?

** US backs first-strike attack plan **
The US will stick to its policy of pre-emptive attacks on states it considers hostile, the White House says.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/americas/4812562.stm >


** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all
in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/dailyemail/ >


** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have?been verified.

If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm


From hecate at diamonddragon.com  Thu Mar 16 10:28:46 2006
From: hecate at diamonddragon.com (Hecate)
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 18:28:46 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] BBC E-mail: Thousands march in French law row
Message-ID: <20060316_182846_026934.hecate@diamonddragon.com>

Hecate saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you
should see it.



** Thousands march in French law row **
Tens of thousands of French students take to the streets to protest against a controversial new labour law.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/europe/4812132.stm >


** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all
in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/dailyemail/ >


** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have?been verified.

If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm


From hecate at diamonddragon.com  Thu Mar 16 10:31:58 2006
From: hecate at diamonddragon.com (Hecate)
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 18:31:58 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] BBC E-mail: US and Iran agree to Iraq talks
Message-ID: <20060316_183158_033150.hecate@diamonddragon.com>

Hecate saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you
should see it.



** US and Iran agree to Iraq talks **
Iran and the US say they are prepared to hold talks on Iraq - in what would be their first public dialogue since 1979.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/4813048.stm >


** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all
in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/dailyemail/ >


** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have?been verified.

If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm


From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Thu Mar 16 11:35:08 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (Ian)
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 14:35:08 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Once a Vision of Water,
	Mexico's Capital Now Thirsts for It
References: <20060316175708.8DAF63AE3A6@lax-gw06.mroute.net>
Message-ID: <016001c64930$bd674f40$99ca6c42@iancn2ccrvzt0j>

E-Mail ThisAs I noted back when the gas "crisis" occurred after the two hurricanes, while everyone is worrrying about oil, the crisis we should be worrying about is water.  Already, one of out three people on earth do not have potable water.  And as we pollute our water, land (which leaches into the water table), and air (which inevitably finds its way to the ocean), water will become scarcer and scarcer - in spite of Evian, Poland Spring and Dasani.  (And maybe partly because of them...)

Peace.
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: mblaxill at yahoo.com 
  To: mb-civic at islandlists.com 
  Sent: Thursday, March 16, 2006 12:57 PM
  Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Once a Vision of Water,Mexico's Capital Now Thirsts for It


            
                
                   
                
                
             
              This page was sent to you by:  mblaxill at yahoo.com 

              INTERNATIONAL / AMERICAS   | March 16, 2006 
              Once a Vision of Water, Mexico's Capital Now Thirsts for It 
              By ELISABETH MALKIN 
              The city serves as an arresting example of the effects on water supplies of unchecked urban growth. 
             
             
                 
                     
                    1. Knock, Knock. It's Indian Comfort Food. 
                    2. A Southern Star Rises in the Lowcountry 
                    3. Silent Struggle: A New Theory of Pregnancy 
                    4. Study Links Ambien Use to Unconscious Food Forays 
                    5. Op-Ed Contributor: Working It Out 

                    ?  Go to Complete List 
                     
                   
                   
                          Advertisement 
                                Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

                                Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.
                                http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/   


                         
                   
                   
                     
                          Do you love NY? Get the insider's guide to where to stay, what to do and where to eat. Go to www.nytimes.com/travel for your NYC Guide now. Click here. 



                   
             
             
                
              Copyright 2006  The New York Times Company | Privacy Policy    
                 
       



------------------------------------------------------------------------------


  _______________________________________________
  Mb-civic mailing list
  Mb-civic at islandlists.com
  http://www.islandlists.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mb-civic
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060316/da3fd0cb/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Thu Mar 16 11:36:48 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 19:36:48 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Call for Censure Is Rallying Cry to Bush's
	Base
Message-ID: <20060316193650.797C411FA1D@lax-gw07.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

WASHINGTON | March 16, 2006
Call for Censure Is Rallying Cry to Bush's Base
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
Republicans have found a new rallying cry in the dreams of liberals about impeaching or censuring President Bush. 
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/16/politics/16impeach.html?ex=1143176400&en=4e8ead7c83c7365c&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060316/a3de1dbe/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Thu Mar 16 11:37:05 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 19:37:05 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Report Backs Iraq Strike and Cites Iran
	Peril
Message-ID: <20060316193705.9C7EE3AE6C6@lax-gw06.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

WASHINGTON | March 16, 2006
Report Backs Iraq Strike and Cites Iran Peril
By DAVID E. SANGER
An updated version of the Bush administration's national security strategy is the first in more than three years.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/16/politics/16strategy.html?ex=1143176400&en=9dfc9a07d9eafee5&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060316/d6ea67c9/attachment-0001.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Thu Mar 16 11:37:56 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 19:37:56 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: As U.S. Dissents,
	U.N. Approves a New Council on Rights Abuse
Message-ID: <20060316193756.1FD7524AFC2@lax-gw02.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

INTERNATIONAL | March 16, 2006
As U.S. Dissents, U.N. Approves a New Council on Rights Abuse
By WARREN HOGE
The U.N. overwhelmingly approved a new Human Rights Council to replace the widely discredited Human Rights Commission.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/16/international/16nations.html?ex=1143176400&en=febd01cdba48b5a0&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060316/5f047192/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Thu Mar 16 11:39:07 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 19:39:07 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Rep. Harris Pledges Fortune to Revive
	Senate Race
Message-ID: <20060316193907.CCD81249EA0@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

Cool! Now we can watch her go bankrupt while she loses the race anyway...


WASHINGTON | March 16, 2006
Rep. Harris Pledges Fortune to Revive Senate Race
By ABBY GOODNOUGH
Ending speculation about a withdrawal, Katherine Harris of Florida, who lags far behind Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson in polls, said she would spend her own money.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/16/politics/16harris.html?ex=1143176400&en=6d06de2d1a07f979&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060316/e1b08d88/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Thu Mar 16 11:39:51 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 19:39:51 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Move to Curb Gifts of Travel Creates Rift
	in House G.O.P.
Message-ID: <20060316193951.CD3B711FA20@lax-gw07.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

They are just SO addicted to those unethical perks!!!


WASHINGTON | March 16, 2006
Move to Curb Gifts of Travel Creates Rift in House G.O.P.
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Republican leaders insist a proposal barring lawmakers from privately financed trips is necessary to restore public faith in Congress before the November elections.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/16/politics/16lobby.html?ex=1143176400&en=fa9a8bcc8447996a&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060316/bef8c414/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Thu Mar 16 11:41:19 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 19:41:19 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Time to Scrap the Electoral College? (9
	Letters)
Message-ID: <20060316194121.A5C8C83CFF@lax-gw03.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

What we're saying... Am I the only one who is surprised by the continued support for this archaic system?


OPINION | March 16, 2006
Time to Scrap the Electoral College? (9 Letters)

To the Editor:.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/16/opinion/l16electoral.html?ex=1143176400&en=522e8c87934f5bd7&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060316/a9d47428/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Thu Mar 16 11:41:40 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 19:41:40 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Common Sense 1,
	Dubai Port Deal 0 (4 Letters)
Message-ID: <20060316194140.9E58D11F9CA@lax-gw07.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

What we're saying (2)...


OPINION | March 16, 2006
Common Sense 1, Dubai Port Deal 0 (4 Letters)

To the Editor:.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/16/opinion/l16friedman.html?ex=1143176400&en=df50d598ac43416f&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060316/490e5ca5/attachment.htm 

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Thu Mar 16 11:48:11 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 11:48:11 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Stop Bush's War By BOB HERBERT
Message-ID: <C03F00FB.2A28E%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 16, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Stop Bush's War
By BOB HERBERT

"By some estimates," according to a recent article in Foreign Affairs, "the
number of Iraqis who have died as a result of the [U.S.] invasion has
reached six figures ? vastly more than have been killed by all international
terrorists in all of history. Sanctions on Iraq probably were a necessary
cause of death for an even greater number of Iraqis, most of them children."

Not everyone agrees that Iraqi deaths have reached six figures. President
Bush gave an estimate of 30,000 not too long ago. That's probably low, but
horrendous nevertheless. In any event, there is broad agreement that the
number of Iraqis slaughtered has reached into the tens of thousands. An
ocean of blood has been shed in Mr. Bush's mindless war, and there is no end
to this tragic flow in sight.

Jeffrey Gettleman of The Times gave us the following chilling paragraphs in
Tuesday's paper:

"In Sadr City, the Shiite section in Baghdad where the [four] terrorist
suspects were executed, government forces have vanished. The streets are
ruled by aggressive teenagers with shiny soccer jerseys and machine guns.

"They set up roadblocks and poke their heads into cars and detain whomever
they want. Mosques blare warnings on loudspeakers for American troops to
stay out. Increasingly, the Americans have been doing just that."

Everyone who thought this war was a good idea was wrong and ought to admit
it. Those who still think it's a good idea should get therapy.

Last Friday and Saturday, a conference titled "Vietnam and the Presidency"
was held at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston.
Discussions about the lessons we failed to learn from Vietnam, and thus
failed to apply to Iraq, were pervasive.

Some of the lessons seemed embarrassingly basic. Jack Valenti, who served as
a special assistant to Lyndon Johnson, reminded us how difficult it is to
"impress democracy" on other countries. And he noted something that the
public and the politicians seem to forget each time the glow of a brand-new
war is upon us: that wars are "inhumane, brutal, callous and full of
depravity."

Think Abu Ghraib and Guant?namo. Think suicide bombers and death squads and
roadside bombs. Think of the formerly healthy men and women who have come
back to the United States from Iraq paralyzed, or without their arms or legs
or eyes, or the full use of their minds. Think of the many thousands dead.

Most of the people who thought this war was a good idea also thought that
the best way to fight it was with other people's children. That in itself is
a form of depravity.

Among those who played a key role in the conference was David Halberstam,
the author of "The Best and the Brightest," which is not just the best book
about America's involvement in Vietnam, but a book that grows more essential
with each passing year. If you read it in the 70's or 80's, read it again.
We can all use a refresher course on the link between folly and madness at
the highest levels of government, and the all-but-unimaginable suffering it
can unleash.

In the book's epilogue, Mr. Halberstam wrote that, among other things,
President Johnson "and the men around him wanted to be defined as being
strong and tough; but strength and toughness and courage were exterior
qualities which would be demonstrated by going to a clean and hopefully
antiseptic war with a small nation, rather than the interior and more lonely
kind of strength and courage of telling the truth to America and perhaps
incurring a good deal of domestic political risk."

That latter kind of toughness is what's needed now. Invading Iraq was a
disastrous move by the Bush administration, and there is no satisfactory
solution forthcoming. The White House should be working cooperatively with
members of both parties in Congress to figure out the best way to bring the
curtain down on U.S. involvement.

Before that can begin to happen, the administration will have to rid itself
of the delusion that things are somehow going well in Iraq. The democracy
that was supposed to flower in the Iraqi desert and then spread throughout
the Middle East was as much a mirage as the weapons of mass destruction.

President Bush continues to assert that our goal in Iraq is "victory." Gen.
Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently told Tim Russert
that things were going "very, very well" in Iraq.

They are still crawling toward the mirage. It's time to give reality a
chance.

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From michael at michaelbutler.com  Thu Mar 16 11:42:47 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 11:42:47 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Rumsfeld's Blinkers By DAVID BROOKS
Message-ID: <C03EFFB7.2A28C%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 16, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Rumsfeld's Blinkers
By DAVID BROOKS

Some weeks nothing happens; some weeks change history. The week of March 24,
2003, was one of those pivotal weeks. U.S. troops had just begun the ground
invasion of Iraq. They were charging north, but hadn't reached Baghdad. The
Fedayeen had begun to launch suicide attacks and were putting up serious
resistance in Nasiriya.

Everybody denigrates pundits and armchair generals, but immediately the
smartest of them recognized that something unexpected was happening: the
U.S. was not in the midst of a conventional war, but was in the first days
of a guerrilla war.

Michael Kelly, embedded with the Third Infantry Division, wrote a column
describing how Fedayeen guerrillas had taken control of towns like Najaf.
Kelly predicted the war would be long and tough. David Ignatius in The
Washington Post wrote that it was "time to shelve the rosy scenarios" for
the war and face the fact that the U.S. was confronting a difficult battle
against resistance fighters.

Gen. Tommy Franks was slighting the insurgents as a mere speed bump, but the
terrorism expert Rachel Ehrenfeld estimated there were at least 30,000
insurgents "and they are dangerous." Gary Anderson, a retired Marine
colonel, suggested the chief threat would not be Saddam's Republican Guard,
but a drawn-out guerrilla war against the "occupation."

Some of the most prescient pieces came from the Islamic world. In Pakistan,
a retired politician named Shafqat Mahmood wrote: "This is becoming a kind
of war where holding territory or even cities is meaningless.... Saddam
Fedayeen and all manner of Republican guards and security forces will take
off their uniforms and vanish among the people. They will regroup and
continue the fight. We are heading towards a guerrilla war."

All of this, and a great pile of similar commentary, was written in the
first few days of the ground war.

In TV studios and on op-ed pages, the debate shifted that week. If the U.S.
was confronting an insurgency, more boots on the ground would be needed.
Ralph Peters, a retired officer, wrote stinging op-eds in The New York Post
and elsewhere savaging Donald Rumsfeld for not understanding that you can't
prevent sabotage or ethnic cleansing without a large troop presence. The
Weekly Standard, which had been bashing Rumsfeld for years for shrinking the
Army, echoed Peters's argument on its Web page. Retired officers poured into
TV studios, calling for more troops.

Not everybody looks prescient in hindsight. The brilliant historian John
Keegan doubted that there would be an insurgency. But when you look at the
commentary ? at least during that week ? you are struck by how smart a lot
of it was, and how the commentariat responded sensibly to facts on the
ground.

The debate inside the administration was different. We now know a lot about
events inside the Pentagon in that crucial week, thanks to "Cobra II," the
definitive account of the war by The Times's Michael R. Gordon and Lt. Gen.
Bernard E. Trainor.

The officers on the front lines saw the same thing the smart pundits saw,
and in more detail. But Rumsfeld and Franks stifled the free exchange of
ideas, and shut out the National Security Council. They dismissed concerns
about the insurgents and threatened to fire the one general, William
Wallace, who dared to state the obvious in public. The military brass
followed the war in real time on computer screens. As long as the blue icons
representing U.S. troops were heading north to Baghdad, the U.S. was deemed
to be winning. The technology seemed to provide real-time information, but
it was completely misleading.

The week of March 24 is vital because if Rumsfeld had made adjustments to
the new circumstances then, much of the subsequent horror could have been
averted.

But it is also a reminder of the reality one sees again and again: Debate
inside any administration is less sophisticated and realistic than the
debate among experts outside. The people inside have access to a bit more
information. But they are more likely to self-censor for fear of endangering
their careers. Debate inside is much more likely to be warped by the
egotism, insecurity, power lust and distracting busyness of people at the
top.

That's true in general, and it's true in spades in Donald Rumsfeld's
Pentagon. "Cobra II" makes Rumsfeld and Franks each seem like Barry Bonds: a
formerly intimidating figure who now just seems pathetic. Those two were
contemptuous of the armchair generals and the TV kibitzers. But at the
crucial moment in their lives, they got things wrong, and the pundits often
got things right.

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca  Thu Mar 16 16:50:52 2006
From: nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca (CBC News Online)
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 00:50:52 UT
Subject: [Mb-civic] CBC News - WORLD'S POOR TURN TO BOTTLED WATER
Message-ID: <20060317005052.CF9AA7DBC@web04.nm.cbc.ca>

An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Url: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060317/dd194278/attachment.diff 

From michael at intrafi.com  Thu Mar 16 16:52:45 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (Michael)
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 19:52:45 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Article from Tom Dispatch
Message-ID: <200603170052.k2H0qjij029069@thor.thenation.com>

An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060316/b988f6ee/attachment.htm 

From michael at intrafi.com  Thu Mar 16 17:03:57 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (Michael)
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 20:03:57 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] 'The Bolton Archipelago' from The Nation
Message-ID: <200603170103.k2H13vqs029758@thor.thenation.com>

If you like this article, please consider subscribing to The Nation at special
discounted rates. You can order online https://ssl.thenation.com or call our
toll-free number at 1-800-333-8536.

About Bolton and the U N Human Rights Council

   The Bolton Archipelago 
   by Ian Williams


A complete American isolationist may congratulate the Bush Administration and United Nations Ambassador John Bolton on his grandstanding vote Wednesday against the establishment of the UN Human Rights Council. Nobody else would.

It was a clear case of prejudice masquerading as policy, with Bolton playing to his usual gallery of Know-Nothings on one side, while also relishing briefly being on the side of Human Rights NGOs and what he considers to be the liberal New York Times in criticizing the failings of the negotiated outcome.

But taken as a poll on the Bolton-Bush stand, 170 votes to 4 epitomizes America's waning global prestige.

The three states that the United States led into the "nay" camp were Israel, Palau and the Marshall Islands, which are among the highest per capita recipients of US cash in the world, along with the Federated States of Micronesia, which even Bolton couldn't bully enough. The two Pacific micro-states depend on the US Congress for almost their entire budget. There is an additional irony: For decades the United States stalled on allowing the former Trustee territory of Palau independence until it dropped clauses in its constitution that barred the United States from bringing in nuclear weapons to defend it.

Nor could one be sure that Venezuela, Belarus and Iran, the states that abstained, were necessarily part of the Administration's dream team.

In fact, for all the many compromises, UN General Assembly President Jan Eliasson and Secretary General Kofi Annan have pulled together what could be an effective and workable Human Rights Council--despite the Bolton blusterings, which did much to aid the opponents.

For example, although Bolton later jumped on Annan's proposal for a two-thirds majority vote for future members--after it had disappeared in the course of negotiations--he was almost certainly quite pleased. The United States has lost elections to the old Human Rights Commission before--and that was before the Bush Administration added Guant&aacute;namo, Abu Ghraib and "renditions" to the world's human rights vocabulary. Many diplomats at the UN feel that if the US delegation had actively and constructively participated in negotiations instead of posturing for domestic constituencies, the electoral requirement for a two-thirds majority would have been passed.

Similarly, Bolton was very reserved on the term limits for members, and showed initially that he would have preferred a permanent seat for the United States, even if it entailed one for China, hardly a paragon of human rights.

While Bolton is particularly tin-eared in how he listens to other countries, we should remember that it was the Clinton Administration that worked assiduously and steadily to attenuate the International Criminal Court, and then only signed the much-weakened instrument at the very end of his presidency. It was this attitude that cost the United States the seat in times past. There are far more substantial grounds on which states of goodwill, in a secret ballot, may have scruples about voting for this US Administration to have a seat on the council, although many may support Washington in LBJ's eminently pragmatic argument that it is better to have opponents inside the tent urinating outward rather than vice versa.

The American diplomatic approach to human rights is, in its own way, every bit as partisan and partial as some of the notorious human rights offenders who have conspired to emasculate the Human Rights Commission over the years.

Indeed, the best weapon of the Axis of Offenders in the old commission has been the US attitude, which has, for example, condoned, trained and financed some of the worst human rights offenders of the era in Central America, while fulminating against Cuba's much less serious offenses. Disagreement with the United States should not necessarily put a country in the dock for human rights offenses--although neither should opposing the United States allow an exemption.

It did not help that one of the last reports of the Human Rights Commission was on Guant&aacute;namo, in which the experts roundly condemned the US breaches of international law. Even though the commission's conclusions were not that different from the US Supreme Court--that internees have legal rights and should have access to the Courts--the Bush Administration and its supporters attacked the report in terms that could have been borrowed from a riposte by Cuba, Uzbekistan or Syria.

The council has addressed the genuine concerns of many members by adopting the principle of "universality" in a constructive way instead of its usual blocking context at the UN. All members' human rights records will come under scrutiny. The Axis of Offenders' main purpose in getting on the former commission was to block consideration of their cases, so this removes much of the incentive for them to be on the Council.

Countries that are genuinely concerned about human rights need to eschew their usual regional voting pacts, but we can be sure that the NGOs will keep their feet to the fire. And as for the United States, it would be good if it voted on the basis the State Department's own annual Human Rights Report, which has managed to be critical even of allies.

Along with the "Responsibility to Protect" resolution adopted last year, the Human Rights Council is a step forward for the United Nations. But far from being rewarded by Congress, watch out for attacks on the world's temerity for disagreeing with Ambassador Bolton.



This article can be found on the web at:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060327/williams



Visit The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/

Subscribe to The Nation:
https://ssl.thenation.com/

From geomilman at milman.com  Thu Mar 16 19:11:12 2006
From: geomilman at milman.com (George R. Milman)
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 19:11:12 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] FW: For those of you who voted RED because of their
	supposed fiscal management
Message-ID: <002c01c64970$7272f8a0$8c00a8c0@george>

 

http://money.cnn.com/2006/03/16/news/economy/trillions.reut/index.htm

 

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060316/3761555b/attachment.htm 

From ean at sbcglobal.net  Thu Mar 16 20:52:17 2006
From: ean at sbcglobal.net (ean at sbcglobal.net)
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 20:52:17 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Iran: Where do we go from here?
Message-ID: <E1FK8bM-00012p-GO@elasmtp-junco.atl.sa.earthlink.net>


http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12338.htm
Iran: Where do we go from here?

By Mike Whitney

03/14/06 "ICH" -- -- The Bush administration has run into a rock wall at
the Security Council. Neither Russia nor China will agree to any
resolution that condemns Iran for "noncompliance" with its treaty
obligations. In fact, there is general agreement that Iran has not
violated the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) so the point is moot.
This eliminates any chance that punitive action will be taken against Iran
or that sanctions will be applied.

So why did the Bush administration take the case this far if they knew
that there was no possibility for consensus on the main issue?

The administration knew from the beginning that the world body would not
support sanctions or military action. The intention was simply to increase
suspicion about Iran's nuclear programs and mobilize public support for a
war.

In fact, the United States is not at all concerned with Iran's nuclear
programs. It is merely a hoax that is being used to conceal Washington's
war plans.

Presently, the administration is trying to coerce the Security Council to
issue a strongly-worded "presidential statement" laying out what Iran
needs to do to ease concerns that it is using its civilian programs to
hide a nuclear weapons program.

Since there is "no evidence" of such programs (according to the UN
watchdog agency IAEA) the Security Council should not become involved in 
a
process that can only strengthen the administrations plans to attack Iran.

The "presidential statement" does not have the power of a Security Council
"resolution". It cannot be used to apply sanctions or to take military
action. It is purely a formal reprimand that makes constructive
suggestions for changing behavior. It is designed to allay fears that Iran
may be secretly building nukes. Unfortunately, the statement is utterly
meaningless since Iran has already allowed the most extensive inspection
regime to rummage through every aspect of its nuclear program for 2 years
without producing any proof of wrongdoing.

The Bush administration would never waste its time on diplomatic
maneuvering unless it had a goal in mind. The strategy for using the
presidential statement as a pretext for war is evident in the way the
wording is being negotiated. Rather than simply saying that the Security
Council hopes that Iran will guarantee that its program is "exclusively
peaceful purposes"; the US wants to add that, "continued
enrichment-related activity would add to the importance and urgency of
further action by the Council".

This phrasing provides the US with a pretext for intervention if Iran
continues to enrich uranium.

The statement also contains a demand that Iran accept an "additional
protocol" that gives IAEA inspectors "exceptional access to plants". It
asks for "additional 'transparency measures,' including access to
individuals, documents, and research laboratories".

In essence, the statement insists that Iran forgo its "inalienable right"
to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes and accept an intrusive
inspection-regime that can ferret through every armory, barracks,
conventional-weapons site, communications facility, ammunition-dump,
palace, and research laboratory in the country. This is the same rule that
was applied to Saddam before the war in Iraq.

But, why should Iran agree to this public humiliation if it has done
nothing wrong? Should they sacrifice their sovereign rights just to
placate Washington?

Iran will never accept these conditions nor would the United States if the
situation was reversed. Iran must continue to defend its right to enrich
uranium and, thus, vindicate the principle that underscores international
treaties. The Bush administration has no authority to repeal treaties nor
does it have the right to create the conditions whereby the terms of those
treaties are rescinded.

The "presidential statement" will be used in the media to demonize Iran
for its alleged "defiance" and to convince the public that there is
universal agreement on Iran's imaginary nuclear weapons programs. Although
the statement does not authorize the US to take unilateral action, it will
be used to do just that. John Bolton has already admitted that if the
Security Council does not meet the administrations expectations, the US
may act on its own and look for partners in applying sanctions or taking
military action.

So, where do we go from here?

There's a good chance that the logistical groundwork for war with Iran has
already been laid. This would explain the earnestness of American
diplomats at the State Dept. and the UN.

The Security Council needs to realize the gravity of the situation and
take positive steps to diffuse the crisis. The Council should forgo the
issuing of the "presidential statement" and buttress Iran's rights under
the NPT to enrich uranium under the strict supervision of the IAEA. They
should also condemn any unilateral action by member states as a violation
to the UN Charter which confers sole authority to the UN Security Council
for sanctions or military action.

Most of all, the United Nations must defend its own credibility as a
viable institution for world peace by ensuring that it is not used to mask
the war-mongering objectives of other nations.

Posted on Mar. 14, 2006


-- 
You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, 
option D (up to 3 emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options 
(option A - 1x/week, option B - 3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option D - 
up to 3x/day) please reply and let us know!  If someone forwarded you 
this email and you want to be on our list, send an email to 
ean at sbcglobal.net and tell us which option you'd like.


"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060316/6e7e1c8c/attachment.htm 

From ean at sbcglobal.net  Thu Mar 16 20:55:59 2006
From: ean at sbcglobal.net (ean at sbcglobal.net)
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 20:55:59 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] War Resisters
Message-ID: <E1FK8c0-0001JL-Ju@elasmtp-junco.atl.sa.earthlink.net>

Thanks to Ed Pearl for these 3 resonant items......

March, 2006

Dear Friends,

I'm not the president--I just play one on TV! Like many, perhaps
most, of you, I'm a pacifist. If I ran the real West Wing, this great
country would be using all its might to resist war, and we wouldn't need a
War Resisters League. However, with the war in Iraq claiming more than
100,000 (mostly civilian) Iraqi lives so far, the reality is that we do
need the War Resisters League. I am writing you today to ask for your help
for WRL's efforts to end this war and all war.

So far, besides Iraqi casualties, the occupation the Bush
administration calls "Operation Iraqi Freedom" has also claimed
almost 2,300 American lives, with about 16,400 wounded--and most of
them are our youth. Bereaved families have begun to question the real
reasons behind the war. A bereaved mother-turned-activist, Cindy Sheehan,
camped outside the president's Texas Ranch throughout the month of August,
longing to ask Bush, "Why did my son Casey die in Iraq?"

The president has refused to meet with Cindy ever since she began
criticizing his conduct of the war and the U.S. occupation of Iraq. I met
with her outside Bush's ranch on August 28. "At least you've got the
acting president," I told her. However, I couldn't give her what she
really wanted: a satisfactory answer to her terrible questions, "Whose
interests was he protecting?" and "What is the noble cause that he died
for?"

There are many bereaved military families out there asking the same
questions and trying to justify the loss of innocent lives. Some are
grieving privately, but others have turned their grief into
constructive activism, joining organizations like the Gold Star
Families for Peace and Military Families Speak Out.

The War Resisters League believes that there is no satisfactory
answer to those questions. Rather, the war and occupation are serving the
interests of only a narrow group of profiteers. We believe that Iraq and
indeed the world would be better served by the immediate withdrawal of all
U.S. troops from that devastated country. However, it will take more than
one Cindy Sheehan to persuade the Bush administration to change its
policies; it will take hundreds of thousands of people nonviolently
protesting and demanding answers till there is a positive change.

That's where you come in; the War Resisters League is organizing
those thousands. Across the country, its "Stop the Merchants of
Death" campaign is providing people with the real answers to Cindy
Sheehan's question. Its counter-recruitment campaign is exposing the
myths that the military uses to lure youth into the armed forces.

Ambitious and progressive as our goal is, we need the financial and
human resources to get our message out to the hundreds of thousands
who need to hear it.  Watch this! If everyone reading this letter put a
$10 check in the enclosed envelope and dropped it in the mail today, WRL
could bring hundreds of people into the streets to protest these wars. If
half of you mailed a $50 check, we could bring thousands. Whatever you can
afford to send--whether it is $25, $100, $500, or more--will move the
peace project forward at this desperate time. So please: make a
difference. Contribute something by sending a check to WRL, 339 Lafayette
Street, New York, NY 10012, or donating at
<http://www.warresisters.org>www.warresisters.org. And please--do it
today.

Help make this country a little more like the one I'd be president of.

In peace,

Martin Sheen

PS: If you wish your gift to be tax-deductible, make your check of
more than $50 payable to the A.J. Muste Memorial Institute.

Download, print out and send a copy of this letter to your friends and
family http://warresisters.org/MartinSheenletter.pdf

***

http://select.nytimes.com/2006/03/16/opinion/16herbert.html?th&emc=th

Stop Bush's War
By BOB HERBERT
NY Times Op-Ed: March 16, 2006

"By some estimates," according to a recent article in Foreign Affairs,
"the number of Iraqis who have died as a result of the [U.S.] invasion has
reached six figures - vastly more than have been killed by all
international terrorists in all of history. Sanctions on Iraq probably
were a necessary cause of death for an even greater number of Iraqis, most
of them children."

Not everyone agrees that Iraqi deaths have reached six figures. President
Bush gave an estimate of 30,000 not too long ago. That's probably low, but
horrendous nevertheless. In any event, there is broad agreement that the
number of Iraqis slaughtered has reached into the tens of thousands. An
ocean of blood has been shed in Mr. Bush's mindless war, and there is no
end to this tragic flow in sight. Jeffrey Gettleman of The Times gave us
the following chilling paragraphs in Tuesday's paper:

"In Sadr City, the Shiite section in Baghdad where the [four] terrorist
suspects were executed, government forces have vanished. The streets are
ruled by aggressive teenagers with shiny soccer jerseys and machine guns.

"They set up roadblocks and poke their heads into cars and detain whomever
they want. Mosques blare warnings on loudspeakers for American troops to
stay out. Increasingly, the Americans have been doing just that."

Everyone who thought this war was a good idea was wrong and ought to 
admit
it. Those who still think it's a good idea should get therapy.

Last Friday and Saturday, a conference titled "Vietnam and the Presidency"
was held at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston.
Discussions about the lessons we failed to learn from Vietnam, and thus
failed to apply to Iraq, were pervasive.

Some of the lessons seemed embarrassingly basic. Jack Valenti, who served
as a special assistant to Lyndon Johnson, reminded us how difficult it is
to "impress democracy" on other countries. And he noted something that the
public and the politicians seem to forget each time the glow of a
brand-new war is upon us: that wars are "inhumane, brutal, callous and
full of depravity."

Think Abu Ghraib and Guant?namo. Think suicide bombers and death squads
and roadside bombs. Think of the formerly healthy men and women who have
come back to the United States from Iraq paralyzed, or without their arms
or legs or eyes, or the full use of their minds. Think of the many
thousands dead.

Most of the people who thought this war was a good idea also thought that
the best way to fight it was with other people's children. That in itself
is a form of depravity.

Among those who played a key role in the conference was David Halberstam,
the author of "The Best and the Brightest," which is not just the best
book about America's involvement in Vietnam, but a book that grows more
essential with each passing year. If you read it in the 70's or 80's, read
it again. We can all use a refresher course on the link between folly and
madness at the highest levels of government, and the all-but-unimaginable
suffering it can unleash.

In the book's epilogue, Mr. Halberstam wrote that, among other things,
President Johnson "and the men around him wanted to be defined as being
strong and tough; but strength and toughness and courage were exterior
qualities which would be demonstrated by going to a clean and hopefully
antiseptic war with a small nation, rather than the interior and more
lonely kind of strength and courage of telling the truth to America and
perhaps incurring a good deal of domestic political risk."

That latter kind of toughness is what's needed now. Invading Iraq was a
disastrous move by the Bush administration, and there is no satisfactory
solution forthcoming. The White House should be working cooperatively with
members of both parties in Congress to figure out the best way to bring
the curtain down on U.S. involvement.

Before that can begin to happen, the administration will have to rid
itself of the delusion that things are somehow going well in Iraq. The
democracy that was supposed to flower in the Iraqi desert and then spread
throughout the Middle East was as much a mirage as the weapons of mass
destruction.

President Bush continues to assert that our goal in Iraq is "victory."
Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently told Tim
Russert that things were going "very, very well" in Iraq.

They are still crawling toward the mirage. It's time to give reality a
chance.

***

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060314_molly_ivins_statesman/

 Published on Tuesday, March 14, 2006 by TruthDig
      Bush, the Statesman
      by Molly Ivins

      It's hard to keep up with George W. Bush's shuttles between
internationalism and isolationism. You may recall he first ran for office
declaring he was against nation-building and other such effete,
peacekeeping efforts. None of that do-gooder, building-a-better-world
stuff for him-he couldn't even be bothered to learn the names of the
Grecians and Kosovians.

      Until Sept. 11, except for staring deep into Vlad Putin's ice-blue
eyes and concluding the old KGB shark had soul, Bush evinced little
interest in foreign affairs.

      Then he literally became an internationalist with a vengeance.
Absolutely everybody signed up to help go after al-Qaida in
Afghanistan-offers of help gushed in. Next came the campaign to bring down
Saddam Hussein because he had weapons of mass destruction, including a
nuclear weapons program. Unfortunately, most of the rest of the world
didn't think Iraq had much in the way of WMD, or at least felt the United
Nations inspectors should be given more time to see if they were there.

      The unseemly haste with which Bush pushed toward an unnecessary war
alienated many of our closest allies, and the Bush team could not have
made their contempt for those allies and the United Nations more clear.

      So for a while we were the new imperialists and disdained the rest
      of
the world. We didn't need anyone-we would go our own way, and good
riddance to the United Nations, what a bunch of wusses they were. It was
the season of hubris, arrogance and rudeness.

      In the ultimate "up yours," Bush named John Bolton ambassador to the
United Nations. Bolton is a man so undiplomatic, not to mention so
anti-U.N., that half the administration was appalled by the idea. These
were the days when mental pygmies outside the administration were
dismissed as the "reality-based community." The senior Bush adviser
famously quoted by Ron Suskind explained, "We are an empire now, and 
when
we act, we create our own reality." Gosh, that was an exciting time.

      Unfortunately, reality uncharitably refused to conform to the Bush
administration's demands-in fact, reality kept blowing up in our faces. In
Afghanistan and particularly in Iraq, reality turned out to be downright
ugly about not obliging our blithe president.

      Several months after our invasion of Iraq, it turned out we had
actually invaded in order to bring democracy to that lucky little country.
In the odd, dreamlike way that Bush policy morphs, all the conservatives
began to pretend we had always gone in to create democracy and anyone who
suggested otherwise was misremembering that pesky reality.

      Indeed, so dedicated were we to the promotion of democracy around
      the
world that it was the very first principle of our foreign policy. And if
we still aren't too keen on nation-building-well, we'll just outsource it
to Halliburton and let them worry about it. And what a fine job they're
doing.

      So here we are, internationalists again, and Bush sets off for
      India,
where he promptly reversed decades of American foreign policy to exempt
India from the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. It had been our policy
since Nixon was president to refuse to share nuclear energy technology
with nations unwilling to agree to the nonproliferation regime. Both India
and its mortal enemy, Pakistan, became nuclear-armed powers in 1998,
leading to the truly horrific possibility of a nuclear arms race on the
subcontinent.

      Having made this lamentable deal, Bush then proceeded to Pakistan,
which naturally feels insulted and slighted at not getting the same deal.
This is particularly unfortunate, as President Pervez Musharraf of
Pakistan is critical to the control and capture of al-Qaida.

      Bush, who dropped the entire subject of Osama bin Laden like a hot
rock in 2003, is now back to saying we want to capture him. Having
offended Pakistan, our critical ally, Bush then returned triumphantly
to-ta-da!-send exactly the wrong message to Iran. Just in time, showing
the Iranians that if they persist in developing nuclear weapons, they,
too, will eventually be rewarded like India. Naturally, this in turn
strengthens the hard-liners in Tehran and undercuts the pro-Western
reformers. What were they thinking? Does anybody here know how to play
this game?

      So far, it looks as though Bush does better on foreign policy when
he's being an isolationist. Maybe he should just stay home and cut taxes
for the rich some more, or go expose some CIA agent for political payback
against her husband, or just spy on a lot of American pacifists.

      When I heard him deploring xenophobia (that's fear of foreigners) on
the Dubai Ports deal, I did a double-take. Michael Chertoff of Homeland
Security again has said the trouble with homeland security is that it
threatens trade-all important, all sacred trade, profits above all. For
the umpteenth time, it is not only possible, but smart to insist on
adjusting free trade for labor standards, for environmental standards and
even so your ports don't get blown up.

      Molly Ivins is the former editor of the liberal monthly The Texas
Observer. She is the bestselling author of several books including Who Let
the Dogs In?

      ? 2006 TruthDig, LLC

***

      Saturday, March 18th, March and Rally Commemorating the Third
Anniversary of the U.S. War and Occupation in Iraq. March starts at 12:00
noon at the corner of Hollywood and Vine. Endorsers include all major L.A.
area peace groups as well as rally speakers/endorsers such as State
Assembly Leader Gloria Romero, Gold Star Familes for Peace, Academy 
Award
winner Paul Haggis ("Crash"), peace activist Ron Kovic, actor Maria Bello,
 local labor leaders and clergy. Entertainment by Dwight Tribble and
others.The media sponsor for this event is Air America. For more info:
323/464-1636.

-- 
You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, 
option D (up to 3 emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options 
(option A - 1x/week, option B - 3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option D - 
up to 3x/day) please reply and let us know!  If someone forwarded you 
this email and you want to be on our list, send an email to 
ean at sbcglobal.net and tell us which option you'd like.


"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060316/6fe45cf4/attachment-0001.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Fri Mar 17 06:23:49 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 09:23:49 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Bill Would Allow Warrantless Spying - Washington Post
Message-ID: <441AC675.2080600@comcast.net>

Bill Would Allow Warrantless Spying
GOP Plan Would Bring Surveillance Under Review of Congress, FISA Court

By Charles Babington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 17, 2006; A05

The Bush administration could continue its policy of spying on targeted 
Americans without obtaining warrants, but only if it justifies the 
action to a small group of lawmakers, under legislation introduced 
yesterday by key Republican senators.

The four senators hope to settle the debate over National Security 
Agency eavesdropping on international communications involving Americans 
when one of the parties is suspected of terrorist ties. President Bush 
prompted a months-long uproar when he said that constitutional powers 
absolve him of the need to seek warrants in such cases, even though the 
1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requires warrants for 
domestic wiretaps.

The program, begun in 2001, was first publicized late last year.

The bill would allow the NSA to eavesdrop, without a warrant, for up to 
45 days per case, at which point the Justice Department would have three 
options. It could drop the surveillance, seek a warrant from FISA's 
court, or convince a handful of House and Senate members that although 
there is insufficient evidence for a warrant, continued surveillance "is 
necessary to protect the United States," according to a summary the four 
sponsors provided yesterday. They are Mike DeWine (Ohio), Lindsey O. 
Graham (S.C.), Chuck Hagel (Neb.) and Olympia J. Snowe (Maine).

All but Graham are members of the sharply divided intelligence 
committee, whose Democratic members have unsuccessfully sought an 
investigation into the NSA program. Hagel and Snowe threatened last 
month to join the Democrats' request unless the administration and 
Congress agreed on a way to bring the wiretap program under the review 
of FISA's court and Congress.

It is far from clear whether the bill can win passage. Senate Judiciary 
Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) -- whose panel plays a major 
role in the surveillance matter -- pointed his thumb down yesterday when 
asked about the measure. He said he particularly objects to letting the 
government "do whatever the hell it wants" for 45 days without seeking 
judicial or congressional approval.

The Senate intelligence committee's chairman, Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), who 
has defended the administration's actions, said seven members of a newly 
appointed subcommittee should be given time "to complete their review of 
the program before moving ahead with legislation." He added: "I am 
concerned that some of the procedural requirements included in the bill 
may limit the program's effectiveness."

Committee Vice Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.) said through a 
spokeswoman that it is "too soon to consider legislation until the 
oversight subcommittee can answer critical questions about the program."

DeWine told reporters that White House officials "agree with the general 
concept" of the bill. Most Americans think "this type of surveillance 
should continue," he said, but Congress must impose oversight.

Details of the program, and Justice Department requests for exemptions 
from FISA warrants, would go only to the seven-member Senate 
subcommittee and a similar House intelligence subcommittee yet to be 
named. Both subcommittees would include Democrats and Republicans.

The bill introduced yesterday calls for fines of up to $1 million and 
prison terms of up to 15 years for those who disclose "classified 
information related to the Terrorist Surveillance Program," the 
administration's name for the NSA operation. The penalties would not 
apply to journalists.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/16/AR2006031601861.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060317/1c09149e/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Fri Mar 17 06:28:01 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 09:28:01 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Rice,
	the (Un)Candidate - Eugene Robinson - Washington Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <441AC771.6030805@comcast.net>

Rice, the (Un)Candidate

By Eugene Robinson
The Washington Post
Friday, March 17, 2006; A19

She jets constantly around the world, from crisis to catastrophe, and 
when she's soaring 42,000 feet above some ocean she can't hear all the 
noise back home. That's probably just as well. "Run, Condi, run" 
wouldn't offend her ears, but I doubt she'd appreciate Spike Lee's 
advice: "Condi, stop smoking that crack!"

I wouldn't bet the mortgage that Condoleezza Rice will run for president 
this time. She says she doesn't want to, and although she leaves the 
door slightly ajar -- she doesn't say she absolutely, positively won't 
be a candidate -- that's probably just a prudent way of keeping her 
options open.

Even if she secretly does want to run, I think she'd have to be smoking 
something to believe all those Republicans who've been telling pollsters 
how peachy it would be to have a black woman at the head of their 
presidential ticket. This is the party, after all, that built its solid 
South through coded appeals to whites who felt threatened by the 
nameless, dark Other.

Then again, you should have seen the rock-star reception she got from an 
overwhelmingly white crowd last fall when she flipped the coin at a 
University of Alabama football game. It was as if Bear Bryant himself 
had come back to Tuscaloosa.

You could certainly make a case that Rice is doing more than just making 
herself available in case the party finds itself facing a sure 
Democratic victory and turns to her in a desperate Hail Mary. When she 
invited a television crew to roll videotape as she performed her daily 
workout routine, the message wasn't exactly "secretary of state." What's 
the difference between showing the world how you do your stomach 
crunches and donning a funny-looking hat at the state fair?

Her back-to-Birmingham trip last year was chock-full of campaign 
iconography -- hordes of smiling children, acres of patriotic bunting -- 
and even on foreign trips she rarely fails to remind audiences of her 
personal history. Yesterday, in Australia, she began a town hall meeting 
with university students by reminiscing about her youthful promise as a 
musician. A student's question about Iraq led to a disquisition on her 
early years in the segregated South.

Meanwhile, Rice has subtly tried to distance herself and the State 
Department from the worst excesses of the Cheney-Rumsfeld axis -- even 
though, as national security adviser, she was an active participant in 
all the major decisions about Iraq, domestic spying and the 
administration's ambitious, unilateral expansion of executive power. 
"Abu Ghraib was a disgrace," she told the Australian students. "What 
happened there made me sick to my stomach."

Lightning would have to strike for Rice to enter the presidential race 
this time -- something like the fantasy scenario in which Dick 
"Bull's-Eye" Cheney gets fed up and resigns after the midterm election. 
President Bush could then appoint Rice as his new vice president, which 
would instantly put her in play for 2008. Stranger things have happened, 
but not many.

Still, I think it's inevitable that Rice will eventually enter politics. 
The question for the Democratic Party will be how black voters react.

Black conservative Shelby Steele recently speculated with an interviewer 
from the American Enterprise, a conservative journal, about how a race 
between Hillary Clinton and Rice might turn out. "If Hillary runs 
against a man, my guess is there's a certain women's vote out there that 
will go for her, even many Republicans," he said. "But if she's running 
against Condoleezza Rice, that would disappear. A large bit of the black 
vote that Democrats are so desperately dependent upon would also 
disappear. If Condoleezza Rice ran, she could win by simply taking an 
extra 15 percent of the black vote."

But from my own anecdotal observation, Spike Lee speaks for a lot of 
African Americans who have strong negative feelings about Rice. If she 
runs, he told the New York Observer, "African Americans will have to 
really, really, really, really, really , REALLY analyze the secretary of 
state's record, and get past the pigmentation of her skin. . . . I'm not 
going to vote for that woman. No. Way. "

Steele acknowledges that he might be wrong, that Rice might turn out to 
be a lousy politician. Lee acknowledges that "I'm not the spokesperson 
for 45 million African Americans." The truth is that nobody knows how 
voters would respond to a black woman who loyally serves an 
administration so reviled in the black community.

And would those cheering, white 'Bama football fans check her name when 
they're in the privacy of the voting booth?

Nobody knows. But I'll bet that someday -- maybe not soon, but someday 
-- we'll find out.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/16/AR2006031601400.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060317/3faf80a2/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Fri Mar 17 06:30:56 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 09:30:56 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Before We Go 'Single Payer' - Michael Kinsley -
	Washington Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <441AC820.6070802@comcast.net>

Before We Go 'Single Payer'
Insurance Reforms We Should Try
<>
By Michael Kinsley
The Washington Post
Friday, March 17, 2006; A19

In the March 23 New York Review of Books, Paul Krugman makes the case 
for a health care system that is not only "single payer," meaning that 
the government handles the finances, but in some respects "single 
provider," meaning that the government supplies the service directly.

Krugman and his co-author, Robin Wells, correctly diagnose the problem 
with the Bush administration's pet health care solution of encouraging 
people (with tax breaks, naturally) to pay for routine care a la carte, 
instead of through insurance. Like Willie Sutton in reverse, this notion 
goes where the money isn't. Annual checkups and sore throats aren't 
what's bankrupting us: It's the gargantuan cost of treating people who 
are seriously ill. People who can get insurance against that risk would 
be insane not to, and the government would be insane to encourage them 
not to.

Most lucky Americans with good insurance are doubly isolated from 
financial reality: They don't pay for their health care, and they don't 
even pay for most of their insurance -- their employer or the government 
pays. Of course, one perversity of the current system is that you can 
lose your insurance either by losing your job, if you've got one, or by 
taking a job (and losing Medicaid), if you don't.

Krugman and Wells are persuasive -- it's not a hard sell -- about the 
nightmarish complexity and administrative costs of the current 
fragmented system. But they don't do much more than simply assert that a 
single, government-run insurance program would be more efficient. Even 
the most competitive industry can seem wasteful and inefficient when 
described on paper. Dozens of computer companies making hundreds of 
different, incompatible models, millions spent on advertising: Wouldn't 
a single, government-run computer agency producing a few standard models 
be more efficient? No, it wouldn't.

Krugman and Wells duck the issue of rationing -- saving money by simply 
not providing effective treatments that cost too much. They say, let's 
try single-payer first. So I say: Let's try some more modest reforms 
before plunging into single-payer.

Krugman and Wells note repeatedly that 20 percent of the population is 
responsible for 80 percent of health care costs. But that doesn't 
explain why health insurance should be different from other kinds. The 
small fraction of people involved in auto accidents in any year is 
responsible for almost all of the cost of auto insurance. You insure 
against the risk of being in that group.

What's different about health insurance is the opposite: Much of it 
isn't insurance at all but a subsidy. The value of the subsidy is the 
difference between what the individual pays and what the insurance would 
cost in the free market. If people were buying health care or insurance 
with their own money, they might or might not spend too much -- whatever 
"too much" is -- but no one else would need to care if they did.

A subsidy has to take from someone and give to someone else. Everybody 
can't subsidize everybody. Or, to put it another way, society cannot 
give the average citizen better health care than the average citizen 
would choose to buy on his or her own. And this is what people want. 
Krugman and Wells believe that the average citizen will be sated by 
whatever bonus comes out of single-payer efficiencies. In this day of 
$100,000-a-year pills, I doubt it.

Even though we don't do it, most Americans surely think we ought to 
guarantee decent health care to everyone. In fact, most would probably 
be uncomfortable saying it's okay to have anything less than equal 
health care for everybody. Should a poor child die because her family 
can't afford a medicine that an insured, middle-class parent can pick up 
at the drugstore? Current government programs don't protect poor people 
very well against the cost of becoming sick. They do much better at 
protecting sick people against the risk of becoming poor. People who can 
afford insurance ought to protect themselves against a catastrophic 
health expense. But subsidizing this insurance for them is not only 
unnecessary, it is futile and unfair. No one is better able to afford 
health care for people of average means or above than they are themselves.

Krugman and Wells say that private insurance is flawed by "adverse 
selection": Insurance companies will avoid riskier customers. Only a 
single payer (that is, an insurance monopoly) can insure everybody, and 
spread the risk. But anyone is insurable at some price -- a price that 
reflects the cost he or she is likely to impose on the insurer. Adverse 
selection is only a problem to the extent that insurance is not really 
insurance but rather a subsidy.

If you're not as hopeful as Krugman and Wells about being able to avoid 
rationing, you face this question: Should people be allowed to opt out 
of rationing if they can afford it? That is, if the system (private or 
single-payer) won't pay for the $100,000 pill, should you be able to pay 
for it yourself? Fear that this would not be allowed helped to kill the 
Clinton health care reform 13 years ago. But explicitly granting some 
people life and health while denying these things to others is hard, 
even though this disparity has existed throughout history and is 
probably unavoidable. In fact, a serious defect of single-payer is that 
it makes all sorts of unbearable trade-offs explicit government policy, 
rather than obscuring them in complexities.

There are the makings of a deal here. Better-off or better-insured 
people could be told, individually or as a group: Give up your health 
care subsidy and you may opt out of any rationing-type restrictions that 
the system imposes. And if a few smaller reforms like that don't work, 
maybe it will be time for single-payer.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/16/AR2006031601311.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060317/c51c932f/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Fri Mar 17 06:21:52 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 09:21:52 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] GOP Irritation At Bush Was Long Brewing - Washington Post
Message-ID: <441AC600.1020600@comcast.net>

GOP Irritation At Bush Was Long Brewing

By Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 17, 2006; A01

President Bush's troubles with congressional Republicans, which erupted 
during the backlash to the Dubai seaport deal, are rooted in policy 
frustrations and personal resentments that GOP lawmakers say stretch 
back to the opening days of the administration.

For years, the Bush White House and its allies on Capitol Hill seemed 
like one of the most unified teams Washington had ever seen, passing 
most of Bush's agenda with little dissent. Privately, however, many 
lawmakers felt underappreciated, ignored and sometimes bullied by what 
they regarded as a White House intent on running government with little 
input from them. Often it was to pass items -- an expanded federal role 
in education under the No Child Left Behind law and an expensive 
prescription drug benefit under Medicare -- that left conservatives 
deeply uneasy.

What Bush is facing now, beyond just election-year jitters by 
legislators eyeing his depressed approval ratings, is a rebellion that 
has been brewing since the days when he looked invincible, say many 
lawmakers and strategists. Newly unleashed grievances could signal even 
bigger problems for Bush's last two years in office, as he would be 
forced to abandon a governing strategy that until recently counted on 
solid support from congressional Republicans.

The White House at times has been "non-responsive and arrogant," said 
Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.). "There are a thousand small cuts," he 
added, that are ignored when things are going well but "rear their heads 
when things are not going well."

"Members felt they were willing to take a lot of tough votes and did not 
get much in return," said Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.), an early critic 
of the port deal.

Congressional scholar Norman J. Ornstein has written that the recently 
vented anger, after being suppressed for years out of loyalty or fear, 
might be seen in psychological terms. He called the condition 
"battered-Congress syndrome."

The biggest test of dissatisfaction could come this summer if calls for 
withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq intensify. Most Republicans voted to 
authorize the Iraq war after the White House assured them that Saddam 
Hussein posed a threat with weapons of mass destruction and that the 
United States had an effective military strategy. Many now harbor 
serious doubts about the war's prospects.

Bush still enjoys a high level of personal affection among GOP 
lawmakers, but there is a deep-seated frustration with his political, 
policy and congressional relations teams in particular that has poisoned 
the atmosphere. This is one reason many legislators are among a chorus 
of Washington voices urging Bush to infuse his White House with new blood.

Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) recently contacted White House officials and 
implored them to bring aboard a former lawmaker as a new chief diplomat 
to Congress. Lott floated several names, including former senators 
Daniel R. Coats (R-Ind.) and Slade Gorton (R-Wash.). It "would be a good 
idea" to have someone with real stature working Congress on Bush's 
behalf, Lott said. Former Senate majority leader Howard H. Baker Jr. 
(R-Tenn.) told CBS on Wednesday that he did the same in a phone call to 
Bush Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr., offering the name of former 
senator Fred D. Thompson (R-Tenn.).

Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), who won his seat in 2002 after a late push 
by Bush, told the Associated Press this week that the president should 
shake up the staff more broadly, accusing the White House of having a 
political "tin ear." That was seen by some top White House aides as a 
wake-up call, because Coleman has been such a loyal Bush backer.

The White House may be listening. In private conversations with 
lawmakers in recent days, top officials have hinted that Bush is open to 
bringing aboard new high-level staffers, including perhaps a former 
lawmaker or two. With the recent departure of domestic policy chief 
Claude A. Allen, now facing criminal theft charges, Bush has positions 
to fill and every incentive to use those openings to rebuild relations 
with Capitol Hill.

A senior White House official, who requested anonymity to discuss 
internal deliberations, said Bush is moving to hold more face-to-face 
meetings with legislators but has no immediate plans to fire any staff. 
Even before the seaport flap, Bush was holding more meetings than ever 
with individual House and Senate members, including Democrats, to 
discuss Iraq and the domestic agenda, aides said. Bush, Vice President 
Cheney and other officials are also raising millions of dollars for 
lawmakers seeking reelection and other congressional candidates.

One reason some lawmakers said Bush should shift gears quickly is the 
changed power structure in the House. For the first five years of the 
administration, Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and then-House 
Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) used a top-down management style to 
push the Bush agenda through. With Bush at the top of the ticket and 
very popular with the GOP base, most lawmakers fell in line.

The election of Rep. John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) to replace DeLay as party 
leader has created a more unpredictable and freewheeling Republican 
caucus. Boehner won by promising to return power to chairmen and 
rank-and-file legislators who tend to be less compromising -- and less 
concerned about accommodating the White House.

The blowup over the Dubai deal illustrated the new environment. Bush 
infuriated members by threatening to veto any congressional effort to 
prevent an Arab company from taking control of terminals at six U.S. 
seaports. Instead of falling in line, they felled the deal by joining 
with Democrats for a 62 to 2 committee vote against Bush. It was the 
breaking point for many members. Afterward, Rep. Thomas M. Davis III 
(R-Va.) was quoted in The Washington Post as saying, "This is probably 
the worst administration ever in getting Congress's opinion on anything."

Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) is a prime example of such perceived slights. 
He was handpicked by the White House to challenge then-Senate Minority 
Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) in 2004. Thune entered the race under 
heavy White House pressure and won in part by promising to protect South 
Dakota's Ellsworth Air Force Base from being closed.

But when the Pentagon targeted Ellsworth for closing, Thune's complaints 
to White House senior officials were coldly dismissed, according to 
people familiar with the conversations. "Why are you whining?" was how 
one person familiar with the session paraphrased the White House response.

Thune declined to comment on the base closing but said, "I think 
Republicans want to be helpful, but the administration needs to help us 
to help them."

The tipping point for many lawmakers was last year's debate over the 
Bush plan to restructure Social Security by offering personal savings 
accounts. For years, House Republicans had sent word to Karl Rove, 
Bush's top strategist, and others that any efforts to dismantle the 
Social Security system could prove disastrous to them. Regardless of the 
merits, the legislators would say, older Americans vote in high 
percentages in congressional races and would likely punish the party if 
it tinkered with the popular program.

House Republicans in particular were already panicking about the 
Medicare prescription drug benefit they had passed more than a year 
earlier. The program was seen as too costly for conservatives and too 
confusing for seniors. Yet a majority of Republicans voted for it under 
intense lobbying from Bush and GOP congressional leaders, and several 
regretted it.

"Bottom line, there is a lot of buyer's remorse," said Rep. Tom Feeney 
(R-Fla.). If the vote were held today on the Medicare prescription drug 
benefit, he said, as many 120 Republicans would vote against it. "It was 
probably our greatest failure in my adult lifetime," he said.

So when Bush sprang the Social Security plan on them, many Republicans 
balked. Eventually, congressional Republicans revolted and killed what 
Bush had trumpeted as the top domestic priority of his second term. 
Another common complaint about the White House is that it asked 
lawmakers to take politically risky votes and did not bother to provide 
cover when Democrats started attacking.

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), a Bush ally who dismissed concerns about an 
inattentive White House, said he regrets voting for the No Child Left 
Behind bill in the first term.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/16/AR2006031602430.html?referrer=email
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060317/00d7605f/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Fri Mar 17 06:35:20 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 09:35:20 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Can Democrats Play This Game? - E. J. Dionne -
	Washington Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <441AC928.2070601@comcast.net>

Can Democrats Play This Game?
<>
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
The Washington Post
Friday, March 17, 2006; A19

Russ Feingold tossed a political grenade at President Bush this week, 
but it fell into the middle of the Senate Democratic Caucus. Many 
Democratic senators ran away.

The grenade was the Wisconsin senator's proposal to censure the 
president for violating the law by ordering electronic surveillance on 
Americans without explicit congressional or court authorization. While 
the episode says more about Bush's political frailty than the 
first-blush accounts have suggested, it also underscored the frictions 
and tensions between passionate Democratic activists and their cautious 
leaders.

The president has lost so much support and credibility that Republicans 
were simply grateful Feingold briefly changed the political subject from 
the Dubai ports controversy, the mess in Iraq and Bush's anemic poll 
ratings.

As one of Feingold's colleagues pointed out, a censure proposal related 
to any aspect of the president's policies on terrorism would once have 
unleashed an unrelenting Republican attack on the sponsor's patriotism. 
Now, Republicans have to content themselves with using calls for 
censuring or impeaching Bush to rally their own dispirited troops.

But at a moment when Democrats have Bush on the run, Feingold's proposal 
was a tad inconvenient, a conversation-changer coming along when 
Feingold's colleagues liked the way the conversation was going just fine.

Consider the disparity between the response to Feingold's initiative 
among Democratic senators and the reaction among Democratic activists.

Senators mostly scampered away from the cameras earlier this week, 
because they didn't want to say publicly what many of them said 
privately. Most were livid that Feingold sprang his censure idea on a 
Sunday talk show without giving them any notice. Many see Feingold as 
more concerned with rallying support from the Democratic base for his 
2008 presidential candidacy than with helping his party regain control 
of Congress this fall.

Some Democrats want the party to forget the issue of warrantless 
wiretapping, because engaging it would let Bush claim that he's tougher 
on terrorists than his partisan enemies. Others share Feingold's 
frustration with the administration's stonewalling on the program, but 
they think they need to know more before they can effectively challenge 
Bush on the issue. Both groups were furious that Feingold grabbed 
headlines away from those delicious stories about Republican divisions 
and defections.

But at the grass roots and Web roots, Feingold has become a hero -- 
again. They already loved him for his courage in opposing the USA 
Patriot Act and his call for a timetable for troop withdrawals from 
Iraq. Feingold's latest move only reinforced his image of being "a Dem 
with a spine," as the left-liberal Web site BuzzFlash.com put it in a 
comment representative of the acclaim he won across the activist blogs.

In an interview, Feingold was unrepentant, arguing that before he made 
his proposal, "the whole issue of the president violating the laws of 
this country was being swept under the rug."

"We were going to sit back as Democrats and say, 'This is too hot to 
handle' -- well that's outrageous." He warned that "the mistakes of 2002 
are being repeated," meaning, he said, that Democrats should never again 
"cower" before Bush on security issues, as so many at the grass roots 
saw them doing before the 2002 elections.

And it's a sign of Feingold's view of some of his Democratic colleagues 
that he defended his decision not to let them in on his plan. Had they 
known what he was up to, he said, "they would have planned a strategy to 
blunt this."

Here's the problem: Feingold and the activists are right that Democrats 
can't just take a pass on the wiretapping issue, because Bush's legal 
claims are so suspect -- even to many in his own party. The opposition's 
job is to raise alarms over potential abuses of presidential power.

But Democrats, unlike Republicans, have yet to develop a healthy 
relationship between activists willing to test and expand the 
conventional limits on political debate and the politicians who have to 
calculate what works in creating an electoral majority.

For two decades, Republicans have used their idealists, their ideologues 
and their loudmouths to push the boundaries of discussion to the right. 
In the best of all worlds, Feingold's strong stand would redefine what's 
"moderate" and make clear that those challenging the legality of the 
wiretapping are neither extreme nor soft on terrorism.

That would demand coordination, trust and, yes, calculation involving 
both the vote-counting politicians and the guardians of principle among 
the activists. Republicans have mastered this art. Democrats haven't.

Turning a minority into a majority requires both passion and discipline. 
Bringing the two together requires effective leadership. Does anybody 
out there know how to play this game?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/16/AR2006031601303.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060317/ee3ae6e8/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Fri Mar 17 06:38:01 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 09:38:01 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Pandora and Polygamy - Charles Krauthammer - Washington
	Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <441AC9C9.4040700@comcast.net>

Pandora and Polygamy
<>
By Charles Krauthammer
The Washington Post
Friday, March 17, 2006; A19

And now, polygamy.

With the sweetly titled HBO series "Big Love," polygamy comes out of the 
closet. Under the headline "Polygamists, Unite!" Newsweek informs us of 
"polygamy activists emerging in the wake of the gay-marriage movement." 
Says one evangelical Christian big lover: "Polygamy rights is the next 
civil-rights battle."

Polygamy used to be stereotyped as the province of secretive Mormons, 
primitive Africans and profligate Arabs. With "Big Love" it moves to 
suburbia as a mere alternative lifestyle.

As Newsweek notes, these stirrings for the mainstreaming of polygamy 
(or, more accurately, polyamory) have their roots in the increasing 
legitimization of gay marriage. In an essay 10 years ago, I pointed out 
that it is utterly logical for polygamy rights to follow gay rights. 
After all, if traditional marriage is defined as the union of (1) two 
people of (2) opposite gender, and if, as advocates of gay marriage 
insist, the gender requirement is nothing but prejudice, exclusion and 
an arbitrary denial of one's autonomous choices in love, then the first 
requirement -- the number restriction (two and only two) -- is a 
similarly arbitrary, discriminatory and indefensible denial of 
individual choice.

This line of argument makes gay activists furious. I can understand why 
they do not want to be in the same room as polygamists. But I'm not the 
one who put them there. Their argument does. Blogger and author Andrew 
Sullivan, who had the courage to advocate gay marriage at a time when it 
was considered pretty crazy, has called this the "polygamy diversion," 
arguing that homosexuality and polygamy are categorically different 
because polygamy is a mere "activity" while homosexuality is an 
intrinsic state that "occupies a deeper level of human consciousness."

But this distinction between higher and lower orders of love is 
precisely what gay rights activists so vigorously protest when the 
general culture "privileges" (as they say in the English departments) 
heterosexual unions over homosexual ones. Was "Jules et Jim" (and Jeanne 
Moreau), the classic Truffaut film involving two dear friends in love 
with the same woman, about an "activity" or about the most intrinsic of 
human emotions?

To simplify the logic, take out the complicating factor of gender 
mixing. Posit a union of, say, three gay women all deeply devoted to 
each other. On what grounds would gay activists dismiss their union as 
mere activity rather than authentic love and self-expression? On what 
grounds do they insist upon the traditional, arbitrary and exclusionary 
number of two?

What is historically odd is that as gay marriage is gaining acceptance, 
the resistance to polygamy is much more powerful. Yet until this 
generation, gay marriage had been sanctioned by no society that we know 
of, anywhere at any time in history. On the other hand, polygamy was 
sanctioned, indeed common, in large parts of the world through large 
swaths of history, most notably the biblical Middle East and through 
much of the Islamic world.

I'm not one of those who see gay marriage or polygamy as a threat to, or 
assault on, traditional marriage. The assault came from within. Marriage 
has needed no help in managing its own long, slow suicide, thank you. 
Astronomical rates of divorce and of single parenthood (the deliberate 
creation of fatherless families) existed before there was a single gay 
marriage or any talk of sanctioning polygamy. The minting of these new 
forms of marriage is a symptom of our culture's contemporary radical 
individualism -- as is the decline of traditional marriage -- and not 
its cause.

As for gay marriage, I've come to a studied ambivalence. I think it is a 
mistake for society to make this ultimate declaration of indifference 
between gay and straight life, if only for reasons of pedagogy. On the 
other hand, I have gay friends and feel the pain of their inability to 
have the same level of social approbation and confirmation of their 
relationship with a loved one that I'm not about to go to anyone's 
barricade to deny them that. It is critical, however, that any such 
fundamental change in the very definition of marriage be enacted 
democratically and not (as in the disastrous case of abortion) by 
judicial fiat.

Call me agnostic. But don't tell me that we can make one radical change 
in the one-man, one-woman rule and not be open to the claim of others 
that their reformation be given equal respect.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/16/AR2006031601312.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060317/09106a6f/attachment-0001.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Fri Mar 17 06:40:14 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 09:40:14 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] The cost of bird flu hysteria - Marc Siegel - Boston
	Globe Op-Ed
Message-ID: <441ACA4E.4080107@comcast.net>


  The cost of bird flu hysteria

By Marc Siegel  |  March 17, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

RENOWNED bird flu expert Robert Webster told ABC News this week that 
there were ''about even odds at this time for the virus to learn how to 
transmit human to human," and ''society just can't accept the idea that 
50 percent of the population could die. . . . I'm sorry if I'm making 
people a little frightened, but I feel it's my role."

I disagree. As one of the top flu experts in the world, Webster's role 
is to track influenza in the test tube, not to make sweeping 
speculations that are not based on science and do far more harm than 
good. By his estimate, we should be destroying every bird in the world 
right now before we all perish in a pool of pathogens.

Webster's statement is the latest Hitchcockian pronouncement about H5N1 
bird flu, a virus that is deadly in birds. But humans are different. We 
are protected by a species barrier, and serological surveys conducted in 
1997 in Hong Kong and since have detected antibodies in thousands of 
humans who never got sick, showing that bird flu isn't as deadly to the 
few who come in contact with it as has been reported.

In fact, the growing immunity to H5N1 worldwide may lessen the outbreak 
in humans even if the dreaded mutation does occur. As time passes, the 
chances of this mutation appear less rather than more likely. (The 
Spanish flu, by comparison, mutated before killing a lot of birds.)

If H5N1 takes hold in pigs and exchanges genetic material with another 
flu virus, the result is likely to be far less deadly. The swine flu 
fiasco of 1976 is an example of the damage that can be done from fear of 
a mutated virus that can theoretically affect us. More than 1,000 cases 
of paralysis occurred from a rushed vaccine given to more than 40 
million people in response to a pandemic that never came.

Why provoke the public to see a potential pandemic in end-of-the-world 
terms? A pandemic simply means people in several areas having a disease 
at the same time -- but it may be hundreds rather than millions. The 
last flu pandemic, in 1968, killed 33,800 Americans, which is about the 
flu's toll in an average year. We don't need to panic in advance for 
that kind of pandemic.

Cooking poultry kills any flu 100 percent of the time, yet the fear of 
H5N1 bird flu is already so out of control in Europe that 46 countries 
have banned French poultry exports after a single turkey was found to be 
infected. France, fourth in the world in poultry exports, is already 
hemorrhaging more than $40 million a month.

Imagine what would happen if a bird in the United States gets H5N1 bird 
flu. At the rate we are going, the fear of birds will be so great that 
our own poultry industry, number one in the world, is likely to be in 
shambles. We already have this problem with mad cow disease, where a 
single sick cow that is not even in the food chain makes people very 
nervous, despite the fact that it is almost impossible to get mad cow 
disease from eating beef.

Flu is worthy of our concern. But concern can lead to long term 
preparation whereas panic can be far more virulent and costly than the 
bird flu itself.

Dr. Marc Siegel, associate professor of medicine at NYU School of 
Medicine, is author of ''False Alarm: The Truth About the Epidemic of 
Fear."

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/17/the_cost_of_bird_flu_hysteria/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060317/0c9197fd/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Fri Mar 17 06:42:35 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 09:42:35 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Preparing for pandemic - Manuel Cortazal - Boston Globe
	Op-Ed
Message-ID: <441ACADB.7030007@comcast.net>


  Preparing for pandemic

By Manuel Cortazal  |  March 17, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

THE APPEARANCE last month of the avian flu virus in Nigeria and India is 
a troubling development for health officials tracking the spread of the 
H5N1 strain and eyeing its potential for igniting an influenza pandemic.

Both countries, each with a grossly inadequate public health system, are 
beset with endemic diseases that could mask the spread of a variant of 
the H5N1 from animals to humans. The director general of the World 
Health Organization noted, ''If the H5N1 virus changes to allow it to 
pass easily from person to person, and it goes unchecked, this could 
trigger an influenza pandemic."

In this country attention is now turning to implementation of the Bush 
administration's strategy for the potential emergence of a pandemic 
strain of the avian virus. Bush unveiled his plan, built upon three 
pillars, on Nov. 1 and urged the nation not to ''waste time in preparing."

Observers should view the president's plan against the backdrop of a 
recent natural disaster, Hurricane Katrina, to learn vital lessons that 
should shape our preparations for the arrival of another disastrous 
event on our shores.

Preparedness is the first pillar of the administration's blueprint. This 
element of the national strategy presupposes that the patchwork of 3,000 
local public health units is actively developing response plans. 
Likewise, prior to Katrina, every locality and state along the Gulf 
Coast had a disaster plan that dealt specifically with tropical storm 
readiness.

While the potentially calamitous consequences of the looming threat 
surely call for extensive planning at all levels of government and 
across all sectors of society, Katrina's aftermath taught us a salient 
lesson: There is no steadfast relation between disaster planning and 
effective response.

Surveillance is the second pillar of the president's proposal. The 
residents of the Gulf Coast were privy to an abundance of storm 
reconnaissance presaging a disaster, yet officials were unprepared for 
the storm's ferocity. Here, too, Katrina offers a lesson: Even the best 
surveillance confers limited advantage when the capacity for response is 
lacking.

The national strategy's third pillar is response and containment. The 
president's plan depends on the response capability of local health 
departments, which, as the chaos that followed Katrina demonstrated, is 
an approach fraught with risk. Again, last summer's hurricane provides a 
lesson: The federal government cannot assume that local authorities will 
be able to manage relief activities in response to a pandemic.

The president's plan pays scant attention to quarantine measures, which 
many experts believe were the key to the containment of SARS. Also, it 
is weighted heavily toward vaccines and antiviral medications. Yet, 
national stockpiles are woefully inadequate and won't reach desirable 
levels until 2008. Owing to the glaring lack of vaccines and antiviral 
medications, quarantine may be the most effective response to an outbreak.

Officials responding to a pandemic outbreak will have to deal not with 
mass evacuation but with keeping citizens in place. State and local 
authorities have no experience in coping with the complexity of 
restricting the movement of entire metropolitan areas, which, 
ironically, is the opposite challenge that Gulf Coast emergency managers 
had faced.

It may come as a surprise to many that the federal government does not 
have broad police power to impose quarantines, a responsibility 
constitutionally vested in the states. The disarray among local, state, 
and federal agencies in the wake of Katrina vividly demonstrated the 
constraints on cooperation and coordination following a catastrophic 
event. If a regional outbreak, for want of cooperation among government 
agencies, were to spiral out of control, the deadly virus could spread 
nationwide.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that an outbreak 
of pandemic influenza could result in 20 million to 47 million Americans 
requiring healthcare. By way of comparison, California experienced a 
moderate outbreak of typical seasonal influenza in December that flooded 
emergency rooms and forced hospitals to turn away ambulances.

Equally disturbing is the finding of a study concluding that as many as 
50 percent of healthcare workers may be unwilling to report to work 
during a pandemic. The effects of a pandemic will engulf our healthcare 
system and overwhelm our ability to respond to the millions who will 
need assistance.

The unnerving prospects that await us, should an outbreak occur, call 
for unified leadership that recognizes the limits of state and local 
preparedness and the need for employing quarantine measures. Rather than 
delegating planning and response to myriad local health departments, the 
nation's governors and the president must urgently agree on plans to 
quarantine affected areas and prepare for the multitude of people who 
will need healthcare.

Manuel Cortazal is managing editor of the American Journal of Infection 
Control. 

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/17/preparing_for_pandemic/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060317/69a35226/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Fri Mar 17 07:44:54 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 15:44:54 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Police Memos Say Arrest Tactics Calmed
	Protest
Message-ID: <20060317154454.97B2711F8D3@lax-gw07.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

NEW YORK REGION | March 17, 2006
Police Memos Say Arrest Tactics Calmed Protest
By JIM DWYER
New York City police commanders discussed how they had used "proactive arrests" at political demonstrations in 2002.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/17/nyregion/17police.html?ex=1143262800&en=6324ff1d49194c5b&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060317/35090579/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Fri Mar 17 07:45:49 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 15:45:49 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Caught Up in DNA's Growing Web
Message-ID: <20060317154549.E1A7913B80F@lax-gw04.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

OPINION | March 17, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor: Caught Up in DNA's Growing Web
By HARLAN LEVY
Proposals to extend DNA databanks far beyond convicted felons, and even to the general population, go too far.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/17/opinion/17levy.html?ex=1143262800&en=e4083b42f11ab106&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060317/059aca3c/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Fri Mar 17 07:46:51 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 15:46:51 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Should the President Be Censured? (8
	Letters)
Message-ID: <20060317154651.725343AE588@lax-gw06.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

OPINION | March 17, 2006
Should the President Be Censured? (8 Letters)

To the Editor:.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/17/opinion/l17censure.html?ex=1143262800&en=c07abc14af36b8aa&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060317/c01898e1/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Fri Mar 17 07:51:05 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 15:51:05 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Nuclear Reactors Found to Be Leaking
	Radioactive Water
Message-ID: <20060317155105.832A011F9CA@lax-gw07.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

NATIONAL | March 17, 2006
Nuclear Reactors Found to Be Leaking Radioactive Water
By MATTHEW L. WALD
The attorney general of Illinois is filing a lawsuit over tritium discharges, which have also occurred at seven reactors nationwide in the past 10 years, a scientists' group said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/17/national/17nuke.html?ex=1143262800&en=9e04cc9e5fb70112&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060317/9069f6b7/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Fri Mar 17 07:48:07 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 15:48:07 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Braids of Faith at Baba's Temple: A
	Hindu-Muslim Idyll
Message-ID: <20060317154810.93BEB84230@lax-gw03.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

INTERNATIONAL / ASIA PACIFIC | March 17, 2006
Varanasi Journal: Braids of Faith at Baba's Temple: A Hindu-Muslim Idyll
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
A shrine considered holy by Hindus and Muslims alike is a symbol of a city in which those groups have lived in varying states of ease and unease for hundreds of years.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/17/international/asia/17varanasi.html?ex=1143262800&en=f829ff827e283f85&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060317/7216fcf2/attachment-0001.htm 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Fri Mar 17 08:06:12 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 11:06:12 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] The Black Shamrock
Message-ID: <000801c649dc$bb842430$b83fe440@Harold>

The Black Shamrock site speaks for itself !

http://www.blackshamrock.org/


Happy St Patrick's day my Irish friends!

Harry
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060317/f6a3cf02/attachment.htm 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Fri Mar 17 08:24:03 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 11:24:03 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Martian Awareness Day (in celebration of the little
	green people)
Message-ID: <003701c649df$3832dd30$b83fe440@Harold>








Happy St Patrick's Day  !

Harry
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060317/f3173620/attachment.htm 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Fri Mar 17 08:19:32 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 11:19:32 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Tense debates inSaudi Arabia as Islamists fear reforms
Message-ID: <000f01c649de$964ffe30$b83fe440@Harold>

          
      This was published in the Jordanian Times, March 17

      Harry
       
       
          
      Tense debates in Saudi Arabia as Islamists fear reforms    
          
      By Andrew Hammond 
      Reuters 

      RIYADH ? When Saudi intellectuals got together this month to discuss reforming the education system, they needed armed security officers to protect them. 

      "Some people said they were going to teach me a lesson here," Abdullah Al Ghodami declared defiantly, challenging the Islamists attending a seminar in Riyadh. 

      "I want a lesson now then ? I'm a pupil waiting for this lesson," he told the hall where police officers lined the walls, keeping an eye on the roomful of hardline sheikhs and their supporters, sporting beards and loose-fitting headdresses. 

      The Islamists were on the lookout for liberals who they fear are advancing in a plan to compromise the integrity of what they consider to be Saudi Arabia's Islamic utopia ? a country which lives by uncompromising rules of public morality. 

      Mobilising their troops through the Internet to attend Ghodami's speech, they had promised to "teach him a lesson." 

      Ghodami is famed for promoting the use of the word "modernity" in Arabic, to the disapproval of Saudi conservatives who believe the word implies Western values, which they oppose. 

      The soft-spoken writer is typical of the oil producing kindgom's small but increasingly prominent liberal elite, who appear to have the ear of top Saudi royals. At the seminar, he addressed the sensitive subject of reforming the religion-heavy education syllabus ? a topic that goes to the heart of the acrimonious divide between Islamists and those who label themselves reformers. 

      "We don't have to take the question of changing education syllabuses so sensitively and use charged terms [to attack each other]," Ghodami told the gathering. "The syllabus right now is not good enough, so please don't defend it," he beseeched. 

      When the seminar was over, the security officers clustered in front of the podium to prevent any trouble, and the speakers made a quick exit, speeding away in their cars. 

      Tense atmosphere 

      Although reforms appear to be moving at a snail's pace, the tone of debate between the Islamists and liberals has sharpened since King Abdullah, a supporter of cautious political and economic reform, took power in the US ally last year. 

      Overruling clerical fears of corrupting foreign influence, Saudi Arabia has joined the World Trade Organisation, women were allowed to vote in elections to professional organisations, and state television is now packed with women presenters. 

      "Our preachers were able to follow the secularists and block them... but now the secularists are marching on their path to Westernise the country," lamented Abu Lujain Ibrahim, a prominent hardline Islamist writing in an Islamist chatroom. 

      Education is just one area where Islamists see Western influence creeping in, with the help of a fifth column of Saudis whom they attack regularly as "Bani Alman" ? the secular tribe. 

      Washington has pressed Saudi Arabia to change the school syllabus which, with its demonisation of non-Muslim Westerners as "infidels," helped create a social mindset that produced 15 of the 19 militants who attacked US cities on September 11. 

      Western diplomats say religion still accounts for a third of daily education Saudi teenagers receive, and Saudi officials say it will take years to completely revamp the system. 

      Many Islamists, like Sheikh Mohammed Al Farraj, say the reformists are in cahoots with the West. They argue that a country that implements Sharia and lives by the Sunna, or "Way of the Prophet" ? the essence of Sunni Islam ? needs no lessons from foreigners. 

      "We don't want reform imposed from outside, it can only come from inside," Farraj told the seminar. "But unfortunately, sometimes there are voices inside the kingdom who act in harmony with those outside, and this worries us." Hidden from view, academic Hind Al Khuthaila offered her thoughts from a room next-door. Saudi's ultraorthodox version of Islam, called Wahhabism, prevents men and women who are not related from mixing together. 

      "What got us to this point where we need a security cordon in order to talk about culture and society?" she asked, her voice filtered into the hall through a public address system. 

      Litmus test? 

      The question of whether women should be allowed to drive is emerging as a litmus test of how far social reforms can go. 

      The interior ministry refuses to licence women drivers because Islamic scholars say driving is a physical activity that conflicts with women's divinely ordained role as homemakers, and that freedom to drive could lead to illicit relations with men. 

      Information Minister Iyad Madani ? seen as a reformer who is close to the king ? last month encouraged women to lobby traffic departments, saying there was no formal legal ban. 

      Most women would not dare drive for fear of the religious police, who patrol the streets, and also because the informal ban is so socially ingrained, especially in the larger cities. 

      Some key scholars have started to talk positively about easing restrictions on Saudi society ? such as allowing cinema ? but so far none have publicly backed letting women drive. 

      Lawmaker Mohammed Al Zulfi has led calls in the consultative Shura council to take action. He says he was surrounded by angry Islamists at one of the recent debates because of his opinions. 

      "I told them the Koran and the Sunna do not prevent it, and not allowing women to drive creates more social problems than preventing them," Zulfi told Reuters. 

      "The paroxysms of anger these people go into don't help the matter. They are a minority who are very loud, and they are tense now because of the open atmosphere [for debate]."

      Friday-Saturday, March 17-18, 2006
     
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060317/08112a5b/attachment.htm 

From nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca  Fri Mar 17 10:19:29 2006
From: nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca (CBC News Online)
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 18:19:29 UT
Subject: [Mb-civic] CBC News -
Message-ID: <20060317181929.C9AD61B698@nmweb07.nm.cbc.ca>

An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Url: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060317/2db66a04/attachment.diff 

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Fri Mar 17 10:56:13 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 10:56:13 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] America's Iran Policy: Iraq By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Message-ID: <C040464D.2A32F%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 17, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
America's Iran Policy: Iraq
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

The Bush White House issued its latest national security strategy doctrine
yesterday, and it identifies Iran as the "single country" that poses the
greatest danger to the U.S. today. The report, however, doesn't say what
exactly we should do about Iran. But here's what I think: The most
frightening, scary, terrifying thing we could do to Iran today ? short of an
outright attack ? is to get out of Iraq.

The second most frightening, scary, terrifying thing we could do to Iran is
to succeed in Iraq. The worst thing we could do, though, the thing that
would make Iranians the happiest, is to continue bleeding in Iraq and
baby-sitting a stalemate there. In sum, since we are not going to invade
Iran, the best way we can influence it is by what we do in Iraq.

Let me explain: I am not in favor of withdrawing from Iraq now ? not while
there is still a chance for a decent outcome. But if we did pull out of
Iraq, it would make life incredibly complicated for Tehran. There's a lot of
cheap talk that Iran was the big winner from the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Don't be so sure. Hundreds of years of Mesopotamian history teach us that
Arabs and Persians do not play well together.

Right now, the natural antipathy and competition between Iraqi Arabs and
Iranian Persians ? even though large numbers of both are Shiite Muslims ?
have been muted because of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Both sides can focus
their anger on us.

But as soon as we leave ? and you can bet the house and kids on this ? the
natural rivalry between Iraqi Arabs and Iranian Persians will surface.
Culture, history and nationalism matter. Iran and Iraq did not fight a war
for eight years by mistake, or just because Saddam was in power. Once
America is out of Iraq, it will not be a winning political strategy for any
Iraqi politician to be known as "pro-Iranian" or, even worse, as an
instrument of Tehran's.

If we were out of Iraq today and Iran had to manage the chaos there, on its
border, it would be a huge, energy-draining problem for Tehran. Iraqis, in
case you haven't noticed, have a rather violent, independent streak. Anyone
who thinks Iraq is some overripe fruit that will fall into Iran's lap as
soon as we leave, and obediently stay there, doesn't know Iraq or Iran.
Iraqi Arab Shiites did not wait for centuries to rule Iraq in order to turn
it over to Iranian Persian Shiites. Not a chance.

In their superb, must-read, military history of the U.S. invasion of Iraq,
"Cobra II," Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor explain why Saddam always
wanted to keep the world in doubt about his W.M.D., even when his cupboard
was bare: it was to deter Iran. Remember, Iraq and Iran each used poison gas
against the other in their war. The last thing Saddam wanted was to let Iran
know he was out of gas. Gordon and Trainor quote the Iraqi military
intelligence director as telling U.S. interrogators after the war: "What did
we think was going to happen with the coalition invasion? We were more
interested in Turkey and Iran." All geopolitics is local.

Also, if the U.S. were out of Iraq and the U.S. attacked Iran's nuclear
facilities with airstrikes, Iran would not be able to retaliate with its
missiles against any large concentrations of U.S. military forces nearby.
That, too, would give the U.S. a freer hand to deal with Iran's nuclear
threat.

The only thing more frightening to the Iranians than the U.S. leaving Iraq,
would be ? and this is my preference ? the U.S. succeeding in Iraq. Iraq has
already held two elections in which anyone could run and vote. This stands
in sharp contrast with the elections in Iran, where only conservatives
approved by the ayatollahs can run. Iraq has a flourishing free press.
Iran's insecure ayatollahs have shut down their critics.

The more Iraqi Shiites are empowered in a democratic Iraq, the more Iranian
Shiites will ask why they don't have the same rights as the folks next door.
Also, the major spiritual centers of Shiite Islam aren't in Iran, but in
Iraq. The more the Iraqi Shiite religious centers are revived ? with their
particular Iraqi Shiite strain, represented by Grand Ayatollah Ali
al-Sistani, which says clerics should stay out of politics ? the more the
Iranian mullahs will see their influence diminished.

So getting out of Iraq would be a good anti-Iran strategy. Succeeding in
Iraq would be even better. The one strategy that won't work for us, but
would be ideal for Iran, would be for U.S. troops to remain in Iraq as
bleeding sitting ducks, baby-sitting a stalemate and absorbing everyone's
wrath ? including the wrath that would naturally be directed at Tehran.

Paul Krugman is on vacation.

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From michael at intrafi.com  Fri Mar 17 11:12:12 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 11:12:12 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] Alternet: Anarchism, Hollywood-Style
Message-ID: <20060317191212.6BD48B8236@alternet.org>


This story has been forwarded to you from
http://www.alternet.org by michael at intrafi.com



-------------------------------------
Anarchism, Hollywood-Style
http://www.alternet.org/story/33579

'V for Vendetta' is a pro-revolutionary, action-adventure romp that makes other political films look like 'Little House on the Prairie.'
-------------------------------------


From michael at intrafi.com  Fri Mar 17 11:19:55 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 11:19:55 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] Alternet: Civil War in America
Message-ID: <20060317191955.542C5B8234@alternet.org>


This story has been forwarded to you from
http://www.alternet.org by michael at intrafi.com



-------------------------------------
Civil War in America
http://www.alternet.org/story/33676

We need a movement -- one that will loudly proclaim our refusal to go along with right-wing fantasies of time travel to the 1950s.
-------------------------------------


From michael at intrafi.com  Fri Mar 17 11:20:45 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 11:20:45 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] Alternet: So Far, No Good
Message-ID: <20060317192045.C0481B822C@alternet.org>


This story has been forwarded to you from
http://www.alternet.org by michael at intrafi.com



-------------------------------------
So Far, No Good
http://www.alternet.org/story/33663

As Rep. John Murtha put it, 'The only people who want us in Iraq are Iran and al-Qaida.'
-------------------------------------


From michael at intrafi.com  Fri Mar 17 11:21:24 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 11:21:24 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] Alternet: War-Loving Pundits
Message-ID: <20060317192124.77AABB8234@alternet.org>


This story has been forwarded to you from
http://www.alternet.org by michael at intrafi.com



-------------------------------------
War-Loving Pundits
http://www.alternet.org/story/33661

On the third anniversary of the Iraq invasion, don't forget the media spin that helped make this war possible.
-------------------------------------


From michael at intrafi.com  Fri Mar 17 11:23:18 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 11:23:18 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] Alternet: Fog of War or War Crimes?
Message-ID: <20060317192318.7DF41B8237@alternet.org>


This story has been forwarded to you from
http://www.alternet.org by michael at intrafi.com



-------------------------------------
Fog of War or War Crimes?
http://www.alternet.org/story/33533

Jimmy Massey, the Marines' most outspoken anti-war war criminal, talks about what really happened on the road to Baghdad.
-------------------------------------


From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Fri Mar 17 11:28:13 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (Ian)
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 14:28:13 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Should the President Be Censured?
	(8	Letters)
References: <20060317154651.725343AE588@lax-gw06.mroute.net>
Message-ID: <009201c649f8$f0265980$99ca6c42@iancn2ccrvzt0j>

E-Mail ThisMike:

So!  Now you're stealing my "what we're saying" thunder!!  The gauntlet is thrown down!  Prepare to do battle!!  LOL.

Just kidding.  Nice to see you adding this to your arsenal.

Peace.
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: mblaxill at yahoo.com 
  To: mb-civic at islandlists.com 
  Sent: Friday, March 17, 2006 10:46 AM
  Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Should the President Be Censured? (8 Letters)


            
                 
                
             
              This page was sent to you by:  mblaxill at yahoo.com 

              OPINION   | March 17, 2006 
              Should the President Be Censured? (8 Letters) 
              To the Editor:. 
             
             
                 
                     
                    1. Knock, Knock. It's Indian Comfort Food. 
                    2. Students Flock to Seminaries, but Fewer See Pulpit in Future 
                    3. Is Business Ready for a Flu Pandemic? 
                    4. A Southern Star Rises in the Lowcountry 
                    5. It's Costco, but Is It Picasso? Art Sale in Doubt 

                    ?  Go to Complete List 
                     
                   
             
             
                
              Copyright 2006  The New York Times Company | Privacy Policy    
                 
       



------------------------------------------------------------------------------


  _______________________________________________
  Mb-civic mailing list
  Mb-civic at islandlists.com
  http://www.islandlists.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mb-civic
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060317/1876062c/attachment.htm 

From autoreply at economist.com  Fri Mar 17 10:37:49 2006
From: autoreply at economist.com (autoreply at economist.com)
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 13:37:49 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] An article for you from Michael Butler.
Message-ID: <200603171810.NAA17481@stage-web-app.economist.com>


- AN ARTICLE FOR YOU, FROM ECONOMIST.COM -

Dear civic,

Michael Butler (michael at intrafi.com) wants you to see this article on Economist.com.

The sender also included the following message for you:

Current scene in Iraq


(Note: the sender's e-mail address above has not been verified.)

Subscribe to The Economist print edition, get great savings and FREE full access to Economist.com.  Click here to subscribe:  http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/email.cfm 

Alternatively subscribe to online only version by clicking on the link below and save 25%:

http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/offer.cfm?campaign=168-XLMT



IRAN'S POLITICS
Mar 16th 2006  

Three months after elections, the Iraqi parliament is meeting against a
backdrop of increasing sectarian violence

FOR much of the past two years Iraq has seemed poised to dissolve into
hostile ethnic and sectarian enclaves. But this week--on the third
anniversary, as it happens, of the American-led invasion--the body
politic seemed even more fragile than usual. On Sunday March 12th a
series of bombs and mortar barrages ripped across the Shia slum of Sadr
City, killing more than 50 people--a strike that seemed designed to
stoke the anger that was still simmering after the demolition of the
Shia Askariya shrine three weeks ago, and hasten the descent into civil
war.

The Sadr City suburb is the Baghdad base of the Mahdi Army, loyal to
Muqtada al-Sadr, a radical Shia cleric. His men were probably
responsible for many of the reprisal attacks launched against Sunni
mosques after the bombing of the Askariya shrine. Nonetheless,
inhabitants had considered themselves to be living in something of a
safe zone. In part, this was because of the ubiquitous black-clad
militiamen who stop any strange car that ventures into Sadr City. But
it was also because of the position of Mr Sadr himself. Whatever his
followers' inclinations, he has always been careful to express
solidarity with Sunnis against the American and British occupiers. 

That sense of safety has been shattered since rumours spread through
the slum that residents of surrounding middle-class Sunni
neighbourhoods had been gunning down Sadr City residents on their way
to work. Some Sadrists say that it is now high time to end the menace
posed by Sunni extremists once and for all. If the religious leadership
would just give the word, say the hotheads, Baghdad could become a Shia
city "in minutes".

Mr Sadr has tried to calm down his followers as he always does, by
diverting blame towards the Americans. But in a televised address he
did utter one ominous reference to the Americans preventing his
militias from striking at the "TAKFIRIS"--that is, at the Sunni
ultra-puritans whom Shias blame for most attacks. And since some of Mr
Sadr's followers do not make much distinction between TAKFIRIS and
mainstream Sunnis, this set the scene for a new round of revenge
killings. 

Grisly evidence of these killings has been surfacing all week. On
Wednesday, police said that during the preceding 24 hours they had
discovered the bodies of 87 people killed execution-style, although
some of them might have been murdered before the latest blasts. The
victims were discovered in both Shia and Sunni districts of Baghdad.
Some had been tortured. The discovery of these bodies, so soon after
the blows against the protected Shia neighbourhood and the Askariya
shrine, can be expected to feed the cycle of reprisals and
counter-reprisals in the days ahead.

Meanwhile, an increasingly personalised quarrel between the Shia-led
United Iraqi Alliance on the one hand and the Kurdish, Sunni Arab and
secular parties on the other threatens to paralyse politics altogether.
Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish leader, has led a campaign to force the
Alliance to rescind its decision to re-nominate Ibrahim al-Jaafari as
prime minister. Mr Talabani says that during his year in power Mr
Jaafari consistently failed to implement Kurdish-Shia agreements on
resettling refugees and otherwise undoing Saddam-era ethnic cleansing
in the disputed city of Kirkuk. The dispute has now grown into more
than just a matter of policy differences. The Kurds say that they
simply have no faith that Mr Jaafari will act on his commitments. The
Sunnis have their own complaints, mostly related to the government's
failure to protect them from abuses by the security forces. On
Thursday, Mr Jaafari said he would withdraw his nomination "if my
people ask me to step aside".

The dispute over Mr Jaafari's leadership has poisoned Iraqi politics to
the extent that, until a week ago, nearly three months after December's
elections, the two sides could not even agree to convene the newly
elected parliament by the constitutional deadline of March 15th. The
constitution is ambiguous about how binding the transitional deadlines
are: failure to abide by them does not necessarily mean a crisis. But
ignoring the date completely would not have boded well for the
prospects of forming a new government, let alone one that might entice
the formerly excluded Sunni parties into government. Only after the
personal intervention of Zalmay Khalilzad, America's energetic
ambassador, did the quarrelling groups at last agree to meet on
Thursday. Even so, all the outstanding issues remain. Mr Khalilzad has
spoken of herding Iraqi leaders into a conference, possibly outside
Iraq, to "work day and night" to reach a consensus on how to proceed. 

Nonetheless, Iraq continues to generate the odd ray of hope. One such
is a recent agreement intended to deal with the problem of death
squads. Sunnis have long accused the Shia-controlled interior-ministry
forces, both police and commandos, of abducting and killing Sunnis. 

Last weekend the defence and interior ministries announced an agreement
designed to address these concerns. Under this the army, which has a
less brutal reputation, will accompany interior-ministry forces on all
their raids. The interior ministry is also investigating an incident in
which an American patrol reportedly caught a death squad red-handed on
its way to kill a prisoner. Occasional accords such as this, in
addition to the periodic bursts of rhetoric extolling the virtues of
national reconciliation that follow outrages such as the Sadr City
bombings, suggest that none of Iraq's main factions is ready to march
over the edge just yet. Nor, however, do they show much readiness for
compromise.
 

See this article with graphics and related items at http://www.economist.com/agenda/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5636302&fsrc=nwl

Go to http://www.economist.com for more global news, views and analysis from the Economist Group.

- ABOUT ECONOMIST.COM -

Economist.com is the online version of The Economist newspaper, an independent weekly international news and business publication offering clear reporting, commentary and analysis on world politics, business, finance, science & technology, culture, society and the arts.
Economist.com also offers exclusive content online, including additional articles throughout the week in the Global Agenda section.

-	SUBSCRIBE NOW AND SAVE 25% -

Click here: http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/offer.cfm?campaign=168-XLMT

Subscribe now with 25% off and receive full access to:

* all the articles published in The Economist newspaper
* the online archive - allowing you to search and retrieve over 33,000 articles published in The Economist since 1997
* The World in  - The Economist's outlook on the year
* Business encyclopedia - allows you to find a definition and explanation for any business term


- ABOUT THIS E-MAIL -

This e-mail was sent to you by the person at the e-mail address listed
above through a link found on Economist.com.  We will not send you any
future messages as a result of your being the recipient of this e-mail.


- COPYRIGHT -

This e-mail message and Economist articles linked from it are copyright
(c) 2006 The Economist Newspaper Group Limited. All rights reserved.
http://www.economist.com/help/copy_general.cfm

Economist.com privacy policy: http://www.economist.com/about/privacy.cfm



From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Fri Mar 17 11:29:38 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (Ian)
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 14:29:38 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Police Memos Say Arrest Tactics
	Calmed	Protest
References: <20060317154454.97B2711F8D3@lax-gw07.mroute.net>
Message-ID: <00a501c649f9$22ed01c0$99ca6c42@iancn2ccrvzt0j>

E-Mail ThisWhat a load of horse-hockey.  These types of actions are having a chilling effect on First Amendment rights to free speech, press and assembly.
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: mblaxill at yahoo.com 
  To: mb-civic at islandlists.com 
  Sent: Friday, March 17, 2006 10:44 AM
  Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Police Memos Say Arrest Tactics Calmed Protest


            
                
                   
                
                
             
              This page was sent to you by:  mblaxill at yahoo.com 

              NEW YORK REGION   | March 17, 2006 
              Police Memos Say Arrest Tactics Calmed Protest 
              By JIM DWYER 
              New York City police commanders discussed how they had used "proactive arrests" at political demonstrations in 2002. 
             
             
                 
                     
                    1. Knock, Knock. It's Indian Comfort Food. 
                    2. Students Flock to Seminaries, but Fewer See Pulpit in Future 
                    3. Is Business Ready for a Flu Pandemic? 
                    4. A Southern Star Rises in the Lowcountry 
                    5. It's Costco, but Is It Picasso? Art Sale in Doubt 

                    ?  Go to Complete List 
                     
                   
                   
                          Advertisement 
                                Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

                                Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.
                                http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/   


                         
                   
                   
                     
                          Do you love NY? Get the insider's guide to where to stay, what to do and where to eat. Go to www.nytimes.com/travel for your NYC Guide now. Click here. 



                   
             
             
                
              Copyright 2006  The New York Times Company | Privacy Policy    
                 
       



------------------------------------------------------------------------------


  _______________________________________________
  Mb-civic mailing list
  Mb-civic at islandlists.com
  http://www.islandlists.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mb-civic
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060317/2f0a066e/attachment-0001.htm 

From michael at intrafi.com  Fri Mar 17 11:29:37 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 19:29:37 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] BBC E-mail: US evangelicals warn Republicans
Message-ID: <20060317_192937_035552.michael@intrafi.com>

Michael Butler saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you
should see it.



** US evangelicals warn Republicans **
Leaders from the Christian right in the US warn Republicans they must do more to advance conservative values.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/americas/4815912.stm >


** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all
in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/dailyemail/ >


** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have?been verified.

If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm


From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Fri Mar 17 11:32:35 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 19:32:35 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Democracy Push by Bush Attracts Doubters in
	Party
Message-ID: <20060317193235.50D2E11FAD8@lax-gw07.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

Oh goody-goody - is it possible we are watching the Republican Party get hoist by its own petard? Will this increasing fractionalism spell the end of the neocon stranglehold on America? Tune in tomorrow, same bat time, same bat channel... 


WASHINGTON | March 17, 2006
Diplomatic Memo: Democracy Push by Bush Attracts Doubters in Party
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
Some Republicans say that the emphasis on promoting democracy has come at the expense of protecting other U.S. interests.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/17/politics/17democracy.html?ex=1143262800&en=0cc8eb642936dbe7&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060317/970ab858/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Fri Mar 17 11:33:38 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 19:33:38 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Idaho Governor Selected to Lead Interior
	Dept.
Message-ID: <20060317193338.B01509FCD9@lax-gw05.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

Talk about putting the fox in charge of the henhouse!!!


WASHINGTON | March 17, 2006
Idaho Governor Selected to Lead Interior Dept.
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY
If confirmed by the Senate, where he once served, Dirk Kempthorne would succeed Gale A. Norton, who resigned last week.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/17/politics/17interior.html?ex=1143262800&en=739dccf93af646a2&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060317/fc008761/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Fri Mar 17 11:34:29 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 19:34:29 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Same Washington, Different Office
Message-ID: <20060317193429.9035813B847@lax-gw04.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

Is anyone surprised?


WASHINGTON | March 17, 2006
Same Washington, Different Office
By LESLIE WAYNE
After serving as attorney general, John Ashcroft has become a Washington lobbyist and is marketing his insider's knowledge of how government works.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/17/politics/17ashcroft.html?ex=1143262800&en=e02165b1c88dd2e9&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060317/fdf90713/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Fri Mar 17 11:34:57 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 19:34:57 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Time for Facts, Not Resolutions
Message-ID: <20060317193457.AC5E5249EBF@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

OPINION | March 17, 2006
Editorial: Time for Facts, Not Resolutions

Members of Congress don't need to take extraordinary measures like censuring President Bush. They need to fulfill their duty to investigate the executive branch's misdeeds.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/17/opinion/17fri1.html?ex=1143262800&en=676e20494868900e&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060317/e453ca63/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Fri Mar 17 11:35:15 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 19:35:15 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: The War in Iraq: Critics Left and Right (3
	Letters)
Message-ID: <20060317193515.67575249EB9@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

What we're saying...


OPINION | March 17, 2006
The War in Iraq: Critics Left and Right (3 Letters)

To the Editor:.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/17/opinion/l17brooks.html?ex=1143262800&en=736c236ada37d35f&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060317/d6c1127b/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Fri Mar 17 11:35:56 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 19:35:56 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Tying Religion and Politics to an Impending
	U.S. Decline
Message-ID: <20060317193556.EF96F3AE41A@lax-gw06.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

BOOKS | March 17, 2006
Books of The Times | 'American Theocracy': Tying Religion and Politics to an Impending U.S. Decline
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Kevin Phillips is concerned about the interpenetration of religion and politics in America, as well as financial and military overreach.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/17/books/17book.html?ex=1143262800&en=bbe4a9f59ba0b1b0&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060317/27a22d06/attachment-0001.htm 

From CLARKE445566 at msn.com  Fri Mar 17 06:02:06 2006
From: CLARKE445566 at msn.com (ROBERT CLARKE)
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 09:02:06 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Fw: FW: Japan vs. America
Message-ID: <E1FKMJl-0007nH-6R@elasmtp-banded.atl.sa.earthlink.net>



----- Original Message -----


> Subject: This is not too far fetched
>  
>   
>  
> The Canoe Race:" A Modern Parable"- A Japanese company (Toyota) and an
> American company (General Motors) decided to have a canoe race on the  
> Missouri River. Both teams practiced long and hard to reach their peak  
> performance before the race.
>  
> On the big day, the Japanese won by a mile.
>  
> The Americans, very discouraged and depressed, decided to investigate
> the reason for the crushing defeat. A management team made up of  
> senior management was formed to investigate and recommend appropriate  
> action. Their conclusion was the Japanese had 8 people rowing and 1  
> person steering, while the American team had 8 people steering and 1  
> person rowing. So American management hired a consulting company and  
> paid them a large amount of money for a second opinion.
>  
> They advised that too many people were steering the boat, while not
> enough people were rowing. To prevent another loss to the Japanese,  
> the rowing team's management structure was totally reorganized to 4  
> steering supervisors, 3 area steering superintendents and 1 assistant  
> superintendent steering manager. They also implemented a new  
> performance system that would give the 1 person rowing the boat  
> greater incentive to work harder. It was called the "Rowing Team  
> Quality First Program", with meetings, dinners and free pens for the  
> rower. There was discussion of getting new paddles, canoes and other  
> equipment, extra vacation days for practices and bonuses.
>  
> The next year the Japanese won by two miles.
>  
> Humiliated, the American management laid off the rower for poor
> performance, halted development of a new canoe, sold the paddles, and  
> canceled all capital investments for new equipment.The money saved was  
> distributed to the Senior Executives as bonuses and the next year's  
> racing team was outsourced to India!!!!


This message may contain confidential, proprietary or legally privileged information and is
intended only for the use of the addressee named above. No confidentiality or privilege is
waived or lost by any error in transmission. If you are not the intended recipient of this
message you are hereby notified that you must not use, disseminate, copy it in any form or
take any action in reliance on it.






Make FREE PC-to-PC calls with MSN Messenger. Get it now!  
  


Netscape.  Just the Net You Need.



No virus found in this incoming message.
Checked by AVG Anti-Virus.
Version: 7.0.344 / Virus Database: 268.2.1/279 - Release Date: 3/10/2006
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060317/42ec8516/attachment.htm 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Fri Mar 17 13:31:59 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (HS)
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 21:31:59 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] BBC E-mail: US evangelicals warn Republicans
Message-ID: <20060317_213159_076385.harry.sifton@sympatico.ca>

HS saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you
should see it.

** Message **
This is not a good thing!!

** US evangelicals warn Republicans **
Leaders from the Christian right in the US warn Republicans they must do more to advance conservative values.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/1/hi/world/americas/4815912.stm >


** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all
in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/dailyemail/ >


** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have?been verified.

If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm


From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Fri Mar 17 13:37:43 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (HS)
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 21:37:43 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] BBC E-mail: Hospital probed over baby release
Message-ID: <20060317_213743_046975.harry.sifton@sympatico.ca>

HS saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you
should see it.



** Hospital probed over baby release **
Israel's justice ministry is investigating a hospital that allegedly held a newborn baby as a "guarantee" until a bill was paid.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/1/hi/world/middle_east/4816152.stm >


** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all
in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/dailyemail/ >


** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have?been verified.

If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm


From michael at michaelbutler.com  Fri Mar 17 13:40:28 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 13:40:28 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Pakistan About Indian Arms Deal
Message-ID: <C0406CCE.2A355%michael@michaelbutler.com>



-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/octet-stream
Size: 70335 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060317/0d450a0d/attachment-0001.obj 

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Fri Mar 17 14:24:06 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 14:24:06 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Deranged, Disconnected,
	and Dangerous     By William Rivers Pitt
Message-ID: <C0407706.2A361%michael@michaelbutler.com>

    Deranged, Disconnected, and Dangerous
    By William Rivers Pitt
    t r u t h o u t | Perspective

    Friday 17 March 2006

    There was an article in the Washington Post ten days ago that, was, in
no uncertain terms, the most frightening and disturbing report I have seen
in months. It wasn't about mass casualties in Iraq, or about a looming civil
war there, or about terrorism, or the bursting budget, or spying on
Americans. It was about a rug.

    "Nothing says power like the Oval Office," begins the article. "The
paintings of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. The bust of Dwight D.
Eisenhower. The desk used by both Roosevelts. And then there's the rug.
Don't forget the rug. President Bush never does. For whatever reason, Bush
seems fixated on his rug. Virtually all visitors to the Oval Office find him
regaling them about how it was chosen and what it represents. Turns out, he
always says, the first decision any president makes is what carpet he wants
in his office. As a take-charge leader, he then explains, he of course made
a command decision - he delegated the decision to Laura Bush, who chose a
yellow sunbeam design."

    The article goes on to describe, in writhing detail, how George W. Bush
inserts the Oval Office rug into virtually every conversation he has. If a
discussion veers away into matters of import, Bush steers it back to the
rug. "He loves his rug," said Nicolle Wallace, the White House
communications director, in the Post article. "I've heard him describe it
countless times."

    The article, to be sure, was meant to be lighthearted. It left me,
however, in a state of deep disturbance. All he can talk about is his rug?
With everything that is going on these days, he wants to focus on the rug.
Dead soldiers? Rug. Civil war? Rug. Complete and total failure? Complete and
total rug.

    The man is deranged, disconnected, dangerous. It appears, finally, that
a significant portion of the country now sees this clearly. Only 33% of
Americans, according to the latest Pew poll, approve of Mr. Bush and the job
he is doing.

    Hey, it only took five years. It has suddenly become all the rage to
jump all over this administration. Pundits from every corner, including more
than a few conservatives, are apparently waking up to the fact that they
stapled themselves to Casey Jones's train. Hell, even right-wing avatar
Peggy Noonan is saying that if she knew then what she knew now, she wouldn't
have voted for Bush. Here's the kicker, though, and a good explanation for
that lingering 33% support: Noonan says she wouldn't vote for Bush because
he is actually a liberal. The blind leading the blind has become the
deranged following the deranged. Go figure.

    Speaking of deranged, and of the 33-percenters, let me show you
something. This was put together by one of the administrators of the web
forum DemocraticUnderground, who noticed that news reports out of Iraq seem
to continuously use the phrase "a recent surge of violence" to describe what
is happening there. Feast:

    2003

    Middle East Online, September 3, 2003: "Meanwhile, Chancellor Gerhard
Schroeder and French President Jacques Chirac were to meet in Germany on
Thursday to discuss ways for the West to respond to the recent surge in
violence in Iraq and the Middle East."

    UK Telegraph, October 31, 2003: "Ansar is believed to be channeling into
Iraq the foreign fighters who are behind a recent surge in violence in the
country, officials say."

    KNI News, November 3, 2003: "Bush blamed loyalists to ousted Iraqi
President Saddam Hussein and foreign terrorists for the recent surge in
violence in Iraq."

    2004

    Reuters, March 4, 2004: "A wave of bomb attacks in Baghdad and Karbala
killing at least 171 people earlier this week has highlighted the
difficulties in rebuilding the country and restoring peace. But Mr. Blair,
speaking after a meeting in Rome with his Italian counterpart, Silvio
Berlusconi, said the recent surge in violence in Iraq did not constitute
civil war."

    Radio Free Europe, April 14, 2004: "US President George W. Bush held a
major news conference at the White House on 13 April in the middle of the
deadliest month for Americans in Iraq since Baghdad fell a year ago. He
spoke of the recent surge in violence there, but urged his countrymen not to
lose faith. He also said he would adhere to the 30 June deadline for handing
over sovereignty to Iraqis."

    US State Department, April 15, 2004: "Pace said the recent surge in
violence in Iraq is being driven by 'terrorists' who see the June 30
deadline for turnover of sovereignty approaching rapidly and are petrified
by the promise of democracy."

    CBS News, April 26, 2004: "Lt. Gen. David Barno, the top American
commander in Afghanistan, said Monday that the military has seen a recent
surge in violence, but that most attacks were directed against soft targets,
such as civilians or isolated Afghan security outposts."

    Pew Research Center, May 12, 2004: "Despite the prison abuse scandal and
the recent surge in violence in Iraq, a majority of the public (53%)
continues to support keeping troops in Iraq until a stable government is
established."

    China Daily, May 25, 2004: "In his speech to the Army War College here,
Bush warned that 'there are difficult days ahead and the way forward may
sometimes appear chaotic.' Yet he vowed the handover would take place on
schedule and that the US-led coalition would not be defeated by insurgents
blamed for the recent surge in violence."

    The New Standard, June 24, 2004: "Compelled by the recent surge in
violence, US Central Command (CentCom) has informally asked Army planners
for as many as 25,000 more troops in Iraq, the Baltimore Sun reports."

    The Washington Post, July 22, 2004: "Despite a recent surge in violence,
including kidnappings, car bombings and assassinations, senior US and Iraqi
officials gave a relatively optimistic assessment on Wednesday of the
security situation in Iraq since the transfer of political authority from US
to Iraqi authorities June 28."

    Progress Magazine, July/August, 2004: "In the short term, ongoing help
will be required with the maintenance of security within the country. The
response to the recent surge in violence must emphasize political solutions
and not be just a simple deployment of military power."

    The Washington Post, September 9, 2004: "'The recent surge in violence
has been especially surprising because in the weeks after the transfer of
power there was a phase that, for Iraq, felt to some almost like a lull.'"

    Al Jazeera, September 17, 2004: "The assessments, made before the recent
surge in violence in Iraq and the US military death toll there topping 1000,
appear to conflict with Bush's upbeat description of the US-led effort to
stabilize and democratize Iraq."

    The Washington Times, September 22, 2004: "The Iraqi leader also said
that despite a recent surge in violence in Iraq, it is 'very important for
the people of the world really to know that we are winning, we are making
progress in Iraq, we are defeating terrorists.'"

    Al Jazeera, December 18, 2004: "Mosul has experienced a recent surge in
violence. On Friday, a car carrying Turkish security guards was attacked in
the city, in Iraq's far north near the Turkish border, and four people were
killed, one of them decapitated."

    2005

    Radio Free Europe, January 4, 2005: "The incident marks the most senior
assassination since the death in May of Governing Council president Abd
al-Zahra Uthman Muhammad and should be seen within the context of the recent
surge in violence ahead of national and provincial elections slated for 30
January."

    CBS Chicago, January 17, 2005: "The area around Kut has seen a recent
surge in violence. In a separate attack, two Iraqi provincial government
auditors were shot to death late Sunday after armed gunmen stopped their car
in Suwaira, about 25 miles southeast of Baghdad, an official at a Kut
hospital said."

    ABC News, March 2, 2005: "Most of the victims were Shiites, the targets
of a recent surge in violence, most notably a series of suicide bombings and
other attacks that killed nearly 100 people during the Shiite religious
commemoration known as Ashoura."

    The BBC, April 27, 2005: "But he added it was too early to say if a
recent surge in violence amounted to a concerted campaign, and insisted that
US-backed forces were 'winning.'"

    The International Herald-Tribune, May 16, 2005: "The insurgents' choice
of adversary is unusual. But the recent surge in violence, at least, follows
a time-tested pattern."

    The Washington Post, May 19, 2005: "A senior US military official told
reporters Wednesday that the recent surge in violence in Iraq followed a
meeting in Syria last month of associates of the Jordanian insurgent leader
Abu Musab Zarqawi."

    The Council on Foreign Relations, May 20, 2005: "It's unclear how much
of the recent surge in violence stems from tribal leaders, but as Metz
points out: 'Local elites recognize that in a secular, modernized Iraq,
their power would be challenged.'"

    Salon, May 23, 2005: "Even despite the recent surge in violence, in some
areas - downtown Mosul, for example - Iraqi forces have begun limited
independent operations."

    Associated Press, June 17, 2005: "It is also believed to be the main
hideout of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant whose al
Qaeda-linked group has carried out many of the deadliest attacks in Iraq and
who US forces believe is behind a recent surge in violence."

    White House press conference, June 20, 2005: "Mr. President, we were
told that you planned to sharpen your focus on Iraq. Why did this become
necessary? And given the recent surge in violence, do you agree with Vice
President Dick Cheney's assessment that the insurgency is in its last
throes?"

    Iran Focus Online, August 4, 2005: "His comments came as the 15-nation
council unanimously adopted a US-drafted resolution condemning a recent
surge in violence in Iraq that has killed hundreds ..."

    Radio Free Europe, August 12, 2005: "But a recent surge in violence and
reports of growing public hostility to the Japanese presence are prompting
many to question the prospects for continued humanitarian assistance there."

    Associated Press, September 17, 2005: "Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of
al Qaeda in Iraq, has reportedly said the recent surge in violence is in
retaliation for a coalition offensive against the group's stronghold in the
northern city of Tal Afar."

    The Washington Times, October 31, 2005: "The fresh US effort to crack
down on insurgents followed a recent surge in violence caused by the passing
of the new Iraqi constitution in a referendum held earlier this month."

    2006

    Agence France Presse, January 7, 2006: "US officials have sought to
downplay a recent surge in violence that on Thursday alone claimed the lives
of more than 115 Iraqis and 11 US servicemen."

    The Sidney Morning Herald, January 8, 2006: "The recent surge in
violence is "an anomaly" and Iraq is not on the verge of civil war, the top
US commander there said yesterday, after one of the country's bloodiest days
since the fall of Saddam Hussein."

    The American Chronicle, February 1, 2006: "Recently, five other members
of Congress and I sat on a C-130 transport plane surrounded by soldiers
going from Kuwait to Baghdad. The backdrop is a recent surge in violence."

    The Associated Press, February 4, 2006: "Dozens of bodies have been
discovered in various parts of Baghdad gagged, bound and shot repeatedly in
the past week, amid recent surge in violence, which analysts have repeatedly
described as initial stages of an open-ended civil war between Iraq's ethnic
groups."

    Associated Press, March 1, 2006: "AP reports that he was giving an
unusually frank assessment of the stakes in the country's recent surge in
violence."

    The Baltimore Sun, March 4, 2006: "The top US commander in Iraq said
yesterday that he hopes to make an assessment this spring about whether to
reduce the number of American troops in Iraq. But Pentagon officials
speaking anonymously said a recent surge in violence there has dampened
hopes that force levels can be cut anytime soon."

    Associated Press, March 6, 2006: "The training at the desert village is
especially important for the Marines of the First Battalion, 14th Marine
Regiment, 4th Marine Division. The battalion, made up mostly of Marine
reservists, is leaving soon for Iraq, where sectarian tensions have brought
a recent surge in violence - and growing concerns about civil war."

    Reuters, March 10, 2006: "Iraqi forces, not American troops, would deal
with a civil war if one erupts in Iraq and US troop cuts remained possible
despite a recent surge in violence, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said
on Thursday."

    Al Jazeera, March 11, 2006: "Moving to the recent surge in violence that
has swept Iraq, Ritter said he wasn't surprised as the only thing holding
the three infighting ethnic and religious groups (Kurds, Shia, and Sunnis)
together since the end of the Ottoman Empire after World War I was Saddam
Hussein's Ba'athist Party."

    The New York Times, March 13, 2006: "Despite the recent surge in
violence in Iraq, Mr. Reid said he believed that civil war was "neither
imminent nor inevitable." He said Iraqi security forces now numbered around
235,000, with 5,000 more volunteering to join every month."

    There you have it, folks. There isn't anything to worry about in Iraq.
It has only been a "recent surge of violence" we have been hearing about ...
every week for the last three years since this whole catastrophe was first
undertaken. Have no fear, though. As Army General George Casey states in the
January 8, 2006, article above, "This level of violence, I think as we've
seen, is an anomaly." George can keep right on admiring his rug.

 


From michael at michaelbutler.com  Fri Mar 17 14:26:41 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 14:26:41 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Police Files Say Arrest Tactics Calmed Protest By
	Jim	Dwyer
Message-ID: <C04077A1.2A367%michael@michaelbutler.com>

    Go to Original

    Police Files Say Arrest Tactics Calmed Protest
    By Jim Dwyer
    The New York Times

    Friday 17 March 2006

    In five internal reports made public yesterday as part of a lawsuit, New
York City police commanders candidly discuss how they had successfully used
"proactive arrests," covert surveillance and psychological tactics at
political demonstrations in 2002, and recommend that those approaches be
employed at future gatherings.

    Among the most effective strategies, one police captain wrote, was the
seizure of demonstrators on Fifth Avenue who were described as "obviously
potential rioters."

    The reports provide a rare glimpse of internal police evaluations and
strategies on security and free speech issues that have provoked sharp
debate between city officials and political demonstrators since the Sept. 11
attacks.

    The reports also made clear what the police have yet to discuss
publicly: that the department uses undercover officers to infiltrate
political gatherings and monitor behavior.

    Indeed, one of the documents - a draft report from the department's
Disorder Control Unit - proposed in blunt terms the resumption of a covert
tactic that had been disavowed by the city and the federal government 30
years earlier. Under the heading of recommendations, the draft suggested,
"Utilize undercover officers to distribute misinformation within the
crowds." Asked about the proposal, Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for
the Police Department, said yesterday: "The N.Y.P.D. does not use police
officers in any capacity to distribute misinformation."

    Mr. Browne also said that the "proactive" arrests referred to in the
report - numbering about 30 - involved protesters with pipes and masks who
he said presented an obvious threat.

    In another report, a police inspector praised the "staging of massive
amounts" of armored vehicles, prisoner wagons and jail buses in the view of
the demonstrators, writing that the sight "would cause them to be alarmed."

    Besides the draft report, the documents released yesterday included four
final reports written by commanders to assess police performance during the
World Economic Forum, which met in New York from Jan. 31 to Feb. 4, 2002.

    The economic forum, a private organization that normally meets in Davos,
Switzerland, and draws a grab bag of leaders from government, business, and
academia - as well as protesters from a miscellany of causes and movements -
was moved to the city as a gesture of solidarity after the attacks. Security
was extremely tight around Midtown Manhattan, where the delegates were
meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria, and demonstrators were kept blocks from the
hotel. Officials spoke of violence during anti-globalism protests at other
high profile gatherings in Seattle and Genoa, Italy.

    In the end, though, as one of the police reports noted, "the amount of
confrontation and number of arrests were lower than expected."

    Parts of that document and others were made public, over the objections
of the city, by a federal magistrate, Gabriel W. Gorenstein, who said the
excerpts went to the heart of a lawsuit brought by 16 people who were
arrested at an animal rights demonstration during the economic forum. The
police said they were blocking the sidewalk and had refused to obey an order
to disperse; the demonstrators said no one told them to move.

    Many of the issues in the animal rights case, which challenge broad
police tactics and arrest strategies, resonate in well over a hundred other
lawsuits brought against the city by demonstrators who were arrested at war
protests, bicycle rallies and during the Republican National Convention.

    Daniel M. Perez, the lawyer representing the people arrested at the
animal rights demonstration, argued that the police tactics "punish, control
and curtail the lawful exercise of First Amendment activities." The Police
Department and the city have said that preserving public order is essential
to protecting the civil rights of demonstrators and bystanders.

    Mr. Perez maintains that the police documents, taken together, show a
policy of pre-emptive arrests. The draft report discussed how early arrests
could shape future events. "The arrests made at West 59th Street and Fifth
Avenue set a 'tone' with the demonstrators and their possible plans at other
demonstrations," the report stated.

    The disorder control unit's commander, Thomas Graham, is listed as the
author of the report, but the document is not signed and the word "draft" is
handwritten across the top.

    The same tactic is cited in another report, dated Feb. 8, 2002, and
signed by Capt. Robert L. Bonifaci, commander of the Queens North Task
Force. Captain Bonifaci wrote, "It should be noted that a large part of the
success in policing the major demonstration on Saturday, Feb. 2, 2002, was
due in part to the proactive arrest policy that was instituted at the start
of the march at 59th Street and Fifth Avenue, and directed toward
demonstrators who were obviously potential rioters."

    Elaborating on the report, Mr. Browne, the police spokesman, said that
plainclothes officers saw a group of demonstrators put on masks as they drew
near the Plaza Hotel, then take out metal pipes and try to rush police
lines.

    "In addition to mainly peaceful protesters, the W.E.F. attracted
hard-core, violent elements that were shriveled by the N.Y.P.D.," Mr. Browne
said, citing the incident at the Plaza. "Yes, we used surveillance
techniques to track and hopefully disrupt violent elements. That's
proactive."

    About 30 people were arrested there, and virtually all their cases are
now sealed, indicating that the charges were either dismissed by prosecutors
or dropped after six months without further incident.

    The Police Department report from Michael E. Shortell, a deputy
inspector who headed a narcotics command in northern Manhattan, included a
list of "positive aspects" of the Police Department's approach. Among them:
"The staging of massive amounts of equipment in the key areas (e.g. armored
vehicles, command posts, prisoner wagons, Department of Correction buses,
city buses)."

    Capt. Timothy Hardiman also took note of what he saw as the helpful
presence of city corrections buses, which are used to transport prisoners
and have reinforced windows, protected by metal grids.

    "It was useful to have buses with corrections officers on hand," Captain
Hardiman wrote. "They also had a powerful psychological effect."

    Mr. Browne said the main reason buses were on hand was to quickly move
prisoners from an arrest scene. "If a corrections bus had a deterrent effect
on someone contemplating a violent act, then that's value added," he said.

    However, the draft report stated that the emphasis on quickly moving
prisoners had not been helpful. "This hastened the process adding to the
confusion and increasing the potential for mistakes to be made," the report
stated.

    Mr. Perez said the show of force sent a deliberate warning to people
expressing their opinions. "The message is, if you turn out, be prepared to
be arrested, be prepared to be sent away for a long time," he said. "It
sounds like something from a battle zone."

    Demonstrators arrested during the economic forum were held by the police
for up to 40 hours without seeing a judge - twice as long as people accused
of murder, rape and robbery arrested on those same days, Mr. Perez said.

    Mr. Browne of the Police Department said that the arrests were processed
as quickly as possible, and that protesters were not singled out for longer
detention.

    The reports, which were heavily edited at the request of the city, also
discuss the use of undercover officers at the protests. Captain Hardiman
wrote that "the use of under covers from narcotics provided useful
information." And on Inspector Shortell's list of positive aspects of the
strategy, he listed "the use of undercover personnel in the ranks of the
protesters."

    The power of the police to secretly monitor political gatherings was
tightly controlled by a federal court between 1985 and early 2003, the
result of a lawsuit by political activists from the 1960's who charged that
police undercover officers had disrupted their ability to express their
opinions. Many of the restrictions from that case, known as Handschu, were
eased at the request of the city in 2003.

    The proposal to use undercover officers to spread misinformation - which
the Police Department says was not adopted - recalled the origins of the
Handschu lawsuit, which was based in part on the actions of undercover
agents and officers who instigated trouble and spread lies among a group of
military veterans who opposed the Vietnam War.

 


From michael at michaelbutler.com  Fri Mar 17 14:28:14 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 14:28:14 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] White House Civil Liberties Panel Finally Meets After
	16	Months By Richard B. Schmitt The Los Angeles Times
Message-ID: <C04077FE.2A368%michael@michaelbutler.com>

    Go to Original

    White House Civil Liberties Panel Finally Meets After 16 Months
    By Richard B. Schmitt
    The Los Angeles Times

    Friday 17 March 2006

    Washington - A White House civil liberties panel created more than a
year ago to monitor the effects on ordinary citizens of the war on terrorism
took its first significant action this week.

    It met.

    The panel's five members heard from the administration's point man on
the National Security Agency's warrantless surveillance program and got a
briefing on the Patriot Act from the Justice Department.

    The organizational session, held Tuesday at the White House, left the
lone Democrat on the panel cautiously optimistic that the board might
eventually be an effective watchdog.

    The board reports to President Bush, who also appointed its members. It
was created by intelligence-reform legislation signed in December 2004.

    Formally known as the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, it
was conceived by Congress as a check on government power, although it has
had a slow start in part because Bush took months to send its nominees to
the Senate for confirmation.

    The bipartisan commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks said
the inaction reflected indifference by the administration toward civil
liberties, even as the White House had aggressively extended executive power
to protect the country from suspected terrorists.

    The panel's chairman, Carol E. Dinkins, a Houston lawyer, said in an
interview Wednesday that members were taking their mandate seriously and
were beginning to reach out to groups like the American Civil Liberties
Union, as well as to members of Congress and federal agencies, to develop an
agenda.

    "We think it is very important to get input from people really immersed
in these things to see what should warrant our immediate attention," Dinkins
said.

    Besides advising Bush, the board is required to report annually to
Congress on its activities. Dinkins, a former Justice Department official in
the Reagan administration and a longtime political ally of the Bush family,
also said that some meetings would be open to the public.

    The one Democrat on the panel said the meeting surprised him.

    "We were treated with great seriousness by the White House and by the
intelligence community," said Lanny J. Davis, a Washington lawyer who has
known Bush since college. "A lot of my Democratic friends assumed ... we
were really not going to be able to do very much."

    On Tuesday, panel members heard from Air Force Gen. Michael V. Hayden,
deputy director of national intelligence and the former director of the NSA,
who briefed them on the domestic surveillance program. They are obtaining
high-level security clearances so they can review classified information
about the NSA and other government anti-terrorism initiatives.

 


From swiggard at comcast.net  Fri Mar 17 14:49:43 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 17:49:43 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] IMPORTANT: Bush's Infinite Constitutional Loop
Message-ID: <441B3D07.7010702@comcast.net>

Tomgram: De la Vega on Bush's Infinite Constitutional Loop

This post can be found at http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=69308

Since today's dispatch is by a former federal prosecutor, let me suggest 
a small "law" of my own, one fit for the present moment: When it comes 
to the Bush administration, whatever the subject may be and however bad 
you think things are, they're going to be at least several fallback 
positions worse than whatever top administration officials may be 
fessing up to at any given moment. This, after all, is the 
administration of adamant denials, followed by forceful non-confessions, 
followed by proud statements, followed by limited hang-outs 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/28/AR2006022801587.html>, 
followed by even more grudging, only slightly less limited hang-outs. In 
that spirit, without a bit of insider information but with recent 
history as my guide and with consummate confidence, let me assure you 
that the NSA warrantless surveillance operation Elizabeth de la Vega 
takes up below will turn out to be anything but the limited program 
described in the first set of Bush administration fall-back positions. 
It will be a miracle 
<http://www.upi.com/SecurityTerrorism/view.php?StoryID=20060214-053955-9494r> 
if it has not swept up near-infinite 
<http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/021606L.shtml> American 
conversations, startling numbers of which won't have been conducted with 
overseas parties (and don't even get me started on the subject of the 
secret data-mining of our phone and email life); and surely, before 
we're done, it will turn out that this particular NSA surveillance 
program is only the tip of the administration's surveillance iceberg. 
Where the NSA already is, can the Pentagon or the CIA be far behind? Not 
likely.

Now, consider the infinite loop this President and his top advisors have 
set us journeying along, as de la Vega lays it out. Tom


        Reprogramming the Infinite Loop

    The NSA Spying Debate
    By Elizabeth de la Vega

    It has now been three months since the Bush administration
    reluctantly admitted
    <http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/12/20051219-1.html>
    that it has been conducting warrantless surveillance on American
    citizens, despite the explicit prohibitions of the Foreign
    Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Since then, the public has
    been treated to endless and, unfortunately, fruitless discussion
    about the issue. We have experts and scholars earnestly responding,
    and responding yet again, to administration arguments (both legal
    and factual) that can best be described as protean, internally
    inconsistent, and occasionally evanescent. We have the
    administration refusing to explain the program, but enjoining
    everyone to "trust them." And we have legislators trying to "fix" a
    problem that is undefined by proposing new laws that the
    administration doesn't want. We are, in short, trapped in an
    infinite loop.

    In computer parlance, an infinite loop is a coding sequence that has
    no effective exit because of a flaw in the program. It's a bit like
    trying to call your HMO with what you think is the flu and having a
    recording guide you through a series of numbers that land you back
    at the initial message welcoming you to the system. Of course, you
    can end that phone loop simply by hanging up. The only way to
    permanently extract yourself from an infinite loop in a computer
    program, however, is to find the programming defect. Press the
    refresh key, check the power chord, buy a new computer -- none of
    these fixes will work as long as the fundamental flaw in the program
    is ignored.

    If you have any doubt that the NSA spying "debate" is trapped in an
    infinite loop, you need only review two pieces of evidence. The
    first, which we'll call "Exhibit A," is an article, dated March 8,
    2006
    <http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060308/ap_on_go_pr_wh/eavesdropping_10>,
    entitled "Gonzales: NSA Program Doesn't Need a Law." Aha, you say, a
    mere headline. But this is what the article says: "The Attorney
    General made clear Wednesday, March 8, that the White House is not
    seeking congressional action to inscribe the National Security
    Agency's monitoring into U.S. law."

    How, you wonder, could that be true? Since December, the President,
    White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, and Secretary of State
    Condoleezza Rice, among others, have said that FISA is outdated, not
    sufficiently agile, ineffective against terrorists, and too
    paper-intensive. Perhaps the AP reporter misinterpreted Gonzales'
    remarks...

    I now refer you to Exhibit B -- a February 28, 2006 letter
    <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/28/AR2006022801587.html>
    from Alberto Gonzales to Arlen Specter, Chairman of the Senate
    Judiciary Committee. In answer to a question about what changes to
    FISA are needed, Gonzales explicitly says, "The Administration
    believes it is unnecessary to amend FISA" to accommodate the spying
    program.

    Let's review. Members of the Bush administration have admitted that
    they routinely ignore FISA. That does not mean, however, that they
    believe there's anything wrong with the law. On the contrary, the
    Bush administration does not think the law needs to be changed; nor
    does it even want the law to be changed. So every time you hear a
    Bush team member mention problems with FISA, all you need to do is
    think like a lawyer and the terms "objection.. irrelevant" will come
    to mind. Under the circumstances, why should Congress waste one more
    minute trying to amend a law the administration has no desire to see
    amended?

    Unfortunately, disposing of the issue of changing the FISA law just
    brings us back to the point where the administration confessed to
    conducting electronic intercepts in the first place without
    following the procedures set forth in that law -- in, to be exact,
    FISA's criminal penalty provision (Title 18, United States Code,
    Section 1809). In other words, it brings us back to the matter of a
    crime having been committed. On this, as we loop upwards again, the
    administration claims two defenses -- one based on its reading of
    the FISA statute; the other on its interpretation of the Constitution.

    The Statutory Argument: That Pesky "After-the-Fact" Feeling

    The statutory argument is that the FISA law allows an exception to
    its procedures if the surveillance in question is otherwise
    "authorized by statute." The administration argues that the
    September 18, 2001 congressional Authorization to Use Military Force
    ("AUMF") against those responsible for the September 11 attacks is,
    in fact, a statute that satisfies this provision. However, not even
    the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee consider this to
    be a reasonable argument. As Arlen Specter said during the February
    6 NSA wiretap hearings, "[the AUMF argument] just defies logic and
    plain English." In the same hearing, South Carolina's Senator
    Lindsay Graham told Gonzales that the administration's statutory
    argument was "very dangerous."

    One other small problem: The administration's statutory argument
    appears to have been devised after the NSA program began. As it
    happens, it is premised in large part on the analysis of a Supreme
    Court detainee case (Hamdi v. United States) that was not even
    decided until 2004. Also, though the Department of Justice's Office
    of Legal Counsel has released an unsigned 42-page paper
    <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/19/AR2006011903276.html>,
    dated January 20, 2006, which purports to set out the
    administration's legal analysis, Attorney General Gonzales has
    refused to provide the Senate Judiciary Committee with any memos
    setting forth a legal analysis of the NSA surveillance program
    written before it began in October 2001. As Senator Patrick Leahy
    noted <http://judiciary.senate.gov/hearing.cfm?id=1770>, Gonzales
    has even refused to say when the statutory argument was first devised.

    However, what Gonzales has acknowledged is that the administration's
    legal analysis has "evolved over time." This is a damning, if not
    entirely surprising, admission. The Office of Legal Counsel is
    charged with providing objective and balanced advice to the
    President before he takes action; it is not supposed to be a firm of
    defense lawyers dedicated to crafting justifications in hindsight.

    Gonzales' cavalier statement is corroborated by recently disclosed
    emails
    <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/08/AR2006030802360.html>,
    sent in December and January, by David Kris, a former Associate
    Deputy Attorney General, to the Office of Legal Counsel lawyers who
    were preparing the written justification for the NSA spying program.
    After reviewing the draft white paper, Kris commented that the AUMF
    statutory argument had a "slightly after-the-fact feeling" to it. He
    was perfectly positioned to make this observation because he had
    been in charge of national security matters at the Justice
    Department from 2000 to 2003. As his emails and a lengthy January
    25, 2006 memo that he provided to journalists make clear, Kris knew
    nothing whatsoever about the NSA surveillance program even though,
    when it began, he headed the legal department assigned to its
    oversight. As to the administration's statutory argument in support
    of the NSA operation, Kris, an expert on FISA, was clearly not
    persuaded.

    The Constitutional Argument: Those Pesky Other Branches of Government

    Unfortunately, the nearly universal conclusion that the
    administration's statutory argument is meritless does not extricate
    us from the loop for a simple reason. Despite the administration's
    quite successful attempt to suggest otherwise, it is clear that the
    statutory argument has never been its principal rationale for the
    warrantless surveillance program. Its main justification has always
    been the constitutional argument that, under Article II, and as
    commander-in-chief, the President has the authority to prevent
    further attacks by taking whatever "military" actions he deems
    necessary to achieve that end. Although this argument enjoys the
    support of a few exceedingly conservative law professors, it has
    been brilliantly refuted, time and again, by the majority of legal
    scholars.

    At bottom, though, the problem raised by this argument is more
    political than legal. The administration began making the claim to
    an unfettered commander-in-chief-style presidency in a rather
    low-key way -- as if it were a given -- in late 2001, after a few
    brave souls had dared to question the conditions under which it was
    detaining enemy combatants. It has repeated it like a mantra ever
    since, accompanied by the refrain that we are at war -- a war not
    specifically in Iraq or Afghanistan, but of a long-term global
    nature and on terrorism.

    Only in June 2004
    <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6732484/site/newsweek/> did the public
    learn that this argument stemmed from the legal and political
    theories of a young Justice Department lawyer, John Yoo. On
    September 25, 2001, he wrote in a memo to the President that, even
    if the congressional Authorization to Use Military Force had never
    existed, no statute passed by Congress "can place any limits on the
    president's determinations as to any terrorist threat, the amount of
    military force to be used in response, or the method, timing and
    nature of the response."

    Astoundingly, it is the absolutely radical theory of presidential
    powers in this memo, clearly espoused by the President, the Vice
    President, and their senior staff, but written by an extreme
    conservative whose views in the now infamous "torture memo"
    <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23373-2004Jun7.html>
    have largely been dismissed by those inside and outside the
    administration, that is the fundamental flaw in our "program" for
    national debate. It is this theory that has trapped us in an
    infinite loop of discussion about issues that rational persons of
    good faith should be able to resolve: the obviously illegal
    surveillance of American citizens; prolonged detentions without due
    process; renditions to countries known for their abysmal treatment
    of prisoners; and, most shamefully, our own adoption of torture. But
    until we "debug" this program by fearlessly and unflinchingly
    addressing the President's theory of executive power, and its
    unstated false premises -- especially the claim that we are at war
    by virtue of an undeclared, undefined, and unending "war on terror"
    -- we will all continually find ourselves at different places on the
    same infinite loop.

    It should not require courage to insist on an honest debate about
    issues that are substantial and serious. It should not require
    courage to stand firm in the face of juvenile personal attacks on
    one's allegiance to the United States. But, of course, it does. For
    that type of courage, we need patriots, not politicians -- strength,
    not just strategy. So far, in the Senate, Wisconsin's Russ Feingold,
    California's Barbara Boxer, and Iowa's Tom Harkin have shown
    themselves to be patriots in calling for censure of the President as
    a result of his blatantly illegal NSA surveillance operation. That
    is a total of three. There must be more. We look forward to hearing
    from you soon.

    Elizabeth de la Vega is a former federal prosecutor with more than
    20 years of experience. During her tenure, she was a member of the
    Organized Crime Strike Force and Chief of the San Jose Branch of the
    U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California. Her
    pieces have appeared in The Nation magazine, the L.A. Times, Salon,
    and Mother Jones. She writes regularly for TomDispatch. She may be
    contacted at ElizabethdelaVega at Verizon.net.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=69308
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060317/90b32387/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Fri Mar 17 15:54:44 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: 17 Mar 2006 23:54:44 -0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] Headlines for March 17, 2006
Message-ID: <20060317235444.26360.qmail@trinity.democracynow.org>

Mike Blaxill  ( mblaxill at yahoo.com )
sent you this story from democracynow.org




+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  Headlines for March 17, 2006
|  http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/17/1559220
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+


- US Launches Largest Air Assault Since Iraq Invasion
- US, Iran Signal Agreement to Discuss Iraq 
- Student Demonstrations Grow to Over 260,000 in France
- Iraqi Kurds Storm Monument in Anti-Government Protest
- British Drug Test Leaves 2 in Critical Condition
- Audit Shows Millions Wasted on Post-Katrina Contracts
- U. of Miami Announces Wage Increase for Striking Workers
This story continues at: 
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/17/1559220


From nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca  Fri Mar 17 16:28:19 2006
From: nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca (CBC News Online)
Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2006 00:28:19 UT
Subject: [Mb-civic] CBC News - CANADA WINS ANOTHER ROUND IN SOFTWOOD BATTLE
	WITH U.S.
Message-ID: <20060318002819.EF1927DBC@web04.nm.cbc.ca>

An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Url: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060318/a7617c7b/attachment.diff 

From geomilman at milman.com  Fri Mar 17 17:02:31 2006
From: geomilman at milman.com (George R. Milman)
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 17:02:31 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Meet the New Boss,
	Same as the Old Boss? - Sam Stein - The Center for Public Integrity
Message-ID: <001701c64a27$a43cdd30$8c00a8c0@george>

WASHINGTON, March 17, 2006 - When Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, was elected
House majority leader on Feb. 2, he presented himself as a new kind of
leader - someone who would rise above doing business as usual, a departure
from the aggressive tactics and ethical tight-rope walking of his
predecessor, Tom "The Hammer" DeLay.

 

http://www.publicintegrity.org/report.aspx?aid=789

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060317/de590d1b/attachment.htm 

From Hawaiipolo at cs.com  Fri Mar 17 17:24:10 2006
From: Hawaiipolo at cs.com (Hawaiipolo at cs.com)
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 20:24:10 EST
Subject: [Mb-civic] Fwd: part2
Message-ID: <E1FKRMq-0006xb-C6@elasmtp-mealy.atl.sa.earthlink.net>

 
-------------- next part --------------
An embedded message was scrubbed...
From: Pm122964 at aol.com
Subject: part2
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 07:37:19 EST
Size: 91148
Url: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060317/3bc9793b/attachment-0001.eml 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Fri Mar 17 21:10:29 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (harry.sifton at sympatico.ca)
Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2006 00:10:29 -0500 (EST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] Look what I just found on myway.com!
Message-ID: <3825751.1142658629116.JavaMail.root@mprdresin3.nwk.myway.com>

An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060318/e06bef15/attachment.htm 

From ean at sbcglobal.net  Fri Mar 17 20:10:53 2006
From: ean at sbcglobal.net (ean at sbcglobal.net)
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 20:10:53 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Bush's Incompetent Criminals
Message-ID: <E1FKTnU-0002pg-Ez@elasmtp-mealy.atl.sa.earthlink.net>

Bush's Incompetent Criminals
Russ Baker
March 17, 2006

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/03/17/bushs_incompetent_crim
inals.php

Investigative reporter and essayist Russ Baker  is a longtime 
contributor to TomPaine.com. He is also  the founder of the Real News 
Project, a new not-for-profit investigative journalism outlet. He can be 
reached at russ at russbaker.com.

Did you hear the one about the president?s top domestic policy 
adviser? Tired of helping the president pick the pockets of the poor 
and middle class on behalf of the rich, he found a more profitable 
target. Or Target, actually.

Last week, Claude Allen was arrested and charged with a scheme to 
rip off Target and other stores by "returning" more than $5,000 worth of 
merchandise he had allegedly never paid for in the first place. 
According to police, Allen would buy an item and put it in his car, then 
return and bring an identical item from the store shelves for a refund 
based on the original receipt. 

Apparently, the White House had an inkling what was coming. Back on 
Feb 9, it announced that Allen was resigning in order to ?spend more 
time with his family??a bromide that any savvy observer should know 
masks something more serious. In a statement, Bush declared:  
"Claude Allen has been a trusted advisor since 2001 ... Claude is a 
good and compassionate man, and he has my deep respect and my 
gratitude. "

Behind this sad incident lurk two interrelated calamities of the Bush 
years: the continuing placement of the dubiously-qualified in high 
positions, and the use of people of color as window dressing for 
policies that harm communities of color. 

Before Allen?s unique shopping habits were revealed, it was already 
becoming apparent that departments and agencies throughout the 
administration were jammed with incompetents and unfortunates who, 
based on relevant experience or temperament or values, shouldn?t be 
there at all  (see ?Appointees Guarding the Henhouse ").

One colleague previously hauled off to face justice is David Safavian, 
the head of the White House Office of Federal Procurement Policy?a 
former lobbyist and Hill staffer with scant experience in issuing federal 
contracts prior to his hiring by the Bush Administration, who was 
arrested in connection with the sprawling lobbying corruption scandal. 
Both Safavian and Allen will be on the docket in April.

In distancing the administration from Allen, unnamed White House 
sources insisted to reporters that, notwithstanding his title, it was never 
Allen who made domestic policy decisions; he was a merely 
ceremonial nobody. No, they said, it was former direct mail king Karl 
Rove?a man who believes that ?policy? and ?politics? are 
synonymous?who made all the policy decisions, while the ceremonial 
black guy actually just pushed paper. And that?s their spin, for 
goodness? sake.

I?m apparently not alone in thinking that the brain center itself is looking 
especially grim these days. Of late, leading Republicans have begun 
advising Bush to get some "experienced" people into the White 
House?raising doubts even about Chief of Staff Andrew Card. And 
he?s probably the most qualified of the lot. Of course, experience can 
go hand in hand with chicanery: Dick Cheney?s former Chief of Staff 
Lewis ?Scooter? Libby, qualified through long years of public?or at 
least party?service, has been arrested and charged with a serious 
crime: obstructing the investigation in the Valerie Plame leak 
investigation.

The process of distancing Allen from the administration is striking 
because, although nobody ever heard of him, he was the top-ranking 
African-American on the White House staff, and constantly at Bush's 
side both at White House events and on trips around the country.  
Claude Allen was like that one black in a suit stuck in every corporate 
group photo to represent a non-existent diversity. Doubt that? Even 
after Allen first told the White House about his little pick-up problem, 
he still was Laura Bush?s guest in her box at the State of the Union 
address. Why? Was he Laura?s good friend?

Sometimes, as with disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, the ?nobody? 
routine means the exact opposite?that the miscreant was actually a 
major player. But Claude Allen was just an empty suit, a black pawn 
drafted to provide Bush with cover for all manner of regressive 
acts?starting with cutbacks to essential services, passing through tax 
cuts for the wealthiest Americans and culminating in efforts to open 
minority scholarship programs to whites.

The Claude Allen story also is important in giving the lie once again to 
the GOP?s claim of moral superiority. In an interview before he got in 
hot water, Allen explained why, having been raised a Democrat, he 
had switched parties. "I realized after the fact that I agree more with 
the Republican Party platform, that it talked about independence, that it 
talked about individual responsibility, individual rights, it talked about 
the ability to guarantee opportunities, not outcomes," he said.

That interview, fittingly, was conducted by Armstrong 
Williams?another African American who was well-rewarded for 
backing an administration that has done everything possible to make 
life more difficult for others of their race.  "It is a small circle of 
conservatives, especially when you are black," Williams would tell The 
New York Times. And what a circle: Williams was widely shellacked 
after it was disclosed that he?s been paid handsomely by the Bush 
administration to swoon over it in his newspaper columns.

And Allen presumed to speak of ?individual responsibility.? Perhaps the 
Target situation would make a convenient point to bury that term 
forever, since it is hardly ever honestly employed, anyway.

Routinely described as born-again and a ?devoted father,? Allen liked 
to talk about how his religious upbringing was a key factor in his steady 
march from a poor home to the pinnacle. Along the way, he befriended 
or worked for such advocates of color-blindness as the former senator 
Jesse Helms?one of the last of a generation recalling the days of 
segregation with fondness?and Supreme Court Justice Clarence 
Thomas, known for biting the affirmative-action hand that gave him a 
leg up. Allen lunched often with Thomas, who apparently lectured him 
on propriety.  "He would always say to make sure I conducted myself 
appropriately," Allen told an interviewer.

Now that Allen has failed the "appropriateness" test, the administration 
has quickly washed its hands of him?with the general acquiescence 
of the press and the punditocracy, a woefully common scenario these 
past five years.

But, a few facts: Allen was on the highest White House pay scale, 
earning $161,000 a year, and had bought a $958,300 house the same 
month he allegedly began stealing. According to Newsweek, he was 
considered by fellow staffers to be ?a bit stuffy and holier-than-thou.?  
Allen, who had clerked for a federal judge, went on to serve as the 
Health and Human Services secretary for Virginia, where according to 
the Los Angeles Times, he gained conservative credentials by denying 
a low-income rape victim Medicaid funds for an abortion.

Such a record apparently endeared him to the incoming Bush team, 
and in 2001, he was appointed to the No. 2 post at the U.S. 
Department of Health and Human Services. There he promoted 
abstinence-only AIDS-prevention programs. By 2003, despite slim 
legal credentials, Bush proposed Allen for a seat on the federal 
appeals court, though Democrats blocked his nomination. Apparently, 
Allen had once remarked that an opponent of his boss, Jesse Helms, 
was connected to ?queers.? Explaining himself at his confirmation 
hearings, he told senators that by ?queers? he meant people who were 
"odd, out of the ordinary." In 2005, he was brought to the White House.

Claude Allen returned lots of items to Target because, ostensibly, they 
weren?t up to snuff. He was actually perfectly happy with the items he 
is said to have improperly procured. The rest of us are left thinking 
about how to return to sender something bigger, something many of us 
never ordered in the first place, and which has turned into the worst 
kind of damaged goods: an entire administration rotten to the core.


-- 
You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, 
option D (up to 3 emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options 
(option A - 1x/week, option B - 3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option D - 
up to 3x/day) please reply and let us know!  If someone forwarded you 
this email and you want to be on our list, send an email to 
ean at sbcglobal.net and tell us which option you'd like.


"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060317/d424b976/attachment.htm 

From ean at sbcglobal.net  Fri Mar 17 20:14:33 2006
From: ean at sbcglobal.net (ean at sbcglobal.net)
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 20:14:33 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Quick action + Breaking Free + Day of Reckoning
Message-ID: <E1FKTnv-00031z-Ej@elasmtp-mealy.atl.sa.earthlink.net>


Congress is considering legislation approving another $75 billion for 
the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan this week. I just e-mailed my 
Representative to say that it's time to change course in Iraq. You can 
e-mail your Representative here:

Take action now at 
http://www.democracyinaction.org/clw/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=
3010

------

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1731009,00.html

The Guardian   Wednesday March 15 2006

Latin America and Asia are at last breaking free of Washington's grip

The US-dominated world order is being challenged by a new spirit of
independence in the global south

By Noam Chomsky

The prospect that Europe and Asia might move towards greater independence
has troubled US planners since the second world war. The concerns have
only risen as the "tripolar order" - Europe, North America and Asia - has
continued to evolve.

Every day Latin America, too, is becoming more independent. Now Asia and
the Americas are strengthening their ties while the reigning superpower,
the odd man out, consumes itself in misadventures in the Middle East.

Regional integration in Asia and Latin America is a crucial and
increasingly important issue that, from Washington's perspective, betokens
a defiant world gone out of control. Energy, of course, remains a defining
factor - the object of contention - everywhere.

China, unlike Europe, refuses to be intimidated by Washington, a primary
reason for the fear of China by US planners, which presents a dilemma:
steps toward confrontation are inhibited by US corporate reliance on China
as an export platform and growing market, as well as by China's financial
reserves - reported to be approaching Japan's in scale.

In January, Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah visited Beijing, which is
expected to lead to a Sino-Saudi memorandum of understanding calling for
"increased cooperation and investment between the two countries in oil,
natural gas and investment", the Wall Street Journal reports.

Already much of Iran's oil goes to China, and China is providing Iran with
weapons that both states presumably regard as deterrent to US designs.
India also has options. India may choose to be a US client, or it may
prefer to join the more independent Asian bloc that is taking shape, with
ever more ties to Middle East oil producers. Siddharth Varadarjan, the
deputy editor of the Hindu, observes that "if the 21st century is to be an
'Asian century,' Asia's passivity in the energy sector has to end".

The key is India-China cooperation. In January, an agreement signed in
Beijing "cleared the way for India and China to collaborate not only in
technology but also in hydrocarbon exploration and production, a
partnership that could eventually alter fundamental equations in the
world's oil and natural gas sector", Varadarjan points out.

An additional step, already being contemplated, is an Asian oil market
trading in euros. The impact on the international financial system and the
balance of global power could be significant. It should be no surprise
that President Bush paid a recent visit to try to keep India in the fold,
offering nuclear cooperation and other inducements as a lure.

Meanwhile, in Latin America left-centre governments prevail from Venezuela
to Argentina. The indigenous populations have become much more active and
influential, particularly in Bolivia and Ecuador, where they either want
oil and gas to be domestically controlled or, in some cases, oppose
production altogether.

Many indigenous people apparently do not see any reason why their lives,
societies and cultures should be disrupted or destroyed so that New
Yorkers can sit in their SUVs in traffic gridlock.

Venezuela, the leading oil exporter in the hemisphere, has forged probably
the closest relations with China of any Latin American country, and is
planning to sell increasing amounts of oil to China as part of its effort
to reduce dependence on the openly hostile US government.

Venezuela has joined Mercosur, the South American customs union - a move
described by Nestor Kirchner, the Argentinian president, as "a milestone"
in the development of this trading bloc, and welcomed as a "new chapter in
our integration" by Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the Brazilian president.

Venezuela, apart from supplying Argentina with fuel oil, bought almost a
third of Argentinian debt issued in 2005, one element of a region-wide
effort to free the countries from the controls of the IMF after two
decades of disastrous conformity to the rules imposed by the US-dominated
international financial institutions.

Steps toward Southern Cone [the southern states of South America]
integration advanced further in December with the election in Bolivia of
Evo Morales, the country's first indigenous president. Morales moved
quickly to reach a series of energy accords with Venezuela. The Financial
Times reported that these "are expected to underpin forthcoming radical
reforms to Bolivia's economy and energy sector" with its huge gas
reserves, second only to Venezuela's in South America.

Cuba-Venezuela relations are becoming ever closer, each relying on its
comparative advantage. Venezuela is providing low-cost oil, while in
return Cuba organises literacy and health programmes, sending thousands of
highly skilled professionals, teachers and doctors, who work in the
poorest and most neglected areas, as they do elsewhere in the third world.

Cuban medical assistance is also being welcomed elsewhere. One of the most
horrendous tragedies of recent years was the earthquake in Pakistan last
October. Besides the huge death toll, unknown numbers of survivors have to
face brutal winter weather with little shelter, food or medical
assistance.

"Cuba has provided the largest contingent of doctors and paramedics to
Pakistan," paying all the costs (perhaps with Venezuelan funding), writes
John Cherian in India's Frontline magazine, citing Dawn, a leading
Pakistan daily.

President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan expressed his "deep gratitude" to
Fidel Castro for the "spirit and compassion" of the Cuban medical teams -
reported to comprise more than 1,000 trained personnel, 44% of them women,
who remained to work in remote mountain villages, "living in tents in
freezing weather and in an alien culture", after western aid teams had
been withdrawn.

Growing popular movements, primarily in the south but with increasing
participation in the rich industrial countries, are serving as the bases
for many of these developments towards more independence and concern for
the needs of the great majority of the population.

? Noam Chomsky, the author, most recently, of Imperial Ambitions:
Conversations on the Post-9/11 World, is a professor of linguistics at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

www.chomsky.info

-------

Day of Reckoning for the Current Occupant
    By Garrison Keillor
    The Chicago Tribune
    Wednesday 15 March 2006

    Spring arrived in New York last week for previews, a sunny day with
chill in the air, but you could smell mud, and with a little imagination
you could sort of smell grass. I put on a gray jacket, instead of black,
and went to the opera and saw Verdi's "Luisa Miller," a Republican opera
in which love is crushed by the perfidiousness of government. A helpful
lesson for these times. I am referring to the Current Occupant.

    The Republican Revolution has gone the way of all flesh. It took over
Congress and the White House, horns blew, church bells rang, sailors
kissed each other, and what happened? The Republicans led us into a
reckless foreign war and steered the economy toward receivership and
wielded power as if there were no rules. Democrats are accused of having
no new ideas, but Republicans are making some of the old ideas look
awfully good, such as constitutional checks and balances, fiscal
responsibility, and the notion of realism in foreign affairs and taking
actions that serve the national interest. What one might call
"conservatism."

    The head of the National Security Agency under President Ronald
    Reagan,
Lt. Gen. William Odom, writes on the Web site NiemanWatchdog.org that he
sees clear parallels between Vietnam and Iraq: "The difference lies in the
consequences. Vietnam did not have the devastating effects on US power
that Iraq is already having." He draws the parallels in three stages and
says that staying the course will only make the damage to US power
greater. It's a chilling analysis, and one that isn't going to come from
the Democratic Party. It's starting to come from Republicans, and they are
the ones who must rescue the country from themselves.

    I ran into a gray eminence from the Bush I era the other day in an
airport, and he said that what most offended him about Bush II is the
naked incompetence. "You may disagree with Republicans, but you always 
had
to recognize that they knew what they were doing," he said. "I keep going
back to that intelligence memo of August 2001, that said that terrorists
had plans to hijack planes and crash them into buildings. The president
read it, and he didn't even call a staff meeting to discuss it. That is
lack of attention of a high order."

    Over the course of time, the Chief Occupant has been cruelly exposed
over and over. He sat and was briefed on the danger of a hurricane wiping
out a major American city, and without asking a single question, he got up
from the table and walked away and resumed his vacation. He played guitar
as New Orleans was flooded. It took him four days to realize his
responsibility to do something. When the tsunami killed 100,000 people in
Southeast Asia, he was on vacation and it took him 72 hours to issue a
statement of sympathy.

    The Republicans tied their wagon to him and, as a result, their
revolution is bankrupt. He has played the terrorism card for all it is
worth and campaigned successfully against Adam and Steve and co-opted
whole vast flocks of Christians, but he is done now, kaput, out of gas,
for one simple reason. He doesn't represent the best that is our country.
Not even close.

    He openly, brazenly, countenanced crimes of torture at Guantanamo, Abu
Ghraib and Bagram. He engaged in illegal surveillance, authorized the
arrest of people without charge and "disappeared" them to foreign jails.
And he finagled this war, which, after three years of violence, does not
look to be heading toward a happy ending. And now it's up to Republicans
to put their country first and call the gentleman to account.

    The Current Occupant is smart about handling a political mess. The
    best
strategy is to cut and run and change the subject. You defend the Dubai
ports deal in manly terms until you lose a vote in a House committee and
then you retreat - actually, you get the Dubai people to do it for you -
and that's it, End of Story.

    Harriet Miers was fully qualified one day and gone the next. Social
Security was going to be overhauled to give us the Ownership Society, and
then the stock market went in the toilet and Republicans got nervous, and
suddenly it was Never Mind and on to the next new thing.

    Let's bring the boys home. Otherwise, let's send this man back to
    Texas
and see what sort of work he is capable of and let him start making a
contribution to the world.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------
------

    Garrison Keillor is an author and the radio host of "A Prairie Home
Companion."

***

-- 
You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, 
option D (up to 3 emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options 
(option A - 1x/week, option B - 3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option D - 
up to 3x/day) please reply and let us know!  If someone forwarded you 
this email and you want to be on our list, send an email to 
ean at sbcglobal.net and tell us which option you'd like.


"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060317/09a5addb/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sat Mar 18 04:59:54 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2006 07:59:54 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] High Crimes, or A Tokin' Figure? - Washington Post
Message-ID: <441C044A.9080803@comcast.net>

High Crimes, or A Tokin' Figure?
Canadians Find the 'Prince of Pot' Harmless. The DEA Begs to Differ.

By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, March 18, 2006; C01

VANCOUVER

Sweet marijuana smoke tumbles down the steps from "the Vapor Lounge," a 
corner of Marc Emery's bookstore where customers toke up at will.

"We get high with everybody," Emery says, shrugging. "This is a 
pilgrimage spot, and people come here from all over the world. We get high."

Illegal? Yes.

So were the seeds he used to keep in a case in the store, with exotic 
names like Afghan Dream and Chemo Grizzly. So was the booming business 
he ran, complete with glossy seed catalogues describing the subtle and 
sublime nuances of his varieties. ("Nebula: Fruity flavor and scent. 
Transcendental buzz. Harvest outdoor.") So, for that matter, are the 
other marijuana businesses that have sprouted up in the block around his 
Vancouver bookstore. The street is nicknamed "Vansterdam," with pot-hazy 
cafes, headshops filled with pipes and bongs, and neon signs advertising 
illegal seed sales.

Until recently, nobody much cared, it seemed. The police hadn't bothered 
to come around for eight years. Before that, they busted Emery for seed 
sales and raided him four times. But he just got fined -- once with "a 
nice speech from the judge saying what a nice person I was and how 
marijuana probably shouldn't be illegal," Emery says -- and the police 
stopped trying.

In truth, Emery hated being ignored. He tried to stir up notoriety. 
Every year, he filled out his income taxes listing his occupation as 
"Marijuana Seed Vendor," paying heftily and honestly, he says, on his 
multimillion-dollar business. The Canadian Revenue Service never 
questioned him.

He told the Canada post office he was getting and sending his seeds 
through the mail. They never stopped delivery. He started the B.C. 
Marijuana Party, fielded 79 candidates in 2001, and ran repeatedly for 
local and federal offices. He never won.

He broadcast "Pot-TV" on the Internet, entertained politicians, and 
openly funded marches, lawsuits and marijuana-legalization drives from 
Arizona to Israel to Washington, D.C.

When it was too quiet at home, he would go somewhere to rattle up a 
pro-pot demonstration. He would light up a fat joint in front of a 
police station, daring the cops to arrest him.

Twenty-one times they did. Usually he got off, or was released after a 
night in jail, or fined. His longest stretch was 61 days in jail in 
2004, ordered by a Saskatoon judge clearly irked at Emery's in-your-face 
apologia. No big deal, Emery says. He read the Bible behind bars.

Then came the DEA.

Emery figured something was up when a strange young woman pestered him 
to buy 10 pounds of pot. He refused. She bought some seeds at his store, 
asked for tips about how to hide them to go to the States, and left.

Eight days later, U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents and 
Vancouver police tromped into his store, ordered the customers out, 
taped paper over the windows and began hauling out computers and files. 
Emery, on the other side of Canada to speak near Halifax at the Atlantic 
Hemp Festival, was grabbed by six plainclothes policemen as he left a 
restaurant.

Emery is "one of the attorney general's most wanted international drug 
trafficking targets," the DEA in Washington crowed on July 29, 2005, 
announcing an extradition request for Emery and two employees. Emery's 
bust, the DEA said, was "a significant blow not only to the marijuana 
trafficking trade but also to the marijuana legalization movement."

And he thought trying to change the law was legal, Emery muses.

So did lots of other Canadians, it turned out. Emery's arrest for 
extradition on U.S. "drug kingpin" charges, carrying a minimum sentence 
of 10 years to life in prison, outraged many in Canada. They resented 
the long reach of America's law and what they saw as the United States' 
fevered preoccupation with pot.

"They need to leave our country alone," complained a letter to the 
editor in the London (Ontario) Free Press. "If we wanted to prosecute 
Emery we would, but it is not worth our time and money."

"Marc's business was known to police and every level of government," 
intoned a columnist in the Vancouver Province. To arrest him now "is 
petty and dishonest."

Todd Greenberg, the assistant U.S. attorney handling the case in 
Seattle, says Canada's apparent tolerance of Emery's seed business does 
not make the U.S. bid to prosecute him unfair.

"What Canada does or does not do is not particularly relevant to us," he 
says. "We are prosecuting him for what he did in our country -- 
distributing millions and millions of marijuana seeds in the United 
States. When someone does that, the United States has the obligation to 
enforce our laws whether that person is physically located here or 
overseas."

Greenberg says the charges brought by a federal grand jury followed an 
18-month investigation in which DEA agents repeatedly found Marc Emery's 
seeds at the root of illegal marijuana "grow ops." He insists Emery's 
legalization campaigns did not affect the charges.

That sounds hollow to Bruce Mirken, a spokesman for the Washington-based 
Marijuana Policy Project that Emery says he helped finance (contributors 
are confidential, the organization says). The DEA's public boast to have 
dealt a blow to "the legalization movement" showed its hand, Mirken says.

"This is a democracy. We are supposed to be able to talk about whether 
our laws make any sense.

"Year after year they roll out ad campaigns that attempt to demonize 
marijuana," Mirken notes. "They consider it the number one drug threat 
in America. That always struck us as bizarre."

If the DEA tries to demonize marijuana, Emery runs a multimedia 
juggernaut to sanctify it. In addition to his irreverent Internet site, 
his Cannabis Culture magazine comes out every other month, a slick 
magazine chockablock with advertisements by seed vendors and hydroponics 
suppliers, articles on growing lush and potent plants, and even a "pot 
puzzler" crossword. He says he distributes 75,000 copies.

Emery's bookstore is a cheerful dispensary for books and magazines on 
marijuana, bongs and pipes of every conceivable design, T-shirts, pot 
cookbooks, grinders, vaporizers, mushroom spores, and hemp clothing.

And then there is Emery himself. At 48, he looks more like a Young 
Republican than a stoner who calls himself the Prince of Pot. As often 
as not, he is in a coat and tie, with neatly combed hair, an earnest 
expression, with a good sound bite for the TV. He has been a soccer 
coach and a foster parent. Married, divorced and soon to remarry -- to 
Jodie Giesz-Ramsay, 21, who transcribed his jailhouse musings and now 
helps edit his magazine.

He talks with a machine-gun style unmellowed by his admitted custom of a 
daily joint or two. He compares himself to Martin Luther King and 
Mahatma Gandhi. He had to apologize last year for calling a federal 
minister a "Nazi," and he won no PR points when he spat on a policeman 
during a 2000 arrest of one of his employees.

Emery's life is the limelight. For 17 years, he ran a used-book store in 
Ontario, and publicly challenged a business fee, his town's bid for the 
1991 Pan American Games, its Sunday shopping laws and pornography laws. 
In 1990 he flouted the prohibition against selling High Times magazine, 
then banned as "illicit drug literature." He helped win that battle, 
getting the law overturned, and found his calling in the marijuana movement.

He wound up in British Columbia, a tolerant corner of a tolerant 
country. The official statistics agency of Canada says 45 percent of 
Canadians over age 15 have used marijuana. Possession and use is legal 
for medical purposes, and the former Liberal government tried to make 
possession of pot a matter of a small fine.

The legislation did not pass, but the laws on marijuana and sales of 
seeds are often overlooked. Until his arrest in July, Emery says only 
two people had ever been prosecuted for selling seeds, and both had 
simply been fined.

So Emery sold and sold. He accepted seed orders of the 534 varieties 
listed in his catalogue or on the Internet only with money orders that 
could not be easily traced. He got and sent seeds through the Canadian 
Postal Service, and then destroyed the records, he says.

"I sold millions of seeds proudly to people all over the world," and 
perhaps 70 percent of them were mailed to the United States, he 
concedes. "Everything the DEA said is correct -- except I don't buy the 
charge that I'm poisoning children of America."

Emery says he did it all for the movement, not for profit. He claims to 
have funneled more than $3 million to marches, candidates, lawsuits and 
ballot drives over a decade. He says he paid taxes and kept very little. 
He lives modestly in his fiancee's apartment. He doesn't own a car or a 
house, investments or fancy jewelry, he says.

Emery will get a judicial hearing in Canada later this year. The 
Canadian justice minister in the new conservative government could block 
the extradition, but he is a tough-talking former prosecutor and Emery 
acknowledges his chances are "slim odds indeed."

"In the U.S, I have every confidence I would get a minimum of 30 years," 
Emery says in an interview in the basement of his bookstore. "I'll get a 
longer sentence than I'd get in Canada for multiple murder, for 
something no one in Canada has ever gone to jail for."

Here is the twist: Emery welcomes it. Almost.

"I'm interested in whatever would legalize pot fastest," he says. "Part 
of me believes that going to jail will accelerate that process. And part 
of me believes that if I die in jail it will accelerate it even faster."

That is as much for Emery's devotion to the spotlight as devotion to the 
cause, he concedes.

"I'm very interested to see what happens to me, because I think I am a 
person of destiny," he says, with no trace of modesty. "I haven't been 
fearful since the moment I was arrested. I just felt my time has finally 
come. . . .

"I've already got this grand-scale epic going in my head. I am out to 
destroy the DEA and defeat them. And they are out to destroy me."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/17/AR2006031701906.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060318/8f3dc8d7/attachment-0001.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sat Mar 18 05:01:46 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2006 08:01:46 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Looser Emission Rules Rejected - Washington Post
Message-ID: <441C04BA.7000308@comcast.net>

Looser Emission Rules Rejected
Court Says Changes By EPA Violated Clean Air Act

By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 18, 2006; A01

A federal appeals court blocked the Bush administration's four-year 
effort to loosen emission rules for aging coal-fired power plants, 
unanimously ruling yesterday that the changes violated the Clean Air Act 
and that only Congress could authorize such revisions.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of 
Columbia Circuit sided with officials from 14 states, including New 
York, California and Maryland, who contended that the rule changes -- 
allowing older power plants, refineries and factories to upgrade their 
facilities without having to install the most advanced pollution 
controls -- were illegal and could increase the amount of 
health-threatening pollution in the atmosphere.

The Environmental Protection Agency's New Source Review policy was 
formally issued in 2003 but has never taken effect because of legal 
challenges by state officials and environmental groups. The 
administration has long argued that the existing standards are too 
stringent and have discouraged utility plants and other industries from 
upgrading and expanding their facilities. But opponents have 
characterized the rule changes as a favor to administration allies in 
the utility and coal-producing industries that would greatly add to 
public health problems.

New York Attorney General Eliot L. Spitzer, who led the court fight to 
block the administration's New Source Review policy, called yesterday's 
ruling "a major victory for clean air and public health" and a 
"rejection of a flawed policy."

"It will encourage industry to build new and cleaner facilities, instead 
of prolonging the life of old, dirty plants," Spitzer said.

In a statement, EPA spokesman John Millet said: "We are disappointed 
that the Court did not find in favor of the United States. We are 
reviewing and analyzing the opinion and cannot comment further at this 
time."

Some studies have linked pollution from coal-fired power plants to as 
many as 20,000 premature deaths in the United States every year. 
Environmental activists have made curbing this type of pollution one of 
their most pressing legislative and legal priorities, and yesterday they 
celebrated the ruling.

"Irish eyes are surely smiling -- and we all will be breathing easier -- 
with this green court ruling on St. Patrick's Day," said John Walke, 
director of the clean-air program at the Natural Resources Defense 
Council. "This is about as thorough a rebuke a court can give."

President Bush took office in 2001 promising to ease regulations on 
coal-fired power plants as part of a larger energy production 
initiative. Three successive administrators of the EPA have tried 
without success to alter the rules and policies adopted during the 
Clinton administration that cracked down on aging power plants and 
refineries that were not equipped with modern air pollution equipment 
when they were upgraded and when their output was expanded.

Under the revised policy that was rejected by the court yesterday, power 
plants and other industrial polluters would not have to install new 
pollution technology if they modernized less than 20 percent of their 
operations.

The central question in the case focused on what constitutes an 
industrial facility "modification," because that is what triggers the 
federal requirement to cut down on the smog or soot emitted by 
utilities, oil refineries, incinerators, chemical plants and 
manufacturing operations. Previous administrations, including Bill 
Clinton's, had interpreted that phrase to encompass any physical 
activity that increases pollution from a given facility, with the 
exception of routine maintenance.

EPA officials in the Bush administration sought to broaden this 
exemption by asserting that "routine maintenance" is any activity that 
amounts to less than 20 percent of a plant's value. But the ruling, 
written by Judge Judith W. Rogers, rejected that reasoning as illogical.

"EPA's approach would ostensibly require that the definition of 
'modification' include a phrase such as 'regardless of size, cost, 
frequency, effect,' or other distinguishing characteristic," Rogers 
wrote. "Only in a Humpty Dumpty world would Congress be required to use 
superfluous words while an agency could ignore an expansive word that 
Congress did use. We decline to adopt such a world-view."

The other two judges on the panel were David S. Tatel and Janice Rogers 
Brown.

The EPA's statement did not indicate whether the administration intends 
to appeal the ruling. Both Walke and Scott Segal, a lobbyist for the 
utilities industry, said it would be difficult for the administration to 
forge ahead in light of the appeals court's strong ruling. Walke said 
the decision is tantamount to the court "burying the rule six feet 
under, where before it was just in a casket."

Segal said the ruling will make it more costly for plants to operate. 
"This is a missed opportunity for reform that would have made it easier 
to improve power plant efficiency and workplace safety, and that's bad 
news for consumers and the environment," he said. "We believe it is a 
step backwards for the protection of air quality in the United States."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/17/AR2006031701127.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060318/b7ee8d28/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sat Mar 18 05:06:07 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2006 08:06:07 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] 'Teach to the Test'? What Test? - Colman McCarthy -
 Washington Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <441C05BF.3090900@comcast.net>

'Teach to the Test'? What Test?

By Colman McCarthy
The Washington Post
Saturday, March 18, 2006; A21


From swiggard at comcast.net  Sat Mar 18 05:09:59 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2006 08:09:59 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] New Blackface,
	Same Old Song - Jabari Asim - Washington Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <441C06A7.3040003@comcast.net>

New Blackface, Same Old Song

By Jabari Asim
The Washington Post
Friday, March 17, 2006; 7:45 PM

WASHINGTON -- "Black up some white folks and they could deceive a 
resident of Benin," George S. Schuyler dryly observed in "Black No 
More," his classic satire of race relations.

Schuyler, who began hurling rhetorical brickbats during the Harlem 
Renaissance, continued tossing them almost until his death in 1977. An 
expert at poking holes in all manner of American obsessions, he used his 
novel to expose the flimsiness of our ideas about physical differences 
between blacks and whites.

"When you consider that less than 20 percent of our Negroes are without 
Caucasian ancestry and that close to 30 percent have American Indian 
ancestry," he argued, "there cannot be the wide difference in Caucasian 
and Afro-American facial characteristics that most people imagine."

Schuyler came up with his estimates long before such things as DNA 
testing, so I can't vouch for his numbers. But I see his point. It makes 
me wonder what he would make of stunts such as "Black. White.", the 
miniseries currently airing on FX.

In the six-episode series, a black family, the Starks, trade racial 
identities with a white family, the Wurgel-Marcotullis. After "Trading 
Places" and "Trading Spouses," reality-TV programmers may very well be 
running out of ideas.

Some critics have raved over the transformations both families endured, 
but I can't see them fooling any residents of the African country of 
Benin. To my jaded eyes they look no more convincing than those 
odd-looking folks in the famous "race" issue of Colors magazine. In a 
much-discussed photo feature called "What If," the editors used digital 
tricks to paint Arnold Schwarzenegger brown, Spike Lee white, as part of 
a package of celebrity makeovers. The issue, while puckishly designed, 
also asked serious, provocative questions: "What is the difference 
between black, white and in between? We know everyone's blood looks the 
same. But what about hair, eyes, noses and earwax? Why do people have 
painful surgery to look more 'white'?"

"Black. White." seldom digs as deep. While the cast members' makeovers 
seem to work when they meet unsuspecting folks on the street, those 
encounters often risk perpetuating stereotypes instead of eliminating 
them. What's more, rather than forcing us to confront our own 
misperceptions, the show lets us off the hook by allowing us to pass 
judgment on the unsuspecting people whose prejudices are brought to 
light. Viewers can take comfort from being party to the deception.

In contrast, the Wooster Group, a New York experimental theater troupe, 
makes no attempt to fool anyone. Their revival of Eugene O'Neill's "The 
Emperor Jones," about a black American railroad porter who becomes the 
dictator of a fictional island nation, features a Caucasian actress in 
the title role. In blackface.

The show is going over well among the artsy Lower East Side crowd, a 
bunch not likely to include many black faces. Real ones, I mean.

One New York reviewer called the lead performance "riveting, haunting, 
altogether astonishing." I haven't seen the play. I have only seen a 
photograph of the central character ingloriously splashed across a 
newspaper page, cavorting in all her burnt-cork exuberance. Of course, 
the picture can't provide the context necessary to appreciate the merits 
of her performance, but as a snapshot it looks lurid, nightmarish and 
altogether revolting. When compared with the subtle, unthreatening 
shape-shifting made possible by Hollywood latex or digital photography, 
a thick slather of shoe polish achieves only a decidedly 
stomach-churning effect.

There's too much history in those layers of lampblack, a coating no 
performer can put on without conjuring up the ghosts of minstrels long 
gone, from Jim Crow and Zip Coon to Bert Williams and Al Jolson. The 
very first minstrel show probably occurred in 1843, in New York City. 
Within a year it became the most popular form of live entertainment in 
America. In his book "Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the 
Hollywood Melting Pot," Michael Rogin, notes that "blackface provided 
the new country (the United States in the 1800s) with a distinctive 
national identity in the age of slavery."

Because I know the Wooster Group knows all that, I figure that its 
decision to cast a white woman as a garish caricature of a black man 
derives from some ironic sensibility far more sophisticated than my own. 
To illuminate that sensibility would probably require a contrarian wit 
on the level of George Schuyler. Who knows, I might have to go all the 
way to Benin for that.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2006/03/17/BL2006031701721.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060318/5fcd6190/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sat Mar 18 05:13:14 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2006 08:13:14 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Fighting Smarter In Iraq - David Ignatius - Washington
	Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <441C076A.2000206@comcast.net>

Fighting Smarter In Iraq

By David Ignatius
The Washington Post
Friday, March 17, 2006; A19

BAGHDAD -- Three years on, the U.S. military is finally becoming adept 
at fighting a counterinsurgency war in Iraq. Sadly, these are precisely 
the skills that should have been mastered before America launched its 
invasion in March 2003. It may prove one of the costliest lessons in the 
history of modern warfare.

I had a chance to see the new counterinsurgency doctrine in practice 
here this week. U.S. troops are handing off to the Iraqi army a growing 
share of the security burden. As the Iraqis step up, the Americans are 
stepping back into a training and advisory role. This is the way it 
should have happened from the beginning.

A brutal stress test came on Feb. 22, when Sunni insurgents destroyed a 
revered Shiite mosque in Samarra. For a moment, Iraq seemed to be 
slipping toward civil war, but the Iraqi army performed surprisingly 
well. In many areas Iraqi forces -- backed up by overwhelming U.S. 
firepower -- helped restore order. "You never know the tipping point 
until you're past it," says Gen. George Casey, the commander of American 
forces here. With many other U.S. and Iraqi officials, he hopes Samarra 
may have been such a tipping point, for the better.

Iraq is still a mess. Traveling over Baghdad by Black Hawk helicopter, 
you can see piles of fetid trash on nearly every block and pools of raw 
sewage glinting in the sun. Car bombs and roadside explosions are still 
a daily feature of life, and the death toll remains horrific, especially 
for Iraqi civilians. But it would be a mistake to think that nothing is 
changing. The country is fragile, but it hasn't splintered apart.

I visited two bases where you can see the new U.S. strategy begin to 
take hold. The first was at Taji, straddling the Tigris River north of 
Baghdad, where the American 4th Infantry Division is gradually handing 
off responsibility to Iraqi units. After the Samarra bombing, enraged 
Shiites killed two Sunni clerics, and there was a danger that the 
reprisal killings could escalate.

Tensions eased after an Iraqi brigade commander, a Shiite, rolled his 
armored vehicles into the Sunni stronghold of Tarmiya and told local 
imams that his men would protect their mosques against Shiite attacks -- 
and that in return, they must control Sunni militants. "He laid down the 
law," remembers Col. Jim Pasquarette, who commands U.S. forces in the 
area. The crisis gradually eased there, with U.S. forces mostly 
remaining in the background.

"This is the hardest thing I've ever done," Pasquarette says of the new 
rules of counterinsurgency. "In the old days, it was black and white -- 
see a guy and shoot him. But counterinsurgency is a thinking man's 
sport. Every decision you make, you have to step back and say, 'What's 
the next thing that's going to happen?' " He says he drills his troops 
to remember the "three P's" of the new Iraqi battlefield: "be polite, be 
professional, be prepared to kill."

The town of Abu Ghraib, just west of Baghdad, faced a similar test after 
Samarra. The area is almost entirely Sunni; the Iraqi army unit that has 
responsibility there is largely Shiite. That sounds like a recipe for 
disaster, but the Iraqi brigade commander, a feisty Shiite from southern 
Iraq named Gen. Aziz, is making it work. After the Samarra explosion, 
Aziz told me, he convened a meeting with local tribal and religious leaders.

"I am responsible for your safety," he admonished them. "The law should 
protect us all. There are no militias in this area." He told the local 
leaders they could protect their homes and mosques, but if he found 
anyone carrying weapons on the streets, he would kill him. The message 
seemed to work. A fiery local Sunni imam told his worshipers last Friday 
they should try to live with their neighbors.

Inside his headquarters, Aziz showed me a video of a suicide bomb that 
nearly killed him and his American adviser, Lt. Col. Mark Samson, two 
weeks ago. "He has the blood of my soldiers on his uniform," he says 
respectfully of the American. Outside Aziz's office is what he calls a 
"martyr tree," listing the names of the 22 men in his brigade who have 
died. "There can be only one hero in Iraq -- the army," he tells me.

I wouldn't pretend that these two snapshots are an accurate 
representation of the whole of Iraq. If that were so, the country 
wouldn't be in such a mess. But this is the way this war is supposed to 
be going. It's a few years late, but the new U.S. strategy is moving in 
the right direction.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/16/AR2006031601308.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060318/79d1012c/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sat Mar 18 05:17:03 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2006 08:17:03 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] IMPORTANT: Bad times for immigrants - Robert Kuttner -
	Boston Globe
Message-ID: <441C084F.6060202@comcast.net>


  Bad times for immigrants

By Robert Kuttner  |  March 18, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

CONGRESS IS belatedly grappling with immigration reform. There is no 
more difficult dilemma, both in terms of the politics and the need to 
balance contradictory policy objectives. The heightened concern with 
terrorism only complicates the job.

America today is failing to control its borders. Most estimates place 
the number of immigrants here illegally at around 12 million. Despite 
heightened security since 9/11, the Pew Hispanic Center estimates that 
well over 500,000 entered illegally in 2004, more than in 2001.

As antiterrorism measures have increased, all these people are outside 
the law in both senses. They are here without papers, and they are also 
beyond normal legal rights and protections.

On immigration, two prime Republican constituencies are diametrically at 
odds. An anti-immigrant backlash has been brewing in the heartland. It 
was reflected in a harsh bill passed last year by the House, rejecting 
even President Bush's call for a guest-worker program.

The House bill would deny undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship, 
build a two-layer, 700-mile wall between the United States and Mexico, 
and redefine undocumented presence in the United States as a felony. 
Good Samaritans who helped illegal immigrants could be punished. The 
bill's sponsors have the fantastical hope of literally rounding up all 
12 million and sending them back.

By contrast, Republican business groups like lots of vulnerable 
immigrant workers, whose presence drives down wage levels. The last 
major reform, passed in 1986, failed because it was not serious about 
punishing businesses that hired workers illegally. If an employer tells 
an applicant with a wink and a nod to ''come back when you have papers," 
and the papers are forgeries, the employer is not held responsible. Nor 
is a large corporation liable if the worker was hired through a contractor.

The Bush administration has weakened enforcement further. The Wall 
Street Journal recently reported that the number of employers notified 
of possible fines for illegal hires in 2004 was exactly three, down from 
an already low 417 in 1999.

The Senate is debating a variation on the bill that Bush wants, with 
tougher tracking and border-control measures, a provision for temporary 
''guest workers" without normal rights, and stronger penalties (at least 
on paper) for employers who hire illegally. Senator Arlen Specter's 
version of the bill, like Bush's, denies both guest workers and people 
currently here illegally a path to citizenship.

A sensible a bipartisan effort by Senators John McCain and Edward 
Kennedy offers a grand bargain: much tougher border enforcement, 
employer penalty, and ID requirements, in exchange for a path to 
citizenship. Of course, this logical compromise is off the table.

By coincidence, I made a long-deferred visit last weekend to the Ellis 
Island national museum of immigration. Ellis Island, which served as 
principal screening point for immigrants between 1892 and 1954, evokes 
an era of awful Atlantic crossings in steerage, culminating in 
terrifying inspections that divided immigrants into tolerably fit people 
who could stay and those who were sent back.

But, compared with what many immigrants face today, Ellis Island was a 
pretty benign system. The majority of people were admitted. Until 1924, 
there were no quotas. The huddled masses were welcomed to the island 
with decent meals, cups of milk for the children, physical exams, 
showers, blankets, and some rudimentary explanations of how things 
worked in the new land.

In best Progressive Era fashion, inspectors sought to exclude people who 
they thought had been recruited by unscrupulous labor contractors. It 
was a time of massive citizenship education. Immigrants were seen as 
future citizens, not just cheap workers.

As a consequence, most foreign-born people quickly became part of 
American democracy, and its most enthusiastic champions. They 
participated. They voted. Soon, they made amazing economic and cultural 
contributions.

Today 12 million immigrants, mostly poor, are outside our democratic 
system. The obsession with terrorism, ineptly administered, has played 
havoc with cultural and scientific exchanges and admissions of foreign 
students. Even legal entrants can face political hazings, as well as 
denial of social benefits.

Workers without documents are at the mercy of a harsh labor system, and 
the risk of random roundups. Street-corner day-labor contractors have 
returned to America's large cities. People who have lived here 
peacefully for decades, running businesses, can be deported for minor 
misdemeanors, separating parents from children. Ellis Island looks 
pretty good by comparison.

Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect. His column appears 
regularly in the Globe.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/18/bad_times_for_immigrants/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060318/c6451c11/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sat Mar 18 05:22:57 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2006 08:22:57 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Some improvement,
 but graduation gap remains - Derrick Z. Jackson - Boston Globe Op-Ed
Message-ID: <441C09B1.9050005@comcast.net>


  Some improvement, but graduation gap remains

By Derrick Z. Jackson  |  March 18, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

THE NEW NCAA graduation rates make March seem less maddening on the 
surface. Schools now count transfers who graduate, and they are not 
penalized if players leave early in good academic standing. The average 
black men's graduation rate for basketball tournament teams is now 53 
percent, compared with 35 percent in 2003. But there remain tremendous gaps.

Of the 38 men's teams with higher graduation rates for white players 
than black ones, the average gap was a massive 46 percentage points. 
Eleven of the 17 worst black-male graduating teams in the 64-team field 
are in the AP Top 25, including top-ranked Duke.

The women continued their annual devastation of the men in average 
graduation rates, 81 percent to 58 percent. Black women, at 74 percent, 
beat the black men's graduation rate by 21 percentage points.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pop-up 850 X 750 POPUP: Graduation gap 
<http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/18/grad_gap>
Pop-up 1125 X 920 POPUP: Graduation gap 
<http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/18/grad_gapxl>
------------------------------------------------------------------------

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/18/some_improvement_but_graduation_gap_remains/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060318/7687dcb8/attachment.htm 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: dingbat_popup_icon.gif
Type: image/gif
Size: 79 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060318/7687dcb8/attachment.gif 

From Hawaiipolo at cs.com  Fri Mar 17 17:21:09 2006
From: Hawaiipolo at cs.com (Hawaiipolo at cs.com)
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 20:21:09 EST
Subject: [Mb-civic] Fwd: Israel Lobby Part 1(seperate email, for part 2)
Message-ID: <E1FKRMG-0006Wf-LE@elasmtp-mealy.atl.sa.earthlink.net>

Powerful, thoroughly researched article that connects many of the dots of the 
last 6 years and beyond...Well worth the lengthy read...MD
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060317/7f72b598/attachment-0001.htm 
-------------- next part --------------
An embedded message was scrubbed...
From: Pm122964 at aol.com
Subject: Israel Lobby Part 1
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 07:33:09 EST
Size: 122550
Url: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060317/7f72b598/attachment-0001.eml 

From emailthis at motherjones.com  Fri Mar 17 18:39:55 2006
From: emailthis at motherjones.com (emailthis at motherjones.com)
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 18:39:55 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Missouri House bans contraception for poor women
Message-ID: <200603180239.k2I2dtpe028075@linux19585.dn.net>



Missouri House bans contraception for poor women 
03/16/06  06:51 AM 

     

     The Missouri House voted yesterday to ban contraceptive funding for low-income women, and to prohibit state-funded programs from referring those women to other programs. The sponsor of the proposal, Rep. Susan Phillips, declared contraceptive services an "inappropriate use of tax dollars."  

     According to the Kansas City Star, the proposal does not save Missouri any money. Rather, it restricts how state agencies can spend $9.23 million set aside for public health programs for people with low incomes who do not qualify for Medicaid.  

     Phillips says that both Missouri Right to Life and the Missouri Catholic Conference supports her proposal. Opponents repeatedly pointed out that eliminating contraception paves the way for increased abortions, but Republicans and a couple of Democrats voted for passage. 
     
- Diane E. Dees

Read the MoJo Blog online for more:

     http://www.motherjones.com/mojoblog

@2006 The Foundation for National Progress


From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Sat Mar 18 08:06:26 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2006 11:06:26 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] The Doha Debates
Message-ID: <001301c64aa5$ecd689a0$0927e440@Harold>

I was fortunate to catch this debate on BBC World today, 10 am ET (It is to be repeated tomorrow the 19th)

http://www.thedohadebates.com/output/page1.asp


http://www.thepeninsulaqatar.com/Display_news.asp?section=Local_News&subsection=Qatar+News&month=March2006&file=Local_News200603161291.xml


Catch it if you can. 

The interaction/thinking between the students and the panel was quite remarkable/promising and most seem to be on the same page.

Harry
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060318/4c7f34cd/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Sat Mar 18 08:21:32 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2006 16:21:32 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Judges Overturn Bush Bid to Ease Pollution
	Rules
Message-ID: <20060318162132.AA9333AE42C@lax-gw06.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

WASHINGTON | March 18, 2006
Judges Overturn Bush Bid to Ease Pollution Rules
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY
The clean-air regulation would have let many power plants, refineries and factories avoid installing costly new pollution controls.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/18/politics/18enviro.html?ex=1143349200&en=2fab669abc55d9c1&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060318/8ae92bad/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Sat Mar 18 08:23:48 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2006 16:23:48 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Hold the President Accountable (4 Letters)
Message-ID: <20060318162348.6C00C24A027@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

OPINION | March 18, 2006
Hold the President Accountable (4 Letters)

To the Editor:.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/18/opinion/l18bush.html?ex=1143349200&en=43c961f0807b5ebc&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060318/390a1231/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Sat Mar 18 08:24:53 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2006 16:24:53 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: The End of Greater Serbia
Message-ID: <20060318162453.CE7083AE5D3@lax-gw06.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

INTERNATIONAL / EUROPE | March 18, 2006
News Analysis: The End of Greater Serbia
By NICHOLAS WOOD
With Slobodan Milosevic gone, will Serbia embrace the opportunities of growth through a connection with the rest of Europe or will it fester in a sense of defeat?
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/18/international/europe/18serbia.html?ex=1143349200&en=95e01f2716f32b73&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060318/9a8ae4de/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Sat Mar 18 08:27:22 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2006 16:27:22 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Hints of Corruption Lead Some to Urge Blair
	to Resign
Message-ID: <20060318162724.1923D11FA97@lax-gw07.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

INTERNATIONAL / EUROPE | March 18, 2006
Hints of Corruption Lead Some to Urge Blair to Resign
By ALAN COWELL
The Labor Party acknowledged it received more than three times the amount it had previously acknowledged in campaign loans.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/18/international/europe/18britain.html?ex=1143349200&en=85665bae9815c0bf&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060318/38f961b4/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Sat Mar 18 08:28:27 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2006 16:28:27 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Another Killing at a Denny's,
	Fourth in 3 Days
Message-ID: <20060318162827.2D7B983E2E@lax-gw03.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

???????????


NATIONAL | March 18, 2006
Another Killing at a Denny's, Fourth in 3 Days
By CINDY CHANG
An 18-year-old man was shot dead and another man was wounded after a fight started at a Denny's restaurant in Anaheim.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/18/national/18dennys.html?ex=1143349200&en=6ec416519fde06ed&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060318/44044df1/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Sat Mar 18 08:29:34 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2006 16:29:34 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Nonprofit Hospitals Face Scrutiny Over
	Practices
Message-ID: <20060318162934.7D0A3249F99@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

WASHINGTON | March 19, 2006
Nonprofit Hospitals Face Scrutiny Over Practices
By ROBERT PEAR
Congressional leaders, concerned that many non-profit hospitals are not providing enough charity care, say they will set standards if the industry does not do so itself.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/politics/19health.html?ex=1143349200&en=15a79675a695b2d8&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060318/f1e338bc/attachment-0001.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Sat Mar 18 08:31:53 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2006 16:31:53 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Tying Religion and Politics to an Impending
	U.S. Decline
Message-ID: <20060318163155.6618B2372D9@lax-gw01.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

nyt give sober anaylseees...huzzah...


BOOKS | March 17, 2006
Books of The Times | 'American Theocracy': Tying Religion and Politics to an Impending U.S. Decline
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Kevin Phillips is concerned about the interpenetration of religion and politics in America, as well as financial and military overreach.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/17/books/17book.html?ex=1143349200&en=1707aca7cb4f9cf6&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060318/fba3d46f/attachment.htm 

From ktex at mindspring.com  Sat Mar 18 07:20:32 2006
From: ktex at mindspring.com (Keith Kennedy)
Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2006 09:20:32 -0600
Subject: [Mb-civic] Smoking, Drinking, Kissing!!...Oh, My God!!
Message-ID: <E1FKg7H-0006nM-US@smtpauth04.mail.atl.earthlink.net>

Mo. Drama Teacher Resigns in Play Flap
March 18, 2006 9:24 AM EST
COLUMBIA, Mo. - A central Missouri high school drama teacher whose spring play was canceled after complaints about tawdry content in one of her previous productions will resign rather than face a possible firing.
"It became too much to not be able to speak my mind or defend my students without fear or retribution," said Fulton High School teacher Wendy DeVore.
DeVore's students were to perform Arthur Miller's "The Crucible," a drama set during the 17th Century Salem witch trials.
But after a handful of Callaway Christian Church members complained about scenes in the fall musical "Grease" that showed teens smoking, drinking and kissing, Superintendent Mark Enderle told DeVore to find a more family-friendly substitute.
DeVore chose Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream," a classic romantic comedy with its own dicey subject matter, including suicide, rape and losing one's virginity.
DeVore, 31, a six-year veteran teacher, said administrators told her that her annual contract might not be renewed.
"Maybe I need to find a school that's a better match," she said.
Both Enderle and the high school principal declined to discuss DeVore's resignation, citing privacy concerns. The resignation must still be approved by the school board.
Publicity over the drama debate, including a front-page story in The New York Times, has cast an unflattering light on Fulton as an intolerant small town, several of DeVore's colleagues said.
"We have become a laughingstock," teacher Paula Fessler told The Fulton Sun.   (duh!)
***********


Copyright 2005 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
? 2006 EarthLink, Inc. All rights reserved.
Members and visitors to the EarthLink Web site agree to abide by our Policies and Agreements.
EarthLink Privacy Policy
Submit your Feedback 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060318/ecd21ec5/attachment.htm 

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Sat Mar 18 10:39:01 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2006 10:39:01 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Valley of the Rolls By MAUREEN DOWD
Message-ID: <C04193C5.2A3CF%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 18, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Valley of the Rolls
By MAUREEN DOWD

I'm not going all confessional, like one of these bare actresses baring her
soul on the cover of Vanity Fair. But I have a desperate secret, as the
actresses like to say, that may help others if I talk about it.

Or not.

I am a sleep-eater.

It has happened only a few times, and I'm not sure if it's connected to
Ambien. It started last year when a jumbo pack of Oreos mysteriously went
missing in my kitchen. I came down one morning to find the plastic sliced
open and all the cookies gone. I called my exterminator, certain there was a
crumb-covered critter lurking. He never found one.

A couple of other times, when I was staying in hotels with minibars, I found
Snickers wrappers by the bed or telltale Toblerone chocolate smears.

I confided in a friend, a fellow occasional Ambien user, who said he woke up
sometimes with Jackson Pollock-like splatters of Good & Plenty on his white
T-shirts.

New Yorkers have been calling their doctors and nutritionists this week to
see whether they should switch hypnotics, now that Minnesota researchers
have suggested that Ambien may be creating a new form of ravenous sleeper
cells, an alarming development given that some people had actually been
taking Ambien to avoid the urge to stay up and raid the fridge.

It may just be a new form of avoirdupois rationalization. (That's my story,
dear, and I'm sticking to it.) But a California woman included in one of the
studies said she gained 100 pounds from sleep-eating while on Ambien; a
Minneapolis woman in a full body cast was discovered by her son sleepwalking
to her kitchen, frying bacon and eggs on one night and turning on her oven
to 500 degrees on another; a Tennessee nurse said she'd devoured a whole
package of hamburger rolls "like a grizzly bear."

Susan Chana Lask, a New York City lawyer, has filed a class-action suit
against the makers of Ambien on behalf of users ? who are overwhelmingly
female. She gives examples of bad behavior by what she calls " 'Night of the
Living Dead' creatures": driving impaired and eating raw eggs and even a
buttered cigarette, and sleep-shoplifting DVD's.

Far more women suffer from insomnia, and far more women ? even young ones ?
pop sleeping pills than men. As Ariel Levy wrote in New York magazine, pills
are now seen as "brain styling," not mind-altering, because "the line
between medication and recreation has become blurred."

One girlfriend of mine wanted to call her Upper East Side doctor yesterday
and switch to Lunesta. "I have visions of myself in my Subaru crossing the
George Washington Bridge at 3 in the morning covered in Cheetos dust," she
said. But then she realized they'd probably find out something equally weird
about Lunesta next week ? that it causes you to run off with a Starbucks
barista and go to male strip clubs in your sleep.

The scary news of zombie hordes of Ambien sleep-eaters follows fast upon the
scary news of zombie hordes of Ambien sleep-drivers and zombie hordes of
Ambien sleep-sirens.

The New York Observer recounted the saga of an attractive editor at a
fashion magazine who hooked up with a young man in Soho and took him back to
her place.

"She was laying there and had taken her clothes off," he told the paper.
"Then, in completely slurred speech, she said: 'I just took two Ambien, so
anything you're going to do, you better do it before I pass out.' "

The next mishap is sure to be sleep-governing. A headline on Wednesday read
"Study: Ambien Users Invade Countries in Their Sleep; Wake Up With No Memory
of Reasons for Invasion, No Exit Strategy." The story was written by the
humorist Andy Borowitz, who also imagined that an Ambien side effect might
be a tendency of some politicians to concoct incomprehensible prescription
drug programs while asleep.

But real life once more outstrips satire, as the military in Iraq conducts
Ambien air assaults. The president and some Pentagon officials have no
memory of authorizing the strikes, and the generals in Iraq have no memory
that they've already used these tactics without lasting success.

There is, after all, precedent for Sleepers in Chief. The first President
Bush's doctor caught flak for giving him the sleeping pill Halcion ?
fingered as a possible contributor to Poppy's embarrassing frow-up moment at
a state dinner in Japan.

If you don't want to give up Ambien, doctors say, put chimes on your bedroom
door. The tinkling may wake you up on the way to get a snack or take a drive
to shoplift a new wardrobe for your fat zombie self.

John Tierney is on vacation.

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From michael at michaelbutler.com  Sat Mar 18 10:41:16 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2006 10:41:16 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] How I Learned to Love the Wall By IRSHAD MANJI
Message-ID: <C041944C.2A3D1%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 18, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
How I Learned to Love the Wall
By IRSHAD MANJI

New Haven

ON March 28, Israelis will elect a new prime minister to replace the ailing
Ariel Sharon. But I'd bet my last shekel that I'll continue to hear the
phrase "Ariel Sharon's apartheid wall." It's a phrase spoken ? make that
spewed ? on almost every university campus I visit in North America and
Europe.

Among a new generation of Muslims, this is what Mr. Sharon will be known for
long after he leaves office: unilaterally erecting a barrier, most of it a
fence, some of it a wall, that cuts Arab villages in half, chokes the
movement of ordinary Palestinians, cripples local economies and, ultimately,
separates human beings.

The critics have a point ? up to a point.

They're right that Palestinians are virtually wailing at "the wall." When I
went to see its towering cement slabs in the West Bank town of Abu Dis last
year, an Arab man approached me to unload his sadness. "It's no good," he
said. "It's hard."

"Why do you think they built it?" I asked.

The man shook his head and repeated, "It's hard." After some silence, he
added, "We are not two people. We are one."

"How do you explain that to suicide bombers?" I wondered aloud.

The man smiled. "No understand," he replied. "No English. Thank you.
Goodbye."

Was it something I said? Maybe my impolite mention of Palestinian martyrs?
Then again, how could I not mention them?

After all, this barrier, although built by Mr. Sharon, was birthed by
"shaheeds," suicide bombers whom Palestinian leaders have glorified as
martyrs. Qassam missiles can kill two or three people at a time. Suicide
bombers lay waste to many more. Since the barrier went up, suicide attacks
have plunged, which means innocent Arab lives have been spared along with
Jewish ones. Does a concrete effort to save civilian lives justify the
hardship posed by this structure? The humanitarian in me bristles, but
ultimately answers yes.

That's not to deny or even diminish Arab pain. I had to twist myself like an
amateur gymnast when I helped a Palestinian woman carry her grocery bags
through a gap in the wall (such gaps, closely watched by Israeli soldiers,
do exist). It made me wonder how much more difficult the obstacle course
must be for people twice my age, who must travel to one of the wider
official checkpoints nearby.

I appreciate that Israel's intent is not to keep Palestinians "in" so much
as to keep suicide bombers "out." But in the minds of many Palestinians,
Ariel Sharon never adequately acknowledged the humiliation felt by a
60-year-old Arab whose family has harvested the Holy Land for generations
when she has to show her identity card to an 18-year-old Ethiopian immigrant
in an Israeli Army uniform who's been in the country for eight months. In
that context, fences and walls come off as cruelly gratuitous.

For all the closings, however, Israel is open enough to tolerate lawsuits by
civil society groups who despise every mile of the barrier. Mr. Sharon
himself agreed to reroute sections of it when the Israel High Court ruled in
favor of the complainants. Where else in the Middle East can Arabs and Jews
work together so visibly to contest, and change, state policies?

I reflected on this question as I observed an Israeli Army jeep patrol the
gap in Abu Dis. The vehicle was crammed with soldiers who, in turn, observed
me filming the anti-Israel graffiti scrawled by Western activists ?
"Scotland hates the blood-sucking Zionists!" I turned my video camera on the
soldiers. Nobody ordered me to shut it off or show the tape. My Arab taxi
driver stood by, unprotected by a diplomatic license plate or press banner.

Like all Muslims, I look forward to the day when neither the jeep nor the
wall is in Abu Dis. So will we tell the self-appointed martyrs of Islam that
the people ? not just Arabs, but Arabs and Jews ? "are one"? That before the
barrier, there was the bomber? And that the barrier can be dismantled, but
the bomber's victims are gone forever?

Young Muslims, especially those privileged with a good education, cannot
walk away from these questions as my interlocutor in Abu Dis did. If we
follow in his footsteps, we are only conspiring against ourselves. After
all, once the election is over, we won't have Ariel Sharon to kick around
anymore.

Irshad Manji, a fellow at Yale, is the author of "The Trouble With Islam
Today: A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith."

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Sat Mar 18 11:16:59 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2006 19:16:59 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Before and After Abu Ghraib,
	a U.S. Unit Abused Detainees
Message-ID: <20060318191700.12F5724A193@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

INTERNATIONAL / MIDDLE EAST | March 19, 2006
Task Force 6-26: Before and After Abu Ghraib, a U.S. Unit Abused Detainees
By ERIC SCHMITT and CAROLYN MARSHALL
The military's most highly trained counterterrorism unit committed serious abuses of Iraqi prisoners.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/international/middleeast/19abuse.html?ex=1143349200&en=b1f89eb6ba20eb7c&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060318/c8b87af0/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Sat Mar 18 11:19:33 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2006 19:19:33 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: New Yorkers Will Pay to Sweat at 6
	Previously Free Centers
Message-ID: <20060318191933.9BF7B24B006@lax-gw02.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

Although this is local, it represents a disturbing trend, once again putting the onus for revenue generation on those least able to afford it...


NEW YORK REGION | March 18, 2006
New Yorkers Will Pay to Sweat at 6 Previously Free Centers
By SEWELL CHAN
Starting July 1, the city will charge $50 to $75 a year to use the recreation centers, all of which are in low-income neighborhoods.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/18/nyregion/18recreation.html?ex=1143349200&en=4849428cd8419a7b&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060318/eba0285c/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Sat Mar 18 11:20:39 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2006 19:20:39 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Politics Drives a Senate Spending Spree
Message-ID: <20060318192039.53E5213B89F@lax-gw04.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

WASHINGTON | March 18, 2006
News Analysis: Politics Drives a Senate Spending Spree
By CARL HULSE
Hours after opening a new line of credit by increasing the federal debt limit, the Senate splurged on a bevy of popular programs.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/18/politics/18budget.html?ex=1143349200&en=bfe2b7a014b3aecc&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060318/184813cc/attachment-0001.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Sat Mar 18 11:23:27 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2006 19:23:27 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Agency Sees Little Risk From a Leak at
	Indian Point
Message-ID: <20060318192329.38B8B237239@lax-gw01.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

Why doesn't this make me feel better? LOL.


NEW YORK REGION | March 18, 2006
Agency Sees Little Risk From a Leak at Indian Point
By MATTHEW L. WALD
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said in a report released yesterday that the risk from the tritium-contaminated water leaking from the Indian Point 2 nuclear reactor is so small that it is unlikely to affect the health of plant workers or the public.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/18/nyregion/18leak.html?ex=1143349200&en=2ff9dd857cd217b4&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060318/a764519d/attachment.htm 

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Sat Mar 18 12:04:26 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2006 12:04:26 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] THIS SHOULD GIVE YOU SOME LAUGHS
Message-ID: <C041A7CA.2A3E2%michael@michaelbutler.com>

CLEANINGHUNK.COM <http://www.cleaninghunk.com/video.html>  


From grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net  Sat Mar 18 11:43:35 2006
From: grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net (Golsorkhi)
Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2006 14:43:35 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] FW: America's Iran Crucible: Beyond Yapping Dogs and
	Superpowers	Made of Straw
In-Reply-To: <ECB996C7-1236-47FA-9DFF-2279F7088BF9@thesamiis.com>
Message-ID: <E1FKiOd-0006Ja-2t@elasmtp-junco.atl.sa.earthlink.net>


------ Forwarded Message
From: Samii Shahla <shahla at thesamiis.com>
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 13:47:12 -0500
Subject: America's Iran Crucible: Beyond Yapping Dogs and Superpowers Made
of Straw  

> America's Iran Crucible: Beyond Yapping Dogs and Superpowers Made of Straw
> 
> March 15, 2006 
> Center for Security Policy
> Alex Alexiev
> 
> link to original article
> <http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/Americas_Iran_crucible.pdf>
> 
> President Ahmadinejad?s recent calls for the annihilation of Israel have
> provided much needed clarity to a reality the West, rhetoric apart, has often
> refused to acknowledge let alone do something about. While his genocidal
> threats against a fellow-member of the United Nations should serve as a wake
> up call to people of good will anywhere, other less well-known tirades may
> tell us more about why the fanatics in Tehran feel they can spew hatred with
> impunity and why the terrorist regime in Iran has become a clear and present
> danger that could no longer be ignored by civilized nations.
> 
> ?Europeans are like yapping dogs, kick them once and they run away,?
> Ahmadinejad recently opined, while simultaneously dismissing the United States
> as a ?superpower made of straw.? Such rants are seldom paid much attention in
> the Western media, which tends to treat them as unfortunate noise that is best
> ignored. The ?yapping dogs? remark, for instance, was not made public in
> Europe until four months after it was actually made. This is unfortunate,
> because such ravings can tell us more than the reams of sober Western punditry
> generated on the subject of late. They should also make us think through the
> implications of such views both in terms of the threat this regime poses and
> what policies could best counter it.
> 
> It may be useful to begin with the simple proposition that, looked at from the
> vantage point of Iran?s Islamist regime, Ahmadinejad?s outbursts may in fact
> be a rational assessment of actual European and U.S. policies as opposed to
> their rhetoric vis a vis Tehran.
> 
> To start with neither Iran?s quest for nuclear weapons nor Ahmadinejad?s
> threat to wipe out Israel are either new or unprecedented.Iran has been
> pursuing nuclear capabilities for many years and extremely bellicose tirades
> against Jews and the West have been a regular staple of the mullahs? rhetoric
> since Khomeini. Just a few months after 9/11, for instance, Ayatollah
> Rafsanjani, the number two in the Iranian regime then and now, and a man often
> approvingly characterized as ?pragmatic? in the Western media, urged the
> Muslim world to annihilate Israel with nuclear weapons, assuring them that
> they will only suffer ?some damages? as a result of a nuclear exchange.
> 
> Despite such vitriol, Europe has, by and large, chosen to ignore the fact that
> Iran is a designated terrorist state and a key sponsor of terrorism. To this
> day, the Tehran controlled Lebanese Hezbollah, for instance, is not to be
> found on the EU list of terrorist organizations, ostensibly because it also
> provides ?social services.? Instead, the Europeans have focused on business
> better than usual and today hundreds of EU companies do some $15 billion of
> export business with Iran that is growing at 25% per annum.Germany alone
> exported $5 billion worth of goods to Iran in 2005, a 30% increase from 2004.
> And these EU exports, which represent 44% of Iran?s total, are mostly in the
> strategic oil and gas, petrochemical and telecommunications sectors and cannot
> be easily replaced by Russian or Chinese goods. Fully 75% of the machinery and
> technology that keeps Iran?s economy - and oil and gas exports - going is of
> EU provenance. This has made business with Europe an absolutely indispensable
> economic prop for the regime. Moreover, much of it is done with the direct
> support and encouragement of European governments in the form of export credit
> guarantees and bilateral agreements in direct contravention of U.S. declared
> policy on dealing with terrorist states. It would not be an exaggeration to
> say that, wittingly or not, European governments are helping keep the mullah
> regime in power. 
> 
> Which brings us to the ?superpower made of straw.? Unlike the Europeans, the
> United States has taken the Iranian terrorist regime seriously and President
> Bush declared the country one of the axis of evil. Even before that, in 1996,
> the U.S. Congress unanimously passed tough legislation known as the Iran-Libya
> Sanctions Act (ILSA) authorizing sanctions against companies and individuals
> doing business with the Iranian regime, especially in the oil and gas sector.
> Yet, despite the fact that ILSA was extended for another five years in 2001
> and the countless violations of its provisions in the meantime, Washington has
> never imposed sanctions on any company doing business in Iran, except a few
> Chinese arms dealers.
> 
> Thus, at least in the regime?s view, U.S. implicit threats to Iran have to
> date proven to be little more than empty rhetoric. There is no reason to
> expect that they?ll be taken any more seriously in the future than they have
> been in the past unless Washington finally decides to up the ante. And unless
> it does, the United States will soon face an unpredictable terrorist regime
> armed with nuclear weapons and a Middle East profoundly destabilized and on
> the verge of nuclear war.
> 
> Perhaps, as many hope, with the referral of Iran to the UN Security Council,
> the Europeans will finally prove Ahmadinejad wrong and show some bite along
> with the ?yapping.? Unfortunately, given past experience and the large
> European economic interests involved, the odds of that happening are not very
> good. Nor is it likely that Russia and China will suddenly decide to abandon
> their long-standing efforts to obstruct American policy and strike their own
> lucrative deals with Tehran. Indeed, just days after Russia?s voted to refer
> Iran to the UN Security Council, foreign minister Sergei Lavrov stated
> publicly Moscow?s strong opposition to ?any possible sanctions? against Iran.1
> 
> Washington?s current hopes to prevent Iran from going nuclear with the help of
> the UN will yet again prove illusory. This does not mean that America must
> face this daunting task alone, for in facing the warmongers in Tehran we have
> the most powerful of potential allies ? the Iranian people. The first and most
> important step though is to realize that the status quo is simply no longer
> acceptable and it will not really get better until there is a regime change in
> Tehran. 
> 
> Before getting into a discussion of how regime change could best be
> accomplished, however, it is important to briefly discuss the evolution of the
> regime in Iran into a ticking time bomb and an imminent threat to world peace.
> 
> From Totalitarian Theocracy to Messianic Islamofascism
> 
> From its very beginning, Khomeini?s revolution was based on the essentially
> totalitarian concept of vilayat-e faqih (rule of the jurisprudent), which
> simply meant absolute political power for a ?supreme leader? and a small
> clique of top clerics. Though claiming to derive its legitimacy from Islam and
> having a version of Islamic fanaticism as its ideological banner, this system
> had much more in common with the Nazi Fuehrer prinzip and the Bolshevik
> ?vanguard party? concept than with anything found in the Quran or the Twelver
> Shia doctrine. Indeed, it followed the organizational and operational modus
> operandi of its totalitarian confreres to the letter, complete with a ?cult of
> personality? of the leader and brutal suppression of the rule of law, dissent,
> freedom of speech and basic human rights by means of a typical totalitarian
> security services network and extrajudicial violence. It also followed closely
> the totalitarian economic model in its socialist version, with 70% of the
> economy controlled by the state, central planning, five-year plans etc.
> 
> Overtime, the system became progressively ossified and corrupt and failed to
> perform economically. Timid half-baked reform experiments under President
> Khatami predictably came to nothing, yet, despite being tightly controlled,
> threatened the absolute power and economic privilege of the clerics. The
> ruling oligarchy responded by putting an end to even the pretense of reform
> and toleration of reformists and opted out for a new wave of wholesale
> repression, euphemistically dubbed the ?Second Islamic Revolution.? All the
> while, the regime continued to blame the Great Satan and evil Zionists for its
> own failures with the time-tested ?externalization of evil? propaganda tactic
> of totalitarians.
> 
> The result has been the near complete stifling of dissent in Iran. Reformists
> have been prevented from contesting elections, most reformists publications
> have been banned and many hundreds of journalists, bloggers and
> non-conformists have been jailed on trumped up charges and often tortured.
> Since the arrival of Ahmadinejad on the scene, this process has been
> accelerated and led to the thorough purge of suspected reformists from all
> levels of government and their replacement with hard-line zealots.
> 
> The growing tendency of the regime to seek greater ideological conformity and
> use repression as a first resort in its efforts to deal with the palpable
> discontent of Iranian society, has dramatically enhanced the political clout
> of the most reactionary parts of the regime?s support structures in the
> security, intelligence and paramilitary vigilante baseej forces and their
> hardline Islamist mentors. It is these circles that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
> emerged from and represents.
> 
> While this group of extremists is a zealous defender of the Islamist regime,
> their views are even more radical than those of most regime clerics in
> virtually all aspects and they see themselves as the true representatives and
> guardians of Ayatollah Khomeini?s legacy. In this respect, they implicitly and
> sometimes quite explicitly, criticize the clerical establishment for not being
> radical enough in pursuing the goals of the Islamic revolution as they see
> them. 
> 
> Two areas of particular relevance for our discussion here are their attitudes
> toward the West and the messianic nature of their beliefs. Guided by the
> teachings of their ideological godfather ? the ultra-hardline Ayatollah
> Mesbah-e Yazdi and the ?Westoxication? conspiracy theories of Ahmad Fardid, a
> third-rate Persian follower of Nazi sympathizer Martin Heidegger, these
> zealots exhibit a pathological hatred of the West and its civilization and a
> firm belief in the inevitability of an apocalyptic struggle between Islam and
> the West that will usher in the final triumph of Islam worldwide. By itself,
> this fervent fantasy is hardly new, but its current interpretation by
> Ahmadinejad and the extremists now in power in Tehran is novel and highly
> disturbing. For they have combined it with the messianic Shiite belief in the
> reappearance of the Hidden Imam and appear to believe that the final violent
> confrontation with the enemies of Islam is not only close at hand, but that it
> could be speeded up and that it is the religious obligation of the Iranian
> people to do that through the ?art of martyrdom.? And martyrdom in
> Ahmadinejad?s fantasy world is no longer just about individuals but about the
> whole nation. ?A nation with martyrdom knows no captivity,? he exalts and
> warns that those who undermine this ?principle ? undermine the foundation of
> our eternity.? The way to avoid this great misfortune is simple in his view
> and he urges the Iranians to follow those who are ?doing their best to pave
> the way for the urgent reappearance of the Hidden Imam.? How long that will
> take is also no secret and Ahmadinejad is on record saying that he expects the
> Imam to appear in two short years. What exactly ?paving the way? for the
> Messiah?s appearance involves is not clear from the ravings of these lunatics,
> but for the civilized world to assume that these fantasies are totally
> unrelated to Tehran?s quest for nuclear weapons would be folly. Recently, a
> religious scholar and disciple of Ahmadinejad?s mentor Ayatollah Mesbah-e
> Yazdi, better known to Iranians as ?Professor Crocodile,? publicly justified
> the use of nuclear weapons against the enemies of Islam in what regime
> opponents saw as a new effort by the hardliners to ?prepare the religious
> grounds for the use of these weapons.?2
> 
> There are many in the West that are already dismissing these ominous threats
> as empty bluster and yet again urging dialog and calling for more tolerance of
> the intolerant. For them, it may be instructive to see how some prominent
> Iranians who are far from being friends of the West or enemies of the Islamic
> republic perceive these trends. Abdul- Karim Soroush, the most prominent
> Iranian philosopher still living in the country, for instance, sees a ?hidden
> fascism? on the march and believes that the current Tehran rulers are going
> ?even further than the Taliban,? while, in the words of former president
> Khatami, they aspire ?to imitate Bin Laden? and ?compete with the Taliban in
> calling for violence and in carrying out extremist crimes.?
> 
> Toward a Strategy for Regime Change
> 
> If the analysis above has any merit, the West is now facing an imminent and
> acute threat from a terrorist regime armed with a culture of death and a
> messianic belief in the virtue of apocalyptic violence. And soon to be armed
> with nuclear weapons. While there is some benefit in getting international and
> United Nations acknowledgment of this reality, to wait for a highly unlikely
> solution of the problem by them would be tantamount to a dereliction of duty.
> It will either not happen or will be dragged out to the point of becoming
> meaningless. What needs to be done immediately is for the United States to
> formulate and begin executing a comprehensive strategy that aims to prevent or
> delay as long as possible the acquisition of a nuclear capability by Iran as
> the first step and effect regime change in Tehran as the ultimate objective.
> 
> As any sound integrated strategy it should consist of a military contingency
> plan and coordinated but independent plans for economic and political warfare
> against the Tehran regime.
> 
> The Military Option - A discussion of the military dimension of such a
> strategy is beyond the scope of this essay and the competence of its author,
> except for pointing out that regardless of the technical feasibility of a
> strictly military solution, it should not be taken off the table as an option
> and a political lever. It is also imperative for any military option to
> include plans to surgically decapitate the regime and its key supporters with
> as little collateral damage as possible. At the very least, targets should
> include the top leadership and the regime?s key support structures and
> instruments of political oppression such as Republican Guard, Baseej and
> intelligence headquarters and essential installations. The Economic Option-
> The economic dimension of such a strategy is essential and clear cut. Iran is
> a terrorist state and anybody that contributes to its economic and therefore
> political well-being ought to be subject to sanctions under existing American
> law. An effective sanctions regime that will bring an end to European
> strategic exports may by itself critically undermine the regime?s economic
> viability and seriously affect its political stability as well. An effective
> economic strategy to undermine the regime need not be just a government
> affair. Many if not most of the large European companies that currently prop
> Tehran economically, both do a large amount of business in the United States
> and have billions of dollars invested in their stock by American funds and
> individuals. This is especially true of the 100 largest U.S. pension funds to
> say nothing of the hundreds of American mutual funds and a grass roots
> campaign to divest from these companies will in short order force them to
> choose between the American market and doing business with terrorists. 3 It
> will not be a difficult choice to make. In fact, such a campaign already
> exists but it needs much greater public support to be effective.
> 
> The Political Warfare Option
> 
> The greatest promise for regime change in a democratic direction lies in a
> well-designed campaign of political warfare toward that end. The nearly
> complete absence of willingness on the part of the U.S. administration to
> engage in a systematic political warfare effort is our greatest policy failure
> to date in Iran and, indeed, in the war on terror as a whole. In fact, the
> very term political warfare has disappeared from our lexicon, except when used
> to describe campaigns against domestic political opponents. Yet, political
> warfare is and has always been an indispensable instrument of national power
> in times of serious international conflict and theUnited States has
> traditionally engaged in it, more often than not with considerable success, as
> in the Cold War. It is of particular relevance in conflicts of ideological
> nature like the current one that cannot be won by military means alone.
> Instead, what we claim to be doing or are at least interested in doing is
> something called ?public diplomacy? an ill-conceived and futile exercise in
> political correctness unlikely to provide any meaningful contributions to U.S.
> foreignpolitical desiderata.4
> 
> Unlike public diplomacy, which seems to pursue the objective of convincing our
> enemies that we are decent and well-meaning people or provide answers to
> questions such as ?why they hate us,? political warfare is about identifying
> an enemy?s internal weaknesses, analyzing them carefully and developing an
> integrated strategy to exploit them through the various instruments at the
> nation?s disposal. It is a strategy that holds especial promise in dealing
> with opponents that run politically oppressive and economically failing
> regimes that lack legitimacy and the support of large parts of the population.
> In Iran?s case, the regime?s vulnerabilities are numerous and glaring. It is a
> country where a significant segment of society has no illusion as to the
> reactionary nature of the regime and would support the democratization of the
> country. It is also a country with a large, well-educated and, for the most
> part, democratically-oriented diaspora in the West which could serve as the
> catalyst in a democratization effort.
> 
> Given these existing conditions, in order to be effective, a political warfare
> campaign would have to be in sync with the quintessential interests and
> aspirations of the Iranians themselves and help them understand that while the
> mullah regime presents a problem for the West it presents an existential
> threat to the socio-economic future and the physical security of its people. A
> sophisticated political warfare campaign would necessitate a detailed study of
> the regime vulnerabilities and formulating a set of key messages to be
> delivered with the appropriate instruments. This is clearly beyond the scope
> of this essay, but the few examples below should provide a sample of what
> possibilities exist.
> 
> The nature of the conflict ? It is of the utmost importance for the U.S.
> working with democratic opposition groups in and outside ofIran to explain to
> the Iranian people the nature of the current conflict with the Tehran regime.
> First and foremost, it must be made abundantly clear that neither Washington
> nor anybody else in the West has any objections against the peaceful use of
> nuclear energy by Iran. This is a key point because the regime has had some
> success in convincing public opinion in Iran that the opposite is true.
> Secondly, it needs to be constantly reiterated that the regime?s nuclear
> weapons ambitions coupled with its messianic warmongering present a real
> danger of nuclear conflagration of which the Iranian people will be the real
> victim. Finally, a clear message, should also be relayed that in any potential
> conflict it is the reactionary mullah regime and the regime alone that is the
> enemy and main target.
> 
> Islam or Islamist ideology ? Iran is an Islamic republic with a government
> ostensibly based on shari?a and Twelver Shia precepts as a source of its
> ideological legitimacy. While this is the theory, the reality is a theocratic,
> totalitarian regime based on the absolute supremacy of the clerics under
> Khomeini?s invention of the vilayat-e faqih, or the dictatorship of a supreme
> Islamic leader and a small mafia around him made up of corrupt clerics and a
> pervasive secret service and paramilitary vigilante groups. It is every bit as
> totalitarian as the Nazi and Soviet models except that it uses religion rather
> than secular ideology as a source of legitimacy. But it is at great odds with
> the Shia religion and that is a significant vulnerability that should be
> exploited for the purposes of delegitimizing the regime.
> 
> It is a historical fact that in Twelver Shia Islam direct involvement in
> politics by the Islamic establishment has historically been frowned upon. Thus
> the vilayat-e faqih model and its various nostrums directly contradict age-old
> Shia traditions. Many Iranian theologians and ayatollahs, such as Ayatollah
> Montazeri, have openly spoken about this and publicly urged the separation of
> religion and state, as have other prominent Shia clerics like grand ayatollahs
> Ali Sistani and Al-Fayad in Iraq. This key fault-line needs to be analyzed and
> a campaign to exploit it organized with the help of prominent Shia scholars.
> 
> The economics of poverty ? Iran is currently enjoying windfall profits from
> its oil exports campaign already exists and has scored some success but much
> greater public support could and should be mobilized in order to make it truly
> effective.5 because of exorbitant prices, but take away the oil (which
> accounts for 90% of exports) and you have a failed state economically that
> compares very unfavorably in terms of economic development to Shah?s period.
> Even with the oil windfall, there has been no reduction in poverty, which
> afflicts 40% of the population and unemployment among the young averages 35%.
> Things are especially dire under shari?a for young women who are easily the
> best educated in the Middle East, yet are openly discriminated against and
> have an unemployment rate of 50%. The prospects of the massive youth cohort
> are anything but bright - a reality the 70% of the population under 30 know
> only too well. Moreover, with half a million youths, many of them college
> educated, joining the ranks of the unemployed each year, things are set to get
> worse. 
> 
> Iran is also stymied by the continued practice of ossified Marxist economic
> dogmas in the form of central planning and five-year plans that a recent study
> called a ?costly exercise in futility.? And like in the Soviet economy of
> yesteryear, the large number (over 40%) of state-owned firms that operate in
> the red year in year out drag the whole economy down and suffocate the private
> sector. Overall, it would not be very difficult to make the case that, like
> everywhere else it has been imposed, the Islamist regime has already proven an
> economic failure with all this implies for the socio-economic prospects of the
> Iranian people. While official statistics are far from reliable, a recent
> parliamentary research report indicated the percentage of people living under
> the poverty line at 50% of the rural population and 20% among city dwellers.
> As in other states that have succumbed to extremism and despite its huge oil
> wealth, poverty seems to be the only certain product of Islamism in Iran. This
> is a particularly pertinent message for the large number of poor people in the
> country that have placed their faith for a better life in Ahmedinajad.
> 
> Regime Corruption ? Pervasive systemic corruption at all levels of government
> may be the single greatest vulnerability of the clerical regime today. This is
> so because not only is the wide-spread corruption a much discussed public
> knowledge, but because it is associated with the ruling clerical establishment
> in the mind of the public. This explains, at least partly, the victory of
> Ahmadinejad, who campaigned on an anti-corruption platform against Rafsanjani,
> who was widely seen as a poster child of high clerical corruption.
> 
> The problem, in short, is that after 26 years in power, the ruling Islamist
> establishment has built a vast system of economic spoils designed to benefit
> them directly. It is a parasitic system that functions in ways remarkably
> similar to the Soviet nomenklatura and like it is immune to reform because
> reform would threaten the collapse of the regime that underpins it. This is
> one reason, why nothing will change under Ahmadinejab, despite his promises.
> 
> Just two examples would suffice to indicate the magnitude of the problem.
> Following the overthrow of the Shah, the royal family?s vast holdings were
> incorporated into semigovernment foundations designed ostensibly to promote
> public welfare and philanthropy. With 30% to 40% of the entire economy?s
> assets under their control, these ?bonyads? have been transformed into huge
> holding companies that dominate most of the manufacturing and trade sectors
> and operate by rules of their own to avoid taxation, competition and
> regulations to which private companies are subjected. Not surprisingly,
> virtually all of the bonyads are indirectly owned by the top clerical
> nomenklatura. This explains why despite hundreds of court cases of flagrant
> embezzlement and corruption, few have resulted in any convictions since
> invariably the defendants turn out to be related to the high and mighty.
> 
> A similar corrupt scheme is at work in the lucrative oil and gas sector where
> hundreds of nominally private companies owned by the clerics have positioned
> themselves as the compulsory partners of foreign investors in the sector and
> the beneficiaries of huge commissions, a practice identical to the one
> perfected by the royal family in Saudi Arabia.
> 
> There are also numerous other real and potential fault-lines and specific
> target audiences that could and should be addressed in an integrated political
> warfare campaign. These include ethnic issues, women, students and youth,
> private business, the poor etc. To take just the first of these, it has become
> increasingly evident that the regime?s brutal treatment and discrimination of
> sizable ethnic and religious minorities such as the Iranian Kurds, the Arabs
> in oil-rich Khuzestan, Baluchis, Turkmen and others has given rise to the kind
> of ethno-religious alienation that could easily lead to the breakup of the
> multiethnic country in which the dominant Farsi make up only half of the
> population. It should be made clear to the Iranian people, that only the
> replacement of the current dictatorship by a democratic regime acceptable to
> all could prevent these dangerous centrifugal tendencies.
> 
> To effectively reach the intended audience, a campaign of this kind would need
> to develop appropriate communication instruments and strategies but this
> should not be difficult. Open societies enjoy an unbeatable advantage over
> closed, dictatorial ones in this respect as the Cold War struggle proved
> conclusively. It is also the case that technological progress in the form of
> the Internet and satellite television and radio have made communications
> virtually impervious to jamming and totalitarians that are trying to keep
> information out are fighting a losing battle. In just one example, it is now
> believed that there are over 100,000 active blogs in Iranwith the vast
> majority of them antiregime, prompting an irate ayatollah to call blogging ?a
> Trojan horse with enemy soldiers in its belly.?
> 
> To sum up, Iran and its warmongering Islamofascist regime present a clear and
> present danger to the West and to its own people. It is a danger that must and
> could be dealt effectively with an integrated military, economic and political
> warfare strategy by the USand allies that is long overdue. A successful
> outcome would dramatically improve the prospects of the democratic project in
> theMiddle East and beyond; the failure to do that will likely bring us to the
> threshold of nuclear conflagration and signal a seminal defeat for the Free
> World in the war on terror.
> 
> 
> 1 Interfax News Agency, Moscow, Feb. 15, 2005
> 
> 
> 2 Roozonline.com, Feb. 16, 2006 as translated in Memri Special Dispatch #1096,
> Feb. 17, 2006,www.memri.org/bin/opener_latest.cgi?ID=SD109606
> <http://www.memri.org/bin/opener_latest.cgi?ID=SD109606> ?
> 
> 3 A recent study has found out that the top 87 US pension funds have invested
> a staggering $188 billion in foreign companies that do business in terrorist
> states. See Christopher Holton, Stop Investing in Terror, in
> Frank Gaffney, War Footing, Naval Institute Press, 2005,pp.59-74.
> 
> 4 For details on the failures of ?public diplomacy? see Michael Waller et al.,
> Chapter 8, ?Wage Political Warfare? in Frank Gaffney, War Footing, Naval
> Institute Press, 2005
> 
> 5 See www.divestterror.org <http://www.divestterror.org/> ?



------ End of Forwarded Message

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060318/f4e43bb4/attachment.htm 

From sam at samharris.org  Sat Mar 18 07:48:34 2006
From: sam at samharris.org (sam at samharris.org)
Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2006 10:48:34 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] A Petition Worth Signing
Message-ID: <E1FKiji-00014R-Ad@elasmtp-junco.atl.sa.earthlink.net>

The following is from the Muslim journalist Irshad Manji.  I consider this a petition worth signing.
Best,
Sam

www.samharris.org


Dear all:

Greetings from Yale University, where I'm enjoying myself thoroughly. (But not exercising as much at the gym. Sigh.)  In this update, I want to tell you about something that's not so enjoyable -- and then ask you for a small act of courage.

As the dust settled on the Danish cartoon controversy, I -- along with Salman Rushdie, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Taslima Nasrin and several others -- released a statement entitled, "The Manifesto of 12: Together Facing a New Totalitarianism." In this statement, we promote universal human rights and democratic values.  We point out that democrats and theocrats can be found in every civilization.  Therefore, this is not a clash of civilizations but call to rally the ?free spirits of all countries?.

This statement has been praised and condemned worldwide.  But in the condemnation category is something truly troubling,  and that?s why I?m writing.  

The signatories have received a serious death threat from a chat thread on ummah.com, an Islamic website operating from Britain.  (?Ummah? refers to the global Muslim community.) Its wording is unambiguous:

?Excellent ? makes killing the kuffar [infidel] all the bit easier... Now we have a hit list of a ?Who?s Who? guide to slam into. Take your time but make sure their gone soon ? oh and don?t hold out for a fatwah it isn?t really required here.?

Unlike the usual stuff that comes from irate individuals, this threat emanates from a place of "authority."  It's widely known that ummah.com attracts many radicals. 

The Manifesto signatories need you to fight back with us. We've created a petition that will be published in the coming days.  If you love pluralism enough to be vocal about it, I ask you to visit my website and go to the box entitled ?Violence Alert.?  That?s where you can sign the petition and, of course, read the Manifesto.  My website is: http://www.muslim-refusenik.com/

Please forward this message to others who might sign our petition.  Thanks for your courage.  And, strange as it may seem to say, happy spring... 

Warmly,
Irshad

To remove your email from this mailing list, click here:

{unsubscribe_url}

From michael at intrafi.com  Sat Mar 18 13:19:50 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2006 13:19:50 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] Alternet: Rachel Corrie: Too Hot for New York
Message-ID: <20060318211950.35965B8247@alternet.org>


This story has been forwarded to you from
http://www.alternet.org by michael at intrafi.com



-------------------------------------
Rachel Corrie: Too Hot for New York
http://www.alternet.org/story/33669

Why has a New York theater company backed off from producing a celebrated play about the moral awakening of a young American activist?
-------------------------------------


From grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net  Sat Mar 18 13:52:18 2006
From: grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net (Golsorkhi)
Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2006 16:52:18 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] FW: Ken Timmerman: Getting Iran Wrong Again
In-Reply-To: <E8BC9F9A-A383-4A0F-BC6A-DA7363C4CD1E@thesamiis.com>
Message-ID: <E1FKjU9-0003o1-RA@elasmtp-junco.atl.sa.earthlink.net>


------ Forwarded Message
From: Samii Shahla <shahla at thesamiis.com>
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 11:39:01 -0500
Subject: Ken Timmerman: Getting Iran Wrong Again



Begin forwarded message:
> 
>  
> ?
> Getting Iran Wrong ? AgainBy Kenneth R. Timmerman
> <http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/authors.asp?ID=1021>
> FrontPageMagazine.com | March 16, 2006
> 
> When making a revolution, allies matter. So do enemies. If you can?t identify
> your friends and target your enemies, you?re better advised to do nothing.
> 
> And that is just what our enemies hope we will do.
> 
> Washington Post reporter Karl Vick, reporting from Tehran this week, trumpeted
> that the new U.S. strategy to help pro-democracy groups inside Iran ?could
> backfire,? by tainting activists as American agents.
> 
> ?We are under pressure here both from hard-liners in the judiciary and that
> stupid George Bush,? he triumphantly quotes an Iranian ?human rights activist?
> as saying.
> 
> The only problem is, the ?human rights activists? and ?pro-democracy? folks
> Karl Vick quotes are nothing of the sort. They are members of the discredited
> ?reformist? movement, which ruled Iran from 1989 until last year.
> 
> The reformist movement is not happy with the election of Iran?s current
> president, Revolutionary Guards officer and former Tehran mayor Mahmoud
> Ahmadinejad. Their candidate was Hojjat-ol eslam Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani,
> who as Majles speaker in 1986 launched Iran?s secret nuclear weapons program,
> then lavished it with money during his eight years as president from
> 1989-1997.
> 
> The only change the reformists want to see is an end to Iran?s isolation and
> to U.S.-led sanctions, so the regime can be free to develop nuclear weapons in
> peace. In other words, they are a shill for the regime.
> 
> America?s enemies are very eager for us to get it wrong. And the Islamic
> Republic of Iran is a sophisticated enemy. Their intelligence services were
> trained by the KGB at the height of the Cold War. We should never forget that.
> 
> The Soviets mastered the use of ?active measures,? aimed at planting
> disinformatzia and bogus stories to discredit the enemy, and maskirovka,
> strategic deception. They taught those techniques to the Islamist intelligence
> service in the early 1980s. Iran?s conspiracy-minded clerics and spymasters
> turned out to be star pupils.
> 
> Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright fell for Iran?s strategic deception
> campaigns repeatedly. So did the Europeans, who believed all during the 1990s
> they could engage in ?constructive engagement? with a regime whose sole goal
> was to acquire European technology to build better missiles and nuclear
> weapons.
> 
> Today, the Washington Post is falling for it, too. They are following the lead
> of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which in 1997 allowed a newly-created
> ?surrogate? Radio Free Iran to be transformed into ?Radio Khatami.? (Known
> officially as Radio Farda (?Tomorrow?), the radio got its nickname because of
> its sycophantic treatment of Rafsanjani?s ?reformist? successor, Hojjat-ol
> eslam Mohammad Khatami.)
> 
> It?s absolutely critical that we get Iran right. On one side, we have a fake
> Iranian ?resistance? group, the Mujahedin-e Khalq, which has jinned up a
> massive lobbying campaign on Capitol Hill. They are hoping to convince
> Congress to get the administration to lift the State Department?s designation
> of the group, which dates from 1994, as an international terrorist
> organization.
> 
> ?Imagine the message that would send to the Iranian people,? one
> administration official who is appalled at the MEK lobbying efforts told me.
> ?So we?re telling them they should be ruled by some crazy terrorist cult?? As
> I reported <http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=20972>
> ?recently, the MEK helped bring Khomeini to power in 1979, but had a falling
> out two years later over how to share power. Call them Iran?s Trotskyists, if
> you will. 
> 
> On the other hand, you have the ?reformists,? the Rafsanjani-Khatami clique
> that ruled Iran until just last year. On their watch, regime intelligence
> officers brutally hacked to death the leading anti-regime activist in Iran,
> Darioush Forouhar, and his wife, Parvaneh. They sent out hit squads that
> murdered more than 200 Iranian dissidents overseas. They murdered Iranian
> journalists, tortured Iranian students, closed universities, and
> machine-gunned demonstrators.
> 
> And yet, the Washington Post calls members of this failed ?reform? movement
> ?human rights activists.?
> 
> So, apparently, did the State Department, misled as ever by the Council on
> Foreign Relations and its acolytes. State careerists chose self-styled
> ?reformists? to take part in workshops aimed at training Iranians in the
> history of non-violent conflict that were held last year in Dubai.
> 
> This is a recipe for failure. Iran?s ?reformists? are not America?s friends,
> nor are they the people we should be supporting inside Iran. Once again,
> strategic deception is at work.
> 
> There was a real reformist movement at one point, but it didn?t last long. It
> emerged in the early months after Khatami?s first election in 1997, but was
> crushed by Khatami himself when he put down the July 1999 student rebellion at
> Tehran University.
> 
> A key leader of that movement was Mohsen Sazegarah, a founder of Iran?s
> dreaded Revolutionary Guards corps. After leaving government in the late
> 1980s, he published newspapers that were repeatedly shut by the regime. After
> two stints in jail, he left Iran last year and told me flat out that the
> reform movement was ?dead.?
> 
> ?This is the first time in our history that the Iranian people are turning to
> a foreign country for help,? he told me. ?I think the United States government
> can help the Iranian people very much.?
> 
> That is a message Iran?s leaders ? and the anti-Bush crowd here at home ?
> don?t want Americans to hear. So their latest strategy is to undermine the
> just-announced U.S. policy of spending $75 million to help the pro-democracy
> movement inside Iran.
> 
> Sazegarah believes the main tool the U.S. should use is political recognition
> of the opposition. He urged a boycott of last year?s presidential elections,
> as a first step toward convincing the international community to reject as
> illegitimate Iran?s Stalinist-style elections. The reformists, on the
> contrary, are still hoping to change the face of the current regime, to make
> it more palatable to the West.
> 
> The CIA has also fallen for Iranian maskirovka, repeating year after year in
> unclassified intelligence assessments that ?no viable opposition? exists in
> Iran.
> 
> This is strategic deception at its best. You?d think that the few Cold
> Warriors left at Langley would teach their younger colleagues the old Soviet
> tradecraft.
> 
> In fact, the Tehran regime is going to extraordinary lengths to discredit,
> dismember, and discourage real opposition inside Iran. Not only are they
> murdering opposition leaders wherever possible, but they coopt activists
> during torture sessions in jail, then set them up with ?false flag?
> organizations to discredit the real opposition leaders who remain underground.
> 
> The message is clear to the meek and the merely disorganized: oppose us if you
> dare. 
> 
> And yet, despite this extraordinary level of intimidation, demonstrations
> erupt in one Iranian city or another virtually every week, but they get little
> coverage in the Western media.
> 
> On March 12, for example, violent clashes rocked the predominantly Kurdish
> city of Piranshahr, near the border with Iran, as angry residents attacked
> government buildings, banks, security patrol cars and trucks. The protests
> followed the murder of a town resident by Islamist militiamen and the refusal
> of the local authorities to restitute the body to his family.
> 
> On March 8, thousands of women demonstrated peacefully in Tehran?s Laleh Park
> to commemorate international women?s day. Digital video images
> <http://www.iran.org/> , sent via the Internet to Iranians overseas, showed
> the brutal crackdown by regime security troops, led by an intelligence officer
> in civilian clothes. Hundreds of women were beaten and at least sixty were
> jailed, but little mention of the crackdown appeared in the West.
> 
> On February 13, Revolutionary Guards troops stormed a Sufi Muslim shrine in
> Qom, razing it to the ground and arresting upwards of 1,000 Sufi worshippers.
> Even Radio Free Europe acknowledged that the ?scale and violence of the
> crackdown on the Sufis is unprecedented in the Islamic Republic.? The regime?s
> actions were strongly condemned by Ayatollah Ali Hossein Montazeri, a
> respected cleric who has been under house arrest since losing a power struggle
> to become Supreme Leader in 1989.
> 
> In recent months, anti-regime riots have erupted in Ahwaz, along Iran?s
> southern border with Iraq; in Iranian Kurdistan to the northwest, and in
> Iranian Balouchestan, along the border with Pakistan.
> 
> Concerned about the rising tension and the efforts by Iranian journalists to
> report on it, the regime apparently sabotaged a government C-130 packed with
> nearly a hundred Iranian journalists on December 12, killing everyone on
> board. (One journalist managed to call his wife on his cellphone shortly
> before the crash to report the crazed behavior of the pilot ? a young
> replacement who boarded the plane under official escort shortly before
> takeoff).
> 
> No opposition in Iran? Here is a country that is falling apart. Since
> September, Tehran?s bus drivers have been on strike to receive back pay and
> better work conditions, and have braved regime hooligans day after day. In
> January, workers from the Miral Glass factory walked out, also to protest not
> being paid.
> 
> Every time there is a soccer match, tens of thousands of Tehranis take to the
> streets, chanting anti-regime slogans. The events have become so notorious as
> anti-regime protests that the regime has tried to outlaw them, without
> success.
> 
> Disinformatzia and maskirovka. The Islamic Republic?s massive strategic
> deception is aimed at making the West believe this crumbling regime stands on
> solid ground, and that any Western challenge to Iran?s nuclear weapons program
> will be met with a stinging defeat.
> 
> Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
> 
This time around with Iran, we need to get it right. The lives of millions
of people depend on it.




------ End of Forwarded Message

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060318/8946a2f5/attachment-0001.htm 

From barbarasiomos38 at msn.com  Sat Mar 18 15:24:01 2006
From: barbarasiomos38 at msn.com (Barbara Siomos)
Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2006 23:24:01 GMT
Subject: [Mb-civic] Re{mb-hair))Alternet: Rachel Corrie: Too Hot for New York
Message-ID: <BAY114-DAV105A0A1C107B17823B59C1ABE50@phx.gbl>

Why this has happened I am guessing is because of threats as Michael had with HAiR. Only these people don't have the courage of Michael.....

Hopefully someone somewhere will set this story to film or stage it NEEDS to be told. I remember very vividly when this happened and the cover up is a farce..... The whole world is watching.

peace,
barbara


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: michael at intrafi.com
Sent: Sat, 18 Mar 2006 13:19:50 -0800
To: mb-civic at islandlists.com, mb-hair at islandlists.com
Subject: [Mb-hair] Alternet: Rachel Corrie: Too Hot for New York



This story has been forwarded to you from
http://www.alternet.org by michael at intrafi.com



-------------------------------------
Rachel Corrie: Too Hot for New York
http://www.alternet.org/story/33669

Why has a New York theater company backed off from producing a celebrated play about the moral awakening of a young American activist?




-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060318/39b4eb7c/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sun Mar 19 03:02:16 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 06:02:16 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Administration Blocks Ex-Hostages' Bid for Damages From
 Iran - Washington Post
Message-ID: <441D3A38.7010009@comcast.net>

Administration Blocks Ex-Hostages' Bid for Damages From Iran

By Glenn Kessler
The Washington Post
Sunday, March 19, 2006; A01

At an emotional meeting this month at the State Department, steps from 
the office of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, a group of former 
American hostages released by Iran a quarter of a century ago, 
accompanied by lawyers and some relatives, confronted two of Rice's most 
senior aides.

The families' grievance: Why has the Bush administration, which has 
labeled Iran one of the world's most dangerous regimes and has called 
the hostages American heroes, fought their efforts to win damages for 
their ordeal from the Islamic republic?

The answer is rooted in diplomatic obligations and a wariness about 
favoring one set of terrorism victims over others. U.S. officials 
express sympathy for the former hostages. But the administration has 
thwarted every effort in the courts or in Congress to win a monetary 
judgment against Iran, even as other victims of Iranian-linked terrorism 
have secured hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation.

Those attending the March 2 meeting said that Undersecretary of State R. 
Nicholas Burns and legal adviser John B. Bellinger III tried to keep the 
discussion civil but that anger spilled over. The wife of a former 
hostage exclaimed at one point: "You are bloodless!" The meeting broke 
up with Burns acknowledging the difficulty of the issues and saying he 
would be open to further discussions.

But last week the State Department objected when Rep. Brad Sherman 
(D-Calif.) tried to address the issue in a House bill that would 
maintain sanctions against Iran for its links to terrorism, forcing the 
lawmaker to withdraw his proposal.

"We have 52 of our finest Americans who were held hostage," Sherman 
said. "They go to court, and you know who appears against them? The 
State Department."

The former hostages have long tried to sue Iran over being blindfolded, 
tortured and held in dank cells during 444 days in captivity. Earlier 
lawsuits were dismissed because other countries generally cannot be sued 
in federal court. But in 1996 Congress amended the foreign sovereign 
immunity law to allow suits against countries listed as state sponsors 
of terrorism. The former hostages sued under the new law, seeking $33 
billion in compensatory and punitive damages, and won a default judgment 
against Iran in 2001.

But on the eve of a hearing to consider damages, the Bush administration 
intervened, saying the suit violated an agreement with Iran that had 
secured the hostages' release. The judge threw out the suit in 2002 
after Congress twice tried to intervene by passing legislation favoring 
the hostages. The Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal in 2004. Now 
the former hostages are seeking relief from Congress.

"Every one of us has spoken the same line for 26 years: The Iranians 
cannot get away with what they did because it sends the wrong message," 
said Richard H. Morefield, a former hostage and 50-year State Department 
veteran who was the embassy's consul general when it was seized in 1979 
and who still works at State, declassifying records for the archives.

Beyond the plight of these hostages, the case raises difficult issues.

Even if a victim of terrorism wins at trial, it is almost impossible to 
collect damages. Iran's assets in the United States, for instance, are 
worth only about $20 million, mainly diplomatic property, according to 
State Department officials. So Congress in 2000 passed legislation 
authorizing the payment of $380 million in U.S. Treasury funds to 
claimants in cases involving 14 victims who were held hostage or killed 
by Iranian-supported groups such as Hezbollah, according to the 
Congressional Research Service. Lawmakers ordered the State Department 
to try to get that money reimbursed by Iran someday.

Other victims of terrorism, however, have received nothing, leading some 
lawmakers to conclude that it is inequitable -- and costly to U.S. 
taxpayers -- to carve out exceptions on a piecemeal basis.

"The problem is you have had some greedy lawyers" who have blocked 
efforts at a comprehensive solution because it would limit a big payout, 
said Rep. Frank R. Wolf (R-Va.), who wrote to Rice last month to urge 
the administration to come up with a "fair, just and equitable system." 
He said: "You have to have something that cuts the lawyers out."

The administration proposed a plan in 2003 that would have given any 
victim of terrorism $262,000. But only one hearing was held in the 
Senate, and the idea has languished, largely because of complaints that 
the amount was too low.

The former hostages of Iran have benefited from two laws, passed in 1980 
and 1986, that among other things gave them tax breaks, paid their 
educational expenses and provided a "token detention benefit" of $50 for 
each day in captivity. In bringing a lawsuit, they must overcome the 
terms of the diplomatic agreement that led to their release but has also 
put the State Department directly in their path.

The agreement, known as the Algiers Accords, codified the 1981 deal 
between the United States and Iran under which the hostages were 
released, billions of dollars in Iranian assets were unfrozen, and an 
arbitration tribunal was established in the Netherlands to settle claims 
between the two countries. In the first part of the document, the United 
States pledged that it "will be the policy of the United States not to 
intervene, directly or indirectly, politically or militarily, in Iran's 
internal affairs." Elsewhere, the United States pledged to "bar and 
preclude" any claims filed by the hostages against Iran.

For the hostages, the situation is rich in irony. The State Department, 
in legal arguments and on Capitol Hill, has maintained that allowing the 
hostages' case to go forward will violate the Algiers Accords. But Rice 
has announced a $75 million plan to bolster democracy in Iran and to 
foster opposition to the theocracy that controls the country. The 
hostages say Rice's program violates the prohibition on interfering in 
Iran's affairs; Iran has also filed a complaint with the United States 
through the Swiss Embassy, which handles U.S. interests in Tehran.

"This administration has not been shy about breaking international 
agreements," said Barry Rosen, who was press attache at the U.S. Embassy 
and who now heads the Afghanistan Education Project at Columbia 
University's Teachers College. "The administration appears to be in 
contradiction of itself. It seems to me the Algiers Accords should be 
dead and buried."

Rosen, angry that others have "laid claim to millions and millions of 
dollars of compensation," added: "This may sound weird, but if I were 
made aware of that agreement, I would have stayed in Iran."

U.S. officials say that supporting democracy does not amount to 
interference under international law. And they say abrogating the 
Algiers Accords, though not a formal treaty, would be viewed overseas as 
a serious breach of international norms, harming U.S. interests. U.S. 
banks and companies have been able to settle claims with Iran because of 
the accords, while the United States has been forced to pay about $900 
million to Iran for contract violations and property damage.

William J. Daugherty, a CIA employee who spent 425 days in solitary 
confinement during the crisis and is now a college professor, said the 
State Department is being "deceitful and dishonest." He added that "you 
can't argue that getting people to rise up against their government is 
not interfering in a country's affairs." He said that, after taxes, the 
check he received under the 1986 detention benefit was $17,000. "This 
came from the U.S. taxpayer, which none of us wanted to happen," he 
said. "We have always wanted Iran to pay for what it did."

Spokesman J. Adam Ereli said that the State Department supported the 
1980 and 1986 measures giving direct benefits to the former hostages and 
that now the administration favors a "comprehensive program" for victims 
of international terrorism, including the former hostages.

"These brave people are members of the State Department family and are 
true heroes," Ereli added. "We are committed to having a full and open 
discussion about any issues they want to raise, and we will do our best 
to address them.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/18/AR2006031801126.html?referrer=email
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060319/06a44286/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sun Mar 19 03:03:52 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 06:03:52 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] McCain Campaign Hires 'Best Bricklayer' - Washington Post
Message-ID: <441D3A98.4090106@comcast.net>

McCain Campaign Hires 'Best Bricklayer'
<>
By Chris Cillizza and Zachary A. Goldfarb
The Washington Post
Sunday, March 19, 2006; A05

In the behind-the-scenes hunt for 2008 campaign talent, Sen. John McCain 
(R-Ariz.) has bagged a big one.

Terry Nelson, who served as national political director for President 
Bush's reelection race in 2004, has signed on as a senior adviser to 
McCain's Straight Talk America political action committee.

"Senator McCain has demonstrated a real commitment to helping our 
candidates up and down the ballot and I am excited to be a part of his 
effort," Nelson says in a statement the PAC plans to release Monday.

Nelson's formal role for Straight Talk will be to maximize the 
organization's influence and effectiveness in the 2006 midterm 
elections, but his hiring also makes a major mark on the 2008 landscape.

McCain and his chief political strategist, John Weaver, have spent much 
of the past year courting key members of the Bush campaign team. Until 
now, the majority of that recruiting has focused on the men and women -- 
designated Pioneers, Rangers and Super Rangers -- who each helped 
collect hundreds of thousands of dollars for Bush in 2000 and again in 
2004. (In that vein, Straight Talk America recently received $5,000 
checks from former Texas governor Bill Clements, a Republican, and 
lobbyist extraordinaire Ed Rogers -- a close ally of Mississippi Gov. 
Haley Barbour, who recently removed himself from the 2008 field.) But 
the hiring of Nelson shows that McCain and Weaver are not neglecting the 
staff side of the presidential process.

Nelson, a native of Marshalltown, Iowa, managed Iowa Republican Rep. Jim 
Nussle's 1994 race and went on to serve as majority staff director of 
the Iowa state Senate caucus. Nelson served as political director of the 
National Republican Congressional Committee in 2000 and as deputy chief 
of staff at the Republican National Committee two years later. He is a 
partner in Dawson McCarthy Nelson, a GOP media firm, and the Crosslinks 
Strategy Group.

Of Nelson, McCain said: "Straight Talk is fortunate to have the 
strategic guidance of one of the country's most seasoned professionals."

A McCain adviser described Nelson as the "best bricklayer in the 
business" for his ability to build and implement a massive grass-roots 
political organization.

The splintering of the Bush campaign inner circle began earlier this 
year when Ed Gillespie, the former chairman of the Republican National 
Committee, signed on as treasurer of Good Government for America, the 
political action committee of Sen. George Allen (R-Va.).

Withdrawals Don't Pay Off

When Rep. Katherine Harris (R-Fla.) announced last week that she would 
donate $10 million of her own money to her Senate campaign, boosters 
said it would jump-start a flagging candidacy and put her on the path to 
victory this fall.

History suggests this might be a tad optimistic.

In recent years, candidates who have tapped their personal bank accounts 
have tended to drop out of races or lose outright. In fact, in 2002 and 
2004, only two of the 45 candidates for the House and Senate who spent 
more than $1 million of their own money on a race won, according to 
campaign finance records.

"The people running for governor or senator or president have been among 
society's winners," said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for 
Politics at the University of Virginia. "To get to that point, they 
always believe they can beat the odds because they've done that before."

There have been exceptions to the rich-losers trend. New Jersey Gov. Jon 
S. Corzine (D), running for an open Senate seat in 2000, spent more than 
$60 million of his own funds to win. In 2002, Sen. Frank Lautenberg 
(D-N.J.) won after spending $1.5 million on an abbreviated campaign 
while Rep. Michael T. McCaul (R-Tex.) racked up a landslide victory in 
2004 after spending $1.9 million of his own dough -- the vast majority 
of which was disbursed in the primary election.

Only one person has spent $10 million or more since Corzine. Democrat 
Blair Hull dropped $29 million of his money on a 2004 Senate run in 
Illinois but lost badly in the primary after revelations concerning a 
messy divorce came to light.

What's certain is that Harris's candidacy needs the cash infusion. She 
trailed Sen. Bill Nelson (D) by $7 million in available cash at the end 
of 2005.

"Will resources alone ever win elections? No," said Brian Walter, 
National Republican Senatorial Committee spokesman. "It has to go with a 
grass-roots organization and the ability to get your message out to 
voters. Which we believe she'll be able to do."

Burns May Have a Primary

Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.), dogged by controversy over ties to the Jack 
Abramoff lobbying scandal, could face a primary challenge.

Montana Senate Minority Leader Bob Keenan, a Republican, told state 
newspapers he is worried about whether Burns can hold the seat this 
November and is considering challenging the three-term senator in the 
GOP primary in June.

In recent months Burns has been battered by the media and Democrats over 
his connections to Abramoff, and he has watched his lead shrink over his 
two potential Democratic opponents -- state Auditor John Morrison and 
state Sen. Jon Tester.

A Mason-Dixon poll conducted for Lee Newspapers late last year showed 
Burns under the 50 percent mark in head-to-head matchups against 
Morrison and Tester.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/18/AR2006031800966.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060319/c0972b47/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sun Mar 19 03:06:50 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 06:06:50 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Iraq's Insurgents: Who's Who - Jonathan Finer -
 Washington Post Sunday Outlook
Message-ID: <441D3B4A.1050501@comcast.net>

Iraq's Insurgents: Who's Who

By Jonathan Finer
Washington Post Sunday Outlook
Sunday, March 19, 2006; B03

Long considered a fragmentary and disorganized collection of groups with 
varying tactics and aims, Iraq's insurgency is showing signs of 
increasing coordination, consolidation and confidence, those who study 
it now say. There is no consensus on the precise number of insurgent 
fighters, but estimates range from a few thousand to more than 50,000. 
The vast majority of insurgents, probably more than 90 percent, are 
believed to be Iraqis from the Sunni minority group that largely ruled 
the country before the fall of Saddam Hussein. But U.S. commanders say 
that most of the deadliest attacks, and particularly suicide attacks, 
are committed by foreigners from a range of neighboring countries, 
including Jordan, Syrian, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Sudan.

-- Jonathan Finer

Larger Groups

The formation of the Mujahidin Shura Council , announced on Jan. 21, was 
a sign of the once-diffuse insurgency's consolidation around the 
leadership of a few large, powerful groups. It brought together the 
foreign-backed network of al-Qaeda in Iraq, led by Jordanian Abu Musab 
al-Zarqawi, and several smaller, Iraqi-led groups. The council's head 
was said to be an Iraqi, a move made to counter the image of al-Qaeda as 
dominated by Arabs from elsewhere in the region. This appointment may be 
little more than a public relations move. The group's tactics include 
attacks carried out with bombs, small arms and mortar against Iraqi and 
American soldiers, as well as, increasingly, Iraqi civilians, most of 
them Shiites. Two of its "brigades," or affiliates, (the bin Malik and 
the Al-Ansar) are devoted solely to suicide attacks. Another, the Omar 
Brigade, is said to target only members of the Badr organization, a 
feared Shiite militia.

Ansar al-Sunnah , which means "partisans of the law," is an offshoot of 
a group called Ansar al-Islam, which was formed in Kurdistan but has not 
been heard from in many months. The vast majority of its leaders and 
foot soldiers are Iraqi Sunnis who adhere to a strict, fundamentalist 
form of Islam called Salafism, which calls for a return to the practices 
of early Muslims and has gained radical expression throughout the Arab 
world. Their tactics -- including lethal suicide attacks -- and 
religious underpinnings are similar to those of al-Qaeda, but the two 
groups are considered bitter rivals for influence within the insurgent 
community. Among their best-known attacks was a roadside bomb blast that 
killed 14 Marines and an interpreter in August, the deadliest such 
attack of the war.

The stated goal of the Islamic Army in Iraq is to drive the U.S. 
military out of Iraq. Comprised almost entirely of Iraqi Sunnis, 
including many still loyal to Saddam Hussein's regime and Baath Party, 
it is considered more nationalistic than religious in motivation. As 
many as three-quarters of its attacks, which include improvised bombs 
and kidnappings but not suicide attacks, are conducted against U.S. 
forces and non-Iraqi contractors. It often releases video footage of its 
operations. The group publishes a monthly magazine called al-Fursan and 
has denied rumors circulating last summer that it was in discussions 
with Iraqi officials about laying down its weapons. Its members 
reportedly include a sniper named "Juba," who gained a cult following 
when he was said to have killed several American soldiers in Baghdad 
last summer and fall.

There is some discussion as to whether the Islamic Front of the Iraqi 
Resistance , one of the most highly publicized insurgent organizations, 
is actually an armed group or something of a public relations organ for 
other groups. It maintains a frequently updated Web site and publishes a 
magazine called Jami, an acronym composed of its Arabic initials, which 
also mean "mosque" or "gathering." It has claimed responsibility for a 
number of attacks in and around the northern city of Mosul, Iraq's 
third-largest city.

Smaller groups

Mujahidin Army : A group that has released dozens of videos of bomb, 
rocket and sniper attacks, most of them directed against U.S. forces. 
Along with the Islamic Army in Iraq, it denied reports of rapprochement 
talks with the Iraqi government last year. It is one of a few smaller 
insurgent groups that called for attacks against Danish troops in the 
wake of the publication by a Danish newspaper of cartoons depicting the 
prophet Muhammad last fall.

Muhammad Army : A group made up mostly of Iraqi former Baathists and a 
few foreign fighters, it claimed credit for the 2003 bombing of the 
United Nations headquarters that killed 23 people, including the 
organization's chief of mission.

1920 Revolution Brigades : This group, which has claimed responsibility 
for a number of high-profile kidnappings of Westerners and Iraqis 
working with U.S. forces, is named for the Iraqi uprising against the 
British after World War I. The group calls itself the military wing of 
the Islamic Resistance Movement, another insurgent organization.

Conquering Army : A new group that has emerged in the past two months 
through a series of videos released on the Internet and to regional 
television networks showing kidnapping victims confessing to various 
"crimes" such as working with American forces.

Swords of the Righteous : A previously unknown group that gained 
prominence by claiming responsibility, in videos, for the kidnapping of 
four Christian Peacemaker workers, one of whom, Tom Fox of Virginia, was 
found dead March 10.

Iraqi Vengeance Brigades : A little-known group that has released videos 
showing American journalist Jill Carroll, who was abducted in Baghdad in 
early January.

SOURCES: SITE Institute, International Crisis Group, news reports

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/17/AR2006031702087.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060319/9aa5c775/attachment.htm 

From jameshburns at webtv.net  Sun Mar 19 03:10:02 2006
From: jameshburns at webtv.net (Jim Burns)
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 06:10:02 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] When a Republican Says this Administration Is, Lost...
Message-ID: <22872-441D3C0A-17180@storefull-3271.bay.webtv.net>


'AMERICAN THEOCRACY,' BY KEVIN PHILLIPS

"Clear and Present Dangers"  
 
Review by ALAN BRINKLEY
New  York Times Book Review
Published: March 19, 2006


Four decades ago, Kevin Phillips, a young political strategist for the
Republican Party, began work on what became a remarkable book. In
writing "The Emerging Republican Majority" (published in 1969), he asked
a very big question about American politics: How would the demographic
and economic changes of postwar America shape the long-term future of
the two major parties? 

His answer, startling at the time but now largely unquestioned, is that
the movement of people and resources from the old Northern industrial
states into the South and the West (an area he enduringly labeled the
"Sun Belt") would produce a new and more conservative Republican
majority that would dominate American politics for decades. Phillips
viewed the changes he predicted with optimism. A stronger Republican
Party, he believed, would restore stability and order to a society
experiencing disorienting and at times violent change. Shortly before
publishing his book, he joined the Nixon administration to help advance
the changes he had foreseen

Phillips has remained a prolific and important political commentator in
the decades since, but he long ago abandoned his enthusiasm for the
Republican coalition he helped to build. His latest book (his 13th)
looks broadly and historically at the political world the conservative
coalition has painstakingly constructed over the last several decades.
No longer does he see Republican government as a source of stability and
order. Instead, he presents a nightmarish vision of ideological
extremism, catastrophic fiscal irresponsibility, rampant greed and
dangerous shortsightedness. (His final chapter is entitled "The Erring
Republican Majority.") 

In an era of best-selling jeremiads on both sides of the political
divide, "American Theocracy" may be the most alarming analysis of where
we are and where we may be going to have appeared in many years. It is
not without polemic, but unlike many of the more glib and strident
political commentaries of recent years, it is extensively researched and
for the most part frighteningly persuasive.

Although Phillips is scathingly critical of what he considers the
dangerous policies of the Bush administration, he does not spend much
time examining the ideas and behavior of the president and his advisers.
Instead, he identifies three broad and related trends ? none of them
new to the Bush years but all of them, he believes, exacerbated by this
administration's policies ? that together threaten the future of the
United States and the world. 

One is the role of oil in defining and, as Phillips sees it, distorting
American foreign and domestic policy. The second is the ominous
intrusion of radical Christianity into politics and government. And the
third is the astonishing levels of debt ? current and prospective ?
that both the government and the American people have been heedlessly
accumulating. If there is a single, if implicit, theme running through
the three linked essays that form this book, it is the failure of
leaders to look beyond their own and the country's immediate ambitions
and desires so as to plan prudently for a darkening future.

The American press in the first days of the Iraq war reported
extensively on the Pentagon's failure to post American troops in front
of the National Museum in Baghdad, which, as a result, was looted of
many of its great archaeological treasures. Less widely reported, but to
Phillips far more meaningful, was the immediate posting of troops around
the Iraqi Oil Ministry, which held the maps and charts that were the key
to effective oil production. 

Phillips fully supports an explanation of the Iraq war that the Bush
administration dismisses as conspiracy theory ? that its principal
purpose was to secure vast oil reserves that would enable the United
States to control production and to lower prices. ("Think of Iraq as a
military base with a very large oil reserve underneath," an oil analyst
said a couple of years ago. "You can't ask for better than that.") 

Terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, tyranny, democracy and other
public rationales were, Phillips says, simply ruses to disguise the real
motivation for the invasion.
    
And while this argument may be somewhat too simplistic to explain the
complicated mix of motives behind the war, it is hard to dismiss
Phillips's larger argument: that the pursuit of oil has for at least 30
years been one of the defining elements of American policy in the world;
and that the Bush administration ? unusually dominated by oilmen ?
has taken what the president deplored recently as the nation's addiction
to oil to new and terrifying levels. 

The United States has embraced a kind of "petro-imperialism," Phillips
writes, "the key aspect of which is the U.S. military's transformation
into a global oil-protection force," and which "puts up a democratic
facade, emphasizes freedom of the seas (or pipeline routes) and seeks to
secure, protect, drill and ship oil, not administer everyday affairs."

Phillips is especially passionate in his discussion of the second great
force that he sees shaping contemporary American life ? radical
Christianity and its growing intrusion into government and politics. The
political rise of evangelical Christian groups is hardly a secret to
most Americans after the 2004 election, but Phillips brings together an
enormous range of information from scholars and journalists and presents
a remarkably comprehensive and chilling picture of the goals and
achievements of the religious right. 

He points in particular to the Southern Baptist Convention, once a
scorned seceding minority of the American Baptist Church but now so
large that it dominates not just Baptism itself but American
Protestantism generally. The Southern Baptist Convention does not speak
with one voice, but almost all of its voices, Phillips argues, are to
one degree or another highly conservative. 

On the far right is a still obscure but, Phillips says, rapidly growing
group of "Christian Reconstructionists" who believe in a "Taliban-like"
reversal of women's rights, who describe the separation of church and
state as a "myth" and who call openly for a theocratic government shaped
by Christian doctrine. 

A much larger group of Protestants, perhaps as many as a third of the
population, claims to believe in the supposed biblical prophecies of an
imminent "rapture" ? the return of Jesus to the world and the
elevation of believers to heaven. 

Prophetic Christians, Phillips writes, often shape their view of
politics and the world around signs that charlatan biblical scholars
have identified as predictors of the apocalypse ? among them a war in
Iraq, the Jewish settlement of the whole of biblical Israel, even the
rise of terrorism. He convincingly demonstrates that the Bush
administration has calculatedly reached out to such believers and
encouraged them to see the president's policies as a response to
premillennialist thought. 

He also suggests that the president and other members of his
administration may actually believe these things themselves, that
religious belief is the basis of policy, not just a tactic for selling
it to the public. Phillips's evidence for this disturbing claim is
significant, but not conclusive. 

THE third great impending crisis that Phillips identifies is also,
perhaps, the best known ? the astonishing rise of debt as the
precarious underpinning of the American economy. He is not, of course,
the only observer who has noted the dangers of indebtedness. The New
York Times columnist Paul Krugman, for example, frequently writes about
the looming catastrophe. So do many more-conservative economists, who
point especially to future debt ? particularly the enormous
obligation, which Phillips estimates at between $30 trillion and $40
trillion, that Social Security and health care demands will create in
the coming decades. 

The most familiar debt is that of the United States government, fueled
by soaring federal budget deficits that have continued (with a brief
pause in the late 1990's) for more than two decades. But the national
debt ? currently over $8 trillion ? is only the tip of the iceberg.
There has also been an explosion of corporate debt, state and local
bonded debt, international debt through huge trade imbalances, and
consumer debt (mostly in the form of credit-card balances and
aggressively marketed home-mortgage packages). Taken together, this
present and future debt may exceed $70 trillion.

The creation of a national-debt culture, Phillips argues, although
exacerbated by the policies of the Bush administration, has been the
work of many people over many decades ? among them Alan Greenspan,
who, he acidly notes, blithely and irresponsibly ignored the rising debt
to avoid pricking the stock-market bubble it helped produce. It is most
of all a product of the "financialization" of the American economy ?
the turn away from manufacturing and toward an economy based on moving
and managing money, a trend encouraged, Phillips argues persuasively, by
the preoccupation with oil and (somewhat less persuasively) with
evangelical belief in the imminent rapture, which makes 
planning for the future unnecessary. 

There is little in "American Theocracy" that is wholly original to
Phillips, as he frankly admits by his frequent reference to the work of
other writers and scholars. What makes this book powerful in spite of
the familiarity of many of its arguments is his rare gift for looking
broadly and structurally at social and political change. 

By describing a series of major transformations, by demonstrating the
relationships among them and by discussing them with passionate
restraint, Phillips has created a harrowing picture of national danger
that no American reader will welcome, but that none should ignore. 


Alan Brinkley is the Allan Nevins professor of history and the provost
at Columbia University


AMERICAN THEOCRACY
The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in
the 21st Century.
By Kevin Phillips. 
462 pp. Viking. $26.95.  



? Copyright 2006 New York Times



From swiggard at comcast.net  Sun Mar 19 03:09:04 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 06:09:04 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Diminishing the U.S. Footprint - Washington Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <441D3BD0.8000900@comcast.net>

Diminishing the U.S. Footprint

By Jim Hoagland
The Washington Post
Sunday, March 19, 2006; B07

Two important and related changes in the Bush administration's strategy 
for the long war on global terrorism emerged here last week. One tiptoed 
in quietly. The other came with trumpets blaring for political effect. 
It might have worked better the other way around.

The quiet change was suggested in classified briefings for friendly 
diplomats and visiting foreign officials: U.S. troops will be moving out 
of Iraq's streets and then out of Iraq's cities by the end of this year 
as part of a coordinated drawing down and concentration of all foreign 
forces. Troops from Italy and other nations will leave the country, and 
a reduced British force will redeploy into a smaller area of operational 
responsibility.

This is part of a new internal exit strategy that President Bush hinted 
at in Monday's Iraq speech. U.S. forces will stay in Iraq beyond 2006 to 
fight al-Qaeda and other Islamic extremists who are using Iraq as a 
platform for terrorism. Iraqi units -- operating with U.S. logistical 
assistance from remote locations and embedded command help -- are to be 
given primary responsibility for containing the domestic insurgency. 
This is what Bush calls Iraqis standing up to allow Americans to stand down.

Drawing lines between global and local terrorists will be a difficult 
task, as U.S. officials privately acknowledge. And Iraqi security forces 
and their political leaders, deadlocked in an intensifying power 
struggle, still must demonstrate they can carry out their part of the 
internal exit strategy.

But on its face, that strategy is a coherent way of reducing the foreign 
occupation footprint that fuels much of the conflict in Iraq. It 
realistically scales down what Iraqi units can be expected to 
accomplish: a long-term containment of terrorist attacks to a level that 
does not destroy the country's fraying ethnic and sectarian balances, 
rather than a quick final victory over the rebels. Finally, an internal 
exit is consistent with the administration's newest National Security 
Strategy white paper, released with fanfare Thursday.

The White House has struggled since Sept. 11, 2001, to define with 
precision both the enemy that Americans confront and the path to victory 
they must take in the war on terrorism. The Bush team gets closer with 
this exercise, which portrays the long war as a global ideological 
struggle that hinges on a battle of ideas within and about Islam.

That is change: The words "ideology" and "Islam" were each mentioned 
only twice, and in passing, in the 12,629-word version of the strategy 
document issued in 2002. They are at the conceptual heart of this year's 
paper (longer by one-third), which argues that Washington and its allies 
must "counter the lies behind the terrorists' ideology" by empowering 
"the very people the terrorists most want to exploit: the faithful 
followers of Islam. . . . Responsible Islamic leaders need to denounce 
an ideology that distorts and exploits Islam for destructive ends and 
defiles a proud religion."

Bush himself steered drafters away from any discussion of Islam in the 
earlier paper, I am told, and his concern about attacking another 
religion is reflected in a caveat this year that "the War on Terror is a 
battle of ideas . . . not a battle of religions." But this year's 
realistic acknowledgment of the decisive role of moderate Muslims in 
defeating al-Qaeda and its allies is a welcome adjustment.

The heavy emphasis on ideology -- explicitly al-Qaeda's and implicitly 
Bush's -- is less useful. By proposing democracy as a cure-all for the 
vast frustrations and delusions of al-Qaeda's target audience, the White 
House skips over a lot of the hard work that must still be done to shape 
the military and political battlefields of the long war, trying instead 
to rally U.S. and foreign support for Iraq and Afghanistan.

A new tone of realism about those conflicts has taken hold in internal 
administration discussions of the way forward. Nothing could reassure 
Americans more than publicizing that change.

?

The intensity of the power struggle in Baghdad was brought home to me 
when my phone rang shortly after a column reporting that Prime Minister 
Ibrahim al-Jafari is fighting to keep his job was published last week. 
The president of Iraq, Jalal Talabani, was calling to say that he, too, 
is dug in: The Shiite alliance that backs Jafari should present an 
alternative candidate so a "national unity" government can be formed "in 
the next two weeks."

Talabani, an acquaintance of 30 years, would not discuss his reasons for 
opposing Jafari now. But speaking in English, he emphasized that the 
presidency needs new powers to block "extreme demands from the other side."

As they say, stay tuned.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/17/AR2006031701794.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060319/352df5cf/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sun Mar 19 03:11:13 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 06:11:13 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Bleakness In Baghdad - George F. Will - Washington Post
	Op-Ed
Message-ID: <441D3C51.70404@comcast.net>

Bleakness In Baghdad
By George F. Will
The Washington Post
Sunday, March 19, 2006; B07

At this moment, one of the most dangerous since World War II, America's 
perils are exacerbated by the travails of a president indiscriminately 
despised by Democrats and increasingly disregarded by Republicans. What 
should he do?

First, concentrate the public's mind on the deepening dangers beyond 
Iraq. Second, regarding Iraq, accentuate the negative and eliminate the 
positive -- that is, emphasize the dangers of failure and de-emphasize 
talk about Iraq's becoming a democracy that ignites emulative 
transformation in the Middle East.

The dangers? Iran's regime proceeds with its drive for nuclear weapons, 
unfazed by threats of "isolation." North Korea has received less 
attention lately than have Denmark and Dubai. In Afghanistan, according 
to Lt. Gen. Michael Maples, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, 
"insurgents now represent a greater threat to the expansion of Afghan 
government authority than at any point since late 2001." That government 
has an army of only 35,000 for a country nearly 50 percent larger than 
Iraq. The insurgency, by draining the government's energy, serves the 
lords of the heroin trade that accounts for at least a third of 
Afghanistan's gross national product.

But more than any presidency in living memory, George W. Bush's will be 
judged by a single problem -- Iraq, where on May 30 the war will be 
twice as long as was U.S. involvement in World War I. Today the 
impotence of Iraq's quasi-government is prompting ethnic recleansing: 
The government is too weak to prevent private groups from pursuing 
coercive reversals of Saddam Hussein's various ethnic cleansings. And in 
the absence of law and order, Iraqis seek safety in sectarian clustering.

Maples delicately says that although Iraq is not "at this time" in a 
civil war, "the underlying conditions" for such a war "are present." But 
civil wars do not usually begin with an identifiable event, such as the 
firing on Fort Sumter, or proceed to massed, uniformed forces clashing 
in battles like Shiloh. Iraq's civil war -- which looks more like 
Spain's in the 1930s -- began months ago.

In Spain, the security forces were united and in three years were 
victorious. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. John Abizaid, 
U.S. commander in the Middle East, recently said that Iraqi forces would 
cope with a civil war "to the extent they're able to" (Rumsfeld) and 
"they'll handle it with our help" (Abizaid). Their problematic 
assumption is that Iraq's security forces have a national loyalty and 
will not fracture along the fissures of Iraq's sectarian society.

Tom Ricks, military correspondent for The Post, has doubts. He recently 
returned from his fifth visit to Iraq. In March 2003 he thought that the 
invasion was a strategic mistake in the struggle against terrorism. His 
assessment of subsequent events is the title of his book, coming in 
September: "Fiasco." Now, however, he thinks that a U.S. withdrawal 
would leave chaos that might lead to radical Islamists acquiring what 
they most want: Saudi oil fields and Pakistani nuclear weapons. So 
America, he thinks, needs a plan to reduce fatalities to two or three a 
week, then two or three a month.

But who, he wonders, will control the likes of Moqtada al-Sadr? Imagine, 
Ricks says, another cleric, the Rev. Al Sharpton, controlling the Bronx 
with a militia he can call into the streets at any time. Last Monday, 
when Bush again celebrated Iraq's progress from tyranny to December's 
"elections for a fully constitutional government," this was life in 
Iraq, as reported by the New York Times:

"Shiite vigilantes seized four men suspected of terrorist attacks, 
interrogated them, beat them, killed them and left their bodies dangling 
from lampposts. . . . In Sadr City, the Shiite slum in Baghdad where the 
terrorist suspects were executed, government forces have vanished. The 
streets are ruled by aggressive teenagers with shiny soccer jerseys and 
machine guns. They set up roadblocks and poke their heads into cars and 
detain whomever they want. . . . 'This is our government now,' [a 
retired teacher] said, nodding toward Mr. Sadr's glowering face on 
television."

Conditions in Iraq have worsened in the 94 days that have passed since 
Iraq's elections in December. And there still is no Iraqi government 
that can govern. By many measures conditions are worse than they were a 
year ago, when they were worse than they had been the year before.

Three years ago the administration had a theory: Democratic institutions 
do not just spring from a hospitable culture, they can also create such 
a culture. That theory has been a casualty of the war that began three 
years ago today.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/17/AR2006031701795.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060319/d58015b9/attachment-0001.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sun Mar 19 03:14:01 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 06:14:01 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Fanning the political flames - Joan Vennochi - Boston
	Globe Op-Ed
Message-ID: <441D3CF9.2040903@comcast.net>


  Fanning the political flames

By Joan Vennochi  |  March 19, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

SCORCHED EARTH tactics usually don't leave winners. They leave 
destroyers and destroyed.

But some Democrats are playing with fire.

Senator Russell Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, is calling for the 
censure of President Bush, specifically concerning Bush's wiretapping of 
US citizens without a warrant.

Is Feingold's resolution motivated by pure political self-interest? He 
is a probable Democratic presidential candidate trying to stake his 
claim to the political left. Or is it principle? Feingold is the only US 
senator who opposed the original Patriot Act, and he voted against 
authorizing war with Iraq.

Either way, it creates a dilemma for Democrats.

Whipping up white-hot partisan frenzy wins adoration from lefty 
bloggers. But by the tenets of conventional political wisdom, it is a 
risky general election strategy. It also ignores this political reality: 
the president will never again be on an election ballot. Republicans in 
Congress will, as will a crop of Republican presidential candidates 
whose last name is not Bush. Shouldn't they, not Bush, be the Democrats' 
focus? Those in Congress can be held accountable in 2006 and 2008. At 
this point, Bush answers to the history books, not to voters on Election 
Day.

Current polls and surveys show people think as little of Bush as they do 
of Congress. Democrats in Congress should be thinking of ways to change 
that political reality. They need to increase their own favorability 
ratings at the expense of the opposition. Handing the opposition a 
weapon to use against Democrats is counterproductive, to say the least. 
But censure, and even impeachment, are seductive.

At this point, Democrats in Congress appear to understand the danger of 
pouring kerosene on the politics of Iraq and national security. 
Democrats thinking about running for president are another story.

In the Senate, Feingold has been on his own.

In the House, 29 of 201 Democrats have signed on to a resolution from 
Representative John Conyers Jr., Democrat of Michigan, that demands a 
special committee to investigate the Bush administration's 
''manipulation of prewar intelligence," among other things, and advise 
whether there are ''grounds for possible impeachment."

Only three of 10 US House members from Massachusetts signed on to it. 
They are Michael E. Capuano of Somerville, John. F. Tierney of Salem, 
and John W. Olver of Amherst.

Representative James P. McGovern of Worcester called the resolution 
''tempting," but concluded that it distracts from the party's goals of 
winning House and Senate races in the fall. Representative Barney Frank 
says, ''This is an understandable emotional response from people who are 
very angry. But why do we want to energize George Bush's people?"

Democrats with presidential aspirations are happy to energize the right, 
because that also energizes the left. It also helps them tap into money, 
headlines, and rabid supporters. ''It's very important for them to know 
we'll fight for their beliefs," John Edwards, the former US senator who 
was John Kerry's running mate, told the Globe.

Important to whom? It is important to candidates like Kerry and Edwards, 
because bowing to the left helps them in Democratic primary circles -- 
just as bowing to the right helps Mitt Romney gain credibility with GOP 
activists. It amounts to the short-term, feel-good politics of immediate 
self-interest. Does it help Democrats win in 2006? Will it win back the 
White House in 2008? No one knows. In the meantime, how long can 
Democrats such as Senator Hillary Clinton of New York resist the pressure?

A political survey done by American Research Group is helping the left 
make its case. It is based on 1,100 telephone interviews among a random 
sample of adults nationwide from March 13-15. Of those surveyed, 46 
percent said they favored censuring Bush for authorizing wiretaps of 
Americans without obtaining court orders; 44 percent opposed and 10 
percent were undecided. On impeachment, 42 percent favored a vote to 
impeach; 29 percent opposed and 9 percent were undecided.

The survey is particularly interesting when responses from independents 
are analyzed. On the censure question, 42 percent said they favored it; 
47 percent opposed. On the impeachment question, 47percent favored it; 
40 percent opposed.

It all adds fuel to the flames swirling around the White House. There is 
danger for the GOP, but also for Democrats: Will those flames consume 
those who fan them, too?

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/19/fanning_the_political_flames/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060319/65c9bcc1/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sun Mar 19 03:16:04 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 06:16:04 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] The enemy we hardly know - Robert Malley,
 Peter Harling - Boston Globe Op-Ed
Message-ID: <441D3D74.7020700@comcast.net>


  The enemy we hardly know

By Robert Malley and Peter Harling  |  March 19, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

ON THE third anniversary of the US invasion in Iraq, the United States 
is still fighting an enemy it barely knows. Washington relies on crude, 
broad-brush identifications -- Saddamists, Islamofascists, and the like. 
Rather than analyze the armed opposition's strategy and objectives, it 
assumes them. Rather than listen to what the insurgents say, it 
dismisses it. All of which is mystifying and, of far greater importance, 
self-defeating.

For months, the International Crisis Group has probed the armed groups' 
communications since the insurgency's inception. The electronic and 
paper trails are bountiful. The lessons are both highly instructive and 
deeply disturbing. For the United States to ignore the insurgents' 
discourse -- at a time when they evidently are paying close attention to 
what Washington has to say -- is to wage the struggle with one hand tied 
behind your back.

Figuring out who the insurgents are, what they are trying to achieve, 
how they have evolved, and what their vulnerabilities are is not a 
guessing game. They haven't concealed it. They've broadcast it on 
websites, Internet chat rooms, magazines, leaflets, videos, and 
audiotapes. Given conditions under which insurgents must operate, it's 
safe to assume that these represent a significant part, maybe even the 
bulk, of their communications, whether directed at one another or at 
Iraqi and Muslim populations.

To pore over them is to be offered a real-life glimpse into the themes 
insurgents consider most apt to mobilize activists and legitimize their 
actions, to witness their internal debates and level of coordination, 
and to assess their tactical or strategic shifts.

Several conclusions emerge:

The insurgency began as scattered, erratic, and chaotic, not organized 
by Saddam Hussein and his henchmen, but by a cacophonous set of groups 
divided between jihadists and nationalists that sought to outdo one 
another with the gruesomeness and savagery of their operations. No more. 
Today, it increasingly is dominated by a handful of large groups that 
enjoy sophisticated means of communication. They are well organized, 
produce regular publications, react to political developments, and, to a 
surprising degree, coordinate their words and deeds. Over the past year, 
they have tried to shed any outward appearance of disunity, converging 
around a set of relatively homogenous practices and discourse that blend 
Islamist Salafism and Iraqi patriotism and dilute what once were 
considered rigid distinctions between foreign jihadis and Iraqi combatants.

Their methods continue to be brutal, but a notable evolution has been 
demonstrated. As shown by their internal communications, and as they 
have become more coordinated and streamlined, insurgent groups have 
shown greater awareness of public opinion. They systematically and 
promptly respond to accusations of moral depravity or blind violence. 
All -- Al Qaeda in Iraq included -- strenuously, if disingenuously, 
reject accusations of waging a sectarian campaign. They publicize, in 
words and images, their purported efforts to protect or aid civilians. 
They have discarded some of the more gruesome and locally controversial 
practices, such as beheading hostages or attacking people going to the 
polls. And they systematically accuse the United States and its Iraqi 
allies of conducting a dirty war in coordination with sectarian 
militias, engaging in torture, fostering the country's division, and 
showing insensitivity to civilian life.

The insurgents have proved surprisingly adept at adjusting their tactics 
to fit their enemy's. Their Internet postings, chat discussions, and 
publications exhibit implicit self-criticism and overt tactical 
fine-tuning. Having initially opposed elections -- going so far as to 
physically harm those who dared associate with them -- they changed 
course, sensing that their approach had backfired. On the ground, they 
have answered the US strategy of ''clear, hold, and build" with one of 
their own: recoil, redeploy, and spoil. Rather than confront the enemy 
head on, as they had sought to do, they are taking advantage of military 
flexibility, the limited number of US troops, and the fragility of Iraqi 
security forces to attack at the time and place of their choosing.

But the insurgents' communications tell another, more worrisome story: 
After three years of fighting, they are more optimistic and convinced of 
their victory. Confidence is often propaganda, and it would be 
surprising if the insurgents didn't display it. But whereas yesterday's 
self-assurance was expressed in terms of an open-ended jihad against an 
occupier, today's belies a conviction that victory is at hand, America's 
withdrawal is within reach, and the collapse of Iraq's postwar 
institutions are within sight.

Of course, the insurgency is neither infallible nor unassailable; its 
discourse demonstrates its vulnerability. Televised confessions in Iraq 
of captured insurgents and accusations of sectarianism, brutality, and 
depravity, as well as the various elections held in 2005, all had a 
visible impact on the armed opposition, shaking its confidence and 
bringing about tangible changes in its behavior and rhetoric.

But the central message is this: The coalition's most effective tools 
have not been of a military but rather of a political nature. The 
insurgency depends heavily on its legitimacy, which essentially relies 
on opposition to the occupation, anger at its specific practices, and 
the feeling shared by Sunni Arabs of being under siege.

That the insurgency has survived, even thrived, despite being vastly 
outnumbered and outgunned, suggests flaws and limitations of the current 
counterinsurgency campaign. The insurgents' discourse may be dismissed 
as rhetoric, but they appear to have effectively reached agreement on 
core operational matters, grown in self-assurance, and exhibited greater 
sensitivity to Sunni Arab opinion.

The trend remains fragile -- the surface homogeneity probably conceals 
deep-seated tensions; the confidence may be short-lived; and the 
sensitivity has its obvious, and visible, limitations. But the United 
States needs to take these into account if it is to understand the 
insurgency's resilience and learn how to counter it.

An effective counterinsurgency campaign will require grasping the 
insurgents' political dimension, taking their discourse seriously, and 
directing efforts at the sources of their popular support. That means 
mainly controlling the behavior of Iraqi security forces, curbing the 
use of torture, halting resort to collective punishment and other 
methods that inflict widespread civilian harm, and ending reliance on 
sectarian militias.

It means, too, making clear that the United States will withdraw as soon 
as the newly elected government requests, and agreeing in the interim to 
negotiate, openly, the terms of its presence and its rules of 
engagement. US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad has recently struck a candid 
and useful tone but more proactive measures are needed.

The United States and its allies cannot be expected to establish a 
monopoly over the use of force. But they can and should be expected to 
establish a monopoly over the legitimate use of force -- which means 
establishing beyond doubt the legitimacy both of the means being 
deployed and of the state on whose behalf force is being exercised. 
That, at a minimum, is required to get a handle on an insurgency that is 
telling us what the administration is refusing to hear.

Robert Malley, a former adviser to President Clinton, is Middle East 
program director at the International Crisis Group. Peter Harling is a 
senior analyst with Crisis Group.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/19/the_enemy_we_hardly_know/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060319/fa5c34e5/attachment.htm 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Sun Mar 19 06:53:52 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 09:53:52 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] New York Times "Before and After Abu Ghraib,
	a U.S. Unit Abused Detainess"
Message-ID: <000801c64b64$f3377ab0$773fe440@Harold>

March 19, 2006
Task Force 6-26
Before and After Abu Ghraib, a U.S. Unit Abused Detainees 
By ERIC SCHMITT and CAROLYN MARSHALL
As the Iraqi insurgency intensified in early 2004, an elite Special Operations forces unit converted one of Saddam Hussein's former military bases near Baghdad into a top-secret detention center. There, American soldiers made one of the former Iraqi government's torture chambers into their own interrogation cell. They named it the Black Room. 

In the windowless, jet-black garage-size room, some soldiers beat prisoners with rifle butts, yelled and spit in their faces and, in a nearby area, used detainees for target practice in a game of jailer paintball. Their intention was to extract information to help hunt down Iraq's most-wanted terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, according to Defense Department personnel who served with the unit or were briefed on its operations. 

The Black Room was part of a temporary detention site at Camp Nama, the secret headquarters of a shadowy military unit known as Task Force 6-26. Located at Baghdad International Airport, the camp was the first stop for many insurgents on their way to the Abu Ghraib prison a few miles away. 

Placards posted by soldiers at the detention area advised, "NO BLOOD, NO FOUL." The slogan, as one Defense Department official explained, reflected an adage adopted by Task Force 6-26: "If you don't make them bleed, they can't prosecute for it." According to Pentagon specialists who worked with the unit, prisoners at Camp Nama often disappeared into a detention black hole, barred from access to lawyers or relatives, and confined for weeks without charges. "The reality is, there were no rules there," another Pentagon official said. 

The story of detainee abuse in Iraq is a familiar one. But the following account of Task Force 6-26, based on documents and interviews with more than a dozen people, offers the first detailed description of how the military's most highly trained counterterrorism unit committed serious abuses. 

It adds to the picture of harsh interrogation practices at American military prisons in Afghanistan and Guant?namo Bay, Cuba, as well as at secret Central Intelligence Agency detention centers around the world. 

The new account reveals the extent to which the unit members mistreated prisoners months before and after the photographs of abuse from Abu Ghraib were made public in April 2004, and it helps belie the original Pentagon assertions that abuse was confined to a small number of rogue reservists at Abu Ghraib.

The abuses at Camp Nama continued despite warnings beginning in August 2003 from an Army investigator and American intelligence and law enforcement officials in Iraq. The C.I.A. was concerned enough to bar its personnel from Camp Nama that August.

It is difficult to compare the conditions at the camp with those at Abu Ghraib because so little is known about the secret compound, which was off limits even to the Red Cross. The abuses appeared to have been unsanctioned, but some of them seemed to have been well known throughout the camp. 

For an elite unit with roughly 1,000 people at any given time, Task Force 6-26 seems to have had a large number of troops punished for detainee abuse. Since 2003, 34 task force members have been disciplined in some form for mistreating prisoners, and at least 11 members have been removed from the unit, according to new figures the Special Operations Command provided in response to questions from The New York Times. Five Army Rangers in the unit were convicted three months ago for kicking and punching three detainees in September 2005. 

Some of the serious accusations against Task Force 6-26 have been reported over the past 16 months by news organizations including NBC, The Washington Post and The Times. Many details emerged in hundreds of pages of documents released under a Freedom of Information Act request by the American Civil Liberties Union. But taken together for the first time, the declassified documents and interviews with more than a dozen military and civilian Defense Department and other federal personnel provide the most detailed portrait yet of the secret camp and the inner workings of the clandestine unit. 

The documents and interviews also reflect a culture clash between the free-wheeling military commandos and the more cautious Pentagon civilians working with them that escalated to a tense confrontation. At one point, one of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's top aides, Stephen A. Cambone, ordered a subordinate to "get to the bottom" of any misconduct. 

Most of the people interviewed for this article were midlevel civilian and military Defense Department personnel who worked with Task Force 6-26 and said they witnessed abuses, or who were briefed on its operations over the past three years. 

Many were initially reluctant to discuss Task Force 6-26 because its missions are classified. But when pressed repeatedly by reporters who contacted them, they agreed to speak about their experiences and observations out of what they said was anger and disgust over the unit's treatment of detainees and the failure of task force commanders to punish misconduct more aggressively. The critics said the harsh interrogations yielded little information to help capture insurgents or save American lives.

Virtually all of those who agreed to speak are career government employees, many with previous military service, and they were granted anonymity to encourage them to speak candidly without fear of retribution from the Pentagon. Many of their complaints are supported by declassified military documents and e-mail messages from F.B.I. agents who worked regularly with the task force in Iraq. 

A Demand for Intelligence

Military officials say there may have been extenuating circumstances for some of the harsh treatment at Camp Nama and its field stations in other parts of Iraq. By the spring of 2004, the demand on interrogators for intelligence was growing to help combat the increasingly numerous and deadly insurgent attacks.

Some detainees may have been injured resisting capture. A spokesman for the Special Operations Command, Kenneth S. McGraw, said there was sufficient evidence to prove misconduct in only 5 of 29 abuse allegations against task force members since 2003. As a result of those five incidents, 34 people were disciplined.

"We take all those allegations seriously," Gen. Bryan D. Brown, the commander of the Special Operations Command, said in a brief hallway exchange on Capitol Hill on March 8. "Any kind of abuse is not consistent with the values of the Special Operations Command."

The secrecy surrounding the highly classified unit has helped to shield its conduct from public scrutiny. The Pentagon will not disclose the unit's precise size, the names of its commanders, its operating bases or specific missions. Even the task force's name changes regularly to confuse adversaries, and the courts-martial and other disciplinary proceedings have not identified the soldiers in public announcements as task force members. 

General Brown's command declined requests for interviews with several former task force members and with Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who leads the Joint Special Operations Command, the headquarters at Fort Bragg, N.C., that supplies the unit's most elite troops. 

One Special Operations officer and a senior enlisted soldier identified by Defense Department personnel as former task force members at Camp Nama declined to comment when contacted by telephone. Attempts to contact three other Special Operations soldiers who were in the unit ? by phone, through relatives and former neighbours ? were also unsuccessful. 

Cases of detainee abuse attributed to Task Force 6-26 demonstrate both confusion over and, in some cases, disregard for approved interrogation practices and standards for detainee treatment, according to Defense Department specialists who have worked with the unit. 

In early 2004, an 18-year-old man suspected of selling cars to members of the Zarqawi terrorist network was seized with his entire family at their home in Baghdad. Task force soldiers beat him repeatedly with a rifle butt and punched him in the head and kidneys, said a Defense Department specialist briefed on the incident.

Some complaints were ignored or played down in a unit where a conspiracy of silence contributed to the overall secretiveness. "It's under control," one unit commander told a Defense Department official who complained about mistreatment at Camp Nama in the spring of 2004. 

For hundreds of suspected insurgents, Camp Nama was a way station on a journey that started with their capture on the battlefield or in their homes, and ended often in a cell at Abu Ghraib. Hidden in plain sight just off a dusty road fronting Baghdad International Airport, Camp Nama was an unmarked, virtually unknown compound at the edge of the taxiways. 

The heart of the camp was the Battlefield Interrogation Facility, alternately known as the Temporary Detention Facility and the Temporary Holding Facility. The interrogation and detention areas occupied a corner of the larger compound, separated by a fence topped with razor wire.

Unmarked helicopters flew detainees into the camp almost daily, former task force members said. Dressed in blue jumpsuits with taped goggles covering their eyes, the shackled prisoners were led into a screening room where they were registered and examined by medics. 

Just beyond the screening rooms, where Saddam Hussein was given a medical exam after his capture, detainees were kept in as many as 85 cells spread over two buildings. Some detainees were kept in what was known as Motel 6, a group of crudely built plywood shacks that reeked of urine and excrement. The shacks were cramped, forcing many prisoners to squat or crouch. Other detainees were housed inside a separate building in 6-by-8-foot cubicles in a cellblock called Hotel California.

The interrogation rooms were stark. High-value detainees were questioned in the Black Room, nearly bare but for several 18-inch hooks that jutted from the ceiling, a grisly reminder of the terrors inflicted by Mr. Hussein's inquisitors. Jailers often blared rap music or rock 'n' roll at deafening decibels over a loudspeaker to unnerve their subjects. 

Another smaller room offered basic comforts like carpets and cushioned seating to put more cooperative prisoners at ease, said several Defense Department specialists who worked at Camp Nama. Detainees wore heavy, olive-drab hoods outside their cells. By June 2004, the revelations of abuse at Abu Ghraib galvanized the military to promise better treatment for prisoners. In one small concession at Camp Nama, soldiers exchanged the hoods for cloth blindfolds with drop veils that allowed detainees to breathe more freely but prevented them from peeking out. 

Some former task force members said the Nama in the camp's name stood for a coarse phrase that soldiers used to describe the compound. One Defense Department specialist recalled seeing pink blotches on detainees' clothing as well as red welts on their bodies, marks he learned later were inflicted by soldiers who used detainees as targets and called themselves the High Five Paintball Club. 

Mr. McGraw, the military spokesman, said he had not heard of the Black Room or the paintball club and had not seen any mention of them in the documents he had reviewed.

In a nearby operations center, task force analysts pored over intelligence collected from spies, detainees and remotely piloted Predator surveillance aircraft, to piece together clues to aid soldiers on their raids. Twice daily at noon and midnight military interrogators and their supervisors met with officials from the C.I.A., F.B.I. and allied military units to review operations and new intelligence. 

Task Force 6-26 was a creation of the Pentagon's post-Sept. 11 campaign against terrorism, and it quickly became the model for how the military would gain intelligence and battle insurgents in the future. Originally known as Task Force 121, it was formed in the summer of 2003, when the military merged two existing Special Operations units, one hunting Osama bin Laden in and around Afghanistan, and the other tracking Mr. Hussein in Iraq. (Its current name is Task Force 145.)

The task force was a melting pot of military and civilian units. It drew on elite troops from the Joint Special Operations Command, whose elements include the Army unit Delta Force, Navy's Seal Team 6 and the 75th Ranger Regiment. Military reservists and Defense Intelligence Agency personnel with special skills, like interrogators, were temporarily assigned to the unit. C.I.A. officers, F.B.I. agents and special operations forces from other countries also worked closely with the task force. 

Many of the American Special Operations soldiers wore civilian clothes and were allowed to grow beards and long hair, setting them apart from their uniformed colleagues. Unlike conventional soldiers and marines whose Iraq tours lasted 7 to 12 months, unit members and their commanders typically rotated every 90 days. 

Task Force 6-26 had a singular focus: capture or kill Mr. Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant operating in Iraq. "Anytime there was even the smell of Zarqawi nearby, they would go out and use any means possible to get information from a detainee," one official said. 

Defense Department personnel briefed on the unit's operations said the harsh treatment extended beyond Camp Nama to small field outposts in Baghdad, Falluja, Balad, Ramadi and Kirkuk. These stations were often nestled within the alleys of a city in nondescript buildings with suburban-size yards where helicopters could land to drop off or pick up detainees. 

At the outposts, some detainees were stripped naked and had cold water thrown on them to cause the sensation of drowning, said Defense Department personnel who served with the unit. 

In January 2004, the task force captured the son of one of Mr. Hussein's bodyguards in Tikrit. The man told Army investigators that he was forced to strip and that he was punched in the spine until he fainted, put in front of an air-conditioner while cold water was poured on him and kicked in the stomach until he vomited. Army investigators were forced to close their inquiry in June 2005 after they said task force members used battlefield pseudonyms that made it impossible to identify and locate the soldiers involved. The unit also asserted that 70 percent of its computer files had been lost. 

Despite the task force's access to a wide range of intelligence, its raids were often dry holes, yielding little if any intelligence and alienating ordinary Iraqis, Defense Department personnel said. Prisoners deemed no threat to American troops were often driven deep into the Iraqi desert at night and released, sometimes given $100 or more in American money for their trouble. 

Back at Camp Nama, the task force leaders established a ritual for departing personnel who did a good job, Pentagon officials said. The commanders presented them with two unusual mementos: a detainee hood and a souvenir piece of tile from the medical screening room that once held Mr. Hussein. 

Early Signs of Trouble

Accusations of abuse by Task Force 6-26 came as no surprise to many other officials in Iraq. By early 2004, both the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. had expressed alarm about the military's harsh interrogation techniques. 

The C.I.A.'s Baghdad station sent a cable to headquarters on Aug. 3, 2003, raising concern that Special Operations troops who served with agency officers had used techniques that had become too aggressive. Five days later, the C.I.A. issued a classified directive that prohibited its officers from participating in harsh interrogations. Separately, the C.I.A. barred its officers from working at Camp Nama but allowed them to keep providing target information and other intelligence to the task force. 

The warnings still echoed nearly a year later. On June 25, 2004, nearly two months after the disclosure of the abuses at Abu Ghraib, an F.B.I. agent in Iraq sent an e-mail message to his superiors in Washington, warning that a detainee captured by Task Force 6-26 had suspicious burn marks on his body. The detainee said he had been tortured. A month earlier, another F.B.I. agent asked top bureau officials for guidance on how to deal with military interrogators across Iraq who used techniques like loud music and yelling that exceeded "the bounds of standard F.B.I. practice." 

American generals were also alerted to the problem. In December 2003, Col. Stuart A. Herrington, a retired Army intelligence officer, warned in a confidential memo that medical personnel reported that prisoners seized by the unit, then known as Task Force 121, had injuries consistent with beatings. "It seems clear that TF 121 needs to be reined in with respect to its treatment of detainees," Colonel Herrington concluded. 

By May 2004, just as the scandal at Abu Ghraib was breaking, tensions increased at Camp Nama between the Special Operations troops and civilian interrogators and case officers from the D.I.A.'s Defense Human Intelligence Service, who were there to support the unit in its fight against the Zarqawi network. The discord, according to documents, centered on the harsh treatment of detainees as well as restrictions the Special Operations troops placed on their civilian colleagues, like monitoring their e-mail messages and phone calls. 

Maj. Gen. George E. Ennis, who until recently commanded the D.I.A.'s human intelligence division, declined to be interviewed for this article. But in written responses to questions, General Ennis said he never heard about the numerous complaints made by D.I.A. personnel until he and his boss, Vice Adm. Lowell E. Jacoby, then the agency's director, were briefed on June 24, 2004. 

The next day, Admiral Jacoby wrote a two-page memo to Mr. Cambone, under secretary of defense for intelligence. In it, he described a series of complaints, including a May 2004 incident in which a D.I.A. interrogator said he witnessed task force soldiers punch a detainee hard enough to require medical help. The D.I.A. officer took photos of the injuries, but a supervisor confiscated them, the memo said.

The tensions laid bare a clash of military cultures. Combat-hardened commandos seeking a steady flow of intelligence to pinpoint insurgents grew exasperated with civilian interrogators sent from Washington, many of whom were novices at interrogating hostile prisoners fresh off the battlefield. 

"These guys wanted results, and our debriefers were used to a civil environment," said one Defense Department official who was briefed on the task force operations. 

Within days after Admiral Jacoby sent his memo, the D.I.A. took the extraordinary step of temporarily withdrawing its personnel from Camp Nama. 

Admiral Jacoby's memo also provoked an angry reaction from Mr. Cambone. "Get to the bottom of this immediately. This is not acceptable," Mr. Cambone said in a handwritten note on June 26, 2004, to his top deputy, Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin. "In particular, I want to know if this is part of a pattern of behavior by TF 6-26." 

General Boykin said through a spokesman on March 17 that at the time he told Mr. Cambone he had found no pattern of misconduct with the task force. 

A Shroud of Secrecy

Military and legal experts say the full breadth of abuses committed by Task Force 6-26 may never be known because of the secrecy surrounding the unit, and the likelihood that some allegations went unreported. 

In the summer of 2004, Camp Nama closed and the unit moved to a new headquarters in Balad, 45 miles north of Baghdad. The unit's operations are now shrouded in even tighter secrecy. 

Soon after their rank-and-file clashed in 2004, D.I.A. officials in Washington and military commanders at Fort Bragg agreed to improve how the task force integrated specialists into its ranks. The D.I.A. is now sending small teams of interrogators, debriefers and case officers, called "deployable Humint teams," to work with Special Operations forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

Senior military commanders insist that the elite warriors, who will be relied on more than ever in the campaign against terrorism, are now treating detainees more humanely and can police themselves. The C.I.A. has resumed conducting debriefings with the task force, but does not permit harsh questioning, a C.I.A. official said. 

General McChrystal, the leader of the Joint Special Operations Command, received his third star in a promotion ceremony at Fort Bragg on March 13. 

On Dec. 8, 2004, the Pentagon's spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, said that four Special Operations soldiers from the task force were punished for "excessive use of force" and administering electric shocks to detainees with stun guns. Two of the soldiers were removed from the unit. To that point, Mr. Di Rita said, 10 task force members had been disciplined. Since then, according to the new figures provided to The Times, the number of those disciplined for detainee abuse has more than tripled. Nine of the 34 troops disciplined received written or oral counseling. Others were reprimanded for slapping detainees and other offenses.

The five Army Rangers who were court-martialed in December received punishments including jail time of 30 days to six months and reduction in rank. Two of them will receive bad-conduct discharges upon completion of their sentences. 

Human rights advocates and leading members of Congress say the Pentagon must still do more to hold senior-level commanders and civilian officials accountable for the misconduct. 

The Justice Department inspector general is investigating complaints of detainee abuse by Task Force 6-26, a senior law enforcement official said. The only wide-ranging military inquiry into prisoner abuse by Special Operations forces was completed nearly a year ago by Brig. Gen. Richard P. Formica, and was sent to Congress. 

But the United States Central Command has refused repeated requests from The Times over the past several months to provide an unclassified copy of General Formica's findings despite Mr. Rumsfeld's instructions that such a version of all 12 major reports into detainee abuse be made public.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060319/86d46df4/attachment-0001.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Sun Mar 19 07:42:13 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 15:42:13 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Before and After Abu Ghraib,
	a U.S. Unit Abused Detainees
Message-ID: <20060319154214.570ED11F9CA@lax-gw07.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

INTERNATIONAL / MIDDLE EAST | March 19, 2006
Task Force 6-26: Before and After Abu Ghraib, a U.S. Unit Abused Detainees
By ERIC SCHMITT and CAROLYN MARSHALL
At a secret detention center, the military's most highly trained counterterrorism unit committed serious abuses of Iraqi prisoners.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/international/middleeast/19abuse.html?ex=1143435600&en=63f4331d762e977d&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060319/dc394ca2/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Sun Mar 19 07:42:41 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 15:42:41 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Why Do So Few Women Reach the Top of Big
	Law Firms?
Message-ID: <20060319154241.6594C13B8BD@lax-gw04.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

BUSINESS / YOUR MONEY | March 19, 2006
Why Do So Few Women Reach the Top of Big Law Firms?
By TIMOTHY L. O'BRIEN
Law schools now graduate as many women as men, but the number of women who are partners at major law firms nationwide has remained stagnant.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/business/yourmoney/19law.html?ex=1143435600&en=75b04902d82886b1&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060319/8e8085e3/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Sun Mar 19 07:44:49 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 15:44:49 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: The State of Iraq: An Update
Message-ID: <20060319154449.B0D8E23724E@lax-gw01.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

OPINION | March 19, 2006
Op-Chart: The State of Iraq: An Update
By NINA KAMP, MICHAEL O'HANLON and AMY UNIKEWICZ
While a strategically passable outcome still seems within reach, it is increasingly hard to believe that there are the makings of a major success for American foreign policy in Iraq.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/opinion/19ohanlon.html?ex=1143435600&en=bda65f634f241ab2&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060319/e556ca8d/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Sun Mar 19 07:45:08 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 15:45:08 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: The Stuff That Happened
Message-ID: <20060319154508.C12C311FBBF@lax-gw07.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

OPINION | March 19, 2006
Editorial: The Stuff That Happened

The last three years have shown how little our national leaders understood Iraq, and have reminded us how badly attempts at liberation from the outside have gone in the past.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/opinion/19sun1.html?ex=1143435600&en=829455f9bc88dd6f&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060319/0fb2a4d4/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Sun Mar 19 07:45:52 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 15:45:52 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: A Top-Down Review for the Pentagon
Message-ID: <20060319154554.762149FD95@lax-gw05.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

OPINION | March 19, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor: A Top-Down Review for the Pentagon
By PAUL D. EATON
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is not competent to lead our armed forces.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/opinion/19eaton.html?ex=1143435600&en=a231bf01309da8df&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060319/2ee1cee4/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Sun Mar 19 07:46:40 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 15:46:40 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Jagged Little Pills
Message-ID: <20060319154640.310169FD90@lax-gw05.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

OPINION | March 19, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor: Jagged Little Pills
By LAUREN SLATER
Consumers need to know that the pill we cradle in our palm may ease our pain, but will just as surely take its toll.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/opinion/19slater.html?ex=1143435600&en=a50437bf8375283e&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060319/e2af7d40/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Sun Mar 19 07:49:38 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 15:49:38 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Anti - War Rallies Mark Iraq Anniversary
Message-ID: <20060319154938.8D0C69FDFC@lax-gw05.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

an AP story...says it all


INTERNATIONAL | March 19, 2006
Anti - War Rallies Mark Iraq Anniversary
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
CHICAGO (AP) -- The third anniversary of the U.S.-led war in Iraq drew tens of thousands of protesters -- shouting chants of ''Stop the War'' and calling for the withdrawal of troops -- in demonstrations across the globe.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-War-Protests.html?ex=1143435600&en=78dc1f81f2a83841&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060319/18865f7a/attachment-0001.htm 

From lindahassler at sbcglobal.net  Sun Mar 19 08:37:27 2006
From: lindahassler at sbcglobal.net (Linda Hassler)
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 10:37:27 -0600
Subject: [Mb-civic] Check out this artist!
Message-ID: <e1536d731fe668a7e46dd29ea2929309@sbcglobal.net>

Watch and be inspired all over again about what really goes on in the 
human heart.

Linda Hassler
http://marketplace.espeakers.com/movie.php?sid=5290&aid=10558


From olhippie at tampabay.rr.com  Sun Mar 19 09:03:06 2006
From: olhippie at tampabay.rr.com (Robin McNamara)
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 12:03:06 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] [Mb-hair] Check out this artist!
References: <e1536d731fe668a7e46dd29ea2929309@sbcglobal.net>
Message-ID: <000401c64b76$fe687300$97bc2041@CowBox>

Linda

Just plain downright amazing WOW!

Love forever
Robin


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Linda Hassler" <lindahassler at sbcglobal.net>
To: "CIVIC" <MB-Civic at islandlists.com>; "HAIR mail-list" 
<mb-hair at islandemail.com>
Sent: Sunday, March 19, 2006 11:37 AM
Subject: [Mb-hair] Check out this artist!


> Watch and be inspired all over again about what really goes on in the
> human heart.
>
> Linda Hassler
> http://marketplace.espeakers.com/movie.php?sid=5290&aid=10558
>
> _______________________________________________
> Mb-hair mailing list
> Mb-hair at islandlists.com
> http://www.islandlists.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mb-hair 


From hecate at diamonddragon.com  Sun Mar 19 09:28:46 2006
From: hecate at diamonddragon.com (Hecate)
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 17:28:46 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] BBC E-mail: France general strike threatened
Message-ID: <20060319_172846_054033.hecate@diamonddragon.com>

Hecate saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you
should see it.



** France general strike threatened **
Trade unions say there will be a general strike unless new job laws, which triggered riots in Paris, are withdrawn.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/europe/4822986.stm >


** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all
in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/dailyemail/ >


** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have?been verified.

If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm


From hecate at diamonddragon.com  Sun Mar 19 09:32:07 2006
From: hecate at diamonddragon.com (Hecate)
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 17:32:07 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] BBC E-mail: Virus used to make nanoparticles
Message-ID: <20060319_173207_091815.hecate@diamonddragon.com>

Hecate saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you
should see it.



** Virus used to make nanoparticles **
UK scientists from Norwich use a plant virus to create nanotechnology building blocks.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/4782152.stm >


** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all
in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/dailyemail/ >


** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have?been verified.

If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm


From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Sun Mar 19 11:21:02 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 14:21:02 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Time Mag. "Operation Swarmer Fizzles"
Message-ID: <000801c64b8a$46687a20$6c3fe440@Harold>




Friday, Mar. 17, 2006
On Scene: How Operation Swarmer Fizzled
Not a shot was fired, or a leader nabbed, in a major offensive that failed to live up to its advance billing 
By BRIAN BENNETT/AL JALLAM 
Four Black Hawk helicopters landed in a wheat field and dropped off a television crew, three photographers, three print reporters and three Iraqi government officials right into the middle of Operation Swarmer. Iraqi soldiers in newly painted humvees, green and red Iraqi flags stenciled on the tailgates, had just finished searching the farm populated by a half-dozen skinny cows and a woman kneading freshly risen dough and slapping it to the walls of a mud oven. 

The press, flown in from Baghdad to this agricultural gridiron northeast of Samarra, huddled around the Iraqi officials and U.S. Army commanders who explained that the "largest air assault since 2003" in Iraq using over 50 helicopters to put 1500 Iraqi and U.S. troops on the ground had netted 48 suspected insurgents, 17 of which had already been cleared and released. The area, explained the officials, has long been suspected of being used as a base for insurgents operating in and around Samarra, the city north of Baghdad where the bombing of a sacred shrine recently sparked a wave of sectarian violence. 

But contrary to what many many television networks erroneously reported, the operation was by no means the largest use of airpower since the start of the war. ("Air Assault" is a military term that refers specifically to transporting troops into an area.) In fact, there were no airstrikes and no leading insurgents were nabbed in an operation that some skeptical military analysts described as little more than a photo op. What?s more, there were no shots fired at all and the units had met no resistance, said the U.S. and Iraqi commanders. 

The operation, which doubled the population of the flat farmland in one single airlift, was initiated by intelligence from Iraq security forces, says Lt Col Skip Johnson commander of the 187 Battallion, 3rd Combat Brigade of the 101st Airborne. "They have the lead," he said to reporters at the second stop of the tour. But by Friday afternoon, the major targets seemed to have slipped through their fingers. Iraqi Army General Abdul Jabar says that Samarra-based insurgent leader Hamad el Taki of Mohammad?s Army was thought to be in the area, and Iraqi intelligence officers were still working to compare known voice recordings and photographs with the prisoners in custody. 

With the Interior Ministry's Samarra commando battalion, the soldiers had found some 300 individual pieces of weaponry like mortars, rockets and plastic explosives in six different locations inside the sparsely populated farming community of over 50 square miles and about 1,500 residents. The raids also uncovered high-powered cordless telephones used as detonators in homemade bombs, medical supplies and insurgent training manuals. 

Before loading up into the helicopters for a return trip to Baghdad, Iraqi and American soldiers and some reporters helped themselves to the woman?s freshly baked bread, tearing bits off and chewing it as they wandered among the cows. For most of them, it was the only thing worthwhile they?d found all day
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060319/91f4388e/attachment.htm 

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Sun Mar 19 11:34:14 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 11:34:14 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] The Silence of Bystanders By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Message-ID: <C042F236.2A461%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 19, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
The Silence of Bystanders
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

ALONG THE CHAD-SUDAN BORDER

I saw a lot of heartbreak on my latest visit to the fringes of Darfur: two
orphan boys living under a tree after their family was murdered, a
13-year-old girl shot in the chest and a 6-year-old boy trying desperately
not to cry as doctors treated shrapnel wounds to his leg.

But the face of genocide I found most searing belonged to Idris Ismael, a
32-year-old Chadian. Mr. Idris said that a Sudan-sponsored janjaweed militia
had attacked his village, Damri, that very morning. He had managed to run
away. But his wife, Halima, eight months pregnant, could only hobble. And so
she was still in the village, along with their four children, ages 3 to 12.

"The village is surrounded by janjaweed, with civilians inside," Mr. Idris
said. "There's no way for people to escape. The janjaweed will kill all the
men, women and children, take all our blankets and other property, and then
burn our homes. They will kill every last person."

"The janjaweed will rape and kill my family," Mr. Idris added. "And there's
nothing I can do."

Video: The Captured Raider
An excerpt from "The Genocide Spreads," Nicholas D. Kristof's Op-Ed special
report. Watch the complete report.

Elie Wiesel once said, referring to victims of genocide: "Let us remember:
what hurts the victim most is not the cruelty of the oppressor but the
silence of the bystander." And it's our own silence that I find
inexplicable.

In Darfur, we have even less excuse than in past genocides. We have known
about this for more than two years, we have photos and eyewitnesses, our
president has even described it as genocide, and yet we're still paralyzed.
Part of the problem is that President Bush hasn't made it a top priority,
but at least he is now showing signs of stirring ? and in fact he's done
more than most other world leaders, and more than many Democrats. Our
failure in Darfur is utterly bipartisan.

Mr. Bush met recently at the White House with Mudawi Ibrahim Adam, an
authentic Sudanese hero, to get advice on Darfur, and he seems engaged ?
though still not ready to leap into the issue publicly by making a major
speech on Darfur, or by welcoming refugees for a photo op at the White
House. Alas, Mr. Bush is far more timid than the American people.

A new poll by Zogby International that surveyed 1,000 Americans a few days
ago asked about Darfur. Sixty-two percent said that "the United States has a
responsibility to help stop the killings in the Darfur region of Sudan";
only 24 percent disagreed.

In response to another question, only 24 percent said that "the U.S. has
done enough diplomatically to help end the crisis." In contrast, 59 percent
said that more could be done.

One measure we could take would be to enforce a no-fly zone from the air
base in Ab?ch?, Chad. The president of Chad says he would be happy to have
Americans do this, and it would be easy: instead of keeping airplanes in the
air, we would simply wait until a Sudanese plane bombed a village, then
strafe that plane on the ground afterward. (The first time, we would just
damage the plane; we would destroy any after that.)

Asked about such a no-fly zone in the Zogby poll, 70 percent said they
supported the idea, and only 13 percent opposed it.

So Americans are, I think, better than our national policy. How do we align
our government with our hearts? The only way is to push our leaders, whether
by calling the White House or members of Congress, or by attending the rally
in Washington on April 30 planned by the Save Darfur Coalition
(www.savedarfur.org).

Darfur is not hopeless. We need a new peace initiative, focused on the
sheiks of the region. We need a well-equipped U.N. peacekeeping force and a
no-fly zone. We need a public pledge by France to use its military forces in
Chad to stop any invasion from Sudan. And we need Arab leaders to speak up
for the Muslim victims of Darfur: where are you, Hosni Mubarak? With those
measures, Darfur might again be a place where children play, rather than one
in which they are thrown into bonfires.

Among the few heroes in this genocide are the ordinary Chadian villagers.
They are desperately poor, but when 200,000 Darfuris escaped into Chad,
these villagers shared water, forage and food with them.

Now these same Chadians are themselves becoming victims of an ever-expanding
Sudanese genocide. In the town of Borota, I talked to Fatima Adam, 15, who
described being gang-raped and beaten by six janjaweed a few days earlier.
As often happens, the men had used racial slurs against blacks to justify
the attack.

"The same things they were doing in Darfur," Fatima said, "now they are
doing to us."

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Sun Mar 19 11:38:44 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 14:38:44 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] The Torture Judge, America writes it's own rules!
Message-ID: <000f01c64b8c$bf314660$6c3fe440@Harold>

Village Voice


      Liberty Beat
      The Torture Judge
      U.S. court rules our government can break international laws to keep us safe

      by Nat Hentoff
      March 13th, 2006 12:45 AM 





     


     
Essentially you have a judge saying that assuming that U.S. officials sent Mr. Arar to be tortured, a judge can do nothing about it. Georgetown University law professor David Cole, New York Law Journal, February 17 

In a startling, ominous decision?ignored by most of the press around the country?Federal District Judge David Trager, in the Eastern District of New York, has dismissed a lawsuit by a Canadian citizen, Maher Arar, who, during a stopover at Kennedy Airport on the way home to Canada after vacation, was kidnapped by CIA agents. 

Arar was flown to Syria, where he was tortured for nearly a year in solitary confinement in a three-by-six-foot cell ("like a grave," he said). He became, internationally, one of the best-known victims of the CIA's extraordinary renditions?the sending of suspected terrorists to countries known for torturing their prisoners. 

Released after his ordeal, Arar has not been charged with any involvement in terrorism, or anything else, by Syria or the United States. Stigmatized by his notoriety, still traumatized, unemployed, he is back in Canada, where the Canadian Parliament had opened an extensive and expensive public inquiry into his capture and torture. The United States refuses to cooperate in any way with this investigation. 

Maher Arar sued for damages in federal court here (Maher Arar v. John Ashcroft, formerly Attorney General of the United States, et al.). Representing Arar for the New York?based Center for Constitutional Rights, David Cole predicts, and I agree, that if Judge Trager's ruling is upheld in an appeal to the Supreme Court, the CIA and other American officials will be told "they have a green light to do to others what they did to Arar"?no matter what international or U.S. laws are violated in the name of national security. 

Following the dismissal of Arar's case by Trager (former dean of Brooklyn Law School), Barbara Olshansky (deputy legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights) underscored the significance of what Trager has done to legitimize the Bush administration's doctrine that in the war on terrorism, the commander in chief sets the rules. Said Olshansky: "There can be little doubt that every official of the United States government [involved in the torture of Maher Arar] knew that sending him to Syria was a clear violation of the U.S. Constitution, federal statutes, and international law . . . This is a dark day indeed." 

To fathom the darkness of Trager's decision that Maher Arar has no constitutional right to due process in an American court of law for what he suffered because of the CIA, it's necessary to be aware of a decision directly on point by New York's Second Circuit Court of Appeals in 1980. 

In this landmark decision, Fil?rtiga v. Pe?a-Irala, David Cole points out, the appeals court decided that "the prohibition on torture was so universally accepted that a U.S. Court could hold responsible a Paraguayan official charged with torturing a dissident in Paraguay . . . The [U.S.] court declared that when officials violate such a fundamental norm as torture, they can be held accountable anywhere they are found." (Emphasis added.)  

That 1980 Second Circuit Court of Appeals decision proclaimed: "The torturer has become the pirate and slave trader before him . . . an enemy of all mankind." (Emphasis added.) 

The kicker is that this decision giving American courts jurisdiction over cases of official torture in other countries was reaffirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2004 (Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain). 

Now let us hear how Judge Trager justifies his dismissal of Maher Arar's suit for the atrocities he endured in Syria because of the CIA. In his decision, Trager said that if a judge decided, on his or her own, that the CIA's "extraordinary renditions" were always unconstitutional, "such a ruling can have the most serious consequences to our foreign relations or national security or both." 

A judge must be silent, even if our own statutes and treaties are violated! What about the separation of powers? Ah, said Trager, "the coordinate branches of our government [executive and legislative] are those in whom the Constitution imposes responsibility for our foreign affairs and national security. Those branches have the responsibility to determine whether judicial oversight is appropriate." 

Gee, I thought that the checks and balances of our constitutional system depend on the independence of the federal judiciary, which itself decides to exercise judicial review. 

Judge Trager went further to protect the Bush administration's juggernaut conduct of foreign policy: "One need not have much imagination to contemplate the negative effect on our relations with Canada if discovery were to proceed in this case, and were it to turn out that certain high Canadian officials had, despite public denials, acquiesced in Arar's removal to Syria." 

"More generally," Trager went on, "governments that do not wish to acknowledge publicly that they are assisting us would certainly hesitate to do so if our judicial discovery process could compromise them." 

But judge, the Canadian government itself is now actively involved in an inquiry to discover, among other things, what happened to Arar, and how. And in Europe, there is a fierce controversy over whether governments there have been covertly involved in facilitating the CIA's kidnapping of terror suspects from other lands. 

Is it the job of a federal judge here to protect other governments from embarrassment and eventual punishment by their own courts for helping the United States commit crimes? 

And what about our own government's criminal accountability? The February 17 New York Law Journal noted that "Judge Trager said that even assuming the government had intended to remove Maher Arar to Syria for torture, the federal judiciary was in no position to hold our government officials liable for damages 'in the absence of explicit direction by Congress . . . even if such conduct violates our treaty obligations or customary international law.' " (Emphasis added.) 

If independent federal judges cannot hold our government accountable, who can? Fortunately, Judge Trager is not on the Supreme Court. But look at whom George W. Bush has appointed to be our custodians of the Constitution! 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060319/8b2cbd8e/attachment.htm 

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Sun Mar 19 11:41:46 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 11:41:46 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] All Politics Is Thymotic By DAVID BROOKS
Message-ID: <C042F3FA.2A464%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 19, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
All Politics Is Thymotic
By DAVID BROOKS

Let me tell you what men want. Let me tell you why some middle-age men wear
the sports jerseys of semiliterate behemoths half their age while others
customize their cars with so many speakers they sound like the hip-hop
version of the San Francisco earthquake as they roll down the street.

Recognition. Men want others to recognize their significance. They want to
feel important and part of something important.

Some people believe men are motivated by greed for money or lust for power.
But money and power are means to get recognition. They are markers of
success, and success makes men feel important and causes others to pay
attention when they walk in the room.

Plato famously divided the soul into three parts: reason, eros (desire) and
thymos (the hunger for recognition). Thymos is what motivates the best and
worst things men do. It drives them to seek glory and assert themselves
aggressively for noble causes. It drives them to rage if others don't
recognize their worth. Sometimes it even causes them to kill over a trifle
if they feel disrespected.

Plato went on to point out that people are not only sensitive about their
own self-worth, they are also sensitive about the dignity of their group,
and the dignity of others. If a group is denied the dignity it deserves, we
call that injustice. Thymotic people mobilize to assert their group's
significance if they feel they are being rendered invisible by society.
Thymotic people mobilize on behalf of those made voiceless by the powerful.
As Plato indicated, thymos is the psychological origin of political action.

If I had the attention of the world's politicians for one afternoon, I'd
lead a discussion on the nature of the thymotic urge. I'd point out that if
politicians weren't consumed by a hunger for recognition, none of them would
agree to lead the miserable lives they do. I'd point out that in the
thymotic urge, selfishness and selflessness are intertwined. Men compete for
personal glory. But thymos also induces them to sacrifice for causes larger
than themselves.

I'd point out that if you see politics as a competition for recognition,
many things become clear. The economic and literary backwardness of the Arab
world has set off a thymotic crisis, as Arab men lash out to make the world
pay attention to them. The Israeli-Palestinian dispute is not only a
squabble over land; it's intractable because each side wants the other to
recognize its moral superiority. Democracy still has good long-term
prospects in that region because it's the only system that meets rising
expectations about individual dignity.

In this country, when workers strike, they're not enraged over a few cents
an hour. They're enraged because they feel their company is not
acknowledging their worth. When social liberals squabble with social
conservatives, each group is trying to assert the dignity of its own
lifestyle.

The partisanship in Washington is a thymotic contest on stilts. The Bush
administration goes out of its way to show how little it respects the
Democratic opposition. The history of the Democratic Party over the last
five years is the history of a party trying ever more furiously to assert
its dignity. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld are extremely thymotic men.
President Bush is a thymotic man partially chastened by Christianity.
Democratic activists have increasingly spurned measured, reasonable men for
aggressive, thymotic ones: Howard Dean, James Carville and the post-2000 Al
Gore.

If I had those politicians for an afternoon, I'd point out that even though
the thymotic urge drives so much of public life, we really don't talk about
thymos anymore. I'd add that when you read the ancient political
philosophers on thymos, they treat it as a male trait. But over the past
century women have been expressing their thymotic urges more and more, and
people over 40 have a complex about female thymos that people under 40
generally don't have.

I'd ask them to read Harvey Mansfield's new book, "Manliness," which is two
books in one. First, it's a subtle exploration about the virtues and vices
of the thymotic urge. It's also a series of troublemaking generalizations
about the differences between men and women.

Over the next few weeks, Mansfield and his feminist critics are going to
brawl ? thymotically ? over his assertions. I'm not as impressed by
Mansfield's generalizations as he is, but he'll have one advantage: he
understands the nature of thymos, which shapes this fight, and so much of
our political life.

Frank Rich is on a book leave.

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From michael at intrafi.com  Sun Mar 19 11:46:07 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 19:46:07 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: The State of Iraq: An Update
Message-ID: <20060319194608.102A12374E6@lax-gw01.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: michael at intrafi.com.

OPINION | March 19, 2006
Op-Chart: The State of Iraq: An Update
By NINA KAMP, MICHAEL O'HANLON and AMY UNIKEWICZ
While a strategically passable outcome still seems within reach, it is increasingly hard to believe that there are the makings of a major success for American foreign policy in Iraq.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/opinion/19ohanlon.html?ex=1143435600&en=bda65f634f241ab2&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060319/30393ba8/attachment.htm 

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Sun Mar 19 09:59:35 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 09:59:35 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] FEAR vs HOPE
Message-ID: <C042DC07.2A443%michael@michaelbutler.com>


Michael Butler's Blog

http://www.michaelbutler.com/blog/mbutler/

http://www.michaelbutler.com



From michael at intrafi.com  Sun Mar 19 12:16:37 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 20:16:37 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: A Top-Down Review for the Pentagon
Message-ID: <20060319201637.65D129FDEC@lax-gw05.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: michael at intrafi.com.

OPINION | March 19, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor: A Top-Down Review for the Pentagon
By PAUL D. EATON
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is not competent to lead our armed forces.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/opinion/19eaton.html?ex=1143435600&en=a231bf01309da8df&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060319/12a47f2c/attachment.htm 

From zuckersteve at verizon.net  Sun Mar 19 11:58:29 2006
From: zuckersteve at verizon.net (Steve Zuckerman ( Total Access Live ))
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 14:58:29 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Fw: Global Call for Action on Earth Day - March 20
Message-ID: <E1FL4UE-000433-Gz@elasmtp-kukur.atl.sa.earthlink.net>

This was sent to me by my freiend John McConnell, the 90 year old Founder of Earth Day. Very inspiring, I must say. ~Steven 




"Give us, O God, the vision which can see Thy love in the world in spite of human failure....show us what each of us can do to hasten  the coming of the day of universal peace.  Amen"

                                                A GLOBAL CALL TO ACTION
                                                          
                                        By John McConnell, Founder of Earth Day

We are now in the greatest global crisis in human history.  It is imperative the whole human family mobilize for a moral equivalent of World War II. 

In our past wars we forgot our differences and joined in heroic efforts to kill our enemies.  Killing will no longer stop killing.  Now we must join in an all-out effort to eliminate the causes of war.

All people who receive this message are urged to quickly choose what they will do.  Think about it, talk about it, pray about it -- and then act. 

Human greed, injustice and folly have almost ruined our planet.  The most powerful institutions (global corporations and rich governments) have usually put financial profit first.  The resulting violence and environmental damage has been disastrous.  

The human family has a long record of war, using violence to settle differences.  But now new devilish weapons are available worldwide and can be used by the weak as well as the strong.  The fact that America is the strongest country in the world no longer matters.

The only solution is to eliminate the causes of violence.  Killing will only trigger more acts of violence by others who hate America.

We must now all think and act as responsible caretakers and trustees of our planet -- seeking fair benefits for all people.  This will foster mutual understanding and eliminate the causes of violence and war.  Every individual and institution should now think and act as a Trustee of Earth.  This will appeal to every creed and culture.  It provides a way for you to tap the best in your thinking and in your faith.

Press, Radio, TV and Internet play a vital role.  Actions, good or bad, begin in the mind.  Those able to command media attention have a special obligation to speak out about the crisis and its obvious solution -- the Earth Trustee vision and agenda.  (See:  www.earthsite.org)

ALL world leaders should act now, urging that everyone oppose violence with nonviolence -- Martin Luther King's effective solution.  Leaders in other areas of public trust should do the same. Those who believe in the power of prayer can prove the power of their faith by their Earth Trustee actions.  

When people think and act as Earth Trustees they will show a reverence for life -- and for holy places.  Earth Day helped move toward conciliation when it had Shimon Perez of Israel ring the United Nations Peace Bell -- and persuaded Yaser Arafat of Palestine to add his name to the Earth Day Proclamation.  Jerusalem is a holy place to Christian, Muslim and Jew and its role in history is important to people of every religion.  

Earth Day and its Earth Trustee agenda, puts The Golden Rule to work -- do unto others as you would have them do unto you.  Here is a chance for people of all religions to show their ethical values by being Earth Trustees and practicing reverence for life in word and deed.

Mass media has a sacred obligation as the eyes and ears of the public to:
-- Feature solutions as well as problems
-- Headline cases of peaceful progress in the human adventure that replace hate, fear, greed and lust.
-- Give recognition and attention to people and projects that eliminate pollution and poverty and foster peace, justice and the care of Earth.

Every radio and TV station should program a daily "Minute for Peace."  A voice would state, "In this minute for peace let us join our hearts and minds, each in our own way, with faith and commitment to peaceful actions today and every day."  This would be followed by appropriate music or sounds of nature.

On Earth Day at the United Nations there is a global "Minute for Peace," signaled by the ringing of the Peace Bell at the moment Spring begins. 

With the media's cooperation, each year's Earth Day -- on nature's historic annual event, the March Equinox, will provide a great global holiday with world wide participation by people of every creed and culture.  This will inspire actions for Earth's rejuvenation -- with peace, justice and prosperity for all.

Spread the word.  We can change this global crisis into a new beginning for Planet Earth.
                                      
                                   **************************
John McConnell
4924 E. Kentucky Circle
Denver, CO 80246

www.earthsite.org

The Earth Trustee idea of the original Earth Day (March 21, 1970) provides the key: Every individual and institution must now seek to eliminate pollution, poverty and injustice by Earth Trustee choices in ecology, economics and ethics.  Thousands of group projects are already helping people and planet.  Their impact can increase dramatically by uniting in a global Earth Trustee Campaign with one common cause -- the REJUVENATION of Earth.




-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060319/949bfef3/attachment.htm 

From hotprojects at nyc.rr.com  Sun Mar 19 12:33:58 2006
From: hotprojects at nyc.rr.com (richard haase)
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 15:33:58 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Fw: Global Call for Action on Earth Day - March 20
References: <E1FL4UE-000433-Gz@elasmtp-kukur.atl.sa.earthlink.net>
Message-ID: <001801c64b94$7328bb10$f1476c42@hotprojects>

hello steve!!!
there is a name that takes me back
i used to hang out with steve zuckerman during the summer of my engagement to my wife
hey steve 
steve and i were " hanging " in 1990 - 1991
we hung
hope all your ventures are doing great steve
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Steve Zuckerman ( Total Access Live ) 
  To: zuckersteve at verizon.net 
  Sent: Sunday, March 19, 2006 2:58 PM
  Subject: [Mb-civic] Fw: Global Call for Action on Earth Day - March 20


  This was sent to me by my freiend John McConnell, the 90 year old Founder of Earth Day. Very inspiring, I must say. ~Steven 




  "Give us, O God, the vision which can see Thy love in the world in spite of human failure....show us what each of us can do to hasten  the coming of the day of universal peace.  Amen"

                                                  A GLOBAL CALL TO ACTION
                                                            
                                          By John McConnell, Founder of Earth Day

  We are now in the greatest global crisis in human history.  It is imperative the whole human family mobilize for a moral equivalent of World War II. 

  In our past wars we forgot our differences and joined in heroic efforts to kill our enemies.  Killing will no longer stop killing.  Now we must join in an all-out effort to eliminate the causes of war.

  All people who receive this message are urged to quickly choose what they will do.  Think about it, talk about it, pray about it -- and then act. 

  Human greed, injustice and folly have almost ruined our planet.  The most powerful institutions (global corporations and rich governments) have usually put financial profit first.  The resulting violence and environmental damage has been disastrous.  

  The human family has a long record of war, using violence to settle differences.  But now new devilish weapons are available worldwide and can be used by the weak as well as the strong.  The fact that America is the strongest country in the world no longer matters.

  The only solution is to eliminate the causes of violence.  Killing will only trigger more acts of violence by others who hate America.

  We must now all think and act as responsible caretakers and trustees of our planet -- seeking fair benefits for all people.  This will foster mutual understanding and eliminate the causes of violence and war.  Every individual and institution should now think and act as a Trustee of Earth.  This will appeal to every creed and culture.  It provides a way for you to tap the best in your thinking and in your faith.

  Press, Radio, TV and Internet play a vital role.  Actions, good or bad, begin in the mind.  Those able to command media attention have a special obligation to speak out about the crisis and its obvious solution -- the Earth Trustee vision and agenda.  (See:  www.earthsite.org)

  ALL world leaders should act now, urging that everyone oppose violence with nonviolence -- Martin Luther King's effective solution.  Leaders in other areas of public trust should do the same. Those who believe in the power of prayer can prove the power of their faith by their Earth Trustee actions.  

  When people think and act as Earth Trustees they will show a reverence for life -- and for holy places.  Earth Day helped move toward conciliation when it had Shimon Perez of Israel ring the United Nations Peace Bell -- and persuaded Yaser Arafat of Palestine to add his name to the Earth Day Proclamation.  Jerusalem is a holy place to Christian, Muslim and Jew and its role in history is important to people of every religion.  

  Earth Day and its Earth Trustee agenda, puts The Golden Rule to work -- do unto others as you would have them do unto you.  Here is a chance for people of all religions to show their ethical values by being Earth Trustees and practicing reverence for life in word and deed.

  Mass media has a sacred obligation as the eyes and ears of the public to:
  -- Feature solutions as well as problems
  -- Headline cases of peaceful progress in the human adventure that replace hate, fear, greed and lust.
  -- Give recognition and attention to people and projects that eliminate pollution and poverty and foster peace, justice and the care of Earth.

  Every radio and TV station should program a daily "Minute for Peace."  A voice would state, "In this minute for peace let us join our hearts and minds, each in our own way, with faith and commitment to peaceful actions today and every day."  This would be followed by appropriate music or sounds of nature.

  On Earth Day at the United Nations there is a global "Minute for Peace," signaled by the ringing of the Peace Bell at the moment Spring begins. 

  With the media's cooperation, each year's Earth Day -- on nature's historic annual event, the March Equinox, will provide a great global holiday with world wide participation by people of every creed and culture.  This will inspire actions for Earth's rejuvenation -- with peace, justice and prosperity for all.

  Spread the word.  We can change this global crisis into a new beginning for Planet Earth.
                                        
                                     **************************
  John McConnell
  4924 E. Kentucky Circle
  Denver, CO 80246

  www.earthsite.org

  The Earth Trustee idea of the original Earth Day (March 21, 1970) provides the key: Every individual and institution must now seek to eliminate pollution, poverty and injustice by Earth Trustee choices in ecology, economics and ethics.  Thousands of group projects are already helping people and planet.  Their impact can increase dramatically by uniting in a global Earth Trustee Campaign with one common cause -- the REJUVENATION of Earth.







------------------------------------------------------------------------------


  _______________________________________________
  Mb-civic mailing list
  Mb-civic at islandlists.com
  http://www.islandlists.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mb-civic
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060319/68bdbe37/attachment.htm 

From michael at intrafi.com  Sun Mar 19 12:51:24 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 20:51:24 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] BBC E-mail: Iraq in civil war, says former PM
Message-ID: <20060319_205124_030714.michael@intrafi.com>

Michael Butler saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you
should see it.



** Iraq in civil war, says former PM **
Iraq is in the midst of a civil war, the country's former Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi, tells the BBC.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/4821618.stm >


** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all
in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/dailyemail/ >


** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have?been verified.

If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm


From michael at michaelbutler.com  Sun Mar 19 12:56:28 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 12:56:28 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] From Teapot Dome to Gale Norton     By Kelpie Wilson
Message-ID: <C043057C.2A482%michael@michaelbutler.com>

    From Teapot Dome to Gale Norton
    By Kelpie Wilson
    t r u t h o u t | Perspective

    Sunday 19 March 2006

    The rights of the public to the nation's natural resources outweigh
private rights.
    -- Teddy Roosevelt

    Nothing dollarable is safe, however guarded.
    -- John Muir

    As the Teapot Dome scandal of Warren G. Harding's presidency was one
milestone in the history of American resource piracy, the tenure of Gale
Norton as Secretary of the Interior is surely another.

    Harding's Interior Secretary, Albert Fall, failed in his scheme to sell
off the Teapot Dome oil reserves and pocket the money. He was prosecuted and
sentenced to a year in prison. Gale Norton's timely exit on the heels of the
Abramoff scandal that implicates top Interior Department officials could
mean that she is worried, but it is not likely that she will face any
prosecution for her giveaways to industry.

    Harding, like G.W. Bush, had little regard for proper English - Harding
called for a return to "normalcy," while Bush says we should not
"misunderestimate" him. On Harding's death, the poet E. E. Cummings said:
"The only man, woman or child who wrote a simple declarative sentence with
seven grammatical errors is dead." But just as Bush surpasses Harding as a
mangler of language, so the Bush administration far outstrips the Harding
administration in the game of looting.

    Gone are the days when corrupt officials took payments in "little black
bags," as Albert Fall received his $100,000 payment for the Teapot Dome oil
lease from Harry F. Sinclair. Fall also received a shipment from Sinclair of
"six heifers, a yearling bull, two six-months-old boars, four sows and ...
an English thoroughbred horse."

    Today our new reality is that the tycoons and the officials are actually
the same persons, or at least part of the same hive. Like insects that go
through a complex life cycle from larva to pupa tof egg-laying adult, people
like Gale Norton and her deputy secretary Stephen J. Griles will go from
lobbyist to regulator to corporate board member. At every stage of the life
cycle they have one purpose: to direct the flow of resources back to the
corporate nest.

    And so, when Norton claims she is leaving the Interior Department to set
"new goals to achieve in the private sector," you know that she will be well
supplied with hogs, heifers and whatever lucrative lawyering job she wants.

    Gale Norton's number one tool, which she used like a common thief slips
a credit card up a door jamb to spring a cheap lock, is the ideology known
as "Wise Use." The "Wise Use" doctrine is founded on anti-government
rhetoric that advocates eliminating any environmental regulations that might
restrict economic development. Because she was so well known as a "Wise Use"
ideologue, only John Ashcroft was a more controversial cabinet appointment
in Bush's first term.

    During her tenure as Secretary, Norton advanced this agenda through
regulatory rollbacks, suppression of science, preferential treatment, and
collusion with industry. For the most part, she was unable to enshrine "Wise
Use" principles in regulations, with the exception of her new National Park
Service regulations.

    Norton proceeded to revamp the Park Service regulations despite the lack
of any identified need for new rules. Now in the final phase of adoption,
the new directive drastically changes the mission of our national parks from
preservation to commercially sponsored recreation. If these rules are
adopted, park managers won't be able to prevent development that harms
wildlife and other natural features, and corporate logos will spring up like
daisies.

    These rules also require newly hired staff to take what amounts to a
loyalty oath to the policies of the current administration. A loyalty oath
may be the solution to the sticky problem of science that Norton kept
running into. When her agency biologists reported that drilling in the
Arctic Refuge would harm caribou, Norton rewrote the report before
submitting it to Congress. She also suppressed a finding by the US Fish &
Wildlife Service that new Army Corps rules for permitting development would
devastate wetlands.

    In fact, Norton created a climate of intimidation at the Interior
Department that functions almost as effectively as an unconstitutional
loyalty oath would: Last year the Public Employees for Environmental
Responsibility took a survey of Fish & Wildlife Service biologists and found
that more than half of the respondents said agency officials had reversed or
withdrawn the biologists' scientific conclusions under pressure from
industry groups.

    Lying to Congress and suppressing scientific findings. How is it that
these are not prosecutable offenses?

    In 2001, Oregon potato farmers in the upper portion of the Klamath River
suffering from a prolonged drought demanded that the Interior Department
give them water dedicated to fish. Gale Norton complied, and in 2002, at
least 35,000 salmon died at the mouth of the Klamath. The Klamath runs are
now so low that the Fisheries Service is preparing to close the salmon
fishing season, ruining a $150 million dollar industry. Gale Norton is
responsible. Why can't she be indicted for ruining a precious and
irreplaceable natural resource?

    Norton's supporters, like the National Association of Manufacturers,
praise her primarily for her role in opening up the West to massive amounts
of new energy development. Interior Department staff began referring to
Colorado, Wyoming and New Mexico as the "OPEC states," as the drilling
permits multiplied and flew through the bureaucracy with minimal review and
consultation with local citizens.

    Norton's own proudest accomplishment, she says, was implementing her
"four C's" program - a supposedly new approach to public involvement that
included "communication, consultation and cooperation, all in the service of
conservation."

    Unfortunately, the four C's seem only to apply to industry and not to
local people. Take for instance the town of Grand Junction, Colorado. Last
September the BLM informed the city that a few hundred acres in the town's
watershed used for drinking water supplies would be offered for oil and gas
drilling. Then in December, at the end of the public comment period, the BLM
told the town that actually several thousand acres would be leased for
drilling. The agency withheld the information because it would otherwise
"taint" the competitive bidding process. The town does not want any drilling
at all in their watershed. Why can't Gale Norton be indicted for destroying
a town's water supply?

    I can testify that the same process is happening in BLM's western forest
lands where, on orders from Gale Norton, the BLM is tossing the Northwest
Forest Plan out the window and preparing to log every last old growth forest
that they manage in Washington, Oregon and California. Many public meetings
are held, but they are all a waste of time because the communication,
consultation and cooperation are not intended for local people but only for
the timber industry.

    Under Gale Norton's leadership, the Department of Interior has become
nothing less than a big box store for the mining, timber, oil, gas, and coal
industries. As CEO, Norton has eliminated all rivals to give her corporate
customers "low, low prices every day." Meanwhile, fish and wildlife and all
the rest of us who need clean air and water underwrite the true cost.

    Bush's new nominee for Secretary of the Interior, Idaho Governor Dirk
Kempthorne, is known for his animosity toward protecting the last wild
roadless areas in Idaho. Unless something changes in Congress or the White
House, unless Gale Norton is somehow made to pay the price for her looting
of public resources, there is no doubt that he will keep the store open for
business.

    Kelpie Wilson is the t r u t h o u t environment editor. A veteran
forest protection activist and mechanical engineer, she writes from her
solar-powered cabin in the Siskiyou Mountains of southwest Oregon.

 


From michael at intrafi.com  Sun Mar 19 14:05:04 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (Michael)
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 17:05:04 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Article from Tom Dispatch
Message-ID: <200603192205.k2JM54rh000316@thor.thenation.com>

An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060319/1114bd66/attachment-0001.htm 

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Sun Mar 19 12:15:43 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 12:15:43 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] I just Ordered this Book
Message-ID: <C042FBEF.2A46B%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 19, 2006
'American Theocracy,' by Kevin Phillips
Clear and Present Dangers
Review by ALAN BRINKLEY

Four decades ago, Kevin Phillips, a young political strategist for the
Republican Party, began work on what became a remarkable book. In writing
"The Emerging Republican Majority" (published in 1969), he asked a very big
question about American politics: How would the demographic and economic
changes of postwar America shape the long-term future of the two major
parties? His answer, startling at the time but now largely unquestioned, is
that the movement of people and resources from the old Northern industrial
states into the South and the West (an area he enduringly labeled the "Sun
Belt") would produce a new and more conservative Republican majority that
would dominate American politics for decades. Phillips viewed the changes he
predicted with optimism. A stronger Republican Party, he believed, would
restore stability and order to a society experiencing disorienting and at
times violent change. Shortly before publishing his book, he joined the
Nixon administration to help advance the changes he had foreseen.

Phillips has remained a prolific and important political commentator in the
decades since, but he long ago abandoned his enthusiasm for the Republican
coalition he helped to build. His latest book (his 13th) looks broadly and
historically at the political world the conservative coalition has
painstakingly constructed over the last several decades. No longer does he
see Republican government as a source of stability and order. Instead, he
presents a nightmarish vision of ideological extremism, catastrophic fiscal
irresponsibility, rampant greed and dangerous shortsightedness. (His final
chapter is entitled "The Erring Republican Majority.") In an era of
best-selling jeremiads on both sides of the political divide, "American
Theocracy" may be the most alarming analysis of where we are and where we
may be going to have appeared in many years. It is not without polemic, but
unlike many of the more glib and strident political commentaries of recent
years, it is extensively researched and for the most part frighteningly
persuasive.

Although Phillips is scathingly critical of what he considers the dangerous
policies of the Bush administration, he does not spend much time examining
the ideas and behavior of the president and his advisers. Instead, he
identifies three broad and related trends ? none of them new to the Bush
years but all of them, he believes, exacerbated by this administration's
policies ? that together threaten the future of the United States and the
world. One is the role of oil in defining and, as Phillips sees it,
distorting American foreign and domestic policy. The second is the ominous
intrusion of radical Christianity into politics and government. And the
third is the astonishing levels of debt ? current and prospective ? that
both the government and the American people have been heedlessly
accumulating. If there is a single, if implicit, theme running through the
three linked essays that form this book, it is the failure of leaders to
look beyond their own and the country's immediate ambitions and desires so
as to plan prudently for a darkening future.

The American press in the first days of the Iraq war reported extensively on
the Pentagon's failure to post American troops in front of the National
Museum in Baghdad, which, as a result, was looted of many of its great
archaeological treasures. Less widely reported, but to Phillips far more
meaningful, was the immediate posting of troops around the Iraqi Oil
Ministry, which held the maps and charts that were the key to effective oil
production. Phillips fully supports an explanation of the Iraq war that the
Bush administration dismisses as conspiracy theory ? that its principal
purpose was to secure vast oil reserves that would enable the United States
to control production and to lower prices. ("Think of Iraq as a military
base with a very large oil reserve underneath," an oil analyst said a couple
of years ago. "You can't ask for better than that.") Terrorism, weapons of
mass destruction, tyranny, democracy and other public rationales were,
Phillips says, simply ruses to disguise the real motivation for the
invasion.

And while this argument may be somewhat too simplistic to explain the
complicated mix of motives behind the war, it is hard to dismiss Phillips's
larger argument: that the pursuit of oil has for at least 30 years been one
of the defining elements of American policy in the world; and that the Bush
administration ? unusually dominated by oilmen ? has taken what the
president deplored recently as the nation's addiction to oil to new and
terrifying levels. The United States has embraced a kind of
"petro-imperialism," Phillips writes, "the key aspect of which is the U.S.
military's transformation into a global oil-protection force," and which
"puts up a democratic facade, emphasizes freedom of the seas (or pipeline
routes) and seeks to secure, protect, drill and ship oil, not administer
everyday affairs."

Phillips is especially passionate in his discussion of the second great
force that he sees shaping contemporary American life ? radical Christianity
and its growing intrusion into government and politics. The political rise
of evangelical Christian groups is hardly a secret to most Americans after
the 2004 election, but Phillips brings together an enormous range of
information from scholars and journalists and presents a remarkably
comprehensive and chilling picture of the goals and achievements of the
religious right.

He points in particular to the Southern Baptist Convention, once a scorned
seceding minority of the American Baptist Church but now so large that it
dominates not just Baptism itself but American Protestantism generally. The
Southern Baptist Convention does not speak with one voice, but almost all of
its voices, Phillips argues, are to one degree or another highly
conservative. On the far right is a still obscure but, Phillips says,
rapidly growing group of "Christian Reconstructionists" who believe in a
"Taliban-like" reversal of women's rights, who describe the separation of
church and state as a "myth" and who call openly for a theocratic government
shaped by Christian doctrine. A much larger group of Protestants, perhaps as
many as a third of the population, claims to believe in the supposed
biblical prophecies of an imminent "rapture" ? the return of Jesus to the
world and the elevation of believers to heaven.

Prophetic Christians, Phillips writes, often shape their view of politics
and the world around signs that charlatan biblical scholars have identified
as predictors of the apocalypse ? among them a war in Iraq, the Jewish
settlement of the whole of biblical Israel, even the rise of terrorism. He
convincingly demonstrates that the Bush administration has calculatedly
reached out to such believers and encouraged them to see the president's
policies as a response to premillennialist thought. He also suggests that
the president and other members of his administration may actually believe
these things themselves, that religious belief is the basis of policy, not
just a tactic for selling it to the public. Phillips's evidence for this
disturbing claim is significant, but not conclusive.

THE third great impending crisis that Phillips identifies is also, perhaps,
the best known ? the astonishing rise of debt as the precarious underpinning
of the American economy. He is not, of course, the only observer who has
noted the dangers of indebtedness. The New York Times columnist Paul
Krugman, for example, frequently writes about the looming catastrophe. So do
many more-conservative economists, who point especially to future debt ?
particularly the enormous obligation, which Phillips estimates at between
$30 trillion and $40 trillion, that Social Security and health care demands
will create in the coming decades. The most familiar debt is that of the
United States government, fueled by soaring federal budget deficits that
have continued (with a brief pause in the late 1990's) for more than two
decades. But the national debt ? currently over $8 trillion ? is only the
tip of the iceberg. There has also been an explosion of corporate debt,
state and local bonded debt, international debt through huge trade
imbalances, and consumer debt (mostly in the form of credit-card balances
and aggressively marketed home-mortgage packages). Taken together, this
present and future debt may exceed $70 trillion.

The creation of a national-debt culture, Phillips argues, although
exacerbated by the policies of the Bush administration, has been the work of
many people over many decades ? among them Alan Greenspan, who, he acidly
notes, blithely and irresponsibly ignored the rising debt to avoid pricking
the stock-market bubble it helped produce. It is most of all a product of
the "financialization" of the American economy ? the turn away from
manufacturing and toward an economy based on moving and managing money, a
trend encouraged, Phillips argues persuasively, by the preoccupation with
oil and (somewhat less persuasively) with evangelical belief in the imminent
rapture, which makes planning for the future unnecessary.

There is little in "American Theocracy" that is wholly original to Phillips,
as he frankly admits by his frequent reference to the work of other writers
and scholars. What makes this book powerful in spite of the familiarity of
many of its arguments is his rare gift for looking broadly and structurally
at social and political change. By describing a series of major
transformations, by demonstrating the relationships among them and by
discussing them with passionate restraint, Phillips has created a harrowing
picture of national danger that no American reader will welcome, but that
none should ignore.

Alan Brinkley is the Allan Nevins professor of history and the provost at
Columbia University.

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From chiosceola at hotmail.com  Sun Mar 19 06:07:40 2006
From: chiosceola at hotmail.com (ernesto ciccarelli)
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 09:07:40 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] FW: google mars
Message-ID: <E1FL4bx-0000Bj-4Y@elasmtp-kukur.atl.sa.earthlink.net>




>From: "Asgard Oberon" <anarchtype at gmail.com>
>To: "ernesto ciccarelli" <chiosceola at hotmail.com>, "AJ Weberman" 
><ajw at nyc.rr.com>, "Rich Anderson" <rogue at voiceoverlord.com>, 
>stanski44 at netzero.net
>Subject: google mars
>Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2006 19:13:43 -0500
>

-------------- next part --------------
http://www.google.com/mars/


From michael at intrafi.com  Sun Mar 19 14:16:42 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 14:16:42 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] Dreams turned to dust
Message-ID: <26551557.1142806602687.JavaMail.turbine@s78>

This story was sent to you by: michael butler

--------------------
Dreams turned to dust 
--------------------

The war rages on, but the administration's goal of exporting democracy has already failed.

By David Rieff
David Rieff is the author of "At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention" and "A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis," among other books. He reports frequently from Iraq.

March 19 2006

THREE YEARS AFTER IT BEGAN, it is still impossible to know whether the United States has lost the war in Iraq, as many critics and journalists on the ground there have long believed (and as some conservatives such as William F. Buckley Jr. have come to think as well), or whether disaster there might yet be averted. But what is clear is that the Bush administration's prewar ambition to transform Iraq into a modern model for a democratic Middle East has already failed. 

The complete article can be viewed at:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-op-rieff19mar19,0,3023063.story?coll=la-home-commentary 

Visit latimes.com at http://www.latimes.com

From michael at intrafi.com  Sun Mar 19 14:17:21 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 14:17:21 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] Shock, awe and humility
Message-ID: <9901045.1142806641760.JavaMail.turbine@s78>

This story was sent to you by: michael butler

--------------------
Shock, awe and humility 
--------------------


March 19 2006

THREE YEARS AGO TODAY, Iraqis were "shocked and awed" by the power of the U.S. military. Today, Americans are shocked and awed by its limits. If the "cakewalks" of the 1980s and 1990s &#8212; Grenada, the Gulf War, Kosovo &#8212; restored America's belief in its omnipotence, so badly shaken in Vietnam, the occupation of Iraq has been a humbling letdown. 

The complete article can be viewed at:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-iraq19mar19,0,6244632.story?coll=la-news-comment-editorials 

Visit latimes.com at http://www.latimes.com

From autoreply at economist.com  Sun Mar 19 14:27:12 2006
From: autoreply at economist.com (autoreply at economist.com)
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 17:27:12 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] An article for you from Michael Butler.
Message-ID: <200603192158.QAA17714@stage-web-app.economist.com>


- AN ARTICLE FOR YOU, FROM ECONOMIST.COM -

Dear civic,

Michael Butler (michael at intrafi.com) wants you to see this article on Economist.com.



(Note: the sender's e-mail address above has not been verified.)

Subscribe to The Economist print edition, get great savings and FREE full access to Economist.com.  Click here to subscribe:  http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/email.cfm 

Alternatively subscribe to online only version by clicking on the link below and save 25%:

http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/offer.cfm?campaign=168-XLMT



THE BUSH LEGACY
Mar 16th 2006  

It may last a lot longer than you think

GEORGE BUSH still has just over a thousand days left in the White
House--about as long as the Kennedy presidency. Yet as far as many
people are concerned he's halfway out of the door. Republicans in
Congress have started breaking ranks, most spectacularly over foreign
(ie, Arab) ownership of American ports; conservative intellectuals have
started lobbing hand grenades (the venerable William Buckley recently
branded the Iraq war a "failure"); and would-be successors have started
measuring the White House curtains. 

None of which is surprising. Mr Bush's poll numbers are dismal. The
White House staff is accident-prone (one recently departed domestic
adviser just got arrested for shoplifting). And presidential campaigns
have to start early when the entry ticket costs $100m. But anyone who
thinks that the Bush era is over should pick up a biography of Ronald
Reagan. 

In 1987 the NATIONAL JOURNAL--the bible of the Beltway crowd--ran the
headline "Reagan now viewed as an irrelevant president". The failure to
get Robert Bork onto the Supreme Court, the stockmarket crash, the
Iran-contra affair, Reagan's advanced age--all bespoke irrelevance. Yet
Reagan not only went on to regalvanise his presidency with a
foreign-policy coup (the end of the cold war, more or less); he also
became a "consequential president"--a man with a substantial legacy. Mr
Bush looks unlikely to pull off a coup of Reaganesque proportions. But
he is still shaping policy aggressively on all sorts of fronts--and his
legacy could be much bigger than people realise. 

This is partly because the White House is still doing a lot of
conservatism by stealth. The NEW YORK TIMES recently pointed out that,
behind the scenes, the administration is continuing to make steady
advances--particularly through its control over powerful executive
agencies. The Food and Drug Administration is holding up
over-the-counter sales of the "morning-after pill". The Environmental
Protection Agency is delaying green projects by insisting on
cost-benefit analyses. And the Bureau of Land Management is making it
easier to drill for oil and gas on public lands. Across the nation
feminists and greens are hopping mad, whilst oilmen are punching holes
in the virgin soil: what could be more conservative than that?

Looking at the broader picture, Mr Bush's critics tend to see his
legacy entirely in negative terms. They have a point. Whoever succeeds
him will have to clean up not just Iraq but the deficit. In fiscal
terms, moving into the White House in 2009 will be like inheriting a
mansion from a drunk uncle: it's a nice house, but the roof is falling
in and there's nothing in the bank. But if you can force yourself to
look beyond the administration's proven incompetence, Mr Bush has also
done more positive things to steer his successor's hand both at home
and abroad.

 Abroad, even allowing for the disaster in Iraq, something will surely
survive of the Bush doctrine. Future presidents may not want to rush
into pre-emptive attempts to democratise the Middle East. But America
will continue to be hyper-sensitive to the potential nexus between
terrorist groups and WMD. It will continue to engage in a complex
struggle with radical Islam. And it will continue to be the world's de
facto policeman. The biggest challenge facing Mr Bush's successors will
not be to junk his foreign policy but to tame it and implement it more
competently. 

At home, Mr Bush's legacy in domestic policy will be more than just red
ink. His No Child Left Behind Act, which tries to introduce
accountability in public education by measuring performance and
punishing failure, is likely to survive his departure, if only because
it draws on ideas with bipartisan support. Mr Bush has also helped
promote school vouchers. One scheme provides $70m to send 1,700
Washingtonians to private, mainly religious schools for the next five
years; Congress has also passed a $500m voucher scheme for the victims
of Hurricane Katrina. Any Democrat running for president will doubtless
criticise these programmes (to suck up to teachers' unions); but it
will be hard to axe them without a fuss from thousands of poor parents. 

Mr Bush has also changed the judiciary dramatically--not just by
appointing John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court but also
by filling about a quarter of the places on federal appeals courts with
conservatives. You can quibble with this achievement. Mr Bush had
plenty of help: the conservative movement has been minting little
Robertses and Alitos for 40 years. It is also true that he took an
unfortunate diversion, signposted Harriet Miers. And Messrs Roberts and
Alito may turn out to be less conservative than people think. But the
betting is that Mr Bush has reshaped the judiciary for a generation.

GEORGE AND KARL'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE
Finally, there is the political legacy. Mr Bush and his main political
adviser, Karl Rove, hit on a political formula that succeeded in
holding the right together while appealing to just enough moderates to
win elections. Small-government conservatives resent his spending, but
cutting middle-class entitlements (alas) guarantees electoral failure.
Fiscal conservatives resent his deficits, but middle Americans love
their tax cuts (the Democrats may condemn his tax cuts as being sops
for the rich, but they have also voted to prolong some of his
"temporary" cuts). Libertarians resent Mr Bush's social conservatism,
but libertarianism is a philosophy for the salons, not suburban living
rooms. Paleo-conservatives regard him as a wuss on immigration, but the
Republicans would be insane to alienate Latinos. None of this is
pretty, not much of it is principled, but it works.

The Bush formula will be picked apart over the next thousand
days--especially if the White House stumbles on from disaster to
disaster. But any Republican who wants to put together a ruling
government coalition will find that they have no choice but to put the
formula back together.
 

See this article with graphics and related items at http://www.economist.com/world/na/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5636311

Go to http://www.economist.com for more global news, views and analysis from the Economist Group.

- ABOUT ECONOMIST.COM -

Economist.com is the online version of The Economist newspaper, an independent weekly international news and business publication offering clear reporting, commentary and analysis on world politics, business, finance, science & technology, culture, society and the arts.
Economist.com also offers exclusive content online, including additional articles throughout the week in the Global Agenda section.

-	SUBSCRIBE NOW AND SAVE 25% -

Click here: http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/offer.cfm?campaign=168-XLMT

Subscribe now with 25% off and receive full access to:

* all the articles published in The Economist newspaper
* the online archive - allowing you to search and retrieve over 33,000 articles published in The Economist since 1997
* The World in  - The Economist's outlook on the year
* Business encyclopedia - allows you to find a definition and explanation for any business term


- ABOUT THIS E-MAIL -

This e-mail was sent to you by the person at the e-mail address listed
above through a link found on Economist.com.  We will not send you any
future messages as a result of your being the recipient of this e-mail.


- COPYRIGHT -

This e-mail message and Economist articles linked from it are copyright
(c) 2006 The Economist Newspaper Group Limited. All rights reserved.
http://www.economist.com/help/copy_general.cfm

Economist.com privacy policy: http://www.economist.com/about/privacy.cfm



From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Sun Mar 19 15:19:50 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (Ian)
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 18:19:50 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Check out this artist!
References: <e1536d731fe668a7e46dd29ea2929309@sbcglobal.net>
Message-ID: <00de01c64bab$9fdc65f0$99ca6c42@iancn2ccrvzt0j>

Linda:

That is absolutely incredible!!  Thanks for this!!!

Peace.
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Linda Hassler" <lindahassler at sbcglobal.net>
To: "CIVIC" <MB-Civic at islandlists.com>; "HAIR mail-list" 
<mb-hair at islandemail.com>
Sent: Sunday, March 19, 2006 11:37 AM
Subject: [Mb-civic] Check out this artist!


> Watch and be inspired all over again about what really goes on in the
> human heart.
>
> Linda Hassler
> http://marketplace.espeakers.com/movie.php?sid=5290&aid=10558
>
> _______________________________________________
> Mb-civic mailing list
> Mb-civic at islandlists.com
> http://www.islandlists.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mb-civic
> 



From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Sun Mar 19 15:30:52 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 23:30:52 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: French Protests Over Youth Labor Law Spread
	to 150 Cities and Towns
Message-ID: <20060319233052.68DBF11FA68@lax-gw07.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

This is getting serious. And why is it we don't see this kind of thing in the U.S.? (Or is that a rhetorical question?)


INTERNATIONAL / EUROPE | March 19, 2006
French Protests Over Youth Labor Law Spread to 150 Cities and Towns
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
The protesters want the abolition of a new law that allows employees under the age of 26 to be fired without cause until they have held their job for two years.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/international/europe/19paris.html?ex=1143435600&en=ad6dcc18bee4effa&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060319/e87ae05b/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Sun Mar 19 15:31:27 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 23:31:27 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Public Comments by Justices Veer Toward the
	Political
Message-ID: <20060319233128.2F9229FDCA@lax-gw05.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

WASHINGTON | March 19, 2006
Public Comments by Justices Veer Toward the Political
By ADAM LIPTAK
In speeches that may be breaking ground in judicial decorum, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and former Justice Sandra Day O'Connor have reacted to attacks on judicial independence.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/politics/19scotus.html?ex=1143435600&en=36f2cfcff34241be&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060319/5945186d/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Sun Mar 19 15:32:02 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 23:32:02 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: This Essay Breaks the Law
Message-ID: <20060319233202.35F4424A0CF@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

A very important issue...


OPINION | March 19, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor: This Essay Breaks the Law
By MICHAEL CRICHTON
The Patent Office grants patents at a level of abstraction that is unwise.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/opinion/19crichton.html?ex=1143435600&en=c1cbbc24941d5744&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060319/3f36db78/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Sun Mar 19 15:32:44 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 23:32:44 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Believers, Atheists and Morality (5 Letters)
Message-ID: <20060319233244.F1B7624B040@lax-gw02.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

What we're saying...


OPINION | March 19, 2006
Believers, Atheists and Morality (5 Letters)

To the Editor:.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/opinion/l19atheism.html?ex=1143435600&en=1df7d712cfe054e3&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060319/2e5ba5f8/attachment-0001.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Sun Mar 19 15:32:54 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 23:32:54 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Leaving Iraq to the Iraqis (2 Letters)
Message-ID: <20060319233254.8CA249FE07@lax-gw05.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

What we're saying (2)....


OPINION | March 19, 2006
Leaving Iraq to the Iraqis (2 Letters)

To the Editor:.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/opinion/l19iraq.html?ex=1143435600&en=ff13634591b886fb&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060319/aa55159a/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Sun Mar 19 15:33:15 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 23:33:15 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Dashed Hopes for Bush (2 Letters)
Message-ID: <20060319233315.A9F7283E91@lax-gw03.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

What we're saying (3)...


OPINION | March 19, 2006
Dashed Hopes for Bush (2 Letters)

To the Editor:.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/opinion/l19bush.html?ex=1143435600&en=7a00e489a3dd946d&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060319/d2dc94cd/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Sun Mar 19 15:33:39 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 23:33:39 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Strong Feelings Over South Dakota's
	Abortion Law (3 Letters)
Message-ID: <20060319233339.3518283E36@lax-gw03.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

What we're saying (4)... ("We" seem to be saying alot today...)


OPINION | March 19, 2006
Strong Feelings Over South Dakota's Abortion Law (3 Letters)

To the Editor:.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/opinion/l19abortion.html?ex=1143435600&en=e1abfa5e914ef1c8&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060319/e9e11f71/attachment.htm 

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Sun Mar 19 16:05:57 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 16:05:57 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Why We Should Leave By Brian Katulis The San Jose
	Mercury	News
Message-ID: <C04331E5.2A4A5%michael@michaelbutler.com>

    Go to Original

    Why We Should Leave
    By Brian Katulis
    The San Jose Mercury News

    Sunday 19 March 2006

    The gruesome discovery of dozens of men found shot to death
execution-style last week provided more evidence that on the eve of the
third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, the country teeters on the brink
of an all-out sectarian civil war.

    Gen. John Abizaid, the top US commander in the Middle East, recently
told a Senate committee that sectarian violence was now becoming a greater
security concern than the bloody Sunni-led insurgency that has claimed
thousands of American and Iraqi lives. And in a speech Monday, President
Bush made reference twice to various groups' attempts to ignite a civil war
among Iraq's fractious Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds.

    But even as the president suggested that the facts on the ground were
changing, he offered no change in US strategy. "We will not lose our nerve,"
Bush declared, reaffirming his "stay the course" posture.

    Abizaid did tell reporters Thursday that the United States was still
planning on reducing the number of US troops in Iraq if the battling
factions manage to form a unity government. But he did not give any
specifics on how many troops could leave, nor has the administration set any
timeline for withdrawal.

    But keeping US troops indefinitely in Iraq will do nothing to calm
growing tensions between Iraq's Sunnis and Shiites, who are by far the
largest group in the country and in the government. That anger has only
worsened as some Sunnis waged an insurgency to try to retake control of the
country they ran for decades and, more recently, as Shiite-dominated police
and military have been accused of torturing Sunnis and operating death
squads.

    No good military options exist. What is needed is a political deal, a
power-sharing compromise devised by elected Iraqi leaders. Without a deal
that equitably divides Iraq's oil wealth and gives all the major political
factions a stake in the new federal government, Iraqis will have little
incentive to build a unified state.

    One effective way to get all sides to make a deal is to say we're going
to leave Iraq - and set a timetable for doing so.

    Such a plan has three other major advantages. It will take the strain
off our ground forces, which have been pushed to the breaking point. It will
allow the United States to redeploy many of the troops stationed in Iraq to
long-neglected hot spots in the war on terror. And it will deprive
terrorists worldwide of a rallying cry against the United States, which they
have portrayed as an occupation force in a Muslim-majority country.

    At the center of America's Iraq debate is what to do about US troops.
Some leaders, such as Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., argue that the United
States should send more troops. But "extra" troops do not exist; the US Army
has been stretched thin by three years of continuous deployment in Iraq. And
increasing US troop presence would further inflame a precarious situation in
Iraq by feeding perceptions of occupation; nearly all Iraqis reject US troop
increases. The American people also do not support this option: Only one in
10 favor increasing troops.

    President Bush espouses linking troop withdrawals with conditions in
Iraq, a position also vocally endorsed by Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., among
others. But this is a recipe for quagmire. Conditions do not have a chance
of improving until Iraqis understand that the US military is not planning to
serve as a crutch indefinitely.

    Some policy analysts have proposed keeping the troop levels the same but
using them differently. One proposal - by Stephen Biddle at the Council on
Foreign Relations - would have the United States pick sides and use its
military power to force a political solution. That proposal, explained in
the accompanying article, is almost certain to fail, as have other US
attempts to micromanage Iraq's opaque politics over the last three years.

    The reality is that the US military is neither inclined nor qualified to
meddle deeply in Iraqi politics; it does not have enough people who speak
Arabic and understand Iraqi politics and culture.

    Some want out now

    Still others - Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa. among them - have argued for a
rapid withdrawal. But a precipitous departure risks all-out civil war that
could draw in Iraq's neighbors and close off any possibility for Iraqi
security forces - which now number more than 240,000 - to stand on their
own.

    There are two key problems with America's current debate on Iraq. First,
it is narrowly focused on the troops, ignoring the fact that the diplomatic
and economic levers the United States has at its disposal will have a
greater chance of stabilizing Iraq. Second, it fails to examine Iraq in the
broader context of the global threats the United States faces.

    The best alternative is a balanced plan named strategic redeployment,
which calls for a gradual drawdown of US forces from Iraq over the next two
years and which has the backing of former Senate leader Tom Daschle of South
Dakota and Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean.

    The plan began circulating in Washington in September after Lawrence
Korb, a former Reagan administration assistant defense secretary, and I
published a paper on it at the Center for American Progress, a Washington
think tank.

    The proposal says the United States should draw down its troop presence
from its present level of 136,000 to 60,000 by the end of the year, and to
virtually zero by the end of 2007. It also encourages more vigorous
diplomacy in the region and in Iraq, to bring the country's factions
together, and redeploys some of the troops leaving Iraq to other countries
where anti-American terrorists appear to be gaining footholds.

    The gradual drawdown would allow US troops to continue providing crucial
support to the nascent Iraqi security forces. (The performance of Iraqi
security forces, while it has not met expectations, has by most accounts
improved.) But the plan also clears the way for a political solution and
recognizes that current troop levels are unsustainable without a draft.

    Army needs relief

    It has become clear that if we still have more than 130,000 ground
soldiers in Iraq a year from now, we will destroy the all-volunteer Army.
Keeping such a large contingent of troops there will require the Pentagon to
send many units back to Iraq for a third time and to activate reserve and
Guard forces a second or third time. To paraphrase Vietnam-era Army Gen.
Maxwell Taylor, while we sent the Army to Iraq to save Iraq, we now have to
redeploy the Army to save the Army.

    Under strategic redeployment, all Guard and reserve troops would be
demobilized and would immediately return to the United States. This would
allow the Guard and reserve to return to their policies of troops not
spending more than one year out of five on active duty and let the Guard
focus on shoring up gaps in homeland security.

    Approximately 20,000 soldiers would be sent this year to bolster US and
NATO efforts in Afghanistan and support counterterrorist operations in
Africa and Asia. In Afghanistan, more troops are urgently needed to beat
back the resurging Taliban forces and to maintain security throughout the
country. In the Horn of Africa, countries like Somalia remain a breeding
ground for terrorists.

    Another 14,000 of the soldiers serving in Iraq would be positioned
nearby in Kuwait starting this year. Along with a Marine expeditionary force
located offshore in the Persian Gulf, these "over the horizon" forces would
be well-positioned to strike at any terrorist camps in Iraq and guard
against any major acts that risk further destabilizing the region, such as
an incursion of conventional forces from Turkey or Iran into Iraq.

    Even with all those redeployments, the number of soldiers deployed
overseas in the war on terror would drop by more than 40,000 in the first
year. This would enable the Army and Marines to return to the time-tested
policy of allowing a soldier or Marine to spend at least two months at home
for every month deployed abroad.

    The key to strategic redeployment is that it acknowledges up front that
Iraq's problems cannot be solved by American boots on the ground. A
timetable for withdrawal will spur Iraq's battling factions to try harder to
reach a compromise before US troops leave. But US leaders should also
actively work to help Iraqi leaders negotiate and to draw in leaders from
the region.

    The redeployment of US forces from Iraq requires that Iraq's neighbors
play a more active role in supporting Iraq's stability and reconstruction.
Iraq's neighbors have a better chance of persuading recalcitrant Iraqis to
compromise than we do. It was, after all, regional diplomacy and engagement
that put an end to Lebanon's civil war. Thursday's announcement that Iran
and the United States had agreed to hold talks on how to halt Iraq's
sectarian violence was welcome news.

    Bold action needed

    Until our leaders take more bold steps to motivate others to provide
help, our troops are likely to find themselves increasingly in the
cross-fire of sectarian and ethnic conflict. In that case, the United States
may end up exacerbating the tensions Gen. Abizaid is worried about and may
be forced to choose sides in what may be an emerging full-blown sectarian
civil war.

    Not setting a timeline holds the United States hostage to terrorists and
cynical Iraqi politicians like Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, who blamed the United
States for the recent Sunni-Shiite violence. Americans, in the end, will be
safer if our Army is rested and ready to take on necessary assignments, if
our National Guard and reserve are home to respond to terrorism or other
disasters and if terrorists can no longer use Iraq as a recruiting tool. The
time has come for decisive action to put the United States back in charge of
its national security.

    Brian Katulis is director of democracy and public diplomacy on the
National Security Team at the Center for American Progress.

 


From barbarasiomos38 at msn.com  Sun Mar 19 20:49:07 2006
From: barbarasiomos38 at msn.com (barbara)
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 23:49:07 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] 'Too Hot for New York' from The Nation
Message-ID: <200603200449.k2K4n75q023228@thor.thenation.com>

If you like this article, please consider subscribing to The Nation at special
discounted rates. You can order online https://ssl.thenation.com or call our
toll-free number at 1-800-333-8536.


From swiggard at comcast.net  Mon Mar 20 03:55:08 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 06:55:08 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Iranians See Talks With U.S. as Historic - Washington
	Post
Message-ID: <441E981C.1000908@comcast.net>

Iranians See Talks With U.S. as Historic
Desire for Improving Ties Grew With Population Too Young to Recall 
Hostage Crisis

By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 20, 2006; A09

TEHRAN, March 19 -- Iran's acceptance of direct talks with the United 
States over Iraq is being regarded among Iranians as a major foreign 
policy development, a historic if still tentative departure from 27 
years of official enmity that held the government of the "Great Satan" 
as one to be spoken against, but never with.

"America's objective in inviting Iran for talks is to send a message to 
Islamic movements throughout the world that Iran gave in to Washington 
after 27 years of resistance," Kayhan, a hard-line daily newspaper, 
warned Saturday in an editorial that analysts said underscored the 
significance of Iran's shift.

"Announce as soon as possible that you won't have any dialogue with the 
U.S. and avoid entering a destructive trap that has been prepared for 
Islamic Iran," the editorial continued.

Vehement opposition to the United States has been a pillar of Iran's 
theocratic system since 1979, the year an angry population overthrew the 
monarch Washington had helped install 26 years earlier in a coup 
engineered with the help of the CIA. From the U.S. side, a similar 
enmity was embedded in policy when student militants overran the 
red-brick U.S. Embassy in Tehran, taking 52 Americans hostage and 
holding them for more than a year.

The United States severed diplomatic relations with Iran, and over the 
next quarter-century both countries consistently found a reliable 
villain in the other.

Inside Iran, however, an appetite for rapprochement grew along with a 
population whose youthful majority had no memory of the revolution.

In 2002, a poll found that three-quarters of Iranians surveyed favored 
talks with the United States. The pollster was thrown in jail, but the 
reality drove a quiet competition between Iran's two rival political forces.

"Whoever could take the prize" of U.S. rapprochement would, it was 
widely believed, dominate Iranian politics for the foreseeable future, 
said Mehdi Karrubi, a moderate cleric who was speaker of the last 
parliament dominated by reformers.

The competition, however, had paralyzed the effort: Neither side would 
allow the other to reach out to the United States without risking 
accusations of betraying the Islamic revolution.

That changed last year, when conservative clerics edged reformists out 
of government, unifying Iran's elaborate ruling structure for the first 
time in nearly a decade. It also cleared the way for the opening to 
Washington, and even reformists urged the conservatives to act.

"This might be a historic irony, but it's true the state is in 
'harmony,' " said Mostafa Tajzadeh, a prominent reformist theoretician, 
speaking before the announcement of the direct talks. "No time has been 
more convenient for talks between the two countries. We are less 
sensitive than at any time since the revolution."

A few conservatives quietly urged the same. Behind the scenes of Iran's 
conservative establishment, insiders whispered about the prospect of 
negotiations.

When the announcement came Thursday, it was pointedly public. Ali 
Larijani, who heads the Supreme National Security Council, announced the 
decision to parliament, then summoned American correspondents to 
interviews. With a level gaze, he said Iran would accept the invitation 
of the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad, to talk about Iraq.

Analysts and politicians said the decision showed every sign of carrying 
the weight of Iran's ultimate authority, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. And 
some conservatives fell in line.

"It is obvious that when the Iranian officials present an idea, it is a 
calculated act," said Habibollah Asgaroladi, a leader of the Islamic 
Coalition Society, according to the ISNA news agency. "Considering the 
problems in the region, there is this necessity to solve problems 
through negotiations."

No dates have been set for the talks, and Iran has yet to name its 
delegation, which Larijani said would be of a rank "appropriate" to the 
task. Both Iran and the United States publicly emphasize that the 
subject will be limited to the teetering situation in Iraq, where both 
have deep interests and influence.

U.S. officials underscore this adamantly, openly arguing that Iran is 
opening a channel to the United States in hopes of siphoning off 
pressure it faces from the U.N. Security Council about the intentions of 
its nuclear program.

Some Iranian politicians acknowledge as much. "Although the talks will 
be over Iraq, these talks would have certain impacts on other regional 
developments and also on nuclear diplomacy," said Reza Talainik, head of 
parliament's national security and foreign affairs committee, ISNA reported.

Others describe the opening as a first step toward reducing Iran's 
estrangement from the West. The United States long has labeled Iran the 
world's largest state sponsor of terrorism. But Tajzadeh said he feared 
the escalating rhetoric over Iran's nuclear program, which many suspect 
is a front for acquiring atomic weapons, was building toward military 
action.

"The public image the U.S. has made of Iran is a monster. They have to 
do something, at least break a horn," he said. "There is only a small 
chance. This is negotiation.

"Of course, in the short term," he said, "it would not be in my party's 
favor. But in the long term, it would be in the favor of the Iranian 
nation and our party."

Naser Hadian-Jazy, a political scientist at Tehran University, said 
Iranian commentators of all stripes see the new opening as the most 
significant public approach to Washington since 1979, despite mid-level 
diplomatic contacts through third parties in advance of the invasions of 
Afghanistan and Iraq.

"Both the supporters and those who are critical have made this point 
clear," he said.

The public also appeared to welcome news of talks. "I think both sides 
should take advantage of this opportunity. They should be friends," said 
Kobra Mehdipour, 68, clutching her chador against the March wind.

Asked who in Iran might feel otherwise, she said, "There might be some 
illiterate people in the provinces who want to be friends with other 
countries but might be under the influence of some kind of propaganda."

Karrubi, the moderate cleric, moved from supporting the 1979 embassy 
takeover to urging rapprochement with Washington. He said that was the 
challenge for the governments as well.

"Both sides should forget the rhetoric used in the media and politics. 
They should put it aside," he said. "They should create something new."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/19/AR2006031901026.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060320/435a08ca/attachment-0001.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Mon Mar 20 03:56:56 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 06:56:56 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Hamas Is Alone In Cabinet Plan - Washington Post
Message-ID: <441E9888.5030906@comcast.net>

Hamas Is Alone In Cabinet Plan
Other Factions Balk at Joining Government

By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 20, 2006; A08

JERUSALEM, March 19 -- Hamas finalized a proposed cabinet Sunday that 
would place several key ministries in the hands of senior leaders but 
not include any other Palestinian faction, precisely the narrowly 
partisan government that the radical Islamic movement had hoped to avoid.

Ismail Haniyeh, the designated prime minister, submitted the list to 
Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, whose secular Fatah party declined to 
join the cabinet. The cabinet's makeup is likely to complicate efforts 
to persuade international donors to continue funding the government once 
Hamas, designated a terrorist organization by the United States and 
European Union, assumes control of the ministries.

"Their task was to have as wide a government as possible with Fatah, 
other factions and independents," said Ali Jarbawi, a political science 
professor at Beir Zeit University in the West Bank. "The cabinet they 
have proposed will be, in effect, all Hamas. They are facing a deep 
problem."

Also Sunday, the U.S. ambassador to Israel assembled Israeli and 
Palestinian delegations to discuss mounting humanitarian problems in the 
Gaza Strip resulting from closures of the main cargo passage with 
Israel. The Karni crossing has been shut for most of the year because of 
Israeli security concerns, but shortages of food and medicine are 
beginning to threaten the welfare of Gaza's 1.3 million residents.

Richard Jones, the U.S. ambassador, called the meeting in Tel Aviv on a 
few hours' notice to salvage a U.S.-brokered deal setting out the terms 
of operation at Karni following Israel's withdrawal from Gaza last fall. 
In recent weeks, Israeli officials have made clear they want the 
Palestinians to use a southern passage at the intersection of Gaza, 
Israel and Egypt, far from the strip's economic center in the north, 
rather than Karni.

Palestinian officials had refused, citing terms of the deal. But the 
delegations decided Sunday to open the southern passage, known as Kerem 
Shalom, on Monday for humanitarian deliveries from Egypt.

"The ambassador took the initiative to bring the parties together to 
find a way to move humanitarian assistance into Gaza in a way that 
addressed security concerns on both sides," said Stewart Tuttle, the 
U.S. Embassy spokesman.

Haniyeh's proposed cabinet, which was due by the end of the month, could 
change in the weeks ahead. Hamas will probably continue seeking partners 
to broaden its domestic support and assuage international donors, who 
supply nearly half of the Palestinian Authority's roughly $2 billion 
annual budget.

Abbas has demanded that Hamas accept several signed agreements backed by 
his Fatah party that would, in effect, amount to a recognition of 
Israel. Although Palestinian law does not give him the authority to veto 
the proposed cabinet, Abbas could fire Haniyeh immediately after it is 
sworn in by the Hamas-dominated legislature elected in January.

Hamas leaders so far have rejected Abbas's demands and pledged to 
continue confronting Israel "by all means." Abbas's aides have indicated 
in recent days that he will give Hamas a chance to run the ministries 
while working to persuade its leaders to endorse a negotiated two-state 
solution to the conflict.

Abbas will likely wait a few weeks to forward the proposed cabinet to 
parliament, the Palestinian Legislative Council. The delay would allow 
Israeli elections on March 28 to conclude before Hamas takes control of 
the ministries, a transition that could otherwise boost the showing of 
Israel's most hawkish parties. It would also give Haniyeh more time to 
recruit another Palestinian party for the cabinet, ideally Fatah, which 
controls the second-largest parliamentary bloc.

Haniyeh came close to bringing in the Popular Front for the Liberation 
of Palestine, a Marxist party that, like Hamas, appears on the U.S. list 
of foreign terrorist organizations. But the leaders of the party, which 
holds three of parliament's 132 seats, announced Sunday that they would 
not participate.

The Palestinian Authority is already in severe financial straits. 
International donors are considering ways of financing humanitarian 
programs for the Palestinians outside channels controlled by Hamas, 
whose charter calls for Israel's destruction.

Israel has frozen the monthly transfer of about $55 million in tax and 
customs revenue it collects on behalf of the Palestinian Authority under 
an arrangement established by the 1993 Oslo accords. Those transfers 
amount to roughly half of the authority's $115 million monthly payroll 
for 150,000 civil servants and trainees, nearly half of them in the 
security services.

Hamas officials said Haniyeh's cabinet, which was not made public, gives 
the interior and foreign ministries to members of the party, formally 
known as the Islamic Resistance Movement. But many of those nominated to 
run the 24 ministries are technocrats from outside the movement, 
although they have strong ideological connections to it.

Saed Siyam, a former teacher who won the most votes on the Hamas list in 
Gaza, has been nominated as interior minister with control of several 
Palestinian security services. Mahmoud Zahar, a thyroid surgeon and 
hard-liner, would run the Foreign Ministry, although Haniyeh has 
signaled that Abbas will be given wide latitude in dealing with foreign 
governments.

Haniyeh, considered a pragmatic figure within the movement, has been 
working since soon after the party's parliamentary victory to form a 
broad cabinet. But some Palestinian analysts say Hamas would have had a 
better chance of building a national unity government if it had selected 
a figure from outside the movement as prime minister.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/19/AR2006031901014.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060320/2b76f55a/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Mon Mar 20 04:00:12 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 07:00:12 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] My Vision For Iraq - Ibrahim al-Jafari - Washington Post
	Op-Ed
Message-ID: <441E994C.6050402@comcast.net>

My Vision For Iraq

By Ibrahim al-Jafari
The Washington Post
Monday, March 20, 2006; A15

BAGHDAD -- The elections last December in Iraq were a monumental stage 
in my country's history and a testament to the courage of its people, 
who refuse to bow to any dictator or terrorist. As the wheels of 
democracy have begun to turn in Iraq, the people's wishes are becoming 
clearer and their representatives identified. To this end I am humbled 
and honored to be chosen by my coalition to lead Iraq's first 
democratically elected full-term government.

My government's first challenge will be to stifle the terrorism that has 
plagued our country and defiled the name of Islam. While we are making 
good progress in expanding and developing Iraq's security services, the 
war against the terrorists cannot be won by military means alone. It is 
paramount that all Iraqis work together to build a democratic, free Iraq.

Since I took office, I have sought to bring every community into the 
political process. I refused to marginalize the Sunni Arabs after the 
January 2005 election boycott, ensuring they made up over a fifth of the 
cabinet.

Sidelining Moqtada al-Sadr's group from the Governing Council was a 
mistake. Had it been integrated into the political process back then, 
long before the formation of the Mahdi Army, events would have turned 
out differently in the south. I corrected this policy and brought Sadr's 
group into the democratic process. This inclusive approach resulted in 
the huge nationwide turnout for the December elections and a parliament 
that truly reflects Iraq.

During my term as elected prime minister, Sadr's group has not attacked 
any coalition troops. Furthermore, Sadr and several Sunni leaders are 
now catalysts for maintaining the peace in Iraq, calling on their 
followers not to retaliate against terrorist provocations, which aim to 
ignite civil war.

Unfortunately, we have suffered setbacks during the past year. The most 
troubling was the discovery of prisoner torture in an Interior Ministry 
jail in November. As soon as I learned of these despicable acts I formed 
an investigative committee made up solely of Sunni leaders, and I await 
its findings.

The long-term solution to this problem will be multifaceted. We must 
ensure that all security forces receive proper training and that there 
is a chain of command that holds commanders and officers responsible for 
such abuses. In addition, the various militias that fought Saddam 
Hussein's regime honorably must be fully integrated into Iraq's security 
forces without concentrating any particular group into any one division. 
Finally, we need to strengthen the country's nascent judiciary, which 
suffered years of coercion and corruption under the former regime, to 
guarantee its independence and impartiality.

The other major challenge my government will face is reviving Iraq's 
economy. Iraq has been drowned by decades of Baathist socialist policies 
that have made millions reliant on government handouts. We must 
encourage entrepreneurship and enterprise, while establishing adequate 
safety nets for the less privileged.

Economic rehabilitation also requires some tough and unpopular changes, 
such as the reduction in government subsidies for gasoline that my 
administration began a few months ago. Such steps can be made only by a 
popular government that has the trust of the people. My administration 
has the political capital to be able to bring about these necessary changes.

Ultimately, I will work to secure the reality of a democratic, liberal, 
peaceful Iraq -- a beacon for freedom in the Middle East. This is not 
merely a wish but an article of faith. Having lived in London for the 
majority of my years in exile, I appreciate the importance of liberty 
for both guaranteeing democracy and ensuring human development.

I am hopeful that with Iraqi determination, and the support of the 
multinational force, we can defeat the terrorists and make Iraq the 
first democratic Arab country. I believe in working toward a peaceful, 
stable and nuclear-free Middle East, where Iraq is not the rogue state 
that it was under the previous regime.

The road ahead will be tough, but the Iraqi people have demonstrated 
their bravery, determination and resolve. The world should not falter at 
such a crucial stage in history.

The writer is prime minister of Iraq.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/19/AR2006031901003.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060320/3db279d8/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Mon Mar 20 04:02:35 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 07:02:35 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] On Iraq,
 Plenty of Scores to Settle Even If the Dust Hasn't - Howard Kurtz -
 Washington Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <441E99DB.3040505@comcast.net>

On Iraq, Plenty of Scores to Settle Even If the Dust Hasn't

By Howard Kurtz
The Washington Post
Monday, March 20, 2006; C01

For some liberal pundits, it's payback time.

For some conservative commentators, it's time for uncomfortable 
explanations.

For the rest of us, it's the best show in town.

It was probably inevitable, once the Iraq war started to go badly -- 
though how badly remains a matter of political dispute -- that those who 
opposed it from the start would begin kicking sand in the face of those 
who backed it from the start. Had the war been a smashing success, 
accusing fingers would undoubtedly be pointing in the opposite direction.

Some of those on the right now say they were wrong, or that they 
miscalculated, or that the Bush administration has bungled what remains 
a noble effort. Others insist the war is not going all that badly, given 
the difficulty of bringing democracy to Iraq, and that history's verdict 
is not yet in.

But this is no high-minded debate about military strategy and ancient 
religious hatreds. It is an old-fashioned smackdown by those who detest 
George W. Bush against those who once defended him.

Andrew Sullivan, the author and blogger, wrote in Time that he and his 
fellow neoconservatives made "three huge errors" in underestimating the 
difficulty of invading Iraq three years ago this week. "We have learned 
a tough lesson," Sullivan wrote, "and it has been a lot tougher for 
those tens of thousands of dead, innocent Iraqis and several thousand 
killed and injured American soldiers than for a few humiliated pundits."

This drew a blast from Paul Krugman, the liberal New York Times 
columnist, who wrote: "Mr. Sullivan used to specialize in denouncing the 
patriotism and character of anyone who dared to criticize President 
Bush, whom he lionized. Now he himself has become a critic, not just of 
Mr. Bush's policies, but of his personal qualities, too. . . .

"If you're a former worshipful admirer of George W. Bush who now says, 
as Mr. Sullivan did at Cato, that 'the people in this administration 
have no principles,' you're taking a courageous stand. If you said the 
same thing back when Mr. Bush had an 80 percent approval rating, you 
were blinded by Bush-hatred. If you're a former hawk who now concedes 
that the administration exaggerated the threat from Iraq, you're to be 
applauded for your open-mindedness. But if you warned three years ago 
that the administration was hyping the case for war, you were a 
conspiracy theorist."

Sullivan conceded that he "lionized George W. Bush for a while after 
9/11" and "criticized many whose knee-jerk response immediately after 
9/11 was to blame America, and whose partisanship, like Krugman's, was 
so intense they had already deemed Bush a failure before he even had a 
chance." But he accused Krugman of "grossly distorting" his record, 
noting that he has criticized Bush on a wide range of issues, from Abu 
Ghraib to federal spending, and endorsed John Kerry in 2004.

A similar squabble erupted after National Review founder William F. 
Buckley, the intellectual godfather of modern conservatism, wrote that 
Bush must face reality: "One can't doubt that the American objective in 
Iraq has failed. . . . And the administration has, now, to cope with 
failure."

David Corn, the Nation's Washington bureau chief, used the concession to 
jab at Rich Lowry, National Review's editor, for having said while 
debating him that opponents of the war were enemies of democracy and 
freedom. "How can he not apply the same label to Buckley?" Corn 
demanded, adding: "If one side is willing to accuse the other of being 
weak, treasonous, and fans of tyranny, it is difficult to have a decent 
discourse."

Lowry responded by saying he didn't remember using that phrase, but that 
"I do remember complaining that in all our debates David had never once 
expressed the slightest pleasure at Saddam's ouster or the Iraqi 
elections. . . . For the record: I don't think David is an enemy of 
democracy, just a partisan blinded by Bush hatred. And I see no 
connection between the crowd-pleasing bile he sometimes spews at our 
debates, and Buckley's prudential doubts about nation-building in Iraq."

It would be easy to dismiss all the sniping as pundits behaving badly. 
After all, the usual drill is for liberals to declare some 
administration policy a failure (the economy, Hurricane Katrina, the 
Medicare drug program) and for conservatives to insist that things are 
going much better than the Bush-bashers and left-leaning press would 
have you believe. There were exceptions to this pattern -- many 
conservatives savaged the Harriet Miers nomination and the Dubai ports 
deal -- but their rarity made them especially newsworthy.

As Bush continues to flounder in the polls, more on the right are 
breaking ranks. Bruce Bartlett, who was dropped by a free-market think 
tank over his new book "Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America 
and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy," recently called the administration 
"unconscionable," "vindictive" and "inept."

Peggy Noonan writes that she would not have voted for Bush had she known 
he was going to turn into a big-spending Lyndon Johnson. Jonah Goldberg 
writes that "most conservatives never really understood what 
compassionate conservatism was, beyond a convenient marketing slogan," 
and the "reality" is "that there was nothing behind the curtain."

Not everyone is jumping ship. Fred Barnes, executive editor of the 
Weekly Standard, who remains a strong Bush supporter, writes that "the 
mainstream media likes nothing more than to play up conservatives who 
attack other conservatives."

Maybe so. But the war is the overriding issue of the Bush presidency, 
and when conservative commentators begin shifting their stance on 
whether the conflict has been mishandled, it's hardly surprising that 
their liberal counterparts are going to pile on. Iraq, like Vietnam, may 
well stir passions for a generation, and those in the opinion business 
will not be able to escape the question: Which side were you on?

Color Blindness

"The cover photograph in The Times Magazine on Sunday rendered colors 
incorrectly for the jacket, shirt and tie worn by Mark Warner, the 
former Virginia governor who is a possible candidate for the presidency. 
The jacket was charcoal, not maroon; the shirt was light blue, not pink; 
the tie was dark blue with stripes, not maroon. . . . The film that was 
used can cause colors to shift, and the processing altered them further; 
the change escaped notice because of a misunderstanding by the editors." 
-- Wednesday's New York Times.

Huffy Over Huffington

It all depends on the meaning of the word blog.

George Clooney is mighty steamed at Arianna Huffington for stitching 
together comments from a couple of his interviews and running them as a 
posting on her Web site. Clooney says the Huffington Post created the 
false impression that he wrote the short essay about being a proud liberal.

The Oscar-winning actor told the New York Daily News he feels "abused" 
and that Huffington had warned him that his griping would be "bad for my 
career. . . . I'm not going to be threatened by Arianna Huffington!"

Huffington's blog response is that it was all "an honest 
misunderstanding" and she believed she had written permission from 
Clooney's PR person. "But any misunderstanding that occurred, occurred 
between Clooney and the publicist." Over the weekend, however, 
Huffington apologized for making a "big" mistake and said she will now 
make clear when blog postings are reprinted from elsewhere.

Veteran magazine editor Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine.com is siding with 
Clooney: "How Hollywood can this go: 'I'll have my person link to your 
person'? . . . Huffington was wrong to try to create a faked-up post 
under Clooney's name."

NPR's High Standards

"I was so micromanaged that they were telling me how to pronounce 
syllables of words." -- Bob Edwards on his former employer, National 
Public Radio, telling Newsweek he feels liberated at XM Satellite Radio.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/19/AR2006031901169.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060320/6fa0dcfc/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Mon Mar 20 04:05:47 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 07:05:47 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Another Blown Case? - Washington Post Editorial
Message-ID: <441E9A9B.1050602@comcast.net>

Another Blown Case?

Washington Post Editorial
Monday, March 20, 2006; A14

THE DEATH penalty case against accused Sept. 11 conspirator Zacharias 
Moussaoui has barely survived the government's latest bout of 
incompetence. In a blatant violation of a court order, a Federal 
Aviation Administration lawyer working on the case sent key aviation 
witnesses a transcript of the government's opening statement, along with 
her comments on it. This led U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema to 
exclude those witnesses -- potentially crippling the prosecutors' case 
for execution of the only person to face trial for the attacks on the 
Pentagon and the World Trade Center. On Friday, Judge Brinkema revised 
her order, allowing the testimony of aviation witnesses untainted by the 
misconduct. So the case will now limp forward.

Americans opposed to capital punishment, as we are, have little reason 
to regret this development. Mr. Moussaoui already has pleaded guilty and 
faces life in prison, which is the sentence he should get. While he is 
by his own admission an al-Qaeda operative sent here to do America harm, 
his links to the attacks -- which took place after he was in custody -- 
are weak.

This case nevertheless joins a line of big terrorism prosecutions marred 
by government misconduct, overzealousness, hyping of charges or just 
plain ineffectiveness. A conviction in Detroit had to be set aside 
because of prosecutorial misconduct. The government brought spectacular 
charges against accused Islamic Jihad activist Sami al-Arian, only to 
see a jury reject many of them -- and convict on none -- after a lengthy 
trial. Then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft announced the arrest of 
Jose Padilla with great fanfare as the foiling of a plot to detonate a 
radiological "dirty" bomb; after holding him for years as an enemy 
combatant, the government indicted him for far lesser matters. Mohamed 
Qahtani, the Guantanamo Bay inmate the government has labeled the 20th 
hijacker -- when it wasn't busy making the same claim about Mr. 
Moussaoui -- was subjected to such abusive interrogation that he 
probably cannot face trial at all.

More generally, the military still hasn't managed to try a single person 
at Guantanamo before its much-vaunted commissions, whose main selling 
point was their efficiency. More than four years after the Sept. 11 
attacks, the United States lacks a stable, predictable system for trying 
accused terrorists.

Prosecuting terrorists isn't easy, as Mr. Moussaoui's trial has 
repeatedly illustrated, but much of this is the Bush administration's 
fault. The administration failed to work with Congress to create viable 
legal structures to handle these cases, proceeding in whatever way 
seemed most convenient in any given situation. The results are abysmal. 
And, ironically, they undermine the case for the more secretive military 
trial procedures the government is trying to create. If authorities fail 
so often to play by the rules in the relatively open federal court 
system, it's hard to believe their behavior will be better when the 
spotlight is turned off.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/19/AR2006031900763.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060320/343def43/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Mon Mar 20 04:08:46 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 07:08:46 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] IMPORTANT: The politics of pacifism meets FBI monitoring
 - James Carroll - Boston Globe Op-Ed
Message-ID: <441E9B4E.6080804@comcast.net>


  The politics of pacifism meets FBI monitoring

By James Carroll  |  March 20, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

OVER THE LAST four years, the FBI has repeatedly spied on the Thomas 
Merton Center, a Catholic peace organization in Pittsburgh. The American 
Civil Liberties Union made the case public last week, with 
documentation. One 2002 FBI memo defined the center as ''a left-wing 
organization advocating, among many political causes, pacifism." Oh my. 
I confess that I felt a little light-headed on reading this news; d?j? 
vu all over again, as Yogi Berra would say.

The Thomas Merton Center, named for the great Trappist monk, was an 
antiwar beacon of hope beginning in the early 1970s, and it was a target 
of FBI harassment even then. Unlike most Vietnam-era peace 
organizations, the center is still going strong. Hanging on my wall is a 
citation I received from the center in 1972, and last week's news makes 
me prouder of it than ever.

The founding director of the Merton Center is Larry Kessler, who, after 
moving to Boston, became founding director of the AIDS Action Committee 
23 years ago. Having led AIDS Action to its position of national 
prominence as an exemplary AIDS advocacy and service organization, 
Kessler is retiring next month, to, as he put it, ''get back to my roots 
and work on the social justice issues that continue to drive this 
epidemic: poverty, violence, racism, and homophobia."

It is as if, in carrying out fresh surveillance of the antiwar 
organization Kessler started more than 30 years ago, the FBI is paying 
tribute to the staying power of this compassionate prophet of justice 
and peace.

That's one part of the story. Another part is implied in the FBI memo, 
which breathlessly singles out pacifism as a ''political cause" of 
concern. What drew the bureau's attention to the Merton Center in 2002 
was its members' handing out leaflets that opposed the impending war in 
Iraq.

Of course, one needn't have been a pacifist to have seen the folly, and 
immorality, of the impending ''shock and awe" campaign. Still, what made 
the Merton Center leafleting an un-American activity requiring FBI 
monitoring, despite its certain legality, was the blatant rejection of 
the government's hair-trigger presumption in favor of war as the way to 
resolve international conflict.

Never mind that the instincts on display at the Merton Center just then 
proved far more reasonable -- and realistic -- than those that drove the 
United States into the abyss of the present situation in Iraq.

As if to join the FBI in its alarm about pacifism, the Bush 
administration last week reiterated its supreme reliance on force as 
defining America's main mode of being in the world. In 2002, the 
so-called National Security Strategy first articulated the Bush doctrine 
of preventive war, and now an update has been issued. The new statement 
repeats the assertion of a unilateral right of ''anticipatory action to 
defend ourselves."

The preventive war doctrine was a true innovation in American foreign 
policy, yet now it is referred to as if an established tradition. What 
were abstract questions about the doctrine's wisdom and even legality in 
2002 have become, through blood in the streets of cities across the 
Mideast, hard lessons that Washington has yet to learn.

Today, Iran occupies the center of preoccupation, with a threat of a 
coming ''confrontation," but the new document's ominous tone extends to 
Syria, China, and Russia. Lip service is paid to diplomacy, but the 
threat of war is the main note being struck here. In Iraq especially, 
the world sees where such bluster leads.

But in this time of shameless political pliancy, perhaps the FBI is 
right to treat as subversive those who question the Bush premise. And in 
getting caught in shadows of the Merton Center again, perhaps the FBI is 
accidentally serving a useful purpose.

To a government enthralled with the power of violent force, any dissent 
can seem like pacifism, but when the word is slung to discredit reasoned 
objections as wild-eyed idealism that would leave terrorists unchecked, 
it does not stick.

In the distant past, groups had to be associated with communism to 
become targets of the national security apparatus, but in the Vietnam 
era it became enough merely to ask questions about an obviously immoral 
war. D?j? vu indeed.

The FBI is once more serving an invaluable function with its inept 
display of the shallow paranoia that sees enemies everywhere, a clear 
manifestation of the mental unbalance driving the entire enterprise of 
the United States government.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/20/the_politics_of_pacifism_meets_fbi_monitoring/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060320/dcc11c4b/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Mon Mar 20 04:13:33 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 07:13:33 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] The paradox of post-traumatic growth - Richard Tedeschi,
 Lawrence Calhoun - Boston Globe Op-Ed
Message-ID: <441E9C6D.4030909@comcast.net>


  The paradox of post-traumatic growth

By Richard G. Tedeschi and Lawrence G. Calhoun  |  March 20, 2006  |  
The Boston Globe

DO YOU believe that bad things happen to other people and that by 
following the rules and living right you will avoid suffering? Do you 
believe that your life is predictable and stable? Many of us hold these 
beliefs, and when crises occur in our lives, these assumptions about 
life are challenged. Such crises and the questioning that arises from 
them may bring unexpected changes, including hard-won wisdom.

What is the worst thing that ever happened to you? What is the best 
thing? For some people, these are the same. That is what we learned in 
our studies of people who are survivors of traumatic events. Consider Jerry.

Jerry was living the life that many young people aspire to, playing in a 
successful rock band. But one night the bus carrying the band crashed. 
When Jerry woke up in a hospital, he learned that he would never walk 
again. His career as a traveling musician was pretty much over, too.

When we talked to him a few years later, while he sat in his wheelchair, 
he said the accident was the best thing that had ever happened to him. 
Perhaps he was in denial, or perhaps he was employing an unconscious 
defense mechanism. But we think Jerry was describing the experience of 
what we call posttraumatic growth. Jerry valued the disabling accident 
because it steered him in a new, fulfilling direction that he was 
convinced he wouldn't have found otherwise. He returned to college, 
completed graduate school, and became a rehabilitation counselor, 
responsible for a program that helps people with accessibility problems 
at home and at work. Although most people who endure trauma do not claim 
that the trauma was a good thing, many have found their suffering leads 
to valued changes.

Two events have presented major challenges to many people this year 
--the war in Iraq and Hurricane Katrina. We are rightly concerned about 
the negative effects of these events on those who are in the midst of 
them, those who have now left them behind, those of us who have known 
people who have survived them, and those of us who have only watched 
from afar. What has become evident in recent years, however, is that in 
the midst of suffering and loss there is survival and resilience. Beyond 
that, there can be something more -- transformation and growth.

We have discovered that survivors of a variety of crises, including 
life-threatening illness, accidents, crime, combat, and natural 
disaster, can experience, along with the pain and distress, some 
combination of five kinds of positive transformations -- a greater sense 
of personal strength, closer relationships with others, a greater 
appreciation of life, a new philosophy of life, including a more 
meaningful spiritual life, and new opportunities and life paths. In the 
struggle to make sense out of what they have gone through, people can 
develop new ways of looking at life that allow them to live lives that 
are fuller, wiser, and more purposeful.

Ever since the Vietnam War, we have understood that some returning 
veterans, especially those who have seen extended and horrible combat, 
are haunted by post-traumatic symptoms and guilt.

But there seems to be a popular idea that all combat veterans will 
inevitably have trauma symptoms. The truth is that most American 
veterans returning home from war go on to lead good lives without 
psychiatric difficulties.

Moreover, some veterans, including those from Iraq, see their war 
experience as having benefited them, even transformed them in highly 
positive ways. They may be wounded, they may have regrets, and they may 
still have difficult challenges to face. But they have also changed 
their personal philosophies and may now see themselves as stronger, 
wiser, and more closely connected to other humans.

Because of their difficult experiences, these soldiers or survivors of 
other severe challenges may be a future source of wisdom about how to 
live wisely and how to create societies that better allow us to do that. 
They, like so many of us who have experienced suffering and loss, may 
also see the wisdom in the paraphrase of an old American Protestant 
hymn: Shun not the struggle; it is a gift.

Richard G. Tedeschi and Lawrence G. Calhoun are professors of psychology 
at The University of North Carolina at Charlotte and co-editors of the 
soon to be published ''Handbook of Posttraumatic Growth: Research and 
Practice."

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/20/the_paradox_of_post_traumatic_growth/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060320/562e5d17/attachment-0001.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Mon Mar 20 07:13:55 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 15:13:55 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Plight Deepens for Black Men, Studies Warn
Message-ID: <20060320151355.8937424B0A2@lax-gw02.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

NATIONAL | March 20, 2006
Plight Deepens for Black Men, Studies Warn
By ERIK ECKHOLM
Poorly educated black men are becoming more disconnected from mainstream society, even as other groups make gains.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/20/national/20blackmen.html?ex=1143522000&en=05d1d02ee86db429&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060320/d9ad5f20/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Mon Mar 20 07:15:18 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 15:15:18 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: How Pop Sounded Before It Popped
Message-ID: <20060320151518.B78E013B989@lax-gw04.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

ARTS / MUSIC | March 19, 2006
Music: How Pop Sounded Before It Popped
By JODY ROSEN
An astonishing trove of pop music from 100 years ago is now available on the Web, opening up a lost musical world that deserves its place in the historical narrative.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/arts/music/19rose.html?ex=1143522000&en=09154569dd77d78f&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060320/61a8df6e/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Mon Mar 20 07:16:47 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 15:16:47 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Women Who Decide to Opt Out (5 Letters)
Message-ID: <20060320151647.A0A863AE698@lax-gw06.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

OPINION | March 20, 2006
Women Who Decide to Opt Out (5 Letters)

To the Editor:.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/20/opinion/l20women.html?ex=1143522000&en=3ce02ed1a11157eb&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060320/0bb3f264/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Mon Mar 20 07:17:11 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 15:17:11 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Spreading Genocide to Chad
Message-ID: <20060320151711.BAA763AE698@lax-gw06.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

OPINION | March 20, 2006
Editorial: Spreading Genocide to Chad

The Arab militias of Sudan have unleashed their fury on villages in Chad. It is up to the United States to stop the slaughter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/20/opinion/20mon2.html?ex=1143522000&en=2ac85d010b2a74e9&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060320/f5326df7/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Mon Mar 20 07:18:34 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 15:18:34 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Where Showing Skin Doesn't Sell,
	a New Style Is a Hit
Message-ID: <20060320151834.63C4E3AEB03@lax-gw06.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

INTERNATIONAL / AFRICA | March 20, 2006
Dadaab Journal: Where Showing Skin Doesn't Sell, a New Style Is a Hit
By MARC LACEY
A sporty version of the traditional Muslim dress for women is being developed for Somali girls at a refugee camp in Kenya who have discovered the joys of volleyball.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/20/international/africa/20kenya.html?ex=1143522000&en=e37c8b47dc8ebf88&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060320/9372382c/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Mon Mar 20 07:18:57 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 15:18:57 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Ayatollahs Aside,
	Iranians Jump for Joy at Spring
Message-ID: <20060320151858.224B713BA7E@lax-gw04.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

INTERNATIONAL / MIDDLE EAST | March 20, 2006
Ayatollahs Aside, Iranians Jump for Joy at Spring
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
Increasing enthusiasm for ancient traditions in Iran may represent a resistance against more conservative religious rulers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/20/international/middleeast/20iran.html?ex=1143522000&en=9962ba821f80f961&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060320/c7b74586/attachment-0001.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Mon Mar 20 07:19:44 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: 20 Mar 2006 15:19:44 -0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] Headlines for March 20, 2006
Message-ID: <20060320151944.14075.qmail@trinity.democracynow.org>

Mike Blaxill  ( mblaxill at yahoo.com )
sent you this story from democracynow.org




+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  Headlines for March 20, 2006
|  http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/20/1439221
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+


- Anti-War Protests Worldwide as Occupation Enters Fourth Year 
- Ex-Interim Iraq PM Says Iraq Mired in Civil War 
- Iraqi Video Leads to War Crimes Investigation of US Marines 
- US Accused of Killing Iraqi Civilians Near Balad
- Prison Abuse Continued After Abu Ghraib
- Police Memos Recommend Surveillance, ?Proactive Arrest"
This story continues at: 
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/20/1439221


From hecate at diamonddragon.com  Mon Mar 20 08:57:07 2006
From: hecate at diamonddragon.com (Hecate)
Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 11:57:07 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Watch this great film - The Meatrix
Message-ID: <200603201657.k2KGv7A0017980@grace2.client.logicworks.net>



Hecate thought you would like to watch The Meatrix, a four minute animated movie that spoofs the Matrix films and stars a cow, a pig and a chicken. The Meatrix has won many awards, has been seen by millions of people, and has been critically acclaimed by both press and viewers.

Check it out at http://www.themeatrix.com/

Hecate has also sent you a personal message:
great short about industrial farming


And if you've already seen The Meatrix, check out our updated information at http://www.themeatrix.com/action

Thanks!

The Meatrix Team



From hecate at diamonddragon.com  Mon Mar 20 09:58:01 2006
From: hecate at diamonddragon.com (Hecate)
Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 17:58:01 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] BBC E-mail: Canada's growing marijuana problem
Message-ID: <20060320_175801_002981.hecate@diamonddragon.com>

Hecate saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you
should see it.



** Canada's growing marijuana problem **
The sharp growth of Canada's illicit marijuana industry - now thought to be worth billions of dollars a year - is putting increasing pressure on authorities.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/americas/4620272.stm >


** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all
in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/dailyemail/ >


** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have?been verified.

If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm


From ean at sbcglobal.net  Sun Mar 19 21:40:10 2006
From: ean at sbcglobal.net (ean at sbcglobal.net)
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 21:40:10 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Where's the Resistance Here on the Home Front?
Message-ID: <E1FLPU2-0001EZ-O0@elasmtp-banded.atl.sa.earthlink.net>


http://counterpunch.org/

March 18 / 19, 2006

Three Years On

Where's the Resistance Here on the Home Front?

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

Three years into the war in Iraq and now about two out of three Americans
are against it, as against about one out of fifty elected politicians. In
Iraq 2,315 Americans have died, and 17,100 wounded, many of them with
limbs lost, some facing a lifetime in a wheel chair. Of the tens of
thousands who have returned from combat to army bases or civilian life
here, around 2.5 per cent are suffering from severe post traumatic stress
syndrome, powder kegs, a menace to themselves and their families. There
will be psychic as well as physical wreckage across America for years to
come.

In Iraq, the Johns Hopkins study last September made an accounting of the
full death toll wrought by the devastation of the US invasion and
occupation. It concluded that "about 100,000 excess deaths" (in fact
98,000) among men, women, and children had occurred in just under eighteen
months. Violent deaths alone had soared twentyfold. But, as in most wars,
the bulk of the carnage was due to the indirect effects of the invasion,
notably the breakdown of the Iraqi health system.

Re-working the Johns Hopkins study with the benefit of better techniques
of statistical analysis Andrew Cockburn concluded here early in the New
Year that on the basis of the raw sample data compiled by Iraqis for the
Johns Hopkins study, the true number of dead in Iraq in consequence of the
war had probably hit around 180,000, with a possibility that it had
already reached as high as half a million. Of course all sets of numbers,
whatever statistical analysis you accept, have been climbing steadily ever
since.

This week the Pentagon announced it may be increasing its troop strength
by a thousand or so.

Iraq itself is a disaster, teetering on the brink of full blown-civil war.
Conditions of life in the capital and other major cities have steadily
worsened across three years. As a functioning state Iraq has collapsed,
the ministers in its government hastening overseas as often as they can
or, when home, looting public assets while never daring to venture out of
the green zone.

Mention of the "green zone", a bubble of corruption and delusion, takes us
from Baghdad to Washington, and its green zone, secluded from reality, in
which the Democrats now dwell.

As a political matter one would have thought that few leaders in recorded
history would be more vulnerable to attack than Bush and Cheney, regarding
their war in Iraq. The justifications for the attack have been exposed so
many times that the lies are now taken as given, except by the Wall Street
Journal editorial page, where any concession to reality is regarded as a
death penalty offense.

The pretexts have been discredited; the purported aims have long since
evaporated, as the present U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad,
concedes wanly: "We seem to have opened a Pandora's Box." Not so long 
ago,
as Norman Solomon recently recalled on this site Chris Mathews was telling
his audience on MSNBC , "We're are all neo-cons now", and then a few
months later, "Americans love having a guy as president, a guy who has a
little swagger, who's physical, who's not a complicated guy like Clinton.
Women like A GUY [as] president. Check it out. I think we like having a
hero as our president."

These are lonely times for Matthews, as Bush sags to the lowest
presidential approval ratings in the last century. Even the women of
Indiana have abandoned their guy, as his standing in that state tumbles to
below 40.

Across the past year the peace movement didn't do much, so far as we could
tell, but was bailed out by two great champions who changed the political
picture. The first was Cindy Sheehan, who haunted the man Hugo Chavez
taunts as "the king of vacations" for those crucial weeks in the late
summer of 2005, outside his ranch in Texas. (Has any president ever had a
worse stretch than Bush did between the founding of Sheehan's Camp Casey,
through hurricane Katrina, to the exposure of the domestic spying program,
with Cheney shooting one of their top funders as lagniappe.)

The second champion was Jack Murtha, the 73-year old former U.S. Marine
and life-long hawk who turned on the war in a sensational press conference
on the Hill in November, calling for "immediate withdrawal", and repeating
that call in vigorous interviews and speeches. Murtha effortlessly swatted
down the Republican libels of him and the usual devious efforts to
undercut him from prime-time hawks like CNN's Wolf Blitzer.

But the subsequent fate of Sheehan's and Murtha's campaigns is highly
instructive. Sheehan threatened a challenge to Senator Diane Feinstein who
is running for her third term this year. Because CounterPuncher Todd
Chretien has got the Green Party nomination, Sheehan thought aloud about
challenging Feinstein in the Democratic Primary. Why not? Feinstein has
been unwavering in her support for the war and her husband Richard Blum
has made millions in war-related contracts. Sentiment against the war
across the state is strong. Sheehan is well known. But then Senator
Barbara Boxer intervened, and publicly pleaded with Sheehan to stand down.
She did. Result? Politically speaking, Sheehan has vanished.

If any Democrat had the sort of manly credibility Matthews craves, it was
surely Jack Murtha. He's a former Marine drill instructor, a war vet and,
in Congress, had a proven record as paid-up member of the Military
Industrial Complex with his years as chairman of the House Armed Services
Committee. Here was no peacenik turning against the war. But the day he
did, the Democratic delegation in Congress fled him, almost to the last
man and woman. (As did too many on the left, who whined that somehow
Murtha's withdrawal plan wasn't quite radical enough. What did they want?
To have Murtha hold up the Little Red Book and swear allegiance to the
memory of Mao?)

In its present form the Democratic Party has ceased to be a credible
opposition. It is constitutionally incapable of confronting the
Administration, on the war or anything else.

Their only strategy is to let George Bush self-destruct, as a kind of
political suicide bomber. They don't care how many are killed in Iraq or
how many items in the Bill of Rights Bush and Cheney tear up. They are
terrified of actually doing or saying something substantive, except to
taunt Mexicans crossing the border in search of work or to thump the
nativist drum about Arabs owning American assets..

Is this too cruel? Surely the Democrats have some fight left in them.
After all, the first edition of the Patriot Act in 2002 passed with only
one No vote in the Senate. Russell Feingold's. When the second edition of
the Patriot Act passed in recent weeks, there were ten votes against, one
of from a former Republican,. Jeffords of Vermont. The Democrats invented
a new form of "safe opposition" here. When Russ Feingold tried to lead a
filibuster against the Patriot Act, his Democratic colleagues conducted
"test votes" where many of them puffed up their chests and boldly said
they opposed the Patriot Act. Then they came to the real vote, chests
subsided and the numbers dwindled to eight.

Feingold has now introduced into the Senate a censure motion of the
President, charging him with violating the law in the NSA eavesdropping.
Dana Milbanke in the Washington Post had an entertaining piece last
Wednesday describing the panic of Feingold's Democratic colleagues when
asked for their views on his motion.

Barrack Obama of Illinois: "I haven't read it."

Ben Nelson of Nebraska: "I just don't have enough information."

John Kerry of Massachusetts: "I really can't [comment] right now."

Hillary Clinton of New York rushed past reporters shaking her head, then
trying to hide behind the 4'11" Barbara Mikulski.

Charles Schumer of New York, who would normally run over his 
grandmother
to get to a microphone: "I'm not going to comment."

Mary Landrieu of Louisiana: "Senator Feingold has a point he wants to
make. We have a point that we want to make, talking about the budget."

Chris Dodd of Connecticut: "Most of us feel at best it's premature. I
don't think anyone can say with any certainty at this juncture that what
happened [i.e., the NSA's eavesdropping] is illegal."

In the face of this preen of yellow feathers Feingold said, "If there's
any Democrat who can't say the President has no right to make up his own
laws, I don't know if that Democrat really is the right candidate for
president."

Right on Russ, but you know the answer already. You're in a race for the
Democratic nomination for President in 2008 where you are the only
candidate thus far prepared to say the President is a law breaker and that
the war is illegal and should be ended immediately and the Patriot Act
repealed. Why are you in this party? You come from a state which eighty
years ago saw the bold stand of Robert LaFollette who broke away to form a
third party. Why don't you do the same? Look at Jim Jeffords of Vermont.
He broke free, defied the Republican whip is now an independent and has
more stature in his state than Patrick Leahy. Be that "guy" that Mathews
craves for. Jump! Someone has to seize the day.

Footnote: It looks as if the fire escape chosen by Bush to save him from
those low thirties numbers is the old neocon refrain of the Iranian
menace. This clashes with the official line of the pundit legions, which
is that the neocons have been sent out to pasture and replaced in the
corridors of power by "pragmatists". We even heard Michael Gordon of the
New York Times and his co-author Bernard Trainor, while flacking their new
history of the Iraq war on Amy Goodman, claim that the neocons were "on
the outside" during the planning and execution of the Iraq war. That was
before Goodman spoiled Gordon's day by bringing up all those WMD fantasy
pieces he wrote with Judy Miller. Anyone who needs reminding on just how
the neocons did it last time, the better to prepare for the next war,
would do worse than keep by their hand the IHS Press compilation
Neo-Conned Again, which kicks off with a contribution from your two
CounterPunch editors.


_________________________________


-- 
You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, 
option D (up to 3 emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options 
(option A - 1x/week, option B - 3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option D - 
up to 3x/day) please reply and let us know!  If someone forwarded you 
this email and you want to be on our list, send an email to 
ean at sbcglobal.net and tell us which option you'd like.


"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060319/924668c2/attachment.htm 

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Mon Mar 20 11:00:17 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 11:00:17 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Illogical Cutbacks on Cancer By BOB HERBERT-NYTimes
Message-ID: <C0443BC1.2A507%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 20, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Illogical Cutbacks on Cancer
By BOB HERBERT

When I was a kid I had the wildest crush on my Uncle Breeze's wife, Betty.
She was beautiful and with all my heart I wanted to grow up and marry
someone just like her.

I remember acutely the sadness I felt some years later when my mother told
me that Aunt Betty was ill. She died not long after that. Cervical cancer.

This old memory was brought back to me by, of all things, a small but
telling item in President Bush's mammoth budget proposal.

The federal government has a national breast and cervical cancer early
detection program, run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It
provides screening and other important services to low-income women who do
not have health insurance, or are underinsured.

There is agreement across the board that the program is a success. It saves
lives and it saves money. Its biggest problem is that it doesn't reach
enough women. At the moment there is only enough funding to screen one in
five eligible women.

A sensible policy position for the Bush administration would be to expand
funding for the program so that it reached everyone who was eligible. It
terms of overall federal spending, the result would be a net decrease.
Preventing cancer, or treating it early, is a lot less expensive than
treating advanced cancer.

So what did this president do? He proposed a cut in the program of $1.4
million (a minuscule amount when you're talking about the national budget),
which would mean that 4,000 fewer women would have access to early
detection.

This makes no sense. In human terms, it is cruel. From a budget standpoint,
it's self-defeating.

"The program is really designed to help working women," said Dan Smith, a
senior vice president at the American Cancer Society. "They may be working
at a job that doesn't provide health insurance, but they're not the poorest
of the poor who would qualify for Medicaid."

In many cases, these are women who do not have family doctors who might
encourage them to be screened. The program offers free mammograms, Pap tests
and other early detection services. "If they're diagnosed," said Mr. Smith,
"there's a complementary program that allows them to be immediately insured
so they can actually have the coverage for their treatment. That's a great
program, as well."

"The early detection program is a good program because it has saved lives,"
said Dr. Harold Freeman, a senior adviser to the Cancer Society. "The women
who are served come from a population that has a proven higher death rate
from cervical and breast cancer."

He added: "It's hard to get into the health care system when you are
asymptomatic. It's much easier to get into the system if you're obviously
sick, if you're bleeding or in pain. But the problem with cancer is, if
you're going to be cured, you have to get in before those kinds of symptoms
occur. So these women need to be screened."

Dr. Freeman, a New York physician who has long specialized in the prevention
and treatment of cancer, made it clear that his first concern was the health
and quality of life of his patients. But then he addressed what he
characterized as the "shortsighted" economic rationale for the budget cut.

"It won't save money," he said. "You don't save money by not diagnosing
cancer early. You end up spending more money because anyone who develops
cancer will get into the health care system and they will be treated. And
the cost at that point will be a lot more. The logic here is very simple:
the later you diagnose cancer of the breast or cervix, the more expensive it
is to the country."

This is just one program in a range of cancer services that rely on support
from the federal government. As if immune to the extent of human suffering
involved, President Bush has proposed a barrage of cuts for these programs.

"What's really amazing," said Mr. Smith, "is that the president cut every
cancer program. He cut the colorectal cancer program. He cut research at the
National Cancer Institute. He cut literally every one of our cancer-specific
programs. It's incomprehensible."

A bipartisan movement is under way in the Senate to block the president's
proposed cuts. How that ultimately will fare is unclear.

What is clear is that cancer is a disease that horrifies most Americans, and
with good reason. One out of every two men will contract the disease in his
lifetime, and one out of every three women.

This is an area in which we need to be doing more, not less.

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top



From michael at michaelbutler.com  Mon Mar 20 11:05:39 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 11:05:39 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Bogus Bush Bashing By PAUL KRUGMAN- NYTimes
Message-ID: <C0443D03.2A508%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 20, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Bogus Bush Bashing
By PAUL KRUGMAN

"The single word most frequently associated with George W. Bush today is
'incompetent,' and close behind are two other increasingly mentioned
descriptors: 'idiot' and 'liar.' " So says the Pew Research Center for the
People and the Press, whose most recent poll found that only 33 percent of
the public approves of the job President Bush is doing.

Mr. Bush, of course, bears primary responsibility for the state of his
presidency. But there's more going on here than his personal inadequacy;
we're looking at the failure of a movement as well as a man. As evidence,
consider the fact that most of the conservatives now rushing to distance
themselves from Mr. Bush still can't bring themselves to criticize his
actual policies. Instead, they accuse him of policy sins ? in particular, of
being a big spender on domestic programs ? that he has not, in fact,
committed.

Before I get to the bogus issue of domestic spending, let's look at the
policies the new wave of conservative Bush bashers refuses to criticize.

Mr. Bush's new conservative critics don't say much about the issue that most
disturbs the public, the quagmire in Iraq. That's not surprising.
Commentators who acted as cheerleaders in the run-up to war, and in many
cases questioned the patriotism of those of us who were skeptical, can't
criticize the decision to start this war without facing up to their own
complicity in that decision.

Nor, after years of insisting that things were going well in Iraq and
denouncing anyone who said otherwise, is it easy for them to criticize Mr.
Bush's almost surreal bungling of the war. (William Kristol of The Weekly
Standard is the exception; he says that we never made a "serious effort" in
Iraq, which will come as news to the soldiers.)

Meanwhile, the continuing allegiance of conservatives to tax cuts as the
universal policy elixir prevents them from saying anything about the real
sources of the federal budget deficit, in particular Mr. Bush's
unprecedented decision to cut taxes in the middle of a war. (My colleague
Bob Herbert points out that the Iraq hawks chose to fight a war with other
people's children. They chose to fight it with other people's money, too.)

They can't even criticize Mr. Bush for the systematic dishonesty of his
budgets. For one thing, that dishonesty has been apparent for five years.
More than that, some prominent conservative commentators actually celebrated
the administration's dishonesty. In 2001 Time.com blogger Andrew Sullivan,
writing in The New Republic, conceded that Mr. Bush wasn't truthful about
his economic policies. But Mr. Sullivan approved of the deception: "Bush has
to obfuscate his real goals of reducing spending with the smokescreen of
'compassionate conservatism.' " As Berkeley's Brad DeLong puts it on his
blog, conservatives knew that Mr. Bush was lying about the budget, but they
thought they were in on the con.

So what's left? Well, it's safe for conservatives to criticize Mr. Bush for
presiding over runaway growth in domestic spending, because that implies
that he betrayed his conservative supporters. There's only one problem with
this criticism: it's not true.

It's true that federal spending as a percentage of G.D.P. rose between 2001
and 2005. But the great bulk of this increase was accounted for by increased
spending on defense and homeland security, including the costs of the Iraq
war, and by rising health care costs.

Conservatives aren't criticizing Mr. Bush for his defense spending. Since
the Medicare drug program didn't start until 2006, the Bush administration
can't be blamed for the rise in health care costs before then. Whatever
other fiscal excesses took place weren't large enough to play more than a
marginal role in spending growth.

So where does the notion of Bush the big spender come from? In a direct
sense it comes largely from Brian Riedl of the Heritage Foundation, who
issued a report last fall alleging that government spending was out of
control. Mr. Riedl is very good at his job; his report shifts artfully back
and forth among various measures of spending (nominal, real, total,
domestic, discretionary, domestic discretionary), managing to convey the
false impression that soaring spending on domestic social programs is a
major cause of the federal budget deficit without literally lying.

But the reason conservatives fall for the Heritage spin is that it suits
their purposes. They need to repudiate George W. Bush, but they can't admit
that when Mr. Bush made his key mistakes ? starting an unnecessary war, and
using dishonest numbers to justify tax cuts ? they were cheering him on.

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Mon Mar 20 11:22:29 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 19:22:29 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: On Anniversary,
	Bush and Cheney See Iraq Success
Message-ID: <20060320192229.903229FED6@lax-gw05.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

Myopia is a dangerous thing...


WASHINGTON | March 20, 2006
On Anniversary, Bush and Cheney See Iraq Success
By DAVID E. SANGER and THOM SHANKER
President Bush and senior officials argued their strategy was working even as a former Iraqi prime minister spoke of civil war.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/20/politics/20war.html?ex=1143522000&en=fad1d8da949b3315&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060320/37a290b7/attachment-0001.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Mon Mar 20 11:23:31 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 19:23:31 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: The President and the Courts
Message-ID: <20060320192331.B78C49FE7C@lax-gw05.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

OPINION | March 20, 2006
The President and the Courts

President Bush has usurped Congress's right to review claims brought by Guant?namo detainees. It is now up to the judiciary to save the balance of powers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/20/opinion/20mon1.html?ex=1143522000&en=4c4e7092f69a6c4a&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060320/34e629d4/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Mon Mar 20 11:23:20 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 19:23:20 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: At World Forum,
	Support Erodes for Private Management of Water
Message-ID: <20060320192321.1E7E93AEBDC@lax-gw06.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

INTERNATIONAL / AMERICAS | March 20, 2006
At World Forum, Support Erodes for Private Management of Water
By ELISABETH MALKIN
At the fourth World Water Forum, there is little talk of private companies bringing water to the world's poor. 
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/20/international/americas/20water.html?ex=1143522000&en=7c6f2a2e8dd0a85d&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060320/e37a02be/attachment.htm 

From michael at intrafi.com  Mon Mar 20 11:38:44 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 11:38:44 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] Alternet: Chaos Accomplished
Message-ID: <20060320193844.8378CB819D@alternet.org>


This story has been forwarded to you from
http://www.alternet.org by michael at intrafi.com



-------------------------------------
Chaos Accomplished
http://www.alternet.org/story/33768

Three years after the U.S. invasion, a snapshot of Iraq reveals a country that is miles from anything resembling a 'road to progress.'
-------------------------------------


From Reuters_News at reuters.com  Mon Mar 20 11:31:37 2006
From: Reuters_News at reuters.com (Reuters_News at reuters.com)
Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 14:31:37 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Reuters.com - Humans spur worst extinction since
	dinosaurs - Mon Mar 20, 2006 12:18 PM ET
Message-ID: <005d01c64c54$e7f2f120$ab9e4ca7@RCUSSTLA10>

Harry (harry.sifton at sympatico.ca) has sent you this article.	
 <http://www.reuters.com> 	
 Humans spur worst extinction since dinosaurs
<http://today.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx?type=scienceNews&storyID
=uri:2006-03-20T171821Z_01_L20719283_RTRUKOC_0_US-ENVIRONMENT-DIVERSITY.
xml> 	
Mon Mar 20, 2006 12:18 PM ET


 	

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

OSLO (Reuters) - Humans are responsible for the worst spate of
extinctions since the dinosaurs and must make unprecedented extra
efforts to reach a goal of slowing losses by 2010, a U.N. report said on
Monday.

Habitats ranging from coral reefs to tropical rainforests face mounting
threats, the Secretariat of the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity
said in the report, issued at the start of a March 20-31 U.N. meeting in
Curitiba, Brazil.

"In effect, we are currently responsible for the sixth major extinction
event in the history of earth, and the greatest since the dinosaurs
disappeared, 65 million years ago," said the 92-page Global Biodiversity
Outlook 2 report.

Apart from the disappearance of the dinosaurs, the other "Big Five"
extinctions were about 205, 250, 375 and 440 million years ago.
Scientists suspect that asteroid strikes, volcanic eruptions or sudden
climate shifts may explain the five.

A rising human population of 6.5 billion was undermining the environment
for animals and plants via pollution, expanding cities, deforestation,
introduction of "alien species" and global warming, it said.

It estimated the current pace of extinctions was 1,000 times faster than
historical rates, jeopardizing a global goal set at a 2002 U.N. summit
in Johannesburg "to achieve, by 2010, a significant reduction in the
current rate of biodiversity loss".

"Unprecedented additional efforts' will be needed to achieve the 2010
biodiversity target at national, regional and global levels," it said.
The report was bleaker than a first U.N. review of the diversity of life
issued in 2001.

NOT ABATING

According to a "Red List" compiled by the World Conservation Union, 844
animals and plants are known to have gone extinct in the last 500 years,
ranging from the dodo to the Golden Toad in Costa Rica. It says the
figures are probably a big underestimate.

"The direct causes of biodiversity loss -- habitat change,
over-exploitation, the introduction of invasive alien species, nutrient
loading and climate change -- show no sign of abating," the report said.

Despite the threats, it said the 2010 goal was "by no means an
impossible one".

It urged better efforts to safeguard habitats ranging from deserts to
jungles and better management of resources from fresh water to timber.
About 12 percent of the earth's land surface is in protected areas,
against just 0.6 percent of the oceans.

It also recommended more work to curb pollution and to rein in
industrial emissions of gases released by burning fossil fuels and
widely blamed for global warming.

The report said, for instance, that the annual net loss of forests was
7.3 million hectares (18 million acres) -- an area the size of Panama or
Ireland -- from 2000-2005. Still, the figure was slightly less than 8.9
million hectares a year from 1990-2000.

And it said that annual environmental losses from introduced pests in
the United States, Australia, Britain, South Africa, India and Brazil
had been estimated at more than $100 billion.

About 300 "invasive species" -- molluscs, crustaceans and fish -- have
been introduced to the Mediterranean from the Red Sea since the late
19th century when the Suez Canal opened.

It gave mixed overall marks for progress on four key goals.

It said there was "reasonable progress" toward global cooperation but
"limited" advances in ensuring enough cash and research. It estimated
that annual aid to help slow biodiversity losses sank to $750 million
from $1 billion since 1998.

And it said there was "far from sufficient" progress in better planning
and implementation of biodiversity decisions and a "mixed" record in
better understanding of biodiversity.

  _____  

This service is not intended to encourage spam. The details provided by
your colleague have been used for the sole purpose of facilitating this
email communication and have not been retained by Reuters. Your personal
details have not been added to any database or mailing list.

If you would like to receive news articles delivered to your email
address, please subscribe at www.reuters.com
  _____  

? Copyright Reuters 2006All rights reserved. Users may download and
print extracts of content from this website for their own personal and
non-commercial use only. Republication or redistribution of Reuters
content, including by framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited
without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters and the Reuters
sphere logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of the Reuters group
of companies around the world.

Quotes and other data are provided for your personal information only,
and are not intended for trading purposes. Reuters, the members of its
Group and its data providers shall not be liable for any errors or
delays in the quotes or other data, or for any actions taken in reliance
thereon.

? Reuters 2006. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of
Reuters content, including by caching, framing or similar means, is
expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters.
Reuters and the Reuters sphere logo are registered trademarks and
trademarks of the Reuters group of companies around the world.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060320/2d89c7e9/attachment.htm 

From hecate at diamonddragon.com  Mon Mar 20 14:20:00 2006
From: hecate at diamonddragon.com (Hecate)
Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 22:20:00 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] BBC E-mail: Strike call over French job law
Message-ID: <20060320_222000_073954.hecate@diamonddragon.com>

Hecate saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you
should see it.



** Strike call over French job law **
French unions and students call a day of strikes on 28 March against a new controversial labour law.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/europe/4826918.stm >


** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all
in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/dailyemail/ >


** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have?been verified.

If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm


From hecate at diamonddragon.com  Mon Mar 20 14:20:50 2006
From: hecate at diamonddragon.com (Hecate)
Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 22:20:50 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] BBC E-mail: US rejects Belarus poll results
Message-ID: <20060320_222050_018247.hecate@diamonddragon.com>

Hecate saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you
should see it.



** US rejects Belarus poll results **
The US joins EU monitors in condemning Belarus election results, as fresh protests are held in Minsk.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/europe/4824642.stm >


** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all
in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/dailyemail/ >


** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have?been verified.

If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm


From nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca  Mon Mar 20 17:16:40 2006
From: nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca (CBC News Online)
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2006 01:16:40 UT
Subject: [Mb-civic] CBC News - TORIES WON'T MEET WITH BARDOT OVER SEAL HUNT
Message-ID: <20060321011640.C696661DA2@nmweb05.nm.cbc.ca>

An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Url: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060321/123bf7c6/attachment.diff 

From nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca  Mon Mar 20 17:28:59 2006
From: nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca (CBC News Online)
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2006 01:28:59 UT
Subject: [Mb-civic] CBC News - BUSH SAYS U.S. COMMITED TO DEFENCE OF ISRAEL
Message-ID: <20060321012859.13BC21B698@nmweb07.nm.cbc.ca>

An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Url: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060321/182d2bb1/attachment.diff 

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Mon Mar 20 17:50:04 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 17:50:04 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] America policy of Prevention
Message-ID: <C0449BCD.2A53B%michael@michaelbutler.com>



-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/octet-stream
Size: 73515 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060320/ad05d963/attachment-0001.obj 

From dekuyper at sbcglobal.net  Mon Mar 20 18:34:16 2006
From: dekuyper at sbcglobal.net (Gerald Gerald)
Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 18:34:16 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] Church Bulletins
Message-ID: <E1FLXZI-00044h-1K@elasmtp-junco.atl.sa.earthlink.net>

Thank God for church ladies with typewriters. These
sentences actually appeared in church bulletins or
were announced in church services: 

------------------------------------------------------------
The Fasting & Prayer Conference includes meals.
------------------------------------------------------------
The sermon this morning: "Jesus Walks on the Water."
The sermon tonight: "Searching for Jesus."
------------------------------------------------------------
Our youth basketball team is back in action Wednesday
at 8 PM in the
recreation hall. Come out and watch us kill Christ the
King.
------------------------------------------------------------
Ladies, don't forget the rummage sale. It's a chance
to get rid of those
things not worth keeping around the house. Bring your
husbands.
------------------------------------------------------------
The peacemaking meeting scheduled for today has been
canceled due to a conflict.
------------------------------------------------------------
Remember in prayer the many who are sick of our
community.  Smile at
someone who is hard to love. Say "Hell" to someone who
doesn't care much about you.
------------------------------------------------------------
Don't let worry kill you off - let the Church help.
------------------------------------------------------------
Miss Charlene Mason sang "I will not pass this way
again," giving
obvious pleasure to the congregation.
-----------------------------------------------------------
For those of you who have children and don't know it,
we have a nursery downstairs.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Next Thursday there will be tryouts for the choir.
They need all the
help they can get.
------------------------------------------------------------
The Rector will preach his farewell message after
which the choir will
sing: "Break Forth Into Joy."
---------------------------------------------------------
Irving Benson and Jessie Carter were married on
October 24 in the
church. So ends a friendship that began in their
school days.
---------------------------------------------------------
A bean supper will be held on Tuesday evening in the
church hall. Music will follow.
------------------------------------------------------------
At the evening service tonight, the sermon topic will
be "What Is Hell?"
Come early and listen to our choir practice.
----------------------------------------------------------
Eight new choir robes are currently needed due to the
addition of
several new members and to the deterioration of some
older ones.
---------------------------------------------------------
Scouts are saving aluminum cans, bottles and other
items to be recycled.  Proceeds will be used to
cripple children.
---------------------------------------------------------
Please place your donation in the envelope along with
the deceased
person you want remembered.
--------------------------------------------------------
The church will host an evening of fine dining, super
entertainment and gracious hostility.
-------------------------------- --------------------
Potluck supper Sunday at 5:00 PM - prayer and
medication to follow.
-----------------------------------------------------
The ladies of the Church have cast off clothing of
every kind. They may
be seen in the basement on Friday afternoon.
-----------------------------------------------------
This evening at 7 PM there will be a hymn singing in
the park across
from the Church. Bring a blanket and come prepared to
sin.
------------------------------------------------------------
Ladies Bible Study will be held Thursday morning at 10
AM. All ladies
are invited to lunch in the Fellowship Hall after the
B. S. is done.
--------------------------------------------------------
The pastor would appreciate it if the ladies of the
congregation would
lend him their electric girdles for the pancake
breakfast next Sunday.
-------------------------------------------- ---------
Low Self Esteem Support Group will meet Thursday at 7
PM. Please use the back door.
--------------------------------------------------------
The eighth-graders will be presenting Shakespeare's
Hamlet in the Church basement Friday at 7 PM. The
congregation is invited to attend this tragedy.
--------------------------------------------------------
Weight Watchers will meet at 7 PM at the First
Presbyterian Church.
Please use large double door at the side entrance.
-------------------------------------------------------
The Associate Minister unveiled the church's new
tithing campaign slogan last Sunday: "I Upped My
Pledge - Up Yours

From hecate at diamonddragon.com  Mon Mar 20 19:38:42 2006
From: hecate at diamonddragon.com (Hecate)
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2006 03:38:42 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] BBC E-mail: Life's diversity 'being depleted'
Message-ID: <20060321_033842_036067.hecate@diamonddragon.com>

Hecate saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you
should see it.



** Life's diversity 'being depleted' **
Virtually all indicators of biodiversity are heading in the wrong direction, a major new report says.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/4826262.stm >


** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all
in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/dailyemail/ >


** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have?been verified.

If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm


From hecate at diamonddragon.com  Mon Mar 20 19:42:43 2006
From: hecate at diamonddragon.com (Hecate)
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2006 03:42:43 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] BBC E-mail: Putin visits China to boost ties
Message-ID: <20060321_034243_012338.hecate@diamonddragon.com>

Hecate saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you
should see it.



** Putin visits China to boost ties **
Russia's President Putin arrives in China for a visit aiming to promote growing co-operation between the neighbours.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/asia-pacific/4827354.stm >


** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all
in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/dailyemail/ >


** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have?been verified.

If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm


From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Mon Mar 20 19:51:15 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (harry.sifton at sympatico.ca)
Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 19:51:15 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] Some troops headed back to Iraq are mentally ill | The
	San Diego Union-Tribune
Message-ID: <1882387.1142913075029.JavaMail.tomcat@localhost>



*Please note, the sender's email address has not been verified.



Gotta send out the best talent!!



 
********************
 
If you are having trouble with any of the links in this message, or if the URL's are not appearing as links, please follow the instructions at the bottom of this email.
 
Title: Some troops headed back to Iraq are mentally ill | The San Diego Union-Tribune
 
  
Copy and paste the following into your Web browser to access the sent link:
http://www.emailthis.clickability.com/et/emailThis?clickMap=viewThis&etMailToID=1509047497&pt=Y
 

Copy and paste the following into your Web browser to SAVE THIS link:
http://www.savethis.clickability.com/st/saveThisPopupApp?clickMap=saveFromET&partnerID=616&etMailToID=1509047497&pt=Y

 
Copy and paste the following into your Web browser to forward this link:
http://www.emailthis.clickability.com/et/emailThis?clickMap=forward&etMailToID=1509047497&partnerID=616&pt=Y

  
 
********************


Email pages from any Web site you visit - add the EMAIL THIS button to your browser, copy and paste the following into your Web browser:
http://www.emailthis.clickability.com/et/emailThis?clickMap=browserButtons&pt=Y"


*********************



Instructions:
-----------------------------------------
If your e-mail program doesn't recognize Web addresses:
1. With your mouse, highlight the Web Address above. Be sure to highlight the entire Web address, even if it spans more than one line in your email. 
2. Select Copy from the Edit menu at the top of your screen. 
3. Launch your Web browser.
4. Paste the address into your Web browser by selecting Paste from the Edit menu.
5. Click Go or press Enter or Return on your keyboard. 
 
********************
 
 
 
 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060320/c42caab9/attachment.htm 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Mon Mar 20 19:54:05 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harry)
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2006 03:54:05 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] BBC E-mail: US probes Iraqi civilian deaths
Message-ID: <20060321_035405_069715.harry.sifton@sympatico.ca>

Harry saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you
should see it.

** Message **
How will Bush, Cheney spin this one?

** US probes Iraqi civilian deaths **
The United States military investigates allegations that its marines killed 15 Iraqi civilians last November.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/1/hi/world/americas/4827424.stm >


** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all
in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/dailyemail/ >


** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have?been verified.

If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm


From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Mon Mar 20 19:58:37 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (harry.sifton at sympatico.ca)
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2006 03:58:37 GMT
Subject: [Mb-civic] Guardian Unlimited: Iraqi police claim US troops
	executed family
Message-ID: <20060321035837.2E8BC9A051@mussel.gul3.gnl>

HS spotted this on the Guardian Unlimited site and thought you should see it.

To see this story with its related links on the Guardian Unlimited site, go to http://www.guardian.co.uk

Iraqi police claim US troops executed family
&#183; Women and children shot in raid, says official report &#183; Marines accused after 15 died in separate incident
Julian Borger in Washington
Tuesday March 21 2006
The Guardian


Iraqi police have accused American soldiers of executing 11 Iraqi civilians, including four children and a six-month-old baby, in a raid on Wednesday near the city of Balad, it was reported yesterday.

The allegations are contained in an Iraqi police report on the killings, obtained and published by the Knight Ridder news agency. The report emerged at a time when a US navy criminal investigation is under way into a previous incident, in November, in which marines are accused of killing 15 Iraqi civilians in Haditha in reprisal for a bomb attack on a US patrol.

Last week's incident in the village of Abu Sifa, near Balad, stand out because of the seriousness of the accusations and the fact that they appear on an official police report signed by Iraqi officers.

After listing other incidents in the area, the report for March 15 states: "American forces used helicopters to drop troops on the house of Faiz Harat Khalaf situated in the Abu Sifa village of the Ishaqi district. The American forces gathered the family members in one room and executed 11 people, including five children, four women and two men, then they bombed the house, burned three vehicles and killed their animals." Among victims the report lists two five-year-old children, two three-year-olds and a six-month-old baby.

The US military say that the deaths occurred when US troops raided a house in pursuit of an al-Qaida suspect and that only four people were killed. Major Tim Keefe, a US military spokesman in Baghdad said: "A battle damage assessment, the initial reports, said that what they saw were four people killed - a woman and two children and an enemy - and they detained an enemy."

Brigadier General Issa al-Juboori, who runs the joint coordination centre in Tikrit, stood by the report and said he knew the police officer running the investigation. "He's a dedicated policeman, and a good cop," Gen Juboori told Knight Ridder. "I trust him."

Both accounts of the incident agree there was a firefight in the early hours of the morning when US troops raided a house which an al-Qaida suspect was suspected to be visiting. The American account said the house collapsed as a result of the firefight, killing two women, a child, and a man believed to have al-Qaida links. The suspect survived and was captured. But the Iraqi police report suggests that the killings took place when the house was still standing. A local police commander, Lieutenant Colonel Farooq Hussain, said hospital autopsies "revealed that all the victims had bullet shots in the head and all bodies were handcuffed".

Maj Keefe said: "I saw those [autopsy] photos and it didn't appear there were any handcuffs."

In last year's Haditha incident, US troops are accused of killing civilians after a bomb attack. An initial marine report on the incident said a roadside bomb on November 19 last year killed a lance corporal and 15 Iraqi civilians. But further investigation revealed that the civilians had been shot with marine weapons after the blast.

A nine-year-old survivor, Eman Waleed, who lived in a house 150 metres from the roadside bomb attack told Time magazine that after the explosion her father began reading the Qur'an. "First, they went into my father's room, where he was reading the Qur'an, and we heard shots," she said. "I couldn't see their faces very well, only their guns sticking into the doorway. I watched them shoot my grandfather first in the chest and then in the head. Then they killed my granny."

Time quoted officials familiar with the investigation as saying the marines thought they heard a gun being cocked inside the house and feared they were about to be ambushed so they broke down two doors simultaneously and opened fire.

Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited


From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Mon Mar 20 20:04:09 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 23:04:09 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Cpl. Tillman
Message-ID: <000a01c64c9c$84bbff00$3e27e440@Harold>

Mr Tillman is still fighting the Army for the truth!!

http://nytimes.com/2006/03/21/politics/21tillman.html?ei=5094&en=afa52cbd1ddda78b&hp=&ex=1142917200&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print

Will he and the American people ever get it, the truth?

Later H
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060320/63f7b1a1/attachment.htm 

From ean at sbcglobal.net  Mon Mar 20 21:29:42 2006
From: ean at sbcglobal.net (ean at sbcglobal.net)
Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 21:29:42 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Two Different and enlightening views on Iraq after 3
	years
Message-ID: <E1FLZas-00016M-GR@smtpauth04.mail.atl.earthlink.net>

Bush Didn't Bungle Iraq, You Fools
THE MISSION WAS INDEED ACCCOMPLISHED
by Greg Palast
for The Guardian

20 March 2006 

Get off it. All the carping, belly-aching and complaining about George
Bush's incompetence in Iraq, from both the Left and now the Right, is just
dead wrong. 

On the third anniversary of the tanks rolling over Iraq's border, most of
the 59 million Homer Simpsons who voted for Bush are beginning to doubt if
his mission was accomplished. 

But don't kid yourself -- Bush and his co-conspirator, Dick Cheney,
accomplished exactly what they set out to do. In case you've forgotten
what their real mission was, let me remind you of White House spokesman
Ari Fleisher's original announcement, three years ago, launching of what
he called, 

         "Operation
          Iraqi
          Liberation." 

O.I.L. How droll of them, how cute. Then, Karl Rove made the giggling boys
in the White House change it to "OIF" -- Operation Iraqi Freedom. But the
101st Airborne wasn't sent to Basra to get its hands on Iraq's OIF. 

"It's about oil," Robert Ebel told me. Who is Ebel? Formerly the CIA's top
oil analyst, he was sent by the Pentagon, about a month before the
invasion, to a secret confab in London with Saddam's former oil minister
to finalize the plans for "liberating" Iraq's oil industry. In London,
Bush's emissary Ebel also instructed Ibrahim Bahr al-Ulum, the man the
Pentagon would choose as post-OIF oil minister for Iraq, on the correct
method of disposing Iraq's crude. 

And what did the USA want Iraq to do with Iraq's oil? The answer will
surprise many of you: and it is uglier, more twisted, devilish and devious
than anything imagined by the most conspiracy-addicted blogger. The answer
can be found in a 323-page plan for Iraq's oil secretly drafted by the
State Department. Our team got a hold of a copy; how, doesn't matter. The
key thing is what's inside this thick Bush diktat: a directive to Iraqis
to maintain a state oil company that will "enhance its relationship with
OPEC." 

Enhance its relationship with OPEC??? How strange: the government of the
United States ordering Iraq to support the very OPEC oil cartel which is
strangling our nation with outrageously high prices for crude. 

Specifically, the system ordered up by the Bush cabal would keep a lid on
Iraq's oil production -- limiting Iraq's oil pumping to the tight quota
set by Saudi Arabia and the OPEC cartel. 

There you have it. Yes, Bush went in for the oil -- not to get MORE of
Iraq's oil, but to prevent Iraq producing TOO MUCH of it. 

You must keep in mind who paid for George's ranch and Dick's bunker: Big
Oil. And Big Oil -- and their buck-buddies, the Saudis -- don't make money
from pumping more oil, but from pumping LESS of it. The lower the supply,
the higher the price. 

It's Economics 101. The oil industry is run by a cartel, OPEC, and what
economists call an "oligopoly" -- a tiny handful of operators who make
more money when there's less oil, not more of it. So, every time the
"insurgents" blow up a pipeline in Basra, every time Mad Mahmoud in 
Tehran
threatens to cut supply, the price of oil leaps. And Dick and George just
LOVE it. 

Dick and George didn't want more oil from Iraq, they wanted less. I know
some of you, no matter what I write, insist that our President and his
Veep are on the hunt for more crude so you can cheaply fill your family
Hummer; that somehow, these two oil-patch babies are concerned that the
price of gas in the USA is bumping up to $3 a gallon. 

No so, gentle souls. Three bucks a gallon in the States (and a quid a
litre in Britain) means colossal profits for Big Oil, and that makes
Dick's ticker go pitty-pat with joy. The top oily-gopolists, the five
largest oil companies, pulled in $113 billion in profit in 2005 --
compared to a piddly $34 billion in 2002 before Operation Iraqi
Liberation. In other words, it's been a good war for Big Oil. 

As per Plan Bush, Bahr Al-Ulum became Iraq's occupation oil minister; the
conquered nation "enhanced its relationship with OPEC;" and the price of
oil, from Clinton peace-time to Bush war-time, shot up 317%. 

In other words, on the third anniversary of invasion, we can say the
attack and occupation is, indeed, a Mission Accomplished. However, it
wasn't America's mission, nor the Iraqis'. It was an Mission Accomplished
for OPEC and Big Oil. 

********** 
Chaos Accomplished
By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on March 20, 2006, http://www.alternet.org/story/33768/


In a speech at George Washington University, Bush touted the 
"remarkable progress" made by the United States:

In less than three years, the Iraqi people have gone from living under 
the boot of a brutal tyrant, to liberation, to sovereignty, to free elections, 
to a constitutional referendum, and last December, to elections for a 
fully constitutional government.

Yet, a snapshot of Iraq today reveals a country that is miles from 
anything recognizable as a "road to progress."

At the end of last year, Iraqis had 11 percent less electricity and 36 
percent less potable water than before the 2003 invasion. The number 
of Iraqis with sewer access has fallen by 90 percent, and oil output is 
down by more than 20 percent. A poll in mid-2004 found that seven out 
of 10 Iraqis see the U.S. as "occupiers," not "liberators." A more recent 
survey (PDF) showed that almost half of all Iraqis support armed 
attacks on U.S. troops. And this weekend, former Iraqi interim Prime 
Minister Iyad Allawi told the BBC that Iraq was smack in the middle of 
a civil war.

That is the essential truth of what we have wrought in Iraq.

Last week 200 more bodies were found in and around Baghdad, 
dumped in bunches. Many of the corpses had their hands tied behind 
their backs and had been killed by a single bullet to the head. The New 
York Times reported "widespread suspicion" that "most were victims of 
Shiite death squads who went on a quiet but steady killing spree after 
a bomb attack on a Shiite market in Baghdad one week ago."

The political process that the war's supporters tout is at an impasse. 
December's elections were essentially an ethnic or sectarian census of 
Iraq's population; Iraqis voted for lists of anonymous candidates from 
their own "tribe." Names of candidates were withheld for their own 
protection.
Four months after those elections, the ministers have failed to form a 
government. Despite the efforts of U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad 
-- who appears to be an unusually competent appointee for this 
administration -- the factions remain deadlocked.

Last week, members of Iraq's Parliament finally sat down to negotiate 
after months of wrangling over the issue of federalism. The issue has 
been a deal-breaker so far; Shiites and Kurds want powerful regional 
governments, while the Sunnis who make up the heart of the 
insurgency fear that such an arrangement would cut them off from the 
lucre of Iraq's vast oil deposits. The meeting lasted just half an hour, 
adjourning after the ministers argued bitterly over the wording of the 
government's new loyalty oath.

According to a report by the International Crisis Group (PDF), power is 
concentrated in the hands of parties that have militias. "With no central 
apparatus that can rely on its own non-partisan security forces to stand 
in the way of parties and militias holding ethnic, sectarian and even 
separatist agendas, the most likely outcome is the gradual erosion or 
perhaps disintegration of the state," the report said.
In the face of these ugly developments, there's been a significant shift 
in rhetoric from the administration and its dwindling ranks of 
supporters. The hawks are trying to distance themselves from the 
consequences of the war they championed. The continuing violence 
and disarray we can expect in the coming years will be the Iraqis' fault, 
not a result of American hubris.

We no longer hear the "Pottery Barn" maxim famously uttered by 
former Secretary of State Colin Powell: "You break it, you buy it." After 
the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra, which set off a wave 
of back and forth sectarian violence, President Bush suggested that 
while continuing United States military support is crucial, Iraqis must 
take the lead in forming a unified state.

While we reject the Pottery Barn theory as a justification for keeping 
U.S. troops in Iraq, dodging our responsibility for the tragedy being 
lived by Iraq's civilians every day is cowardly and wrong. Sectarian 
tensions certainly simmered under the dictatorship of Saddam 
Hussein, but the low-level, irregular civil war plaguing Iraq today is a 
conflict largely of our making. If one were to sit down and consciously 
map out how best to ignite such a conflict, one would be hard-pressed 
to do a better job than the Bush administration has done.

It wasn't just the neoconservatives' dismissal of the State Department's 
exhaustive post-war planning, nor the rejection of top army officials' 
estimates of the number of troops needed to establish stability after the 
invasion. The so-called political process itself was always based on 
American domestic politics rather than sound nation-building.

After the administration's original justifications for the war were proven 
false, the emphasis shifted to the rhetoric of "democratization." From 
that point, the building of an Iraqi state was shaped by Karl Rove's 
political apparatus and not the experience learned in other post-conflict 
situations. A power-sharing government -- in which different groups are 
guaranteed certain offices and ministries -- was rejected, despite the 
fact that such arrangements have been used following intra-state 
conflicts from Cambodia to Mozambique. Worse yet, the 
administration insisted on an overarching program of "de-
Ba'athification," which left many mid-level Sunni officials unemployed 
and humiliated -- and still armed to the teeth.

What is harder to quantify is the degree to which incompetence, graft 
and cronyism has contributed to support for Iraqi insurgents. While the 
administration's backers speak of the great progress being made in 
reconstructing a war-torn country, the Pentagon's own Inspector-
general warns (PDF) that, with nearly all of the $30 billion allocated 
already spent, there remains a dramatic "reconstruction gap."
That's the reality 35 months after the president stood before a banner 
reading "Mission Accomplished" and thanked "all of the citizens of Iraq 
who welcomed our troops and joined in the liberation of their own 
country."

For three long and disastrous years, the administration has continued 
to put that sunny spin on the havoc it has wrought. As long as that 
obstinate state of denial persists, we have little reason to hope for 
anything better before we face the war's fourth anniversary. 

Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer. 
? 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/33768/


-- 
You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, 
option D (up to 3 emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options 
(option A - 1x/week, option B - 3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option D - 
up to 3x/day) please reply and let us know!  If someone forwarded you 
this email and you want to be on our list, send an email to 
ean at sbcglobal.net and tell us which option you'd like.


"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060320/eb8498bd/attachment.htm 

From ean at sbcglobal.net  Mon Mar 20 21:35:42 2006
From: ean at sbcglobal.net (ean at sbcglobal.net)
Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 21:35:42 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Fisk on the End of The American Dream...+ Voting for
	Peace
Message-ID: <E1FLZdl-0002dW-4z@smtpauth04.mail.atl.earthlink.net>

The farcical end of the American dream

The US press is supposed to be challenging the lies of this war

By Robert Fisk

03/18/06 "The Independent" -- -- It is a bright winter morning and I am
sipping my first coffee of the day in Los Angeles. My eye moves like a
radar beam over the front page of the Los Angeles Times for the word that
dominates the minds of all Middle East correspondents: Iraq. In
post-invasion, post-Judith Miller mode, the American press is supposed to
be challenging the lies of this war. So the story beneath the headline "In
a Battle of Wits, Iraq's Insurgency Mastermind Stays a Step Ahead of US"
deserves to be read. Or does it?

Datelined Washington - an odd city in which to learn about Iraq, you might
think - its opening paragraph reads: "Despite the recent arrest of one of
his would-be suicide bombers in Jordan and some top aides in Iraq,
insurgency mastermind Abu Musab Zarqawi has eluded capture, US 
authorities
say, because his network has a much better intelligence-gathering
operation than they do."

Now quite apart from the fact that many Iraqis - along, I have to admit,
with myself - have grave doubts about whether Zarqawi exists, and that
al-Qai'da's Zarqawi, if he does exist, does not merit the title of
"insurgency mastermind", the words that caught my eye were "US authorities
say". And as I read through the report, I note how the Los Angeles Times
sources this extraordinary tale. I thought American reporters no longer
trusted the US administration, not after the mythical weapons of mass
destruction and the equally mythical connections between Saddam and the
international crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001. Of course, I
was wrong.

Here are the sources - on pages one and 10 for the yarn spun by reporters
Josh Meyer and Mark Mazzetti: "US officials said", "said one US Justice
Department counter-terrorism official", "Officials ... said", "those
officials said", "the officials confirmed", "American officials
complained", "the US officials stressed", "US authorities believe", "said
one senior US intelligence official", "US officials said", "Jordanian
officials ... said" - here, at least is some light relief - "several US
officials said", "the US officials said", "American officials said",
"officials say", "say US officials", "US officials said", "one US
counter-terrorism official said".

I do truly treasure this story. It proves my point that the Los Angeles
Times - along with the big east coast dailies - should all be called US
OFFICIALS SAY. But it's not just this fawning on political power that
makes me despair. Let's move to a more recent example of what I can only
call institutionalised racism in American reporting of Iraq. I have to
thank reader Andrew Gorman for this gem, a January Associated Press report
about the killing of an Iraqi prisoner under interrogation by US Chief
Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer Jnr.

Mr Welshofer, it transpired in court, had stuffed the Iraqi General Abed
Hamed Mowhoush head-first into a sleeping bag and sat on his chest, an
action which - not surprisingly - caused the general to expire. The
military jury ordered - reader, hold your breath - a reprimand for Mr
Welshofer, the forfeiting of $6,000 of his salary and confinement to
barracks for 60 days. But what caught my eye was the sympathetic detail.
Welshofer's wife's Barbara, the AP told us, "testified that she was
worried about providing for their three children if her husband was
sentenced to prison. 'I love him more for fighting this,' she said, tears
welling up in her eyes. 'He's always said that you need to do the right
thing, and sometimes the right thing is the hardest thing to do'".

Yes, I guess torture is tough on the torturer. But try this from the same
report: "Earlier in the day ... Mr Welshofer fought back tears. 'I deeply
apologise if my actions tarnish the soldiers serving in Iraq,' he said."

Note how the American killer's remorse is directed not towards his
helpless and dead victim but to the honour of his fellow soldiers, even
though an earlier hearing had revealed that some of his colleagues watched
Welshofer stuffing the general into the sleeping bag and did nothing to
stop him. An earlier AP report stated that "officials" - here we go again
- "believed Mowhoush had information that would 'break the back of the
insurgency'." Wow. The general knew all about 40,000 Iraqi insurgents. So
what a good idea to stuff him upside down inside a sleeping bag and sit on
his chest.

But the real scandal about these reports is we're not told anything about
the general's family. Didn't he have a wife? I imagine the tears were
"welling up in her eyes" when she was told her husband had been done to
death. Didn't the general have children? Or parents? Or any loved ones who
"fought back tears" when told of this vile deed? Not in the AP report he
didn't. General Mowhoush comes across as an object, a dehumanised creature
who wouldn't let the Americans "break the back" of the insurgency after
being stuffed headfirst into a sleeping bag.

Now let's praise the AP. On an equally bright summer's morning in
Australia a few days ago I open the Sydney Morning Herald. It tells me, on
page six, that the news agency, using the Freedom of Information Act, has
forced US authorities to turn over 5,000 pages of transcripts of hearings
at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp. One of them records the trial of
since-released British prisoner Feroz Abbasi, in which Mr Abbasi vainly
pleads with his judge, a US air force colonel, to reveal the evidence
against him, something he says he has a right to hear under international
law.

And here is what the American colonel replied: "Mr Abbasi, your conduct is
unacceptable and this is your absolute final warning. I do not care about
international law. I do not want to hear the words international law. We
are not concerned about international law."

Alas, these words - which symbolise the very end of the American dream -
are buried down the story. The colonel, clearly a disgrace to the uniform
he wears, does not appear in the bland headline ("US papers tell
Guantanamo inmates' stories") of the Sydney paper, more interested in
telling us that the released documents identify by name the "farmers,
shopkeepers or goatherds" held in Guantanamo.

I am now in Wellington, New Zealand, watching on CNN Saddam Hussein's
attack on the Baghdad court trying him. And suddenly, the ghastly Saddam
disappears from my screen. The hearing will now proceed in secret, turning
this drumhead court into even more of a farce. It is a disgrace. And what
does CNN respectfully tell us? That the judge has "suspended media
coverage"!

If only, I say to myself, CNN - along with the American press - would do
the same.

***

Pledging to Vote for Peace

By The Nation

03/18/06 "The Nation -- -- How many Americans would pledge to cast their
votes in November only for candidates who want to end the war in Iraq?

According to a poll conducted for the new group Vote for Peace, 46 percent
of likely voters agree with the pledge the group will be promoting in
advance of the November, 2006, congressional elections: "I will not vote
for or support any candidate for Congress or President who does not make a
speedy end to the war in Iraq, and preventing any future war of
aggression, a public position in his or her campaign."

One in every five voters surveyed expressed strong agreement, while 26
percent said they were at least somewhat in agreement with the statement.

Among Democrats, agreement with the pledge rises to 67 percent (33 percent
strongly). Fifty-nine percent (25 percent strongly) of Independents agree,
while and 26 percent (5.5 percent strongly) of Republicans are on board.

"This poll demonstrates that anti-war voters are significant enough in
size to effect the outcome of elections -- if they become organized. Just
like pro-gun groups have organized, pro-choice and pro-life groups have
organized -- now the anti-war constituency has been identified and the
peace movement is ready to organize them. This will ensure that the
anti-war movement will no longer be one that can be ignored," argues Kevin
Zeese, an organizer of the nonpartisan Voters for Peace initiative that
launched Friday.

Starting with grants of $1 million for the 2006 election season, Voters
for Peace run a national campaign that will encourage voters to pledge to
cast their ballots for anti-war candidates as part of a broader effort to
educate the electorate about how to make the war an issue this fall. The
pledge, which was inspired by a Nation magazine editorial that committed
the publication to endorse only candidates who seek a rapid end to the
war, can be found at the new group's website: www.VotersForPeace.US.

Already endorsed by many of the country's largest and most active anti-war
organizations, including United for Peace and Justice, Peace Action, Not
In Our Name, Democracy Rising, Code Pink, AfterDowningStreet and Peace
Majority, the Voters for Peace initiative will reach across partisan and
ideological lines.

Zeese says the initiative will seek to organize two million voters in 2006
and five million by 2008. And makes a convincing case that such
organization could have a profound impact on both elections by putting
more focused pressure on both major political parties.

"Organized anti-war voters who pledge not to vote for pro-war candidates
may force the Democrats in particular to develop a stronger position
against the war. The Democrats may now realize that if they fail to
represent the anti-war community voters will stay home or vote for
alternative party and independent candidates," explains Zeese, the
president of the national group Common Sense for Drug Policy who is
seeking Maryland's open U.S. Senate seat as an "independent unity"
candidate in November.

"Republicans are not free to ignore the anti-war constituency either,"
adds Zeese. "Not only do more that 25 percent of Republican voters oppose
candidates who support the war, but the fastest growing group of voters --
independents -- overwhelmingly support the pledge. So, that all important
swing voter can cause Republicans to lose elections - and could become a
new source of support for Democrats -- or if both parties fail to support
voters wishes then candidates running independent of the two parties may
find a new foundation on which to build an independent political
movement."

---
Organizing Voters to End War

Protests and Petitions are Not Enough

"I will not vote for or support any candidate for President or Congress
who does not make a speedy end to the war in Iraq, and preventing any
future war of aggression, a public position in his or her campaign.?

Click here to make a difference."
http://www.votersforpeace.us/content.jsp?content_KEY=1470

Copyright ? 2006 The Nation


-- 
You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, 
option D (up to 3 emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options 
(option A - 1x/week, option B - 3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option D - 
up to 3x/day) please reply and let us know!  If someone forwarded you 
this email and you want to be on our list, send an email to 
ean at sbcglobal.net and tell us which option you'd like.


"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060320/412b9491/attachment-0001.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Tue Mar 21 03:46:19 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2006 06:46:19 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Freedom, Yes, Iraqis Say, But at Great,
	Grave Cost - Washington Post
Message-ID: <441FE78B.1060202@comcast.net>

Freedom, Yes, Iraqis Say, But at Great, Grave Cost
Contrasts to Hussein Era Leave Some Hopeful, Others Bitter

By John Ward Anderson and Omar Fekeiki
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, March 21, 2006; A13

BAGHDAD, March 20 -- By almost any standard, Bashar Muhammed, the owner 
of a thriving Internet cafe, is a Baghdad success story. Three years 
after the United States invaded Iraq and overthrew Saddam Hussein, the 
Internet business here is booming, and Muhammed has what most Iraqis 
could only dream of under Hussein -- freedom, a cutting-edge job, lots 
of customers.

But when conversation turns to his life and prospects, he sighs and 
voices frustration that Americans just don't get it.

"It is true that we got freedom after the war, but uncontrolled freedom 
-- chaos and violence," he said in a cool, deliberate tone. Five of his 
relatives have been killed in car bombings and assassinations, Muhammed 
said, noting that most recently an uncle was killed for being a Sunni Arab.

"The new generation is growing on violence and sectarian ethics, and 
this will affect Iraq for many years to come," he said. "We are living a 
more devastating war every day."

As Iraqis on Monday marked the third anniversary of the U.S.-led 
invasion, there was a stark difference between their pessimistic outlook 
and some U.S. officials' upbeat assessment of the situation. With 
insurgent violence grinding on, essential services sagging below 
pre-invasion levels and the prospect of civil war looming, many Iraqis 
question whether Hussein's ouster was worth the cost.

Many thousands of their countrymen have been killed. In December, 
President Bush estimated the Iraqi toll at 30,000.

Laith Muhammad, 32, a student in Fallujah, 35 miles west of Baghdad, 
listed the risks Iraqis face these days. "We either die by the 
Americans, the insurgents in the name of jihad, the security companies, 
which kill you and leave you laying in the street, the Iraqi police or . 
. . the death squads," he said. Such squads are widely believed to be 
operating from within the country's Interior Ministry. Muhammad cited 
private militias as yet another threat.

"Three years after the American invasion of Iraq, I have only one wish," 
he said. "I do not want democracy, food, electricity and water. I just 
do not want to die."

Other Iraqis, however, are less quick to blame the United States.

Sardar Muhsin Maheed, 25, a student at Mosul University, said too many 
people blamed the occupation for all of Iraq's ills. He traced most 
problems to Hussein, suggesting that issues such as the poor economy are 
legacies of the ousted president.

"The U.S. has liberated us from Saddam and his oppression," he said. "We 
are not ready to form a democratic state, and that is because of the 
burden left by Saddam's regime."

Another of Hussein's legacies, he said, was sectarian tension in the 
country. An Iraqi government has been democratically elected, but the 
politicians and their parties are creating a new Iraq based on religious 
and ethnic interests.

Luay Mohammed, a 57-year-old Sunni Arab who spent 35 years working for 
the Education Ministry, said he was forced to retire because the 
government and the ministry are now run by Shiite Muslims. His son could 
not get a job "because he is not a Shiite and he did not suffer" under 
Hussein, Mohammed said, his voice laced with bitterness and sarcasm.

"We've been waiting for years for true democracy to come, a democracy 
that makes everybody live and work together with respect and love. But 
here it is: a democracy with maximum chaos," he said. Now, all of his 
sons have cellular telephones -- not because it is hip or because of a 
communications boom, but because the security situation demands it. 
"This is what democracy has brought us."

The U.N. sanctions that had been imposed on Hussein's government have 
been lifted, and a vibrant free press has emerged. But unemployment is 
stuck between 27 and 40 percent, while oil production -- which the 
government counts on to generate 90 percent of its revenue -- remains 
below prewar levels.

"The toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime was worth everything," said 
Fakhri Fikry Kareem, owner and publisher of the daily Meda newspaper, 
one of more than 100 newspapers that have begun publishing in Iraq since 
Hussein's fall. Despite a rocket attack on his office, a bomb attack on 
his car and the killing of three of his reporters, Kareem said: "I have 
never felt as free to speak any day in my life as today. If George Bush 
did anything good, it was toppling Saddam Hussein."

Kareem, 63, said he opposed the war. While drinking Turkish coffee and 
fingering a long string of worry beads in his Baghdad living room, he 
talked of what might have been, suggesting that perhaps the United 
States could have removed Hussein without starting a broader conflict.

"I am not pessimistic," he said. "But I'm upset, because the war and the 
occupation, which could have led to a new situation in Iraq, were 
squandered by the stupid mistakes committed by the American 
administration and military and the U.S. representatives in Iraq."

Subhi Nadhem Tawfik, a professor at Baghdad University's Center for 
Strategic Studies, said people no longer believed that helping Iraq was 
foremost on the U.S. agenda during the invasion. "The U.S. has won a 
tremendous strategic victory," which has come increasingly at the 
expense of Iraq, he said.

"With the occupation of Iraq, the strategic significance of all the 
states in the region was diminished," Tawfik said.

The war and its aftermath have so far cost the United States about $250 
billion. Congress allocated $21 billion to repair essential 
infrastructure and revitalize the economy, and to establish programs for 
good governance and democratic institutions. As much as $3.5 billion has 
been diverted to pay for better security, but Iraq remains the largest 
U.S. government reconstruction effort since the Marshall Plan following 
World War II.

Meanwhile, many Iraqis -- especially in Baghdad, home to almost a 
quarter of the population -- said they don't see much evidence of the aid.

"We hear about tens of billions of dollars spent on reconstruction," 
said Bashar Muhammed, the Internet cafe owner. "The only reconstruction 
in the country I see now are the cement barriers. There are lots of them."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/20/AR2006032001568.html?referrer=email
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060321/1eca4b5e/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Tue Mar 21 03:48:04 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2006 06:48:04 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] An Iraq Success Story's Sad New Chapter - Washington Post
Message-ID: <441FE7F4.1070500@comcast.net>

An Iraq Success Story's Sad New Chapter
Bush's Struggle in Reassuring U.S. Is Illustrated by City's Renewed Strife

By Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 21, 2006; A01

CLEVELAND, March 20 -- As President Bush tells the tale, the battle for 
Tall Afar offers a case study in how U.S. and Iraqi forces working 
together can root out insurgents and restore stability. "The example of 
Tall Afar," he told an audience here Monday, "gives me confidence in our 
strategy."

Reports from the streets of Tall Afar, half a world away, offer a more 
complex story. U.S. forces last fall did drive out radicals who had 
brutalized the mid-size city near the Syrian border. But lately, 
residents say, the city has taken another dark turn. "The armed men are 
fewer," Nassir Sebti, 42, an air-conditioning mechanic, told a 
Washington Post interviewer Monday, "but the assassinations between 
Sunni and Shiites have increased."

The twists of Tall Afar underline the difficulties Bush has had in 
reassuring a doubtful American public that progress is being made in 
Iraq. The president and his aides say that the positive developments in 
Iraq get overwhelmed by the grim pictures of mayhem and massacre that 
dominate the evening news. If Americans knew about the success stories, 
the White House maintains, they would understand Bush's confidence of 
victory.

Yet even the success stories seem to come with asterisks. The 
administration hailed the election of a new democratic parliament last 
year, but the new body has so far proved incapable of forming a 
government for more than three months. U.S. forces have trained more 
Iraqi security troops, but the only unit judged capable of acting fully 
independently of U.S. assistance no longer can.

The cycle has taken a new spin with the latest evolution of Iraq from 
violent insurgency against foreign occupiers to sectarian strife 
bordering on civil war. Since the bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra 
last month, hundreds of Iraqis have been killed in reprisals in a bloody 
spate of violence that has eclipsed most periods during the three years 
since the U.S.-led invasion.

All this has taken its toll on Bush's credibility, Republican 
strategists say, making it hard for him to make people see what he sees 
in Iraq. Continuing his latest drive to rebuild public support for the 
war, Bush flew to this Midwestern city on Monday to empathize with the 
pessimism many Americans feel as the war heads into its fourth year, 
while trying to explain the basis for his own optimism.

"In the face of continued reports about killings and reprisals, I 
understand how some Americans have had their confidence shaken," he told 
the City Club of Cleveland. "Others look at the violence they see each 
night on their television screens and they wonder how I can remain so 
optimistic about the prospects of success in Iraq. They wonder what I 
see that they don't."

To illustrate, he devoted his talk to Tall Afar, hoping to use the 
progress there as a symbol of hope for the rest of the country. The city 
of 290,000 in northern Iraq was at one point awash in violence, a haven 
for insurgents and foreign extremists. An initial U.S. military 
offensive in the fall of 2004 dislodged them only temporarily. When the 
3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment returned last year, it set about trying a 
new, more patient strategy that focused more on winning over the local 
population, building cooperation with Iraqis, surrounding the city with 
a wall and ultimately flooding Tall Afar with patrols.

As Bush noted, the military heralded the offensive as a model for 
counterinsurgency. "The strategy that worked so well in Tall Afar did 
not emerge overnight -- it came only after much trial and error," the 
president said. "It took time to understand and adjust to the brutality 
of the enemy in Iraq. Yet the strategy is working."

Bush acknowledged that this offensive stood out. "I wish I could tell 
you that the progress made in Tall Afar is the same in every single part 
of Iraq. It's not," he said. But, he added, "the progress made in 
bringing more Iraqi security forces online is helping to bring peace and 
stability to Iraqi cities."

The Tall Afar strategy may not apply easily to other areas, particularly 
Baghdad -- a far larger and more populous city where it would take 
enormous numbers of U.S. troops to replicate the strategy, military 
analysts say.

The 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment "did a wonderful thing" in retaking 
Tall Afar, said Ahmed Hashim, a professor of strategy at the U.S. Naval 
War College who advised the regiment on counterinsurgency and cultural 
tactics. But Hashim, who wrote a book on the Iraqi insurgency that is 
being published next week, said he doubts that the example is readily 
transferable to the rest of Iraq, in part because of the weakness of the 
central government in Baghdad.

Hashim said he has also seen indications lately that the insurgents have 
begun "seeping back in" to Tall Afar now that the 3rd Armored Cavalry 
Regiment has rotated home and been replaced by another Army unit. And 
given the deep ethnic and sectarian divides in Tall Afar, he said, it is 
quite possible that the city could succumb to civil war, along with the 
rest of the country.

A Washington Post employee interviewing residents of Tall Afar found 
continuing anxiety in the streets. "Al-Qaeda has started to come back 
again," said Jaafar al-Khawat, 33, a tailor. "They have started to kill 
Shiites and Sunnis who cooperate with the Americans. Last Wednesday, 
they killed a truck driver because he worked with the Americans."

Yasir al-Efri, 23, a law student at Mosul University, said al-Qaeda 
pamphlets began appearing on the biggest mosque in Tall Afar in the past 
two months claiming credit for attacks. "The Tall Afar mission failed," 
he said. "The city will turn back to how it was before the battle within 
two months. The Americans are busy putting cement barriers and barbed 
wire around their bases and no one is taking care of the infrastructure."

Sebti, the mechanic, was more fearful of sectarian conflict. "People now 
are afraid to send their kids to school," he said. "I have to take my 
son to and from the school every day. There are two gangs in Tall Afar 
now that specialize in kidnapping children. Police can do nothing 
against that."

In his Cleveland speech, Bush received supportive applause for removing 
Saddam Hussein but also faced polite skepticism from some who addressed 
him during a subsequent question period. No major Ohio politician other 
than the mayor appeared with Bush, whose approval ratings have sunk 
below 40 percent, and war protesters demonstrated outside the downtown 
hotel where he appeared.

One man in the audience asked about Bush's credibility given that some 
of the reasons he originally gave for the war proved false. The 
president quarreled with the contention in one instance, denying that he 
ever made a "direct connection" between Hussein and the attacks of Sept. 
11, 2001, even though he often linked Baghdad with al-Qaeda generally. 
"I was very careful never to say that Saddam Hussein ordered the attacks 
on America," he said.

Bush acknowledged that the credibility issue -- the failure to find 
weapons of mass destruction that the administration said were in Iraq -- 
affected his ability now to confront Iran, which he has accused of 
secretly building nuclear weapons. But he offered tough language for 
Tehran, characterizing it as bent on destroying Israel. "It's a threat 
to world peace, it's a threat, in essence, to a strong alliance," Bush 
said. "I made it clear, I'll make it clear again, that we will use 
military might to protect our ally Israel."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/20/AR2006032001897.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060321/9161f963/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Tue Mar 21 03:49:27 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2006 06:49:27 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Old Forecasts Come Back to Haunt Bush - Washington Post
Message-ID: <441FE847.4050308@comcast.net>

Old Forecasts Come Back to Haunt Bush
Erosion in Confidence Will Be Hard To Reverse, Say Pollsters, Strategists

By Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 21, 2006; A14

Three years of upbeat White House assessments about Iraq that turned out 
to be premature, incomplete or plain wrong are complicating President 
Bush's efforts to restore public faith in the military operation and his 
presidency, according to pollsters and Republican lawmakers and strategists.

The last two weeks have provided a snapshot of White House optimism that 
skeptics contend is at odds with the facts on the ground in Iraq.

Vice President Cheney said Sunday that his 10-month-old claim that the 
insurgency was in its "last throes" was "basically accurate" and 
reflects reality. Since Cheney's original comment, on at least 70 days 
there have been violent attacks that in each instance killed more than 
10 people. Two weeks ago, Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs 
of Staff, said the United States is making "very, very good progress" -- 
less than 48 hours before the U.S ambassador warned of a possible civil 
war breaking out. And Bush yesterday said his optimism flows in part 
from success in Tall Afar, a city in northern Iraq, though local 
residents there said sectarian violence is spreading.

Pollsters and some congressional Republicans said the administration's 
sunny-side-up appraisals, instead of lifting the public mood, may now 
complicate the task of sustaining support for a long-term military 
commitment in Iraq. The loss of trust, they said, is affecting Bush's 
presidency more broadly, as polls show his public support at a nadir.

Rep. Heather A. Wilson (R-N.M.) said in an interview that Cheney was 
wrong about the insurgency being in its last throes and that she sent 
word to the White House recently to level with the American people about 
the challenges. "We need to assume that things are going to be very hard 
because when you do, you plan accordingly," said Wilson. "I am always 
cautious about always seeing things in the best light because war is not 
like that" and the public knows it.

Michael Dimock, associate director of the nonpartisan Pew Research 
Center for the People and the Press, said a recent survey by his group 
showed the public skeptical toward Bush, about both his administrative 
competency and his personal credibility. Only 40 percent of respondents 
said Bush was trustworthy, a 22-point drop from September of 2003, six 
months after the invasion of Iraq.

Dimock said the cumulative effect of the past three years has made 
Bush's public-relations challenge imposing, and perhaps impossible. 
"When you give a speech and try to persuade people that they are only 
hearing the bad and things are going better than the media is saying, if 
a majority of people say they do not find you trustworthy, it is hard to 
be persuasive," he said.

Frank Newport of the nonpartisan Gallup polling organization said White 
House efforts to turn around public opinion are complicated now because 
Bush is waging the wrong argument. His polling shows a majority of 
Americans agree with Bush that troops should not be pulled out 
immediately and that Iraq is better off now and will be in the future as 
a result of the invasion, two points the president made yesterday. Yet 6 
out of 10 said the war was not worth it because, Newport said, the 
public does not see an upside for the United States. "The focus for 
Americans is Americans," he said.

Newport, whose survey found a 26-point drop in the number of people who 
find Bush trustworthy since the 2003 invasion, said Bush can restore his 
standing on Iraq, on his credibility and on other issues by improving 
his overall popularity -- a feat past slumping second-term presidents 
have found difficult to pull off. The erosion in the public's support 
for Bush at a personal level is a striking reversal for a president who 
for most of his first term was described by the public as a strong and 
trustworthy leader, especially on national security measures.

This erosion in trust is not a new phenomenon for a wartime president. 
Lyndon B. Johnson's upbeat appraisals of progress in the Vietnam War 
proved wrong so often that by 1967 commentators spoke of his 
"credibility gap" with the public, a liability that soon helped push him 
out of office.

In recent months, Bush has moved to talk more candidly about the 
problems in Iraq and yesterday said repeatedly that he understood the 
public's concerns. But it has not stopped his slide in the polls.

There also has been a steady drumbeat of criticism -- from Democrats in 
particular -- that the administration should have been more forthright 
about the war and its cost from the outset. There were the famous claims 
by Cheney and others that U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators 
after the invasion. Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), a strong supporter of 
the war, said that was true -- to a point. "The same people who cheer 
when you get rid of someone they hate might not be so happy" when you 
occupy their country for three-plus years, he said.

Other statements were proved wrong. The weapons of mass destruction the 
administration said Saddam Hussein possessed before the war have never 
been found -- and many experts believe never existed. White House 
officials hammered then-chief economic adviser Lawrence B. Lindsey for 
claiming the war could cost as little as $100 billion, saying the 
estimate was too high. The actual tally is fast approaching four times 
that amount, according to the Congressional Research Service, which 
estimates a $360 billion price tag to date.

Perhaps the most famous rosy statement came nearly three years ago when 
Bush proclaimed: "We have seen the turning of the tide" under a banner 
that read "Mission Accomplished." Since then, more than 2,300 Americans 
have died in Iraq.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/20/AR2006032000341.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060321/9d0695a5/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Tue Mar 21 03:52:32 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2006 06:52:32 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] EXCELLENT: The Planet of Unreality - Eugene Robinson -
 Washington Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <441FE900.40104@comcast.net>

The Planet of Unreality

By Eugene Robinson
The Washington Post
Tuesday, March 21, 2006; A17

This is not good. The people running this country sound convinced that 
reality is whatever they say it is. And if they've actually strayed into 
the realm of genuine self-delusion -- if they actually believe the 
fantasies they're spinning about the bloody mess they've made in Iraq 
over the past three years -- then things are even worse than I thought.

Here is reality: The Bush administration's handpicked interim Iraqi 
prime minister, Ayad Allawi, told the BBC on Sunday, "We are losing each 
day an average of 50 to 60 people throughout the country, if not more. 
If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is. Iraq is in 
the middle of a crisis. Maybe we have not reached the point of no return 
yet, but we are moving towards this point. . . . We are in a terrible 
civil conflict now."

Here is self-delusion: Dick Cheney went on "Face the Nation" a few hours 
later and said he disagreed with Allawi -- who, by the way, is a tad 
closer to the action than the quail-hunting veep. There's no civil war, 
Cheney insisted. Move along, nothing to see here, pay no attention to 
those suicide bombings and death-squad murders. As an aside, Cheney 
insisted that his earlier forays into the Twilight Zone -- U.S. troops 
would be greeted as liberators, the insurgency is in its "last throes" 
-- were "basically accurate and reflect reality."

Maybe on his home planet.

Donald Rumsfeld, meanwhile, was busy on The Post's op-ed page, abusing 
history. Leaving Iraq now, he wrote, "would be the modern equivalent of 
handing postwar Germany back to the Nazis." The bizarre analogy was 
immediately disputed by foreign policy sages Henry Kissinger (who noted 
that there was "no significant resistance movement" in Germany after 
World War II) and Zbigniew Brzezinski (who just called the comparison 
"absolutely crazy'').

George W. Bush, who speaks as if he has ascended to an even higher plane 
of unreality, marked the third anniversary of the invasion Sunday by 
touting a "strategy that will lead to victory in Iraq." I know that 
"victory" is a word that focus groups love, but did anyone else hear an 
echo of Richard Nixon's "secret plan" to end the war in Vietnam? Does 
anyone else remember that there was no "secret plan''?

It's reprehensible when our highest elected officials act cynically, as 
I believe this administration has done -- Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the 
rest knew the evidence for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was less 
than conclusive, but they hyped it anyway to build support for an 
invasion they were determined to launch. It's dangerous when our leaders 
act cluelessly, and the Bush White House has done plenty of that as well 
-- experts who called for a much bigger invasion force were silenced and 
shoved aside, assurances that Iraqi oil revenue would defray U.S. costs 
turned out to be a sick joke, and there was no effective plan to get the 
electricity turned on, much less deal with thousands of insurgents.

But cynicism and cluelessness are one thing. Actually being divorced 
from reality is another. Do Bush et al. really see only the democratic 
process they have installed in Iraq and not the bitter sectarian 
conflict that process has been unable to quell? Do they realize that 
whatever happens, there's not going to be a neat package, tied up with a 
bow, labeled "victory" -- certainly in the 34 months (but who's 
counting?) that the Bush administration has left in office?

Rumsfeld, I think, gets it. "History is a bigger picture, and it takes 
some time and perspective to measure accurately," he wrote in his op-ed 
piece, the whole tone of which reminded me of Fidel Castro's famous 
declaration as he was being jailed after his first, failed attempt at 
revolution: "History will absolve me." Condoleezza Rice seems to get it, 
too, telling Australians the other day that "beyond my lifetime" people 
would appreciate what the administration had done for the Middle East.

But what about the two men at the top?

Cheney lamented this weekend that "what's newsworthy is the car bomb in 
Baghdad," and "not all the work that went on that day in 15 other 
provinces in terms of making progress towards rebuilding Iraq." 
Yesterday Bush recounted a successful anti-insurgent operation in one 
town, calling it a good-news story that people wouldn't see in their 
newspapers or on their television screens.

Fine, blaming the media is a time-honored tactic. I just hope they're 
being cynical about it. I hope they don't really believe the nonsense 
they're trying to sell.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/20/AR2006032001417.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060321/f1c9248e/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Tue Mar 21 03:53:56 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2006 06:53:56 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] The GOP's Shrinking Middle - E. J. Dionne - Washington
	Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <441FE954.6060103@comcast.net>

The GOP's Shrinking Middle

By E. J. Dionne Jr.
The Washington Post
Tuesday, March 21, 2006; A17

Members of Congress retire all the time, but some retirements are 
leading indicators of the direction of our politics. Rep. Sherwood 
Boehlert's announcement last week to call it quits matters, and in a 
depressing way.

The affable 69-year-old New York Republican is one of the last of a 
breed: a liberal Republican, though he calls himself a "moderate" and 
has the record to prove it. Boehlert's departure does not leave the 
House bereft of liberal Republicans -- Rep. Jim Leach of Iowa is more 
liberal than Boehlert. But Leach, alas, is an outlier. The spotted owl 
is in good shape compared with liberal Republicans.

Boehlert chose to retire in the year when National Journal, the 
political world's answer to Sports Illustrated, featured him as the 
ultimate "Down the Middle" guy. In its Feb. 25 issue, the magazine 
published its annual ratings, which showed that Boehlert's votes were 
more liberal than those of 52.2 percent of House members and more 
conservative than 47.8 percent. Boehlert's district includes the 
Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, and it's hard to move the ball 
more to the middle of the plate than he does.

It's been downhill for his brand of Republicanism from the moment he set 
foot in Washington as a congressional staffer in 1964. That's the year 
Barry Goldwater won the Republican presidential nomination and the great 
flight of the Republican liberals began.

After Goldwater's landslide defeat, two Republican progressives who 
later became conservatives, George Gilder and Bruce Chapman, wrote a 
brilliant book called "The Party That Lost Its Head," detailing how and 
why the party's liberal wing responded so anemically to the conservative 
challenge. But it was too late. The party of Abraham Lincoln and 
Theodore Roosevelt was destined to become an annex of the conservative 
movement.

Boehlert has always been unabashed in embracing his liberal roots. Over 
breakfast on a sunny summer morning in Cooperstown five years ago, 
Boehlert embraced two of the most progressive politicians of his 
lifetime. "People say to me: 'Why are you the kind of Republican you 
are?' Because in my formative political years, when I was coming up in 
New York, my governor was Nelson A. Rockefeller and my senator was Jacob 
K. Javits."

Why does the decline and fall of liberal Republicanism matter? After 
all, rationalizing the political system into a more conservative GOP and 
a more-or-less liberal Democratic Party makes the alternatives clearer 
to voters, who are offered, in Goldwater's famous phrase, "a choice, not 
an echo."

But it turns out that a Republican Party dominated by conservatives is 
no more coherent than the party that left room for progressives. The 
huge budget deficit is conservatism's Waterloo, testimony to its 
political failure. The conservatives love to cut taxes but can't square 
their lust for tax reduction with plausible spending cuts. Oh, yes, a 
group of House conservatives has a paper plan involving deep program 
cuts, but other conservatives know that these cuts will not pass, and 
shouldn't.

Paradoxically, because the liberal Republicans didn't pretend to hate 
government, they were better at fiscal responsibility. They were willing 
to match their desired spending levels with the taxes to pay for them. 
It didn't make for exciting, to-the-barricades politics. It merely 
produced good government.

Boehlert, being an optimist by nature, was always ready to declare that 
the "moderates' moment" had finally arrived. Last November, after I had 
written a column taking some moderate Republicans to task for backing 
the outrageous budget bill that passed under the cover of darkness at 
1:30 a.m., there was Boehlert on the phone insisting that he and fellow 
moderate Mike Castle (R-Del.) had wrung some important concessions out 
of the House leadership. Maybe so, I replied, but I had a higher opinion 
of moderate Republicans and expected more of them than that lousy budget 
bill.

The problem may be that Boehlert and Castle did get as much as they 
could, given the numerical weakness of their variety of Republicanism, 
but that's not good enough. I suspect Boehlert knows this. Absent a 
robust progressive wing, congressional Republicans will continue to 
produce fiscally incoherent government. Democrats now have the task of 
representing their own brand of politics, and that of progressive 
Republicans, too.

I'll miss Boehlert and his optimistic moderation. Our politics worked 
better when a sufficiently large band of Republican moderates and 
liberals could take the edge off polarization and orient government 
toward problem-solving. But the liberal Republicans are gone. We have to 
deal with the GOP we have, not the GOP we wish still existed.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/20/AR2006032001418.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060321/2bf34651/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Tue Mar 21 03:57:20 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2006 06:57:20 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] WORTH A LOOK: Straight talk on Bush - Scot Lehigh -
 Boston Globe Op-Ed
Message-ID: <441FEA20.30405@comcast.net>


  Straight talk on Bush

By Scot Lehigh  |  March 21, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

THE MOST UNLIKELY page-turner I read on my winter vacation?

It was ''Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed 
the Reagan Legacy," by former Reagan administration official Bruce Bartlett.

When party and principles clash, loyalty to team typically trumps 
fidelity to tenets, while rationalization usually supplants 
ratiocination. Not in this case, however. Bartlett values his ideals 
enough to speak important truths about a president of his own party.

 From the policy-generation process to tax cuts to spending to free 
trade, the author portrays the Bush record as dismal. Because 
partisanship imparts a certain imperviousness to facts (on both sides of 
the ideological aisle), criticisms of this administration are too often 
shrugged off, at least by the right-wing talk-radio crowd, as political 
carping.

It will be hard to dismiss Bartlett's book that way. A confirmed 
Reaganite, he not only worked in the Gipper's White House but went on to 
serve as deputy assistant secretary for economic policy during the last 
few months of Reagan's presidency and all of George H.W. Bush's.

One particularly troubling trait of the current White House, Bartlett 
writes, has been its ''total subordination of analysis to short-term 
politics." A second ''is a disregard for established economic agencies 
and total reliance on a small cadre of White House staffers, many with 
no substantive economic backgrounds, who regularly overrule those with 
experience and expertise on issues under discussion."

And consider the honesty it takes for a conservative to make this point: 
When it comes to fiscal responsibility, Bill Clinton's record is better 
than George W. Bush's.

Praising Clinton for deficit reduction, spending discipline, federal 
workforce reductions, and welfare reform, Bartlett writes that ''for 
those reasons, growing numbers of conservatives now view Clinton as 
having governed as one of them -- at least on economic policy."

One shortcoming: Although Bartlett criticizes the Bush tax cuts as 
poorly designed, he never quite acknowledges how much of the huge yearly 
budget deficits result from them.

 From fiscal year 2001 through fiscal year 2005, ''tax cuts and new 
spending contributed roughly equally to the increase in the deficit," 
says Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a 
nonpartisan budgetary watchdog.

Bartlett, who labels George W. Bush ''one of the most free-spending 
presidents on record," is focused much more on that aspect of the ledger.

He's particularly exercised about the Medicare prescription drug 
benefit. That legislation was billed as a plan that would cost $400 
billion over its first 10 years. However, it quickly turned out that the 
true cost of the bill had been concealed. The real price tag for the 
first 10 years is $557 billion. Meanwhile, a more representative 
decade-long cost, for the years from 2006 to 2015, is now put at more 
than $700 billion.

That benefit alone will consume 1.9 percent of gross domestic product 
virtually forever, Bartlett says. ''In 2005, this would have come to 
$232 billion -- more than all the corporate income taxes collected by 
the federal government and 26 percent of all personal income taxes," he 
writes. ''In other words, the individual income tax would have to rise 
by 26 percent immediately and forever just to pay for the drug program."

It's worth noting that if Bush has been a spendthrift, the Democrats 
have hardly distinguished themselves. One depressing memory of the 2004 
presidential campaign was watching the Democratic candidates tumble over 
themselves in their hurry to tell seniors that the new drug benefit 
simply wasn't generous enough.

Bartlett underscores another important idea: Although Bush likes to 
style himself a tax-cutter, in reality his borrow-and-spend fiscal 
policies have made a future tax hike virtually inevitable.

Or, to put it another way, because they haven't held spending to what 
revenues will support, Bush and Congress are sending part of the tab for 
current programs to future taxpayers, who will eventually have to make 
good our bills.

''Bush may turn out to be extraordinarily lucky and avoid having to face 
the consequences of his own fiscal actions, especially the hugely 
ill-conceived Medicare drug bill, and the burden of enacting a major tax 
increase may fall on his successor," Bartlett writes. ''But it will be 
Bush's fault even if someone else ends up paying the political price."

It may not be everyone's idea of a race-through beach read, but 
Bartlett's is a thought-provoking book -- one that merits more attention 
than apologists for this administration are likely to give it.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/21/straight_talk_on_bush/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060321/b5c9c1b6/attachment-0001.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Tue Mar 21 03:58:51 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2006 06:58:51 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Immigrants' bitterness boils over in France - H.D.S.
 Greenway - Boston Globe Op-Ed
Message-ID: <441FEA7B.2090806@comcast.net>


  Immigrants' bitterness boils over in France

By H.D.S. Greenway  |  March 21, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

ONCE AGAIN Paris is the scene of violent demonstrations, but this time 
it is the young with jobs that they want to protect who are 
demonstrating. Last time it was the sons of immigrants without jobs, and 
without hope of jobs, that began far more serious riots that spread 
quickly across France. It wasn't about religion, although most of the 
rioters were Muslims. The fire last time was a cry against poverty, lack 
of opportunity, discrimination, and social injustice that mark the lives 
of many immigrant communities across Europe.

I recently spoke with Claude Dilain, the mayor of Clichy-sous-Bois, 
where last autumn's riots began, to find out what he had learned from 
those November days. ''It's not for me to learn, it was for French 
society to learn something," he said in a tone of controlled anger. 
''For 20 years France has refused to see the reality of the suburbs," he 
said, ''the hypocrisy, the self-serving hypocrisy."

The face of immigrant France had been hidden away in the dying suburbs 
of France, and when mayors tried to draw attention to the problems they 
were told it's just your local problem, the mayor said. ''But I think it 
is a national problem."

The mayor described a France in which moving from one socio-economic 
level to another is becoming ever more difficult, especially in 
immigrant communities, even for those born in France. ''I am very 
pessimistic about the willingness to change, and what French society 
needs to know is that if they want to keep people down they must expect 
explosions."

Clichy-sous-Bois still has no police station of its own, Dilain said. 
The nearest one is in the next town. Also, there is no train to take 
people to work. One has to take buses to get to the train in the next 
town, and the service begins so late in the morning that low-level jobs 
that might start immigrants on the road away from poverty are less 
obtainable.

There is 24 percent unemployment in Clichy-sous-Bois, according to the 
mayor, against a national average of 10 percent. ''Some of the kids have 
good diplomas," Dilain said. It was not just a matter of not having a 
good education, but a problem of ''having not such a good color of the 
skin or a good address."

This is not the way it is supposed to be in France. The ideals of the 
French Revolution, ''liberte, egalite, fraternite," still rule public 
policy. Everyone is supposed to be absolutely equal in France. It is not 
supposed to matter what color or religion you are. Everyone who is a 
French citizen is automatically equal under French tradition and law.

As France's minister of equal opportunity, Azous Begag, a writer from 
Lyon of Algerian descent, told me, you cannot have affirmative action in 
France because ''it's impossible to have ethnic monitoring in this 
country." There are no racial, ethnic, or religious differences 
recognized in France. But the truth is far from the ideal, he said.

Listen to the words of Hibat Tabib, an Iranian immigrant and lawyer whom 
I met in the nearby suburb of Pierfitte, where the unemployment in the 
immigrant housing projects is 35 percent compared with 20 percent for 
the town.

''There is no equality because of discrimination, he said. ''People 
coming with the same equal talent don't have equal opportunity. If you 
have a North African name you don't get the job.

''Equality doesn't exist in political representation. Of the 35,000 
municipalities in France there is not one mayor from an immigrant 
background. Not one. In the National Assembly there is not one delegate 
from an immigrant background. Not one." In Germany, France, and Holland, 
immigrants and their children can be found in parliaments -- even in the 
British House of Lords.

''We are French citizens but never treated as French. We have a whole 
generation of people in France who belong to nowhere," he said. ''Not to 
France. Not to the home country."

There is not much fraternity either because if there is no equality how 
can you be brothers? And without equality and fraternity you cannot have 
real liberty. The riots of the suburbs may be over but the bitterness 
has not gone away.

France is not alone in its troubles absorbing immigrants, but perhaps it 
is more painful in France because the ideal is so high, and therefore 
the gap between the ideal and the reality so wide.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/21/immigrants_bitterness_boils_over_in_france/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060321/392456ca/attachment.htm 

From jameshburns at webtv.net  Tue Mar 21 05:40:25 2006
From: jameshburns at webtv.net (Jim Burns)
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2006 08:40:25 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Bush Squeaks, and Oil's Well
In-Reply-To: mb-civic-request@islandlists.com's message of Tue, 21 Mar 2006
	04:16:35 -0800
Message-ID: <1279-44200249-19176@storefull-3278.bay.webtv.net>


I usually hate this conspiracy crap, but a fascinating nugget-- 

According to this article, the five top oil companies have seen their
profits rise from $32 billion, in 2002-- 

To $113 billion in 2005... 
______

Bush Didn't Bungle Iraq, You Fools
THE MISSION WAS INDEED ACCCOMPLISHED

by Greg Palast
for The Guardian 
20 March 2006 

Get off it. All the carping, belly-aching and complaining about George
Bush's incompetence in Iraq, from both the Left and now the Right, is
just dead wrong. 
On the third anniversary of the tanks rolling over Iraq's border, most
of the 59 million Homer Simpsons who voted for Bush are beginning to
doubt if his mission was accomplished. 
But don't kid yourself -- Bush and his co-conspirator, Dick Cheney,
accomplished exactly what they set out to do. In case you've forgotten
what their real mission was, let me remind you of White House spokesman
Ari Fleisher's original announcement, three years ago, launching of what
he called, 
??????????????????"Operation
??????????Iraqi
??????????Liberation." 
O.I.L. How droll of them, how cute. Then, Karl Rove made the giggling
boys in the White House change it to "OIF" -- Operation Iraqi Freedom.
But the 101st Airborne wasn't sent to Basra to get its hands on Iraq's
OIF. 
"It's about oil," Robert Ebel told me. Who is Ebel? Formerly the CIA's
top oil analyst, he was sent by the Pentagon, about a month before the
invasion, to a secret confab in London with Saddam's former oil minister
to finalize the plans for "liberating" Iraq's oil industry. In London,
Bush's emissary Ebel also instructed Ibrahim Bahr al-Ulum, the man the
Pentagon would choose as post-OIF oil minister for Iraq, on the correct
method of disposing Iraq's crude. 
And what did the USA want Iraq to do with Iraq's oil? The answer will
surprise many of you: and it is uglier, more twisted, devilish and
devious than anything imagined by the most conspiracy-addicted blogger.
The answer can be found in a 323-page plan for Iraq's oil secretly
drafted by the State Department. Our team got a hold of a copy; how,
doesn't matter. The key thing is what's inside this thick Bush diktat: a
directive to Iraqis to maintain a state oil company that will "enhance
its relationship with OPEC." 
Enhance its relationship with OPEC??? How strange: the government of the
United States ordering Iraq to support the very OPEC oil cartel which is
strangling our nation with outrageously high prices for crude. 
Specifically, the system ordered up by the Bush cabal would keep a lid
on Iraq's oil production -- limiting Iraq's oil pumping to the tight
quota set by Saudi Arabia and the OPEC cartel. 
There you have it. Yes, Bush went in for the oil -- not to get MORE of
Iraq's oil, but to prevent Iraq producing TOO MUCH of it. 
You must keep in mind who paid for George's ranch and Dick's bunker: Big
Oil. And Big Oil -- and their buck-buddies, the Saudis -- don't make
money from pumping more oil, but from pumping LESS of it. The lower the
supply, the higher the price. 
It's Economics 101. The oil industry is run by a cartel, OPEC, and what
economists call an "oligopoly" -- a tiny handful of operators who make
more money when there's less oil, not more of it. So, every time the
"insurgents" blow up a pipeline in Basra, every time Mad Mahmoud in
Tehran threatens to cut supply, the price of oil leaps. And Dick and
George just LOVE it. 
Dick and George didn't want more oil from Iraq, they wanted less. I know
some of you, no matter what I write, insist that our President and his
Veep are on the hunt for more crude so you can cheaply fill your family
Hummer; that somehow, these two oil-patch babies are concerned that the
price of gas in the USA is bumping up to $3 a gallon. 
No so, gentle souls. Three bucks a gallon in the States (and a quid a
litre in Britain) means colossal profits for Big Oil, and that makes
Dick's ticker go pitty-pat with joy. The top oily-gopolists, the five
largest oil companies, pulled in $113 billion in profit in 2005 --
compared to a piddly $34 billion in 2002 before Operation Iraqi
Liberation. In other words, it's been a good war for Big Oil. 
As per Plan Bush, Bahr Al-Ulum became Iraq's occupation oil minister;
the conquered nation "enhanced its relationship with OPEC;" and the
price of oil, from Clinton peace-time to Bush war-time, shot up 317%. 
In other words, on the third anniversary of invasion, we can say the
attack and occupation is, indeed, a Mission Accomplished. However, it
wasn't America's mission, nor the Iraqis'. It was an Mission
Accomplished for OPEC and Big Oil. 
********** 
On June 6, Penguin Dutton will release GREG PALAST'S NEW BOOK, "ARMED
MADHOUSE: DISPATCHES FROM THE FRONT LINES OF THE CLASS WAR." Order it
today -- and view his investigative reports for Harper's Magazine and
BBC television's Newsnight -- at www.GregPalast.com. 
Palast returns to the pages of the Guardian today with this column.
Catch his commentaries weekly. 



From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Tue Mar 21 08:07:02 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2006 16:07:02 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: New Business Blooms in Iraq: Terror
	Insurance
Message-ID: <20060321160702.A84AE11F81E@lax-gw07.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

orwell would be proud


INTERNATIONAL / MIDDLE EAST | March 21, 2006
New Business Blooms in Iraq: Terror Insurance
By ROBERT F. WORTH
Iraqis have begun to purchase what insurance experts say is the first off-the-shelf terrorism policy in the world.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/21/international/middleeast/21insurance.html?ex=1143608400&en=9bf7fe0d8eeeced8&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060321/5f170345/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Tue Mar 21 08:08:35 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2006 16:08:35 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: A Republican Rara Avis
Message-ID: <20060321160835.BAADF83CD1@lax-gw03.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

OPINION | March 21, 2006
Appreciations: A Republican Rara Avis
By ROBERT B. SEMPLE Jr.
Sherwood Boehlert organized a Republican opposition to conservative Republicans who tried to roll back laws protecting the environment.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/21/opinion/21tue4.html?ex=1143608400&en=fbbb20c8b079f245&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060321/85a1baee/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Tue Mar 21 08:13:14 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2006 16:13:14 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Visitors Seek a Taste of Revolution in
	Venezuela
Message-ID: <20060321161314.7F5093AE3C7@lax-gw06.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

i just read the first page and it doesn't mention that Chavez is "democratically elected...that's demo-fucking-cratically elected!


INTERNATIONAL / AMERICAS | March 21, 2006
Visitors Seek a Taste of Revolution in Venezuela
By JUAN FORERO
President Hugo Ch?vez is drawing a following from all over and turning Caracas into the new leftist mecca.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/21/international/americas/21venezuela.html?ex=1143608400&en=8045411aaa6cc115&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060321/810c32e2/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Tue Mar 21 08:14:36 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2006 16:14:36 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Extraditing Charles Taylor
Message-ID: <20060321161437.01B68249C03@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

OPINION | March 21, 2006
Editorial: Extraditing Charles Taylor

Liberia's new president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, is taking a courageous, very risky step by calling for Nigeria to extradite the former president, Charles Taylor.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/21/opinion/21tue2.html?ex=1143608400&en=bb25b7f1fa65ed07&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060321/18324172/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Tue Mar 21 08:16:05 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2006 16:16:05 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: 2 Years After Soldier's Death,
	Family's Battle Is With Army
Message-ID: <20060321161605.6831F11F999@lax-gw07.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

WASHINGTON | March 21, 2006
2 Years After Soldier's Death, Family's Battle Is With Army
By MONICA DAVEY and ERIC SCHMITT
Army explanations of Pat Tillman's death in Afghanistan have not satisfied his family, and now a criminal investigation is under way.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/21/politics/21tillman.html?ex=1143608400&en=671923f82f177bfc&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060321/44f5c0ac/attachment-0001.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Tue Mar 21 08:18:44 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2006 16:18:44 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Cheney at Fund-Raiser,
	but Not With the Candidate
Message-ID: <20060321161844.EF93513B73C@lax-gw04.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

NEW YORK REGION | March 21, 2006
Cheney at Fund-Raiser, but Not With the Candidate
By DAVID W. CHEN
Vice President Dick Cheney appeared at an event for U.S. Senate candidate Thomas H. Kean Jr., who arrived after Mr. Cheney left.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/21/nyregion/21kean.html?ex=1143608400&en=f6226aad2b93bb0c&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060321/45d39e58/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Tue Mar 21 08:20:35 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: 21 Mar 2006 16:20:35 -0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] Videotape Forces Pentagon to Investigate Claims U.S.
	Marines Shot Dead 15 Iraqi Civilians in Apparent Revenge Killings
Message-ID: <20060321162035.30049.qmail@trinity.democracynow.org>

Mike Blaxill  ( mblaxill at yahoo.com )
sent you this story from democracynow.org




+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  Videotape Forces Pentagon to Investigate Claims U.S. Marines Shot Dead 15 Iraqi Civilians in Apparent Revenge Killings
|  http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/21/1418210
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+


The U.S. military is conducting a criminal investigation into allegations that marines shot and killed 15 civilians, including seven women and three children, in the Iraqi town of Haditha last November in an apparent act of revenge for the death of a U.S. soldier by a roadside bomb. A videotape obtained by Time Magazine shows that many of the victims were still in their nightclothes when they died. We speak with the Time reporter who broke the story.
This story continues at: 
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/21/1418210


From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Tue Mar 21 08:20:16 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: 21 Mar 2006 16:20:16 -0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] Headlines for March 21, 2006
Message-ID: <20060321162016.30045.qmail@trinity.democracynow.org>

Mike Blaxill  ( mblaxill at yahoo.com )
sent you this story from democracynow.org

check out the First item re 911

+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  Headlines for March 21, 2006
|  http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/21/1418203
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+


- FBI Agent Says Ignored Warnings Could Have Prevented 9/11
- 27 Killed in Attack on Iraq Jail
- Bush Says He Didn?t Link Saddam to 9/11
- Protesters Announce Pending Strike Against France Worker Law
- French Demonstrator Left in Coma After Police Beating
- Milosevic Honored, Protested in Belgrade
This story continues at: 
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/21/1418203


From michael at michaelbutler.com  Tue Mar 21 10:30:15 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2006 10:30:15 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Passing the Dinar By JOHN TIERNEY-NYTimes
Message-ID: <C0458637.2A59B%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 21, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Passing the Dinar
By JOHN TIERNEY

Two months before the Iraq war began, David Kay reported to the Pentagon for
a job in the agency being formed to run postwar Iraq. Kay, a former Defense
Department scientist and weapons inspector in Iraq, was supposed to oversee
the police.

He assumed this meant preparing for the looting and crime to be expected
when any regime collapsed. But those problems didn't seem to be on anyone
else's mind, he told me, recalling his first day on the job.

"I said our first priority should be to establish order quickly, but that
was considered a peripheral issue," he said. "The attitude was that it's not
a problem, and if something happens the military will deal with it. I had
one of the worst feelings ever in my gut, that this was going over a cliff."

On his second day on the job, he resigned ? an excellent career move in
retrospect, although Kay doesn't believe it took any special clairvoyance.
There were tough questions before the war, like figuring out whether Saddam
had W.M.D. or forecasting the strength of the insurgency. But the looting
and disorder were easily predictable, and Kay wasn't the only one making the
predictions, as Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor document in their
new book on the war, "Cobra II."

Before the war, Dick Mayer, a former policeman working for the Justice
Department, came up with a plan to send in thousands of international police
officers to maintain order after the invasion. But Pentagon officials
bristled at the expense, and the White House rejected the plan.

A similar plan was proposed in a prewar briefing at the Pentagon by Robert
Perito, a veteran of peacekeeping operations in other countries. He told the
Defense Policy Board, the advisory group led by Richard Perle, that neither
Iraqi authorities nor American soldiers could be counted on to maintain
order, and that the U.S. should send in a constabulary force as soon as it
occupied Iraq.

"The group at the Pentagon liked the concept and said it was a worthwhile
thing to do," Perito told me. "But as one member put it, 'Not this war.'
Their feeling was that the conflict in Iraq would be over so soon and things
would be back to normal so quickly that it wasn't worth the effort."

Some Pentagon officials did warn of civil disorder and crime, but they
didn't do anything about it. They passed the buck to Gen. Tommy Franks, even
though he didn't have enough troops or money for the job and showed little
interest in postwar planning. He simply assured President Bush that there
would be a "lord mayor" in each city and large town to deal with civilian
problems.

Looting, crime, mayhem ? that was always someone else's department. The
buck-passing reached its most absurd level at a briefing in the Situation
Room just before the invasion, when Bush heard about the postwar plan to
rely on Iraqis for law enforcement. According to Gordon and Trainor, the
president was told of an intelligence report concluding that the Iraqi
police "appeared to have extensive professional training."

That was like concluding that Inspector Clouseau appeared to be a master
detective. During Saddam's era, when his security forces were the prime
enforcers of order, the Iraqi police were notorious for corruption and
lethargy. Officers waited for citizens to report crimes and expected bribes
for investigating them. To the police, preventing crime, or even doing
street patrols, was not their job.

When the regime fell, they didn't even protect their own police stations
against the mobs of looters, a lack of professionalism that came as no
surprise to the Iraqis I encountered shortly after the invasion. Nor were
they surprised by the initial outbreak of violence against the buildings
built by an oppressive regime.

But they were shocked at how little the Americans did in response. The
looting went on so long that it became a regular job. Thieves methodically
dismantled office towers, removing wires, pipes, walls, floors, escalators.
In the summer of 2003, they took the "broken windows" theory of social
disorder to a new level ? to broken buildings ? and Iraq has been paying the
price ever since.

That summer, as Iraqis watched looters and criminals taking control, they
kept asking why nobody put a stop to the crime. The answer from officials in
Washington, it turns out, is the same one that would have been given by the
old Iraqi police: not my job.

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From michael at michaelbutler.com  Tue Mar 21 10:34:03 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2006 10:34:03 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] On the Road, You and Me By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF-NYTimes
Message-ID: <C045871B.2A59C%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 21, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
On the Road, You and Me
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

NDJAMENA, Chad

Where's the best place to get an education? Some might say Harvard or Yale,
Oxford or the Sorbonne. But maybe you should add Ndjamena to the list.

Universities are ? oh so slowly ? recognizing that they need to prepare
students to survive globalization. But most overseas studies programs are
both too short and too tame. They typically involve sending a herd of
students for a term in France or Italy, where they study a little and drink
a lot together, amid occasional sightings of locals.

That's why I bring up Ndjamena, this dusty capital of one of the poorest
countries in the world. A student living independently here could learn
French and Arabic, and would emerge with a much richer understanding of the
world than could be taught in any classroom.

Traditionally, many young Britons, Irish, Australians and New Zealanders
take a year to travel around the world on a shoestring, getting menial jobs
when they run out of money. We should try to inculcate the custom of such a
"gap year" in this country by offering university credit for such
experiences.

So here's my proposal. Universities should grant a semester's credit to any
incoming freshman who has taken a gap year to travel around the world. In
the longer term, universities should move to a three-year academic program,
and require all students to live abroad for a fourth year. In that year,
each student would ideally live for three months in each of four continents:
Latin America, Asia, Africa and Europe.

A student might, for example, start off teaching English and studying Latin
American history in Ecuador, then learn Chinese intensively in Chengdu, then
work at an AIDS clinic in Botswana while reading African literature on the
side, and finish up by studying Islamic history in Istanbul. In each place,
the students would live with local families.

Since the best way to learn about public health challenges is to endure
them, I would also suggest offering extra credit for any student who gets
malaria.

The cost of a year of travel would be far less than the annual cost of
attending many colleges in the U.S. Third-class trains and buses are
incredibly cheap; you can sometimes ride free on top of the trains. As a
student backpacker myself in India two decades ago, I once lined up with the
beggars and lepers of Amritsar to get free gruel from a Sikh temple ? but
that embarrassed even me.

In any case, all this suffering builds character. And students would get far
more out of a year of travel than a year in classrooms.

Meanwhile, there's no need for universities to take the first step. Spring
break season is upon us, and university students are dashing off to party in
Mexico and Florida. So, you student readers, how about dashing off instead
to Mongolia, where you'll find plenty of sand ? the Gobi Desert ? and get a
truly exotic alcoholic drink: fermented mare's milk.

As for parents, if you have a child graduating from high school or college
this year, forget about a conventional graduation present. Instead, send him
or her off with a friend with a one-way ticket to Timbuktu.

Over a year or so, the kids would figure out how to catch rides with trucks
north over the Sahara, then hitchhike through the Middle East and across
Central Asia. After a temporary job in Calcutta to earn a few rupees, they
could migrate through East Asia and then make enough money as tutors
teaching English in China to buy cheap air tickets home.

Now, that would be an education!

You may not know that one of the most cosmopolitan states is Utah. That's
because so many young Mormons spend two years abroad as missionaries. They
learn languages, live as the locals do and bring back a worldliness that
stays with them forever.

All this has been throat-clearing for my own announcement: In an effort to
put my company's money where my mouth is, I'm sponsoring a contest in which
I'll take a university student with me on a reporting trip to a remote part
of Africa. We'll visit schools, clinics and villages, perhaps chatting with
presidents in their villas and Pygmies in the rain forest. The winner will
write a Weblog for nytimes.com and prepare a video blog that will be shown
on mtvU.

So if you're a masochistic student ? or if you have an ex you want to send
into a malarial jungle ? you can find out more information at
nytimes.com/winatrip.

And even if you don't win, you can do this kind of thing on your own. So
I'll hope to see you hanging out in Ndjamena by the Chari River, as the
hippos bellow nearby.

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From hecate at diamonddragon.com  Tue Mar 21 10:54:19 2006
From: hecate at diamonddragon.com (Hecate)
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2006 18:54:19 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] BBC E-mail: Farms 'big threat' to fresh water
Message-ID: <20060321_185419_086572.hecate@diamonddragon.com>

Hecate saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you
should see it.



** Farms 'big threat' to fresh water **
Intensive farming is the main threat to the world's fresh water resources, says a major UN environment report.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/4828716.stm >


** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all
in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/dailyemail/ >


** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have?been verified.

If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm


From michael at intrafi.com  Tue Mar 21 10:37:39 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2006 18:37:39 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] BBC E-mail: Prince urges respect among faiths
Message-ID: <20060321_183739_078236.michael@intrafi.com>

Michael Butler saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you
should see it.



** Prince urges respect among faiths **
Prince Charles calls for greater understanding between religions in a speech while touring the Middle East.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/4824734.stm >


** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all
in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/dailyemail/ >


** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have?been verified.

If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm


From nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca  Tue Mar 21 16:29:00 2006
From: nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca (CBC News Online)
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 00:29:00 UT
Subject: [Mb-civic] CBC News - BUSH STILL BELIEVES VICTORY POSSIBLE IN IRAQ
Message-ID: <20060322002900.8C7E17DBC@web04.nm.cbc.ca>

An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Url: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060322/5d19a041/attachment.diff 

From nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca  Tue Mar 21 16:31:42 2006
From: nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca (CBC News Online)
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 00:31:42 UT
Subject: [Mb-civic] CBC News - CANADA CONCERNED OVER AFGHAN FACING DEATH FOR
	BEING A CHRISTIAN
Message-ID: <20060322003142.882EE32F85@web05.nm.cbc.ca>

An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Url: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060322/c6a15ffb/attachment.diff 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Tue Mar 21 18:49:21 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (harry.sifton at sympatico.ca)
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 02:49:21 GMT
Subject: [Mb-civic] IRS plans to allow preparers to sell data
Message-ID: <8885034.1142995761052.JavaMail.webform@noreply.realcities.com>

An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060322/56c99c04/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Tue Mar 21 21:08:25 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 05:08:25 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Opponents of New French Labor Law Step Up
	Protests
Message-ID: <20060322050825.8A3DA13B748@lax-gw04.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

Power to the people!!!


INTERNATIONAL / EUROPE | March 21, 2006
Opponents of New French Labor Law Step Up Protests
By CRAIG S. SMITH
French students and unions called for more demonstrations culminating in strikes next week to fight a contested new labor law.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/21/international/europe/21france.html?ex=1143694800&en=a9442b4f7c1a63c9&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060322/94d08370/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Tue Mar 21 21:09:28 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 05:09:28 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Librarian Is Still John Doe,
	Despite Patriot Act Revision
Message-ID: <20060322050928.B3DA983DE7@lax-gw03.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

NEW YORK REGION | March 21, 2006
Librarian Is Still John Doe, Despite Patriot Act Revision
By ALISON LEIGH COWAN
A Connecticut colleague who challenged an F.B.I. demand for patron records was not helped by changes in the law, librarians said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/21/nyregion/21library.html?ex=1143694800&en=2864ba1f2be83592&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060322/35e679d3/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Tue Mar 21 21:10:09 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 05:10:09 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Report Urges Requiring All Convicts to Give
	DNA
Message-ID: <20060322051009.4E5C883DD8@lax-gw03.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

Holy Moly! If this is not an outrageous, Orwellian invasion of privacy, then nothing is...


NEW YORK REGION | March 21, 2006
Report Urges Requiring All Convicts to Give DNA
By DANNY HAKIM
ALBANY, March 20 ? A State Investigation Commission report released on Monday calls for DNA samples to be collected from anyone convicted of a crime, bolstering an effort by Gov. George E. Pataki to expand the state's DNA database.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/21/nyregion/21dna.html?ex=1143694800&en=a7bf00c20dbbe741&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060322/884d091d/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Tue Mar 21 21:10:43 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 05:10:43 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Justices Weigh In on Use of Tapes and
	Transcripts
Message-ID: <20060322051043.7982A23708F@lax-gw01.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

WASHINGTON | March 21, 2006
Justices Weigh In on Use of Tapes and Transcripts
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
The question before the Supreme Court is if 911 calls used as evidence violate the rights of defendants to face their accusers in court.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/21/politics/21scotus.html?ex=1143694800&en=7d8c43ea8a70877a&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060322/9d7a7b8c/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Tue Mar 21 21:11:47 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 05:11:47 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Two Perceptions of the Mellow Decade as
	Anything But
Message-ID: <20060322051147.CF8A213B742@lax-gw04.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

BOOKS | March 21, 2006
Books of The Times: Two Perceptions of the Mellow Decade as Anything But
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
New books by Philip Jenkins and Andreas Killen focus on the darker undercurrents running beneath the 1970's tacky, polyester surface.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/21/books/21kaku.html?ex=1143694800&en=c1324b62eedbcb15&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060322/2b99901d/attachment-0001.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Tue Mar 21 21:12:47 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 05:12:47 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Hindsight and Foresight on the War (4
	Letters)
Message-ID: <20060322051247.295A283DC8@lax-gw03.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

What we're saying...


OPINION | March 21, 2006
Hindsight and Foresight on the War (4 Letters)

To the Editor:.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/21/opinion/l21iraq.html?ex=1143694800&en=7d6f8693616c6319&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060322/49a9e564/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Wed Mar 22 03:45:18 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 06:45:18 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Grants Flow To Bush Allies On Social Issues - Washington
	Post
Message-ID: <442138CE.1030601@comcast.net>

Grants Flow To Bush Allies On Social Issues
Federal Programs Direct At Least $157 Million

By Thomas B. Edsall
The Washington Post
Wednesday, March 22, 2006; A01

For years, conservatives have complained about what they saw as the 
liberal tilt of federal grant money. Taxpayer funds went to abortion 
rights groups such as Planned Parenthood to promote birth control, and 
groups closely aligned with the AFL-CIO got Labor Department grants to 
run worker-training programs.

In the Bush administration, conservatives are discovering that turnabout 
is fair play: Millions of dollars in taxpayer funds have flowed to 
groups that support President Bush's agenda on abortion and other social 
issues.

Under the auspices of its religion-based initiatives and other federal 
programs, the administration has funneled at least $157 million in 
grants to organizations run by political and ideological allies, 
according to federal grant documents and interviews.

An example is Heritage Community Services in Charleston, S.C. A decade 
ago, Heritage was a tiny organization with deeply conservative social 
philosophy but not much muscle to promote it. An offshoot of an 
antiabortion pregnancy crisis center, Heritage promoted abstinence 
education at the county fair, local schools and the local Navy base. The 
budget was $51,288.

By 2004, Heritage Community Services had become a major player in the 
booming business of abstinence education. Its budget passed $3 million 
-- much of it in federal grants distributed by Bush's Department of 
Health and Human Services -- supporting programs for students in middle 
school and high school in South Carolina, Georgia and Kentucky.

Among other new beneficiaries of federal funding during the Bush years 
are groups run by Christian conservatives, including those in the 
African American and Hispanic communities. Many of the leaders have been 
active Republicans and influential supporters of Bush's presidential 
campaigns.

Programs such as the Compassion Capital Fund, under the Health and Human 
Services, are designed to support religion-based social services, a goal 
that inevitably funnels money to organizations run by people who share 
Bush's conservative cultural agenda.

"If what you are asking is, has George Bush as president of the United 
States established priorities in spending for his administration? The 
answer is yes," said Wade F. Horn, who as assistant secretary for 
children and families at HHS oversees much of the spending going to 
conservative groups. "That is a prerogative that presidents have."

Horn and other officials said politics has not played a role in making 
grants. "Whoever got these grants wrote the best applications, and the 
panels in rating these grants rated them objectively, based on the 
criteria we published in the Federal Register," he said. "Whether they 
support the president or not is not a test in any of my grant programs."

"These are just slush funds for conservative interest groups," countered 
Bill Smith, vice president of the Sexuality Information and Education 
Council of the United States, one of the most outspoken critics of 
abstinence-only sex-education programs. "These organizations would not 
be in existence if not for the federal dollars coming through."

H. James Towey, director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and 
Community Initiatives, said politics plays no role in grant-making 
decisions. "We don't have that kind of calculation," he said.

Most, but not all, of the money going to conservative groups has come 
from two programs that did not exist before Bush took office in 2001. 
The Compassion Capital Fund, which distributed $148.3 million from 2002 
to 2005, was created "to expand the role that faith-based and community 
groups play in providing social services to those in need," according to 
the White House.

The Community-Based Abstinence Education grant program was enacted by 
Congress in 2001, and $391.7 million has been appropriated for it.

Beneficiaries of more than $2 million each from the compassion fund 
include five organizations run by black and Hispanic leaders who 
endorsed Bush and Operation Blessing, a charity run by television 
evangelist Pat Robertson. It has received $23.5 million, which includes 
$1.5 million from the Compassion Capital Fund and $22 million in surplus 
dry milk from the Agriculture Department.

Hundreds of struggling antiabortion and pregnancy crisis centers have 
received federal grants that often doubled or tripled their annual 
budgets, allowing them to branch out and hire staff, especially for 
abstinence education.

The Door of Hope Pregnancy Care Center in Madisonville, Ky., a small 
outfit of four part-time employees committed "to the belief in the 
sanctity of human life, primarily as it relates to the protection of the 
unborn," operated on an annual budget of $75,000 to $79,000, most of it 
raised from an annual banquet and a "walk for life." Last year, Door of 
Hope got an abstinence education grant of $317,017, allowing it to hire 
staff and expand.

In Dyersburg, Tenn., the Life Choices Pregnancy Support Center, where 
the staff believes "without reservation or qualification that the 
Scriptures teach that human life begins at conception," had revenue of 
$81,621 and could pay Executive Director Natalie Wilson $12,247 in 2001. 
Two years later, the center got a $534,339 grant for abstinence 
education. By 2004, annual revenue totaled $617,355.

Altogether, local antiabortion and crisis pregnancy centers have 
received well over $60 million in grants for abstinence education and 
other programs, according to a Post review of federal records.

The distribution of new money to conservative organizations is a small 
part of an estimated flood of $2 billion a year in federal grants to 
religious and religiously affiliated organizations. For decades, in 
Democratic and Republican administrations, well over $1 billion annually 
has been going to such groups, most of it to mainline organizations such 
as Catholic Charities, the Salvation Army and Lutheran Social Services.

The shift under Bush in part grows out of the administration's Faith and 
Community Based Initiative. Under the initiative, White House officials 
and new offices in 10 Cabinet-level departments have aggressively sought 
to widen the "pool" of applicants for federal grants for all kinds. 
Faith-based organizations are encouraged to apply for grants to operate 
Head Start and subsidized housing programs.

In a Dec. 12, 2002, executive order, Bush addressed one of the major 
concerns of religious groups considering applying for public money. Bush 
declared that religious groups receiving federal grants would not be 
required to comply with certain civil rights statutes, and could 
discriminate by hiring employees of specific religious faiths.

Skepticism about the distribution of money under the religion-based 
initiatives abounds in both parties.

Rep. Mark Edward Souder (R-Ind.), chairman of the Government Reform 
subcommittee on criminal justice, drug policy and human resources, said 
the effort "has gone political."

"Quite frankly, part of the reason it went political is because we can't 
sell it unless we can show Republicans a political advantage to it, 
because it's not our base," he said, referring to the fact that many of 
those receiving social services are Democratic voters.

Rep. Chet Edwards (D-Tex.) was more outspoken. "I believe ultimately 
this will be seen as one of the largest patronage programs in American 
history," he said.

The Compassion Capital Fund has disbursed many multiyear grants of $1.5 
million to $7.5 million to groups designated as "intermediary 
organizations" empowered, according to the White House to "issue 
sub-awards directly to qualified faith- and community-based organizations."

In effect, this designation turns the recipient organization into a 
major dispenser of federal money.

The Institute for Youth Development in Sterling, which is run by 
Shepherd Smith and his wife, Anita M. Smith, has been awarded $7.5 
million over three years. In turn, the institute has parceled out $4.5 
million of the federal money in grants of $5,000 to $50,000 to smaller 
organizations.

Shepherd Smith, who was a top strategist in Pat Robertson's 1988 
presidential bid, said the institute's grants were "not an effort on my 
part to make the right stronger; this was an effort to help little 
people" who have difficulty getting access to federal money.

The recipients listed on the institute's Web site include many socially 
conservative groups, among them at least 15 pregnancy crisis and 
counseling centers that oppose abortion.

The Rev. Luis Cort?s's Esperanza USA has received three $2.5 million 
grants. Cort?s is an evangelical Protestant; many of the grants from his 
organization have gone to Protestant Hispanic providers.

Among organizations run by ordained ministers, every Latino group 
receiving a large grant is headed by a Protestant. Protestant Hispanics 
are a key Republican target constituency. From 2000 to 2004, Bush's 
support among Hispanic Protestants grew from 44 percent to 54 percent, 
while remaining unchanged among Hispanic Roman Catholics, according to 
the Pew Hispanic Center.

In Milwaukee, a 2004 presidential battleground state, Pentecostal Bishop 
Sedgwick Daniels's Holy Redeemer Institutional Church of God in Christ 
was awarded $626,598 in 2003 and $824,471 in 2004 from the Compassion 
Capital Fund. Daniels, a Bush supporter, was a 2004 Republican National 
Convention delegate.

In Florida, another presidential battleground state, the National Center 
for Faith Based Initiatives, run by one of Bush's earliest 2000 
supporters in the black community, Bishop Harold Calvin Ray, has 
received $1.75 million over three years from the compassion fund.

HHS is not the only department making such grants.

The Education Department awarded a $750,000 discretionary grant to the 
GEO Foundation, run by Kevin Teasley, a former staffer at the 
libertarian Reason Foundation and conservative Heritage Foundation, and 
conservative Center for the Study of Popular Culture, to "provide 
outreach and information" on public-school choice. The department also 
awarded $1.5 million over three years to the conservative Black Alliance 
for Educational Options, which was created in 2000 with support from 
such funders on the right as the Bradley, John M. Olin and Walton Family 
foundations, to provide information about the No Child Left Behind Act.

In addition to liberals, there are conservative critics of taxpayer 
funding of groups on the right.

Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, said the 
grant-making is "corrupting."

"The danger is that any group that gets money from the government will 
end up serving the interests of the state rather than the constituencies 
they are trying to serve," he said. "The guy who writes the check writes 
the rules."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/21/AR2006032101723.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060322/ff84e056/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Wed Mar 22 03:45:25 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 06:45:25 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] French Take to the Streets to Preserve Their Economic
 Fantasy - Washington Post
Message-ID: <442138D5.1020107@comcast.net>

French Take to the Streets to Preserve Their Economic Fantasy

By Steven Pearlstein
The Washington Post
Wednesday, March 22, 2006; D01

Ah, springtime in Paris.

The sight of riot police outside the Sorbonne.

The smell of tear gas wafting along the Seine.

The sweet sounds of hypocrisy floating from the National Assembly and 
the Elysee Palace.

And, next Tuesday, a national strike, perfectly timed to create a 
four-day weekend.

What inspired this season's revolutionary festivities is a radical new 
law that would give employers up to two years before deciding whether to 
give new young employees the kind of lifetime job security conferred by 
French law.

To those of you brainwashed by Anglo-American market capitalism, this 
might appear like the sort of labor market flexibility they babble on 
about at meetings like this week's European summit -- the kind that 
might actually entice a French company to create a new job.

But when viewed through the dark prism of the French imagination, these 
aren't real jobs -- they're "garbage jobs" and "slave contracts" meant 
to undermine the birthright of all Frenchmen to be shielded from all 
economic risk. Give in on this, and who knows what could go next? The 
35-hour workweek? The six weeks of paid vacation? State-mandated profit 
sharing? Retirement at age 60?

What's so galling about the French is that, in the name of equality and 
solidarity, they are well on their way to creating not only one of the 
least vibrant economies in the industrialized world, but also one of the 
least equitable.

The "insiders" of this economy consist of a shrinking pool of older, 
middle-class workers who enjoy the full panoply of worker protections. 
Most of them are in the public sector or heavily regulated private 
industries, with the rest in a dwindling number of competitive private 
firms.

And then there are the "outsiders." This growing pool includes the 
unemployed young men of the mostly immigrant suburbs who went on a 
rampage last year, throwing rocks and burning cars. But it also includes 
the children of "insiders," who tend to hang around the university until 
they are 24 or 25, then drift between unpaid internships, temp jobs and 
welfare for another five years before finally getting "inside."

You'd think that, with all that time they spend chatting away in cafes, 
these young "outsiders" would have figured out by now that this system, 
which protects and cossets the "insiders" at all costs, is sucking the 
innovation and vitality from the economy. But rather than supporting the 
reforms that might generate more jobs and more income, the outsiders 
have bought into the nostalgic fantasy of a France that once was, but 
can never be again, making common cause with the very "insiders" whose 
selfishness and pigheaded socialism have left them out in the cold.

That said, you can hardly blame the kids for being confused about their 
economic predicament.

After all, the supposedly center-right government that pushed through 
the new youth-employment contract is the same government that adamantly 
refused to give up subsidies for farmers, stepped in to prevent foreign 
takeovers of French companies and, just last week, demanded that Apple 
iPods accept music downloads from iTunes competitors (read: French 
competitors). But having declared, in effect, that markets cannot be 
trusted to generate socially and politically acceptable outcomes, the 
same government is now shocked to find that it doesn't have much 
credibility when it asks workers to trust markets when it comes to the 
terms of their employment.

This sort of calculated hypocrisy among the French political elite, 
which likes to "talk left, act right," has now completely undermined 
support for market capitalism. A telling poll released in January by the 
Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland 
found that only 36 percent of French respondents felt that "the free 
enterprise system and free market economy" is the best system. That's 
the lowest response from any of the 22 countries polled and compares 
with 59 percent in Italy, 65 percent in Germany, 66 percent in Britain 
and 71 percent in the United States.

Perhaps it's no surprise, then, that Forbes magazine's latest list of 
global billionaires includes only 14 from France, without a single new 
entry this year. Germany, a country not twice its size, has four times 
as many, while Britain, which is about the same size, has 24.

Indeed, when you ask French university students who is the Bill Gates of 
France, they look at you blankly. It's not simply that they can't name 
one. The bigger problem is that they can't imagine why it matters, or 
why that has anything to do with why they can't find a good job.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/21/AR2006032101741.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060322/56d16d8e/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Wed Mar 22 03:47:32 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 06:47:32 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Will Your Job Survive? - Harold Meyerson - Washington
	Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <44213954.9090502@comcast.net>

Will Your Job Survive?

By Harold Meyerson
The Washington Post
Wednesday, March 22, 2006; A21

In case you've been worrying about how the war in Iraq will end, or the 
coming of avian flu, or the extinction of the universe as we drift into 
the cosmic void, well, relax. Here's something you should really fret 
about: the future of the U.S. economy in the age of globalization.

For a discussion of same, let me call your attention to an article in 
the March-April issue of Foreign Affairs by Princeton University 
economist Alan Blinder. The vice chairman of the Federal Reserve's board 
of governors from 1994 to 1996, Blinder is the most mainstream of 
economists, which makes his squawk of alarm all the more jarring. But 
the man has crunched the numbers, and what he's found is sure to induce 
queasiness.

In the new global order, Blinder writes, not just manufacturing jobs but 
a large number of service jobs will be performed in cheaper climes. 
Indeed, only hands-on or face-to-face services look safe. "Janitors and 
crane operators are probably immune to foreign competition," Blinder 
writes, "accountants and computer programmers are not."

There follow some back-of-the-envelope calculations as Blinder totes up 
the number of jobs in tradable and non-tradable sectors. Then comes his 
(necessarily imprecise) bottom line: "The total number of current U.S. 
service-sector jobs that will be susceptible to offshoring in the 
electronic future is two to three times the total number of current 
manufacturing jobs (which is about 14 million)." As Blinder believes 
that all those manufacturing jobs are offshorable, too, the grand total 
of American jobs that could be bound for Bangalore or Bangladesh is 
somewhere between 42 million and 56 million. That doesn't mean all those 
jobs are going to be exported. It does mean that the Americans 
performing them will be in competition with people who will do the same 
work for a whole lot less.

The threat of globalization and the reality of de-unionization have 
combined to make the raise, for most Americans, a thing of the past. 
Between 2001 and 2004, median household income inched up by a meager 1.6 
percent, even as productivity was expanding at a robust 11.7 percent. 
The broadly shared prosperity that characterized our economy in the 
three decades following World War II is now dead as a dodo.

Also dying, if not yet also kaput, is the comforting notion that a good 
education is the best defense against the ravages of globalization -- 
or, as Bill Clinton famously put it: What you earn is the result of what 
you learn. A study last year by economists J. Bradford Jensen of the 
Institute for International Economics and Lori Kletzer of the University 
of California at Santa Cruz demonstrates that it's the more highly 
skilled service-sector workers who are likely to have tradable jobs. And 
according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the proportion of jobs in 
the United States that require a college degree will rise by a measly 
one percentage point -- from 26.9 percent in 2002 to 27.9 percent in 
2012 -- during this decade.

Since education as such won't save us, Blinder recommends a kind of 
particularized vocational ed. We will have to specialize more, he 
writes, "in the delivery of services where personal presence is either 
imperative or highly beneficial. Thus, the U.S. workforce of the future 
will likely have more divorce lawyers and fewer attorneys who write 
routine contracts." Now, there's a prospect to galvanize a nation.

My own sense (which I develop at greater length in the April issue of 
the American Prospect) is that nothing short of a radical reordering of 
our economy will suffice if we're to save our beleaguered middle-class 
majority. Every other advanced economy -- certainly, those of the 
Europeans and the Japanese -- has a conscious strategy to keep its most 
highly skilled jobs at home. We have none; American capitalism, 
dominated by our financial sector, is uniquely wedded to disaggregating 
companies, thwarting unionization campaigns and offshoring work in a 
ceaseless campaign to impress investors that it has found the cheapest 
labor imaginable.

So, here are three immodest suggestions:

? We need to entice industry to invest at home by having the government 
and our public- and union-controlled pension funds upgrade the 
infrastructure and invest in energy efficiency and worker training.

? We need to unionize and upgrade the skills of the nearly 50 million 
private-sector workers in health care, transportation, construction, 
retail, restaurants and the like whose jobs can't be shipped abroad.

? And, if America is to survive American capitalism in the age of 
globalization, we need to alter the composition of our corporate boards 
so that employee and public representatives can limit the offshoring of 
our economy.

That failing, here come more divorce lawyers.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/21/AR2006032101133.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060322/9068ac80/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Wed Mar 22 03:49:34 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 06:49:34 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] A Punchy President Meets the Press - Dana Milbank -
 Washington Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <442139CE.4030005@comcast.net>

A Punchy President Meets the Press
<>
By Dana Milbank
The Washington Post
Wednesday, March 22, 2006; A02

President Bush had a senior moment midway through his news conference 
yesterday. Referring to an earlier question from the Los Angeles Times' 
Jim Gerstenzang, who has covered much of Bush's presidency, Bush looked 
at the veteran correspondent -- and forgot his name.

"Back, to, uh, this man's question right here," he said, and then he 
looked down at his seating chart for a refresher before adding: "This 
man being Jim."

"Sorry, Jim," the president said after everybody had a chuckle at his 
expense. "I got a lot on my mind these days."

That he does. Bush's presidency is in trouble, his approval ratings are 
in the 30s, Iraq is approaching civil war, and congressional Republicans 
are in open rebellion. But Bush has maintained his equanimity. He may be 
a lame duck, but he seems to be enjoying his swim.

He identified Terry Hunt, the Associated Press's veteran White House 
correspondent, as the generic "AP Person." He accused New York Times 
correspondent Elisabeth Bumiller of sleeping through his speech Monday 
in Cleveland. After USA Today's David Jackson interrupted a Bush 
non-answer, the president queried: "Now, what is your follow-up yell?"

And he made a show of reading from his stage directions. Rambling his 
way through a question about interest rates, Bush paused to confess, 
"I'm kind of stalling for time here." Checking his seating chart before 
calling on a questioner, he confided, "They've told me what to say." 
After announcing that "there's going to be a P-5," the president 
translated his own jargon: "That's diplomatic sloganeering."

Whether it's the strain of the office, the weight of international 
crises, or simply his old Delta Kappa Epsilon roots showing, Bush has 
been President Punchy of late. In Cleveland on Monday, he said there 
were 16 U.N. Security Council resolutions about Iraq, then called on an 
unsuspecting Dick Keil, a Bloomberg News reporter. "I think 16 -- is 
that right, Stretch, 16?" Bush inquired, using the nickname he assigned 
Keil. "I like to, like, reverse roles sometimes," the president explained.

When an audience member prefaced a question by saying, "I'm 100 percent 
behind your fight against terrorism," Bush interrupted: "Why don't you 
just leave it at that." And he was suspicious of a man who introduced 
himself as Jose Feliciano, by chance the name of the blind singer and 
guitarist.

"No," the president challenged.

"Yes," the other Feliciano maintained.

"It's like the time I called a guy and said, 'Hey, this is George Bush 
calling.' He said, 'Come on, quit kidding me, man.' " For yesterday's 
session, called with 90 minutes' notice, Bush had a surprise: He ended 
his long boycott of questions from Helen Thomas, the venerable UPI 
correspondent-turned-anti-Bush columnist for Hearst Newspapers. He began 
by invoking her performance at a Gridiron Club dinner in which she 
played Hillary Clinton singing about her presidential ambitions.

"Helen, after that brilliant performance at the Gridiron, I am --"

"You're going to be sorry," Thomas warned.

"Well, then, let me take it back."

It was too late. Thomas hectored him with a question about how "every 
reason given" for the Iraq war was wrong, then repeatedly interrupted 
his answers to argue.

"I kind of semi-regretted it," Bush said after the ordeal-by-Helen. He 
reaffirmed that her musical performance was "just brilliant," then 
offered that Reuters correspondent Steve Holland's performance in the 
same show "was a little weak."

Bush's jests apparently did nothing to reduce the antagonism in the 
questions, but the president did succeed at entertaining his tormentors, 
and himself.

NBC's Kelly O'Donnell weighed in with a question about whether it's time 
to make some changes on his staff, which appears "tired and even 
tone-deaf." This prompted the networks to go to cutaway shots of Bush 
aides Dan Bartlett, Karl Rove, Scott McClellan and Steve Hadley, 
squeezed into small chairs along one wall, looking miserable. "Wait a 
minute," Bush interrupted cheerfully, "is this a personal attack 
launching over here?"

Asked about his lost "political capital" by Gerstenzang, Bush replied 
that he had just listed a series of accomplishments, offering, "I'd be 
glad to repeat them if you like." Bumiller waved her hand to indicate 
such a recitation would be unnecessary. "Please," Bush responded, "no 
hand gestures."

Bush took his revenge moments later, when, explaining his immigration 
policy, he asserted that "Elisabeth was half asleep" for his speech on 
Monday. When she protested, he insisted: "Well, the person next to you 
was. They were dozing off. I could see them watching their watches, kind 
of wondering how long he's going to blow on for. 'Let's get him out of 
here so we can go get lunch' is what they were thinking."

Perhaps. Or perhaps Bush was projecting. Seconds later, when he had 
finished his answer to the question, he added: "Listen, thank you for 
your time. I've got lunch with the president of Liberia right now." It 
was not yet 11 a.m.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/21/AR2006032101570.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060322/dab42583/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Wed Mar 22 03:50:56 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 06:50:56 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Why Iraq Is Still Worth the Effort - Fareed Zakaria -
 Washington Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <44213A20.9030701@comcast.net>

Why Iraq Is Still Worth the Effort
<>
By Fareed Zakaria
The Washington Post
Wednesday, March 22, 2006; A21

Three years ago this week, I watched the invasion of Iraq 
apprehensively. I had supported military intervention to rid the country 
of Saddam Hussein's tyranny, but I had also been appalled by the crude 
and unilateral manner in which the Bush administration handled the 
issue. In the first weeks after the invasion, I was critical of several 
of the administration's decisions -- crucially, invading with a light 
force and dismantling the governing structures of Iraq (including the 
bureaucracy and army). My criticisms grew over the first 18 months of 
the invasion, a period that offered a depressing display of American 
weakness and incompetence. And yet, for all my misgivings about the way 
the administration has handled this policy, I've never been able to join 
the antiwar crowd. Nor am I convinced that Iraq is a hopeless cause that 
should be abandoned.

Let's remember that in 2002 and early 2003, U.S. policy toward Iraq was 
collapsing. The sanctions regime was becoming ineffective against Saddam 
Hussein -- he had gotten quite good at cheating and smuggling -- and it 
was simultaneously impoverishing the Iraqi people. Regular 
reconnaissance and bombing missions over Iraq were done through "no-fly" 
zones, which required a large U.S. and British presence in Saudi Arabia 
and Turkey. These circumstances were fueling a poisonous 
anti-Americanism in the Muslim world.

In his fatwa of 1998, Osama bin Laden's first two charges against the 
United States were that it was "occupying" Saudi Arabia and starving 
Iraqi women and children. The Palestinian cause was a distant third. 
Meanwhile, Hussein had a 30-year history of attempting to build nuclear, 
chemical and biological weapons.

The other reality by 2003 was that the United States and the 
international community had developed a reasonably effective process for 
military interventions like Iraq. The Rand Corp. released a thorough 
study just before the invasion pointing out that the central lesson of 
the 1990s was that if you went in with few troops (Haiti, Somalia), 
chaos prevailed, but if you went in with robust forces (Bosnia, Kosovo, 
East Timor), it was possible to succeed.

Consider what the administration did in Afghanistan. It allied with 
local forces on the ground so that order would be maintained. It upheld 
the traditional structure of power and governance in the country -- that 
is, it accepted the reality of the warlords while working slowly and 
quietly to weaken them. To deflect anti-Americanism, the military turned 
over the political process to the United Nations right after Kabul fell. 
(Most people forget that it was the United Nations that created the 
assembly that picked Hamid Karzai as president.) The United States gave 
NATO and the European Union starring roles in the country -- and real 
power -- which led them to accept real burden-sharing. The European 
Union actually spends more in Afghanistan than the United States does.

But Iraq turned out to be a playground for all kinds of ideological 
theories that the Bush administration had about the Middle East, 
democracy, the United Nations and the Clinton administration. It also 
became a playground for a series of all-consuming turf wars and policy 
battles between various departments and policymakers in the 
administration. A good part of the chaos and confusion in Washington has 
abated, but the chaos in Iraq has proved much harder to reverse. It is 
far easier to undo a long-standing social and political order than it is 
to put it back together again.

So why have I not given up hope? Partly it's because I have been to 
Iraq, met the people who are engaged in the struggle to build their 
country and cannot bring myself to abandon them. Iraq has no Nelson 
Mandelas, but many of its leaders have shown remarkable patience, 
courage and statesmanship. Consider the wisdom and authority of Grand 
Ayatollah Ali Sistani, or the fair-minded and effective role of the 
Kurds, or the persistent pleas for secularism and tolerance from men 
such as Ayad Allawi. You see lots of rough politics and jockeying for 
power in Baghdad. But when the stakes get high, when the violence 
escalates, when facing the abyss, you also see glimpses of leadership.

There is no doubt that the costs of the invasion have far outweighed the 
benefits. But in the long view of history, will that always be true? If, 
after all this chaos, a new and different kind of Iraqi politics 
emerges, it will make a difference in the region. Even now, amid the 
violence, one can see that. The old order in Iraq was built on fear and 
terror. One group dominated the land, oppressing the others. Now 
representatives of all three communities -- Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds -- 
are sitting down at the table, trying to construct a workable bargain 
they can all live with.

These sectarian power struggles can get extremely messy, and violent 
parties have taken advantage of every crack and cleavage. But this may 
be inevitable in a country coming to terms with very real divisions and 
disagreements. Iraq may be stumbling toward nation-building by consent, 
not brutality. And that is a model for the Middle East.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/21/AR2006032101152.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060322/1b4196e0/attachment-0001.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Wed Mar 22 03:58:00 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 06:58:00 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] GREAT PIECE: Bush follows Johnson's logic - The Boston
	Globe
Message-ID: <44213BC8.30304@comcast.net>


  Bush follows Johnson's logic

By Derrick Z. Jackson  |  March 22, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

WITH DISAPPROVAL ratings for his handling of Iraq now at 65 percent in 
the latest Newsweek poll, President Bush reached down into President 
Johnson's magic hat for an illusion. In a speech in Cleveland, Bush 
talked about the voters of Tal Afar.

''The recent elections show us how Iraqis respond when they know they 
are safe," Bush said. ''Tal Afar is the largest city in Western Nineveh 
Province. In the elections held in January 2005, of about 190,000 
registered voters, only 32,000 people went to the polls. Only Fallujah 
had a lower participation rate.

''By the time of the October referendum on the constitution and the 
December elections, Iraqi and coalition forces had secured Tal Afar from 
surrounding areas. The number of registered voters rose to about 204,000 
and more than 175,000 turned out to vote in each election, more than 85 
percent of the eligible voters in Western Nineveh Province. These 
citizens turned out because they were determined to have a say in their 
nation's future and they cast their ballots at polling stations that 
were guarded and secured by fellow Iraqis."

This was reminiscent of a news conference President Johnson held in 
November of 1967, when the percentage of Americans who thought Vietnam 
was a mistake was closing in on 50 percent in the Gallup poll.

''In the midst of all the horrors of war, in guerrilla fighting in South 
Vietnam, we have had five elections in a period of a little over 14 
months," Johnson said. ''. . . To think that here in the midst of war 
when the grenades are popping like firecrackers all around you, that 
two-thirds or three-fourths of the people would register and vote and 
have five elections in 13 months -- and through the democratic process 
select people at the local level, a constituent assembly, a house of 
representatives, a senate, a president, and a vice president -- that is 
encouraging. The fact that the population under free control has 
constantly risen, and that under Communist control has constantly gone 
down, is a very encouraging sign."

Four months later, a discouraged Johnson, his illusions shattered by the 
Tet Offensive, would announce that he would not run for reelection. In 
Bush's case, the trick was picking one city that seems stable, despite 
our probable inability to stabilize the entire nation on our own. Rand 
military analysts determined that it would take 500,000 troops -- our 
peak Vietnam-era troop strength -- to achieve successful nation-building 
in Iraq. We currently have about 133,000 troops there.

''According to the lessons learned," the Rand study said, ''the ultimate 
consequences for Iraq of a failure to generate adequate international 
manpower and money are likely to be lower levels of security, higher 
casualties sustained and inflicted, lower economic growth rates, and 
slower, less thoroughgoing political transformation."

Bush did acknowledge that the progress in the rest of Iraq is not the 
same as in Tal Afar. But he went on to claim that the city's example 
''gives me confidence in our strategy, because in this city, we see the 
outlines of the Iraq that we and the Iraqi people have been fighting for."

With 133,000 troops only being an outline of what security analysts feel 
is needed, Bush's illusion of the minimalist explodes with every car 
bomb. This is the White House that famously dissed the estimate of 
then-Army chief of staff Eric Shinseki that ''several hundred thousand 
soldiers" would be needed in postwar Iraq. Paul Wolfowitz, then the 
deputy defense secretary, said Shinseki was ''wildly off the mark."

This was the same Wolfowitz who said in the same testimony on Capitol 
Hill that success would come with minimal force in Iraq because, 
''There's been none of the record in Iraq of ethnic militias fighting 
one another that produced so much bloodshed and permanent scars in 
Bosnia, along with a continuing requirement for large peacekeeping 
forces to separate those militias."

We know who was wildly off the mark now, with Iraq's former interim 
prime minister, Ayad Allawi, telling the BBC this weekend, ''If this is 
not civil war, then God knows what civil war is." This earned Allawi a 
personal dissing by Bush. In September of 2004, Bush praised Allawi for 
his courage and leadership. In a news conference yesterday, Bush 
answered a question about Allawi's statement to the BBC by saying, 
''There are other voices coming out of Iraq, by the way, other than Mr. 
Allawi."

It is all a sign that Bush, like Johnson, is hearing voices.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/22/bush_follows_johnsons_logic/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060322/513fd534/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Wed Mar 22 04:00:16 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 07:00:16 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] The humanitarian case for war in Iraq - Jeff Jacoby -
 Boston Globe Op-Ed
Message-ID: <44213C50.5070702@comcast.net>


  The humanitarian case for war in Iraq

By Jeff Jacoby  |  March 22, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

''I WONDERED at first whether the women were exaggerating."

The writer is Pamela Bone, a noted Australian journalist and 
self-described ''left-leaning, feminist, agnostic, environmentalist 
internationalist." She is writing about a group of female Iraqi emigrees 
whom she met in November 2000.

''They told me that in Iraq, the country they had fled, women were 
beheaded with swords and their heads nailed to the front doors of their 
houses, as a lesson to other women. The executed women had been 
dishonoring their country with their sexual crimes, and this behavior 
could not be tolerated, the then-Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, had said 
on national television. More than 200 women had been executed in this 
manner in the previous three weeks. . . . Because the claims seemed so 
extreme, I checked Amnesty International's country report. . . . Some of 
the women's 'sexual crimes' were having been raped by one of Saddam's 
sons. One of the women executed was a doctor who had complained of 
corruption in the government health department."

Bone's words appear in an essay she contributed to ''A Matter of 
Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq," a 2005 collection 
edited by Wellesley College sociologist Thomas Cushman. To read her 
essay this week, with the war entering its fourth year, is to be 
reminded of the abiding moral power of the liberal case for the war. 
While most of the left was always opposed to liberating Iraq, a small 
but honorable minority never lost sight of the vast humanitarian stakes: 
Defeating Saddam would mean ending one of the most unspeakable 
dictatorships of modern times. Wasn't that a goal anyone with 
progressive values should embrace?

That was why, ''in February 2003, when asked to speak at a rally for 
peace, I politely declined," Bone writes. ''But I added, less politely, 
that if there were to be a rally condemning the brutality Saddam Hussein 
was inflicting on his people . . . I would be glad to speak at it."

But condemning Saddam's brutality, let alone doing something to end it, 
was not a priority for most of the left. I remember asking Ted Kennedy 
during the run-up to the war why he and others in the antiwar camp 
seemed to have so little sympathy for the countless victims of Ba'athist 
tyranny. Even if they thought an invasion was unwise, couldn't they at 
least voice some solidarity with the innocent human beings writhing in 
Saddam's Iraqi hell? Kennedy replied vehemently that he took a back seat 
to no one in his concern for those who suffer under all the world's evil 
regimes, and demanded to know whether supporters of war in Iraq also 
wanted to invade North Korea, Burma, and other human-rights violators.

It was a specious answer. The United States may not be able to stop 
every homicidal fascist on the planet, but that is hardly an argument 
for stopping none of them. If the Bush administration had listened to 
Kennedy and to the millions like him the world over who raised their 
voices against invading Iraq, would the world be a better place today? 
Leaving Saddam and the Ba'athists in power -- free to break and butcher 
their victims, to support international terrorists, to menace other 
countries -- would have emboldened murderous dictators everywhere. The 
jihadists of Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas, celebrating the latest 
display of American irresolution, would have been spurred to new 
atrocities. The Arab world would have sunk a little deeper into its 
nightmare of cruelty and fear. And women's heads would still be getting 
nailed to the front doors of Iraqi homes.

Three years into the war, with many Americans wondering if it was a 
mistake and the media coverage endlessly negative, one voice I miss more 
than ever is that of Michael Kelly. The first journalist to die while 
covering the war, Kelly had covered the liberation of Kuwait in 1991, 
and in one of his last columns, filed from Kuwait City, he reflected on 
the coming liberation of Iraq: ''Tyranny truly is a horror: an immense, 
endlessly bloody, endlessly painful, endlessly varied, endless crime 
against not humanity in the abstract but a lot of humans in the flesh. 
It is, as Orwell wrote, a jackboot forever stomping on a human face.

''I understand why some dislike the idea, and fear the ramifications, of 
America as a liberator. But I do not understand why they do not see that 
anything is better than life with your face under the boot. And that any 
rescue of a people under the boot (be they Afghan, Kuwaiti, or Iraqi) is 
something to be desired. Even if the rescue is less than perfectly 
realized. Even if the rescuer is a great, overmuscled, bossy, selfish 
oaf. Or would you, for yourself, choose the boot?"

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/22/the_humanitarian_case_for_war_in_iraq/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060322/86d636c7/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Wed Mar 22 07:27:16 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 15:27:16 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: No Breach Seen in Work in Iraq on Propaganda
Message-ID: <20060322152717.B62E213B7D8@lax-gw04.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

it's a brave new world


WASHINGTON | March 22, 2006
No Breach Seen in Work in Iraq on Propaganda
By THOM SHANKER
An inquiry found that a U.S. public relations firm did not violate military policy by paying Iraqi news outlets to print positive articles.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/22/politics/22lincoln.html?ex=1143694800&en=aeee70764de5985e&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060322/c13ac0bc/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Wed Mar 22 07:28:53 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 15:28:53 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: In the Jungle, the Unjust Jungle,
	a Small Victory
Message-ID: <20060322152855.9889D83DDF@lax-gw03.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

INTERNATIONAL / AFRICA | March 22, 2006
Johannesburg Journal: In the Jungle, the Unjust Jungle, a Small Victory
By SHARON LaFRANIERE
The saga of the song now known worldwide as "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" is anything but a lullaby.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/22/international/africa/22lion.html?ex=1143694800&en=c8119af81b47f981&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060322/cafa6610/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Wed Mar 22 07:31:04 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 15:31:04 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Experts Reveal the Secret Powers of
	Grapefruit Juice
Message-ID: <20060322153106.D5AA99FC1B@lax-gw05.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

HEALTH | March 21, 2006
Experts Reveal the Secret Powers of Grapefruit Juice
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR
One glass of grapefruit juice can make certain drugs dangerously potent thanks to an enzyme known as CYP 3A4.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/21/health/21grap.html?ex=1143694800&en=05ba3021c56bea74&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060322/b78e2b7d/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Wed Mar 22 07:34:10 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 15:34:10 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: The Doctor Will See You for Exactly Seven
	Minutes
Message-ID: <20060322153412.90636236F6C@lax-gw01.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

we need Dr Claude!!


OPINION | March 22, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor: The Doctor Will See You for Exactly Seven Minutes
By PETER SALGO
Turning doctors into shopkeepers who regard patients as customers is unacceptable.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/22/opinion/22salgo.html?ex=1143694800&en=dc19564d1995eded&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060322/249a99cd/attachment-0001.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Wed Mar 22 07:34:40 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 15:34:40 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Called by God to Help
Message-ID: <20060322153440.A96B8249F30@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

OPINION | March 22, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor: Called by God to Help
By ROGER MAHONY
The Roman Catholic Church couldn?t obey a law barring aid to immigrants.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/22/opinion/22mahony.html?ex=1143694800&en=854ef51d1995d069&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060322/8ff545c8/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Wed Mar 22 07:38:11 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: 22 Mar 2006 15:38:11 -0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] Helen Thomas Asks President Bush Why He Went to War
Message-ID: <20060322153811.2538.qmail@trinity.democracynow.org>

Mike Blaxill  ( mblaxill at yahoo.com )
sent you this story from democracynow.org




+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  Helen Thomas Asks President Bush Why He Went to War
|  http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/22/150252
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+


At the White House Tuesday, veteran correspondent Helen Thomas took President Bush to task on his reasons for invading Iraq. It was the first time Bush had called on Thomas, known as the ?First Lady of the American Press?, in three years. [includes rush transcript]
This story continues at: 
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/22/150252


From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Wed Mar 22 07:39:17 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: 22 Mar 2006 15:39:17 -0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] Headlines for March 22, 2006
Message-ID: <20060322153917.2771.qmail@trinity.democracynow.org>

Mike Blaxill  ( mblaxill at yahoo.com )
sent you this story from democracynow.org




+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  Headlines for March 22, 2006
|  http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/22/1435251
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+


- Bush Suggests Troops To Remain in Iraq Until At Least 2009
- UN Envoy Warns of Increasing Violence in Sudan
- Basque Separatist Group Announces Permanent Ceasefire
- Ecuador Declares State of Emergency Over Trade Protests
- Report: Ex-Iraq FM Acted as Paid CIA Informant
- Duckworth Leads Democratic Primary in Illinois
This story continues at: 
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/22/1435251


From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Wed Mar 22 09:47:31 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 12:47:31 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Earth Policy News - Wind Energy Demand Booming: Cost
	Dropping Below Conventional Sources Marks Key Milestone
Message-ID: <003d01c64dd8$b5301620$133fe440@Harold>




> Eco-Economy Update 2006-2
> For Immediate Release
> March 22, 2006
>
>
> WIND ENERGY DEMAND BOOMING:
> Cost Dropping Below Conventional Sources Marks Key Milestone in U.S. Shift
> to Renewable Energy
> www.earthpolicy.org/Updates/2006/Update52.htm
>
> Lester R. Brown
>
>
> When Austin Energy, the publicly owned utility in Austin, Texas, launched
> its GreenChoice program in 2000, customers opting for green electricity
> paid a premium. During the fall of 2005, climbing natural gas prices
> pulled conventional electricity costs above those of wind-generated
> electricity, the source of most green power. This crossing of the cost
> lines in Austin and several other communities is a milestone in the U.S.
> shift to a renewable energy economy.
>
> Austin Energy buys wind-generated electricity under 10-year, fixed-price
> contracts and passes this stable price on to its GreenChoice subscribers.
> This fixed-price energy product is quite attractive to Austin's 388
> corporate GreenChoice customers, including Advanced Micro Devices, Dell,
> IBM, Samsung, and 3M. Advanced Micro Devices expects to save $4 million
> over the next decade through this arrangement. School districts are also
> signing up. Round Rock School District, for example, projects 10-year
> savings to local taxpayers at $2 million.
>
> Facing a Texas-style stampede of consumers wanting to sign up for the
> current remaining supply of green electricity, Austin Energy has resorted
> to a GreenChoice raffle that will be held on March 23. All its
> customers-both residential and business-were invited to participate in the
> drawing.
>
> A similar situation has unfolded in Colorado with Xcel Energy, which is
> the state's largest electricity supplier. Xcel's 33,000 Windsource
> customers, who until late 2005 were paying $6 more each month for their
> electricity, are now paying slightly less than those using conventional
> electricity, which comes mostly from natural gas and coal. To meet
> fast-growing demand, Xcel is currently soliciting proposals from wind
> developers for up to 775 megawatts of new wind power generation, enough to
> supply 232,000 Colorado homes with electricity.
>
> Austin Energy and Xcel Energy are among the first utilities to pass on the
> falling cost of wind energy to their customers. In the short run, the
> price advantage of wind over conventional electricity may disappear as the
> surging demand for wind electricity from climate-conscious customers
> outruns the supply, driving up the price, and as natural gas prices fall
> from their late 2005 highs. Over the longer term, however, as reserves of
> natural gas are depleted, its price is projected to rise, giving a strong
> advantage to wind.
>
> Interest in wind energy is rising as production costs fall. Although media
> attention focuses on communities with a not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY)
> response to wind turbines, such as the large, off-shore wind farm planned
> off Cape Cod, in most of the country wind farms are enthusiastically
> welcomed. Here, it's the PIIMBY syndrome-put-it-in-my-backyard.
>
> When Xcel announced it would develop several hundred megawatts of
> additional wind-generating capacity, it got the attention of ranching
> communities throughout wind-rich eastern Colorado. In tiny ranch-country
> towns like Grover, near the Wyoming border, ranchers welcomed a proposed
> 300-megawatt wind farm that would span some 30 ranches.
>
> With a large, advanced-design wind turbine generating easily $100,000
> worth of electricity per year, even a 3-percent royalty would earn
> ranchers $3,000 a year from leasing a quarter-acre of ranchland. And they
> can still run cattle on the land. If the proposed project is approved as
> expected, these 30 or so ranchers will have an average of seven turbines
> each, yielding roughly $21,000 a year in additional income. A decade from
> now, there may be thousands of ranchers who will be earning more selling
> electricity than they do selling cattle.
>
> In upstate New York, dairy farmers in Lewis County near Lake Ontario
> warmly embraced the 195-turbine Maple Ridge Wind Farm, and the $5,000 to
> $10,000-annual royalty offered for each of the turbines on their land.
> Rural communities welcome wind farms because they provide income to
> farmers and ranchers, skilled jobs, cheap electricity, and additional tax
> revenue to upgrade schools and maintain roads.
>
> The growing profitability of wind energy is attracting big-time players.
> Four years ago, General Electric purchased Enron Wind, one of Enron's few
> profitable segments, parlaying its advanced wind turbine design into a
> leading position in the world wind turbine market.
>
> In mid-2005, Goldman Sachs purchased Zilkha Renewable Energy, a small wind
> farm development company. Now called Horizon Wind Energy, this
> wholly-owned subsidiary of Goldman Sachs has under construction or in the
> planning stages 4,000 megawatts of wind-generated electricity, enough to
> supply electricity to 1.2 million homes.
>
> AES, a leading international player in electricity generation, has used
> its purchase of SeaWest, another wind developer, to establish a strong
> position in the U.S. wind sector. It now has under development 1,800
> megawatts of wind-generating capacity. Shell, one of the leading bidders
> for offshore wind rights in the United Kingdom, owns 315 megawatts of
> wind-generating capacity in the United States and is planning more. And BP
> is mapping out areas in the United States where it could build some 2,000
> megawatts of wind-generating capacity.
>
> Overall, U.S. wind-generating capacity expanded by 36 percent in 2005,
> reaching 9,149 megawatts. This year it could expand by 50 percent. At the
> end of 2005, there were commercial wind farms in 30 states. (Data at
> www.earthpolicy.org/Updates/2006/Update52_data.htm.)
>
> Wind power generation would grow even faster if it were not constrained by
> the availability of turbines. General Electric, now supplying 60 percent
> of the U.S. wind turbine market, is sold out through 2007. Clipper
> Windpower, a startup turbine manufacturer, is planning to produce 20 of
> its 2.5-megawatt Liberty turbines per month by mid 2006 and a total of 250
> turbines in 2007. Its production is also committed well into the future.
>
> After years of industry uncertainty, when Congress allowed the wind
> production tax credit (PTC) to lapse several times, the 2005 PTC extension
> through 2007 has given investors renewed confidence in the future of wind
> power. The extension of the PTC, which is designed to offset subsidies to
> fossil fuels and nuclear power, is leading to record growth in the number
> of new wind farms planned.
>
> Wind energy is emerging as a centerpiece of the new energy economy,
> because it is abundant, inexpensive, inexhaustible, widely distributed,
> clean, and climate-benign. Three of the 50 states-North Dakota, Kansas,
> and Texas-have enough harnessable wind energy to satisfy national
> electricity needs. The cost of wind-generated electricity has fallen from
> 38? per kilowatt-hour in the early 1980s to 4? to 6? today, offering an
> almost endless supply of cheap energy.
>
> Beyond that, these wells will never go dry. No one can cut off the supply
> or raise the fuel cost. And wind can supply our energy needs without
> disrupting the earth's climate.
>
> #    #   #
>
> Lester R. Brown is President of the Earth Policy Institute and author of
> Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble.

> 



From michael at michaelbutler.com  Wed Mar 22 10:59:03 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 10:59:03 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Fly Into a Building? Who Could Imagine? By MAUREEN DOWD
Message-ID: <C046DE77.2A654%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 22, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Fly Into a Building? Who Could Imagine?
By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

Three little words:

Still employed there.

Of all the through-the-looking-glass moments in the last few days, the
strangest is this: The F.B.I officer who arrested and questioned Zacarias
Moussaoui told a jury that he had alerted his superiors about 70 times that
Mr. Moussaoui was a radical Islamic fundamentalist who hated America and
might be plotting to hijack an airplane.

Seventy? That makes one time for every virgin waiting for Mr. Moussaoui in
heaven. Judging by how disastrously the prosecution is doing, the virgins
will have to wait.

We could have cracked the 9/11 plot if the F.B.I. wasn't run by dunces. Mr.
Moussaoui's lawyers got a break because according to the testimony of the
officer, Harry Samit, a better-run bureau could have broken the case even
without the terrorist's confession ? maybe F.B.I. officers should have shot
him with some paintballs.

On Sept. 10, 2001, Mr. Samit confided to a colleague that he was "desperate
to get into Moussaoui's computer." He never heard back from the F.B.I.'s bin
Laden unit before 9/11 ? what did the unit have to do that was more pressing
than catching bin Laden? And he was obstructed by officials in F.B.I.
headquarters here, whom he labeled "criminally negligent."

He named two of the officials who did not want to endanger their careers
with any excess aggression toward radical fundamentalists: David Frasca and
Michael Maltbie, then working on the Radical Fundamentalist Unit.

Even though Condi Rice told the 9/11 commission that "no one could have
imagined" terrorists' slamming a plane into the World Trade Center, an
F.B.I. officer did. Officer Samit testified that a colleague, Greg Jones,
tried to light a fire under Mr. Maltbie by urging him to "prevent Zacarias
Moussaoui from flying a plane into the World Trade Center."

Later, Mr. Jones told Mr. Samit that it had just been "a lucky guess."

Kenneth Williams, a Phoenix agent, also sent a warning memo to the
phlegmatic Mr. Frasca in July 2001, after sniffing out a scheme by Osama to
dispatch Middle East extremists to America to get flight training.

Neil Lewis wrote in The Times yesterday that "William Carter, an F.B.I.
spokesman, said that neither the bureau nor Mr. Maltbie nor Mr. Frasca, who
are still employed there, would have any comment."

Still employed there? How can Mr. Maltbie and Mr. Frasca still be employed
at the F.B.I.? How can Michael Chertoff still be employed at Homeland
Security? How can Donald Rumsfeld still be employed at the Pentagon?

Missing 9/11, missing Katrina, mangling Iraq, racking up a $9 trillion debt
? those things don't cause officials to lose their jobs. Only saying
something honest ? as prescient Gen. Eric Shinseki did ? can get you a
one-way ticket to Palookaville.

Rummy told reporters last week that the military was preparing for a civil
war in Iraq, but he did not consider it a civil war yet ? even though he
acknowledged it was hard to tell exactly when chaos tipped into civil war.

"I don't think it'll look like the United States' Civil War," he added
sanguinely. Yeah. At Fort Sumter, Lincoln let the enemy fire first. So the
defense secretary believes if the body count stays below the Civil War era's
600,000, Iraq will achieve a healthy blue-state, red-state democracy?

One administration official says that Rummy does not hold the same sway in
meetings anymore, that he's treated as an eccentric old uncle who pops off
and is ignored. But why can't W. just quit him? Instead, the president
praised him for doing "a fine job" on two wars and transforming the
military, when Rummy actually bullied the military to go along with his
foolish schemes in Iraq and has sapped the once-feared fighting machine.

At his impromptu press conference yesterday, the president presented himself
as a nice guy doing a difficult job, relentlessly joshing with reporters. He
chided the press for playing into terrorists' goals by showing bad news from
Iraq ? "they're capable of blowing up innocent life so it ends up on your TV
show" ? even as reports surfaced about insurgents outside Baghdad storming a
jail, slaughtering 18 police officers and letting the prisoners out,
following fast upon an insurgent raid on Iraqi Army headquarters in Kirkuk.
Does the president think TV will instead report on an increase in melon
sales at the market?

When the Bushies harp on training Iraqi security forces so America can hand
the country over to them, it has a hollow ring. Back in 2003, the U.S.
de-Baathified Iraq and put its faith in its friends, the Shiites. Now, given
the suspected Shiite death squads and militias, the U.S. wants to bring the
Sunnis back into the system. So whom do we trust? And for how long?

Asked if he could envision a day when there would be no more U.S. forces in
Iraq, the president said, "That, of course, is an objective." But he added
that it would be decided by future Iraqi governments and future American
presidents.

Once W. is not still employed there.

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From michael at michaelbutler.com  Wed Mar 22 10:41:13 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 10:41:13 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] A New Grip on 'Reality' By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Message-ID: <C046DA49.2A651%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 22, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
A New Grip on 'Reality'
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

One of the most important laws of political debate is this: To name
something is to own it. If you can name something, get that name to stick
and therefore define how people think about an issue, your opponents don't
stand a chance. One of the most pernicious things that Vice President Dick
Cheney and Big Oil have done for years is to define "realism" when it comes
to U.S. energy policy ? and therefore they have owned the debate.

If you listen to them, they always offer this patronizing,
pat-you-on-the-head view about alternative energy ? hybrids, wind, solar,
ethanol ? which goes like this: "Yes, yes, those are all very cute and
virtuous, but not realistic. Real men know that oil and fossil fuels are
going to dominate our energy usage for a long time, so get used to it."

Well, here's what's encouraging today. There is a split emerging among
conservatives on this issue. Not all conservatives are in the pocket of Big
Oil. Many evangelicals, led by people like Gary Bauer, are going green ?
both because they believe that we need to be better stewards of God's green
earth and because they don't like being dependent for energy on countries
that nurse a deep hostility toward the United States.

One of the best speeches I've ever read about the necessity of breaking
America's oil addiction now, and redefining "realism," was delivered by
Senator Richard Lugar, the Republican who is chairman of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, at the Brookings Institution on March 13. Drop what you
are doing and read it at www.brookings.edu.

Mr. Lugar states: "Vice President Cheney, who oversaw Bush administration
energy policy, stated on April 30, 2001, ... 'Years down the road,
alternative fuels may become a great deal more plentiful than they are
today. But we are not yet in any position to stake our economy and our way
of life on that possibility. For now, we must take the facts as they are.
Whatever our hopes for developing alternative sources and for conserving
energy ? and that's part of our plan ? the reality is that fossil fuels
provide virtually 100 percent of our transportation needs and an
overwhelming share of our electricity requirements. For years down the road,
this will continue to be true.' "

Mr. Lugar then says: "For decades, the energy debate in this country has
pitted so-called pro-oil realists against idealistic advocates of
alternative energy. The pro-oil commentators have attempted to discredit
alternatives by saying they make up a tiny share of energy consumed and that
dependence on oil is a choice of the marketplace.

"They assert that our government can and should do little to change this.
They have implied that those who have bemoaned oil dependency do not
understand that every energy alternative comes with its own problems and
limitations."

While acknowledging that the oil alternatives still require a huge amount of
work in order to achieve the necessary scale, Mr. Lugar insists that with a
big strategic push we can, and must, get there: "My message is that the
balance of realism has passed from those who argue on behalf of oil and a
laissez-faire energy policy that relies on market evolution, to those who
recognize that in the absence of a major reorientation in the way we get our
energy, life in America is going to be much more difficult in the coming
decades. ... No one who is honestly assessing the decline of American
leverage around the world due to our energy dependence can fail to see that
energy is the albatross of U.S. national security.

"We have entered a different energy era that requires a much different
response than in past decades. What is needed is an urgent national campaign
led by a succession of presidents and Congresses who will ensure that
American ingenuity and resources are fully committed to this problem."

Dick Cheney regularly dismisses liberals for having a "pre-9/11" mind-set,
as opposed to tough guys like him, who have a "post-9/11" mind-set. Hogwash!
When it comes to energy, there is no one more pre-9/11, no one more stuck in
keeping America addicted to foreign oil, than Dick Cheney.

A deep pessimist, Mr. Cheney has an utterly impoverished view of what
American technologists can do when asked to do the impossible and an utterly
impoverished view of what the American people would do ? post-9/11 ? if
summoned to the great national cause of energy independence.

While I would push for even tougher steps than Mr. Lugar, I draw great hope
from seeing that smart conservatives like him are no longer willing to let
Dick Cheney and Big Oil tell them what is "realistic" when it comes to
America's energy future.

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Wed Mar 22 11:50:13 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (harry.sifton at sympatico.ca)
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 11:50:13 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] AP's Bush 'Straw Man' Story: News Analysis Or Unlabeled
	Opinion?
Message-ID: <1507046.1143057013211.JavaMail.tomcat@localhost>



*Please note, the sender's email address has not been verified.



You have received the following link from harry.sifton at sympatico.ca

 
********************
 
If you are having trouble with any of the links in this message, or if the URL's are not appearing as links, please follow the instructions at the bottom of this email.
 
Title: AP's Bush 'Straw Man' Story: News Analysis Or Unlabeled Opinion?
 
  
Copy and paste the following into your Web browser to access the sent link:
http://www.emailthis.clickability.com/et/emailThis?clickMap=viewThis&etMailToID=689152842&pt=Y
 

Copy and paste the following into your Web browser to SAVE THIS link:
http://www.savethis.clickability.com/st/saveThisPopupApp?clickMap=saveFromET&partnerID=60&etMailToID=689152842&pt=Y

 
Copy and paste the following into your Web browser to forward this link:
http://www.emailthis.clickability.com/et/emailThis?clickMap=forward&etMailToID=689152842&partnerID=60&pt=Y

  
 
********************


Email pages from any Web site you visit - add the EMAIL THIS button to your browser, copy and paste the following into your Web browser:
http://www.emailthis.clickability.com/et/emailThis?clickMap=browserButtons&pt=Y"


*********************



Instructions:
-----------------------------------------
If your e-mail program doesn't recognize Web addresses:
1. With your mouse, highlight the Web Address above. Be sure to highlight the entire Web address, even if it spans more than one line in your email. 
2. Select Copy from the Edit menu at the top of your screen. 
3. Launch your Web browser.
4. Paste the address into your Web browser by selecting Paste from the Edit menu.
5. Click Go or press Enter or Return on your keyboard. 
 
********************
 
 
 
 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060322/42802e7c/attachment.htm 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Wed Mar 22 11:56:50 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (HS)
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 13:56:50 -0600 (CST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] From A Friend: 'nbc5i.com - News - Bar Sweep Sparks
	Controversy'
Message-ID: <31591512.1143057410534.JavaMail.nfsnobody@app106.mtc.ibsys.com>


    
HS has sent you a story: "nbc5i.com - News - Bar Sweep Sparks Controversy"

the link:
http://www.nbc5i.com/news/8169246/detail.html?taf=orl

Message from HS:  What's next?

  

From michael at intrafi.com  Wed Mar 22 12:16:14 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (Michael)
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 15:16:14 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Article from Tom Dispatch
Message-ID: <200603222016.k2MKGEGD018792@thor.thenation.com>

An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060322/15df230c/attachment.htm 

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Wed Mar 22 13:01:55 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 13:01:55 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Pipeline Politics
Message-ID: <C046FB43.2A671%michael@michaelbutler.com>



Economist.com      
    

    
Click here to find out more!
About sponsorship

Pipeline politics
Mar 22nd 2006

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Wed Mar 22 13:22:41 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 13:22:41 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] ETA declares Ceasefire
Message-ID: <C0470021.2A675%michael@michaelbutler.com>

 BBC NEWS
Eta declares permanent ceasefire
The Basque separatist group Eta has declared a permanent ceasefire.

Eta is blamed for killing more than 800 people in its four-decade fight for
independence for the Basque region of northern Spain and south-west France.

In a statement released to Basque media, the group said its objective now
was "to start a new democratic process in the Basque country".

Spanish PM Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said the government was cautious but
hopeful about the announcement.

    Ending the conflict, here and now, is possible - this is the desire and
the will of Eta
Eta statement

The BBC's Danny Wood, in Madrid, says the ceasefire could be the first step
towards a formal peace process.

Eta, which is classed as a terrorist group by the US and the European Union,
declared an indefinite ceasefire in 1998 but peace talks broke down and the
bombing campaign resumed a year later. The group has never previously called
a permanent stop to the violence.

'Joined in hope'

Mr Zapatero has said previously that a permanent end to hostilities by Eta
is a condition for any talks.

Responding to the statement, he said any peace process after so many years
of horror would be "long and difficult".

"Now I trust we will be joined in hope," he said.

But opposition leader Mariano Rajoy said the ceasefire was a pause and it
did not amount to a renunciation of criminal activity.

"It does not repent of anything and it does not ask the victims of terrorism
for forgiveness," he told Spanish TV.

The statement was also rejected by Spain's Association of Victims of
Terrorism as "a new trick by the murderers to achieve their political
objectives".

The Eta statement was read out by a woman in a mask wearing a black Basque
beret, flanked by two colleagues similarly dressed.

"At the end of this process, Basque citizens will be able to have a voice
and the power to decide their future," she said.

"Ending the conflict, here and now, is possible. This is the desire and the
will of Eta."

The ceasefire will come into effect on Friday, the statement said.

Bombing campaign

The group's activities have been waning, with the number of bombings falling
in recent years. The last deadly Eta attack was in May 2003.

    
ETA TIMELINE
1959: Eta founded
1968: Eta kills San Sebastian secret police chief Meliton Manzanas, its
first victim
1973: PM Luis Carrero Blanco assassinated
1978: Political wing Herri Batasuna formed
1980: 118 people killed in bloodiest year
Sept 1998: Indefinite ceasefire
Nov 1999: End of ceasefire, followed by more bomb attacks in January and
February 2000
Dec 2001: EU declares Eta a terrorist organisation
March 2003: Batasuna banned by Supreme Court
May 2003: Two police killed in Eta's last deadly attack
Nov 2005: 56 alleged Eta activists on trial in the largest prosecution of
its kind

Some analysts said Eta's campaign became virtually untenable after the
Madrid train bombings in March 2004, blamed on Islamists, caused widespread
popular revulsion.

Nearly 200 people died in the series of attacks.

In the 1970s Eta killed 100 people or more every year, many of them Spanish
police, judges and politicians.

There have been several small bombs in recent weeks, but none of them caused
injuries.

The 1998 ceasefire led to a dialogue with the conservative government of
Jose Maria Aznar. But talks broke down in November 1999 and the following
year Eta embarked on a renewed bombing campaign.

However, Spanish and French police responded with a wave of arrests which
were said to have hit the organisation hard.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/4832672.stm

Published: 2006/03/22 17:02:08 GMT

? BBC MMVI



From michael at michaelbutler.com  Wed Mar 22 13:29:27 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 13:29:27 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Bush Bombs in Cleveland by Robert Scheer
Message-ID: <C04701B7.2A677%michael@michaelbutler.com>

Truthdig

Bush Bombs in Cleveland
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060321_bush_cleveland_wmd_lies/
Posted on Mar. 21, 2006

By Robert Scheer

On the third anniversary of the beginning of his Iraq catastrophe, President
Bush yet again dealt in denial, but this time the carefully screened
audience at the Cleveland City Club wasn?t buying it.

Perhaps most on target was an elderly gentleman who cited what he said were
the three main reasons for going to war in Iraq ? WMD, Iraq?s ties to the
Sept. 11 terrorists and the alleged purchase of nuclear material from Niger
? and then noted dryly that all three of these rationales turned out to be
false.

?How do we restore confidence that Americans may have in their leaders and
to be sure that the information they are getting now is correct?? he asked
the president.

How indeed? ?That?s a great question,? began Bush by way of dissembling.
?First, just if I may correct a misperception. I don?t think we ever said ?
at least I know I didn?t say ? that there was a direct connection between
Sept. 11 and Saddam Hussein.?

Really? So when he said in his May 1, 2003, ?Mission Accomplished? speech on
the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln that ?we have removed an
ally of Al Qaeda,? he meant a different gang with the same name as the one
blamed for the attack on the World Trade Center twin towers and Pentagon? It
is his way of finessing the firm conclusion of the bipartisan Sept. 11
commission that Hussein was an opponent of Al Qaeda and never its ally. Yet
that didn?t stop Bush from again on Monday insisting that ?the central front
on the war on terror is Iraq.?

Meanwhile, the old ?central front,? woolly Afghanistan, is now all sewed up,
Bush reassures us. ?Twenty-five million people are now free, and Afghanistan
is no longer a safe haven for the terrorists.? Apparently the president
missed the director of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, Gen. Michael
Maples, giving testimony to Congress a few weeks ago that Taliban resurgence
now presents ?a greater threat to the Afghan central government?s expansion
of authority than at any point since late 2001.?

To be sure, occupied Iraq is useful to Al Qaeda and its ilk ? as a
recruiting poster. In this and myriad other ways, the United States
military?s continued heavy-handed presence in Iraq strengthens the hands of
extremists and demagogues who can appeal to latent Iraqi nationalism and
Muslim pride. Yet we seem to have forgotten that terrorists don?t really
need Iraq as ?a safe haven for terrorists to plot new attacks against our
nation,? as Bush put it ? they are just as likely to be drawn from countries
that are nominally our allies, such as the 15 hijackers recruited under the
noses of the Bush family?s sheik friends in Saudi Arabia.

Finally, for old times? sake, Bush trotted out his now hoary excuses for
those missing Iraqi WMD he so trumped up to get us psyched for a
?preemptive? war three years ago, again blaming the deception on everyone
except himself. ?Like you, I asked that very same question, ?Where did we go
wrong on intelligence?,? ? he plaintively responded to his questioner. ?The
truth of the matter is that the whole world thought that Saddam Hussein had
weapons of mass destruction.?

Not so. Most of the world thought it best to wait for the U.N. inspectors,
then on the ground in Iraq, to complete their work before answering that
question. Those inspectors had found no evidence of WMD and this president
knew full well that would probably be their final conclusion when he ordered
the preemptive invasion. Yet he justified it then by referring to the 9/11
attack, warning, ?We cannot wait for the final proof ? the smoking gun ?
that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.?

On Tuesday, the Associated Press reported that a treasure trove of
translations of audio tapes of top-level Iraqi meetings involving Hussein,
released at the request of U.S. Rep. Peter Hoekstra, the Republican chairman
of the House Intelligence Committee, show that Iraq had destroyed its WMD
program by 1992. Those tapes were obtained soon after the 2003 invasion, yet
the Bush administration kept them secret while continuing to assert that
Iraq had an active WMD program.

As opposed to ordinary people in this country and the world, Bush has access
to the same detailed information that the Sept. 11 commission used to
conclude that the terrorist acts of Sept. 11 and others conducted by Al
Qaeda bore no relation to Iraq. It is hardly an advertisement for American
democracy that he was able to operate before the war and as recently as this
week as if the truth will never be allowed to hold him accountable ? though
not in Cleveland, which is something to cheer about.

Bush Cleveland
AP/Mark Duncan

President Bush shades his eyes from the lights
as he takes questions at the City Club in
Cleveland, Monday, March 20. Bush
claimed success in stabilizing an insurgent
stronghold in northern Iraq, saying he has
?confidence in our strategy? and that critics
should look beyond the images of violence to
see clear signs of progress.
HOME|Digs|Uncovered|Ear to the Ground|Reports|Cartoons|A/V
Booth|Podcast|Bazaar|About Us|Contact Us|User Agreement|Privacy Policy
truthdig Subscribe with Bloglines Add to My Yahoo! Subscribe to my feed
Subscribe to my feed Subscribe to my feed See LiveJournal Feed
A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer. Publisher,
Zuade Kaufman.
Copyright ? 2006 Truthdig, L.L.C. All rights reserved.



From barbarasiomos38 at msn.com  Wed Mar 22 15:18:57 2006
From: barbarasiomos38 at msn.com (Barbara Siomos)
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 23:18:57 GMT
Subject: [Mb-civic] Airline screeners fail government bomb tests
Message-ID: <BAY114-DAV2C3BB825992ADCD800274ABD90@phx.gbl>

How easy would it be to get materials for a homemade bomb past airport security screeners? Federal investigators tested that recently and the results were so disturbing the report was classified._ NBC's Lisa Myers investigates.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11863165/from/ET/


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060322/6c02d839/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Wed Mar 22 15:19:03 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 23:19:03 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Bush Concedes Iraq War Erodes Political
	Status
Message-ID: <20060322231917.616179FD75@lax-gw05.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

WASHINGTON | March 22, 2006
Bush Concedes Iraq War Erodes Political Status
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
Analysts said that with President Bush's message now familiar to the nation, it was not clear whether people were listening.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/22/politics/22prexy.html?ex=1143694800&en=d2f9ae087653ce40&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060322/c689b2c8/attachment-0001.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Wed Mar 22 15:19:52 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 23:19:52 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: French Premier Considers Easing Job Law
Message-ID: <20060322231953.86974249D6B@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

INTERNATIONAL / EUROPE | March 22, 2006
French Premier Considers Easing Job Law
By CRAIG S. SMITH
Facing crippling strikes and growing civil unrest, Dominique de Villepin discussed watering down his contentious new labor law with legislators.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/22/international/europe/22france.html?ex=1143694800&en=5d0fda1a5c2de044&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060322/664544e9/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Wed Mar 22 15:20:50 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 23:20:50 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: French Leader's Rival Submits Own Labor
	Solution
Message-ID: <20060322232050.70DFD2372AF@lax-gw01.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

We should only have the Democrats and Republicans fighting over how best to satisfy the will of the people...


INTERNATIONAL / EUROPE | March 22, 2006
French Leader's Rival Submits Own Labor Solution
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin distanced himself for the first time from his boss over the new labor law.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/22/international/europe/22cnd-france.html?ex=1143694800&en=abcf0f92ea26e3cf&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060322/d6c013c1/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Wed Mar 22 15:22:01 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 23:22:01 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: More Contaminants Discovered in Water at
	Indian Point Plant
Message-ID: <20060322232201.52BC99FD33@lax-gw05.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

Isn't it strange that no matter what they find wrong, no matter how many times, and no matter how serious, none of these things ever "pose a hazard" to the public?


NEW YORK REGION | March 22, 2006
More Contaminants Discovered in Water at Indian Point Plant
By MATTHEW L. WALD
WASHINGTON, March 21 ? Two more radioactive contaminants have shown up in the groundwater under the Indian Point nuclear reactor complex in Westchester County, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said on Tuesday. But the agency and the plant owner, Entergy Nuclear Northeast, said they did not pose a hazard.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/22/nyregion/22nuke.html?ex=1143694800&en=bc761baee29226d8&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060322/0ae9196d/attachment.htm 

From hotprojects at nyc.rr.com  Wed Mar 22 15:22:08 2006
From: hotprojects at nyc.rr.com (richard haase)
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 18:22:08 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: French Premier Considers Easing Job Law
References: <20060322231953.86974249D6B@lax-gw08.mroute.net>
Message-ID: <001601c64e07$710505d0$f1476c42@hotprojects>

E-Mail ThisIan my mishbuchah in christ lol
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com 
  To: mb-civic at islandlists.com 
  Sent: Wednesday, March 22, 2006 6:19 PM
  Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: French Premier Considers Easing Job Law


            
                
                   
                
                
             
              This page was sent to you by:  ialterman at nyc.rr.com 

              INTERNATIONAL / EUROPE   | March 22, 2006 
              French Premier Considers Easing Job Law 
              By CRAIG S. SMITH 
              Facing crippling strikes and growing civil unrest, Dominique de Villepin discussed watering down his contentious new labor law with legislators. 
             
             
                 
                     
                    1. Johannesburg Journal: In the Jungle, the Unjust Jungle, a Small Victory 
                    2. The Consumer: Hand Sanitizers, Good or Bad? 
                    3. Experts Reveal the Secret Powers of Grapefruit Juice 
                    4. Op-Ed Contributor: The Doctor Will See You for Exactly Seven Minutes 
                    5. 'American Theocracy,' by Kevin Phillips: Clear and Present Dangers 

                    ?  Go to Complete List 
                     
                   
                   
                          Advertisement 
                                Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

                                Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.
                                http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/   


                         
                   
                   
                     
                          Do you love NY? Get the insider's guide to where to stay, what to do and where to eat. Go to www.nytimes.com/travel for your NYC Guide now. Click here. 



                   
             
             
                
              Copyright 2006  The New York Times Company | Privacy Policy    
                 
       



------------------------------------------------------------------------------


  _______________________________________________
  Mb-civic mailing list
  Mb-civic at islandlists.com
  http://www.islandlists.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mb-civic
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060322/7bb7a1e7/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Wed Mar 22 15:23:09 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 23:23:09 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Study Says U.S. Companies Lag on Global
	Warming
Message-ID: <20060322232309.EFF1124AEE2@lax-gw02.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

Sadly, no surprise here...


BUSINESS | March 22, 2006
Study Says U.S. Companies Lag on Global Warming
By CLAUDIA H. DEUTSCH
European and Asian companies are paying more attention to global warming than their American counterparts, a report says.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/22/business/22emission.html?ex=1143694800&en=97077e38d5d48a70&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060322/7bd9eeaf/attachment-0001.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Wed Mar 22 15:23:49 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 23:23:49 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Patently Ridiculous
Message-ID: <20060322232349.4DCF013B737@lax-gw04.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

OPINION | March 22, 2006
Editorial: Patently Ridiculous

Something has gone very wrong with the United States patent system.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/22/opinion/22wed1.html?ex=1143694800&en=ac4b4aadace812fd&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060322/8122a043/attachment.htm 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Wed Mar 22 16:36:34 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (harry.sifton at sympatico.ca)
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 19:36:34 -0500 (EST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] Article from LifeSiteNews.com
Message-ID: <200603230036.k2N0aYTY029942@interim.securesites.net>

Hello,

HS (harry.sifton at sympatico.ca) has recommended the following news to you from LifeSiteNews.com:

Check out LifeSiteNews.com!

The full text of the story is available at: 
http://www.lifesite.net

This page was sent using our send-to-friend service. Your email address has not been added to any list and has not been recorded at our site.

From michael at intrafi.com  Wed Mar 22 16:50:24 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 16:50:24 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] Alternet: Democracy: What A Concept
Message-ID: <20060323005024.86A2AB809A@alternet.org>


This story has been forwarded to you from
http://www.alternet.org by michael at intrafi.com



-------------------------------------
Democracy: What A Concept
http://www.alternet.org/story/33852

Finally, there's a dandy way to abolish the Electoral College and elect the president by popular vote. 
-------------------------------------


From michael at michaelbutler.com  Wed Mar 22 17:09:03 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 17:09:03 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Bad strategy
Message-ID: <C0473531.2A69B%michael@michaelbutler.com>



-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/octet-stream
Size: 73515 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060322/37cde411/attachment-0001.obj 

From ean at sbcglobal.net  Wed Mar 22 20:17:22 2006
From: ean at sbcglobal.net (ean at sbcglobal.net)
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 20:17:22 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Deranged, Disconnected, and Dangerous   Part II
Message-ID: <E1FMHKJ-0006VW-CY@elasmtp-junco.atl.sa.earthlink.net>


http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12432.htm

Deranged, Disconnected, and Dangerous

by Paul Craig Roberts

03/21/06  -- -- On March 17 William Rivers Pitt wrote that Bush is
"deranged, disconnected, and dangerous." In his March 20 Cleveland
speech, Bush proved Pitt right.

Bush gave a delusional speech that shows he is detached from reality.
"We're going to help the Iraqis build a strong democracy that will be an
inspiration throughout the Middle East, a democracy that'll be a partner
in the global war against the terrorists."

Has no one told Bush that the Iraqis cannot even agree to form a
government?

The day before Bush's delusional Cleveland speech, Iyad Allawi, the former
prime minister of one of our make-believe Iraqi governments, said that in
Iraq the casualty rate from the sectarian strife is so high that "if this
is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is."

The day of Bush's delusional speech, Patrick Cockburn, present on the
scene in Irbil, Iraq, gave a much more truthful account of the situation.
Writing in CounterPunch, he reported: "Iraq is a country convulsed by
fear. It is at its worst in Baghdad. Sectarian killings are commonplace. .
. . The scale of the violence is such that most of it is unreported. . . .
Unseen by the outside world, silent populations are on the move,
frightened people fleeing neighborhoods where their community is in a
minority for safer districts. There is also a growing reliance on militias
because of fears that police patrols or checkpoints are in reality death
squads hunting for victims."

Not a word of this reality from our delusional president.

The fantasy Iraq that Bush painted was only his warm-up. He went on to
tell his Cleveland audience that American could not be safe unless Iraq
was a democracy. What a weak, pitiful, vulnerable place Bush's America
must be. Unless a small, devastated Middle Eastern country is a democracy,
America cannot be safe. Who in the Cleveland audience could possibly have
believed this utter nonsense.

Bush told his audience that "the security of our country is directly
linked to the liberty of the Iraqi people, and we will settle for nothing
less than victory." What victory is he talking about? Despite the huge
sums of dollars paid by the Bush regime to all the leaders of all the
factions, Iraq cannot form a government.

Without victory, Iraq will be "a safe haven for terrorists to plot new
attacks against our nation." Alas, there were no terrorists in Iraq until
Bush invaded the country and drew them in. The problem our troops face in
Iraq is not terrorists, but resistance fighters, "insurgents" in the Bush
regimes parlance. Democracies lack the dictatorial, extra-legal powers to
suppress terrorists. That is why Bush is destroying civil liberties in the
US. Under Saddam Hussein, there were no terrorists and no insurgents. Bush
is modeling his no habeas corpus, torture prone, all intrusive government
on Saddam Hussein.

The security of Americans has nothing whatsoever to do with Iraq. Iraq
cannot overthrow the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the separation
of powers, and American civil liberties. Iraq cannot illegally spy on
American citizens, declare them to be "suspects" and detain them forever
without warrant or charges. Iraq cannot put American critics of the Bush
regime on "no-fly" lists.

The real dangers to Americans reside in the neocon Bush administration.
This delusional warmonger administration believes it has the power and the
right to dictate to Muslim countries their political and social
institutions. This extraordinary arrogance and hubris breeds opposition
where there was none. The world is not going to obey Bush and a handful of
stupid neocons.

In his speech Bush told Cleveland that "the decision to remove Saddam
Hussein was a difficult decision." That is a lie. Bush's Treasury
Secretary, Paul O'Neill, and a number of others have reported that Bush
came into office intending to remove Hussein. The head of British
intelligence told the British Cabinet that Bush first decided to go to war
and then created the reasons to justify his aggression against Iraq.

"Before we acted," Bush told his audience, Hussein's "regime was defying
U.N. resolutions calling for it to disarm. It was violating cease-fire
agreements, was firing on American and British pilots which were enforcing
no-fly zones." Gentle reader, think what Bush is saying. As Iraq had no
weapons of mass destruction, a fact that Bush has acknowledged, how could
Iraq possibly have been violating U.N. resolutions calling on it to
disarm?

What cease-fire agreements are Bush talking about? It was US and UK planes
that continued to fly over Iraqi territory and bomb Iraqis.

Do you know what Bush means by no-fly zones? He means that US and UK 
jet
fighters could fly all over Iraq, but if Iraqi planes flew over Iraqi
territory, we would shoot them down.

Where did the US get the right to tell countries that they dare not try to
control their own air space?

Americans need to understand that terrorists are responding to America's
behavior, or misbehavior. The only successful way to stop terrorism is to
alter our behavior. America is not God. It has no right, and it certainly
lacks the power, to impose its will on the world.

The Bush regime cannot lead the world to democracy by tearing democracy
down at home. Not since Abraham Lincoln have American civil liberties been
so threatened as by the Bush regime. America even has an Attorney General,
a Vice President, and a Secretary of Defense who believe in torture. How
do they differ from officials in the Third Reich or Stalin's KGB? Anyone
who believes in torture is not an American. That person is outside our
tradition. Yet, it is people who believe in torture who occupy our highest
offices.

When we get the mote out of our own eye, then we can instruct the Middle
East. Dr. Roberts [send him mail] is Chairman of the Institute for
Political Economy and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. He is
a former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, former contributing
editor for National Review, and a former assistant secretary of the U.S.
Treasury.

***


-- 
You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, 
option D (up to 3 emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options 
(option A - 1x/week, option B - 3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option D - 
up to 3x/day) please reply and let us know!  If someone forwarded you 
this email and you want to be on our list, send an email to 
ean at sbcglobal.net and tell us which option you'd like.


"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060322/62c3d32b/attachment.htm 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Wed Mar 22 22:33:09 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 01:33:09 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Secrets of Baghdad Airport
Message-ID: <000d01c64e43$ad4abe90$7327e440@Harold>

The following story was reprinted in the International Herald Tribune (Opinion)


Secrets of Baghdad Airport

Boston Globe


The more revelations there are of detainee abuse by U.S. troops, the more evident it is that the guards who mistreated prisoners at Abu Ghraib were not just a few bad apples, as the Bush administration has described them. A New York Times report Sunday focused on a detention center at Baghdad airport where FBI, CIA and civilian Department of Defense officials complained to their superiors about the harsh tactics, including beatings, used by military interrogators. 

The military could not ignore the Abu Ghraib abuses after soldiers who disapproved of what happened released photos to the media. The Bush administration then did its best to minimize Abu Ghraib as an isolated case and the work of untrained reservists. But the Baghdad airport center was staffed largely by highly trained Special Operations troops, with about 1,000 present at any time. According to the Times, 34 have been disciplined for mistreatment. 

In late 2003, warnings of what was going on at the center came from medics who saw injuries on detainees that could have come from beatings. By 2004, relations between military and civilian officials were strained enough for reports to reach the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Vice Admiral Lowell Jacoby. He informed the under secretary of defense for intelligence, Stephen Cambone, who instructed his deputy, Lieutenant General William Boykin, to "get to the bottom of this immediately." Boykin, who kept his Pentagon job despite having publicly disparaged the Islamic faith, concluded at the time there was no pattern of misconduct at the center. 

Since then, there has been a broader inquiry into allegations of prisoner abuse by Special Operations forces. Completed in 2005 by Brigadier General Richard Formica, it was sent to Congress, but the Pentagon has refused to release even an unclassified version. 

America is paying for prisoner abuse in the animosity it engenders throughout the Middle East and the world. And U.S. soldiers will pay for it in future conflicts when they are captured and subjected to similar mistreatment. The public deserves to know the findings of the Pentagon inquiry on what happened at the airport. President George W. Bush should order Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to release the Formica report
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060323/96c14e53/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Thu Mar 23 03:48:06 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 06:48:06 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] IMPORTANT: Researchers Shed More Light on Bird Flu -
	Washington Post
Message-ID: <44228AF6.7000108@comcast.net>

Researchers Shed More Light on Bird Flu

By David Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 23, 2006; A13

Two research teams have independently discovered explanations for the 
chief features of the H5N1 bird flu virus -- its difficulty infecting 
humans, and the deadly effects when it does.

Unlike influenza viruses that are passed easily between people, H5N1 has 
a hard time attaching to cells in the nose, throat and upper airways. 
But it readily attaches to cells deep in the lungs.

This suggests that people need close and heavy exposure to the H5N1 
virus for it to get into the lungs. But once it takes hold, it causes 
extensive damage to the machinery of respiration -- the cells and air 
spaces where oxygen is exchanged for carbon dioxide.

That scenario mimics the clinical experience of many of the 184 human 
cases of bird flu that have been officially recorded since late 2003. 
More than half have been fatal.

"This is information that we need to know -- fundamental and exciting," 
said Robert G. Webster, a leading flu virologist at St. Jude Children's 
Research Hospital in Memphis. He was not a member of either of the 
research groups, one of which published its results in yesterday's issue 
of the journal Nature, and the other online in Science.

Influenza infection occurs through a series of steps, with a key early 
one involving hemagglutinin, a protein that coats the virus's outer 
envelope. That protein attaches to sugar molecules that lie on the 
surface of many cells.

Virologists have known for years that human flu viruses attach through a 
sugar "linkage" designated alpha 2,6. The vast family of avian flu 
viruses favors a linkage with a different shape, designated alpha 2,3.

A research team led by Kyoko Shinya at the University of Wisconsin and 
the University of Tokyo looked at what cells in the human respiratory 
tract contain which linkage. They found that alpha 2,6 -- the receptor 
for human flu -- predominated in the nose and down the airways to the 
microscopic passageways that lead to the air sacs, or alveoli. At that 
point, cells with the alpha 2,3 linkage -- the receptor for bird viruses 
-- become common. Human viruses attached to the upper airways, while 
avian viruses attached to cells deep in the lungs.

The Japanese researchers, who published their findings in Nature, also 
tested an H5N1 virus taken from a person who died of bird flu in Hong 
Kong in 2003. That microbe's hemagglutinin recognized both the human and 
bird linkages, and it attached to cells from nose to lung. Most H5N1 
samples isolated from people do not generally follow that pattern. The 
ability to bind to alpha 2,6 human receptors is one of several features 
that would have to become dominant for the H5N1 virus to become easily 
transmitted from human to human.

In the other paper, Thijs Kuiken and colleagues at Erasmus Medical 
Center in the Netherlands exposed H5N1 to blocks of tissue taken from 
all along the respiratory tree. They found the bird virus attached 
predominantly to cells at the entrance to the air sacs and in them, as 
well as to immune-system cells called alveolar macrophages that patrol 
the area.

This same pattern was seen in cats and ferrets. (Ferrets have 
traditionally been considered the species whose flu infections most 
closely mimic those of humans.) In mice, however, the pattern was 
reversed. H5N1 attached best to cells in the windpipe, not the lung -- 
suggesting mice are not the best animal model for research on this strain.

In many of the fatal H5N1 infections, people's lungs were filled with 
fluid, the result of an out-of-control inflammatory reaction. Kuiken 
speculated that bird flu's affinity for macrophages -- which can release 
inflammatory chemicals -- may be part of the reason.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/22/AR2006032202043.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060323/3cfe32ea/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Thu Mar 23 03:52:44 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 06:52:44 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Drugs Cure Depression In Half of Patients - Washington
	Post
Message-ID: <44228C0C.6000205@comcast.net>

Drugs Cure Depression In Half of Patients
Doctors Have Mixed Reactions To Study Findings

By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 23, 2006; A01

Antidepressants fail to cure the symptoms of major depression in half of 
all patients with the disease even if they receive the best possible 
care, according to a definitive government study released yesterday.

Significant numbers of patients continue to experience symptoms such as 
sadness, low energy and hopelessness after intensive treatment, even as 
about an equal number report an end to such problems -- a result that 
quickly lent itself to interpretations that the glass was either half 
empty or half full.

The $35 million taxpayer-funded study was the largest trial of its kind 
ever conducted. It provided what industry-sponsored trials have rarely 
captured: Rather than merely ask whether patients are getting better, 
the study asked what patients most care about -- whether depression can 
be made to disappear altogether.

The study has been eagerly awaited by physicians, patients and the 
pharmaceutical industry. According to government statistics, depression 
afflicts 15 million Americans a year. About 189 million prescriptions 
for antidepressants were written last year, and the disease costs the 
nation $83 billion annually because of treatment costs, lost 
productivity, absenteeism and suicide.

David Rubinow, a professor and the chairman of the psychiatry department 
at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said the results are 
an "illuminating and disconcerting" window into the affliction that is 
thought to fuel many of the 30,000 suicides committed each year in the 
United States.

Although the study showed that patients who do not respond well to one 
drug could be helped by another, the results are "discouraging for 
several reasons," Rubinow said in an editorial published in the New 
England Journal of Medicine, which also published the study.

It is troubling that large numbers of patients continued to have 
problems, he said. Additionally, he noted that the drugs used in the 
study -- Celexa, Wellbutrin, Zoloft and Effexor -- work in very 
different ways yet had roughly equal effectiveness when it came to 
treating depression. This suggests that the underlying brain mechanisms 
of depression are far more complicated than simple notions of a single 
chemical imbalance.

Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, which 
funded the study, emphasized that patients should seek -- and stick with 
-- treatment. "The glass is half full from our perspective," he said. 
But "the glass is half empty in that we need to come up with better 
treatments in the future."

The study is immediately relevant to physicians because it tracked a 
large number of patients with the kind of complications and chronic 
problems that are usually excluded from pharmaceutical industry trials. 
About one in three patients had seen their depression symptoms go away 
after an initial round of treatment, a result known as remission. About 
half achieved that goal after a new round of treatment involving either 
a new medication or an additional drug, the research found.

Although patients recruited to pharmaceutical industry trials are 
usually carefully screened to ensure they do not have other psychiatric 
or medical conditions, those in the government-funded study often 
suffered from multiple physical and mental problems -- typical of 
patients whom doctors routinely see.

At the same time, the researchers acknowledged, the care provided in the 
study was exceptional. Intensive monitoring and careful evaluation was 
provided to all patients. Such services are available today in perhaps 
one in 10 medical practices. If the patients in this study had received 
the kind of care that patients receive on average, the researchers said, 
the remission rate probably would have been significantly lower -- 
perhaps even in the single digits.

"People who entered into this trial received a level of care which is 
quite different than many patients receive when they see a primary-care 
doc or even a psychiatrist," Insel said as he described what clinical 
facilities should aim for in terms of care. "This involved a 
depression-care specialist who made sure there was very careful 
monitoring of side effects and a relentless effort to optimize the dose. 
It is not like writing a prescription for penicillin and coming back in 
four to six weeks."

The study also employed standardized assessment tests that looked more 
deeply at patients' conditions than the routine conversations about 
their health that are generally employed in clinical care. Such 
attention allowed problems to rise to the surface that may otherwise be 
missed, and kept patients from becoming discouraged about treatment.

Augustus John Rush, a psychiatrist at the University of Texas 
Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, who helped organize the study 
known as the Sequenced Treatment Alternatives to Relieve Depression, 
said the results are positive, given the many complications that often 
accompany depression.

"A 50 percent remission rate is extraordinarily good, given the nature 
of these disorders," he said. "These individuals have had an average of 
16 years of depression. Two-thirds have other concomitant psychiatric 
conditions and two-thirds have concomitant general medical problems. All 
of these reduce the chances of remission."

Although the study has continued to offer treatment for even longer 
periods, those results are not yet available. Rush said that with 
chronic problems, most of the benefit is usually seen in the first 
couple of rounds of treatment, since the remaining patients are those 
with the most intractable problems.

Psychiatric drugs have been at the center of growing controversy for 
nearly two years -- including concerns that antidepressants may increase 
the risk of suicidal behavior among some children and worries that drugs 
used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder are overused. 
Still, researchers and clinicians say they are far more worried about 
untreated mental illness than any overuse of medications.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/22/AR2006032202450.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060323/3dd49403/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Thu Mar 23 03:55:53 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 06:55:53 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] For Afghans, Allies, A Clash of Values - Washington Post
Message-ID: <44228CC9.3080203@comcast.net>

For Afghans, Allies, A Clash of Values
Case Against Christian Convert Puts Pressure on Karzai -- and on Bush

By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, March 23, 2006; A01

The case of an Afghan man who could be prosecuted and even put to death 
for converting to Christianity has unleashed a blizzard of condemnation 
from the West this week and exposed a conflict in values between 
Afghanistan, a conservative Muslim country, and the foreign countries 
that have helped defend and rebuild it in the four years since the fall 
of the Taliban.

The case of Abdul Rahman, a longtime Christian convert who lived in 
Germany for years and was arrested last month in Kabul, has also 
highlighted the volatile debate within Afghanistan over the proper role 
of Islam in Afghan law and public policy as the country struggles to 
develop a democracy.

Diplomats from several countries said yesterday that Rahman, 41, now 
seems unlikely to be tried or executed. Prosecutors in Kabul said he 
might be mentally unfit to stand trial, a sign that the government may 
be seeking to avoid confronting its Western allies without giving ground 
on Islamic law, under which conversion to another religion is punishable 
by death.

But the case, the first of its kind since the radical Islamic Taliban 
movement was toppled in 2001 by a U.S.-led military invasion, continued 
to draw protests from the governments of Italy, Germany, Canada and 
other NATO nations, at a time when NATO forces are beginning to replace 
tens of thousands of U.S. troops as the principal defenders of 
Afghanistan against Taliban and al-Qaeda insurgents.

It also put pressure on President Bush, who visited Kabul last month to 
show support for Afghan President Hamid Karzai. A number of U.S. 
Christian and conservative groups demanded this week that Bush take 
action, and one organization accused him yesterday of propping up an 
Islamic fundamentalist regime in Kabul.

"This is an extremely sensitive issue here and an extremely serious 
issue back home," Abdullah, Afghanistan's foreign minister, said in an 
interview yesterday with Washington Post editors and reporters. "Every 
time we have a case, it is like an alarm. These contradictions will not 
go away with one or two cases."

Bush, on a visit to Wheeling, W.Va., said yesterday he was "deeply 
troubled" to learn of Rahman's possible prosecution. "That's not the 
universal application of the values that I talked about" while in Kabul, 
he said. He stopped short of calling for the case against Rahman to be 
dropped but said he would work with Karzai's government "to make sure 
that people are protected in their capacity to worship."

Bush's comments were tougher than those made previously by 
administration officials. On Tuesday, a State Department spokesman urged 
the Afghan government to "conduct any legal proceedings in a transparent 
and fair manner." R. Nicholas Burns, the undersecretary of state for 
political affairs, said that the Afghan constitution "affords freedom of 
religion to all Afghans" and that the U.S. government hoped for a 
"satisfactory result" of the case.

The initial low-key response apparently infuriated Christian 
conservative groups. Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research 
Council, complained in a letter to Bush and Secretary of State 
Condoleezza Rice: "How can we congratulate ourselves for liberating 
Afghanistan from the rule of jihadists only to be ruled by radical 
Islamists who kill Christians? . . . Americans will not give their blood 
and treasure to prop up new Islamic fundamentalist regimes."

In another open letter to Bush, the U.S. Commission on International 
Religious Freedom said it was "the obligation of our government" to take 
action in the case. The group warned that in Afghanistan, there is no 
legal guarantee of religious freedom and the judiciary is instructed to 
enforce Islamic principles. "The door is open for a harsh, unfair or 
even abusive interpretation of religious orthodoxy to be officially 
imposed," it said.

Bush, a Christian, often talks about God, faith and respect for all 
religions, especially in relation to the war on terrorism. The White 
House has often portrayed Karzai as an example of a Muslim leader and 
ally who is working to hunt down Islamic terrorists and build a 
democracy based on the rule of law and human rights.

But Afghanistan is also a deeply traditional and tribal society, where 
99 percent of the 25 million inhabitants are Muslims and no Christians 
worship openly. It is a capital crime under Afghan Islamic law to 
convert to Christianity, and prosecutors and judges in Kabul initially 
said Rahman might be sentenced to death.

The country's 2004 constitution, which was heavily debated and rewritten 
by Afghan officials after it was crafted with help from U.N. advisers, 
is an ambiguous document that endorses international human rights 
conventions but also says that no law shall contravene the principles of 
Islam.

"This case goes right to the heart of the contradictions in the 
constitution. Is Afghanistan a democracy that respects human rights and 
international norms, or is it an Islamic country with an extremely 
conservative judiciary?" said Alex Their, a senior rule of law adviser 
at the U.S. Institute of Peace. "The issues being raised will have an 
important impact on Afghanistan's ability to become a stable democracy."

Although Rahman is the first Afghan charged with converting since the 
fall of the Taliban, Afghan courts have recently prosecuted or harshly 
criticized individuals for other alleged anti-Islamic acts, including a 
presidential candidate in 2004 who questioned the right of Muslim men to 
have multiple wives and a magazine editor last year who challenged the 
doctrine that conversion from Islam is a capital offense.

The Supreme Court's chief justice, an elderly cleric named Fazl Hadi 
Shinwari, has issued religious decrees against such individuals. Karzai, 
a moderate who in Afghanistan is widely viewed as having ceded the 
judiciary to Islamic conservatives, renominated Shinwari this week. 
Abdullah, who was not renamed to his post in a cabinet shuffle this 
week, said the Afghan judiciary was in serious need of reform.

So far, the government has not invoked the extreme punishments ordained 
by Islamic law, or sharia , such as cutting off thieves' hands and 
stoning adulterers, which were frequently carried out by the Taliban and 
drew international condemnation. But most Afghans view Islamic law as 
absolute once it is invoked. And despite their gratitude for U.S. 
military and economic support, many remain leery of Western values and 
associate Christianity with fornication and drunkenness.

Under sharia, a convert to Christianity "should be given time to think," 
said Abdul Aziz, a professor of Islamic law who spoke by telephone from 
Kabul. "What he has done may damage Islamic society, so he should change 
his mind." If he does not, sharia prescribes the punishment of death. 
"Then, even a judge cannot change it. It is like doing a coup against 
the government," Aziz said. Rahman's case was brought by a public 
security court, not a regular criminal one.

The case against Rahman is complicated by personal aspects. His 
conversion was denounced by his family in Kabul after he was involved in 
a lawsuit and child custody fight with his former wife, and he has been 
described as perennially jobless and mentally unbalanced. He converted 
in 1990 while working with a Christian aid group in Pakistan and then 
moved to Germany, returning only recently.

Comments made this week in Kabul by judges, prosecutors, neighbors and 
Rahman's relatives illustrated the strong emotional and religious 
feelings such a case can evoke. His father expressed shame and 
bewilderment at his conversion. Guards refused to let journalists visit 
him in a Kabul prison, and one said, "We will cut him into little pieces."

But yesterday, Rahman was briefly brought before the news media. 
According to a report by the BBC, he said: "I am not an infidel or a 
fugitive. I am a Christian. If they want to sentence me to death, I 
accept that."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/22/AR2006032201113.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060323/15e93260/attachment-0001.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Thu Mar 23 04:00:03 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 07:00:03 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Opening With a Trap Door - Jim Hoagland - Washington
	Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <44228DC3.2040709@comcast.net>

Opening With a Trap Door
How Best to Manage The Talks With Iran

By Jim Hoagland
The Washington Post
Thursday, March 23, 2006; A23

Ask administration hard-liners about Iran's sudden acceptance of the 
U.S. offer to talk about stability in Iraq and you hear this reaction: 
It's a booby trap. These hawks are right.

Put the same question to moderates on the Bush team and this is the 
response: It's an opening in the confrontation and a necessary step 
toward an exit strategy for Iraq. The remarkable thing is that these 
doves are right, too.

President Bush must treat the Iranian decision to open discussions in 
Baghdad as trap and opportunity. It is both. The administration should 
pursue this small opening in the Iranian wall with discipline and 
attention to maintaining a united front with its European and Asian 
partners. They are Iran's immediate targets.

The Iranians will certainly suggest to Europe, Japan and India that the 
United States is dealing behind its allies' backs to protect its 
interests in Iraq. The Iranians are masters at playing on others' 
divisions, often by inviting them to exploit simulated divisions on the 
Iranian side. Thus the endless arguments over Iran's "moderates."

The Bush team must make the Baghdad talks one insulated part of a 
coordinated three-pronged approach to Iran. Contacts with Iran must be 
managed as hard-nosed diplomacy that will go to the brink -- but not be 
carried over it by bluster and inflexibility.

The White House rightly insists that the Baghdad talks be limited to 
practical steps for defusing the crisis in Iraq. Discussion in Baghdad 
of Iran's nuclear ambitions, now under scrutiny in the U.N. Security 
Council, or other broad topics would undermine the allied unity that has 
brought the complaint against Iran this far.

The State Department hopes to get a declaration from the Security 
Council in about two weeks that ostensibly gives the Iranians a final 
chance to suspend their nuclear enrichment program and return to 
negotiations with the European Union and Russia.

The statement is in fact a necessary step toward new U.N. negotiations 
over a resolution imposing sanctions on Iran. "The Europeans need to 
show their publics that they have jumped through all the hoops" before 
threatening sanctions, a U.S. official says. Washington is cooperating 
in this approach.

To reduce the danger that Iran will use the Baghdad talks as a divisive 
ploy, the United States should now join -- and lead -- the negotiating 
effort over enrichment. After the move to talk to Iran in Baghdad, the 
Bush administration cannot remain a silent, outside partner at the top 
rung of the negotiating ladder. And U.S. direct involvement provides the 
only hope of getting the Iranians back to the table.

The threat of sanctions has already triggered a counterthreat from Iran 
to use oil as a weapon. Washington must lead in establishing a credible 
international emergency energy-sharing program to confront that bad-case 
scenario. "We have to say to the Iranians together that we will endure a 
cold winter or two but they will be harmed even more by an oil boycott," 
says a senior European politician who has studied Iranian negotiating 
behavior extensively.

U.S. officials recognize that U.N. action might not be sufficient or 
even forthcoming. They now speak of a "diplomatic coalition of the 
willing" to pursue sanctions and other measures against Iran if the U.N. 
effort falters. But that coalition must be forged through diplomatic 
leadership and the sharing of the negotiating burden.

Such sharing can be reinforced in a third layer of contacts in this 
policy of engaging Iran, with intense skepticism. The United States 
should support efforts by the U.N. special representative to Iraq, 
Ashraf Jehangir Qazi, to establish a contact group of regional states 
that would meet regularly -- in Baghdad.

Regional "meetings outside Baghdad don't work at this stage," Qazi told 
U.S. officials he visited this week in Washington in a refreshing burst 
of candor. Having senior diplomats from Egypt, Syria, Jordan and other 
Persian Gulf countries -- including Iran -- wrestle concretely with 
Iraq's daily problems could usefully supplement the U.S.-Iranian talks.

The experts say that Iran is six to nine months away from mastering the 
centrifuge process of enrichment, the key step in a 5- to 10-year 
process of building a nuclear bomb. Talking to the Iranians at three 
interlocking levels is the best way to determine whether there is any 
realistic hope of deflecting them from enrichment or deterring them if 
they get the bomb -- and what happens if the answer to both is no.

Bush must reshape Ronald Reagan's attitude toward Mikhail Gorbachev: 
Don't trust, do verify at every step of the way. First, there must be 
something to verify.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/22/AR2006032202168.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060323/9689dc6f/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Thu Mar 23 04:01:57 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 07:01:57 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Dangerous Prosecution - Washington Post Editorial
Message-ID: <44228E35.90406@comcast.net>

Dangerous Prosecution

Thursday, March 23, 2006; A22
Editorial
The Washington Post

THE UNITED STATES has never had an Official Secrets Act -- a law that 
would forbid anyone, even a private citizen, from disclosing information 
the government wants to keep under wraps. But if the Justice Department 
has its way in the prosecution of two former officials of the American 
Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), it will effectively have 
created one -- without even going to Congress for a change in the law. 
The case against Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman is heading toward 
trial. Their conviction would herald a dangerous aggrandizement of the 
government's power not merely to prosecute leaks but to force ordinary 
Americans to keep its secrets.

Mr. Rosen and Mr. Weissman are accused of conspiring to give national 
defense information to people not authorized to receive it -- including 
officials of the Israeli government, a Post reporter and other officials 
at AIPAC. Despite the suggestive tenor of the indictment, prosecutors 
have not accused either man of spying. Rather, the government has 
charged them under an old and vaguely worded law that prohibits people 
in possession of such information from disclosing it further.

The reach of this law, which dates from the World War I era, has never 
been clear. By its terms, it would seem to require every person to 
protect the government's secrets -- a principle hardly in keeping with 
the American system of robust public debate. While it is reasonable for 
the government to demand that its employees and contractors protect the 
information it entrusts to them, it's not okay to criminalize 
discussions among people who do not work, directly or indirectly, for 
the government. Traditionally, the government has treaded carefully with 
this law, using it sparingly even against government employees.

The AIPAC case marks a dangerous break with that tradition. We do not 
defend the alleged actions of Mr. Rosen and Mr. Weissman, whom AIPAC 
fired. According to the indictment, they received classified information 
from Pentagon analyst Lawrence A. Franklin and passed it to the Israeli 
Embassy. The indictment alleges similar behavior in the past. But the 
government isn't even trying to prove spying charges. Instead, 
prosecutors have proceeded under a legal theory that must alarm anyone 
who values open debate.

Under the government's reading of the law, there is no reason why 
newspaper reporters who publish classified information could not face 
charges. Nor, indeed, would anything protect activists who brought 
secrets to members of Congress. Under the government's theory, in fact, 
countless conversations and publications that take place every day are 
criminal acts. The government makes this point explicitly in its briefs: 
While acknowledging that a prosecution of "an actual member of the press 
for publishing classified information" would "raise legitimate and 
serious issues," it says that "[there] plainly is no exemption in the 
statutes for the press, let alone lobbyists like the defendants." You 
don't have to anticipate an immediate raft of prosecutions of such 
people to appreciate the danger of a precedent that would permit it.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/22/AR2006032202055.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060323/54860d38/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Thu Mar 23 04:05:07 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 07:05:07 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] A HOWLER: A generous Bush always thinking of others -
 David Martin - Boston Globe Op-Ed
Message-ID: <44228EF3.3010705@comcast.net>


  A generous Bush always thinking of others

By David Martin  |  March 23, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

DURING A RECENT news conference, George W. Bush let it be known that the 
decision to end the US military presence in Iraq will not be his. 
Instead, according to Bush, it will be for ''future presidents" to decide.

Barely reliable sources note a possible post-conference follow-up in 
which Bush plans to leave a number of other decisions to future 
presidents, preferably Democrats.

''As far as the increasing national debt," said Bush, ''future 
presidents will have to tackle that problem."

''Given the precarious state of the economy," said the US president, 
''it would be irresponsible of me to interfere at this point in time. I 
really think it's best if someone else handles it."

Suspending tax cuts for the wealthy is another issue apparently best 
left to future presidents.

''I handed out those tax cuts," said Bush. ''So how would it look if all 
of a sudden I took them back? Again, I think it's better that someone 
new make that decision."

The end of the war on terror has also been deferred.

''My speech-writers tell me that it's unrealistic to expect a war on a 
concept to end any time soon," said President Bush. ''So I'll leave that 
one to a future president to deal with as well."

When questioned about his administration's ill-fated prescription drug 
plan, Bush again deferred.

''It's obviously way too early to do something about that," said the 
president. ''Tinkering with the plan now could make the situation even 
worse. Best to let some future president try to fix it."

Gulf Coast residents hoping to get some immediate hurricane relief will 
also have to wait for another day.

''The worst thing to do at this point is to throw more money at the 
problem," said Bush. ''Better to wait a few years and see where help is 
really needed. Then some future president can clean up the mess."

Asked how he intends to spend his remaining political capital, the 
president said that he would not be undertaking any major new 
initiatives in the next two years. ''Let's face it," said Bush. 
''Anything I tried to do now would just need to be fixed up by some 
future president anyway. I think it's best for the nation if I just do 
nothing."

David Martin is author of the satiric collection ''My Friend 'W'."

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/23/a_generous_bush_always_thinking_of_others/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060323/b7f38b66/attachment.htm 

From activist at democrats.com  Thu Mar 23 00:54:40 2006
From: activist at democrats.com (Democrats.com)
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 03:54:40 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Impeachment Resolutions Sweep America!
Message-ID: <20060323035440.488391@democrats.com>

Impeachment Resolutions Sweep America!


From newsletter at villagevoice.com  Wed Mar 22 22:12:21 2006
From: newsletter at villagevoice.com (Village Voice Newsletter)
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 01:12:21 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Today's 'Voice':  The Mutant Bike Gangs of New York
Message-ID: <20060323061221.10990.qmail@www3.villagevoice.com>

An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060323/000c8765/attachment-0001.htm 

From dekuyper at sbcglobal.net  Wed Mar 22 16:38:51 2006
From: dekuyper at sbcglobal.net (Gerald Gerald)
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 16:38:51 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] Funny Commercial (naughty)
Message-ID: <E1FMGVg-00017V-PC@elasmtp-junco.atl.sa.earthlink.net>

One of the funniest, yet!
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: MCcommercial.asf
Type: video/x-ms-asf
Size: 1931410 bytes
Desc: 3220842807-MCcommercial.asf
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060322/456b8fca/attachment-0001.asf 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Thu Mar 23 04:06:44 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 07:06:44 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] A needless toll of natural disasters - Eric Schwartz -
 Boston Globe Op-Ed
Message-ID: <44228F54.5060009@comcast.net>


  A needless toll of natural disasters

By Eric Schwartz  |  March 23, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

WHEN A MUDSLIDE in the southern Philippines wiped out the village of 
Guinsaugon and killed more than 1,000 people last month, it was the 
latest in a seeming spike in developing world natural disasters.

The numbers impacted by recent calamities are indeed staggering. The 
earthquake that leveled large parts of Pakistan-administered Kashmir 
last October killed about 75,000 people, and left some 3 million 
homeless. About a year earlier, the Asian tsunami caused the deaths of 
230,000 people and the displacement of 1.5 million. In these two 
tragedies, governments, international organizations, and private 
individuals were asked to provide urgent assistance, and they 
contributed some $20 billion to relief and recovery.

The bad news is that more and more people are being affected each year 
by natural disasters, and most of the populations are in the developing 
world. Since 2000, some 1.6 billion have lost their homes or livelihoods 
or have suffered other damage. This continues an upward trend over the 
past several decades and represents a four-fold annual increase, on 
average, from the decade of the 1970s.

In 2004 alone, disasters caused some $100 billion in damages and 
impacted the lives of about 140 million people.

One might reasonably take the apocalyptic perspective and conclude that 
this growth in damage caused by natural disasters comes from an increase 
in the number and magnitude of hazards like earthquakes and hurricanes. 
But while greater storm severity in recent decades is one risk factor, 
it cannot fully explain the large increase in overall effects -- 
especially as there is little indication of a greater incidence or 
severity of earthquakes and other natural hazards.

Rather, it is human behavior that is primarily responsible. Worldwide 
migration to coastal areas has made populations far more vulnerable to 
hurricanes, and nearly 50 million people worldwide face risk of flooding 
due to storm surges. Environmental degradation has only accentuated this 
problem. In some areas of Sri Lanka, for example, mangrove trees 
provided critical coastal defenses during the tsunami and saved many 
lives. But where the mangroves had been depleted, the tsunami left a 
path of death and destruction in its wake.

Rapid urbanization, population growth, and poverty have also contributed 
to increased levels of risk. There are now some 400 cities with 
populations of more than one million people, the overwhelming majority 
of which are in poor countries -- where public education on disaster 
preparedness is in short supply and citizens have limited ability to 
construct homes to meet whatever building codes may exist.

The good news is that human practices and development patterns can often 
be altered to prevent natural hazards from becoming full-blown natural 
disasters. Even when practices cannot be changed completely, there are 
other ways to mitigate manmade risks. These may have been the most 
important lessons coming out of the Asian tsunami.

In India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, the Maldives, and Thailand, governments 
are working to develop and implement not only an Indian Ocean early 
warning system for tsunamis, but also domestic legislation and policies 
that bring preparedness from national capitals to local communities -- 
through measures such as stronger building codes, public education, safe 
access areas for emergencies, and private insurance for homes and 
businesses. But to succeed, these and other disaster mitigation efforts 
around the world will require substantial resources and a major 
reorientation of development priorities.

At present, however, only 4 percent of the estimated $10 billion in 
annual humanitarian assistance is devoted to prevention, and neither 
donors nor affected governments have offered the kind of financial 
commitments that would turn their increased rhetorical support for 
prevention into reality. This is a tragedy, as every dollar spent on 
risk reduction saves between $5 and $10 in economic losses from disasters.

Next week in Bonn, government experts from around the world will gather 
under the auspices of the United Nations for the Third International 
Early Warning Conference, to promote systems to protect communities 
against a wide range of natural hazards. Governments, international 
organizations, and nongovernmental organizations will showcase dozens of 
key early warning initiatives, valued at nearly $200 million, to enhance 
the protection of vulnerable populations.

The Bonn session provides a unique opportunity for governments to 
demonstrate their resolve to make progress on disaster reduction through 
full funding of these efforts. Such action would be a fitting tribute to 
the memories of the more than 300,000 victims who perished in disasters 
over the past two years, and it would offer the prospect of a brighter 
future for hundreds of millions of people around the world.

Eric Schwartz is the UN secretary general's deputy special envoy for 
tsunami recovery.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/23/a_needless_toll_of_natural_disasters/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060323/484813b7/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Thu Mar 23 08:40:14 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 16:40:14 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Roberts Dissent Reveals Strain Beneath
	Court's Placid Surface
Message-ID: <20060323164014.2EAD83AE4A7@lax-gw06.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

WASHINGTON | March 23, 2006
Roberts Dissent Reveals Strain Beneath Court's Placid Surface
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
In a case about police searches, the chief justice wrote his first dissent and the justices expressed disagreement in pointed tones.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/23/politics/23scotus.html?ex=1143781200&en=f3a8fed5953d151f&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060323/34e9f4df/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Thu Mar 23 08:41:08 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 16:41:08 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Common Sense in Maryland
Message-ID: <20060323164108.3AE7883D47@lax-gw03.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

OPINION | March 23, 2006
Editorial: Common Sense in Maryland

Maryland's State Senate should vote to discontinue the use of the Diebold voting machines, and other states should follow Maryland's lead.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/23/opinion/23thu3.html?ex=1143781200&en=f43e765781c137dc&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060323/0b1010b9/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Thu Mar 23 08:45:28 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 16:45:28 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: To All the Girls I've Rejected
Message-ID: <20060323164529.0D43A9FD78@lax-gw05.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

OPINION | March 23, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor: To All the Girls I've Rejected
By JENNIFER DELAHUNTY BRITZ
To the female students getting thin envelopes, I apologize for the demographic realities.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/23/opinion/23britz.html?ex=1143781200&en=93dac5ba192a7f44&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060323/f2c4e1a2/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Thu Mar 23 08:49:39 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 16:49:39 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Adopted in China,
	Seeking Identity in America
Message-ID: <20060323164949.EE6313AE3C5@lax-gw06.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

NATIONAL | March 23, 2006
Adopted in China, Seeking Identity in America
By LYNETTE CLEMETSON
More than 55,000 Chinese children, almost all girls, adopted by American families since 1991 are beginning to explore who they are.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/23/national/23adopt.html?ex=1143781200&en=41ff24fd481bcffb&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060323/a3151aa1/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Thu Mar 23 08:51:18 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 16:51:18 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Panel Advises Disclosure of Drugs'
	Psychotic Effects
Message-ID: <20060323165118.EE04A11F81A@lax-gw07.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

sounds fun..got any?


HEALTH | March 23, 2006
Panel Advises Disclosure of Drugs' Psychotic Effects
By GARDINER HARRIS
Experts said stimulants like Ritalin should carry a warning that children may suffer hallucinations of insects, snakes or worms.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/23/health/23fda.html?ex=1143781200&en=c069d8b0fbe99d4b&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060323/f98dd094/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Thu Mar 23 08:52:28 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 16:52:28 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Mrs. Clinton Says G.O.P.'s Immigration Plan
	Is at Odds With the Bible
Message-ID: <20060323165236.A854F249DA9@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

touche...


NEW YORK REGION | March 23, 2006
Mrs. Clinton Says G.O.P.'s Immigration Plan Is at Odds With the Bible
By NINA BERNSTEIN
Offering aid to illegal immigrants would be a crime under the bill, which Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton called mean-spirited.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/23/nyregion/23hillary.html?ex=1143781200&en=4c71964261089d69&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060323/e5eb755a/attachment-0001.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Thu Mar 23 08:55:07 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: 23 Mar 2006 16:55:07 -0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] Headlines for March 23, 2006
Message-ID: <20060323165507.23078.qmail@trinity.democracynow.org>

Mike Blaxill  ( mblaxill at yahoo.com )
sent you this story from democracynow.org




+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  Headlines for March 23, 2006
|  http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/23/152246
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+


- Three Kidnapped Peace Activists Freed in Baghdad-
Army Dog Handler Faces Six Months For Abu Ghraib Abuse-
GM Offers Buyouts to 113,000 Unionized Workers-
Massive Food Shortage Forces Gaza Residents to Ration Food -
American Arrested for Bolivian Bombing-
IRS Audited Greenpeace At Request of ExxonMobil-Funded Group-
South Korean Farmers Protest Expansion of U.S. Base-
New Orleans Remains Without Emergency Hurricane Shelter-
Nearly 100 Disabled Activists Arrested At Nashville Protest-
Police Raid Home of Top Nepalese Opposition Leader
This story continues at: 
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/23/152246


From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Thu Mar 23 09:01:02 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 17:01:02 GMT
Subject: [Mb-civic] Poll: opposition to gay marriage declining
Message-ID: <8133778.1143133262152.JavaMail.webform@noreply.realcities.com>

An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060323/3bf20efb/attachment.htm 

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Thu Mar 23 09:17:17 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 09:17:17 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] A Vision, Bruised and Dented By DAVID BROOKS-NYTimes
Message-ID: <C048181D.2A6F4%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 23, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
A Vision, Bruised and Dented
By DAVID BROOKS

The big question in Democratic circles is, Who can win? The big question in
Republican circles is, What do we believe? The setbacks in Iraq, the failure
to limit the size of government and plummeting poll numbers have changed the
way Republicans talk and govern.

If you wanted to put these changes in a nutshell, you'd say the Republicans
have gone from soaring Bushian universalism to nervous, dumbed-down
Huntingtonism.

Just over a year ago, Republicans were thrilling to the lofty sentiments of
President Bush's second inaugural: that freedom is God's gift to humanity,
that people everywhere hunger for liberty. To explain his efforts to
democratize the Middle East, Bush hit all the high notes of the American
creed, while not dwelling much on the intricacies and stubbornness of
foreign cultures.

Today, many Republicans have lost patience with Bush's high-minded creedal
statements. Like the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington, they
have come to believe that culture matters most. Lofty notions about
universal liberty splinter on the shoals of Arab customs. Heartfelt
convictions about reducing the size of government disintegrate inside the
culture of Washington. Many Republicans have lost faith in efforts to
transform patterns of behavior, and come to believe that we shouldn't
exaggerate how much we can change.

In the realm of foreign affairs, we have seen the rise of what Richard Lowry
of National Review calls the " 'To Hell With Them' Hawks." These, Lowry
writes, "are conservatives who are comfortable using force abroad, but have
little patience for a deep entanglement with the Muslim world, which they
consider unredeemable, or at least not worth the strenuous effort of trying
to redeem." They look at car bombs and cartoon riots and wonder whether
Islam is really a religion of peace. They look at the mayhem in the Middle
East and just want to withdraw. After all, in his book "The Clash of
Civilizations," Huntington didn't want to change the Muslim world ? he just
called for less contact with it.

In the field of immigration, Republican sentiment seems to be shifting away
from the idea that the United States is a universal nation, where immigrants
come from across the world to work, rise and join in the pursuit of
happiness. Now Republican rhetoric emphasizes how alien immigrant culture
is; how slowly the Mexicans assimilate, if at all; how much disorder and
strain their presence creates.

There is a chance that in the next few weeks, the G.O.P. will walk off a
cliff on the subject of immigration. In the desperate effort to win back
their base, Republican senators may follow Bill Frist and embrace a
draconian enforcement-only immigration bill (which will lose them Florida
and the Southwest for a generation).

Finally, there is the issue of domestic poverty. Hurricane Katrina rekindled
a brief resurgence of compassionate conservatism, at least for President
Bush. But Republicans in Congress were having none of it. They appropriated
the money they had to, but they had no confidence that the federal
government could do anything effective to transform the culture of poverty:
the out-of-wedlock births, the family breakdowns and so on.

In short, Republicans seem to have gone from believing that culture is
nothing, to believing that culture is everything ? from idealism to fatalism
in the blink of an eye.

Recently, I've spilled a lot of ink stressing the importance of culture as
we think about poverty, development and foreign affairs. But it's dismaying
to see so many Republicans veer overboard into a vulgarized version of
Huntingtonist cultural determinism.

European conservatives from Edmund Burke to Michael Oakeshott usefully
remind us of the power of culture and tradition. But American conservatives
? from Hamilton to Reagan ? have never taken that path precisely because
they believe in the power of the American creed, precisely because they have
an Enlightenment faith in the power of reason to change minds.

Whether in Iraq or the barrio, history is not a prison. Culture shapes
people, but cultures are changeable.

Fortunately, there is a great Republican leader who understood the balance
between culture and creed: Abraham Lincoln. In this spring of Republican
discontent, his approach and governing method will make a good subject for a
future column.

Correction

Last Sunday, I wrote that Plato used the word "eros" to signify the
appetitive part of the soul. This isn't the first time I've been led astray
by the power of eros. The correct word is "epithymia."

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From michael at intrafi.com  Thu Mar 23 09:24:09 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 17:24:09 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Cuba on the West Bank
Message-ID: <20060323172412.C2061249E37@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: michael at intrafi.com.

OPINION | March 23, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor: Cuba on the West Bank
By GIDEON LICHFIELD
Whatever the world does about Hamas, it needs to do it in unison ? or face indefinite deadlock, as with Cuba.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/23/opinion/23lichfield.html?ex=1143781200&en=c275c44177aa4755&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060323/5d7c71ba/attachment.htm 

From michael at intrafi.com  Thu Mar 23 09:26:42 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 09:26:42 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] =?iso-8859-1?q?FT=2Ecom_/_Asia-Pacific_/_China_-_China?=
 =?iso-8859-1?q?=02019s_competitiveness_=02018on_the_decline=02019?=
Message-ID: <16765807.1143134802451.JavaMail.tomcat@localhost>



*Please note, the sender's email address has not been verified.



You have received the following link from michael at intrafi.com

 
********************
 
If you are having trouble with any of the links in this message, or if the URL's are not appearing as links, please follow the instructions at the bottom of this email.
 
Title: FT.com / Asia-Pacific / China - China019s competitiveness 018on the decline019
 
  
Copy and paste the following into your Web browser to access the sent link:
http://www.emailthis.clickability.com/et/emailThis?clickMap=viewThis&etMailToID=68460326&pt=Y
 

Copy and paste the following into your Web browser to SAVE THIS link:
http://www.savethis.clickability.com/st/saveThisPopupApp?clickMap=saveFromET&partnerID=1744&etMailToID=68460326&pt=Y

 
Copy and paste the following into your Web browser to forward this link:
http://www.emailthis.clickability.com/et/emailThis?clickMap=forward&etMailToID=68460326&partnerID=1744&pt=Y

  
 
********************


Email pages from any Web site you visit - add the EMAIL THIS button to your browser, copy and paste the following into your Web browser:
http://www.emailthis.clickability.com/et/emailThis?clickMap=browserButtons&pt=Y"


*********************



Instructions:
-----------------------------------------
If your e-mail program doesn't recognize Web addresses:
1. With your mouse, highlight the Web Address above. Be sure to highlight the entire Web address, even if it spans more than one line in your email. 
2. Select Copy from the Edit menu at the top of your screen. 
3. Launch your Web browser.
4. Paste the address into your Web browser by selecting Paste from the Edit menu.
5. Click Go or press Enter or Return on your keyboard. 
 
********************
 
 
 
 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060323/a46c7969/attachment.htm 

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Thu Mar 23 09:23:38 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 09:23:38 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] George Bush's Trillion-Dollar War By BOB HERBERT
Message-ID: <C048199A.2A6F5%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 23, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 23, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
George Bush's Trillion-Dollar War
By BOB HERBERT

Call it the trillion-dollar war.

George W. Bush's war in Iraq was never supposed to be particularly
expensive. Administration types tossed out numbers like $50 billion and $60
billion. When Lawrence Lindsey, the president's chief economic adviser, said
the war was likely to cost $100 billion to $200 billion, he was fired.

Some in the White House tried to spread the fantasy that Iraqi oil revenues
would pay for the war. Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy defense secretary
and a fanatical hawk, told Congress that Iraq was "a country that can really
finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon."

The president and his hot-for-war associates were as wrong about the money
as they were about the weapons of mass destruction.

Now comes a study by Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at
Columbia University, and a colleague, Linda Bilmes of the Kennedy School of
Government at Harvard, that estimates the "true costs" of the war at more
than $1 trillion, and possibly more than $2 trillion.

"Even taking a conservative approach and assuming all U.S. troops return by
2010, we believe the true costs exceed a trillion dollars," the authors say.

The study was released earlier this year but has not gotten much publicity.
The analysis by Professors Stiglitz and Bilmes goes beyond the immediate
costs of combat operations to include other direct and indirect costs of the
war that, in some cases, the government will have to shoulder for many
years.

These costs, the study says, "include disability payments to veterans over
the course of their lifetimes, the cost of replacing military equipment and
munitions, which are being consumed at a faster-than-normal rate, the cost
of medical treatment for returning Iraqi war veterans, particularly the more
than 7,000 [service members] with brain, spinal, amputation and other
serious injuries, and the cost of transporting returning troops back to
their home bases."

The study also notes that Defense Department expenditures that were not
directly appropriated for Iraq have grown by more than 5 percent since the
war began. But a portion of that increase has been spent "on support for the
war in Iraq, including significantly higher recruitment costs, such as
nearly doubling the number of recruiters, paying recruitment bonuses of up
to $40,000 for new enlistees and paying special bonuses and other benefits,
up to $150,000 for current Special Forces troops that re-enlist."

"Another cost to the government," the study says, "is the interest on the
money that it has borrowed to finance the war."

Among the things taken into account by the study are some of the
difficult-to-quantify but very real costs inflicted by the war on the
American economy and society, such as the effect of the war on oil prices,
and the economic loss that results from the many thousands of Americans
wounded and killed in the war.

The study does not address the substantial costs of the war borne by Iraq or
by any other countries besides the United States.

In an interview, Mr. Stiglitz said that about $560 billion, which is a
little more than half of the study's conservative estimate of the cost of
the war, would have been enough to "fix" Social Security for the next 75
years. If one were thinking in terms of promoting democracy in the Middle
East, he said, the money being spent on the war would have been enough to
finance a "mega-mega-mega-Marshall Plan," which would have been "so much
more" effective than the invasion of Iraq.

It's not easy to explain just how much money $1 trillion really is. Imagine
a stack of bills worth $1 million that is roughly six inches high. (Think
big denominations ? a mix of $100 bills and $1,000 bills, mostly $1,000's.)
If the six-inch stack were enlarged to the point where it was worth $1
billion, it would be as tall as the Washington Monument, about 500 feet. If
it were worth $1 trillion, the stack would be 95 miles high.

Ms. Bilmes said that the $1 trillion we're spending on Iraq amounts to about
$10,000 for every household in the U.S.

At his press conference on Tuesday, President Bush made it clear that
whatever the cost, American forces would not be leaving Iraq soon. When
asked whether a day would come when there were no U.S. forces in Iraq, he
said that decision would be made by future presidents and future governments
of Iraq.

The meter's running. We're at a trillion dollars, and counting.

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top



Call it the trillion-dollar war.

George W. Bush's war in Iraq was never supposed to be particularly
expensive. Administration types tossed out numbers like $50 billion and $60
billion. When Lawrence Lindsey, the president's chief economic adviser, said
the war was likely to cost $100 billion to $200 billion, he was fired.

Some in the White House tried to spread the fantasy that Iraqi oil revenues
would pay for the war. Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy defense secretary
and a fanatical hawk, told Congress that Iraq was "a country that can really
finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon."

The president and his hot-for-war associates were as wrong about the money
as they were about the weapons of mass destruction.

Now comes a study by Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at
Columbia University, and a colleague, Linda Bilmes of the Kennedy School of
Government at Harvard, that estimates the "true costs" of the war at more
than $1 trillion, and possibly more than $2 trillion.

"Even taking a conservative approach and assuming all U.S. troops return by
2010, we believe the true costs exceed a trillion dollars," the authors say.

The study was released earlier this year but has not gotten much publicity.
The analysis by Professors Stiglitz and Bilmes goes beyond the immediate
costs of combat operations to include other direct and indirect costs of the
war that, in some cases, the government will have to shoulder for many
years.

These costs, the study says, "include disability payments to veterans over
the course of their lifetimes, the cost of replacing military equipment and
munitions, which are being consumed at a faster-than-normal rate, the cost
of medical treatment for returning Iraqi war veterans, particularly the more
than 7,000 [service members] with brain, spinal, amputation and other
serious injuries, and the cost of transporting returning troops back to
their home bases."

The study also notes that Defense Department expenditures that were not
directly appropriated for Iraq have grown by more than 5 percent since the
war began. But a portion of that increase has been spent "on support for the
war in Iraq, including significantly higher recruitment costs, such as
nearly doubling the number of recruiters, paying recruitment bonuses of up
to $40,000 for new enlistees and paying special bonuses and other benefits,
up to $150,000 for current Special Forces troops that re-enlist."

"Another cost to the government," the study says, "is the interest on the
money that it has borrowed to finance the war."

Among the things taken into account by the study are some of the
difficult-to-quantify but very real costs inflicted by the war on the
American economy and society, such as the effect of the war on oil prices,
and the economic loss that results from the many thousands of Americans
wounded and killed in the war.

The study does not address the substantial costs of the war borne by Iraq or
by any other countries besides the United States.

In an interview, Mr. Stiglitz said that about $560 billion, which is a
little more than half of the study's conservative estimate of the cost of
the war, would have been enough to "fix" Social Security for the next 75
years. If one were thinking in terms of promoting democracy in the Middle
East, he said, the money being spent on the war would have been enough to
finance a "mega-mega-mega-Marshall Plan," which would have been "so much
more" effective than the invasion of Iraq.

It's not easy to explain just how much money $1 trillion really is. Imagine
a stack of bills worth $1 million that is roughly six inches high. (Think
big denominations ? a mix of $100 bills and $1,000 bills, mostly $1,000's.)
If the six-inch stack were enlarged to the point where it was worth $1
billion, it would be as tall as the Washington Monument, about 500 feet. If
it were worth $1 trillion, the stack would be 95 miles high.

Ms. Bilmes said that the $1 trillion we're spending on Iraq amounts to about
$10,000 for every household in the U.S.

At his press conference on Tuesday, President Bush made it clear that
whatever the cost, American forces would not be leaving Iraq soon. When
asked whether a day would come when there were no U.S. forces in Iraq, he
said that decision would be made by future presidents and future governments
of Iraq.

The meter's running. We're at a trillion dollars, and counting.

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Thu Mar 23 14:15:59 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 22:15:59 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Police Commander Accused of Lying About
	Arrests During Convention
Message-ID: <20060323221559.91052249E8B@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

NEW YORK REGION | March 23, 2006
Police Commander Accused of Lying About Arrests During Convention
By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS
A civil liberties group accused the Police Department yesterday of providing false information used to prosecute hundreds of people arrested in protest marches during the 2004 Republican National Convention, and said that information might have tainted the arrests.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/23/nyregion/23arrest.html?ex=1143781200&en=5aa3b286d3a38d81&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060323/2062b152/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Thu Mar 23 14:16:53 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 22:16:53 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Jury Told Lay Lied on Enron
Message-ID: <20060323221656.8598A3AE6C4@lax-gw06.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

BUSINESS / BUSINESS SPECIAL | March 23, 2006
Jury Told Lay Lied on Enron
By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
Ben F. Glisan Jr., a former Enron treasurer, provided some of the strongest testimony against Kenneth L. Lay so far.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/23/business/businessspecial3/23enron.html?ex=1143781200&en=ed22b0c92a0764ea&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060323/cd055b84/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Thu Mar 23 14:16:57 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 22:16:57 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: The Joy of Being Blameless
Message-ID: <20060323221657.169FA3AE6D0@lax-gw06.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

OPINION | March 23, 2006
Editorial: The Joy of Being Blameless

President Bush has clung to the fiction that the abuse of prisoners was just the work of a few rotten apples, despite report after report demonstrating that it was systematic.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/23/opinion/23thu1.html?ex=1143781200&en=2188d523bce1dcfe&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060323/918fc4d9/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Thu Mar 23 14:17:10 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 22:17:10 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Bush's Long Road Out of Iraq (6 Letters)
Message-ID: <20060323221710.9130183CF5@lax-gw03.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

What we're saying...


OPINION | March 23, 2006
Bush's Long Road Out of Iraq (6 Letters)

To the Editor:.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/23/opinion/l23iraq.html?ex=1143781200&en=b662222c1a54e90c&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060323/e99d47a4/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Thu Mar 23 14:17:40 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 22:17:40 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: The Two Sides of Israel's Barrier (3
	Letters)
Message-ID: <20060323221743.EDE5513B847@lax-gw04.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

What we're saying (2)...


OPINION | March 23, 2006
The Two Sides of Israel's Barrier (3 Letters)

To the Editor:.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/23/opinion/l23wall.html?ex=1143781200&en=9c0bb2a6120a33c4&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060323/0cc91f7e/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Thu Mar 23 19:22:18 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 19:22:18 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] CNN.com - 'Clive of India's tortoise' dies aged 250 -
	Mar 23, 2006
Message-ID: <28303741.1143170538763.JavaMail.tomcat@localhost>



*Please note, the sender's email address has not been verified.



Wow!  He was around before the founding of the United States of America!!



 
********************
 
If you are having trouble with any of the links in this message, or if the URL's are not appearing as links, please follow the instructions at the bottom of this email.
 
Title: CNN.com - 'Clive of India's tortoise' dies aged 250 - Mar 23, 2006
 
  
Copy and paste the following into your Web browser to access the sent link:
http://www.emailthis.clickability.com/et/emailThis?clickMap=viewThis&etMailToID=459852450&pt=Y
 

Copy and paste the following into your Web browser to SAVE THIS link:
http://www.savethis.clickability.com/st/saveThisPopupApp?clickMap=saveFromET&partnerID=2006&etMailToID=459852450&pt=Y

 
Copy and paste the following into your Web browser to forward this link:
http://www.emailthis.clickability.com/et/emailThis?clickMap=forward&etMailToID=459852450&partnerID=2006&pt=Y

  
 
********************


Email pages from any Web site you visit - add the EMAIL THIS button to your browser, copy and paste the following into your Web browser:
http://www.emailthis.clickability.com/et/emailThis?clickMap=browserButtons&pt=Y"


*********************



Instructions:
-----------------------------------------
If your e-mail program doesn't recognize Web addresses:
1. With your mouse, highlight the Web Address above. Be sure to highlight the entire Web address, even if it spans more than one line in your email. 
2. Select Copy from the Edit menu at the top of your screen. 
3. Launch your Web browser.
4. Paste the address into your Web browser by selecting Paste from the Edit menu.
5. Click Go or press Enter or Return on your keyboard. 
 
********************
 
 
 
 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060323/7f02c82c/attachment.htm 

From ean at sbcglobal.net  Thu Mar 23 14:41:48 2006
From: ean at sbcglobal.net (ean at sbcglobal.net)
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 14:41:48 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Very important article by Howard Zinn--Read and share!
Message-ID: <E1FMeF0-0000r2-Px@elasmtp-mealy.atl.sa.earthlink.net>

   http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0321-20.htm

Published on Tuesday, March 21, 2006 by the Progressive
America's Blinders
by Howard Zinn
 
Now that most Americans no longer believe in the war, now that they 
no longer trust Bush and his Administration, now that the evidence of 
deception has become overwhelming (so overwhelming that even the 
major media, always late, have begun to register indignation), we 
might ask: How come so many people were so easily fooled?

The question is important because it might help us understand why 
Americans?members of the media as well as the ordinary 
citizen?rushed to declare their support as the President was sending 
troops halfway around the world to Iraq.

A small example of the innocence (or obsequiousness, to be more 
exact) of the press is the way it reacted to Colin Powell?s presentation 
in February 2003 to the Security Council, a month before the invasion, 
a speech which may have set a record for the number of falsehoods 
told in one talk. In it, Powell confidently rattled off his ?evidence?: 
satellite photographs, audio records, reports from informants, with 
precise statistics on how many gallons of this and that existed for 
chemical warfare. The New York Times was breathless with 
admiration. The Washington Post editorial was titled ?Irrefutable? and 
declared that after Powell?s talk ?it is hard to imagine how anyone could 
doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction.?

It seems to me there are two reasons, which go deep into our national 
culture, and which help explain the vulnerability of the press and of the 
citizenry to outrageous lies whose consequences bring death to tens of 
thousands of people. If we can understand those reasons, we can 
guard ourselves better against being deceived.

One is in the dimension of time, that is, an absence of historical 
perspective. The other is in the dimension of space, that is, an inability 
to think outside the boundaries of nationalism. We are penned in by 
the arrogant idea that this country is the center of the universe, 
exceptionally virtuous, admirable, superior.

If we don?t know history, then we are ready meat for carnivorous 
politicians and the intellectuals and journalists who supply the carving 
knives. I am not speaking of the history we learned in school, a history 
subservient to our political leaders, from the much-admired Founding 
Fathers to the Presidents of recent years. I mean a history which is 
honest about the past. If we don?t know that history, then any President 
can stand up to the battery of microphones, declare that we must go to 
war, and we will have no basis for challenging him. He will say that the 
nation is in danger, that democracy and liberty are at stake, and that 
we must therefore send ships and planes to destroy our new enemy, 
and we will have no reason to disbelieve him.

But if we know some history, if we know how many times Presidents 
have made similar declarations to the country, and how they turned out 
to be lies, we will not be fooled. Although some of us may pride 
ourselves that we were never fooled, we still might accept as our civic 
duty the responsibility to buttress our fellow citizens against the 
mendacity of our high officials.

We would remind whoever we can that President Polk lied to the 
nation about the reason for going to war with Mexico in 1846. It wasn?t 
that Mexico ?shed American blood upon the American soil,? but that 
Polk, and the slave-owning aristocracy, coveted half of Mexico.

We would point out that President McKinley lied in 1898 about the 
reason for invading Cuba, saying we wanted to liberate the Cubans 
from Spanish control, but the truth is that we really wanted Spain out of 
Cuba so that the island could be open to United Fruit and other 
American corporations. He also lied about the reasons for our war in 
the Philippines, claiming we only wanted to ?civilize? the Filipinos, while 
the real reason was to own a valuable piece of real estate in the far 
Pacific, even if we had to kill hundreds of thousands of Filipinos to 
accomplish that.

President Woodrow Wilson?so often characterized in our history 
books as an ?idealist??lied about the reasons for entering the First 
World War, saying it was a war to ?make the world safe for 
democracy,? when it was really a war to make the world safe for the 
Western imperial powers.

Harry Truman lied when he said the atomic bomb was dropped on 
Hiroshima because it was ?a military target.?

Everyone lied about Vietnam?Kennedy about the extent of our 
involvement, Johnson about the Gulf of Tonkin, Nixon about the secret 
bombing of Cambodia, all of them claiming it was to keep South 
Vietnam free of communism, but really wanting to keep South Vietnam 
as an American outpost at the edge of the Asian continent.

Reagan lied about the invasion of Grenada, claiming falsely that it was 
a threat to the United States.

The elder Bush lied about the invasion of Panama, leading to the death 
of thousands of ordinary citizens in that country.

And he lied again about the reason for attacking Iraq in 1991?hardly 
to defend the integrity of Kuwait (can one imagine Bush heartstricken 
over Iraq?s taking of Kuwait?), rather to assert U.S. power in the oil-rich 
Middle East.

Given the overwhelming record of lies told to justify wars, how could 
anyone listening to the younger Bush believe him as he laid out the 
reasons for invading Iraq? Would we not instinctively rebel against the 
sacrifice of lives for oil?

A careful reading of history might give us another safeguard against 
being deceived. It would make clear that there has always been, and is 
today, a profound conflict of interest between the government and the 
people of the United States. This thought startles most people, 
because it goes against everything we have been taught.

We have been led to believe that, from the beginning, as our Founding 
Fathers put it in the Preamble to the Constitution, it was ?we the 
people? who established the new government after the Revolution. 
When the eminent historian Charles Beard suggested, a hundred 
years ago, that the Constitution represented not the working people, 
not the slaves, but the slaveholders, the merchants, the bondholders, 
he became the object of an indignant editorial in The New York Times.

Our culture demands, in its very language, that we accept a 
commonality of interest binding all of us to one another. We mustn?t 
talk about classes. Only Marxists do that, although James Madison, 
?Father of the Constitution,? said, thirty years before Marx was born 
that there was an inevitable conflict in society between those who had 
property and those who did not.

Our present leaders are not so candid. They bombard us with phrases 
like ?national interest,? ?national security,? and ?national defense? as if 
all of these concepts applied equally to all of us, colored or white, rich 
or poor, as if General Motors and Halliburton have the same interests 
as the rest of us, as if George Bush has the same interest as the 
young man or woman he sends to war.

Surely, in the history of lies told to the population, this is the biggest lie. 
In the history of secrets, withheld from the American people, this is the 
biggest secret: that there are classes with different interests in this 
country. To ignore that?not to know that the history of our country is a 
history of slaveowner against slave, landlord against tenant, 
corporation against worker, rich against poor?is to render us helpless 
before all the lesser lies told to us by people in power.

If we as citizens start out with an understanding that these people up 
there?the President, the Congress, the Supreme Court, all those 
institutions pretending to be ?checks and balances??do not have our 
interests at heart, we are on a course towards the truth. Not to know 
that is to make us helpless before determined liars.

The deeply ingrained belief?no, not from birth but from the 
educational system and from our culture in general?that the United 
States is an especially virtuous nation makes us especially vulnerable 
to government deception. It starts early, in the first grade, when we are 
compelled to ?pledge allegiance? (before we even know what that 
means), forced to proclaim that we are a nation with ?liberty and justice 
for all.?

And then come the countless ceremonies, whether at the ballpark or 
elsewhere, where we are expected to stand and bow our heads during 
the singing of the ?Star-Spangled Banner,? announcing that we are ?the 
land of the free and the home of the brave.? There is also the unofficial 
national anthem ?God Bless America,? and you are looked on with 
suspicion if you ask why we would expect God to single out this one 
nation?just 5 percent of the world?s population?for his or her 
blessing.

If your starting point for evaluating the world around you is the firm 
belief that this nation is somehow endowed by Providence with unique 
qualities that make it morally superior to every other nation on Earth, 
then you are not likely to question the President when he says we are 
sending our troops here or there, or bombing this or that, in order to 
spread our values?democracy, liberty, and let?s not forget free 
enterprise?to some God-forsaken (literally) place in the world.

It becomes necessary then, if we are going to protect ourselves and 
our fellow citizens against policies that will be disastrous not only for 
other people but for Americans too, that we face some facts that 
disturb the idea of a uniquely virtuous nation.

These facts are embarrassing, but must be faced if we are to be 
honest. We must face our long history of ethnic cleansing, in which 
millions of Indians were driven off their land by means of massacres 
and forced evacuations. And our long history, still not behind us, of 
slavery, segregation, and racism. We must face our record of imperial 
conquest, in the Caribbean and in the Pacific, our shameful wars 
against small countries a tenth our size: Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, 
Afghanistan, Iraq. And the lingering memory of Hiroshima and 
Nagasaki. It is not a history of which we can be proud.

Our leaders have taken it for granted, and planted that belief in the 
minds of many people, that we are entitled, because of our moral 
superiority, to dominate the world. At the end of World War II, Henry 
Luce, with an arrogance appropriate to the owner of Time, Life, and 
Fortune, pronounced this ?the American century,? saying that victory in 
the war gave the United States the right ?to exert upon the world the 
full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by 
such means as we see fit.?

Both the Republican and Democratic parties have embraced this 
notion. George Bush, in his Inaugural Address on January 20, 2005, 
said that spreading liberty around the world was ?the calling of our 
time.? Years before that, in 1993, President Bill Clinton, speaking at a 
West Point commencement, declared: ?The values you learned here . . 
. will be able to spread throughout this country and throughout the 
world and give other people the opportunity to live as you have lived, to 
fulfill your God-given capacities.?

What is the idea of our moral superiority based on? Surely not on our 
behavior toward people in other parts of the world. Is it based on how 
well people in the United States live? The World Health Organization in 
2000 ranked countries in terms of overall health performance, and the 
United States was thirty-seventh on the list, though it spends more per 
capita for health care than any other nation. One of five children in this, 
the richest country in the world, is born in poverty. There are more than 
forty countries that have better records on infant mortality. Cuba does 
better. And there is a sure sign of sickness in society when we lead the 
world in the number of people in prison?more than two million.

A more honest estimate of ourselves as a nation would prepare us all 
for the next barrage of lies that will accompany the next proposal to 
inflict our power on some other part of the world. It might also inspire 
us to create a different history for ourselves, by taking our country 
away from the liars and killers who govern it, and by rejecting 
nationalist arrogance, so that we can join the rest of the human race in 
the common cause of peace and justice.

Howard Zinn is the co-author, with Anthony Arnove, of ?Voices of a 
People?s History of the United States.?

? 2006 the Progressive


-- 
You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, 
option D (up to 3 emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options 
(option A - 1x/week, option B - 3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option D - 
up to 3x/day) please reply and let us know!  If someone forwarded you 
this email and you want to be on our list, send an email to 
ean at sbcglobal.net and tell us which option you'd like.


"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060323/c689b602/attachment-0001.htm 

From ean at sbcglobal.net  Thu Mar 23 14:59:37 2006
From: ean at sbcglobal.net (ean at sbcglobal.net)
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 14:59:37 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Life in the Shadows of the Empire
Message-ID: <E1FMeFu-0001jL-OM@elasmtp-mealy.atl.sa.earthlink.net>

http://www.counterpunch.org/martin03182006.html

Counter Punch   March 18 / 19, 2006

Mysterious Photographers of Nothing

Life in the Shadows of the Empire

By Eamon Martin


"It takes a lot of degeneration before a country falls into dictatorship,
but we should avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings."

Sandra Day O'Connor, March 9, 2006

I help publish a small, nonprofit, independent newspaper in western North
Carolina called the Asheville Global Report. We print under-reported news
that casts an often-critical eye on the doings of our government at home
and abroad, in the hope that our fellow citizens will find the inspiration
and motivation to hold our government accountable. In doing so, our
explicitly nonpartisan goal has always been to fulfill the traditional
role of the press in a democratic society.

Since we began our project seven years ago, members of our staff have
encountered a few unmistakable incidents of surveillance --by whom, we
cannot say for certain. Although one episode back in 2000, when the
retired local field director of the FBI came by the used bookstore where I
worked at the time, leaves me with some suspicions. It had been two months
since I'd been arrested in Seattle during the WTO demonstrations, and one
month since my step-brother had died from a heroin overdose in New Jersey.
I was ringing up some books for this older man --who I later discovered
was named John Quigley -- when he casually uncorked the shocking 
comment:
"Oh, Eamon...did I read somewhere that your brother was sick? You're a
writer, right?"

I'd never met this man before and was stunned, speechless. He'd
blind-sided me. After a quick and intensely strange interaction in which I
explained that my brother had in fact suddenly died recently, and the
sheer impossibility of his having read anything about my brother anywhere,
he disingenuously apologized and left. He would continue to shop at the
store regularly, almost always parting with a "be careful" farewell. Then
of course, there was the time almost three years ago when I'd confronted
two men videotaping my fellow editor and I outside of the cafe where she
had been working that Sunday afternoon. A few months later, one of these
gentlemen had the audacity to appear at one of our benefits, merely to
hang out by the club entrance, not speak with anyone and enjoy several
cups of water. For some reason, this man who had been our very first
patron that night, suddenly lost interest in the show and quickly
disappeared after I approached him to chat a little.

But last week was special. There are moments in time when historic change
emerges from its sublimated status in the mundane and crystallizes itself
into personal consciousness and awareness. These are what I call "WAKE 
UP"
moments. It is in these jolting moments when one discovers that what they
are experiencing is endemic of something larger and much greater than
themselves. Last week I experienced one of those "WAKE UP" calls. On a
whim, I'd decided to drive to a favorite cafe to get breakfast. After I'd
finished eating, I went outside to small-talk with a friend of mine. After
a few minutes, my friend pointed out to me that somebody up the street was
taking our picture.

Perhaps realizing he'd "been made," our mysterious photographer
immediately put his elephantine zoom-lens camera down and made haste to
walk away. I followed him.

He seemed surprised when he soon discovered I was silently standing right
behind him at an intersection. Abruptly he attempted to cross the street
in front of oncoming traffic. Giving him about a yard of distance, I
continued to follow him anyway. Halfway across the street, he turned his
head back and noticed me on his heels, and then instantly started walking
diagonally back in the direction we'd came. What followed next can only be
described as a scene that was equal parts Rod Serling, Alfred Hitchcock
and Monty Python.

After a few minutes of this sort of preposterous, zigzagging pursuit back
and forth across the street in bizarre paces alternately shifting between
a fast trot and a sluggish lurch, I decided to give the man some space and
sat down on a portico stoop next to a closed restaurant He stopped walking
too, and then, while standing right next to me, proceeded to place his
zoom lens camera up against the window of the pitch-black, lifeless
restaurant and take pictures of ... nothing. At this point, it's more than
obvious that I've been following him, but his behavior never shifts from
feigned oblivion and muted, but comic, confusion.

A few seconds pass and he starts to walk away. I duck behind a car and
watch him through the vehicle's large windows. A minute later he turns
around, looks in my direction and attempts to take my picture through the
glass. I squat and hide, which begins an absurd round of "peek-a-boo" with
me popping up and down, into and out of his view, frustrating his attempts
to catch me again on film. Suddenly it maybe dawned on him that we were
now fully engaged -- still, without having any open, verbal acknowledgment
of such--and he abruptly quits the game and keeps walking.

A moment later he turns around again and looks back, but I've disappeared.
Briskly, he marches back in the direction he came and I continue to
discreetly follow him. Not much later, as we near what will be his final
destination -- a parking garage blocks away from the restaurant where this
escapade began, and right near our office -- a healthy-looking man in
"homeless" garb suddenly crosses my path, saying intently to me, "are you
still following him?" Undistracted, I keep on the first stranger and
follow him to the garage. As he pays his fee to leave, I make no attempt
to hide the fact that I'm copying down his license plate number. He looks
at me, and without a word, takes off.

The creepiest part about all of this is that I'd driven to the restaurant.
He obviously had not and was perhaps informed about my location? Of
course, one must always hold out the possibility that this man was just a
garden-variety Asheville wing-nut. Not only does our city have our fair
share, but it has become a well-established facet of our local culture
such that it has earned us national notoriety. Like I said before, we
cannot say for sure who these strangers are, or what exactly they
represent. But their appearance in our lives would seem to dovetail with
current events, the likes of which, we've made it our duty to report. And
our website seems to be a big hit with employees of the US Department of
Defense. The following day, with little media fanfare, President Bush
signed the USA PATRIOT Act into permanence. The lack of media attention 
to
this historic event was all the more glaring in that Bush was in effect
signing the death certificate of the Fourth Amendment -- which protects US
citizens from unwarranted spying -- at the precise moment that his
administration was fending off controversy about abusing that very right.
Also attracting little media attention that day were the staggering
remarks made by recently retired Supreme Court justice Sandra Day 
O'Connor
who'd made the astonishing admission that she feared the US republic was
edging towards a dictatorship.

Indeed, days before on the Senate floor, resident constitutional expert
Sen. Robert Byrd issued a stark warning about the PATRIOT Act that 
demands
to be quoted at length: "This new proposal would erase too many of our
freedoms guaranteed to the American people. In essence, this legislation
says that the Bill of Rights is right no more... There is no doubt that
constitutional freedoms will never be abolished in one fell swoop, for the
American people cherish their freedoms, and would not tolerate such a loss
if they could perceive it. But the erosion of freedom rarely comes as an
all-out frontal assault but rather as a gradual, noxious creeping, cloaked
in secrecy, and glossed over by reassurances of greater security."

Now this week it was revealed that a local college freshman and former
Eagle Scout had his computer confiscated by the Secret Service. Why? He'd
made the grave mistake of quoting some lyrics by the band The Misfits on
his Myspace.com web page, in which he had replaced some of the words
describing the assassination of JFK to portray a Bush version of the
theme. Our local Gannett monopoly franchise newspaper, the Asheville
Citizen-Times would reflectively opine that "it pays to be cautious
online."

No doubt. It was also reported this past week that the FBI has listed
Indymedia -- an open source newswire born out of the WTO protests which
disseminates news very similar to our newspaper -- as one of the current,
top ten domestic terrorist threats in the US. Did you catch that? The FBI
now considers disseminating news an act of terrorism.

As I entered our office this morning, I passed two guys who recently moved
into our building. They're media producers of some sort, and they were
intensely discussing a new ad campaign they're working on for the
military. The one fellow looked very much like Verizon's trendoid
posterboy --horn-rimmed glasses, vintage bowling shirt, elaborate arm
tattoos -- and he reeked of the musk of "X-treme sports" and that "I think
capitalism is killer, dude," ethic that seems more and more common in our
gentrifying city.

"We'll have the soldiers marching down the street together in
formation...the main theme of these ads is unity," this guy was
instructing his friend. "It's all about unity. Maybe use the image of a
man who is lonely and sad (gestures with arms over his head) and then cut
to 'No man should have to be alone.' Then the Navy logo will come in, and
it'll build up, cut with images of power and masculinity... I really like
the idea of using imagery of thunder and lightening...we want to stress
unity and masculinity, power, the warrior spirit -- all that man was meant
to be, all that man was born to be." Famous Nazi propagandist Joseph
Goebbels often said similar things.

However seemingly unrelated, for me, all of these events knit together
into a social mosaic of "WAKE UP" moments. As each of us individually
struggle to make our way through this competitive world, it can be easy to
lose sight, let alone recognize the fabric deterioration of our ostensibly
"democratic" social compact. Who knows who walks among us, what their
intentions are and what greater purpose they may ultimately serve? You may
not care and perhaps you may only register bafflement about what any of
this paranoid portrait of contemporary life may indicate. But I for one,
Senator Byrd, Justice O'Connor, am hearing you loud and clear.

Eamon Martin is an editor of Asheville Global Report.


-- 
You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, 
option D (up to 3 emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options 
(option A - 1x/week, option B - 3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option D - 
up to 3x/day) please reply and let us know!  If someone forwarded you 
this email and you want to be on our list, send an email to 
ean at sbcglobal.net and tell us which option you'd like.


"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060323/656dcfe2/attachment.htm 

From ean at sbcglobal.net  Thu Mar 23 15:06:03 2006
From: ean at sbcglobal.net (ean at sbcglobal.net)
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 15:06:03 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Water Rights
Message-ID: <E1FMeGm-0002dE-UH@elasmtp-mealy.atl.sa.earthlink.net>

Published on Wednesday, March 22, 2006 by OneWorld.net
Groups Demand Water Rights, Cite Millions of 
Deaths
by Niko Kyriakou
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0322-07.htm

CARACAS - The right to safe water must be enshrined in international 
law and policed by the United Nations if millions of people are to be 
spared death from want of water or from water-borne diseases, 
activists told governments and business at international talks ending 
Wednesday.

A coalition of groups opposed to efforts to give private enterprise 
control over water resources and distribution systems called on 
governments attending the Fourth World Water Forum in Mexico City 
to agree a formal declaration at the nascent UN Human Rights Council 
that would stiffen their commitment to ensuring basic water rights.

Officials from 140 countries were set to issue a broad declaration on 
World Water Day, but will stop short of declaring a universal right to 
the precious resource for which two thirds of humanity face uncertain 
supplies.(AFP/Shariq Alam)

The groups--including U.S.-based Bread for the World, the Coalition of 
Mexican Organizations for the Right to Water (COMDA), and the 
Council of Canadians--defined those rights as the ability to access 
sufficient and affordable clean water in or near the home, school or 
workplace.

They blamed violations of those rights for a UN-reported annual toll of 
three million deaths from diseases related to dirty or unsafe water. The 
world body also reported that 2.6 billion people--about 40 percent of 
the world's population--lack access to toilets or latrines.

Activists further pressed governments to establish an international 
mechanism to monitor countries' efforts to guarantee the right to water. 
Possibilities included a UN Special Rapporteur or advisor to the UN 
Secretary General.

Such measures are necessary because ''billions of people are unable 
to hold governments, corporations and international organizations 
accountable when they deliberately neglect the poor, such as people 
living in informal settlements, and when they violate the right of water 
users to participate in decision making on how their services are 
managed, as has been seen in many enforced privatizations of water 
services,'' said Scott Leckie, executive director of the Geneva-based 
Center on Housing Rights and Evictions, a coalition member.

The right to water already is enshrined in international covenants and 
UN resolutions but the United States, Canada, and other influential 
countries have shunned the documents, activists said, adding that in 
recent years, rather than strengthen public provision of water, 
numerous governments have favored efforts to privatize water 
systems.

That has proven controversial. Popular protest and government 
pressure in Argentina, Uruguay, and Bolivia, have pushed out private 
owners of water distribution facilities widely viewed as inhibiting public 
access to water by charging too much for the resource.

Delegates at the weeklong talks in Mexico City got a demonstration of 
the intensity of opposition to privatization when activists mobilized 
massive street protests.

Several advocacy groups urged stepped up grassroots efforts to wrest 
control over water.

''There is a silent holocaust occurring around the world caused by lack 
of water and sanitation. People are dying because the international aid 
community and national governments are not listening to the poor or 
looking at the overwhelming evidence,'' said Barbara Frost, chief 
executive of international charity WaterAid.

''Pressure must continue on donor and recipient governments, but we 
also need to encourage bottom-up solutions. If service providers are 
not held to account, the poor and the socially excluded will never 
achieve their water and sanitation rights. The groundwork has been 
laid. Citizens' action needs to become a movement,'' Frost added.

According to her organization, such a movement would prove essential 
in achieving the UN Millennium Development Goal of halving, by 2015, 
the number of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water 
and basic sanitation.

WaterAid, in a report released at the conference, touted several 
community projects it carried out with partners in Africa and Asia that it 
said succeeded in increasing public access to clean water. Citizen 
pressure in Kathmandu, Nepal, forced authorities there to reduce 
water charges and to cut the connection tariff by 84 percent, for 
example.

As part of a WaterAid project in Kampala, Uganda, community 
members in impoverished areas mapped rubbish dumps, water points, 
drainage channels, and latrines in a bid to help the government there 
carry out projects to improve water supply and sanitation.

The March 16-22 forum in Mexico City attracted some 11,000 
participants from more than 100 countries, said organizers at the 
World Water Council, a France-based umbrella group for multinational 
water companies and other businesses, universities, and non-
governmental organizations.

Copyright ? 2006 OneWorld.net

###



-- 
You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, 
option D (up to 3 emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options 
(option A - 1x/week, option B - 3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option D - 
up to 3x/day) please reply and let us know!  If someone forwarded you 
this email and you want to be on our list, send an email to 
ean at sbcglobal.net and tell us which option you'd like.


"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060323/43439e66/attachment.htm 

From sam at samharris.org  Thu Mar 23 11:40:43 2006
From: sam at samharris.org (sam at samharris.org)
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 14:40:43 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] New Essay
Message-ID: <E1FMePU-0001q7-Sd@elasmtp-mealy.atl.sa.earthlink.net>

For those of you who missed my essay entitled "Killing the Buddha" in the Shambhala Sun, it is now available as a PDF on my website:

http://www.samharris.org/index.php/samharris/print/

Best,
Sam



www.samharris.org

To remove your email from this mailing list, click here:

http://www.samharris.org/index.php?ACT=5&id=206UdRzdY8

From michael at intrafi.com  Thu Mar 23 21:01:27 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (Michael)
Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 00:01:27 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Article from Tom Dispatch
Message-ID: <200603240501.k2O51RId022310@thor.thenation.com>

An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060324/a0bc0372/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Fri Mar 24 03:45:09 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 06:45:09 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Power Plays? Payback Time? Agencies Realign Their Stars
 - Washington Post
Message-ID: <4423DBC5.6090603@comcast.net>

Power Plays? Payback Time? Agencies Realign Their Stars
Disaster Plans List Pecking Orders for Those Left Standing

By Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 24, 2006; A17

If a terrorist attack wiped out the top layer of government, the law has 
a plan for who would step in: Without the president or vice president, a 
succession of congressional leaders and Cabinet secretaries stand in 
line to assume control of the country.

But forget about the presidency. What about the National Archives? Who 
would take charge of the nation's files in case of a catastrophe?

Fortunately, the White House has an answer. President Bush this week 
endorsed a new order of succession for the National Archives and Records 
Administration detailing down to the 10th level who would assume command 
in a national emergency. If the top nine guys are gone, it turns out, 
the director of the Jimmy Carter Library and Museum takes over. That's 
right -- 25 years after leaving office, Carter, in the form of his top 
librarian, would return to power, of a sort.

In a government fixated on doomsday scenarios, the White House memo 
issued Wednesday was at least the fifth time since the start of last 
year that an executive branch agency has created or revised an order of 
succession. Many departments rushed to draft emergency plans in the 
aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. But nearly four 
years later, government officials in agencies such as the budget and 
personnel offices still busy themselves with the macabre exercise of 
figuring out who would be on top should the worst happen.

"It's kind of a sign of the thinking of government that there are so 
many high-level people at all these agencies that you need to have an 
order of succession," said Paul C. Light, a government specialist at New 
York University. "At the risk of being flip, the question would not be 
'Who's in charge at these agencies?' but 'Who cares who's in charge at 
these agencies?' "

Evidently people at the agencies. Some of the recent lineups reflect one 
official moving up the chart at the expense of colleagues. Others seem 
to be even more brazen power plays intended to put rivals in their 
places. In case there are any doubts, the succession orders make plain 
which associate director stands above which other associate director in 
an agency pecking order.

All of this, of course, stems from the serious post-9/11 concern about 
the government's ability to keep running after an attack using nuclear, 
chemical or biological weapons. Long before 2001, a single member of the 
Cabinet was kept away from the U.S. Capitol during the president's State 
of the Union address to ensure that a senior executive would survive 
should disaster strike. But Sept. 11 brought home how rudimentary plans 
for continuity of government really were.

After the attacks, Bush activated a shadow government, dispatching about 
100 senior civilian managers to live and work secretly in fortified 
locations outside Washington on a 24-hour basis. Vice President Cheney 
famously retreated to "undisclosed locations."

Congress, on the other hand, has debated and debated without coming up 
with its own plan. The House passed a bill last year, just as it did the 
year before, requiring states to hold elections within 49 days if 100 or 
more of the 435 House seats are empty, only to have the idea languish in 
the Senate, where critics favor immediate temporary appointments.

But at least the National Archives has a plan. Under this week's memo, 
if the archivist and his deputy are unable to serve, power devolves to 
the assistant archivist for administration, followed by the assistant 
archivist for records services and then the assistant archivist for 
regional records services and so on down the line.

"It's good to know they're taking care of this because, without a 
Congress, they've got someone to chronicle the abuses of the martial-law 
state," said Rep. Brian Baird (D-Wash.), who has proposed a 
constitutional amendment permitting governors to name interim House 
members in case of mass casualties.

Baird laughed but then added that the archives plan makes sense: "One of 
the best ways to deter terrorist attack is to be so protected in terms 
of maintaining government continuity that you could say, 'Go ahead, take 
your best shot.' What a powerful message it would be to be able to have 
your government up and going within days."

Others said the White House has more important issues to tackle. "We 
have huge problems with presidential succession," said Rep. Brad Sherman 
(D-Calif.), "and knowing who is head of the archives is not my number 
one concern." Sherman has proposed removing the House speaker and Senate 
president pro tempore from the presidential succession because putting 
either in the Oval Office could represent a radical departure from who 
voters thought they were electing.

The new archives plan supersedes one issued in March 2002, and the main 
effect seems to be demoting the assistant archivist for information 
services from third in line of succession to seventh.

A memo issued for the Office of Personnel Management last year bumped 
the agency's general counsel ahead of the chief of staff and the 
communications director up to fourth in line from 10th. Now serving as 
10th is the associate director for human capital leadership and merit 
systems accountability.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld rewrote his succession plan in 
December to put his inner circle closer to the top, placing 
Undersecretary for Intelligence Stephen A. Cambone right behind Deputy 
Secretary Gordon R. England, and effectively demoting the secretaries of 
the Army, Air Force and Navy.

The new national intelligence director, John D. Negroponte, has issued 
his first succession chart.

In Atlanta, Jay Hakes, director of the Jimmy Carter library, said he 
figured he was tapped to be part of the archives' succession because he 
works outside Washington but in a city with a significant federal presence.

He said he has not been mapping out what he would do with his power 
should the occasion arise. "I don't spend a lot of time thinking about 
it," Hakes said. "But I think this is a case where being overprepared is 
better than being underprepared."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/23/AR2006032301694.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060324/ebf835d6/attachment-0001.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Fri Mar 24 03:49:30 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 06:49:30 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Happy Doomsday to You! - Dana Milbank - Washington Post
	Op-Ed
Message-ID: <4423DCCA.7010301@comcast.net>

Happy Doomsday to You!

Dana Milbank
The Washington Post
Friday, March 24, 2006; A02

Washington was about one horseman short of an apocalypse yesterday.

It began with a breakfast meeting in a Senate office building where, 
over fruit salad and bagels, government and academic experts discussed 
the coming avian flu pandemic. "Currently it has a fatality rate of 56 
percent," reported Nancy Cox, flu expert with the Centers for Disease 
Control and Prevention. "An increasing number of countries have reported 
human cases. The severe cases are really quite severe."

Pointing to slides of some nasty chest X-rays, she added: "Death from 
this particular pathogen is not a pleasant death."

Next: the mid-morning news conference on mad cow disease at the National 
Press Club. There, a beef producer explained why he is suing the 
government for not letting him test his cattle for bovine spongiform 
encephalopathy, an "invariably fatal, progressive, incurable, 
neurodegenerative disease" that can be transmitted to people. The feds 
say the testing is unnecessary, but the rancher, John Stewart, warned 
that "BSE is not understood enough today to really come to scientific 
conclusions."

For those who still had an appetite, there was a luncheon meeting of the 
National Economists Club at the Chinatown Garden restaurant on H Street, 
where Congressional Budget Office economist Bob Shackleton was 
explaining the "high-end" global-warming projections, which have Earth's 
temperature growing by five degrees Celsius -- nine degrees Fahrenheit 
-- this century.

"That five degrees centigrade is the equivalent of the change that 
happened since the end of the last glaciation 18,000 years ago to now," 
he told the economists as they munched on fortune cookies and orange 
wedges. "Eighteen thousand years ago, there was a mile of ice over New 
York City and you could walk 100 miles out into the ocean and still be 
on land."

Have a nice doomsday? Possibly. When President Bush went to Cleveland on 
Monday, a questioner asked him about a claim "that members of your 
administration have reached out to prophetic Christians who see the war 
in Iraq and the rise of terrorism as signs of the apocalypse. Do you 
believe this, that the war in Iraq and the rise of terrorism are signs 
of the apocalypse?"

"I haven't really thought of it that way," the president said. "The 
first I've heard of that, by the way."

But maybe not the last, if yesterday's collection of end-of-days 
warnings was any indication.

On the fourth floor of the Russell Building on Capitol Hill, public 
health experts were so perplexed by the bird flu that they had trouble 
setting up the presentation. The start was delayed for about 15 minutes 
as organizers debated where best to place the lectern (Q: "Where do you 
suggest?" A: "Where do you suggest?").

Once underway, the experts, assembled by the Center for Strategic and 
International Studies, displayed a number of slides, some frightening 
(675,000 Americans dead from the 1918 flu), some technical ("vestigial 
esterase E region"), and some merely drawings of ducks, geese, pigs, 
horses and seals. But the message was, as pathologist Jeffrey 
Taubenberger of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology put it, "we 
really don't understand a lot."

"If we take everything we know about influenza virology now, take 
everything I know about influenza virology now, and formulate a model of 
the next pandemic, it would look like this," Taubenberger said as he 
displayed a large question mark on the screen.

In fact, Taubenberger had evidence that the bird flu might have some 
difficulty mutating to a human form. But that did not entirely satisfy 
David Nabarro, the U.N. coordinator for influenza. "It's a very virulent 
and horrible virus," he said. "It has also moved into 20 countries 
during the last six weeks and I just checked the reports this morning: 
Overnight we have reports of it moving into the Gaza Strip and also 
moving into settlements in the West Bank."

Nabarro spoke of "mounting concern" across the world. "We are very 
vulnerable," he warned. "Most of us, I think, feel that it's best to be 
preparing to hunker down."

At the press club, John Stewart of Creekstone Farms Premium Beef was all 
done hunkering. Explaining his lawsuit against the Agriculture 
Department, he said the government wasn't testing enough animals for mad 
cow disease, so he wanted to do it himself. Stewart, just in from 
Kansas, said he was "surprised" USDA had cut back on testing. Sounding 
much like the influenza scientists, he said there are "question marks 
today about the science of this matter," and, besides, "consumers want 
the beef tested."

It was time for lunch in Chinatown. The CBO's Shackleton stood at a 
microphone stand in the middle of a room decorated by plastic and 
cardboard trinkets, as if delivering a toast to the economists assembled 
at banquet tables. There, the economist said something the Bush 
administration can't bring itself to say: "The problem of climate change 
stems mainly from the use of fossil fuels by human beings."

Shackleton said the likely temperature increase this century would be 
between one and five degrees Celsius, and the average rise in sea levels 
one to three feet. There is, he continued, "also the possibility of 
relatively abrupt shifts where the climate system could experience a 
dramatic shift."

The good news: We "won't be alive when most of the effects occur," he said.

The bad news: We all will have succumbed to bird flu and mad cow disease.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/23/AR2006032301783.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060324/e870f27d/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Fri Mar 24 03:51:16 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 06:51:16 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Drug-Resistant Cases Of TB in U.S. Increase - Washington
	Post
Message-ID: <4423DD34.6040201@comcast.net>

Drug-Resistant Cases Of TB in U.S. Increase

By David Brown
The Washington Post
Friday, March 24, 2006; A10

The number of cases of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis is increasing in 
the United States, as is the fraction of those cases that is resistant 
to at least five antimicrobial drugs.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that there were 
128 cases of multidrug-resistant TB in the United States in 2004, up 
from 113 the year before. This is the first increase in a decade.

In addition, the proportion of hard-to-treat cases that are "extensively 
drug resistant" rose from 3.9 percent in the 1993-1996 period to 4.5 
percent during 2001-2004.

"It is a modest increase, but it is a movement in the wrong direction," 
said Kenneth G. Castro, an assistant surgeon general and director of the 
tuberculosis program at the CDC, which released the data.

These findings appear to be driven by the growth of multidrug-resistant 
(MDR) TB overseas and in recent immigrants to the United States. .

Of the 2005 cases, 45 percent were in U.S.-born people, and the balance 
in foreign-born people. The most frequent native countries of the latter 
group were Mexico, the Philippines, Vietnam, India, and China.

Overall, tuberculosis continues to decline in this country. The 
per-capita rate of the lung infection last year was the lowest since the 
government began collecting data in 1953. There were slightly more than 
14,000 cases reported to health authorities, compared with about 24,000 
a decade earlier.

The incidence of TB has fallen steadily since 1993, when a seven-year 
rise of the disease finally got the attention of public health 
authorities who had considered it virtually eliminated.

That resurgence was marked by outbreaks of multidrug-resistant 
infections, particularly among prisoners. Castro said he and other 
officials hope the slight uptick in MDR cases now is not the harbinger 
of a new phase of growth in the ancient infection.

The report, timed for World TB Day today, also described the growth of 
"extensively drug-resistant" (XDR) TB, defined as microbes resistant to 
not only the two first-line drugs, but to three or more of the six 
classes of second-line drugs.

Laboratory studies from Latvia showed that 19 percent of drug-resistant 
cases fit the XDR definition, as did 15 percent of the drug-resistant 
cases in South Korea.

"Drug-resistant TB is growing, and that should worry us," said Marcos 
Espinal, a World Health Organization official who heads the Global 
Partnership to Stop TB.

On a telephone briefing organized by the anti-poverty activist 
organization, Results, he called for more money to fight the global TB 
epidemic, which is particularly severe in sub-Saharan Africa because of 
the disease's high incidence in people infected with the AIDS virus.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/23/AR2006032301522.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060324/f2ff5826/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Fri Mar 24 03:57:33 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 06:57:33 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] GREAT PIECE: In Charge,
 Except They're Not- E. J. Dionne - Washington Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <4423DEAD.6070903@comcast.net>

In Charge, Except They're Not

By E. J. Dionne Jr.
The Washington Post
Friday, March 24, 2006; A19

Is President Bush the leader of our government, or is he just a 
right-wing talk-show host?

The question comes to mind after Bush's news conference this week in 
which he sounded like someone who has no control over the government he 
is in charge of. His words were those of a pundit inveighing against the 
evils of bureaucrats.

"Obviously," said the critic in chief, "there are some times when 
government bureaucracies haven't responded the way we wanted them to, 
and like citizens, you know, I don't like that at all." Yes, and if you 
can't do something about it, who can?

Bush went on: "I mean, I think, for example, of the trailers sitting 
down in Arkansas. Like many citizens, they're wondering why they're down 
there, you know. How come we've got 11,000?"

Bush was talking about 10,777 mobile homes ordered up to provide housing 
for the victims of Hurricane Katrina. As Rep. Mike Ross put it in an 
interview, most of these "brand-new, fully furnished homes are sitting 
in a hay meadow in Hope, Arkansas," and are "a symbol of what's wrong 
with this administration and what's wrong with FEMA."

Ross, a Democrat whose district includes that hay meadow, has been 
running a one-man crusade since December to get the homes moved to where 
they could actually provide shelter for those left homeless by the 
storm. The Federal Emergency Management Agency let the homes sit there 
because its regulations don't permit the use of such structures in a 
flood plain.

That raises at least two questions: Why did FEMA spend anywhere from 
$300 million to $430 million -- the numbers are in dispute -- to buy 
homes that didn't meet its own regulations? Alternatively, why can't it 
alter its regulations at least temporarily to use the homes where they 
are desperately needed?

Nearly three months after Ross first complained about the homes sitting 
in the field -- and nearly six weeks after Fox News reported the story 
and CNN broadcast an extensive account -- Bush seemed perplexed. He 
insisted that he was asking Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff 
to get to the bottom of the deal.

"So I've asked Chertoff to find out," Bush said. "What are you going to 
do with them? I mean, the taxpayers aren't interested in 11,000 trailers 
just sitting there. Do something with them. And so I share that sense of 
frustration when a big government is unable to, you know -- sends wrong 
signals to taxpayers. But our people are good, hardworking people."

Hold on: The president of the United States runs the "big government" 
he's attacking. This is mysterious. If Bush's "good, hardworking people" 
aren't responsible for the problem, the villains of the piece must be 
alien creatures created by some strange beast called Big Government.

Ross reports that 300 of the homes were finally moved last month and 
that 5,000 are supposed to be moved soon to Katrina victims. That still 
leaves a lot of homes. FEMA has said they will be stored for future 
disasters.

This episode is important because it is representative of a corrosive 
style of politics. Bush and many of his fellow Republicans have done a 
good business over the years running against the ills of Big Government. 
They are so much in the habit of trashing government that even when they 
are in charge of things -- remember, Republicans have controlled the 
White House and both houses of Congress for all but 18 months since 2001 
-- they pretend they are not.

And when their own government fails, they turn around and use their 
incompetence to argue that government can never work anyway, so you 
might as well keep electing conservatives to have less government. It's 
an ideological Catch-22. Even their failures prove they are right.

On the same day Bush was pushing off accountability for the mobile home 
fiasco, another politician was giving his voters some very bad news -- 
and taking responsibility for fixing the problem.

Gov. Jon Corzine of New Jersey announced that his state's fiscal 
situation was a mess, and he proposed a budget that simultaneously 
raised taxes, cut programs and walked away from some of his own campaign 
promises. "New Jerseyans believe that telling the truth is always better 
than hiding from it, even when it hurts," said Corzine, a Democrat. "And 
boy, does this budget hurt."

I'll leave it to New Jersey's budget experts to parse the details of 
Corzine's fiscal plan. But it's definitely bracing when a politician 
skips all the rhetoric about big or small government and just tries to 
fix the thing.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/23/AR2006032301133.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060324/7adc917a/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Fri Mar 24 04:00:47 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 07:00:47 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Analyzing a Downfall - Eugene Robinson - Washington Post
	Op-Ed
Message-ID: <4423DF6F.6080400@comcast.net>

Analyzing a Downfall
Claude Allen Had the Ear of the President. Now He's Accused of Theft. 
What Happened?

By Eugene Robinson
The Washington Post
Friday, March 24, 2006; A19

I have to admit that when Claude Allen was arrested a couple of weeks 
ago for allegedly stealing merchandise from discount stores, my first 
reaction was pure schadenfreude. Until his resignation last month for 
the standard Washington non-reason -- to spend more time with his family 
-- Allen had been the highest-ranking African American on the White 
House staff, the president's top domestic policy adviser. I think it was 
"Saturday Night Live" that first came out with the obvious joke: Who 
knew that George W. Bush had a domestic policy adviser?

Would it be fair to cheer Allen's downfall just because he held a highly 
visible post in an administration that is reviled by most African 
Americans? No, but there's more: He made his name in black conservative 
circles by serving as a top aide to Jesse Helms, the old buzzard from 
North Carolina. I can't say anything else about Helms that's suitable 
for a family newspaper, so I'll just quote my colleague David S. Broder, 
who once called him "the last prominent unabashed white racist 
politician in this country."

Helms, you will recall, railed against a federal holiday for the Rev. 
Martin Luther King Jr. at a time when even old Strom Thurmond had gone 
over to the other side. Allen later said that was a "difficult" period 
in his association with Helms, but apparently not too difficult.

As if that weren't enough, during a bitter 1984 campaign Allen was 
caught spreading smarmy innuendo about Helms's opponent, Gov. James Hunt 
Jr., whispering to a reporter that Hunt was vulnerable because of links 
"with the queers."

So, yes, when Allen was arrested on felony theft charges, my first 
reaction was smug satisfaction. But then I told myself: Don't hate. The 
proper reaction is pity, on every level.

Police allege that on several occasions, Allen did the following: He 
went into a Target store near his home in the Maryland suburbs and 
bought some merchandise, then went to another Target, loaded a Target 
shopping bag with identical items and used the receipt from the first 
store to "return" the items for a refund -- in effect, getting a bunch 
of stuff for nothing.

The most expensive item Allen is alleged to have stolen is a $525 Bose 
home theater system; mostly, he's charged with taking cheap items such 
as a $60 jacket and a $25 pair of pants. Police say they have documented 
25 instances of theft, and while the total value of the merchandise adds 
up to more than $5,000 -- and makes the alleged thefts a felony -- we're 
still talking small potatoes.

If what the police say is true, this graduate of Duke University Law 
School wasn't much of a criminal mastermind. Hadn't he ever heard of 
inventory control, or wondered what those ubiquitous bar codes are for? 
And why would a man who met several times a week with the president of 
the United States, and who earned $161,000 a year, risk everything to 
steal an $88 radio?

It sounds like a cry for help, and I have no idea what went so wrong in 
Allen's life. But I can imagine some of the strains and contradictions 
he had to live with.

I have respect for principled black conservatives -- I think they're 
wrong about many things, but I respect their right to be wrong. It's a 
fact of life, though, that they are isolated from the larger African 
American community by their political views. At times it must be very 
lonely.

And since black conservatives with credentials like Claude Allen's are 
relatively rare, they are in great demand and tend to rise fast. They 
have to balance their genuine political beliefs against the fact that 
the Jesse Helmses of the world love to have them around as window 
dressing so they can say, "Look, I'm not racist; here's this black 
person on my staff."

You could rationalize working for someone like Helms by telling yourself 
that you could do more good for the African American community from the 
inside, next to the seat of power, than from the outside. You could tell 
yourself you were advancing the interests of black people, even if most 
black people disagreed. You could ignore racism or pretend it was 
something else. You could tell yourself that you were making compromises 
and sacrifices for the greater good.

Finally, you could arrive at the White House, with a big job and regular 
access to the president. But it might be a White House where all the big 
decisions were made by just a few people, and you weren't one of them.

Then what?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/23/AR2006032301166.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060324/396904c6/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Fri Mar 24 04:04:39 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 07:04:39 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Taking the gay insults personally - Ellen Goodman -
 Boston Globe Op-Ed
Message-ID: <4423E057.8040404@comcast.net>


  Taking the gay insults personally

By Ellen Goodman  |  March 24, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

IN MY business, it's only fair to acknowledge a bias. My bias is named 
Ruthie.

Ruthie is the youngest cousin in a bumper crop of babies that have 
extended our family over the last few years. When she was adopted, we 
didn't pass out cigars, we passed out Baby Ruth bars. So maybe it's our 
fault that she's now in the sugar-rush stage of toddlerhood, leaving her 
parents joyously breathless and regularly transforming her grandmother's 
house into Early Childproof Decor.

Did I mention that Ruthie has two daddies, something her toddler cousins 
take for granted? Did I mention that Ruthie's birth mother chose this 
couple to raise her, picking these two men from all the dossiers at the 
adoption agency?

Ruthie is why I take it personally when the Vatican calls gay adoptions 
''gravely immoral" or says that such adoptions ''mean doing violence to 
these children." Ruthie is why I grimace when Russell Johnson, chairman 
of the Ohio Restoration Project, says, ''experimenting on children 
through gay adoption is a problem." Ruthie and her parents are not an 
experiment. They are a family. Part of my family.

Once again, we are back to the subject of gay adoption. This month, 
Catholic Charities in Boston was called on the Vatican carpet. For years 
the agency had operated a kind of ''don't ask, don't tell" policy. Over 
the course of two decades, Catholic social workers had placed 13 
children with gay parents, saving most from the revolving door of foster 
care.

But Roman Catholic law forbids gay adoption, and Massachusetts state law 
forbids discrimination. Faced with a conflict, the bishops overrode the 
board of Catholic Charities and ended its long and cherished role in 
adoption.

Now this issue is rolling out across the country, all the way to San 
Francisco. There, the new archbishop appears to be on a similar 
collision course with Catholic Charities and secular laws.

In Massachusetts, Governor Mitt Romney, nodding madly to conservatives 
in his bid for a presidential run, has filed a bill to grant a religious 
exemption to discrimination laws. But if you give one church permission 
to discriminate against gays, what's next? Permission to discriminate 
against blacks or Jews who want to adopt? Isn't that where we came from?

It seems that many see gay adoption as another issue to rally the right 
in the culture wars. There are now efforts underway in 16 states for 
laws to ban gay adoptions. These would add to a crazy quilt of state 
laws ranging from Florida, which bans gay adoptions but allows gay 
foster parents, to Mississippi, which bans adoption by gay couples but 
not gay singles, to Utah, which prohibits all unmarried couples from 
adoption.

But let's put my Ruthie bias aside for the moment. Let's even put aside 
the studies that support my bias: A comprehensive review of them coming 
out next week from the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute shows again 
that children of gay parents do fine.

If some still insist that it is ''gravely immoral" to raise children in 
gay households, what exactly do those wedge-drivers propose to do?

We have always had gay parents. Most had children the old-fashioned way, 
hiding their sexuality as long as they could. Now they can also do it 
the new-fashioned way with every reproductive aid from sperm bank to 
surrogate.

A researcher analyzing the 2000 Census estimated 250,000 kids being 
raised by same-sex couples. If gay parenting is harmful, do we take 
children away from their biological gay parents? Do we make it unlawful 
for gays to use fertility technologies? How? If there are states that 
allow gay adoption, would we ban interstate travel for that? And what do 
we say to a birth mother who picks a gay couple? No?

Today 60 percent of agencies accept applications and 40 percent 
knowingly place children with gay parents. Social workers, whether at 
religious, state, or private agencies, want only one thing: to find 
safe, good homes in a country with 500,000 children adrift.

''The effect of all this opposition is not to prevent gay people from 
becoming parents," says Adam Pertman of the Donaldson Adoption 
Institute. ''All it can do is diminish the pool of mothers and fathers 
for children who need homes."

We all talk about ''the best interest of the child." What makes up that 
interest? On my list are attention, love, security, humor, and a 
besotted family racing to keep one step ahead of a toddler. Of course, a 
little bias on that child's behalf never hurts.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/24/taking_the_gay_insults_personally/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060324/7526c845/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Fri Mar 24 04:07:00 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 07:07:00 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] The crooked smile of fortune - Leonard Rosen - Boston
	Globe Op-Ed
Message-ID: <4423E0E4.50202@comcast.net>


  The crooked smile of fortune

By Leonard Rosen  |  March 24, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

ON THE FIRST day of spring this year, I awoke to find that only half of 
my face could smile. The other half drooped -- turning down at the 
corner no matter how hard I tried to rescue it. Panic is not too 
dramatic a word to describe my response. After a brief but thorough 
exam, my doctor concluded: ''Bell's palsy, a temporary paralysis caused 
by a virus. You'll be fine," she said.

A curious word, fine. In the mirror this morning, I watched the ancient 
masks of comedy and tragedy fighting for control of my face. I am -- for 
a few weeks, anyway -- a human question mark. Try as I might, I cannot 
form both sides of my mouth into my old, winning smile, nor even make 
both sides frown convincingly. For the moment I'll have to be agnostic 
on the advice I heard years ago: that each day we must decide if life is 
comic or tragic and then live accordingly.

My question-mark face suggests that life must be both. Despite the cold 
spell, the crocuses are blooming, a good sign. But for two friends, the 
news is not so good.

One of them, taking a shower, felt a swelling in his armpit. The doctors 
tell him his chances for recovery are excellent, but not without weekly 
trips to the hospital for chemicals that will scorch his blood. For my 
other friend, the doctors can offer no elixirs. Still young, he is 
beyond their reach and lives moment-to-moment, grateful for the days 
that remain.

In such times, the expression ''There but for the grace of God go I" 
cuts me to the quick. Why did my doctor say, ''Relax," while my friends' 
doctors did not? I know with certainty that my good fortune has nothing 
to do with my goodness, for my friends are caring, decent souls. I don't 
know why. I don't know why I was born to relative safety, literacy, 
health, and dignity -- and not to parents making the best home they 
could in some precarious lean-to on Haiti's central plateau.

Is it dumb luck -- what the ancients called fate, Dame Fortune? What 
kind of principle is this for doling out life's bounty? Job, with his 
pocketful of troubles, didn't know, and yet he refused to ''curse God 
and die."

Before veering off into Marxist critiques or ruminations on karma, I 
think once more of the crocuses. Soon, songbirds and herons will return, 
and perhaps this is all the answer one needs to begin seeing the 
proverbial glass as half full.

But the question mark in my mirror persists, and I know that elsewhere 
on this good Earth, right around the corner and halfway across the 
world, the days are darker for many, through no fault of their own. Will 
I remember those with less luck than I when my seventh cranial nerve 
quiets down and restores my smile?

A resolution, then, for the day my smile returns: to place on my already 
cluttered desk a replica of the ancient masks -- a reminder of my newly 
split, weirdly joined selves: one, eyes crinkled with joy; the other, 
raising a wail to heaven.

I may never understand the balance of fortune and misfortune in this 
world, but what I do with that reminder, each day, will be the measure 
of my worth.

Leonard Rosen teaches at Bentley College.  

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/24/the_crooked_smile_of_fortune/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060324/12a690db/attachment.htm 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: dingbat_story_end_icon.gif
Type: image/gif
Size: 49 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060324/12a690db/attachment.gif 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Fri Mar 24 07:47:34 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 15:47:34 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Secretary of Homeland Insecurity
Message-ID: <20060324154735.A6186237250@lax-gw01.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

OPINION | March 24, 2006
Editorial: Secretary of Homeland Insecurity

Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, should be supporting strong chemical plant security rules, not speaking to the chemical industry about his support for weak ones.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/24/opinion/24fri1.html?ex=1143867600&en=c1098e14a72ef7c5&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060324/f3f535d9/attachment-0001.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Fri Mar 24 07:48:21 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 15:48:21 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: What's Bad for G.M.
Message-ID: <20060324154821.699B024AF93@lax-gw02.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

OPINION | March 24, 2006
Editorial: What's Bad for G.M.

The troubles at G.M. worsen the nagging worry about an America without the kinds of jobs that can provide a blue-collar middle class.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/24/opinion/24fri2.html?ex=1143867600&en=0ae8d3f5ef6898bf&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060324/7e51f631/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Fri Mar 24 07:49:07 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 15:49:07 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Speak Softly and Carry a Smaller Stick
Message-ID: <20060324154907.697819FD07@lax-gw05.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

OPINION | March 24, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor: Speak Softly and Carry a Smaller Stick
By ANDREW KOHUT
Americans aren?t becoming isolationist, just more cautious.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/24/opinion/24Kohut.html?ex=1143867600&en=a22e13ccca6286af&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060324/757582dc/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Fri Mar 24 07:50:11 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 15:50:11 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Don't Take This Lying Down
Message-ID: <20060324155012.1537613B808@lax-gw04.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

OPINION | March 24, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor: Don't Take This Lying Down
By SARAH BILSTON
Obstetricians in the United States are too quick to prescribe bed rest.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/24/opinion/24bilston.html?ex=1143867600&en=5cd78a22d4f2cd8b&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060324/3bd47284/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Fri Mar 24 07:53:47 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 15:53:47 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: South Korea Nominates First Female Prime
	Minister
Message-ID: <20060324155347.CF379249EA0@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

INTERNATIONAL / ASIA PACIFIC | March 24, 2006
South Korea Nominates First Female Prime Minister
By CHOE SANG-HUN
Han Myeong Sook, a feminist legislator, was imprisoned under the country's former military dictatorship.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/24/international/asia/24cnd-korea.html?ex=1143867600&en=7baee56042973c5b&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060324/f4ddd336/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Fri Mar 24 07:55:16 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: 24 Mar 2006 15:55:16 -0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] Headlines for March 24, 2006
Message-ID: <20060324155516.27190.qmail@trinity.democracynow.org>

Mike Blaxill  ( mblaxill at yahoo.com )
sent you this story from democracynow.org




+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  Headlines for March 24, 2006
|  http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/24/1459255
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+


- Freed Peace Activists Plan To Head Home From Iraq-
U.S. Rounds Up All Adult Males in Iraqi Village-
Massive Protests Against Immigration Bill Continue-
U.S. Mutual Fund Backs Divestment From Sudan-
Puerto Rico Sues U.S. Officials Over Ojeda Rios Killing-
New Study Criticizes Power of Israeli Lobby in Washington
This story continues at: 
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/24/1459255


From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Fri Mar 24 07:55:31 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: 24 Mar 2006 15:55:31 -0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] IRS Audited Greenpeace At Request of ExxonMobil-Funded
	Group
Message-ID: <20060324155531.27200.qmail@trinity.democracynow.org>

Mike Blaxill  ( mblaxill at yahoo.com )
sent you this story from democracynow.org




+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  IRS Audited Greenpeace At Request of ExxonMobil-Funded Group
|  http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/24/150203
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+


The Wall Street Journal revealed this week that a little-known watchdog group, largely subsidized by ExxonMobil, was responsible for getting the IRS to audit the environmental organization Greenpeace. We speak with the reporter who broke the story and the head of Greenpeace USA.
This story continues at: 
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/24/150203


From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Fri Mar 24 07:55:51 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: 24 Mar 2006 15:55:51 -0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] The PsyOps War: A Look at the Lincoln Group and the U.S.
	Military's Planting of Stories in the Iraqi Press
Message-ID: <20060324155551.27203.qmail@trinity.democracynow.org>

Mike Blaxill  ( mblaxill at yahoo.com )
sent you this story from democracynow.org




+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  The PsyOps War: A Look at the Lincoln Group and the U.S. Military's Planting of Stories in the Iraqi Press
|  http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/24/150208
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+


The Pentagon defends its policy of paying Iraqi news organizations to publish pro-American articles secretly written by the U.S. military. Its contractor, the Lincoln Group is being paid over a hundred million dollars to write and plant stories. We speak with reporter Andrew Buncombe of the London Independent and retired Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner.
This story continues at: 
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/24/150208


From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Fri Mar 24 09:11:34 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 17:11:34 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Women Wage Key Campaigns for Democrats
Message-ID: <20060324171142.331EE9FC17@lax-gw05.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

WASHINGTON | March 24, 2006
Women Wage Key Campaigns for Democrats
By ROBIN TONER
If the Democrats have their way, the 2006 Congressional elections will be the revenge of the "mommy party."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/24/politics/24women.html?ex=1143867600&en=c4b699654b5aa51c&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060324/cf834901/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Fri Mar 24 09:13:19 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 17:13:19 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Kabul Judge Rejects Calls to End Trial of
	Christian Convert
Message-ID: <20060324171321.9D66911F996@lax-gw07.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

This is admittedly coming from the extreme fringe of Islam. However, can anyone imagine a Jewish or Christian government condemning to death a person who converted from Judaism or Christianity to Islam? Peace.


INTERNATIONAL / ASIA PACIFIC | March 24, 2006
Kabul Judge Rejects Calls to End Trial of Christian Convert
By ABDUL WAHEED WAFA and DAVID ROHDE
The judge presiding over the prosecution of a man facing death for converting from Islam said that he would resist interference.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/24/international/asia/24convert.html?ex=1143867600&en=16480577c91fd4d5&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060324/b79b3bfd/attachment-0001.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Fri Mar 24 09:14:07 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 17:14:07 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Official at Saudi Company and Ex-Employee
	at Halliburton Unit Accused in Kickback Inquiry
Message-ID: <20060324171407.3405F9FBF7@lax-gw05.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

And yet Halliburton continues to secure no-bid contracts from our government...


INTERNATIONAL | March 24, 2006
Official at Saudi Company and Ex-Employee at Halliburton Unit Accused in Kickback Inquiry
By JAMES GLANZ
An official at a Saudi company is accused in connection with what is believed to be a scheme involving a major Army base.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/24/international/24contract.html?ex=1143867600&en=8ea2ea9ead732e70&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060324/4ec9624f/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Fri Mar 24 09:15:06 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 17:15:06 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: The Afghan Christian Who Faces Death (2
	Letters)
Message-ID: <20060324171506.37769237386@lax-gw01.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

What we're saying...


OPINION | March 24, 2006
The Afghan Christian Who Faces Death (2 Letters)

To the Editor:.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/24/opinion/l24afghan.html?ex=1143867600&en=1e390b6eac7c9f0f&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060324/afcc39ca/attachment.htm 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Fri Mar 24 09:24:21 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 12:24:21 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Good vs Evil isn't a strategy "Madeleine Albright"
Message-ID: <000b01c64f67$ce99f5a0$1027e440@Harold>

       


I'm looking forward to reading her book "The Mighty and the Almighty - Reflections on America, God and World Affairs"

Harold



From michael at michaelbutler.com  Fri Mar 24 11:11:10 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 11:11:10 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Letter to the Secretary By PAUL KRUGMAN
Message-ID: <C049844E.2A7BC%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 24, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Letter to the Secretary
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Dear John Snow, secretary of the Treasury:

I'm glad that you've started talking about income inequality, which in
recent years has reached levels not seen since before World War II. But if
you want to be credible on the subject, you need to make some changes in
your approach.

First, you shouldn't claim, as you seemed to earlier this week, that there's
anything meaningful about the decline in some measures of inequality between
2000 and 2003. Every economist realizes that, as The Washington Post put it,
"much of the decline in inequality during that period reflected the popping
of the stock market bubble," which led to a large but temporary fall in the
incomes of the richest Americans.

We don't have detailed data for more recent years yet, but the available
indicators suggest that after 2003, incomes at the top and the overall level
of inequality came roaring back. That surge in inequality explains why,
despite your best efforts to talk up the economic numbers, most Americans
are unhappy with the Bush economy.

I find it helpful to illustrate what's going on with a hypothetical example:
say 10 middle-class guys are sitting in a bar. Then the richest guy leaves,
and Bill Gates walks in.

Because the richest guy in the bar is now much richer than before, the
average income in the bar soars. But the income of the nine men who aren't
Bill Gates hasn't increased, and no amount of repeating "But average income
is up!" will convince them that they're better off.

Now think about what happened in 2004 (the figures for 2005 aren't in yet,
but it was almost certainly more of the same). The economy grew reasonably
fast in 2004, but most families saw little if any improvement in their
financial situation.

Instead, a small fraction of the population got much, much richer. For
example, Forbes tells us that the compensation of chief executives at the
500 largest corporations rose 54 percent in 2004. In effect, Bill Gates
walked into the bar. Average income rose, but only because of rising incomes
at the top.

Speaking of executive compensation, Mr. Snow, it hurts your credibility when
you say, as you did in a recent interview, that soaring pay for top
executives reflects their productivity and that we should "trust the
marketplace." Executive pay isn't set in the marketplace; it's set by boards
that the executives themselves appoint. And executives' pay often bears
little relationship to their performance.

You yourself, as you must know, are often cited as an example. When you were
appointed to your present job, Forbes pointed out that the performance of
the company you had run, CSX, was "middling at best." Nonetheless, you were
"by far the highest-paid chief in the industry."

And the business careers of other prominent members of the administration,
including the president and vice president, seem to demonstrate the truth of
the adage that it's not what you know, it's who you know. So my advice on
the question of executive pay is: don't go there.

Finally, you should stop denying that the Bush tax cuts favor the wealthy. I
know that administration number-crunchers have produced calculations
purporting to show that the tax cuts were tilted toward the middle class.
But using the right measure ? the effect of the tax cuts on after-tax income
? the bias toward the haves and have-mores is unmistakable.

According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, once the Bush tax cuts are
fully phased in, they will raise the after-tax income of middle-income
families by 2.3 percent. But they will raise the after-tax income of people
like yourself, with incomes of more than $1 million, by 7.3 percent.

And those calculations don't take into account the indirect effects of tax
cuts. If the tax cuts are made permanent, they'll eventually have to be
offset by large spending cuts. In practical terms, that means cuts where the
money is: in Social Security and Medicare benefits. Since middle-income
Americans will feel the brunt of these cuts, yet received a relatively small
tax break, they'll end up worse off. But the wealthy will be left
considerably wealthier.

Of course, my suggestions about how to improve your credibility would force
you to stop repeating administration talking points. But you're the
secretary of the Treasury. Your job is to make economic policy, not to spout
propaganda. Oh, wait.

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From michael at michaelbutler.com  Fri Mar 24 11:12:55 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 11:12:55 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Worried About India's and China's Booms? So Are They By
	THOMAS L.	FRIEDMAN
Message-ID: <C04984B7.2A7BD%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 24, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Worried About India's and China's Booms? So Are They
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

The more I cover foreign affairs, the more I wish I had studied education in
college, because the more I travel, the more I find that the most heated
debates in many countries are around education. And here's what's really
funny ? every country thinks it's behind.

Tony Blair has been fighting with his own party over permitting more
innovative charter schools. Singapore is obsessed with improving its already
world-leading math scores before others catch up. And America agonizes that
its K-12 public schools badly need improvement in math and science. I was
just in Mumbai attending the annual meeting of India's high-tech
association, Nasscom, where many speakers worried aloud that Indian
education wasn't nurturing enough "innovators."

Both India and China, which have mastered rote learning and have everyone
else terrified about their growing armies of engineers, are wondering if too
much math and science ? unleavened by art, literature, music and humanities
? aren't making Indira and Zhou dull kids and not good innovators. Very few
global products have been spawned by India or China.

"We have no one going into the liberal arts and everyone going into
engineering and M.B.A.'s," said Jerry Rao, chief executive of MphasiS, one
of the top Indian outsourcing companies. "We're becoming a nation of
aspiring programmers and salespeople. If we don't have enough people with
the humanities, we will lose the [next generation of] V. S. Naipauls and
Amartya Sens," he added, referring to the Indian author and the Indian
economist, both Nobel laureates. "That is sad and dangerous."

Innovation is often a synthesis of art and science, and the best innovators
often combine the two. The Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, in his compelling
Stanford commencement address last year, recalled how he dropped out of
college but stuck around campus and took a calligraphy course, where he
learned about the artistry of great typography. "None of this had even a
hope of any practical application in my life," he recalled. "But 10 years
later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back
to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with
beautiful typography."

Fifty years ago the Sanskrit scholar was respected in India, Mr. Rao noted,
but today it is all about becoming an engineer, a programmer, an M.B.A. or a
doctor. "More people will get Ph.D.'s [in the study of] Sanskrit in America
this year than in India," Mr. Rao asserted, "and Sanskrit is the root of our
culture!"

Why all this ed-anxiety today? Because computers, fiber-optic cable and the
Internet have leveled the economic playing field, creating a global platform
that more workers anywhere can now plug into and play on. Capital will now
flow faster than ever to tap the most productive talent wherever it is
located, so every country is scrambling to upgrade its human talent base.
When everyone has access to the same technology platform, human talent, as
the consultants John Hagel III and John Seely Brown wrote, is the "only
sustainable edge."

Hence the concern I found in India that it must move quickly from business
process outsourcing (B.P.O.) ? running back rooms, answering phones or
writing code for U.S. companies ? into knowledge process outsourcing
(K.P.O.): coming up with more original designs and products.

"We need to encourage more incubation of ideas ... to make innovation a
national initiative," said Azim Premji, the chairman of Wipro, one of
India's premier technology companies. "Are we as Indians creative? Going by
our rich cultural heritage, we have no doubt some of the greatest art and
literature. We need to bring the same spirit into our economic and business
arena."

But to make that leap, Indian entrepreneurs say, will require a big change
in the rigid, never-challenge-the-teacher Indian education system. "If we do
not allow our students to ask why, but just keep on telling them how, then
we are only going to get the transactional type of outsourcing, not the
high-end things that require complex interactions and judgment to understand
another person's needs," said Nirmala Sankaran, C.E.O. of HeyMath, an
Indian-based education company. "We have a creative problem in this
country."

My guess is that we're at the start of a global convergence in education:
China and India will try to inspire more creativity in their students.
America will get more rigorous in math and science. And this convergence
will be a great spur to global growth and innovation. It's a win-win. But
some will win more than others ? and it will be those who get this balance
right the fastest, in the most schools.

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From michael at michaelbutler.com  Fri Mar 24 11:14:35 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 11:14:35 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Speak Softly and Carry a Smaller Stick By ANDREW KOHUT
Message-ID: <C049851B.2A7BE%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 24, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
Speak Softly and Carry a Smaller Stick
By ANDREW KOHUT

Washington

WE shouldn't allow isolationism and protectionism to overwhelm us," said
President Bush in his press conference on Tuesday, building on the concerns
that he expressed in his State of the Union address about Americans turning
inward.

Recent opinion surveys affirm that isolationist sentiment has increased in
recent years. Notably, a survey by my center and the Council on Foreign
Relations last fall reported that the percentage of the public who said that
the United States should "mind its own business internationally and let
other countries get along the best they can on their own" rose to levels
seen during the mid-1970's, following the Vietnam War, and in the 1990's
after the cold war ended. And a companion poll of opinion leaders found that
they, too, had become less supportive of the United States playing a world
leadership role.

But while these trends represent significant shifts in attitudes, it would
be a mistake to conclude that this country is becoming isolationist. There
is no sign that most Americans want the United States to turn its back on
the world or that anti-foreign sentiment in this country is rising.
Discontent with Mr. Bush's policies, notably on Iraq, has led to widespread
public frustration. And while it has also created more isolationists, they
remain a minority.

The number of Pew respondents agreeing that the United States should mind
its own business and let other countries get along as best they can climbed
to 42 percent last year from 34 percent in 2004. Agreement with this
statement has been roughly this high only twice in the last four decades: in
1976 and in 1995. Now as then, however, most Americans continue to disagree
with this sentiment. And huge majorities, including many who express some
isolationist sentiments, believe that the United States should consider the
views of its allies in making foreign policy, and they acknowledge America's
leadership role in the world given its power.

Polls also find no rise in broad-based anti-foreign sentiment. Americans, in
fact, rate most countries more favorably than people in other countries rate
the United States. For example, a February Gallup survey showed 54 percent
of the public holding a favorable view of France and 79 percent a favorable
opinion of Germany. In contrast, just 41 percent of the Germans and 43
percent of the French expressed favorable views of the United States in last
year's Pew Global Attitudes Survey.

Further, there is no sign of increased alarm about rivals to the United
States. Americans are less inclined now than in the past to view China as an
adversary, and few express worries about its rising economic might. In
addition, Americans favor a stronger European Union and closer relations
with Europe. Fully 66 percent of Americans think the United States and
Western European partnership on security and diplomatic matters should
remain as close it has been the past. But only 26 percent of the French, 39
percent of the German and 42 percent of the British respondents felt the
same way in our survey.

Even right after the uproar over the bid by a Dubai-based company to take
over facilities in American ports, Americans continue to welcome foreign
investment and are much less worried about foreign ownership of American
companies than they were at the end of the 1980's. The rejection of the
Dubai ports deal appears to reflect not xenophobia but a deep concern about
Arab terrorism. While a narrow majority of respondents (53 percent) to a Pew
survey last week expressed a negative view of foreign investors owning
American companies, 70 percent did so in 1989, when high-profile
acquisitions of American businesses by Japanese companies provoked
widespread concern.

Moreover, by a 53 percent to 36 percent margin, Americans view foreign
companies investing in the United States as a good thing. And more
generally, two-thirds of Americans (66 percent) believe free trade is good
for the United States. This view is largely unchanged since 2000, even
though public concern about the outsourcing of American jobs has risen
sharply.

All this shows that America's current mood is less a rejection of the rest
of the world than it is a deep concern about terrorism and a growing
wariness about America's own assertive foreign policy. In particular, there
is little potential support for the use of force against Iran. And more
generally, the American experience in Iraq has reduced support for
pre-emptive wars. The belief that it is justifiable to use military force
against countries that threaten us but have not attacked us fell from 67
percent in May 2003, when the war in Iraq seemed a success, to just 52
percent last fall.

Unfortunately, the uptick in isolationism has the potential for dangerous
political consequences. In an election year, politicians in both parties
(each of which has significant isolationist minorities) may feel mistakenly
compelled to play to strong sentiments that do not reflect the beliefs of
the majority, urging the United States to pull back on its global
commitments, move away from free trade and close its borders. More
dangerously in this age of terrorism, the president may well need to pursue
policies that are assertive, if not costly. If he does, and even with the
best of intentions, he may not find the requisite support.

Andrew Kohut is the president of the Pew Research Center and co-author of
the forthcoming "Americans Against the World."

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top



From arianna at huffingtonpost.com  Fri Mar 24 13:08:31 2006
From: arianna at huffingtonpost.com (Arianna Huffington)
Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 13:08:31 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] The Huffington Post's Weekly Digest -- 3.24.06
Message-ID: <E1FMx5z-0001oO-FP@elasmtp-junco.atl.sa.earthlink.net>

The Huffington Post's Weekly Digest
March 24, 2006

Arianna Huffington
Apocalypse What?

March 21 -- Did you catch Bush's evangelical-deer-caught-in-the-political-headlights moment Monday?

It came during the Q & A session following his speech on Iraq. The first question came from a woman who asked: "[Author Kevin Phillips] makes the point that members of your administration have reached out to prophetic Christians who see the war in Iraq and the rise of terrorism as signs of the apocalypse. Do you believe this, that the war in Iraq and the rise of terrorism are signs of the apocalypse? And if not, why not?"

The president was clearly taken aback. He reacted as if he'd just seen a burning bush -- or had just been asked a really hard math question.

First he hemmed. Then he hawed. Then he hemmed some more.

"Um... uh... I... The answer is, I haven't really thought of it that way," he finally spit out. "Here's how I think of it. The first I've heard of that, by the way. I guess I'm more of a practical fellow." He then abruptly Left Behind the question at hand and went off on a long, standard-issue answer about 9/11 and fighting terrorists over there so we don't have to fight them over here.

It was the least convincing performance since, well, since the why-I'm-optimistic-about-Iraq speech that preceded it.

I mean, come on. The man is a born again, evangelical Christian whose favorite political philosopher is Jesus, has let it be know that God speaks to -- and through -- him, believes "in a divine plan that supercedes all human plans"... and he wants us to buy that he's never even heard of, let alone thought about the biblical implications of terrorism in relation to the apocalypse?

Sorry if I find this Revelation just a little hard to swallow.

After all, the notion that we are fast approaching the end of the world is not being espoused by some street corner Jeremiah wearing a "The End is Nigh!" sandwich board. Roughly 50 million Americans believe in some form of End-Time philosophy. And check out the best-seller lists: the apocalyptic Left Behind series of books have repeatedly been among the country's best selling titles, with over 70 million copies sold.

End-Timers have also spawned a mini-industry of imminent doomsday Web sites like ApocalypseSoon.org and Raptureready.com. The latter features a Rapture Index that, according to the site, acts as a "Dow Jones Industrial Average of end time activity" and a "prophetic speedometer" (the higher the number, the faster we're moving toward the Second Coming). For those of you keeping score, the Rapture Index is currently 156 -- an off-the-chart mark of prophetic indicators.

Questions about Bush having an apocalyptic worldview have been bandied about for years. So much so that his chief speechwriter, Michael Gerson, felt compelled, at a 2004 conference, to dismiss the idea that the invasion of Iraq had anything to do with goosing the Rapture: "The president is not reading [Left Behind author] Tim LaHaye for his Middle East policy," he sniffed.

So why the president's over-the-top, "first I've heard of that" denial? If he really hasn't given any thought to the idea that the war on terror, which he has so frequently described as a battle between "good" and "evil," is in any way connected to the Biblical battle of Armageddon, wouldn't a simple "Hell no" have sufficed?


OTHER HUFF POST BLOGGERS: Rep. John Conyers, RJ Eskow, Nora Ephron, Harry Shearer, Trey Ellis, Jerry and Joe Long, Paul Rieckhoff, All Bloggers 


More Blog Posts from Arianna Huffington

Still Optimistic About Iraq? You Just Might Be a Fanatic
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/still-optimistic-about-ir_b_17607.html>

John Ashcroft, Lobbyist: "Let the Earnings Soar"
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/john-ashcroft-lobbyist-_b_17559.html>


Top Blog Posts on HuffingtonPost.com

Jane Smiley: Notes for Converts
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-smiley/notes-for-converts_b_17662.html>

Bob Cesca: WAH! The President Fielded Tough Questions For Once. WAH! 
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-cesca/wah-the-president-field_b_17702.html>

Laurie David: Mr. Luna's Bright Idea
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/laurie-david/mr-lunas-bright-idea_b_17550.html>

Rachel Sklar: Welcome to Senator Bill Napoli's X-Rated Mind
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rachel-sklar/welcome-to-senator-bill-n_b_17669.html>


Top News Stories on HuffingtonPost.com

Bush Admin. Hiring Chinese Company To Detect Nukes Inside Cargo Heading To US... 
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2006/03/23/bush-admin-hiring-chines_n_17782.html>

Study: New York, London, Tokyo To Be 20 Ft. Underwater by 2100...
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2006/03/23/study-new-york-london-_n_17799.html>

"Lord Of The Rings" The Musical Opens With $23M Price Tag...
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2006/03/24/lord-of-the-rings-t_n_17818.html>


Copyright (C) 2006 HuffingtonPost.com, LLC

To prevent mailbox filters from deleting mailings from Arianna Huffington, add arianna at huffingtonpost.com to your address book.

To remove yourself from this mailing, please go to http://www.kintera.org/TR.asp?ID=M715233616701125925626265

To modify your profile, please go to http://www.kintera.org/TR.asp?ID=M715233626701125925626265
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060324/15675dad/attachment.htm 

From ethics_in_action at venusproject.com  Fri Mar 24 14:52:02 2006
From: ethics_in_action at venusproject.com (Bahram Maskanian)
Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 17:52:02 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] - The Mistake Of, - - I Better Do Nothing,
 Because I Could Do So Little - -
Message-ID: <E1FMxFb-0008K9-P2@elasmtp-mealy.atl.sa.earthlink.net>




  The Mistake Of, - - I Better Do Nothing,
  Because I Could Do So Little - -

http://www.venusproject.com/ethics_in_action/Mistake_of_Doing_So_Little.html 

- By Bahram Maskanian - January 09, 2006

Recently, in the past few months I noticed a whole lot of new 
subscribers signing up, many of whom seems that just been woken up to 
their first moment of - - Holy Shit, They Did What? - -.

The shutting up of the American public and stifling the little free 
speech there was, can clearly be traced back to that momentous historic 
event on the - November 22, 1963 -, when four (4) shots rung out, 
killing JFK. At that very same moment the last possible chance for human 
spirit to soar, and creativity to erupt on Earth was effectively 
extinguished by the criminal ruling elites, and we, the people have been 
living in the ruins of what could have been the best, the biggest and 
the brightest era of human evolution ever since.

I am glad to see so many of our fellow humankinds are waking up and 
joining the forces of change, democracy and human rights. Through this 
unity we must make sure that the tragic events of - September 11, 2001 
-, are the last attempt by the criminal ruling elites to stop 
civilization and human progress at its tracks.

I have been getting lots of mail, people asking - - what could I do - -?

To those who asked the above question I say: - that there is no bigger 
mistake, than the mistake of thinking, - - I better do nothing, because 
I could do so little - -. Oceans on Earth have accumulated their waters 
and have grown, - drop by drop -. We are each a drop in the ocean of 
humanity and together we can easily and peacefully set fourth the 
necessary changes for taking control of our own lives and destiny.

2006 is going to be a wonderful historic year. The year 2006 is the 
congressional election year. The widely believed popular myth, that 
power lies with the executive branch - office of the president - of US 
government, it is just that, a myth. The true power of US government 
lies with United States Congress. US president cannot do anything 
without congress's approval and more importantly without congress 
appropriating funds for it.

So you see, the power is, and have always been in our hands. We, the 
people, every two (2) years hand over our power to our congressional 
representatives thinking that they are going to do what is best for the 
country and the people utilizing the wisdom of common sense based on 
ethical standards. - WRONG, if we do not keep their feet to the fire 
they will soon be corrupted and encouraged to switch side working for 
the opposing force, which is known as the LOBBYIST. -

We must begin organizing at home first, then go to our neighbors and 
start a peaceful and respectful dialogue, working together to elect 
ethical and knowledgeable individuals to represent us the people in our 
house of representatives, Unites States Congress.

We, the people are consisting of a diverse group of free-thing 
independent individuals. What unite us all, should be the nine (9) 
simple and yet vital principles below:

    1 - Defend / safeguard the constitution of the United States of
    America.

    2 - Defend / safeguard human rights, gender equality and freedom of
    speech.

    3 - Defend / safeguard the health and integrity of our environment
    in which we all live.

    4 - Defend / safeguard the development of our democracy and true
    independence.

    5 - Defend / safeguard the security, fairness and honesty of our
    election procedures.

    6 - Defend / safeguard free press, fair, honest and unbiased
    journalism.

    7 - Defend / safeguard peaceful means of boycott and conflict
    resolution.

    8 - Defend / safeguard the civil rights act championed by Dr. Martin
    Luther King Jr.

    9 - Defend / safeguard establishing a respectful, dignifying and
    multilateral relationship with other nations of the world.

So lets set aside our trivial divisive differences and get to work as 
one united nation.


    Are you on - Circles Of Unity And Engagement - Ethics In Action
    Community <http://www.venusproject.com/ethics_in_action/> - mailing
    list by mistake? If yes, just say so. - You will be removed
    immediately.

    - Please Unsubscribe Me -
    <mailto:ethics_in_action at venusproject.com?Subject=Please%20Unsubscribe%20Me%20From%20%0A-%20Ethics%20In%20Action%20-%20Mailing%20List&Body=I%20no%20longer%20wish%20to%20receive%20mail%20from%20%0A-%20Ethics%20In%20Action%20->

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060324/9cb12601/attachment.htm 

From emailthis at motherjones.com  Fri Mar 24 17:06:15 2006
From: emailthis at motherjones.com (emailthis at motherjones.com)
Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 17:06:15 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Uncle Bucky makes out like a...Bush
Message-ID: <200603250106.k2P16FnM021890@linux19585.dn.net>



Uncle Bucky makes out like a...Bush 
03/23/06  10:15 AM 

     

     George W. Bush's Uncle Bucky (William H.T. Bush), brother of George H.W. Bush, has collected about $1.9 million in cash, plus $800,000 in stocks, from the recent sale of Engineered Support Systems, Inc. ESSI, of which Bush was a director, was sold to DRS Technologies for $1.7 billion at the end of January, after the company experienced record growth from expanded military contracts, most related to activity in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

     The contracts, some awarded on a no-bid basis, include a $77-million deal to refit military vehicles with armor for use in Iraq. 

     Securities and Exchange Commission filings indicate that there are two investigations of ESSI in progress. One involves a stop order from the U.S. government on field generator units. It seems ESSI did not tell its shareholders about the stop order until seven months after it was issued. During that seven month period, several of the company's executives, including William Bush, cashed in millions of dollars worth of stock and stock options. 

     DRS is not commenting on the investigations (the second one involves an insurance contract), other than to say it is cooperating with SEC officials. 
     
- Diane E. Dees

Read the MoJo Blog online for more:

     http://www.motherjones.com/mojoblog

@2006 The Foundation for National Progress


From michael at intrafi.com  Fri Mar 24 17:24:32 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 17:24:32 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] Alternet: Bring the Sixties Out of the Closet
Message-ID: <20060325012432.1B5F0B8081@alternet.org>


This story has been forwarded to you from
http://www.alternet.org by michael at intrafi.com



-------------------------------------
Bring the Sixties Out of the Closet
http://www.alternet.org/story/33896

We need to resurrect the good '60s -- a time when acting, despite being messy and imperfect, made a lot of good things happen.
-------------------------------------


From michael at intrafi.com  Fri Mar 24 17:25:52 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 17:25:52 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] Alternet: Student Debts, Stunted Lives
Message-ID: <20060325012552.BC7BCB8078@alternet.org>


This story has been forwarded to you from
http://www.alternet.org by michael at intrafi.com



-------------------------------------
Student Debts, Stunted Lives
http://www.alternet.org/story/33861

If students during the '60s had been saddled with the debts our present-day young people carry, there might not have been a civil rights movement.
-------------------------------------


From michael at intrafi.com  Fri Mar 24 17:27:19 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 17:27:19 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] Alternet: Excerpt: Life Out of Context
Message-ID: <20060325012719.7A4D3B8078@alternet.org>


This story has been forwarded to you from
http://www.alternet.org by michael at intrafi.com



-------------------------------------
Excerpt: Life Out of Context
http://www.alternet.org/story/33952

Since natural reasons are not motivating us to unite, we have to create a rallying point -- a reason for us to get together and work as One.
-------------------------------------


From swiggard at comcast.net  Sat Mar 25 05:09:49 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2006 08:09:49 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Russians Helped Iraq, Study Says - Washington Post
Message-ID: <4425411D.8090908@comcast.net>

Russians Helped Iraq, Study Says
Papers Show Hussein Was Tipped Off About U.S. Strategy During Invasion

By Ann Scott Tyson and Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, March 25, 2006; A01

Russian officials collected intelligence on U.S. troop movements and 
attack plans from inside the American military command leading the 2003 
invasion of Iraq and passed that information to Iraqi leader Saddam 
Hussein, according to a U.S. military study released yesterday.

The intelligence reports, which the study said were provided to Hussein 
through the Russian ambassador in Baghdad at the height of the U.S. 
assault, warned accurately that American formations intended to bypass 
Iraqi cities on their thrust toward Baghdad. The reports provided some 
specific numbers on U.S. troops, units and locations, according to Iraqi 
documents dated March and April 2003 and later captured by the United 
States.

"The information that the Russians have collected from their sources 
inside the American Central Command in Doha is that the United States is 
convinced that occupying Iraqi cities are impossible, and that they have 
changed their tactic," said one captured Iraqi document titled "Letter 
from Russian Official to Presidential Secretary Concerning American 
Intentions in Iraq" and dated March 25, 2003.

A Russian official at the United Nations strongly rejected the 
allegations that Russian officials gave information to Baghdad. "This is 
absolutely nonsense," said Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman for the 
Russian mission to the United Nations. She said the allegations were 
never presented to the Russian government before being issued to the 
news media.

Russia was among the nations opposed to the U.S. war with Iraq. Russian 
President Vladimir Putin warned on the eve of the U.S.-led invasion in 
March 2003 that an American attack would have grave consequences. He 
urged Washington to resolve its conflicts with Baghdad peacefully.

The study gives no indication who the alleged sources inside the U.S. 
Central Command might have been, or whether American officials believe 
the Kremlin authorized the transfer of information to Hussein's government.

The Central Command, which oversees military operations in the Middle 
East and is headquartered in Tampa, did not respond to requests for 
comment. A State Department spokeswoman declined to comment.

The U.S. military and defense officials who released the study said the 
revelations about Russia in the captured documents came as a surprise. 
They said they believe the captured Iraqi documents are authentic.

"Certainly, sure, I was surprised," said Army Brig. Gen. Anthony A. 
Cucolo III, director of the Joint Center for Operational Analysis and 
Lessons Learned under the Joint Forces Command in Norfolk. He said he 
thinks the alleged Russian intelligence-sharing was linked to Moscow's 
commercial interests in Iraq. "Essentially, it's driven by economic 
interests," he told reporters at the Pentagon. "I don't see it as an 
aberration. I see it as a follow-on to economic engagement." Retired Lt. 
Col. Kevin M. Woods, the project director, said he has "no reason to 
doubt the Iraqi documents."

The 210-page study, called the Iraqi Perspectives Project, draws on 
declassified information from an internal U.S. military report that was 
based on the examination of more than half a million files of Iraqi 
documents and dozens of interviews with former senior Iraqi military and 
political leaders. Some of that information remains classified.

The study offers little analysis of the consequences for the U.S. 
military of the alleged Russian-supplied intelligence, which was 
received by what the study depicts as a hopelessly confused Iraqi chain 
of command.

One document, for example, was sent to Hussein as rumors swirled in 
Baghdad that the main American military push would come not from the 
south -- as it in fact did -- but through Jordan into western Iraq, a 
misperception that U.S. Special Forces units operating throughout the 
western desert were seeking to create.

"Significantly, the regime was also receiving intelligence from the 
Russians that fed suspicions that the attack out of Kuwait was merely a 
diversion," the study says, citing the March 25 document.

Another captured Iraqi document, dated April 2, 2003, said Russian 
intelligence had reported to Hussein more detailed and potentially 
damaging information: The Americans had their heaviest concentration of 
forces, 12,000 troops and 1,000 vehicles, near the Iraqi city of Karbala 
and were moving to cut off Baghdad.

In fact, the Army's 3rd Infantry Division and other U.S. forces at the 
time were making a precarious move through a narrow strip of land known 
as the Karbala Gap, where they anticipated major resistance from the 
Iraqi Republican Guard and possible chemical or biological weapons attacks.

One senior Republican Guard commander, Raad Majid Rashid al-Hamdani, 
issued a warning in line with the Russian intelligence when he told 
Hussein's son Qusay that the main U.S. attack was coming past Karbala. 
But Hamdani was largely ignored by Qusay Hussein and other generals, to 
his dismay, he told the authors of the study while describing the 
internal debates in an interview. "It was the kind of arguments that I 
imagine took place in Hitler's bunker in Berlin. Were all these men on 
drugs?" he said.

Michael E. O'Hanlon, a defense expert at the Brookings Institution, said 
the passing of information on U.S. troop movements during combat, if 
true, constituted "a stark betrayal." He added: "I think we should be 
demanding a fairly clear explanation from Moscow."

But Celeste A. Wallander, director of the Russia and Eurasia program at 
the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that although 
Russia probably had intelligence on U.S. war plans, she is skeptical 
that the Kremlin would have ordered that it be passed to Hussein's 
government.

It is more likely that a "freelancing" Russian official such as the 
ambassador in Baghdad personally shuttled the information, she said.

"If it were the case that the Kremlin had approved passing along what 
the Russian military knew about American war planning, that would be 
extraordinary," Wallander said.

"If it were ordered, it would be a direct action that would in effect 
help another country to use more effectively their military forces 
against U.S. forces."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/24/AR2006032400996.html?referrer=email
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060325/54abe33c/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sat Mar 25 05:11:34 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2006 08:11:34 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Near Paul Revere Country,
 Anti-Bush Cries Get Louder - Washington Post
Message-ID: <44254186.30305@comcast.net>

Near Paul Revere Country, Anti-Bush Cries Get Louder

By Michael Powell
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 25, 2006; A01

HOLYOKE, Mass. -- To drive through the mill towns and curling country 
roads here is to journey into New England's impeachment belt. Three of 
this state's 10 House members have called for the investigation and 
possible impeachment of President Bush.

Thirty miles north, residents in four Vermont villages voted earlier 
this month at annual town meetings to buy more rock salt, approve school 
budgets, and impeach the president for lying about Iraq having weapons 
of mass destruction and for sanctioning torture.

Window cleaner Ira Clemons put down his squeegee in the lobby of a city 
mall and stroked his goatee as he considered the question: Would you 
support your congressman's call to impeach Bush? His smile grew until it 
looked like a three-quarters moon.

"Why not? The man's been lying from Jump Street on the war in Iraq," 
Clemons said. "Bush says there were weapons of mass destruction, but 
there wasn't. Says we had enough soldiers, but we didn't. Says it's not 
a civil war -- but it is." He added: "I was really upset about 9/11 -- 
so don't lie to me."

It would be a considerable overstatement to say the fledgling 
impeachment movement threatens to topple a presidency -- there are just 
33 House co-sponsors of a motion by Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) to 
investigate and perhaps impeach Bush, and a large majority of elected 
Democrats think it is a bad idea. But talk bubbles up in many corners of 
the nation, and on the Internet, where several Web sites have led the 
charge, giving liberals an outlet for anger that has been years in the 
making.

"The value of a powerful idea, like impeachment of the president for 
criminal acts, is that it has a long shelf life and opens a debate," 
said Bill Goodman of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which 
represents Guantanamo Bay detainees.

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted last month to urge Congress 
to impeach Bush, as have state Democratic parties, including those of 
New Mexico, Nevada, North Carolina and Wisconsin. A Zogby International 
poll showed that 51 percent of respondents agreed that Bush should be 
impeached if he lied about Iraq, a far greater percentage than believed 
President Bill Clinton should be impeached during the Monica S. Lewinsky 
scandal.

And Harper's Magazine this month ran a cover piece titled "The Case for 
Impeachment: Why We Can No Longer Afford George W. Bush."

"If the president says 'We made mistakes,' fine, let's move on," said 
Rep. Michael E. Capuano (D-Mass.). "But if he lied to get America into a 
war, I can't imagine anything more impeachable."

Democrats remain far from unified. Prominent party leaders -- and a 
large majority of those in Congress -- distance themselves from the 
effort. They say the very word is a distraction, that talk of 
impeachment and censure reflect the polarization of politics. Activists 
spend too many hours dialing Democratic politicians and angrily 
demanding impeachment votes, they say.

In California, poet Kevin Hearle, an impeachment supporter, is 
challenging liberal Rep. Tom Lantos -- who opposes impeachment -- in the 
Democratic primary in June.

"Impeachment is an outlet for anger and frustration, which I share, but 
politics ain't therapy," said Rep. Barney Frank, a Massachusetts liberal 
who declined to sign the Conyers resolution. "Bush would much rather 
debate impeachment than the disastrous war in Iraq."

The GOP establishment has welcomed the threat. It has been a rough patch 
for the party -- Bush's approval ratings in polls are lower than for any 
president in recent history. With midterm elections in the offing, 
Republican leaders view impeachment as kerosene poured on the bonfires 
of their party base.

"The Democrats' plan for 2006?" Republican National Committee Chairman 
Ken Mehlman wrote in a fundraising e-mail Thursday. "Take the House and 
Senate and impeach the president. With our nation at war, is this the 
kind of Congress you want?"

The argument for an impeachment inquiry -- which draws support from 
prominent constitutional scholars such as Harvard's Laurence H. Tribe 
and former Reagan deputy attorney general Bruce Fein -- centers on 
Bush's conduct before and after the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

It is argued that Bush and his officials conspired to manufacture 
evidence of weapons of mass destruction to persuade Congress to approve 
the invasion. Former Treasury secretary Paul H. O'Neill told CBS News's 
"60 Minutes" that "from the very beginning there was a conviction that 
Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go . . . it was 
all about finding a way to do it." And a senior British intelligence 
official wrote in what is now known as the "Downing Street memo" that 
Bush officials were intent on fixing "the intelligence and the facts . . 
. around the policy."

Critics point to Bush's approval of harsh interrogations of prisoners 
captured Iraq and Afghanistan, tactics that human rights groups such as 
Amnesty International say amount to torture. Bush also authorized 
warrantless electronic surveillance of telephone calls and e-mails, 
subjecting possibly thousands of Americans each year to eavesdropping 
since 2001.

"Bush is saying 'I'm the president' and, on a range of issues -- from 
war to torture to illegal surveillance -- 'I can do as I like,' " said 
Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights. "This 
administration needs to be slapped down and held accountable for actions 
that could change the shape of our democracy."

Tribe wrote Conyers, dismissing Bush's defense of warrantless 
surveillance as "poppycock." It constituted, Tribe concluded, "as grave 
an abuse of executive authority as I can recall ever having studied."

But posed against this bill of aggrievement are legal and practical 
realities. Not all scholars, even of a liberal bent, agree that Bush has 
committed "high crimes and misdemeanors." Bush's legal advice may be 
wrong, they say, but still reside within the bounds of reason.

"The Clinton impeachment was plainly unconstitutional, and a Bush 
impeachment would be nearly as bad," said Cass R. Sunstein, a professor 
of constitutional law at the University of Chicago. "There is a very 
good argument that the president had it wrong on WMD in Iraq but that he 
was acting in complete good faith."

Sunstein argues that Bush's decision to conduct surveillance of 
Americans without court approval flowed from Congress's vote to allow an 
armed struggle against al-Qaeda. "If you can kill them, why can't you 
spy on them?" Sunstein said, adding that this is a minority view.

Here in Massachusetts and Vermont, though, in the back roads and on the 
streets of Holyoke and Springfield, the discontent with Bush is 
palpable. These are states that, per capita, have sent disproportionate 
numbers of soldiers to Iraq. Many in these middle- and working-class 
towns are not pleased that so many friends and cousins are coming back 
wounded or dead.

"He picks and chooses his information and can't admit it's erroneous, 
and he annoys me," said Colleen Kucinski, walking Aleks, 5, and Gregory, 
2, home.

Would she support impeachment? Kucinski wags her head "yes" before the 
question is finished. "Without a doubt. This is far more serious than 
Clinton and Monica. This is about life and death. We're fighting a war 
on his say-so and it was all wrong."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/24/AR2006032402248.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060325/88f26a4e/attachment-0001.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sat Mar 25 05:12:55 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2006 08:12:55 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Fox News, Decaf Help Keep Cheney Happy - Associated Press
Message-ID: <442541D7.3040700@comcast.net>

Fox News, Decaf Help Keep Cheney Happy

The Associated Press
Friday, March 24, 2006; 9:23 AM

WASHINGTON -- It doesn't take much to make Dick Cheney at home on the 
road: Diet Sprite, a pot of coffee _ both sans caffeine _ and a TV tuned 
to Fox News Channel.

No matter how controversial his policies or how great his political 
power, the vice president has kept any excitement in his personal life 
and habits under deep cover (except for that one hunting trip).

So perhaps it isn't surprising that the newly unearthed memo Cheney's 
office sends to hotels, outlining his "downtime requirements," contains 
no shockers or even rock star-like indulgences. The memo, obtained by 
the Web site The Smoking Gun, makes such modest requests as:

_A suite with a king- or queen-size bed and a connecting parlor.

_Four to six bottles of bottled water (specifically the name brands 
Calistoga or Perrier, if Mrs. Cheney is traveling with the vice president).

_Diet Caffeine Free Sprite, 4 cans.

Also, the hotel staff is advised, when the veep arrives all lights 
should be turned on, a freshly brewed pot of decaf should be waiting, 
and the room should be 68 degrees, with "all televisions tuned to FOX News."

And, by the way, if the hotel would like to leave a gift in the suite, 
please let the vice president's office know in advance.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/24/AR2006032400647.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060325/5e5cc9b7/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sat Mar 25 05:15:17 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2006 08:15:17 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Not By Math Alone - Sandra Day O'Connor,
 Roy Romer - Washington Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <44254265.4060404@comcast.net>

Not By Math Alone
<>
By Sandra Day O'Connor and Roy Romer
The Washington Post
Saturday, March 25, 2006; A19

Fierce global competition prompted President Bush to use the State of 
the Union address to call for better math and science education, where 
there's evidence that many schools are falling short.

We should be equally troubled by another shortcoming in American 
schools: Most young people today simply do not have an adequate 
understanding of how our government and political system work, and they 
are thus not well prepared to participate as citizens.

This country has long exemplified democratic practice to the rest of the 
world. With the attention we are paying to advancing democracy abroad, 
we ought not neglect it at home.

Two-thirds of 12th-graders scored below "proficient" on the last 
national civics assessment in 1998, and only 9 percent could list two 
ways a democracy benefits from citizen participation. Yes, young people 
remain highly patriotic, and many volunteer in their communities. But 
most are largely disconnected from current events and issues.

A healthy democracy depends on the participation of citizens, and that 
participation is learned behavior; it doesn't just happen. As the 2003 
report "The Civic Mission of Schools" noted: "Individuals do not 
automatically become free and responsible citizens, but must be educated 
for citizenship." That means civic learning -- educating students for 
democracy -- needs to be on par with other academic subjects.

This is not a new idea. Our first public schools saw education for 
citizenship as a core part of their mission. Eighty years ago, John 
Dewey said, "Democracy needs to be reborn in every generation and 
education is its midwife."

But in recent years, civic learning has been pushed aside. Until the 
1960s, three courses in civics and government were common in American 
high schools, and two of them ("civics" and "problems of democracy") 
explored the role of citizens and encouraged students to discuss current 
issues. Today those courses are very rare.

What remains is a course on "American government" that usually spends 
little time on how people can -- and why they should -- participate. The 
effect of reduced civic learning on civic life is not theoretical. 
Research shows that the better people understand our history and system 
of government, the more likely they are to vote and participate in the 
civic life.

We need more and better classes to impart the knowledge of government, 
history, law and current events that students need to understand and 
participate in a democratic republic. And we also know that much 
effective civic learning takes place beyond the classroom -- in 
extracurricular activity, service work that is connected to class work, 
and other ways students experience civic life.

Preserving our democracy should be reason enough to promote civic 
learning. But there are other benefits. Understanding society and how we 
relate to each other fosters the attitudes essential for success in 
college, work and communities; it enhances student learning in other 
subjects.

Economic and technological competitiveness is essential, and America's 
economy and technology have flourished because of the rule of law and 
the "assets" of a free and open society. Democracy has been good for 
business and for economic well-being. By the same token, failing to hone 
the civic tools of democracy will have economic consequences.

Bill Gates -- a top business and technology leader -- argues strongly 
that schools have to prepare students not only for college and career 
but for citizenship as well.

None of this is to diminish the importance of improving math and science 
education. This latest push, as well as the earlier emphasis on 
literacy, deserves support. It should also be the occasion for a broader 
commitment, and that means restoring education for democracy to its 
central place in school.

We need more students proficient in math, science and engineering. We 
also need them to be prepared for their role as citizens. Only then can 
self-government work. Only then will we not only be more competitive but 
also remain the beacon of liberty in a tumultuous world.

Sandra Day O'Connor retired as an associate justice of the Supreme 
Court. Roy Romer, a former governor of Colorado, is superintendent of 
the Los Angeles Unified School District. They are co-chairs of the 
national advisory council of the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/24/AR2006032401621.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060325/8954d0a9/attachment.htm 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Sat Mar 25 05:19:48 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2006 08:19:48 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Speak softly and carry a smaller stick
Message-ID: <001401c6500e$ce5eee90$b53fe440@Harold>

 Reprinted from the International Herald Tribune

HS


Tracking American isolationism: Speak softly and carry a smaller stick 
Andrew Kohut The New York Times 
SATURDAY, MARCH 25, 2006 
WASHINGTON 'We shouldn't allow isolationism and protectionism to overwhelm us," President George W. Bush said in his press conference last Tuesday. Recent opinion surveys affirm that isolationist sentiment has increased in recent years.

But while these trends represent significant shifts in attitudes, it would be a mistake to conclude that this country is becoming isolationist. There is no sign that most Americans want the United States to turn its back on the world or that anti-foreign sentiment in this country is rising.

Discontent with Bush's policies, notably on Iraq, has led to widespread public frustration. While it has also created more isolationists, they remain a minority.

A survey by my center and the Council on Foreign Relations last fall reported that the percentage of the public who said that the United States should "'mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own" climbed to 42 percent last year from 34 percent in 2004. These are levels seen during the mid-1970's, following the Vietnam War, and in the 1990's after the Cold War ended.

Now as then, however, most Americans disagree with this sentiment. Huge majorities, including many who express some isolationist sentiments, believe that the United States should consider the views of its allies in making foreign policy, and they acknowledge America's leadership role in the world.

Polls also find no rise in broad-based anti-foreign sentiment. Americans, in fact, rate most countries more favorably than people in other countries rate the United States.

A Gallup survey in February showed 54 percent of the public holding a favorable view of France and 79 percent a favorable opinion of Germany. In contrast, just 41 percent of the Germans and 43 percent of the French expressed favorable views of the United States in last year's Pew Global Attitudes Survey.

Further, there is no sign of increased alarm about rivals to the United States. Americans are less inclined now than in the past to view China as an adversary, and few express worries about its rising economic might.

Americans also favor a stronger European Union and closer relations with Europe. Fully 66 percent of Americans think the partnership of the United States and Western European on security and diplomatic matters should remain as close it has been the past. Only 26 percent of the French, 39 percent of the German and 42 percent of the British respondents felt the same way in our survey.

Even after the uproar over the bid by a Dubai- based company to take over facilities in American ports, Americans continue to welcome foreign investment and are much less worried about foreign ownership of American companies than they were at the end of the 1980s.

The rejection of the Dubai ports deal appears to reflect not xenophobia but a deep concern about Arab terrorism. While a narrow majority of respondents (53 percent) to a Pew survey last week expressed a negative view of foreign investors owning American companies, 70 percent did so in 1989, when high-profile acquisitions of American businesses by Japanese companies provoked widespread concern.

Moreover, by a 53 percent to 36 percent margin, Americans view foreign companies investing in the United States as a good thing. Two-thirds of Americans (66 percent) believe free trade is good for the United States. This view is largely unchanged since 2000, even though public concern about the outsourcing of American jobs has risen sharply.

All this shows that America's current mood is less a rejection of the rest of the world than it is a deep concern about terrorism and a growing wariness about America's own assertive foreign policy.

The American experience in Iraq has reduced support for pre-emptive wars. The belief that it is justifiable to use military force against countries that threaten us but have not attacked us fell from 67 percent in May 2003, when the war in Iraq seemed a success, to just 52 percent last autumn.

Unfortunately, the uptick in isolationism has the potential for dangerous political consequences. In an election year, politicians in both parties (each of which has significant isolationist minorities) may feel compelled to play to sentiments that do not reflect the beliefs of the majority, urging the United States to pull back on its global commitments, move away from free trade and close its borders. 

(Andrew Kohut is president of the Pew Research Center and co-author of the forthcoming "Americans Against the World.")

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060325/b8c8ab36/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sat Mar 25 05:18:47 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2006 08:18:47 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Loving to Hate Hillary - Richard Cohen - Washington Post
	Op-Ed
Message-ID: <44254337.3080305@comcast.net>

Loving to Hate Hillary
<>
By Richard Cohen
The Washington Post
Saturday, March 25, 2006; 12:00 AM

In order to understand what's going on with Hillary Clinton, it helps to 
recall a woman who lost her head and therefore her life in 1793: Marie 
Antoinette. She is probably best remembered as the spoiled 
princess-cum-queen who said, "Let them eat cake" -- a remark (the 
"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job" of its day) that would have 
shown how callous and out of touch she was, if she had ever said it. She 
did not.

In her own time, though, it was not merely what she supposedly said that 
defamed her and made her so unpopular, it was also her alleged behavior. 
She was manufactured into an Austrian-born slut who, as Stefan Zweig put 
it in his classic biography, was (falsely) "guilty of every crime, every 
form of moral corruption, every perversion." It was necessary to have 
someone like her to embody the greed and corruption of the upper 
classes. It was necessary, in fact, to have a woman because male 
sexuality is, let's face it, not all that interesting. Contrast her, in 
fact, with her husband. Louis XVI was king and he, too, died on the 
guillotine but he, sad fellow, is mostly forgotten.

My feminist credentials have been impeached of late, but whatever I am, 
I am struck by the Marie Antoinette-ish treatment of Hillary Rodham 
Clinton. More than 30 books have been written about Clinton, some of 
them as vituperative and ugly as any written about the late Queen of 
France. They have questioned Hillary's honesty, sexuality, parenting, 
wifing and just about everything else. Just as Marie came to personify 
all that was wrong with the aristocracy, so Hillary has come to 
personify all that is wrong with Bill, the Democrats, liberals, working 
women, independent women and women of a certain kind -- which is any 
kind you don't happen to like. No man could possibly match her in that 
department -- or departments.

It is, of course, Hillary's very wifeyness that titillates. All wives 
are mysterious to others (even to their husbands, I suspect) since their 
relationships to their men are not based on merit, as we know it, or 
patronage, as we know it, but on love and sex (at first), children 
(after a while) and then something else. Since we do not know our own 
marriages, we cannot know anyone else's. This engenders endless 
speculation about the distribution of power and the importance of pillow 
talk. (Somehow, it's OK for the unelected Karl Rove to advise Bush, but 
if Laura did it, some people would go nuts.) Did Nancy Reagan actually 
tell Ron what to do? What about Eleanor Roosevelt -- especially Eleanor? 
She was even more vilified than Franklin and all she ever did was go 
down into a coal mine, invite Marian Anderson to sing on the Mall and 
make some speeches in that high, squeaky voice of hers. Hardly worth 
hating, you'd think. But, oh, she was certainly hated.

Hillary, of course, is a very famous and very mysterious wife. We need 
not enumerate the reasons. They were more or less impeachable. Did she 
know? How could she not have known? Was she complicit? Is she an 
enabler? And now that she is a public official in her own right, even 
more mystery attaches to her. Who is she? What, exactly, are her 
politics? Is she a Cubs or a Yankees fan?

It's true, of course, that Hillary is widely considered a presidential 
candidate and so a certain amount of attention is warranted. In the last 
month alone, though, The New York Times has mentioned her about 60 times 
compared to 45 for her more senior colleague, Sen. Charles Schumer, the 
uncrowned (but undisputed) heavyweight champion of publicity until 
Clinton came along. Some of the Times' stories are merely about her 
existence -- they say little more than that -- and in this they are 
similar to those in other papers. It's obvious some people think that 
Hillary sells newspapers, although as we all know, nothing does anymore.

Some scrutiny of a possible president, even a mere senator, is expected, 
even required. But for one person to be so loved, so hated, and of such 
compelling interest -- so much more a celebrity than, say, John McCain 
-- suggests that more than politics is involved. Like Marie Antoinette, 
Hillary has emerged as the repository of so many fears, so much dread, 
such aspirations -- so much good and bad -- that we have to look past 
her office or her ambitions and suggest, strongly, that something deeply 
Freudian is at work. It was Freud, after all, who spoke for all men (and 
many women) by asking, "What do women want?" Now -- some fear, others 
hope -- we may finally have the answer.

The White House.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/24/AR2006032401279.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060325/a4747bc6/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sat Mar 25 05:21:31 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2006 08:21:31 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Making US manufacturing work - Robert Kuttner - Boston
	Globe Op-Ed
Message-ID: <442543DB.6000402@comcast.net>


  Making US manufacturing work

By Robert Kuttner  |  March 25, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

GENERAL MOTORS and the United Auto Workers stunned Wall Street and the 
labor movement this week by proposing the ultimate buyout package. GM 
proposes to pension off every one of its 131,000 GM and Delphi workers 
in the United States, with cash bonuses of up to $140,000 for taking 
early retirement.

Who would make the cars? A new generation of lower-paid workers. It is a 
mark of GM's fragility that the UAW considers this about the best deal 
the union can get.

GM lost $10.6 billion last year. Its bonds are now classified junk. The 
stock market values the entire company at just $12.4 billion, a fraction 
of Toyota's $177 billion. Wall Street reacted to the prospect of this 
daring desperation plan by bidding up GM stock -- by exactly one cent.

GM once made nearly half the autos sold in America; it now sells about 
one in four, many of them imports. What went so wrong? And what does 
this say about the future of US manufacturing and trade unionism?

For starters, as a frequent renter, I conclude that GM makes cars 
consumers don't want. Compared with Japanese, Korean, and European 
competitors, the steering is slushy, the instrument panel needlessly 
confusing, and the feel cheesy. The reliability ratings are less than 
impressive. With a few nice exceptions, the designs are weird. Even the 
latest Caddy looks like it wants to be a Hummer.

Ever since the abortive Corvair, GM executives have been promising to 
learn from the competition, but they never do. Meanwhile, GM is stuck 
with a once-proud social contract that was defensible in the era of 
scant imports and a Big Three monopoly: GM would pay good health and 
pension benefits, as well as decent wages. But GM's foreign competitors 
live in nations with universal health insurance, giving domestic 
automakers a cost disadvantage from the get-go.

Even so, total labor costs for automakers are actually about $10 an hour 
higher in Germany, which manages to compete by making terrific cars. If 
GM management were not such a mess, its workers would not be paying the 
price.

There is a larger story here. The United States is also needlessly 
losing manufacturing jobs because it hasn't figured out how to compete 
globally. This is partly a story of lazy management, but partly of 
misguided public policy.

Mostly, it is not a story of overpaid production workers. Since 1973, 
total productivity of the US economy is up about 70 percent while the 
median wage of nonsupervisory workers is up about 10 percent, according 
to the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute (on whose board I serve). 
Economist Robert Gordon recently calculated that nearly all the fruits 
of that productivity went to the very top income brackets.

In autos, however, workers in Mexico and China with comparable 
production equipment and skills are paid less than one-10th the US wage. 
To stay in the game, the United States will have to compete smarter.

Yet the United States lacks sensible trade, industrial, technology, and 
labor-market policies to revive domestic manufacturing. Its policies are 
crafted mainly for the benefit of corporations that want the lowest-paid 
workers, regardless of where they are located and whether their home 
governments play fair. Consequently, America welcomes imports, whether 
or not the government of the exporting company subsidizes industry to 
capture market share, steals intellectual property, and honors basic 
labor rights.

Some have proposed smart strategies to reclaim competitive industry and 
good jobs in the United States. A plan by Senator Barack Obama of 
Illinois would relieve automakers of the ''legacy costs" of retiree 
expenses in exchange for Detroit's commitment to put serious money into 
state-of-the art hybrid cars. This idea is disparaged in some circles as 
''industrial policy," as if Japan, Korea, and China did not have 
industrial policies.

The next generation of workers, which will include much lower paid GM 
employees (assuming there is a GM) faces the most unequal distribution 
of wages and opportunities since the Gilded Age a century ago. 
Unionization of the expanding service sector, most of which can't pick 
up and move to China, would help defend wages. But the United States 
shouldn't abandon manufacturing altogether.

Automation means manufacturing will never have the share of jobs that it 
once did. Still, it's not too late to save US manufacturing and at least 
some good industrial jobs. But that will take radical revision of both 
management thinking and of the official free-market ideology.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/25/making_us_manufacturing_work/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060325/1011e9c0/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sat Mar 25 05:23:38 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2006 08:23:38 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Preserving enthusiasm for science - Derrick Z. Jackson -
 Boston Globe Op-Ed
Message-ID: <4425445A.7020702@comcast.net>


  Preserving enthusiasm for science

By Derrick Z. Jackson  |  March 25, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

I HAD the pleasure this week of serving on a board of review that 
approved 17-year-old Travis LeSaffre of Melrose as an Eagle Scout in the 
Boston Minuteman Council. For his Eagle leadership project, he and his 
Troop 635 searched last spring for vernal pools for Melrose's 
conservation commission. In the Northeast, vernal pools are small bodies 
of water that collect water during the moist fall and winter, burst to 
life in the spring, then dry out during the summer.

''A vernal pool is very important because the obligate species which 
live in them, primarily for breeding, return generation after generation 
to the same pool, traveling as much as a mile or as little as a hundred 
feet," LeSaffre wrote in his project workbook. ''If the pool is 
destroyed, by either being filled in or paved over or built on top of, 
the obligate species will not move to another marshland. All life -- 
frogs, salamanders, fairy shrimp, caddis flies -- which breed, live, or 
depend on the pool will die and lose their link to the food chain. Once 
these sites are found, documented, and protected, the species that rely 
on them will be safe."

Obligate species? Join the crowd if you suddenly feel as dumb as we did 
on the board. Once we lifted our jaws back up from the floor, we 
blubbered over this young man. Yesterday, I mentioned LeSaffre's project 
to MIT President Susan Hockfield. Her response was, ''It brings tears to 
my eyes."

The curiosity of LeSaffre is precisely what concerns Hockfield these 
days. President Bush is of late touting a new initiative for K-12 math 
and science. But scientists are distraught over Bush's profound 
disregard for science on global warming and a host of other 
environmental protection issues and deep proposed cuts in research and 
student loans.

Citing NASA cuts, Richard Anthes, president of the University 
Corporation for Atmospheric Research and co-chair of a National Academy 
of Sciences committee on earth observation from space, said our system 
of environmental satellites ''is at risk of collapse." Joan Vernikos, 
former director of NASA's life sciences division, said this month that 
NASA research cuts are a ''terrible blow for US science. Right now, the 
US has leadership in space life science. It is not going to have that 
leadership."

Nobel laureate and Princeton physics professor Joseph Taylor this month 
said on Capitol Hill that budget cuts will drive future astronomers to 
other fields or out of science altogether and ''other bright people will 
decide not to enter." Last week, Granger Morgan, the chairman of the 
Environmental Protection Agency's science advisory board, said on the 
hill, ''We all want environmental decision-making to be based on sound 
science. However, our nation is not investing adequately in producing 
that sound science."

Mentioning slated cuts for a doctoral fellowship program, Morgan asked, 
''Where will the next generation of US environmental scientists come from?"

Hockfield, presiding over the world's beacon for science research, is 
equally concerned. She said that the atmosphere where undergraduates and 
graduate students see their professors ''tearing their hair out for 
funding" is ''dispiriting at best and inhibiting of their careers and 
dreams at worst." She said that in the current absence of a White House 
that champions sound science that America is in the midst of a crisis 
with ''a public that cannot discriminate good science from bad science."

LeSaffre and Troop 635 were frustrated early in their search, finding no 
vernal pools in their first attempts. Then, acting on tips from hikers 
and neighbors and searching for telltale frogs and salamanders near 
ponds, in woods, and on a golf course, they eventually found four 
suspected sites. LeSaffre said that the hardest part was getting his 
fellow Scouts to take the search seriously. They did not think it would 
be fun. Once they started seeing the critters, the excitement began to 
build.

Hockfield wonders how long we can keep that excitement if we keep 
cutting the funding for science. She said the national drive for 
scientific learning she felt as a girl growing up in the shadow of 
Sputnik now resides in places like China. She said that she felt a 
hunger for learning and a physical energy in the streets ''that you 
don't feel here." That is why she said she had a tear in her eye over 
LeSaffre. A teenager who obligates himself to finding obligate species 
is a teen bursting with the energy to fuel tomorrow's science.

''It is marvelous to see that kind of passion," Hockfield said. ''We 
have to fertilize those passions."

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/25/preserving_enthusiasm_for_science/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060325/481314ad/attachment.htm 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Sat Mar 25 05:49:38 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2006 08:49:38 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Compter purchase from China draws fire
Message-ID: <000a01c65012$f8eea2a0$b53fe440@Harold>

More overreaction to foreign investors in America?

HS


State Department computer purchase from China draws fire 
By Keith Bradsher The New York Times 
FRIDAY, MARCH 24, 2006 
HONG KONG A U.S. State Department purchase of more than 15,000 computers produced by Lenovo Group, a company controlled by the Chinese government, is starting to draw criticism in the latest sign of American unease about the role of foreign companies in the American economy.

The computers, worth more than $13 million, are coming from factories in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Monterrey, Mexico, that were part of the personal computer division that Lenovo purchased from International Business Machines last May.

Sean McCormack, a State Department spokesman, said at the department's daily media briefing on Wednesday that the computers were intended for unclassified systems and would be serviced by the former IBM division.

The cost of the contracts was carefully scrutinized, he said, without discussing security issues in any detail.

"The United States takes its responsibilities seriously in terms of getting the best value for the dollar whenever we spend American taxpayer dollars," he said.

The computer contracts are nonetheless drawing criticism from the diverse group of liberal and conservative critics who have been warning about China's growing power for years. These critics have been encouraged by the congressional scrutiny given to a plan by a company controlled by the royal family of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates to acquire operations at six American ports; the company has since agreed to relinquish those operations.

The critics warn that the computer deal could help China spy on American embassies and intelligence-gathering activities by planting extra hardware and software in the computers.

"The opportunities for intelligence gains by the Chinese are phenomenal," said Michael Wessel, a member of the U.S.-China Economic & Security Review Commission, which was created by Congress to monitor and report on the bilateral relationship.

Larry Wortzel, the panel's chairman, said in an interview two weeks ago that while he would not be concerned if Airbus moved an aircraft production line to China, he would be worried if Lenovo ever started to sell computers to U.S. government agencies involved in foreign affairs. Responding Thursday to the Lenovo deal, he said, "Members of Congress, I think, will react very strongly when they see a deal like this come through."

Lenovo has been combining the former IBM operations with its own, and the company announced on March 16 that it would eliminate 1,000 jobs in North America, Europe and Asia.

Lenovo is a publicly traded subsidiary of Legend Holdings, which was started by the Chinese government in 1984 and is still controlled by the government. Lenovo declined on Thursday to comment on the computer sales to the State Department.

Word of the deal began to trickle out Monday when a Lenovo distributor, CDW Government, a wholly owned subsidiary of CDW Corp., sent a press release to business media announcing its success in winning contracts to help the State Department modernize its information technology systems.

CDW, based in Vernon Hills, Illinois, said that it had been carrying out an $11.65 million contract to supply more than 15,000 Lenovo ThinkCentre M51 desktop computers, plus a $1.35 million contract to provide nearly 1,000 Lenovo ThinkCentre M51 minitower computers.

Max Peterson, vice president of federal sales at CDW Government, said that the State Department had approved a list of specific computer models, including the Lenovo models, and had asked computer systems integrators to bid for contracts to meet the department's needs and make their own choices among approved models. CDW won the contracts and chose to begin delivering Lenovo computers at a pace of 500 a week starting in November, he said.

Chinese ownership of Lenovo was never discussed with the State Department through the contract process and the computer deliveries, Peterson said. He noted that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, led by the Treasury Department, had approved the Lenovo acquisition of the IBM division more than a year ago.

The same committee cleared the Dubai ports deal, Wessel said, adding that the panel had no procedures for following up on acquisitions later to see if they had affected national security.

Peterson said that with $1.8 billion in annual public procurement contracts to supply information technology to the federal government and other public bodies, CDW Government was supplying Lenovo computers to a wide range of federal agencies every day. He declined to provide examples of these agencies.

David Barboza in Shanghai contributed reporting for this story
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060325/389fb4b5/attachment-0001.htm 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Sat Mar 25 06:55:31 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2006 09:55:31 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Battle for Baghdad 'has already started'!
Message-ID: <000801c6501c$2d4daf10$b53fe440@Harold>

Reprinted from The Independent Online
Harry

Battle for Baghdad 'has already started' 
By Patrick Cockburn in Arbil 
Published: 25 March 2006 
The battle between Sunni and Shia Muslims for control of Baghdad has already started, say Iraqi political leaders who predict fierce street fighting will break out as each community takes over districts in which it is strongest. 

"The fighting will only stop when a new balance of power has emerged," Fuad Hussein, the chief of staff of Massoud Barzani, the Kurdish leader, said. "Sunni and Shia will each take control of their own area." He said sectarian cleansing had already begun.

Many Iraqi leaders now believe that civil war is inevitable but it will be confined, at least at first, to the capital and surrounding provinces where the population is mixed. "The real battle will be the battle for Baghdad where the Shia have increasing control," said one senior official who did not want his name published. "The army will disintegrate in the first moments of the war because the soldiers are loyal to the Shia, Sunni or Kurdish communities and not to the government." He expected the Americans to stay largely on the sidelines.

Throughout the capital, communities, both Sunni and Shia, are on the move, fleeing districts where they are in a minority and feel under threat. Sometimes they fight back. In the mixed but majority Shia al-Amel district, Sunni householders recently received envelopes containing a Kalashnikov bullet and a letter telling them to get out at once. In this case they contacted the insurgents who killed several Shia neighbours suspected of sending the letters.

"The Sunni will fight for Baghdad," said Mr Hussein. "The Baath party already controls al-Dohra and other Sunni groups dominate Ghazaliyah and Abu Ghraib [districts in south and west Baghdad]."

The Iraqi army is likely to fall apart once inter-communal fighting begins. According to Peter Galbraith, former US diplomat and expert on Iraq, the Iraqi army last summer contained 60 Shia battalions, 45 Sunni battalions, nine Kurdish battalions and one mixed battalion.

The police are even more divided and in Baghdad are largely controlled by the Mehdi Army of the radical nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and the Badr Organisation that has largely been in control of the interior ministry since last May. Sunni Arabs in Baghdad regard the ministry's paramilitary police commanders as Shia death squads.

Mr Hussein gave another reason why the army is weak. "Where you have 3,000 soldiers there will in fact be only 2,000 men [because of ghost soldiers who do not exist and whose salaries are taken by senior officers]," he said. "When it comes to fighting only 500 of those men will turn up."

Iraqi officials and ministers are increasingly in despair at the failure to put together an effective administration in Baghdad. A senior Arab minister, who asked not to be named, said: "The government could end up being only a few buildings in the Green Zone."

The mood among Iraqi leaders, both Arabs and Kurds, is far gloomier in private than the public declarations of the US and British governments. The US President George W Bush called this week for a national unity government in Iraq but Iraqi observers do not expect this to be any more effective than the present government of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari. One said this week: "The real problem is that the Shia and Sunni hate each other and not that we haven't been able to form a government."

The Shia and Kurds will have the advantage in the coming conflict because they have leaders and organisations. The Sunni are divided and only about 30 per cent of the population of the capital. Nevertheless they should be able to hold on to their stronghold in west Baghdad and the Adhamiyah district east of the Tigris. The Shia do not have the strength and probably do not wish to take over the Sunni towns and villages north and west of Baghdad.

Though the Kurds have long sought autonomy close to quasi-independence, their leaders are worried that civil war will increase Iranian and Turkish involvement in Iraq. Mr Hussein said he feared that civil war in Baghdad could spread north to Mosul and Kirkuk where the division is between Kurd and Arab rather than Sunni and Shia.

Already Baghdad resembles Beirut at the start of the Lebanese civil war in 1975, when Christians and Muslims fought each other for control of the city.

.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060325/05611868/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Sat Mar 25 08:11:18 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2006 16:11:18 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: U.S. and Europe Plan Sanctions Against
	Belarus
Message-ID: <20060325161119.DC7C324AFC0@lax-gw02.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

where's the sanctions against us?


INTERNATIONAL / EUROPE | March 25, 2006
U.S. and Europe Plan Sanctions Against Belarus
By C. J. CHIVERS
The sanctions are likely to irritate Russia, which endorsed the presidential election and made light of the violence on Friday.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/25/international/europe/25belarus.html?ex=1143954000&en=add0c890d8228389&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060325/16e0dc75/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Sat Mar 25 08:12:23 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2006 16:12:23 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: The Factories of Lost Children
Message-ID: <20060325161223.EA45524AFBA@lax-gw02.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

OPINION | March 25, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor: The Factories of Lost Children
By KATHARINE WEBER
As long as we don't question the source of the inexpensive clothing we wear, children will die in factory fires overseas.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/25/opinion/25weber.html?ex=1143954000&en=4e927327a696b626&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060325/75dd255a/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Sat Mar 25 08:13:17 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2006 16:13:17 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Follow the Chopsticks
Message-ID: <20060325161317.C422E249EA5@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

OPINION | March 25, 2006
Editorial: Follow the Chopsticks

China is to be commended for using regulatory levers and economic incentives to curb its appetites.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/25/opinion/25sat2.html?ex=1143954000&en=0f9e9e00a3e4fb93&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060325/9361864a/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Sat Mar 25 08:14:51 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2006 16:14:51 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Selling the Forests
Message-ID: <20060325161454.2B66C9FD07@lax-gw05.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

OPINION | March 25, 2006
Editorial: Selling the Forests

It's rarely a good idea to sell off assets to pay normal operating expenses. It's an even worse idea when the assets are chunks of national forest.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/25/opinion/25sat3.html?ex=1143954000&en=26a96cca48dca30b&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060325/563a637b/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Sat Mar 25 08:32:31 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2006 16:32:31 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: On Coup's Anniversary,
	Argentines Vow 'Never Again'
Message-ID: <20060325163232.257DF249ED1@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

read "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" by John Perkins...for "perspective"


INTERNATIONAL / AMERICAS | March 25, 2006
On Coup's Anniversary, Argentines Vow 'Never Again'
By LARRY ROHTER
A coup launched 30 years ago ushered in one of the most murderous dictatorships in modern South American history.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/25/international/americas/25argentina.html?ex=1143954000&en=14134565253d623e&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060325/08ad3425/attachment.htm 

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Sat Mar 25 10:03:48 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2006 10:03:48 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Happiness Is a Warm Gun By MAUREEN DOWD
Message-ID: <C04AC604.2A824%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 25, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Happiness Is a Warm Gun
By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

It doesn't take much to make Dick Cheney happy. According to a list of his
travel perks, printed by the Smoking Gun Web site, all he needs is a few
cans of caffeine-free Diet Sprite, a big bed, a pot of decaf. (And global
hegemony, of course.) Dr. Gloom, who once dismissed conservation as a
"personal virtue," likes all the lights blazing before he gets to a hotel
suite and all the TV's beaming Fox News.

Sometimes happiness means being protected from news about other people's
unhappiness.

Washington may be gripped by a malaise over the miasma in Iraq. But
elsewhere, in business, books and academia, there is a scavenger hunt under
way to root out the scientific, economic and emotional reasons for joy.

When I was in college, in the Vietnam-Watergate era, sullen mugs trumped
smiley faces.

"Happiness was very uncool," my friend Michael Kinsley recalls of his
Harvard days. "There was a huge premium on being depressed."

Leon Wieseltier, who graduated from Columbia about the same time, agrees
that "happiness was considered embarrassing, a mark of shallowness." He
still calls joie de vivre "a sign that you're not paying attention."

But in the Ivy League now, students are eager to embrace the group therapy
of positive thinking. As Carey Goldberg wrote in The Boston Globe, the most
popular Harvard course is one taught by Tal Ben-Shahar about how to shed
pathologies.

You'd think just being lucky enough to get that Harvard edge would cause
elation. But Ms. Goldberg reported that more than 800 students left smiling
and cheering after hearing Dr. Ben-Shahar offer self-help formulas like
these: "Learn to fail or fail to learn"; don't think, "It happened for the
best," but rather, "How can I make the best of what happened?"

He meditated with the students, telling them to "give yourself permission to
just be." A gut on trusting your gut.

If there's post-traumatic stress disorder, he told me, there can be
"post-peak experience order" spurred by music or giving birth. Or making
love ? but "not all the time, unfortunately," he said, laughing.

Martin Seligman, a University of Pennsylvania professor who popularized
positive psychology, says the field is growing because there are ways to
measure it. He adds: "The epidemic of depression seems to be completely
democratic. It hits the Harvard kids and the rich people and the poor people
at about an equal rate."

Dr. Seligman developed the theory of "learned helplessness." He found that
dogs who were given shocks for anything they did would become passive,
accepting shocks they could escape if they tried. Humans, he says, should
try to escape the culture of victimology, the self-absorption of "a huge I
and a small we," and shortcuts like drugs and shopping.

In his class, he offers "positive emotion" exercises. One is writing down
three things that went well during the day. Another is taking someone on a
"strength date," encouraging the person to show off a skill or talent.
Another is writing a "forgiveness letter." (I'm Irish, so I won't be doing
that.)

One of his teaching assistants once told his students they'd all get A's, in
the spirit of positive emotions. But we don't need to worry about a placid
Stepford universe. The guru of good vibes, as Dr. Seligman is called, warns
that people can increase their happiness only within a "set range."

"It's like a waistline," he says. "Everyone can't be happier in the pleasure
sense. Maybe people can be happier in the engagement sense" ? for example,
taking a job where you use your strengths every day ? "and in the sense of
more meaning in life."

Studies show the happiest people are the most resilient. (And probably
regard positive-psych classes as demented psychobabble?) Since they didn't
have to learn to be resilient in the Depression and World War II, yuppies
and their offspring succumbed to narcissism and materialism.

They say money can't buy happiness, but maybe it can buy some. In 2004, two
economists declared that money seemed to buy greater happiness but,
surprisingly, not more sex. (Explain Ron Perelman.) David Blanchflower of
Dartmouth and Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick in England
calculated that if you increased your sexual activity from once a month to
once a week, you'd be as happy as if you had an extra $50,000 a year.

But is the converse true? For $50,000 more, you're just as happy as if you'd
quadrupled your sex? Along these lines, how much will it cost us to get rid
of Dick Cheney and end his trillion-dollar war, because that would buy us
happiness?

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From michael at michaelbutler.com  Sat Mar 25 10:06:46 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2006 10:06:46 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] On Campus, a Good Man Is Hard to Find By JOHN TIERNEY
Message-ID: <C04AC6B6.2A825%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 25, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
On Campus, a Good Man Is Hard to Find
By JOHN TIERNEY

When a boy opens his acceptance letter from college, he now has to wonder
what most impressed the admissions officers. Did they want him for his mind,
or just his body?

The admissions director at Kenyon College, Jennifer Delahunty Britz,
published an Op-Ed article this week revealing an awkward truth about her
job: affirmative action for boys. As the share of the boys in the applicant
pool keeps shrinking ? it will soon be down to 40 percent nationally ?
colleges are admitting less-qualified boys in order to keep the gender ratio
balanced on campus.

This week's revelation did not please Kim Gandy, the president of the
National Organization for Women, who told me that she might challenge the
legality of affirmative action for male applicants. She and I are not
normally ideological soulmates, but I have some sympathy with her on this
policy.

It's not fair to the girls who are rejected despite having higher grades and
test scores than the boys who get fat envelopes. It's not fair to the boys,
either, if they're not ready to keep up with their classmates. Affirmative
action just makes them prone to fail, and is probably one of the reasons
that men are more likely than women to drop out of college.

After consulting with the federal Education Department, I can confidently
report that this discrimination may violate the law ? or then again, it may
not. Either way, I agree with Gandy that public colleges shouldn't practice
it, because the government shouldn't favor one group over another.

Gandy's also wary of allowing private schools like Kenyon to discriminate,
and she's skeptical of their justification: that they need a fairly even
male-female ratio on campus to attract the best applicants of either sex.
I'm not sure if that's true, but I trust the colleges to know better than me
or Gandy or federal lawyers. As long as a school is private, let it favor
whomever it wants ? men, women, alumni children, Latinos, African-Americans
? without any interference from the Education Department.

What the department should be doing is figuring out how to help boys reach
college. The gender gap has been getting worse for two decades, but the
Education Department still isn't focusing on it. Instead, it has an
"educational equity" program aimed at helping girls and women.

The department is paying to encourage African and Slavic girls and women in
Oregon to pursue careers in science. There's a grant to help women in West
Virginia overcome "traditional, outdated 19th-century attitudes" by pursuing
jobs in blue-collar trades. Another grant aims to motivate women at the
Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn to study math.

Those are all noble goals. I'd be glad to see the women in Brooklyn take up
advanced calculus. But the chief "equity" issue at their college is the
shortage of men, who make up barely a fifth of the student body. What
happened to the boys who didn't make it?

Boys are, on average, as smart as girls, but they are much less fond of
school. They consistently receive lower grades, have more discipline
problems and are more likely to be held back for a year or placed in special
education classes. The Harvard economist Brian Jacob attributes these
problems to boys' lack of "noncognitive skills," like their difficulties
with paying attention in class, their disorganization and their reluctance
to seek help from others.

Those are serious handicaps, but they could be mitigated if schools became
more boy-friendly.

A few educators have suggested reforms: more games and competitions that
appeal to boys, more outdoor exercise, more male teachers, more experiments
with single-sex schools. But those ideas have gotten little attention or
money. Schools have been too busy trying to close the gender gap in the few
areas where boys are ahead, like sports and science.

No matter what changes are made to help boys, they'll probably still be less
likely than girls to go on to college, simply because girls' skills and
interests are better suited to the types of white-collar jobs that now
require college degrees. Boys will remain more inclined to skip college in
favor of relatively high-paying jobs in fields like construction and
manufacturing.

There's no reason to expect a 50-50 ratio on campus ? and certainly no
reason to mandate it. Boys don't need that kind of affirmative action. What
they could use, long before college, is equal attention.

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Sat Mar 25 13:39:34 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2006 21:39:34 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Braving Jail for Democracy,
	but Is That a Goal or a Tool?
Message-ID: <20060325213934.A012C249F9C@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

INTERNATIONAL / MIDDLE EAST | March 25, 2006
The Saturday Profile: Braving Jail for Democracy, but Is That a Goal or a Tool?
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
Critics contend that religious organizations in the Middle East support democracy so they can gain power, but won't support its values or practices once in charge.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/25/international/middleeast/25essam.html?ex=1143954000&en=1c5bd90eab26af8d&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060325/83df4e9a/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Sat Mar 25 13:40:42 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2006 21:40:42 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Time to Stall a Bush Nominee
Message-ID: <20060325214042.E5F903AE971@lax-gw06.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

OPINION | March 25, 2006
Editorial: Time to Stall a Bush Nominee

The vote on the nomination of Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach to become commissioner of the F.D.A. should not take place until the agency tackles the morning-after pill.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/25/opinion/25sat1.html?ex=1143954000&en=0b6d9b997a6455e9&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060325/9f65b5c8/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Sat Mar 25 13:40:35 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2006 21:40:35 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Privileged Conversations Said Not Excluded
	From Spying
Message-ID: <20060325214042.66E5A3AE7D1@lax-gw06.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

Yet another loophole...


WASHINGTON | March 25, 2006
Privileged Conversations Said Not Excluded From Spying
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
The Justice Department argued that if privileged conversations are connected to Al Qaeda, then warrants are not needed to listen.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/25/politics/25nsa.html?ex=1143954000&en=14d6a076a84e414f&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060325/12850e60/attachment.htm 

From michael at intrafi.com  Sat Mar 25 14:46:04 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (Michael)
Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2006 17:46:04 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Article from Tom Dispatch
Message-ID: <200603252246.k2PMk4px023931@thor.thenation.com>

An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060325/e47dcdfb/attachment.htm 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Sat Mar 25 19:13:01 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2006 22:13:01 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Film set thought to be hostage crisis!! Ha-ha!
Message-ID: <000801c65083$33cae2b0$5f3fe440@Harold>

Only in America, where fear reigns over common sense!

It just gets sillier every day.

Later H



FERNANDINA BEACH, Fla. - A movie set at the downtown post office turned all too real for a group of high school filmmakers. 

Members of the high school Spanish club were shooting a movie Thursday night when the police showed up believing a hostage crisis was going on inside the post office.

But apparently, someone saw the teens carrying toy guns into the building on Centre Street, which is the heart of the town's historical district. When they couldn't get an answer to calls placed inside the building, they assumed the worst.

Police cordoned off the block, cleared nearby buildings and surrounded the post office ready for a hostage crisis. When a group of students left the post office, they were ordered to get on the ground, face down.

Postmaster Ron Steedley had given permission for the school group to use the post office after hours to make a movie, "Rolling Thunder." Steedley said he didn't think the student's movie would frighten anyone.

Devon Menendez, the film's director, said his film career is over.

"I'm not accepting any more offers to direct a movie," he said.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060325/a18a9e7d/attachment.htm 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Sat Mar 25 19:25:16 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2006 22:25:16 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Abramoff clearing Delay
Message-ID: <000b01c65084$ea473c40$5f3fe440@Harold>

Power politics at work, by Delay and other stories........

Later H




Abramoff clearing DeLay
By Robert Novak

Mar 25, 2006


WASHINGTON -- Disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff has advised friends that he has no derogatory information about former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and is not implicating him as part of his plea bargain with federal prosecutors.

 Abramoff's guilty plea on fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy charges requires him to provide evidence about members of Congress. That led to speculation that this would mean trouble for DeLay, who faces money laundering and conspiracy charges in Texas.  

 However, Abramoff has not given a clean bill of health to any other congressman -- including Rep. Robert Ney, who has stepped down as chairman of the House Administration Committee. Ney was the only member of Congress named in court papers connected with Abramoff's guilty plea Jan. 4.

BUSH'S SPRING OFFENSIVE

 While President Bush hits the road to build support, his spring offensive is bringing conservative activists and businessmen into the White House for briefings in small groups.

 "I've been in the White House more in the last two weeks than I was in the last two years," Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform told this column. Norquist and conservative theoretician Jeffrey Bell were called into a meeting on the administration's embattled immigration bill. Also attending were representatives of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the National Federation of Independent Business.

 Bush has been criticized for being reclusive as he and the Republican Party tumble in the polls.

KERRY IN '08

 Al Gore's withdrawal from consideration for another presidential try in 2008 is viewed by Democratic insiders as strengthening Sen. John Kerry's bid for a second straight nomination, running to the left of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

 Even before Gore's surprising decision, Kerry political operatives were telling Democrats that the senator was a likely candidate. Kerry's 2004 running mate, John Edwards, is also inclined to run. But his campaign is menaced by a possible candidacy by Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, who would block Edwards in the Iowa caucuses.

 A footnote: Democratic politicians were surprised by the message from Sen. Clinton's camp that she henceforth would censor Bill Clinton's comments to prevent recurrence of their heavily publicized disagreements over Dubai Ports. While such restraint on the former president was considered desirable, it was viewed as something that should not be talked about publicly.

DEMOCRATIC TARGET

 Rep. Rahm Emanuel, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), has taken the unusual step of targeting his Republican counterpart, Rep. Tom Reynolds, for defeat in his upstate New York district this year. There is no record of a House campaign committee chairman ever being defeated for re-election by the opposition party.

 The DCCC claims secret polls showed the supposedly safe Republican district represented by Reynolds is competitive this year. Reynolds, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, in 2004 won re-election to a fourth term with a surprisingly low 56 percent. His Democratic opponent was retired industrialist Jack Davis, who spent $1,250,000 of his own money in 2004 and is trying again.

 In its campaign to seize control of the House, the DCCC is aiming at three other upstate New York districts to take advantage of the region's low popularity ratings for President Bush and the Republican Party. The Democrats have targeted ninth-term Rep. James Walsh and fourth-term Rep. John Sweeney, plus the seat left vacant by 12-term Rep. Sherwood Boehlert's retirement.

STUMBLING IN JERSEY

 Republican State Sen. Tom Kean Jr., who has lost an early lead in his New Jersey campaign for the U.S. Senate, is engaged in a backstage power struggle with the influential, relatively conservative Republican organizations in Bergen and Passaic counties.

 Kean, whose father was a two-term governor, has identified himself with the pro-choice social liberals in the state party. A key role in his campaign is being played by former Rep. Bob Franks, considered a moderate during four terms in Congress.

 After starting the campaign ahead of appointed Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez, Kean has fallen behind by four percentage points according to surveys last week by the Quinnipiac University poll. Democrats chided Kean for coming so late to his own Newark fund-raiser Monday that he missed the principal speech by Vice President Dick Cheney.





-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060325/cc376b6d/attachment.htm 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Sat Mar 25 19:31:20 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2006 22:31:20 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Testing the West's values in Afghanistan
Message-ID: <001201c65085$c2ff1fd0$5f3fe440@Harold>


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 Testing the West's values in Afghanistan

This is an interesting article

Later HS



 Jim Reed has worked as a researcher, writer, producer, director, reporter and news anchor for CTV, TVO and CBC. He has travelled widely and has freelanced for The Associated Press, The New York Times, The Globe and Mail and other news organizations.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


There is a disingenuous aura surrounding the outrage now being voiced by Westerners over the trial and possible execution of an Afghan convert to Christianity. The anger being expressed by Western churches and governments smacks of the worst sort of hypocrisy. Otherwise intelligent individuals and supposedly plugged-in governments are professing amazement, surprise, astonishment, shock and any number of other emotional reactions to behaviour they have known about and tolerated for a very long time. 

Stephen Harper says that the Afghan President Hamid Karzai assured him by telephone that Abdul Rahman would not be executed. That assurance may have been given, but it's meaningless unless Karzai can influence the Afghan judiciary. The problem in this particular case is that there's no provision in the Afghan constitution to allow a pardon for "insulting God." 

This case highlights the past cynical views of Western leaders with respect to traditions and cultures that are radically different from our own. It also shows just how na?ve, and even ignorant, Mr. Harper and others are about the politics and culture of other nations, particularly Afghanistan. 

For years ? no, for decades ? American, Canadian and European diplomats have been briefed in detail by their governments on the variety of customs, rituals and practices approved of, accepted or tolerated by governments in other parts of the world, including in the Muslim world. 

The Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs, the U.S. State Department, the British Foreign Office ? all these arms of "civilized" Western governments have been fully apprised of the extremes of the Sharia law, for example. They have been made keenly aware of barbaric practices by a number of different governments. But over the years, they have all turned a blind eye. 

North American and European governments have accepted for generations a wide variety of customs, rituals and practices, that "Christian" nations have supposedly outgrown and discarded. (Although it's not so long ago that black citizens in the southern United States were lynched and apparently even today, Americans and other westerners engage in the practice of coercive interrogation and torture, when it comes to "defending" our own way of life). 

We have not only accepted that countries and governments approve and implement inhuman laws and punishments, we have instructed our diplomatic representatives not to bring them up with their host governments ? or at least not to challenge them too strongly. These include such allies as Saudi Arabia, Arab states such as Yemen, African countries like Mauritania and many many others, including India and Pakistan. 

When human-rights organizations have called on our Western governments to censure or sanction the offending nations for gross violations of human rights, the Canadians, Americans, British and others have ignored the criticisms. They have quite simply swept the entire question of unacceptable customs and local laws under the rug. 

These outrageous but accepted practices have included the amputation of hands for theft, the stoning to death of women over allegations of prostitution and adultery and the beheading of men and women for certain crimes, including some which are sex-related. They have included the burning of young women alive, the gang raping of others and numerous styles of punishment carried out in other countries with official approval or tolerance. 

The present case in Afghanistan is just one which has caught the attention of the Western media, churches and governments because it involves something familiar. A man is being threatened with execution because he changed religions. It has become a cause c?l?bre because the Afghan man converted to Christianity. But the convert's trial and punishment are allowed ? mandated even ? under the Afghan Constitution, a document that was drafted under the watchful eyes of Western officials and implemented with the full knowledge of the Americans, Canadians and Europeans. 

The anger now being expressed in the West rings hollow. 

A case like this was bound to surface sooner or later and there will be more in the future. On the one hand, it's evidence that we are in over our heads in dealing with a tribal culture, which we have vowed to defend but do not understand or fully accept. On the other hand, the groundswell of protest rising in Western countries says to the Afghan people that the West does not respect their beliefs. 

Abdul Rahman may escape execution because of the outcry, but only because the courts will likely rule that he is "insane" and unfit for trial. 

The nations of the West are caught on the horns of a self-made dilemma. Our governments have said we're in Afghanistan to defend a fledgling government, to fight terrorism and to build a nation. 

The trial and possible execution of a man, whose crime was to choose to practice another religion, will be a severe test for Canada and other Western nations ? now too deeply involved in Afghanistan to pull out. 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060325/802a9897/attachment-0001.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sun Mar 26 06:46:23 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sun, 26 Mar 2006 09:46:23 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Former DeLay Aide Enriched By Nonprofit - Washington Post
Message-ID: <4426A93F.5030907@comcast.net>

Former DeLay Aide Enriched By Nonprofit
Bulk of Group's Funds Tied to Abramoff

By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 26, 2006; A01

A top adviser to former House Whip Tom DeLay received more than a third 
of all the money collected by the U.S. Family Network, a nonprofit 
organization the adviser created to promote a pro-family political 
agenda in Congress, according to the group's accounting records.

DeLay's former chief of staff, Edwin A. Buckham, who helped create the 
group while still in DeLay's employ, and his wife, Wendy, were the 
principal beneficiaries of the group's $3.02 million in revenue, 
collecting payments totaling $1,022,729 during a five-year period ending 
in 2001, public and private records show.

The group's revenue was drawn mostly from clients of Republican lobbyist 
Jack Abramoff, according to its records. From an FBI subpoena for the 
records, it can be inferred that the bureau is exploring whether there 
were links between the payments and favorable legislative treatment of 
Abramoff's clients by DeLay's office.

In recent months, Abramoff pleaded guilty to charges of tax fraud and 
conspiracy to defraud clients and bribe a public official; DeLay 
(R-Tex.) stepped down from his post as House majority leader; and 
Buckham folded his lobbying firm, the Alexander Strategy Group.

In the late 1990s, when DeLay's influence was growing, the lawmaker 
depicted the USFN in a promotional letter as a nationwide, grass-roots 
organization. In fact, it had a tiny staff that barely registered an 
impact on Capitol Hill. The group appears to have served mostly as a 
vehicle for funneling corporate funds to DeLay's advisers and financing 
ads that attacked Democrats.

The group's payments to the Buckhams -- in the form of a monthly 
retainer as well as commissions on donations by Abramoff's clients -- 
overlapped briefly with Edwin Buckham's service as chief of staff to 
DeLay and continued during his subsequent role as DeLay's chief 
political adviser.

During this latter period, Buckham and his wife, Wendy, acting through 
their consulting firm, made monthly payments averaging $3,200-$3,400 
apiece to DeLay's wife, Christine, for three of the years in which he 
collected money from the USFN and some other clients.

Even though Buckham left DeLay's staff at the end of 1997, he still 
coordinated much of the congressional office's work and ran DeLay's 
principal fundraising committee from a building bought with USFN money, 
according to three former DeLay staff members who said they had 
firsthand knowledge of his role then.

"If an individual called DeLay's appointments secretary saying they 
wanted to talk to DeLay about overregulation, the appointment secretary 
would say go speak to Buckham," one former aide said. Buckham, an 
evangelical minister, also continued to serve as DeLay's spiritual 
adviser and prayed frequently with him, the former aides said.

DeLay's lawyer, Richard Cullen, disputed the accounts of Buckham's 
influence. He said Buckham made appointment requests but was not 
involved in final decisions on scheduling after he left the office. He 
also said Buckham did not coordinate the office's activities, saying 
that was done by successors.

Abramoff, for his part, once boasted that he had invested a million 
dollars in Buckham, according to a former Abramoff colleague who said he 
witnessed the conversation. Abramoff expressed confidence that the funds 
would bring a good return for his clients, the colleague said. Abramoff, 
through a spokesman, declined comment on this claim or other details of 
this article.

Wendy Buckham was not the only spouse of a DeLay staffer to benefit from 
the USFN revenue stream sustained by Abramoff's clients. A consulting 
firm owned by the wife of Tony C. Rudy, DeLay's deputy chief of staff, 
was paid $15,600 by the group in 1999 and another $10,400 in 2000. Rudy 
resigned to work with Abramoff in 2001. It could not be determined what 
the payments were for.

DeLay supported the interests of many USFN donors on Capitol Hill, 
including an Indian tribe seeking to keep a tax exemption for gambling 
revenue and wealthy Russians seeking a favorable vote on Russian aid 
legislation. DeLay's spokesman has said his opinions and votes were 
based solely on "good policy" and national interests.

Edwin and Wendy Buckham and their lawyer, Laura A. Miller, did not 
respond to multiple requests for comment on USFN spending or the money 
they received. The Rudys did not return calls to their home and Tony 
Rudy's cellphone.

The accounting records reviewed by The Washington Post included a list 
of every transaction by the USFN from 1996 to 2000 and the group's tax 
returns for 2001, the last year it existed. They demonstrate that the 
consulting fees, bonuses and fundraising commissions for the Buckhams -- 
plus the purchase of a townhouse that served as the locus of DeLay's own 
fundraising efforts -- consumed far more of the group's budget than its 
spending for lobbying on "moral fitness" issues.

A previous article in The Post detailed how USFN had drawn its largest 
checks from Abramoff's clients, including $1 million from what several 
former Buckham associates described as Russian oil and gas executives 
and hundreds of thousands of dollars from an Indian tribe.

Records obtained by federal investigators after that article appeared 
and reviewed by The Post make clear just how unusual USFN's spending 
was. Its revenue was lavished not only on DeLay's advisers but on a 
variety of expenses that experts say are atypical for such a small 
nonprofit: $62,375 for wall art, a vase listed at $20,100, airfare and 
meals for Abramoff that cost $11,548, and $267,202 in travel and 
entertainment expenses that appear to have benefited mostly Buckham, the 
group's board members, and its tiny staff.

"They were using donor funds for interior decorating," said Chris 
Geeslin, a pastor in Frederick, Md., who between 1998 and 2001 served as 
one of the group's directors and then its president. He blamed what he 
described as the group's misspending on Buckham, who he said "would tell 
us where you should put things. He orchestrated all this. . . . He used us."

A Handpicked Board

When the USFN was incorporated at Buckham's instigation in 1996, it 
described its purpose as promoting policies favorable for "families, the 
economic prosperity, social improvement, moral fitness, and general well 
being of the United States."

 From the outset, it was organized differently from other public 
advocacy groups located in the capital that hoped to influence the 
nation's leaders. For example, Buckham selected as its board members 
three evangelical Christians from the tiny town of Republic, Wash. (pop. 
954), who associates say he had met at a religious retreat.

According to the minutes from its March 1997 board meeting, the group 
considered appointing "J. Abramoff" to the board, but never did. The 
group's first donation, a $15,000 check, came from the Mississippi Band 
of Choctaw Indians, one of Abramoff's highest-paying clients, and the 
next two donor checks came from other groups linked with Abramoff.

Formally, Buckham was a consultant to the board, but he said in an 
October 2003 deposition taken by Federal Election Commission lawyers and 
obtained by The Post that he had a verbal understanding allowing him to 
take whatever actions he deemed "in the best interest of the USFN 
pertaining to issues that they cared about." This included authorizing 
payments to others.

But some routine procedures were not followed: USFN officials did not 
register as lobbyists until 2000, when the group became the target of a 
complaint at the FEC, and they sent in retroactive registrations for the 
three previous years.

The Buckhams closely controlled the group's finances. Wendy Buckham 
formally served as the group's treasurer and secretary for only five 
months in 1996 and 1997, but kept the books and signed its checks until 
it folded in 2001, according to its tax forms and former officers. Edwin 
Buckham said in the 2003 deposition it was he who suggested she take 
this role.

USFN nevertheless paid both an accounting firm and Wendy Buckham for 
accounting in 1997. She also collected $43,000 in "commissions" that 
year on the first $524,975 in contributions to the group from business 
entities that worked with Abramoff, according to its ledger. 
Congressional ethics rules do not bar such payments to spouses unless 
they are meant to purchase favors from lawmakers or staff.

The Alexander Strategy Group began collecting its monthly stipend of 
$10,000-$12,000 from USFN in October 1997 to perform fundraising and 
other services, even while Buckham was still receiving a salary from the 
whip's office, according to House payroll records. House rules allow 
such overlap only if the outside income is limited and not a reward for 
official acts.

Within four weeks after Buckham resigned from DeLay's staff in December 
1997, the Alexander Strategy Group began also collecting commissions on 
donations to USFN from firms that worked with Abramoff. The largest were 
two $75,000 payments in 1998 and one for $104,500 in 1999. The total 
reached $364,500 before they stopped at the end of 1999. USFN's ledger 
also lists an unexplained "bonus" payment of $60,000 in December 1998.

The Internal Revenue Service generally requires that board members of 
nonprofits approve all payments to related entities. But several 
documents labeled as contracts with Buckham's firm in the group's papers 
are not signed, and Geeslin said in an interview that some of the 
minutes for board meetings in 1998 and 1999 were formally written after 
the FEC began its investigation.

Besides spending lavishly during its meetings at various resorts, the 
group also spent $149,000 in July 1998 to lease a skybox at MCI Center 
"at the request of one of the donors to USFN," the group's internal 
audit states. Geeslin said that person was actually Abramoff, who 
expressed his gratitude while sitting near him at a sporting event.

In the version of the group's official, typewritten ledgers, supplied to 
the FBI last month under subpoena, several of its most unusual 
expenditures are partially crossed out and relabeled in ink. The $20,100 
purchase of a vase in October 1999 from a Royal Doulton dealer in Miami 
was relabeled "office equipment," and the $62,375 purchase in January 
1999 of a collection of Salvador Dali and Peter Max prints was relabeled 
"office fixtures."

Asked about the handwritten changes, the group's former lawyer, J. 
Thomas Smith, said he did not recall seeing them and declined further 
comment.

Art Taylor, head of the Better Business Bureau's Wise Giving Alliance, a 
watchdog group, noted after reviewing the nonprofit group's tax returns 
for 1998 and 1999 that a tax inspector might wonder if "they have enough 
activity going on" of public benefit to justify their tax exemption. "If 
they were a charity," he said, "they don't meet our standards."

Labor in the Marianas

One of the first policy issues to be discussed by the group's board, 
according to its March 1997 minutes, was a "free-market research 
project" in the Northern Marianas Islands, a U.S. protectorate in the 
Pacific Ocean.

At the time, Abramoff was under contract with the Marianas government to 
lobby against congressional legislation to impede the free flow of 
immigrant labor to the islands from China and elsewhere in Asia, and 
impose a minimum hourly wage exceeding the island's standard rate of $3.05.

To U.S. immigration officials and other critics, maintaining the 
Marianas' exemptions from these rules amounted to providing legal 
protection for sweatshops. But textile manufacturers, who dominated the 
islands' politics and profited heavily from paying immigrant workers 
less than required on the mainland, ardently opposed the legislation. 
The Marianas government paid Abramoff a total of $7.17 million in 
lobbying fees from 1996 to 2001, according to an audit there.

Abramoff focused on DeLay's office in his lobbying effort, billing the 
Marianas for 187 contacts in 1996 and 1997, including 104 conversations 
with Buckham and 16 direct meetings with DeLay, according to Abramoff's 
billing records. Buckham affirmed in a 1995 interview withNational 
Journal that Abramoff "is someone on our side. . . . He has access to 
DeLay."

So it was perhaps understandable that in the spring of 1997, USFN's 
board was eager to demonstrate that the economic policies that were good 
for the Marianas (pop. 53,552) could be good for America. To do so, it 
dispatched its first director, a former manager of DeLay's 1996 Texas 
reelection campaign named Robert G. Mills.

During the trip, Mills -- accompanied by Buckham, who was still on 
DeLay's staff -- met with Willie Tan, the islands' largest private 
employer. Tan's textile companies had settled a lawsuit filed five years 
earlier by the U.S. Labor Department charging workplace abuses, and he 
had long cultivated contacts in Washington to stop the immigration and 
wage legislation.

In April 1997, for example, a longtime Tan aide and island politician 
named Benigno Fitial went to Washington, where he sang "Happy Birthday" 
to DeLay in the whip's office. He sent Buckham an e-mail after the trip 
expressing appreciation for his support and recalling Buckham's 
explanation that one of his roles was to "stop legislation from getting 
on the floor of the House." Fitial signed the e-mail, "YOUR 'ADOPTED' 
BROTHER BEN."

Three months earlier, Tan's network of companies had written five checks 
of $10,000 each to USFN, and Buckham's wife had claimed $10,000 in 
"commissions" on these checks, according to the group's ledger.

These were just the first of 23 payments by Tan's companies to the 
group, which eventually totaled $650,000.

Later in 1997, Wendy Buckham claimed another $10,000 in commissions on 
Tan's checks, and in 1998, the couple's jointly owned consulting firm 
took another $20,000 in commissions explicitly attributed to the Tan 
donations, according to the ledger. Many other "commissions" collected 
by the couple were not linked in the ledgers to a specific donor.

DeLay saw Tan when he took his wife and daughter to the Marianas in a 
December 1997 trip arranged with the help of Abramoff and his lobby 
firm. After brunching with Tan on his first full day, followed by a 
round of golf with Tan and others, DeLay attended a dinner in his honor 
sponsored by Tan's holding company at the local Pacific Islands Club.

It was at this dinner that DeLay gave the speech in which he called 
Abramoff "one of my closest and dearest friends," according to a copy. 
DeLay also reminded Tan and his colleagues of his earlier promise that 
no wage and immigration legislation would be passed.

"Stand firm," DeLay said in his closing. "Resist evil. Remember that all 
truth and blessings emanate from our Creator." He then departed with Tan 
to see a cockfight, according to a written account by one of the trip 
participants.

In response to a reporter's question, Tan said in an e-mail Friday that 
"we hired [a] reputable firm, and we never ask[ed] the firm to do 
anything wrong." He said he was unaware of the commissions collected 
personally by the Buckhams.

No Marianas immigration or wage reform legislation passed Congress. 
Aides to Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), a key sponsor, say that 
Senate-passed legislation was never taken up by any House committee.

Attack Ads

Before the U.S. Family Network folded in 2001 under pressure from an FEC 
probe, it became involved in other controversial political matters.

In 1998, the group lobbied Congress against new regulations on 
cigarettes and collected a $100,000 donation from the R.J. Reynolds 
Tobacco Co. It also spent $75,863 that year on radio ads that called for 
President Clinton's resignation and attacked Democrats, according to the 
group's ledger and transcripts of the ads.

The following year, the National Republican Congressional Committee gave 
the USFN a $500,000 check to finance additional radio ads in the 
districts of vulnerable Democrats. Buckham told the FEC he solicited the 
check, and others told FEC investigators it was paid over the objections 
of the NRCC's director and chief counsel.

Of the $500,000, USFN gave just $300,000 to another nonprofit group for 
the ads. In his deposition, Buckham explained that he retained a portion 
of the Republican Party's check as a commission. "If I raise money, I 
get a portion," Buckham said. "It is in my contract."

The NRCC in 2004 paid the eighth-highest fine in FEC history to settle 
allegations that some of its officials colluded with USFN on the ads in 
violation of campaign finance laws.

As the group started to wind down, it made five payments totaling nearly 
$200,000 to entities affiliated with its staff or board members or 
located at USFN's address, according to the ledger. It sold the 
townhouse at a $19,000 loss.

The board also agreed at its final meeting in January 2001 to pay 
$150,000 to the Dorothy Joan Morris Foundation.

The minutes state this was done at the request of "the gentleman who 
donated the largest amount of money to USFN" -- a term that Geeslin said 
is a euphemism for Buckham's fundraising.

Incorporation papers on file with the Maryland Secretary of State list 
the foundation's location as an insurance company office in a strip mall 
in Frederick.

The papers state that the foundation is in turn owned by another group, 
Foundation Ministries Inc., which has its legal address at the Frederick 
home of the Buckhams.

Dorothy Joan Morris is the name of the 79-year-old mother of a former 
Buckham assistant named Roger Albanese, who is described in USFN 
documents as collecting roughly $20,000 from the group for "program 
services related to prayer." She says she never authorized the use of 
her name for the foundation, was never told about the $150,000 donation 
and never saw any of the proceeds.

"What rights does he [Buckham] have to put that in my name?" asked 
Morris, who said she lives with her husband in a trailer home parked in 
Las Vegas. "It's fishy."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/25/AR2006032501166.html?referrer=email
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060326/700765a5/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sun Mar 26 06:48:38 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sun, 26 Mar 2006 09:48:38 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] From a Conservative,
 a Lack Of Compassion for Ralph Reed- Washington Post
Message-ID: <4426A9C6.20308@comcast.net>

 From a Conservative, a Lack Of Compassion for Ralph Reed
<>
By Thomas B. Edsall and Dan Balz
The Washington Post
Sunday, March 26, 2006; A05

Ralph Reed, candidate for Georgia lieutenant governor and former 
executive director of the Christian Coalition, has a standard line when 
opponents link him to disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. "The Democrats, 
radical left, and dominant media have made numerous unfair personal 
attacks against Ralph," his Web site declares.

Lately, however, it's becoming harder for Reed to dismiss his critics as 
ideologically motivated. One of the toughest is Marvin Olasky, a close 
associate of President Bush who helped developed the administration's 
faith-based initiative and the concept of "compassionate conservatism."

Olasky, a journalism professor at the University of Texas, is editor in 
chief of World magazine, the mission of which "is to glorify God and 
enjoy Him forever." Since Nov. 19, World has run 10 articles and essays 
describing the $4 million in gambling money Abramoff paid to Reed to 
lobby against casinos competing with Abramoff's clients. The articles 
have highlighted incriminating e-mails and other disclosures that have 
raised doubts about Reed's explanations of his activities.

Reed, Olasky wrote March 4, "has damaged Christian political work by 
confirming for some the stereotype that evangelicals are easily 
manipulated and that evangelical leaders use moral issues to line their 
own pockets."

On Feb. 6, Reed wrote Olasky to say he was " very disappointed that 
WORLD would repeat false and politically-motivated attacks by liberal 
groups in Texas."

In language similar to his campaign stump responses, Reed said: "Had I 
known then what I know now, I would not have undertaken the work. On 
reflection, I should have declined the work and I regret any difficulty 
it has caused the pro-family community, for which I have accepted full 
responsibility. . . . What I do not appreciate and what I am confident 
your readers will reject is an unfair attempt by the media to engage in 
guilt by association."

Some polling data have been published in Georgia indicating that the 
Abramoff scandal has hurt Reed's first bid for elective office. Most 
recently, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution cited a survey suggesting 
that if Reed wins the Republican nomination, his presence could weaken 
support for the reelection of Gov. Sonny Perdue (R).

When 500 Republicans were asked whether the presence of Reed on a ticket 
with Perdue would increase or decrease their likelihood of voting for 
the Republican governor, 18 percent said it would improve the chances, 
while 26 percent said it would diminish the prospect of voting for 
Perdue, a net eight-point negative, the newspaper reported.

MoveOn to Stoke House Races

One of the biggest obstacles facing Democrats in their quest to capture 
control of the House in November is the relatively limited number of 
competitive seats. MoveOn.org, the liberal grass-roots activist 
organization, hopes to help make the playing field bigger.

Beginning in April, MoveOn will begin bombarding five congressional 
districts with advertising campaigns aimed at turning second-tier 
targets into competitive contests, all with the goal of generating the 
kind of anti-incumbent sentiment that will topple the Republican majority.

"If we can put enough districts in play that [analysts] say the House is 
up for grabs, that will open the floodgate in terms of energy from our 
members and in terms of money from donors who otherwise might be 
reticent to give to many different races," said Eli Pariser, executive 
director of MoveOn's political action committee. "The earlier that we 
can flip that switch where someone says that, the better off we believe 
we are in terms of the amount of energy that people are going to put 
into the election."

Pariser won't say which five districts will draw the initial 
advertising, only that the commercials will attempt to connect a local 
House member's votes to sentiment that lobbyists and corporate interests 
have too much sway with the current Congress. Nor will Pariser say 
whether MoveOn will seek to go into additional districts if the first 
ads prove successful.

MoveOn's PAC has become one of the largest collectors of so-called 
hard-dollar contributions in the country. In the 2004 cycle, the group 
raised about $30 million, putting it behind Emily's List but ahead of 
any number of other well-known interest groups on the left and right. 
Last year, the organization raised $10 million, and this year has set a 
goal of $15 million to $20 million. Some of that will be used for ads, 
some for voter mobilization, some for direct contributions.

The ads will run at what Pariser called "near saturation" level, with 
interruptions, for a period of about three months. "Realistically, we're 
not going to single-handedly create a change election," Pariser said. "I 
think we can play a role in tipping a number of close races and helping 
to make sure that as we move closer to the election that the right 
issues are on voters' minds."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/25/AR2006032500815.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060326/5bbff4d0/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sun Mar 26 06:53:57 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sun, 26 Mar 2006 09:53:57 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] CYBERWARFARE:  Terrorist 007,
 Exposed - Rita Katz and Michael Kern - Washington Post Sunday
 Outlook
Message-ID: <4426AB05.3000000@comcast.net>

Terrorist 007, Exposed
<>
By Rita Katz and Michael Kern
The Washington Post - Sunday Outlook
Sunday, March 26, 2006; B01

For almost two years, intelligence services around the world tried to 
uncover the identity of an Internet hacker who had become a key conduit 
for al-Qaeda. The savvy, English-speaking, presumably young webmaster 
taunted his pursuers, calling himself Irhabi -- Terrorist -- 007. He 
hacked into American university computers, propagandized for the Iraq 
insurgents led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and taught other online jihadists 
how to wield their computers for the cause.

Suddenly last fall, Irhabi 007 disappeared from the message boards. The 
postings ended after Scotland Yard arrested a 22-year-old West Londoner, 
Younis Tsouli, suspected of participating in an alleged bomb plot. In 
November, British authorities brought a range of charges against him 
related to that plot. Only later, according to our sources familiar with 
the British probe, was Tsouli's other suspected identity revealed. 
British investigators eventually confirmed to us that they believe he is 
Irhabi 007.

The unwitting end of the hunt comes at a time when al-Qaeda sympathizers 
like Irhabi 007 are making explosive new use of the Internet. Countless 
Web sites and password-protected forums -- most of which have sprung up 
in the last several years -- now cater to would-be jihadists like Irhabi 
007. The terrorists who congregate in those cybercommunities are rapidly 
becoming skilled in hacking, programming, executing online attacks and 
mastering digital and media design -- and Irhabi was a master of all 
those arts.

But the manner of his arrest demonstrates how challenging it is to 
combat such online activities and to prevent others from following 
Irhabi's example: After pursuing an investigation into a European 
terrorism suspect, British investigators raided Tsouli's house, where 
they found stolen credit card information, according to an American 
source familiar with the probe. Looking further, they found that the 
cards were used to pay American Internet providers on whose servers he 
had posted jihadi propaganda. Only then did investigators come to 
believe that they had netted the infamous hacker. And that element of 
luck is a problem. The Internet has presented investigators with an 
extraordinary challenge. But our future security is going to depend 
increasingly on identifying and catching the shadowy figures who exist 
primarily in the elusive online world.

The short career of Irhabi 007 offers a case study in the evolving 
nature of the threat that we at the SITE Institute track every day by 
monitoring and then joining the password-protected forums and 
communicating with the online jihadi community. Celebrated for his 
computer expertise, Irhabi 007 had propelled the jihadists into a 
21st-century offensive through his ability to covertly and securely 
disseminate manuals of weaponry, videos of insurgent feats such as 
beheadings and other inflammatory material. It is by analyzing the trail 
of information left by such postings that we are able to distinguish the 
patterns of communication used by individual terrorists.

Irhabi's success stemmed from a combination of skill and timing. In 
early 2004, he joined the password-protected message forum known as 
Muntada al-Ansar al-Islami (Islam Supporters Forum) and, soon after, 
al-Ekhlas (Sincerity) -- two of the password-protected forums with 
thousands of members that al-Qaeda had been using for military 
instructions, propaganda and recruitment. (These two forums have since 
been taken down.) This was around the time that Zarqawi began using the 
Internet as his primary means of disseminating propaganda for his 
insurgency in Iraq. Zarqawi needed computer-savvy associates, and Irhabi 
proved to be a standout among the volunteers, many of whom were based in 
Europe.

Irhabi's central role became apparent to outsiders in April of that 
year, when Zarqawi's group, later renamed al-Qaeda in Iraq, began 
releasing its communiqu?s through its official spokesman, Abu Maysara 
al-Iraqi, on the Ansar forum. In his first posting, al-Iraqi wrote in 
Arabic about "the good news" that "a group of proud and brave men" 
intended to "strike the economic interests of the countries of blasphemy 
and atheism, that came to raise the banner of the Cross in the country 
of the Muslims."

At the time, some doubted that posting's authenticity, but Irhabi, who 
was the first to post a response, offered words of support. Before long, 
al-Iraqi answered in like fashion, establishing their relationship -- 
and Irhabi's central role.

Over the following year and a half, Irhabi established himself as the 
top jihadi expert on all things Internet-related. He became a very 
active member of many jihadi forums in Arabic and English. He worked on 
both defeating and enhancing online security, linking to multimedia and 
providing online seminars on the use of the Internet. He seemed to be 
online night and day, ready to answer questions about how to post a 
video, for example -- and often willing to take over and do the posting 
himself. Irhabi focused on hacking into Web sites as well as educating 
Internet surfers in the secrets to anonymous browsing.

In one instance, Irhabi posted a 20-page message titled "Seminar on 
Hacking Websites," to the Ekhlas forum. It provided detailed information 
on the art of hacking, listing dozens of vulnerable Web sites to which 
one could upload shared media. Irhabi used this strategy himself, 
uploading data to a Web site run by the state of Arkansas, and then to 
another run by George Washington University. This stunt led many experts 
to believe -- erroneously -- that Irhabi was based in the United States.

Irhabi used countless other Web sites as free hosts for material that 
the jihadists needed to upload and share. In addition to these sites, 
Irhabi provided techniques for discovering server vulnerabilities, in 
the event that his suggested sites became secure. In this way, jihadists 
could use third-party hosts to disseminate propaganda so that they did 
not have to risk using their own web space and, more importantly, their 
own money.

As he provided seemingly limitless space captured from vulnerable 
servers throughout the Internet, Irhabi was celebrated by his online 
followers. A mark of that appreciation was the following memorandum of 
praise offered by a member of Ansar in August 2004:

"To Our Brother Irhabi 007. Our brother Irhabi 007, you have shown very 
good efforts in serving this message board, as I can see, and in serving 
jihad for the sake of God. By God, we do not like to hear what hurts 
you, so we ask God to keep you in his care.

You are one of the top people who care about serving your brothers. May 
God add all of that on the side of your good work, and may you go 
careful and successful.

We say carry on with God's blessing.

Carry on, may God protect you.

Carry on serving jihad and its supporters.

And I ask the mighty, gracious and merciful God to keep for us everyone 
who wants to support his faith.

Amen."

Irhabi's hacking ability was useful not only in the exchange of media, 
but also in the distribution of large-scale al-Qaeda productions. In one 
instance, a film produced by Zarqawi's al-Qaeda, titled "All Is for 
Allah's Religion," was distributed from a page at www.alaflam.net/wdkl .

The links, uploaded in June 2005, provided numerous outlets where 
visitors could find the video. In the event that one of the sites was 
disabled, many other sources were available as backups. Several were 
based on domains such as www.irhabi007.ca or www.irhabi007.tv , 
indicating a strong involvement by Irhabi himself. The film, a major 
release by al-Qaeda in Iraq, showed many of the insurgents' recent 
exploits compiled with footage of Osama bin Laden, commentary on the Abu 
Ghraib prison, and political statements about the rule of then-Iraqi 
Interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi.

Tsouli has been charged with eight offenses including conspiracy to 
murder, conspiracy to cause an explosion, conspiracy to cause a public 
nuisance, conspiracy to obtain money by deception and offences relating 
to the possession of articles for terrorist purposes and fundraising. So 
far there are no charges directly related to his alleged activities as 
Irhabi on the Internet, but given the charges already mounted against 
him, it will probably be a long time before the 22-year-old is able to 
go online again.

But Irhabi's absence from the Internet may not be as noticeable as many 
hope. Indeed, the hacker had anticipated his own disappearance. In the 
months beforehand, Irhabi released his will on the Internet. In it, he 
provided links to help visitors with their own Internet security and 
hacking skills in the event of his absence -- a rubric for jihadists 
seeking the means to continue to serve their nefarious ends. Irhabi may 
have been caught, but his online legacy may be the creation of many 
thousands of 007s.

feedback at siteinstitute.org <mailto:feedback at siteinstitute.org>

Rita Katz is the author of "Terrorist Hunter" (HarperCollins) and the 
director of the SITE Institute, which is dedicated to the "search for 
international terrorist entities." Michael Kern is a senior analyst with 
the institute.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/25/AR2006032500020.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060326/59051349/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sun Mar 26 06:56:18 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sun, 26 Mar 2006 09:56:18 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] EXCELLENT AND SCARY: America,
 the Global Target - Jim Hoagland - Washington Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <4426AB92.2000600@comcast.net>

America, the Global Target
<>
By Jim Hoagland
The Washington Post
Sunday, March 26, 2006; B07

Hoping to lower tensions between the Muslim world and the West, British 
Prime Minister Tony Blair maintained the other day that the world 
confronts "a clash about civilization," not "a clash between 
civilizations." But the overriding lesson of events since Sept. 11, 
2001, may be that you can't have one without the other.

In radical Islamic propaganda, the United States has graduated from 
being a mere Great Satan out to undermine Iran's ayatollahs to being 
depicted as a global monster responsible for virtually every crime and 
failing since the dawn of modern history. Meet the new Jews: the Americans.

Don't misunderstand. Americans have not replaced Jews at the top of the 
hate parade in Islamic countries. But the history of anti-Semitism, a 
word coined in Germany to provide a bogus scientific basis for prejudice 
against Jews, and its spread in recent years across the Middle East as 
an all-purpose explanation of whatever is wrong, should give Americans 
no cause for complacency.

The centrality of American power to global change -- good and bad, 
economic and political, topsy and turvy -- inevitably carries with it a 
heavy burden abroad of resentment and opposition. In the wake of Sept. 
11 and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a widespread stereotyping and a 
visceral hatred that imputes racial characteristics to national policies 
and actions have also taken hold.

The distemper of these global times can be read in a wide variety of 
settings, where this new virulent anti-Americanism competes with 
historical anti-Semitism as a single explanation for the failures and 
delusions of entire nations.

The change can be seen in Turkish and Egyptian movie houses, where 
overflow crowds watch depictions of Americans routinely raping, killing, 
firebombing mosques and torturing innocents as a function of national 
character. It flows through the fanatical statements of Osama bin Laden 
and others that conflate "Jews" and "Crusaders." It peeks out of an 
overjoyed online announcement I came across last week that Hitler's 
favorite book, "The Riddle of the Jew's Success," is back in print.

Nothing new in this, it can be said. Besides, American movies, comics, 
journalists and politicians among others have never hesitated to 
stereotype Arabs, Turks or any other foreigners for their purposes, and 
often in extremely crude terms. Finally, the terrible polarizing effect 
of the conflict in Iraq and the crimes committed at Abu Ghraib and 
elsewhere do invite harsh criticism of Americans rooted not in animus 
but in a sense of justice.

But the central and intrusive role of the United States in unleashing 
the traumatic changes of globalization on families, workplaces and 
nations everywhere brings unintended consequences. The forces that 
created anti-Semitism are not confined to one group of people or one 
moment in history.

" The Jew is in every respect the center of the language of the Third 
Reich, indeed of its whole view of the epoch," literary scholar Viktor 
Klemperer wrote in his Nazi-era diary. A forthcoming book quotes that 
passage to explain how long-standing prejudice was mobilized as engine 
and rationale for mass murder and state terrorism in Germany.

"Anti-Semitism was not only a set of prejudices and hatreds but also an 
explanatory framework for historical events," Jeffrey Herf writes in 
"The Jewish Enemy." He demonstrates that while Hitler was convincing 
Germans that the Jews were about to annihilate them, the numbers and 
influence of Jews in Germany were sharply declining. Facts did not get 
in Hitler's way.

A vehement counter-ideology is developing across the Arab world today to 
President Bush's drive to put America even more at the center of 
democratic change and material progress in that region. Some of the 
reaction is reasoned and pragmatic; much of it veers into hate 
propaganda that confounds nationality with race.

That suggests two initial propositions for an ongoing discussion of this 
vast subject:

The Bush administration must avoid throwing gasoline on this raging fire 
by making assertive declarations about preemptive warfare, or God's 
gifts of democracy being distributed to Arabs by Americans or the like. 
It must show that misbehavior or crimes in Iraq or elsewhere will be 
punished up to the highest level of responsibility.

Second, Americans need to recognize that the problems we face in the 
Middle East are bigger than the failings or mistakes of Bush & Co. Those 
problems would not fade quickly if U.S. troops left Iraq tomorrow. 
Repairing America's image at home and abroad is also a complex, 
generational task that begins now.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/24/AR2006032401715.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060326/e8bd3fe1/attachment-0001.htm 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Sun Mar 26 06:39:10 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Sun, 26 Mar 2006 09:39:10 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Apple not happy, but French may be on the right track
Message-ID: <000801c650e3$0f85c0e0$9e27e440@Harold>

         
        

Article by David Lazarus
SF Gate.com

Sunday, March 26, 2006 


The French have a point. 

Lawmakers in Paris last week approved a bill that would require Apple Computer to make songs sold on its hugely successful iTunes Web site playable on all music devices, not just Apple's hugely successful iPods. 

The draft law, which still must be approved by France's Senate, doesn't specifically target Apple. But as the overwhelming market leader for music downloads, Apple is clearly the company that would be hit hardest by a one-song-fits-all requirement. 

Apple calls this a recipe for "state-sponsored piracy." 

Consumer advocates say otherwise. 

"It's not a recipe for piracy," said Gigi Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, a Washington digital-rights group. "It's a recipe for competition, which is what Apple really doesn't like." 

She called the French bill "a big step in the right direction." 

France's draft law essentially says that anyone who legally purchases a song (or, by extension, a video, TV show or movie) via the Net has a right to be able to enjoy that material on the gadget of his or her choice and not to be beholden to a single maker's product. 

It's tempting to say that the draft law places art before commerce, but that's not quite right. The French aren't opposed to profiting from digital downloads. They're just reprioritizing things more in favor of the consumer. 

What the law would do is require Apple and other companies to share details of copyright-protection software with one another so the same content could run on all players. 

In tech terms, it would create open standards for so-called digital-rights management. It wouldn't be an invitation for people to make as many copies of a song or video as they please and distribute them free online. 

"Without guaranteed interoperability, we run a major risk of captive client bases and an anti-competitive situation," French lawmakers explained in a note that accompanied the legislation. 

Their goal, they said, is to prevent consumers from being "held hostage" by any one company's media player. 

Apple issued a brief statement last week that offers an oddly contradictory response to the French vote. 

On the one hand, the company is attacking the move with its sound-bite-ready warning of "state-sponsored piracy." 

"If this happens, legal music sales will plummet just when legitimate alternatives to piracy are winning over customers," Apple says. 

On the other hand, it's saying that the French law would be a boon primarily for Apple, which would benefit as additional, non-iTunes content becomes available for the company's popular iPod players. 

Apple predicts "iPod sales will likely increase as users freely load their iPods with 'interoperable' music which cannot be adequately protected." 

A company spokesman in Cupertino declined to elaborate on whether Apple ultimately views the French bill as a plus or minus. 

U.S. Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez told an interviewer last week that the federal government supports Apple's efforts to keep details of its proprietary software to itself. 

He said he needs to study the French bill more closely, "but anytime something like this happens, anytime that we believe that intellectual property rights are being violated, we need to speak up. And in this case, the company is taking the initiative." 

Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy in Washington, said European lawmakers tend to take a more egalitarian approach to consumer technology. 

"If you buy the content, you should be able to play it on any device," he said. "There shouldn't be toll booths and gatekeepers when it comes to distribution of digital content." 

Chester said Apple, in opposing the French bill, is acting exclusively out of self-interest. He chided Steve Jobs, the company's chief exec, for trying to depict this as a piracy matter. 

"They're just trying to squeeze out as much excess revenue as possible," he said. "Jobs knows perfectly well that, over the long run, digital content will be available on all platforms." 

Jason Schultz, staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, said the French bill is ultimately about providing consumers with choices and boosting competition, which can only have a positive effect on the marketplace. 

"The more people can move their content around from one device to another, the more they'll buy things to play it on," he said. "You might have one device at home and one in your car, and they wouldn't have to be the same." 

Joe Kraus, co-founder of Palo Alto's DigitalConsumer.org, an advocacy group, said he understands why Apple would be against open standards for copy-protection software. 

"The incumbent with the largest market share will always try to hold on for as long as it can," he observed. "It has the most to lose. But the best thing for consumers is to create a fair and open marketplace." 

Assuming the French bill is enacted, the question now is whether Apple will play ball or whether it will close down iTunes in France and stalk off to sulk. 

Then comes the question: Could it happen here? 

Every advocate I spoke with said no -- not without an overhaul of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which forbids tampering with anti-piracy measures in commercial software. This would take a whole lot of political muscle, they said. 

You know, like they have in France. 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060326/179f38e4/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sun Mar 26 07:00:22 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sun, 26 Mar 2006 10:00:22 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] WOW...Shatner's Latest Enterprise - Frank Ahrens -
 Washington Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <4426AC86.7040602@comcast.net>

Shatner's Latest Enterprise
<>
By Frank Ahrens
The Washington Post
Sunday, March 26, 2006; F06

Ah, William Shatner. How effortlessly he moves from show to show, era to 
era, platform to platform.

For those of you who missed him as Capt. James T. Kirk of the Starship 
Enterprise in "Star Trek" in the 1960s, there was "The Barbary Coast" in 
the 1970s. Or maybe you bought his 1968 album, which featured a 
spoken-word version of "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds."

No? Maybe you saw him as hood-hurdling police officer T.J. Hooker in the 
1980s, or on "Rescue 911." Missed those? Maybe you read his "Tek War" 
novels. You probably saw him sing in Priceline.com television ads in the 
1990s, or in the film "Miss Congeniality" or in any number of 
self-spoofing roles that continue today.

Heck, he's even created a new character -- mad-cow-afflicted, gun-toting 
lawyer Denny Crane on ABC's "Boston Legal" -- that may, may enter the 
Shatnerian pantheon alongside Capt. Kirk.

Now, like a virus that hops to successive hosts as they are introduced 
into a system, Shatner is mastering e-commerce: He's started his own 
online club to sell DVDs to sci-fi fans. ( http://www.shatnerdvdclub.com/ )

For a one-time annual fee, the site says, of $47.99 ("Dammit, Jim! I'm a 
doctor, not a bank!"), customers gain entry to the club, which will give 
them access to a "selection of rare and compelling Sci-Fi, Fantasy & 
Horror films, personally selected by William Shatner."

Okay. First off, there's no such thing as a "one-time annual fee." It's 
one or the other. The site promises that sci-fi buffs will "own the 
underground hits no one else has!" but fails to actually, um, list most 
of the titles that Bill will send you, once a month, for $4 per DVD.

"Only members can enjoy expert selections from the William Shatner DVD 
Club," the site reads. "We never publish a list of our constantly 
evolving collection." It grudgingly lists three examples: "Ginger 
Snaps," "Immortal" and "Dragon Storm," a made-for-the-Sci-Fi-Channel 
film. All three have received fine marks from the critics.

I mean, as much as anybody, I implicitly trust Bill Shatner and his 
judgment in all matters. This is the man, after all, who pioneered an . 
. . entirenewwayof . . . deliveringDIALOGUEthat . . . no one had seen . 
. . BEFORE! Or SINCE!

But I'm not sure I'm ready to plunk down nearly $50 on the idea, even 
though, as the site reads, "The iconic Captain Kirk has watched 
literally thousands of Sci-Fi, Horror, and Fantasy films and has 
selected his personal favorites for you."

Wait a minute: Who's watching these movies, Shatner or Kirk? ("Dammit, 
Jim! I'm a doctor, not a Jungian psychoanalyst!")

I might be even more wary of the upfront fee if I checked out, oh, say, 
Netflix, and found out that for $9.99 per month I could rent -- one at a 
time, viewing and then returning one DVD and then getting another -- as 
many DVDs as I could watch in that month. With Netflix, there is no 
upfront fee, the DVDs are mailed to my house and returned in prepaid 
mailers, I could hold onto each DVD as long as I want, and I get to 
choose from a list of 55,000 DVDs that are in plain sight. ( 
http://www.netflix.com/ )

I understand that's not the same as Shatner and his "team of expert film 
critics" (now, there's a job) picking out movies for me, but it might 
have to do.

Tell you what, though. I might be willing to pay $47.99 and $4 per DVD 
to join a William Shatner DVD Club that sent me only movies starring 
William Shatner.

Oh, sure. It'd be fun to watch him acting mano-a-maniac with Ricardo 
Montalban in "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan." That's a holiday 
favorite in the Web Watch household and should be in yours.

But where else would you get the chance to own 1961's "Judgment at 
Nuremberg," a fine retelling of a Nazi war-crimes trial, in which a 
young Shatner acts opposite Werner Klemperer ("Hogan!")? Or, best of 
all, "Incubus," the 1965 art-horror classic starring Shatner filmed 
entirely in Esperanto?

Web Watch had the great pleasure and privilege of hanging with Shatner 
in Spring 2001, when he hosted the Miss USA pageant in Gary, Ind., as 
unlikely a combination as you'll find anywhere. The man's energy and 
keen eye for new enterprise was amazing.

I am certain that he would find nothing more personally edifying than 
selling a library of DVDs starring himself.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/25/AR2006032500095.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060326/9cd203ce/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sun Mar 26 07:03:26 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sun, 26 Mar 2006 10:03:26 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] The voice of intrusion - Elissa Ely - Boston Globe Op-Ed
Message-ID: <4426AD3E.8010705@comcast.net>


  The voice of intrusion

By Elissa Ely  |  March 26, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

SHE WAS living alone for the first time, an independent woman, after 
years in the hospital and years living with others. It was a triumph.

A month after moving, she left a message canceling an appointment. She 
did not show the month after that, and did not answer the phone. This 
was not like her. Finally, family drove her in.

Her hair sprouted in a dozen electrified directions. Her voice had 
always been thin, a little vulnerable. But it had also been exuberant 
and full of self-love. Now she could barely bring herself to speak.

The apartment was fine. There were no problems with the landlord or 
neighbors. The elevator worked well.

''Streets safe?"

''Fine, fine."

''Phone's working OK?"

''Well," she said, and the formerly self-loving voice wavered. There had 
been some calls. One man at first, asking about her bank account. He 
said he could make her a lot of money. That didn't seem right. But she 
didn't hang up. She didn't want trouble. He said he needed her account 
and credit card number. He said she had to give them to him. She was 
afraid to hang up. He kept calling and calling. She didn't know what to 
say. Then he stopped calling -- and another man started.

''Did you worry they knew where you lived?"

''I thought they might come to the apartment and wait outside."

''Did you tell anyone?"

She was an independent woman. She had told no one.

We understand one another in comparative and self-centered ways. I had a 
memory. Many years ago, I was 12, maybe 13, alone in our big house for 
the first time at night. It was a landmark event, and I was keeping 
myself excellent company -- playing piano, heating the oven for cookies, 
contemplating an ill-tasting, forbidden nip from the company liquor shelf.

It was dark outside when the kitchen phone rang. A pleasant voice said 
he was taking a survey. He appreciated my time, it was a real help. The 
survey was about women's clothing. First he asked some questions about 
my age and grade. Then he asked a few other questions, more particular 
now, about my size and hair color. They seemed unnecessary, but I was 
raised in a polite culture to respond helpfully.

The next question came after a pause. For the survey, he needed to know 
this: What kind of underpants did I like? What kind of top? What exactly 
was I wearing at that moment? Would I describe it to him?

I was standing by the sink, facing the yard. The time for freely hanging 
up had passed. His voice sank. Now he was making suggestions, things I 
might be doing at that very moment. None of it was true, but he was so 
knowing. His knowledge was expansive and terrifying, bigger than a 
single sense that maybe he could see as well as hear; maybe he was close 
enough -- in the yard beyond the window -- for touch.

Now he began to tell me what he wanted me to do.

What is this survey for? I said in the tiniest final voice. There had to 
be a reason for these questions. Even then, I did not want to offend him.

The line went dead. I put the receiver on the hook, took it off the 
hook, put it on, and took it off. There was no safe location for it. It 
was off the hook when my parents came home. I did not tell them what had 
happened.

''Did these men know your name?" I asked the patient.

She chewed the implication over. Logic comes hard in the midst of 
terror, but she was here now, not home. No, she didn't think they knew 
her name, and if they didn't know that, they couldn't know where she 
lived. Come to think of it, they hadn't called for a few weeks now. 
Probably they were on to someone else. That must be what had happened. 
They had moved on.

But she did not look relieved. The realization that they were finished 
with her brought no comfort. We discussed sensible actions -- an 
unlisted number, caller ID. Nothing broke her distractedness. The 
apartment had been penetrated.

When the meeting was over, she made no move to go. She was still an 
independent woman -- but not a free one. The clothing surveyor had never 
called back, but it did not matter. The patient and I had this in 
common. The voices might have left, but they were not gone. For a long, 
long time, they were not going to go away.

Elissa Ely is a psychiatrist.  

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/26/the_voice_of_intrusion/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060326/83bd24a3/attachment.htm 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: dingbat_story_end_icon.gif
Type: image/gif
Size: 49 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060326/83bd24a3/attachment.gif 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Sun Mar 26 07:06:02 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Sun, 26 Mar 2006 10:06:02 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] SHOULD READ: America takes side of Israel - Jeff Jacoby
 - Boston Globe Op-Ed
Message-ID: <4426ADDA.7040603@comcast.net>


  America takes side of Israel

By Jeff Jacoby  |  March 26, 2006 |  The Boston Globe

First of two columns

A GALLUP POLL released last month puts American support for Israel at 
near-record levels. When asked for their views on the Middle East, 59 
percent of Americans say they sympathize with the Israelis, while just 
15 percent favor the Palestinians. Pro-Israel sentiment rises with 
increased knowledge -- 66 percent of those who follow international 
affairs ''very closely" support Israel, compared with 52 percent of 
those who don't pay close attention to foreign news.

Other findings are comparable. More than two-thirds of Americans say 
their overall view of Israel is favorable. Only 11 percent, by contrast, 
have a favorable opinion of the Palestinian Authority. While 22 percent 
of the public wants Washington to conduct diplomatic relations with the 
Hamas-controlled Palestinian government even if it refuses to recognize 
Israel's right to exist as a sovereign state, 44 percent say recognition 
of Israel must be a precondition to relations with the United States. 
Another 25 percent -- one American in four -- oppose any US dealings 
with Hamas at all.

Staunch American support for Israel is nothing new. In February 2005, 
Gallup reported similarly lopsided findings -- 69 percent of the public 
viewed Israel favorably, 25 percent unfavorably. In 2004, when Israel 
was being denounced in Europe and the United Nations for its 
assassination of Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the leader of Hamas, 61 percent of 
Americans said Israel was justified in killing him. In 2002, when a CBS 
News poll asked whether Israel's actions against Yasser Arafat and his 
forces were equivalent to US actions against Osama bin Laden and Al 
Qaeda, 59 percent agreed that they were.

In short, solidarity with Israel is an abiding feature of American 
public opinion. Because the American people are pro-Israel, the American 
government is pro-Israel. And because Americans so strongly support 
Israel in its conflict with the Arabs, American policy in the Middle 
East is committed to Israel's defense.

Only someone far outside the American mainstream, then, would insist 
that ''Israel's past and present conduct offers no moral basis for 
privileging it over the Palestinians." Or that US policy is engineered 
through a Zionist ''stranglehold on Congress." Or that ''neither 
strategic nor moral arguments can account for America's support for 
Israel," leaving only one possible explanation: ''the unmatched power of 
the Israel Lobby."

Those aren't the words of American neo-Nazi David Duke -- though Duke 
has ringingly endorsed them. They aren't the words of Egypt's Muslim 
Brotherhood, the granddaddy of Islamist radicalism -- though a top 
Brotherhood official praises them. They aren't the words of the PLO -- 
though the PLO is actively distributing them.

The source of those words, and many more like them, is a bitter 
anti-Israel screed masquerading as academic scholarship. Co-authored by 
Stephen Walt, academic dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, 
and University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer, ''The Israel Lobby 
and US Foreign Policy" was released last week as a ''working paper" on 
the Kennedy School website. But so slipshod is the paper's research and 
so extreme its bias that within days the Harvard and Kennedy School 
logos were stripped from the title page. ''It clearly does not meet the 
academic standards of a Kennedy School research paper," said Marvin 
Kalb, one of the school's best-known scholars.

The idea that the American public and US policy makers dance to a tune 
played by an all-powerful ''Israel Lobby" is an old canard. Neo-Nazis 
like Duke have long described Capitol Hill as part of the ZOG, or 
Zionist Occupation Government. Right-wing nativist Pat Buchanan 
notoriously charged ''the Israeli defense ministry and its 'amen corner' 
in the United States" with ''beating the drums for war" in 1990.

If the truth be told, it isn't hard to understand why America's ardent 
support for Israel might strike some people as odd, or even suspicious. 
In so much of the world -- Europe, the Middle East, the UN General 
Assembly -- Israel is despised. Even if Americans don't share the 
anti-Semitism that is rife in other lands, wouldn't it be more practical 
for them to stop taking Israel's side? After all, there are 500 million 
Arabs in the world, and they control one-third of the world's oil 
supply. Why should Americans alienate them by continuing to support 
Israel, a country with no oil and just 6 million people?

As a matter of plain economic common sense, the United States has every 
reason to turn against the Jewish state. What accounts for its refusal 
to do so? If it isn't an ''Israel Lobby" pulling hidden strings, what on 
earth can it be?

Something more powerful than economics: the kinship of common values.

Next: An ''America" in the Middle East

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/26/america_takes_side_of_israel/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060326/fdab0449/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Sun Mar 26 07:40:36 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Sun, 26 Mar 2006 15:40:36 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Schools Cut Back Subjects to Push Reading
	and Math
Message-ID: <20060326154036.B637783DF4@lax-gw03.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

EDUCATION | March 26, 2006
Schools Cut Back Subjects to Push Reading and Math
By SAM DILLON
Trying to meet the requirements of No Child Left Behind, thousands of schools are reducing class time spent on other subjects.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/26/education/26child.html?ex=1144040400&en=14e741580d6b9cfd&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060326/b48e0a32/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Sun Mar 26 07:49:42 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Sun, 26 Mar 2006 15:49:42 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: A Poverty of the Mind
Message-ID: <20060326154942.B8EB511FAF9@lax-gw07.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

OPINION | March 26, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor: A Poverty of the Mind
By ORLANDO PATTERSON
Why do we ignore the culture behind young blacks' plight?
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/26/opinion/26patterson.html?ex=1144040400&en=563565405d44ee55&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060326/dc0c2582/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Sun Mar 26 07:53:19 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Sun, 26 Mar 2006 15:53:19 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Four Ways to Fire a Frenchman
Message-ID: <20060326155320.3BC8B11FB1E@lax-gw07.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

WEEK IN REVIEW | March 26, 2006
Ideas & Trends: Four Ways to Fire a Frenchman
By CRAIG S. SMITH
The laws on "licensement," as firing in France is called, are complex enough to fill a book, but in the end there are essentially four ways to deliver a pink slip.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/26/weekinreview/26smith.html?ex=1144040400&en=1acf706a94899896&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060326/057d696a/attachment-0001.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Sun Mar 26 07:55:33 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Sun, 26 Mar 2006 15:55:33 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: A Bellwether for the Power of a President
Message-ID: <20060326155533.E49F09FD41@lax-gw05.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

good question


WEEK IN REVIEW | March 26, 2006
The Nation: A Bellwether for the Power of a President
By JONATHAN MAHLER
Is the war on terror really a war? What are the implications of an unending war with no geographical boundaries?
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/26/weekinreview/26mahler.html?ex=1144040400&en=bb0260c2c4d49846&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060326/187a5fdd/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Sun Mar 26 07:56:49 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Sun, 26 Mar 2006 15:56:49 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Firefighters Gone Vegan? Even Austin Is
	Impressed
Message-ID: <20060326155651.D5CB53AE6F4@lax-gw06.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

NATIONAL | March 26, 2006
Firefighters Gone Vegan? Even Austin Is Impressed
By DEBORAH BLUMENTHAL
In Austin, Tex., the five firefighters of Team C at Firehouse 2 now eat vegan.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/26/national/26vegan.html?ex=1144040400&en=0b01b2b435b54d9e&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060326/90684368/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Sun Mar 26 08:14:59 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Sun, 26 Mar 2006 16:14:59 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Bound,
	Blindfolded and Dead: The Face of Revenge in Baghdad
Message-ID: <20060326161500.1BC663AE609@lax-gw06.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

INTERNATIONAL / MIDDLE EAST | March 26, 2006
Bound, Blindfolded and Dead: The Face of Revenge in Baghdad
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
As leaders struggle to avert a civil war, hundreds of men continue to be kidnapped, tortured and executed in Baghdad.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/26/international/middleeast/26bodies.html?ex=1144040400&en=63baa8f97adc7ed1&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060326/18b801ed/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Sun Mar 26 08:42:54 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Sun, 26 Mar 2006 16:42:54 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: In Kabul, a Test for Shariah
Message-ID: <20060326164254.EC67D237197@lax-gw01.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

WEEK IN REVIEW | March 26, 2006
The World: In Kabul, a Test for Shariah
By ANDREA ELLIOTT
The news that a man in Afghanistan might face a death sentence for converting to Christianity brought cries of outrage around the world last week.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/26/weekinreview/26elliott.html?ex=1144040400&en=524c6a22df5db497&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060326/6e04366d/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Sun Mar 26 08:42:53 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Sun, 26 Mar 2006 16:42:53 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Jews in France Feel Sting as Anti-Semitism
	Surges Among Children of Immigrants
Message-ID: <20060326164254.62F05237078@lax-gw01.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

INTERNATIONAL | March 26, 2006
Jews in France Feel Sting as Anti-Semitism Surges Among Children of Immigrants
By CRAIG S. SMITH
In the wake of the torture and killing of Ilan Halimi, attention has focused on anti-Semitism among France's second-generation immigrant youth.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/26/international/26antisemitism.html?ex=1144040400&en=65d4dfbad16dbdc6&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060326/73b1a9b9/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Sun Mar 26 08:43:40 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Sun, 26 Mar 2006 16:43:40 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: The Crescent and the Gavel
Message-ID: <20060326164341.1552713B751@lax-gw04.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

OPINION | March 26, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor: The Crescent and the Gavel
By J ALEXANDER THIER
Abdul Rahman's case should remind us of how important it is to help Afghanistan develop competent and independent judges if we want its democracy to succeed.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/26/opinion/26thier.html?ex=1144040400&en=7e5c564c0036f81c&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060326/fed81392/attachment-0001.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Sun Mar 26 08:44:02 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Sun, 26 Mar 2006 16:44:02 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Neo No More
Message-ID: <20060326164403.07EA5237197@lax-gw01.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

BOOKS / SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW | March 26, 2006
'America at the Crossroads,' by Francis Fukuyama: Neo No More
Review by PAUL BERMAN
Francis Fukuyama has decided to resign from the neoconservative movement ? though for reasons that may seem ambiguous.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/26/books/review/26berman.html?ex=1144040400&en=8b931564a8a8c939&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060326/d65dcf18/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Sun Mar 26 08:44:22 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Sun, 26 Mar 2006 16:44:22 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Why Can't Democrats Win?
Message-ID: <20060326164422.791DD13B821@lax-gw04.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

BOOKS / SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW | March 26, 2006
'Crashing the Gate,' by Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Z?niga: Why Can't Democrats Win?
Review by PETER BEINART
Two liberal bloggers argue that the party establishment must change, or die.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/26/books/review/26beinart.html?ex=1144040400&en=0acd38749f3b0914&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060326/9f274535/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Sun Mar 26 08:45:36 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Sun, 26 Mar 2006 16:45:36 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: The Cable Guys
Message-ID: <20060326164536.E33FC3AE740@lax-gw06.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

BOOKS / SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW | March 26, 2006
Books by James Carville and Paul Begala and Fred Barnes: The Cable Guys
Review by RICK LYMAN
James Carville and Paul Begala chart a path to Democratic victory, while Fred Barnes says the G.O.P. is in good hands.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/26/books/review/26lyman.html?ex=1144040400&en=a0b3cc394c08708f&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060326/b516cd52/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Sun Mar 26 09:26:22 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Sun, 26 Mar 2006 09:26:22 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] CNN.com - Be worried, be very worried - Mar 26, 2006
Message-ID: <9113196.1143393982162.JavaMail.tomcat@localhost>



*Please note, the sender's email address has not been verified.



For those who have been screaming about this for years, there is little - indeed, no - comfort in saying "I told you so."

Peace.



 
********************
 
If you are having trouble with any of the links in this message, or if the URL's are not appearing as links, please follow the instructions at the bottom of this email.
 
Title: CNN.com - Be worried, be very worried - Mar 26, 2006
 
  
Copy and paste the following into your Web browser to access the sent link:
http://www.emailthis.clickability.com/et/emailThis?clickMap=viewThis&etMailToID=620820521&pt=Y
 

Copy and paste the following into your Web browser to SAVE THIS link:
http://www.savethis.clickability.com/st/saveThisPopupApp?clickMap=saveFromET&partnerID=2006&etMailToID=620820521&pt=Y

 
Copy and paste the following into your Web browser to forward this link:
http://www.emailthis.clickability.com/et/emailThis?clickMap=forward&etMailToID=620820521&partnerID=2006&pt=Y

  
 
********************


Email pages from any Web site you visit - add the EMAIL THIS button to your browser, copy and paste the following into your Web browser:
http://www.emailthis.clickability.com/et/emailThis?clickMap=browserButtons&pt=Y"


*********************



Instructions:
-----------------------------------------
If your e-mail program doesn't recognize Web addresses:
1. With your mouse, highlight the Web Address above. Be sure to highlight the entire Web address, even if it spans more than one line in your email. 
2. Select Copy from the Edit menu at the top of your screen. 
3. Launch your Web browser.
4. Paste the address into your Web browser by selecting Paste from the Edit menu.
5. Click Go or press Enter or Return on your keyboard. 
 
********************
 
 
 
 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060326/316d7a3c/attachment.htm 

From ean at sbcglobal.net  Sat Mar 25 16:32:03 2006
From: ean at sbcglobal.net (ean at sbcglobal.net)
Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2006 16:32:03 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Robert Jensen critique of "Crash": A white-supremacist
	movie"
Message-ID: <E1FNZKe-0006XQ-QK@smtpauth08.mail.atl.earthlink.net>

Today's commentary:
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2006-03/21jensen-wosnitzer.cfm

ZNet Commentary
Crash 
March 24, 2006
By Robert Jensen and Robert Wosnitzer 


"Crash" is a white-supremacist movie.

The Oscar-winning best picture -- widely heralded, especially by white
liberals, for advancing an honest discussion of race in the United States
-- is, in fact, a setback in the crucial project of forcing white America
to come to terms the reality of race and racism, white supremacy and white
privilege. 

The central theme of the film is simple: Everyone is prejudiced -- black,
white, Asian, Iranian and, we assume, anyone from any other racial or
ethnic group. We all carry around racial/ethnic baggage that's packed with
unfair stereotypes, long-stewing grievances, raw anger, and crazy fears.
Even when we think we have made progress, we find ourselves caught in
frustratingly complex racial webs from which we can't seem to get
untangled.

For most people -- including the two of us -- that's painfully true; such
untangling is a life's work in which we can make progress but never feel
finished. But that can obscure a more fundamental and important point:
This state of affairs is the product of the actions of us white people. In
the modern world, white elites invented race and racism to protect their
power, and white people in general have accepted the privileges they get
from the system and helped maintain it. The problem doesn't spring from
the individual prejudices that exist in various ways in all groups but
from white supremacy, which is expressed not only by individuals but in
systemic and institutional ways. There's little hint of such understanding
in the film, which makes it especially dangerous in a white-dominant
society in which white people are eager to avoid confronting our
privilege. 

So, "Crash" is white supremacist because it minimizes the reality of white
supremacy. Its faux humanism and simplistic message of tolerance directs
attention away from a white-supremacist system and undermines white
accountability for the maintenance of that system. We have no way of
knowing whether this is the conscious intention of writer/director Paul
Haggis, but it's emerges as the film's dominant message. 

While viewing "Crash" may make some people, especially white people,
uncomfortable during and immediately after viewing, the film seems
designed, at a deeper level, to make white people feel better. As the film
asks us to confront personal prejudices, it allows us white folk to evade
our collective responsibility for white supremacy. In "Crash," emotion
trumps analysis, and psychology is more important than politics. The
result: White people are off the hook. 

The first step in putting white people back on the hook is pressing the
case that the United States in 2006 is a white-supremacist society. Even
with the elimination of formal apartheid and the lessening of the worst of
the overt racism of the past, the term is still appropriate, in
ideological and material terms. 

The United States was founded, of course, on an ideology of the inherent
superiority of white Europeans over non-whites that was used to justify
the holocausts against indigenous people and Africans, which created the
nation and propelled the U.S. economy into the industrial world. That
ideology also has justified legal and extralegal exploitation of every
non-white immigrant group. 

Today, polite white folks renounce such claims of superiority. But scratch
below that surface politeness and the multicultural rhetoric of most white
people, and one finds that the assumptions about the superiority of the
art, music, culture, politics, and philosophy rooted in white Europe are
still very much alive. No poll can document these kinds of covert
opinions, but one hears it in the angry and defensive reaction of white
America when non-white people dare to point out that whites have unearned
privilege. Watch the resistance from white America when any serious
attempt is made to modify school or college curricula to reflect knowledge
from other areas and peoples. The ideology of white supremacy is all
around. 

That ideology also helps white Americans ignore and/or rationalize the
racialized disparities in the distribution of resources. Studies continue
to demonstrate how, on average, whites are more likely than members of
racial/ethnic minorities to be on top on measures of wealth and
well-being. Looking specifically at the gap between white and black
America, on some measures black Americans have fallen further behind white
Americans during the so-called post-civil rights era. For example, the
typical black family had 60 percent as much income as a white family in
1968, but only 58 percent as much in 2002. On those measures where there
has been progress, closing the gap between black and white is decades, or
centuries, away.

What does this white supremacy mean in day-to-day life? One recent study
found that in the United States, a black applicant with no criminal record
is less likely to receive a callback from a potential employer than a
white applicant with a felony conviction. In other words, being black is
more of a liability in finding a job than being a convicted criminal. Into
this new century, such discrimination has remained constant. 

That's white supremacy. Many people, of all races, feel and express
prejudice, but white supremacy is built into the attitudes, practices and
institutions of the dominant white society. It's not the product simply of
individual failure but is woven into society, and the material
consequences of it are dramatic. 

It seems that the people who made "Crash" either don't understand that,
don't care, or both. The character in the film who comes closest to
articulating a systemic analysis of white supremacy is Anthony, the
carjacker played by the rapper Ludacris. But putting the critique in the
mouth of such a morally unattractive character undermines any argument he
makes, and his analysis is presented as pseudo-revolutionary blather to be
brushed aside as we follow the filmmakers on the real subject of the film
-- the psychology of the prejudice that infects us all. 

That the characters in "Crash" -- white and non-white alike -- are complex
and have a variety of flaws is not the problem; we don't want films
populated by one-dimensional caricatures, simplistically drawn to make a
political point. Those kinds of political films rarely help us understand
our personal or political struggles. But this film's characters are drawn
in ways that are ultimately reactionary.

Although the film follows a number of story lines, its politics are most
clearly revealed in the interaction that two black women have with an
openly racist white Los Angeles police officer played by Matt Dillon.
During a bogus traffic stop, Dillon's Officer Ryan sexually violates
Christine, the upper-middle-class black woman played by Thandie Newton.
But when fate later puts Ryan at the scene of an accident where
Christine's life is in danger, he risks his own life to save her, even
when she at first reacts hysterically and rejects his help. The white male
is redeemed by his heroism. The black woman, reduced to incoherence by the
trauma of the accident, can only be silently grateful for his
transcendence. 

Even more important to the film's message is Ryan's verbal abuse of
Shaniqua, a black case manager at an insurance company (played by Loretta
Devine). She bears Ryan's racism with dignity as he dumps his frustration
with the insurance company's rules about care of his father onto her, in
the form of an angry and ignorant rant against affirmative action. She is
empathetic with Ryan's struggle but unwilling to accept his abuse,
appearing to be one of the few reasonable characters in the film. But not
for long. 

In a key moment at the end of the film, Shaniqua is rear-ended at a
traffic light and emerges from her car angry at the Asian driver who has
hit her. "Don't talk to me unless you speak American," she shouts at the
driver. As the camera pulls back, we are left to imagine the language she
uses in venting her prejudice.

In stark contrast to Ryan and his racism is his police partner at the
beginning of the film, Hanson (played by Ryan Phillippe). Younger and
idealistic, Hanson tries to get Ryan to back off from the encounter with
Christine and then reports Ryan's racist behavior to his black lieutenant,
Dixon (played by Keith David). Dixon doesn't want the hassles of
initiating a disciplinary action and Hanson is left to cope on his own,
but he continues to try to do the right thing throughout the movie. Though
he's the white character most committed to racial justice, at the end of
the film Hanson's fear overcomes judgment in a tense moment, and he shoots
and kills a black man. It's certainly true that well-intentioned white
people can harbor such fears rooted in racist training. But in the world
"Crash" creates, Hanson's deeper awareness of the nature of racism and
attempts to combat it are irrelevant, while Ryan somehow magically
overcomes his racism.

Let us be clear: "Crash" is not a racist movie, in the sense of crudely
using overtly racist stereotypes. It certainly doesn't present the white
characters as uniformly good; most are clueless or corrupt. Two of the
non-white characters (a Latino locksmith and an Iranian doctor) are the
most virtuous in the film. The characters and plot lines are complex and
often intriguing. But "Crash" remains a white-supremacist movie because of
what it refuses to bring into the discussion. 

At this point in our critique, defenders of the film have suggested to us
that we expect too much, that movies tend to deal with issues at this
personalized level and we can't expect more. This is evasion. For example,
whatever one thinks of its politics, another recent film, "Syriana,"
presents a complex institutional analysis of U.S. foreign policy in an
engaging fashion. It's possible to produce a film that is politically
sophisticated and commercially viable. Haggis is clearly talented, and
there's no reason to think he couldn't have deepened the analysis in
creative ways.

"Crash" fans also have offered this defense to us: In a culture that seems
terrified of any open discussion of race, isn't some attempt at an honest
treatment of the complexity of the issue better than nothing? That's a
classic argument from false alternatives. Are we stuck with a choice
between silence or bad analysis? Beyond that, in this case the answer may
well be no. If "Crash" and similar efforts that personalize and
psychologize the issue of race keep white America from an honest
engagement with the structure and consequences of white supremacy, the
ultimate effect may be reactionary. In that case, "nothing" may be better.

The problem of "Crash" can be summed up through one phrase from the
studio's promotional material, which asserts that the film "boldly reminds
us of the importance of tolerance." 

That's exactly the problem. On the surface, the film appears to be bold,
speaking of race with the kind of raw emotion that is rare in this
culture. But that emotion turns out, in the end, to be manipulative and
diversionary. The problem is that the film can't move beyond the concept
of tolerance, and tolerance is not the solution to America's race problem.
White people can -- and often do -- learn to tolerate difference without
ever disturbing the systemic, institutional nature of racism.

The core problem is not intolerance but white supremacy -- and the way in
which, day in and day out, white people accept white supremacy and the
unearned privileges it brings.

"Crash" paints a multi-colored picture of race, and in a multi-racial
society recognizing that diversity is important. Let's just not forget
that the color of racism is white.


Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at
Austin and the author of The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism
and White Privilege. He can be reached at rjensen at uts.cc.utexas.edu.
Robert Wosnitzer is associate producer of the forthcoming documentary on
pornography "The Price of Pleasure." He can be reached at
robert.wosnitzer at mac.com. 



-- 
You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, 
option D (up to 3 emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options 
(option A - 1x/week, option B - 3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option D - 
up to 3x/day) please reply and let us know!  If someone forwarded you 
this email and you want to be on our list, send an email to 
ean at sbcglobal.net and tell us which option you'd like.


"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060325/3f9aa617/attachment-0001.htm 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Sun Mar 26 09:49:32 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harry)
Date: Sun, 26 Mar 2006 17:49:32 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] BBC E-mail: US reprises 'ping-pong diplomacy'
Message-ID: <20060326_174932_045758.harry.sifton@sympatico.ca>

Harry saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you
should see it.

** Message **
Those were interesting days!

** US reprises 'ping-pong diplomacy' **
US table tennis veterans return to China to mark the 35th anniversary of "ping-pong diplomacy" which helped thaw ties.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4846076.stm >


** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all
in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/dailyemail/ >


** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have?been verified.

If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm


From michael at michaelbutler.com  Sun Mar 26 10:07:07 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Sun, 26 Mar 2006 10:07:07 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Lincoln's Winning Strategy for 2008 By DAVID BROOKS
Message-ID: <C04C184B.2A87B%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 26, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Lincoln's Winning Strategy for 2008
By DAVID BROOKS

Let's say you're one of the 36,000 people thinking of running for president
in 2008. You're wooing donors (like Zero Mostel in "The Producers"),
rounding up consultants and pretending you respect journalists so they'll
give you good press when you need it later on. But in the back of your mind
you are wondering: How am I going to inspire a war-weary nation? How am I
going to unite a bitterly divided land?

If you're going to frame a successful campaign in these circumstances,
you're going to have to learn from Lincoln, a man who knew about war and
division.

The Civil War was of course bloodier and more dismal than anything we're
facing today. Leadership blunders led to more American deaths in single
hours than we've seen during three years in Iraq. Lincoln's opponents argued
that the South was too culturally and economically dissimilar to be
reconciled with the North, that blacks could not live freely and equally
with whites.

But as the situation grew dire, Lincoln did not scale back his ambitions or
grow more "realistic." On the contrary, he enlarged and revolutionized the
meaning of the war. He emancipated the slaves. He portrayed the war as a
front in a worldwide struggle for liberty.

"This kind of response to Southern secession might seem counterintuitive ?
to take on more burdens, instead of less, just when the night was darkest,"
Paul Berman has written. But Lincoln understood that the American creed was
his strongest weapon. He knew it would attract allies and manpower.

While never losing sight of the ultimate purpose ? the triumph of freedom ?
he pursued his ends with amazing prudence. The historian Allen Guelzo has
shown that Lincoln intended to emancipate the slaves from the very first,
but he was cautious in the way he proceeded.

His first inaugural was so full of concessions, it enraged his evangelical
allies. He brought men of wildly different opinions and interests into his
cabinet, as Doris Kearns Goodwin has reminded us. He sought to eradicate
slavery gradually, with compensation for slaveholders, and within the
framework of the Constitution. Even when the Emancipation Proclamation came,
it was a famously dry, uninspiring document.

He was guided by a sense that God is self-concealing. Over the long run, the
course of providence is toward justice, but the path is mysterious, so a
prudent person is ready for setbacks, lulls and ironies. Lincoln could take
startling chances ? Emancipation was one ? but he could also wait.

His brand of ironic, prudent idealism was evident in domestic policy as
well. He had a long-range vision of a just society, implied in the
Declaration of Independence. The U.S. was to be a land where all people
would have "an open field and a fair chance" for their "industry, enterprise
and intelligence." It would be a land of hard-working people striving to
rise and transform themselves. His government did everything it could to
enhance social mobility.

But in the meantime, he was cautious. He was suspicious of those who tried
to divide the nation between the haves and the have-nots, and between
natives and immigrants. These sorts of divisions are generally exploited by
people trying to get something for nothing.

Far from regarding immigrants as culturally alien, Lincoln saw them as a
"replenishing stream." They were true Americans, just as if they were "flesh
of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration." He rejected schemes to
give immigrants second-class citizenship. These are the schemes kings are
always devising, he argued, products of the "same old serpent that says you
work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it."

The people who run for president in 2008 will find themselves campaigning in
a weary nation. They will also confront an old form of multiculturalism that
has been given a new life. This is the multiculturalism that puts aside the
universal claims of the Declaration of Independence, which Lincoln
cherished. Instead, it says, democracy is good for many cultures, but not
for Arabs. America has benefited from other immigrants, but not the current
wave of Mexicans.

This is a multiculturalism born of frustration, embraced by people who have
been so soured by the course of change that they've given up on the
destination.

The candidates who hope to reinspire such an electorate will have to devise
foreign and domestic policies that pursue Lincoln's core goal: "The theory
of our government is universal freedom." But they'll have to show they can
be prudent in pursuit of that difficult ideal.

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From michael at intrafi.com  Sun Mar 26 10:08:05 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Sun, 26 Mar 2006 18:08:05 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: The Crescent and the Gavel
Message-ID: <20060326180806.9B99A24AFB4@lax-gw02.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: michael at intrafi.com.

OPINION | March 26, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor: The Crescent and the Gavel
By J ALEXANDER THIER
Abdul Rahman's case should remind us of how important it is to help Afghanistan develop competent and independent judges if we want its democracy to succeed.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/26/opinion/26thier.html?ex=1144040400&en=7e5c564c0036f81c&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060326/f0fb0b0e/attachment.htm 

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Sun Mar 26 10:11:10 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Sun, 26 Mar 2006 10:11:10 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Kristof  Column
Message-ID: <C04C193E.2A87D%michael@michaelbutler.com>

Sorry cannot print out as it has a video which will not download.
Michael


From hecate at diamonddragon.com  Sun Mar 26 11:36:14 2006
From: hecate at diamonddragon.com (Hecate)
Date: Sun, 26 Mar 2006 19:36:14 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] BBC E-mail: 'Three die' in Balochistan clash
Message-ID: <20060326_193614_043930.hecate@diamonddragon.com>

Hecate saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you
should see it.

** Message **
Gas-rich Balochistan has seen months of violence as tribal groups push for greater political and economic rights. 



** 'Three die' in Balochistan clash **
At least three people are killed in Pakistan's Balochistan province during clashes, officials say.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/south_asia/4847100.stm >


** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all
in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/dailyemail/ >


** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have?been verified.

If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm


From hecate at diamonddragon.com  Sun Mar 26 11:38:50 2006
From: hecate at diamonddragon.com (Hecate)
Date: Sun, 26 Mar 2006 19:38:50 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] BBC E-mail: Abbas warns Hamas prime minister
Message-ID: <20060326_193850_052156.hecate@diamonddragon.com>

Hecate saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you
should see it.

** Message **
Under current legislation, the Palestinian president is empowered by law to fire Mr Haniya if his policies are considered harmful to the national interest

** Abbas warns Hamas prime minister **
Mahmoud Abbas tells Hamas he is prepared to intervene to protect the interests of the Palestinian people.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/4846114.stm >


** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all
in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/dailyemail/ >


** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have?been verified.

If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm


From hecate at diamonddragon.com  Sun Mar 26 11:41:28 2006
From: hecate at diamonddragon.com (Hecate)
Date: Sun, 26 Mar 2006 19:41:28 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] BBC E-mail: Revolutionary jet engine tested
Message-ID: <20060326_194128_018230.hecate@diamonddragon.com>

Hecate saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you
should see it.



** Revolutionary jet engine tested **
A jet engine that could reduce flight times between London and Sydney to two hours is tested in Australia.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/4832254.stm >


** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all
in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/dailyemail/ >


** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have?been verified.

If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm


From hecate at diamonddragon.com  Sun Mar 26 11:44:06 2006
From: hecate at diamonddragon.com (Hecate)
Date: Sun, 26 Mar 2006 19:44:06 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] BBC E-mail: Drilling into a hot volcano
Message-ID: <20060326_194406_026980.hecate@diamonddragon.com>

Hecate saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you
should see it.

** Message **
Power station manager Albert Albertsson predicts that, by the end of the century, "Iceland could become the Kuwait of the North", exporting energy in the form of liquid hydrogen as part of a new hydrogen economy. 

** Drilling into a hot volcano **
Geologists in Iceland are drilling directly into the heart of a hot volcano to reveal more about the nature of mid-ocean ridges, the places  where new ocean floor is created.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/4846574.stm >


** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all
in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/dailyemail/ >


** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have?been verified.

If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm


From michael at intrafi.com  Sun Mar 26 14:16:54 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Sun, 26 Mar 2006 17:16:54 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] michael wants you to see this.
Message-ID: <200603262216.k2QMGstU012972@server1.truthout.org>



michael thought you would like this site.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/032606Z.shtml

ApplyRefer v2.3




From nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca  Sun Mar 26 16:22:50 2006
From: nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca (CBC News Online)
Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 00:22:50 UT
Subject: [Mb-civic] CBC News - BELARUS POLICE DETAIN OPPOSITION LEADER
Message-ID: <20060327002250.D95A832F85@web05.nm.cbc.ca>

An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Url: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060327/e59a6968/attachment.diff 

From ean at sbcglobal.net  Sun Mar 26 15:11:44 2006
From: ean at sbcglobal.net (ean at sbcglobal.net)
Date: Sun, 26 Mar 2006 15:11:44 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Che Rides Again (On a Mountain Bike)
Message-ID: <E1FNi0Z-00077z-4S@smtpauth08.mail.atl.earthlink.net>

   http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=71996
Che Rides Again (On a Mountain Bike)
    By Nick Miroff

    Has Latin America ever had such a unifying figure?

    At political rallies, his visage is held aloft as a beacon to regional 
independence and self-determination. He's helped forge new trade 
partnerships to spur economic growth and alleviate poverty. And his 
leadership has fanned a gale-force electoral trend that's sweeping the 
hemisphere to topple one pro-Washington government after the next.

    Who is this grand inductor of Latin American leftism? Venezuelan 
fireball Hugo Chavez? Blue-collar Brazilian Lula Ignacio da Silva? 
Bolivia's coca-farmer-cum-president, Evo Morales?

    ?Epa! It's George W. Bush, the accidental revolutionary.

    In the past five years, the swaggering Texan has inspired a leftward 
surge that is uniting Latin America and threatening to knock Che 
Guevara right off all those natty t-shirts.

    When Che's ill-fated insurgency ended in the jungles of Bolivia with 
his death in 1967, his vision of a single, unified, socialist continent 
remained utterly unfulfilled. U.S.-backed right-wing military dictators 
would rule much of Latin America over the ensuing two decades, and 
many of Che's followers would be tortured and killed in efforts to 
overthrow them.

    As democracy returned to the region at the end of the Cold War, 
most Latin American governments rushed to embrace the 
"Washington consensus" -- market-oriented liberalization policies that 
cut social spending and privatized national industries in order to pay 
down national debts. But the formula, pushed on the region by 
successive American presidents, largely failed to deliver the goods and 
left entire governments bankrupt and beholden to foreign lenders. For 
Latin America's angry, marginalized, impoverished masses, already-
threadbare social safety nets only unraveled further.

    "The macroeconomic proposals of the Washington consensus have 
not been working," says Guillermo Delgado, professor of Latin 
American Studies at UC Santa Cruz. "That model was supposed to 
create prosperity and, after so many years, such prosperity has not 
been seen and class polarization has grown deeper."

    Sensing an opportunity, new social and political movements in the 
region began marshalling their forces. Then George W. Bush came 
along, combining Yankee hubris with a Che-worthy radicalizing touch.

    Bush has since presided over one of the most significant political re-
alignments in the history of the Western Hemisphere. By this summer, 
every major Latin American nation but Colombia is likely to be run by 
elected leaders with stronger backgrounds in Marx than free markets. 
If Cold War-era "domino theory" has been a bust in the Middle East, 
it's working with textbook precision in Latin America.

    Late last year, voters overwhelmingly elected former coca-grower 
Evo Morales, the founder of Bolivia's "Movement Toward Socialism" 
party, who fancies himself a "nightmare" for the Bush administration. 
Then, in January, Chilean voters chose socialist candidate Michele 
Bachelet, a torture victim of the Pinochet regime, as the nation's first 
woman president. Leftists now rule as well in Venezuela, Uruguay, 
Brazil, and Argentina, and are leading in upcoming elections in both 
Peru and Mexico, the region's electoral grand prize. Even recycled 
Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega -- "a hoodlum," according to Roger 
Noriega, formerly the U.S.'s top Latin America official -- appears 
poised for a comeback when Nicaraguan voters go to the polls in 
November.

    Though Latin America's national borders won't melt away anytime 
soon, Che's vision of pan-Latin cooperation has already begun to 
materialize. Venezuela, Brazil, and Argentina recently announced a 
$20 billion plan to build a trans-national gas pipeline through the 
Amazon. Chile has opened dialogue with landlocked Bolivia, easing a 
long-simmering feud over seaport access that stretches back more 
than a century. Cuba, that tropical b?te noire of the White House, still 
uses doctor diplomacy and sends physicians all over the region -- only 
now, it receives billions of dollars worth of Venezuelan oil in return. And 
Mercosur, a South American common market dominated by Brazil, has 
emerged as a rival to the faltering U.S.-sponsored Free Trade Area of 
the Americas (FTAA).

    Mercosur member states blocked ratification of the FTAA at the 
2005 Summit of the Americas in Argentina. When Bush arrived to 
deliver a speech at the conference, he was greeted by mobs of angry 
street protestors who burned American flags, a Burger King, and 
unflattering effigies in his likeness.

    "Fascist Bush!" they chanted, "you are the terrorist!"

    Fencing Off the "Backyard"?

    Bush's overwhelming unpopularity in Latin America is especially 
disappointing given that he put Latin American relations at the top of 
his foreign-policy agenda after taking office. No other U.S. president 
had gone to Latin America for his first visit abroad, and even after 9/11, 
Bush maintained that the United States "has no more important 
relationship in the world than the one we have with Mexico." At every 
turn, he'd trot out his twangy Spanish in order to burnish his Latin cred.

    Since then, Latin America has only drifted further south. Support for 
the U.S. war in Iraq is notably abysmal. Only a handful of countries in 
the region backed the invasion to oust Saddam Hussein and all were 
minor players with the exception of Colombia, the fifth-largest recipient 
of U.S. foreign aid. That Washington is willing to spend lavishly on 
drug eradication in the Andean region but little on development or 
public health has not been lost on the new ascendant left, either.

    In a recent Zogby poll, fewer than 20% of Latin American elites 
(typically the most politically conservative voters in the region) gave 
Bush a favorable approval rating. Only 6% said Bush's policies were 
better than those of his predecessors.

    Some analysts have attributed Latin America's political shift to U.S. 
foreign policy negligence, arguing that, because the Bush 
administration is so consumed with Iraq, American officials are now 
incapable of wielding effective diplomatic influence in the region.

    "After 9/11, Washington effectively lost interest in Latin America," 
writes Peter Hakim, President of Inter-American Dialogue, in the 
January/February issue of Foreign Affairs. "Since then, the attention 
the United States has paid to the region has been sporadic and 
narrowly targeted at particularly troubling or urgent situations."

    This interpretation suggests Bush has been a kind of inattentive 
steward, too busy riding that mountain bike to notice the mutiny going 
on beneath his nose. Worse yet, Hakim believes the United States has 
neither the resources nor the will to alter the course.

    But Latin America's leftward shift stems from more than White 
House distraction. It's not that the United States is acting aloof with its 
neighbors; rather, we're the worst-behaved homeowner on the block. 
We fly the biggest flag, make the loudest demands, and on top of it all, 
we don't even like having guests over. Sure, the United States has 
treated Latin America as its "backyard" for two hundred years -- but 
now, Bush's own party wants to fence it off.

    House Republicans recently approved a plan to erect a 2,000-mile, 
Israeli-style barrier that would wall off Mexico and the rest of Latin 
America. The plan isn't expected to survive a Senate vote, but it sums 
up the current state of north-south relations quite well. And it's been a 
godsend for the presidential campaign of left-wing Mexico City Mayor 
Manuel Lopez Obrador, the leading candidate in the July 2nd elections 
and a frequent Bush critic.

    For Lopez Obrador, the border fence proposal is proof that NAFTA 
is faltering and that outgoing President Vicente Fox was on the wrong 
end of the rope in his faux-ranchero friendship with Bush. Fox had 
staked his presidential reputation on securing an immigration accord 
with the Bush administration, and his failure has made excellent fodder 
for Lopez Obrador's campaign. His election victory in July would leave 
the last domino leaning right on Washington's doorstep.

    Helping Hugo

    The Bush administration has been most frazzled by the growing 
regional influence of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, whom 
Donald Rumsfeld recently likened to Hitler. Chavez has his own 
nickname for Bush -- "Mr. Danger" -- and he's effectively shaped the 
American president into his political foil.

    As Bush pushes the region away, Chavez pulls. The Venezuelan 
leader has fashioned himself into a kind of Latin American Robin 
Hood, raking in tanker-loads of petrodollars in order to bankroll 
massive social programs and regional integration schemes. He's 
provided oil at subsidized rates to poor countries throughout the 
Caribbean, even sending discounted winter heating oil to low-income 
residents in Boston and the Bronx -- an act of mockery as much as 
aid. The Bush administration's tacit endorsement of a 2002 coup that 
briefly ousted Chavez has left the U.S.'s rhetoric about respect for 
democracy ringing hypocritical.

    At the World Social Forum in Caracas in January, Chavez t-shirts 
were reportedly de rigueur, along with all the other standard-fare 
knickknacks of rebellion: Castro-hats, Zapatista stickers, and anything 
red with Che on it. By comparison, Bush apparel was in short supply.

    Granted, he did show up on a few banners and posters that weren't 
slated for immolation, like one that read "Chavez yes, Bush no!" But 
twenty years from now, who knows? Latin America may be much 
better off then. And perhaps he'll finally get the "Gracias Bush" he 
deserves -- with his own face on a silkscreen.

    Nick Miroff is a student at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of 
Journalism. He has reported from Latin America for National Public 
Radio, Mother Jones, and the Oakland Tribune.

Copyright 2006 Nick Miroff 

-- 
You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, 
option D (up to 3 emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options 
(option A - 1x/week, option B - 3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option D - 
up to 3x/day) please reply and let us know!  If someone forwarded you 
this email and you want to be on our list, send an email to 
ean at sbcglobal.net and tell us which option you'd like.


"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060326/a6315ce0/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Mon Mar 27 03:42:52 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 06:42:52 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Help Wanted as Immigration Faces Overhaul - Washington
	Post
Message-ID: <4427CFBC.4020608@comcast.net>

Help Wanted as Immigration Faces Overhaul
Congress Considers New Rules, and Businesses Worry About Finding Workers

By S. Mitra Kalita and Krissah Williams
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, March 27, 2006; A01

Year after year, Professional Grounds Inc. runs a help-wanted ad to find 
landscapers and groundskeepers. Starting wage: $7.74 per hour.

In a good year, three people call. Most years, no one does.

So the Springfield company relies on imported labor -- seasonal guest 
workers allowed to immigrate under the federal guest-worker program -- 
to keep itself running. For 10 months this year, 23 men from Mexico and 
Central America will spend their days mulching and mowing, seeding and 
sodding for Professional Grounds.

Occasionally, company President Bill Trimmer asks himself: If I doubled 
wages, would native-born Americans apply? He thinks he knows the answer.

"I don't think it's a wage situation. It's the type of work and the 
nature of the work. It's hard, backbreaking work," said Trimmer, who 
started the company 31 years ago. "I think we're a more affluent society 
now. They expect more. Everybody expects more. . . . I have contracts, 
and they want an affordable price, too."

Here lies the dilemma facing Congress as it attempts an immigration 
overhaul. Businesses say it is hard to persuade Americans to perform the 
unskilled jobs that immigrants easily fill. Significantly higher wages 
might work, but that increase would be passed on to unhappy consumers, 
forcing Americans to give up under-$10 manicures and $15-per-hour paint 
and lawn jobs.

Yet against a backdrop of heightened scrutiny of those who cross U.S. 
borders and the estimated 12 million migrants already here illegally, 
most everyone agrees that the current immigration system warrants a 
severe makeover.

A recent study by the Pew Hispanic Center estimated that unauthorized 
immigrants make up nearly 5 percent of the labor force. In the 
Washington region, they make up nearly 10 percent of the 3.1 
million-strong workforce, providing mainly unskilled labor.

The federal government has a work visa -- known as H-2B -- that aims to 
help unskilled migrants enter the country legally. But the government 
issues only about 66,000 new H-2B visas each year. The guest workers, 
who generally take jobs in businesses such as restaurants, amusement 
parks, cleaning companies and landscaping firms, are allowed to stay for 
10 months.

The immigration measure passed by the House last year would allow the 
guest-worker program to lapse. Today, the Senate Judiciary Committee 
resumes debating legislation proposed by Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.). It 
would create a new guest-worker program that would allow foreigners to 
enter the United States for three years, with the possibility of renewal 
for another three years.

Both House and Senate plans place on employers the onus for verifying 
the legal status of workers with the creation of a national database of 
Social Security or work identification numbers. Besides requiring 
enforcement, the proposals would impose criminal penalties on employers 
who hire someone not authorized to work in the United States.

Under current law, companies must review two forms of government-issued 
identification to verify that a job applicant is a legal resident. 
Beyond keeping copies of IDs on file, many businesses say they do little 
more than take workers at their word. While some readily dismiss illegal 
workers, they don't necessarily report them and their whereabouts to the 
federal government.

Businesses say they already patrol job applications to sift out 
counterfeit documents. At least four out of 10 applicants for jobs at 
Harry's Essential Grille in Vienna present work documents that look like 
frauds, such as Social Security cards that feel too thin, said Jason 
Steward, manager of the restaurant.

"You have a gut feeling," Steward said. The company he works for, 
Essential Restaurant Holdings LLC, has hired 200 people since opening 
its two Northern Virginia restaurants 2 1/2 years ago. About half of its 
workers are immigrants. He does not object to checking a Social Security 
number in a national database. But he worries about being the first line 
of defense for the company. If he messes up, Essential Restaurants could 
be fined or face criminal penalties under some of the proposals before 
Congress.

Brett McMahon, vice president of Bethesda-based Miller & Long Concrete 
Construction Co., one of the biggest concrete contractors in the 
country, with $300 million in annual revenue, said his concern is that 
the legislation would essentially turn his company into "an enforcer of 
who's legal and who's not." McMahon said, "It's nowhere near that simple 
to check."

In the past 15 years, the Labor Department has audited McMahon's company 
five times looking for illegal workers -- each time finding none, 
McMahon said. He added that the House bill threatens to bring his 
business to a "screeching halt" because there is no provision for a 
guest-worker program or for dealing with the undocumented immigrants 
already working.

But advocates of tighter borders say hiring foreigners should be 
difficult, not just for security but to limit competition between 
less-skilled immigrants and Americans.

"Employers in many of these sectors have gotten themselves into a 
Catch-22 situation where if they do not look the other way and hire 
illegal workers, they will not be competitive with other businesses," 
said Jack Martin, a spokesman for the Federation for American 
Immigration Reform, an advocacy group governed by business leaders and 
activists favoring national immigration limits.

"The wages and working conditions where there are large numbers of 
illegal workers have been driven down to the point where those jobs are 
not as attractive to American workers," Martin said.

According to the Pew Hispanic Center data, undocumented workers tend to 
be clustered in service and construction jobs and make up more than half 
of the region's janitorial and landscape workers. Forty-three percent of 
the region's construction workers are illegally in the United States or 
have only temporary work authorization, the data show.

Wages for landscaping and groundskeeping workers in the Washington area 
have risen slightly in recent years, according to the Bureau of Labor 
Statistics, from an average of $9.61 per hour in 1999 to $10.51 in 2004. 
Professional Grounds' Trimmer said most employees, including guest 
workers, earn $9 to $11 per hour.

Construction wages in the Washington area have risen from an average of 
$15.86 in 1999 to $17.19 in 2004, according to the bureau. McMahon 
estimated that construction wages these days are even higher -- roughly 
$20 an hour, plus health care.

"People think construction is about hiring day laborers in a Lowe's 
parking lot and throwing them in a pickup and paying them $2 an hour," 
McMahon said.

The company has roughly 60 projects underway, including offices, hotels 
and condominiums, and employs about 2,800 workers in the Washington area 
-- three-fourths of them immigrants.

"Every time I put up a crane, they are the guys who show up," McMahon said.

At Professional Grounds' Springfield office, Trimmer said the 
guest-worker program insulates him from having to deal with forged 
documents. Trimmer started using the H-2B program about five years ago 
to fill the void left by high school and college students who preferred 
air-conditioned summer internships over the work he could offer.

The guest workers arrive in February or March and pay $40 a week for 
housing subsidized by the company. A van picks up and drops off those 
who can't drive; workers who have driver's licenses pay $3 per day for 
the use of a company car. Workers pay income, Social Security and 
Medicare taxes.

One of his workers, Abelardo Flores, said he likes returning to his wife 
and three children in Mexico after making money for 10 months. Two other 
workers, Luciano Arango and Marcos Ochoa, said they would like to 
permanently live in the United States someday. All said they had worked 
for the company last year. Trimmer cited investments he makes in the 
guest workers, from English classes to housing, as proof that he views 
them as more than cheap labor.

Once, Trimmer confessed, he did hire an illegal worker: a Nicaraguan man 
named Victor Parrales on a tourist visa.

Next week will mark Parrales's 22nd year with the company; Professional 
Grounds sponsored his green card, and he eventually became a citizen. 
Parrales now owns a house in Alexandria and boasts the title of vice 
president.

A piece of paper taped to Parrales's office door advertises that 
Professional Grounds needs more workers. In fact, the company says it 
will pay workers who bring forward qualified candidates a $1,000 
referral fee.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/26/AR2006032601058.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060327/4606f2d2/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Mon Mar 27 03:46:01 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 06:46:01 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] In Iran,
 Even Some On Right Warning Against Extremes - Washington Post
Message-ID: <4427D079.6090906@comcast.net>

In Iran, Even Some On Right Warning Against Extremes
Conservative Faction Fears Radicalism

By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 27, 2006; A11

TEHRAN -- Nine months after the election of hard-liner Mahmoud 
Ahmadinejad as president, Iranian politics has shifted so sharply to the 
right that some traditional conservatives are warning of the dangers of 
radicalism.

With reformists sidelined and Ahmadinejad setting a strident new tone on 
the global stage, figures from the extreme right of Iran's political 
spectrum are defining the terms of political debate in the country. In 
remarks that set off a domestic firestorm, a senior cleric close to the 
new president suggested in January that Iranian voters were largely 
irrelevant because the government requires only the approval of God.

The remarks by Ayatollah Taqi Mesbah, and similar comments by an aide, 
were roundly criticized, even on the editorial page of Kayhan, a 
traditional showcase for hard-line thinking. Iranian political insiders 
said the flap offered a window on intense infighting at the highest 
reaches of Iran's theocracy just as world attention is focused on the 
government's determination to proceed with a nuclear program that 
skeptics call a cover for atomic weapons.

"Ayatollah Mesbah is an extremist," said one Iranian official close to 
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the soft-spoken cleric who has been Iran's 
supreme leader since the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989.

"Ayatollah Khomeini warned the people lots of times not to allow these 
people, the Shia Talibans, to come to power in Iran and have space," 
said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, noting that 
Khamenei has judged it prudent to accommodate even extremists within the 
system and accord them respect. "Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei feel 
these people can do a lot of damage. They can damage Iran. They can 
damage Islam. They are like the Taliban. They are like al-Qaeda. They 
say they know what Allah expects from us -- that we should do what he 
wants from us without paying attention to the consequences.

"And it's a very dangerous belief."

The tension highlights significant divisions within Iran's conservative 
camp, often viewed from outside the country as a turbaned monolith. In 
reality, 27 years after the 1979 revolution that brought Shiite clerics 
to power, Iranian politics is a nuanced landscape defined largely by the 
lessons taken from the previous quarter-century.

Traditional conservatives describe themselves as firm but flexible. 
While remaining committed to the precept that clerics should hold 
ultimate authority, they were chastened in the 1990s when reformists -- 
determined to lessen the intrusion of the state into private lives and 
show greater tolerance for dissent -- won landslide electoral victories.

Other conservatives, who proudly call themselves fundamentalists, argue 
that reformists were hollowing out the Islamic Republic from within. 
Equating dissent with treason, they demanded a hard-line defense of the 
revolution's tenets, including strident opposition to the United States 
and Israel.

In recent years, the two camps united at election time, making common 
cause against reformists. But after the votes were counted, moderate 
conservatives were left unsatisfied.

"There was a problem in our structure, our conservative political 
structure," said Amir Mohebian, a leader in a conservative faction that 
absorbed some reformist inclinations, including cautious engagement with 
the West. "We start very well, but the result was not under our control."

Mohebian said the outcomes of 2003 elections for local councils, the 
2004 contest for parliament, "and now the presidency," were "not our 
result." Each succeeding contest tightened the right's grip.

One reason was the hard-line orientation of the Guardian Council, a 
screening panel that barred reformist candidates, producing a ballot 
skewed to the right.

That amplified another factor: turnout. The Basij civilian militia, and 
in last June's presidential contest the Islamic Revolutionary Guard 
Corps, showed up most reliably at the polls, doing their duty as the 
core constituency Khamenei set out to create after succeeding Khomeini.

"The Basij is mainly a creation of Mr. Khamenei," said one Iranian 
analyst, who declined to be quoted by name. "They spent a huge amount of 
money to reinforce these military groups. Basiji people and even the 
Revolutionary Guard people are really an artificial social class, like 
an artificial island."

Ahmadinejad spent most of his career in both groups, and he wrote huge 
increases for each into his first budget as president. He commanded a 
Revolutionary Guard engineering unit during the 1980s war with Iraq, the 
defining experience for many hard-liners holding fast to the slogans of 
a then-young revolution, and he was a leader in the Basij.

"He's a true believer in the revolutionary values, which we believe in, 
too," said Mohammad Ali Tai, 61, as he squatted on a curb at Tehran 
University, where Friday prayers are held in the capital. Usually, a few 
thousand people attend. Most are veterans like Tai, who returned home to 
lives that failed to improve materially while the governing elites grew 
wealthy.

"I am a barber myself. I talk to many people," Tai said. "They are only 
tolerating this hardship because they believe in Islam. Some people who 
were in charge did not believe in these values, and this inequality is 
because of them."

Each week, Tai attends a Basij meeting, and well as a gathering of his 
hayat , a community group that mounts celebrations for religious 
holidays. When Ahmadinejad was mayor of Tehran, he provided the groups 
with rice at discount prices.

"Everything we do is actually a matter of keeping alive the 
revolutionary spirit," said Tai, who said he voted in the previous two 
presidential contests for Mohammad Khatami, a reformist. "But this time 
the Basij told us: Only vote for Ahmadinejad, and don't vote for anybody 
else."

If such groups were key to Ahmadinejad's electoral success, the 
cocooning cycle of their meetings -- offering mutual reinforcement and 
fealty to a shared vision -- provides insight into the staying power of 
his rigid outlook. Friends say he held to it stubbornly when others 
adjusted their views to the post-revolution realities that spawned 
Iran's reform movement.

"He always thought that was a deviation from the true path of the 
revolution," said Nasser Hadian-Jazy, who has known Ahmadinejad since 
grade school. "Equality, justice, humility, being simple, supporting 
Muslims, opposing global arrogance -- he was never ashamed of these 
principles. Never."

Hadian-Jazy, himself a revolutionary who evolved into a reformist, said 
he marveled at seeing his old friend wearing a checkered headdress 
around his shoulders on a university campus in 1998, a deeply 
unfashionable gesture at the height of the reform movement. "His sense 
of overconfidence, to me, that's not a positive point. But that's the 
way he is," said Hadian-Jazy, now a political scientist at Tehran 
University. "He's naive. The black and white area of his mind is a lot 
bigger than the gray area."

Insiders say these are the qualities that keep Iran's hard-liners in the 
extremes.

"Because of their religious beliefs, these people are inflexible," said 
a former senior official in Khatami's government, who declined to be 
identified further. "Although their number might be few, the certainty 
of their belief lets them resist a larger population. The supporters of 
civil society and reformists are less hard, less ready to be damaged 
because of their belief."

"Whenever someone is fixed in his thinking, we call them hard-liners," 
said Mehdi Karrubi, a moderate cleric who lost narrowly to Ahmadinejad 
in the first round of last year's presidential balloting. "A group of 
people just come together. They talk to each other and say: This is what 
the society thinks!"

Mesbah, the cleric whose speech touched off the current conflict in the 
conservative camp, is praised even by critics for his intellect. He 
leads a well-funded seminary in the holy city of Qom and has forged a 
reputation for steeling the resolve of Iran's harshest conservatives, 
famously declaring: "If someone tells you he has a new interpretation of 
Islam, sock him in the mouth!"

A cartoonist dubbed him "Ayatollah Crocodile" for encouraging 
suppression of the press. One follower, now Ahmadinejad's intelligence 
minister, once bit a journalist on the shoulder. Another, now 
Ahmadinejad's interior minister, oversaw the execution of thousands of 
prisoners in the late 1980s.

Many of Mesbah's former students hold places in the Revolutionary 
Guard's ideological and political section. The cleric encourages 
students to study in Canada and the United States, which critics say 
does little to soften their views. Most eventually return to Qom.

Mesbah's followers have now set their sights, Hadian-Jazy said, on 
gaining control of the panel of clerics that is empowered to name Iran's 
supreme leader -- an open-ended appointment that has been assumed to run 
a lifetime. Called the Assembly of Experts, the 86-member body will be 
elected in nationwide balloting set for October.

Mesbah is expected to field a slate of graduates from his seminary, and 
in the preelection positioning now underway, some see preparations for a 
kind of coup. But the boldness hard-liners have shown since 
Ahmadinejad's surprise win -- on a populist platform that emphasized 
quality of life -- has unsettled many here.

"I believe the traditional right wing is worried," said Saeed Laylaz, an 
analyst who served in the first reformist administration of Khatami. 
"Until now they used each other as a horse to ride from one place to the 
other, and each thought the other was the rider."

Ahmadinejad's triumph, he said, clarified the driving force.

"When you create radicals, they don't stop when you want them to," 
Laylaz said. "The leader can order when they leave the barracks, but 
they decide when to go back. This is the dangerous position of the 
supreme leader and the right wing right now."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/26/AR2006032600755.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060327/bfe42835/attachment-0001.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Mon Mar 27 03:48:36 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 06:48:36 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] The Freedom to Describe Dictatorship - Jackson Diehl -
 Washington Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <4427D114.9080000@comcast.net>

The Freedom to Describe Dictatorship
<>
By Jackson Diehl
The Washington Post
Monday, March 27, 2006; A15

Following the first day of Egypt's deeply flawed parliamentary election 
last November, the country's largest newspaper, the state-controlled 
al-Ahram, appeared with an equally flawed headline: "The Fairest 
Parliamentary Elections in 50 Years." Its sister, al-Gumhuriya, 
proclaimed to its readers that "Egyptians Spoke Yesterday -- They Chose 
True Democracy Rather Than Slogans and Heeded President Hosni Mubarak's 
Call."

But for the first time in the 24 years of Mubarak's rule, there was 
another voice that day on the newsstands. The newspaper al-Masri al-Yom, 
or the Daily Egyptian, reported "death threats, bribes, violence and 
partisan security forces." It said that "the elections were marred by 
irregularities and violations carried out by a large number of 
[Mubarak's] National Democratic Party and independent candidates and 
their militias, which prevented people from entering polling stations."

This was no more or less than the truth. But the fact that it was 
published in Cairo, and in Arabic -- and that the newspaper's publisher 
remains a free man who can travel to Washington and talk about it -- is 
perhaps the strongest single sign that Egypt's stifling and stagnant 
autocracy has begun to unravel. "Egyptians have discovered dissent," 
says Hisham Kassem, the stocky, graying and once-lonely liberal who 
created al-Masri al-Yom. "And it's no longer possible for the regime to 
manage information in the old ways."

Kassem is actually pretty pessimistic about where Mubarak is taking 
Egypt in the short term. But, before we get to that, it's worth 
marveling at the mini-revolution his paper has wrought. Until two years 
ago Egyptian media consisted of official organs such as al-Ahram, whose 
editors are appointed by Mubarak and routinely order up headlines like 
those above, and an "opposition" press that specialized in slanders 
against Israel, the Jewish people, the United States, Western culture -- 
anything other than Mubarak. Ten years ago this spring, the biggest 
story in Egypt, thanks to such media, was the allegation that Israel was 
trying to corrupt Egyptian women by distributing chewing gum that 
created irresistible sexual urges.

"From 1993 to 2003 Mubarak was criticized once," Kassem told me last 
week. "He closed down the newspaper, as well as the political party that 
published it." Kassem himself published a spirited paper called the 
Cairo Times, but it was in English and appeared only weekly.

In 2003 he was approached by a group of businessmen who proposed to 
start a new daily and asked Kassem to run it. He agreed, on condition 
that he be allowed to create "a paper of record," with objective 
reporting, no sensationalism -- and no self-censorship. "I said we would 
cover human rights and civil liberties on the front page," Kassem says. 
"I said, 'Enough xenophobia. Anyone who wants to destroy Israel can join 
the jihad. And I want to be the oldest person in the paper.' " (He's 46.)

Al-Masri al-Yom was launched in June 2004. Though the first months were 
rocky, the paper took off as Mubarak opened his campaign for another 
term as president a year ago. Early on, it covered an anti-Mubarak 
protest with the once-unthinkable headline, "Angry Demonstrations Demand 
Information on President's Health." The next day Kassem brushed off the 
inevitable threats from the mukhabarat , or state security, and never 
looked back. In the past year the paper's daily circulation has grown 
from 3,000 to a peak of 40,000. Meanwhile, other opposition papers are 
springing up, including several that attack Mubarak so unmercifully that 
even Kassem is put off.

How did this space for press freedom open? Kassem doesn't hedge: "U.S. 
pressure on the Mubarak regime has been the catalyst for most of the 
change we have seen," he said. He traces the turning point to an April 
2004 summit between Mubarak and President Bush in Crawford, Tex., at 
which the aging Egyptian strongman heard for the first time from an 
American president that political liberalization would be necessary to 
maintain good relations. After stalling a few months in the hope that 
Bush would lose the 2004 election, Mubarak reluctantly concluded that he 
must take some visible steps, Kassem says. One was the allowance of 
greater press freedom; another was the conversion of his reelection from 
a referendum into a multi-candidate competition.

The problem, Kassem says, is that once his reelection was secured and 
accepted by Washington, Mubarak froze the reforms. Though he promised a 
long list of political and economic liberalizations before the election, 
not one has been implemented in the six months since. Instead, Mubarak 
has imprisoned his chief liberal opponent, Ayman Nour, on bogus criminal 
charges; postponed scheduled municipal elections; and refused to 
legalize the centrist political parties that might provide an 
alternative to his regime and the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood. 
Kassem says he fears the 77-year-old president plans to die in office 
without leaving either a successor or a democratic mechanism for 
choosing one.

Ask him for a remedy, and once again he doesn't hedge. "The United 
States has to continue pressuring," he says. "We're all willing to 
accept a controlled process of reform under Mubarak. But leave him alone 
and he won't do it."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/26/AR2006032600879.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060327/6eba2dc7/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Mon Mar 27 03:50:41 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 06:50:41 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Why U.S. Business Is Winning - Sebastian Mallaby -
 Washington Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <4427D191.2030504@comcast.net>

Why U.S. Business Is Winning
<>
By Sebastian Mallaby
The Washington Post
Monday, March 27, 2006; A15

Newspapers bring us the dark stories about American business. The Enron 
trial serves up tales of lies and looting. The General Motors 
restructuring dramatizes the death of traditional U.S. manufacturing. 
Commentators from left and right agree that a growing swath of the 
economy, from accounting services to non-emergency health care, may one 
day move offshore. And yet something is going dramatically right inside 
American corporations. Despite all the nostalgia for the era when GM 
dominated the world's car industry, the heyday of American business may 
actually be now.

The dawn of this heyday came in 1995. In the two preceding decades, the 
productivity of American workers had grown more slowly than that of 
Japanese and European competitors. But in the decade since 1995, U.S. 
labor productivity growth has outstripped foreign rivals'. Meanwhile 
U.S. firms' return on equity -- that is, the efficiency with which they 
manage the capital entrusted to them -- has pulled away from that of 
Japan, France and Germany, according to data provided by Standard & 
Poor's Compustat.

Other measures tell a similar story. Up until the 1990s, management 
books were crammed with Japanese buzzwords, and the early Clinton 
administration was in awe of Germany's apprenticeship system. But today 
the United States provides most of the business role models, from 
Starbucks to Procter & Gamble, from Apple to Cisco. The (British) 
Financial Times publishes an annual list of the world's most respected 
companies. In 2004 and again in 2005, no fewer than 12 of the top 15 
slots were occupied by American firms.

Or consider the database on management quality constructed by Nick Bloom 
and John Van Reenen of Stanford University and the London School of 
Economics. This duo organized a survey of 732 medium-sized American and 
European companies and measured their management procedures against 
benchmarks of best practice. The result: American firms, including the 
subsidiaries of American firms in Europe, are simply better managed than 
European rivals. In fact, superior American management accounts for more 
than half of the productivity gap between American and European firms.

Whence this American superiority? The first answer is that competition 
is fiercer. The United States has relatively few trade and regulatory 
barriers for firms to hide behind, so bad companies either shape up 
quickly or go bust. In retailing, for example, firms such as Wal-Mart 
and Target have been able to spread their super-efficient logistics 
systems all across the country -- at least until lately, when a perverse 
anti-Wal-Mart campaign has sprung up. In Europe and Japan, by contrast, 
a web of zoning laws entangles efficient retailers, sheltering 
unproductive companies that overcharge consumers.

The next explanation for American superiority is a healthy indifference 
to first sons. Bloom and Van Reenen report that the practice of handing 
a family firm down from father to oldest son is five times more common 
in France and Britain than in the United States. Not surprisingly, this 
anti-meritocratic practice does not always produce good managers. So 
even though the best European companies are managed roughly as well as 
the best American ones, there's a fat tail of second-rate firms in 
Europe that's absent in the United States.

Competition and meritocracy cannot explain all of America's superiority, 
however. The U.S. economy has always had these advantages but hasn't 
always trounced overseas rivals. Nor is it enough to say that Americans 
work harder than Europeans, since the productivity numbers show that 
Americans are boosting what they achieve per hour. And anyone who 
explains America's superiority by saying that the country is more 
"dynamic" or "creative" is merely relabeling the mystery we're trying to 
solve.

The best guess about the "X factor" is that America's business culture 
is peculiarly well-suited to contemporary challenges. American business 
is not especially good at coaxing productivity out of factory workers: 
The era when this was all-important was the heyday of Germany and Japan. 
But American business excels at managing service workers and knowledge 
workers: at equipping these people with technology, empowering them with 
the right level of independence and paying for performance. So the era 
of decentralized "network" businesses is the American era.

Moreover, America's business culture is perfectly matched to 
globalization. American executive suites and MBA courses are full of 
talented immigrants, so American managers think nothing of working in 
multicultural firms. The immigrants have links to their home countries, 
so Americans have an advantage in establishing global supply chains. The 
elites of Asia and Latin America compete to attend U.S. universities; 
when they return to their countries, they are keener to join the local 
operation of a U.S. company than of a German or Japanese one.

So the shift from manufacturing to services; the gallop of 
globalization; and the rise of information technology that flattens 
corporate hierarchies: All these forces come together to create an 
American moment. But you could be forgiven for missing this, because 
other forces spoil what ought to be a celebration. In the midst of this 
American moment, hatred of President Bush has simultaneously created an 
anti-American moment. And in the midst of American prosperity, rising 
inequality has prevented American workers from sharing in the success of 
American firms.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/26/AR2006032600878.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060327/dfa7013d/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Mon Mar 27 03:53:08 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 06:53:08 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] How to Stop a Civil War - Michael O'Hanlon - Washigton
	Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <4427D224.90705@comcast.net>

How to Stop a Civil War
<>
By Michael O'Hanlon
The Washigton Post
Monday, March 27, 2006; A15

Administration officials have been right in recent weeks to argue that 
there is no large-scale civil war underway in Iraq. As long as the Iraqi 
political leadership remains generally united in trying to calm the 
situation, and as long as sectarian violence remains more sporadic than 
strategic (with no systematic ethnic cleansing, for example), true civil 
war remains a threat rather than a reality. But as President Bush 
himself recognized in his March 13 speech on Iraq, whoever attacked the 
Golden Mosque in Samarra on Feb. 22 was trying to spark a civil war. 
Yesterday's gruesome events, including the discovery of 30 beheaded 
bodies near Baqubah, heavy fighting in parts of Baghdad and the firing 
of fatal mortar rounds at Moqtada al-Sadr's compound in Najaf, suggest 
that such attempts will likely continue.

Of course, preventing a civil war is primarily a political task. In this 
light, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad has been right to push Iraqis to 
form a coalition government. He might also encourage them to start 
thinking about what policies such a government would pursue. For 
example, in debating whether Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jafari should 
retain his post, Iraqis might think a bit less about the past year and 
instead ask Jafari about his plans for the future: for sharing oil 
revenue among provinces, rehabilitating lower-level Baathists to reenter 
the society, integrating security forces and creating jobs.

But if the political process continues to falter and the risk of civil 
war looms larger, we will also need a military plan for quelling it. 
Much of the American debate has been asking how to handle an all-out 
conflict in which Iraq has already fractured and violence is rampant. 
But the more important question is how to quell violence in the early 
stages, before such a scenario develops fully. And this is not the 
typical debate over how fast and soon we can draw down U.S. troops in 
Iraq; rather, it is a debate about what they do while they are there.

On this point, initial indications are that American thinking is on the 
wrong track. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has stated that U.S. 
forces would not become heavily involved in any civil strife, leaving it 
instead to Iraqis to sort out the problem. This approach, which mirrors 
the relatively passive approach U.S. troops took to the reprisal 
violence after the Feb. 22 bombing, has an understandable appeal. But it 
is akin to our decision to stand aside and allow wanton looting after 
Saddam Hussein fell in April 2003, and it could have comparably 
disastrous consequences.

If civil war begins in Iraq, it will probably consist of increasingly 
active vigilante justice -- as well as random, pointless acts of violent 
rage -- by Iraq's powerful militias. They will attack defenseless 
mosques, homes of important figures from other ethnic and religious 
groups, and defenseless citizens. They will begin to perpetrate ethnic 
cleansing with cold, premeditated purpose. As time goes on, hearing 
about similar behavior by other militias from other sectarian groups, 
they will also be motivated by a desire for vengeance -- not just for 
Hussein's atrocities of yesteryear but for what happened last week and 
last night. And they will seek to protect their own unarmed families and 
friends by stepping up ethnic cleansing in neighborhoods where they 
live, to preclude the possibility of further attacks against their own kin.

These are the typical dynamics of civil conflicts, as analyzed by 
scholars such as John Mueller, Barry Posen, Steve Stedman and Chaim 
Kaufmann. Civil wars with a heavy ethnic dimension do not typically 
begin as full-blown conflicts but rather develop an internal dynamic in 
which hate, rage and fear increasingly influence the actions of a 
growing number of people.

In such a situation, stemming violence early is critical. Checkpoints 
need to be manned, curfews enforced, vigilantes arrested or shot, 
mosques and schools and hospitals protected.

Yes, Iraqi forces can do many of these things and should. And, yes, many 
of them will. But Iraqi security forces are at present politically 
untested. Most units are dominated by one group or another. If the 
country begins to descend toward civil war, the temptation of many will 
be to take sides in the sectarian strife rather than stop it.

The foreign coalition can do a great deal to discourage this. By 
deploying with Iraqi police and army troops on the streets, it can 
provide enough manpower to do the labor-intensive work required to 
restore order as anarchy begins to spread. It can help give Iraqi 
security forces the backbone they need to hang together and do their job 
for the country rather than fight for their Kurdish or Shiite or Sunni 
Arab interests. It can act as a glue, helping to hold them together by 
working with them and providing an example worthy of emulation.

In his statements about letting Iraqis handle their own civil strife, 
perhaps Rumsfeld was trying to drive home to Iraqis the message that 
they should not count on the distant American superpower to bail them 
out if civil war begins. This message is grounded in a sound logic; 
Iraqis do need to step up to the plate and solve more of their own 
problems. But as a full indication of what our military plans would be 
for any incipient civil war, it is not the right strategy. Now is the 
time to reassess.

The writer is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/26/AR2006032600875.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060327/d297c973/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Mon Mar 27 03:55:55 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 06:55:55 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Rejecting the urge to isolate Hamas - Makau Mutua -
 Boston Globe Op-Ed
Message-ID: <4427D2CB.6020805@comcast.net>


  Rejecting the urge to isolate Hamas

By Makau Mutua  |  March 27, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

CONTRARY TO popular political rhetoric in the West, it is a colossal 
mistake to isolate Hamas, the Islamist movement poised to form the next 
government in the Palestinian Authority. It is neither democratic nor 
politically defensible to deny a people the right to be governed by a 
party they have freely elected to power. If the West truly supports 
democracy, it must accept a Hamas government.

Hamas is not a garden-variety political party. But the occupied 
territories are not a run-of-the-mill political entity. It is a society 
that has been under occupation and colonization for decades. Hamas rose 
to power because of the failure of the Western-led Oslo peace process, 
the virtual collapse of the Palestinian Authority, and impotence of the 
Palestinian Liberation Organization. Like it or not, Hamas is now the 
embodiment of the sovereignty of the people of Palestine.

It smacks of hypocrisy for the West and Israel to accept the 
participation of Hamas in the elections and then reject its victory over 
Fatah, the party of PLO leader Mahmoud Abbas. This is tantamount to 
accepting the results of a fair contest only if your preferred side 
wins. That is not how democracy works. What moral authority or 
consistency can the United States -- and the West -- claim if they 
reject a democratically elected Hamas government?

I know all the arguments against Hamas. The West has declared it a 
terrorist organization. It refuses to accept the existence of Israel. It 
has incubated suicide bombers and attacked civilians. Its Islamist 
blueprint would subordinate women and violate the rights of moderates 
and non-Muslims. But Hamas endeared itself to Palestinians by providing 
social services and adopting a zero-tolerance policy to corruption. That 
is partly why it won.

Some have minimized the victory of Hamas by claiming that it was a 
protest vote. They argue that Palestinians did not really want Hamas to 
win, even though they resoundingly voted for it. Where else in the 
Middle East, including Israel, has a political party won such a huge 
mandate in a free vote? These denials seek to thwart the will of 
Palestinians.

No matter the objections to Hamas, there is blame on both sides of 
conflict. The Israelis have carried out a policy of occupation and 
colonization, border closings, assassinations, checkpoints, a barrier, 
and detentions. On the Palestinians' side, attacks on civilians and 
suicide bombings have claimed scores of Israelis. But it is these mortal 
enemies that must make peace.

Until now, Hamas operated outside the formal structures of Palestinian 
society, which were dominated by the PLO. Internationally, the PLO was 
accepted as the legitimate representative of Palestinians. But rampant 
corruption within the Palestinian Authority and the failure of the PLO 
to deliver an independent Palestinian state eroded internal legitimacy. 
Yasser Arafat came to personify these failures. Abu Mazen, as President 
Abbas is known, inherited them.

There has been no peace process between Israelis and Palestinians. The 
so-called road map has been nothing but a cruel illusion. The truth is 
that neither side -- Palestinian nor Israeli -- has had the political 
will to make the hard decisions on a two-state solution.

Despite objections, there are several reasons to root for the success of 
a Hamas government. Among the key players, only Hamas has the potential 
to shake up this irredeemable paralysis and inject new life into the 
peace process. But that will not happen if the West and Israel choke off 
a Hamas government. It is important that Hamas is not captive to the 
pathologies of Oslo.

Spurning Hamas will only further radicalize it and the Palestinian 
people, making peace more elusive. The policy of isolation will be proof 
positive to Palestinians that no matter what they do -- including a 
democratic election -- the Israelis and the West will never permit them 
statehood. This will harden Hamas and narrow the space for moderates in 
Palestinian society. It will also diminish the influence of secularists 
and liberals.

Hamas is a reality that simply cannot be wished away. As the government, 
Hamas is more likely to adopt pragmatic and internationally acceptable 
policies. Over time, it should soften its stance toward Israel, step 
back from Islamist programs, and permit women's rights. It has no other 
choice if it wants the allegiance of the Palestinian people, the 
majority of whom are secular, moderate, and liberal. Nor can it acquire 
international legitimacy otherwise. It is a hopeful sign that Hamas 
desperately wanted to form a coalition government with moderates before 
other factions turned it down.

The United States and the European Union -- who write the checks for the 
Palestinian Authority -- must not cut off aid to the Hamas government. 
Doing so is shortsighted, undemocratic, and foolhardy. Liberation 
movements normally mellow in the aftermath of political victory.

The West must remember that it once designated Nelson Mandela's African 
National Congress a terrorist organization. Engaging Hamas -- as opposed 
to isolating it -- may establish the first real political democracy in 
the Arab world.

Makau Mutua is director of the Human Rights Center at the State 
University of New York at Buffalo.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/27/rejecting_the_urge_to_isolate_hamas/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060327/89f04482/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Mon Mar 27 03:59:27 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 06:59:27 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] IMPORTANT: Rumsfeld and the big picture - James Carroll
 - Boston Globe Op-Ed
Message-ID: <4427D39F.9010405@comcast.net>


  Rumsfeld and the big picture

By James Carroll  |  March 27, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

''FORTUNATELY, history is not made up of daily headlines, blogs on 
websites, or the latest sensational attack," Donald Rumsfeld wrote in a 
Washington Post op-ed column last week. ''History is a bigger picture, 
and it takes some time and perspective to measure accurately."

Rumsfeld was arguing that any evaluation of the present catastrophe in 
Iraq should take a longer view, and I agree with him. Indeed, I have 
spent the last six years exploring two generations' worth of events and 
decisions that brought us here. I have written a long history of the 
Pentagon called ''House of War," which will be published in May. But 
contrary to what Rumsfeld hopes, such a ''bigger picture" in no way 
exonerates him or the Bush administration for its grave failures. The 
disaster in Iraq both recapitulates American mistakes of the past and 
worsens them immeasurably.

Let's begin with Rumsfeld himself. In 1975, he was Gerald Ford's 
secretary of defense when the USS Mayaguez was seized off Cambodia by 
the newly empowered Khmer Rouge, whose ascendance followed the 
destabilizing US ''incursion." The American crew of 38 was captured.

Rumsfeld shaped the response -- which was to ignore diplomacy, begin 
bombing a Cambodian port city, and dispatch a large force of Marines to 
rescue the crew. Bad moves based on bad intelligence. While untold 
Cambodian civilians were bombed, 40 American rescuers were killed in an 
attack on an island where the crew was thought to be held. In fact, the 
American sailors had already been released unharmed and set adrift on a 
Thai fishing vessel. The Mayaguez affair was a dress rehearsal for 
Rumsfeld's war in Iraq.

The Iraq war breaks with American tradition by being explicitly defined 
as ''preventive," but in other ways it fulfills the core tradition -- 
the eschewing of diplomacy in favor of war preparation, and wars, whose 
real purpose is to feed the insatiable appetite of the economic, 
political, and cultural behemoth on the Potomac. The Pentagon is 63 
years old: Key moments in its lifetime cry out to be freshly understood.

Why, after the disappearance of America's Cold War enemy in the early 
1990s, did Washington maintain its huge Cold War military? In what 
sense, for that matter, did the United States ''win" the Cold War, when 
its structures were overwhelmingly dismantled by the other side?

By what right did the United States come out of the energy crisis of the 
1970s proclaiming, with the Carter Doctrine, its intention to use 
military force to protect access to Persian Gulf oil? Jimmy Carter, too, 
is a progenitor of the war in Iraq.

In reviewing an arms race that led, across 40 years, to the accumulation 
of more than 100,000 nuclear weapons, when will the United States reckon 
with the truth that Washington held the initiative at almost every stage 
of that escalation, with Moscow forever struggling to catch up? What 
does it say about America that the United States led the way up this 
mountain of horror, with Moscow, under Mikhail Gorbachev, leading the 
way down?

What is revealed by the ''retirement syndrome," in Robert Jay Lifton's 
phrase -- the consistent phenomenon of men whose careers shaped the 
national security state, only to denounce its assumptions as they left 
power? This is true not only of legions of generals and admirals, but of 
statesmen like Henry L. Stimson and George Kennan, civilian hawks like 
Robert S. McNamara and Paul Nitze, and presidents like Dwight D. 
Eisenhower, who famously decried the ''military-industrial complex" he 
had just created.

What does it say that, as pressures periodically built to rein in 
Pentagon budgets and influence, new threats and enemies were 
conveniently discovered, ''rescuing" the Pentagon, as Dean Acheson said 
of the North Korean invasion of South Korea? Ho Chi Minh, Manuel 
Noriega, and Saddam Hussein were such rescuers, and so was Osama bin 
Laden. Now comes Iran.

How did the impulse to demonize the enemy in Moscow paralyze American 
strategic and political thinking? This psychological imprisonment was so 
complete that the demonizing mindset carried over into the new century, 
when dreaded ''communism" was replaced by ''terrorism." George W. Bush 
did not invent this myopia.

Iraq shows how self-destructive were the responses of Americans and 
their government to the crisis of Sept. 11, 2001. They were not new, but 
flowed along a channel through which powerful currents had been running 
for 60 years.

The point of history's bigger picture, however, is to see that, as human 
choices shaped this terrible outcome, human choices can change it.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/27/rumsfeld_and_the_big_picture/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060327/5ce92c4f/attachment.htm 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Mon Mar 27 06:45:57 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 09:45:57 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Evangelical teens rally in S.F.
Message-ID: <000801c651ad$2bcb3e90$b527e440@Harold>

         
  
   

 Evengelical teens rally in S.F.
Joe Garofoli, Chronicle Staff Writer
Saturday, March 25, 2006 

 

More than 25,000 evangelical Christian youth landed Friday in San Francisco for a two-day rally at AT&T Park against "the virtue terrorism" of popular culture, and they were greeted by an official city condemnation and a clutch of protesters who said their event amounted to a "fascist mega-pep rally." 

"Battle Cry for a Generation" is led by a 44-year-old Concord native, Ron Luce, who wants "God's instruction book" to guide young people away from the corrupting influence of popular culture. 

Luce, whose Teen Mania organization is based in Texas, kicked off a three-city "reverse rebellion" tour Friday night intended to counter a popular culture that he says glamorizes violence and sex. The $55 advance tickets for two days of musical performances and speeches were sold out, but walk-up admission was available for $199. 

After stops in Detroit and Philadelphia in the next few weeks, Luce wants to unleash a "blitz" of youth pastors into the communities to do everything from work with the homeless to find new ways to bring others to Christ. He challenged youth leaders to double the size of their groups in the next year. 

And then he plans to return to San Francisco next year to chart their progress. 

That's bad news to Assemblyman Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, who told counterprotesters at City Hall on Friday that while such fundamentalists may be small in number, "they're loud, they're obnoxious, they're disgusting, and they should get out of San Francisco." 

Luce didn't flinch in the face of the counterprotest. The author, host of the "Acquire the Fire TV" cable television program and a President Bush appointee to a federal anti-drug-abuse commission, wants teens to find Bible-based solutions for the spread of sexually transmitted disease, teen pregnancy, drug abuse and suicide. 

The villains, Luce said, range from the promiscuity and "sexualization" of young people on MTV and the popular online meeting hub MySpace.com to a corporate culture that spends millions trying to woo the under-21 crowd. 

Battle Cry will try to bring them back to God through two days of religious rockers, speakers and the debut of what Luce called a Christian alternative to My Space.com. 

"This is more than a spiritual war," Luce said. "It's a culture war." 

Military metaphors abound in Luce's descriptions of the struggle. He tells young people of how "an enemy has launched a brutal attack on them." At a pre-Battle Cry rally Friday afternoon on the steps of City Hall, Luce told his mostly teenage audience that "terrorists of a different kind" -- advertisers -- were targeting them and that they were "caught in the middle of the battle." 

"Are you ready to go to battle for your generation?" he asked, and the young people roared "yes!" and some waved triangular red flags flown from long, medieval-looking poles. 

Luce's approach has been praised by conservative leaders from the Rev. Jerry Falwell to Fox News commentator Sean Hannity. Much of the statistical backing for the horrors Luce sees on TV is provided by the Parents Television Council, which is funded by conservative foundations such as the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. 

Those alliances weren't lost on the 50 protesters representing a rainbow of San Francisco's left -- from abortion-rights advocates to anti-war activists to atheists -- who staged Friday's counterprotest. 

"There is a real intolerancy to homosexuality in a lot of these organizations," said Peter Cobb, an organizer with Not In Our Name. 

Earlier this week, the Board of Supervisors passed a resolution condemning the "act of provocation" by what it termed an "anti-gay," "anti-choice" organization that aimed to "negatively influence the politics of America's most tolerant and progressive city." 

Luce said it was the first time one of his events has been officially condemned. 

A Battle Cry invitation to teenagers made plain the symbolism of gathering in San Francisco for a pre-event rally at "the very City Hall steps where several months ago, gay marriages were celebrated for all the world to see." 

Same-sex marriage "is another sign of the end of times," said Sherilyn David, referring to the apocalypse that some fundamentalist Christians believe is foretold in Scripture. The 22-year-old San Jose administrative assistant came to Battle Cry with 15 other young Christians on Friday and will be joined by 60 other friends Saturday. 

Christian Gallion, a 15-year-old in town with his Assembly of God youth group from Humboldt County, shrugged off being called "fascists" by counterdemonstrators. 

"It doesn't bother me," Gallion said. "It's a beautiful city, and we don't have anything against the protesters." 

His youth pastor had no interest in engaging in political debates. 

"I'm not here to hate anybody," Scott Thompson said. "This isn't about Bush or gays or anything other than being here to worship together." 

That's not how some liberal leaders saw it. 

"Even if it is done by a Barnum & Bailey crowd with a tent and some snake oil, I think we need to pay attention to it," said Supervisor Tom Ammiano, who authored the condemnation resolution. "We should not fall asleep at the wheel." 

Separated by barricades and six feet of neutral sidewalk in front of City Hall, the two sides traded amplified calls to arms Friday. 

On one side of the barricade was girl carrying a sign that said, "Instead of porn, show us Godly relationships." On the other, a woman held one that said, "I moved here to get away from people like you." 

As Battle Cry organizers walked through the crowd of young people telling them, "Don't engage with them," one rain-soaked counterdemonstrator yelled, "And next time, come back in summer." 

Luce said they will. 

"We're going to be back here in a year, to see what kind of progress we've made," he said. "And we're going to be at AT&T Park. Or whatever it is called then." 

E-mail Joe Garofoli at jgarofoli at sfchronicle.com. 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060327/16012350/attachment-0001.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Mon Mar 27 08:09:05 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (Ian)
Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 11:09:05 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Evangelical teens rally in S.F.
References: <000801c651ad$2bcb3e90$b527e440@Harold>
Message-ID: <002a01c651b8$c66de140$99ca6c42@iancn2ccrvzt0j>

I cannot help but agree with the position this group is taking re popular culture.  They are 100% correct.  Indeed, based on the various comments of the members of Battle Cry and the anti-protestors, elected officials and others who disagree with Battle Cry's socio-politics, it seems to me that the anti-protestors etc. come out looking and sounding much worse - indeed, much more intolerant - than Battle Cry.

It also does not escape me that Battle Cry's rally was for a specific issue - popular culture, and its emphasis on sex and violence - and yet rather than addressing that issue at all, the anti-protestors etc. glommed onto other Battle Cry positions, re abortion, homosexuality, etc.  In fact, not one anti-protestor, elected official, etc. made a single comment on the issue that Battle Cry was rallying around.  What does that tell me about the anti-protestors, etc.?  Here was an opportunity for those elected officials and others who agree with the position of Battle Cry on the specific issue of the prominence of sex and violence in popular culture to "reach across the aisle," as it were, and make a statement in support of that position.  Yet no one did, because they were all too busy attacking Battle Cry for their other Christian beliefs.

After all, none of agrees with each other on every socio-political or socio-culture issue.  But that does not mean that we do not support each other re issues on which we have similar positions.  I may vehemently disagree with someone on issue A.  But if I strongly agree with them on issue B, and they ask me to publicly support them on issue B, then I will certainly do so.  In this regard, the elected officials and people of San Francisco should be ashamed of their narrow, intolerant response - ironically, the very kind of narrow-mindedness and intolerance that many Christians are accused of constantly.

Bravo to Battle Cry for their position on popular culture.  Boo to San Francisco for its inability and unwillingness to see past its own myopicism.

Peace.
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Harold Sifton 
  To: MB Civic 
  Sent: Monday, March 27, 2006 9:45 AM
  Subject: [Mb-civic] Evangelical teens rally in S.F.


           
    
     
   Evengelical teens rally in S.F.
  Joe Garofoli, Chronicle Staff Writer
  Saturday, March 25, 2006 

   

  More than 25,000 evangelical Christian youth landed Friday in San Francisco for a two-day rally at AT&T Park against "the virtue terrorism" of popular culture, and they were greeted by an official city condemnation and a clutch of protesters who said their event amounted to a "fascist mega-pep rally." 

  "Battle Cry for a Generation" is led by a 44-year-old Concord native, Ron Luce, who wants "God's instruction book" to guide young people away from the corrupting influence of popular culture. 

  Luce, whose Teen Mania organization is based in Texas, kicked off a three-city "reverse rebellion" tour Friday night intended to counter a popular culture that he says glamorizes violence and sex. The $55 advance tickets for two days of musical performances and speeches were sold out, but walk-up admission was available for $199. 

  After stops in Detroit and Philadelphia in the next few weeks, Luce wants to unleash a "blitz" of youth pastors into the communities to do everything from work with the homeless to find new ways to bring others to Christ. He challenged youth leaders to double the size of their groups in the next year. 

  And then he plans to return to San Francisco next year to chart their progress. 

  That's bad news to Assemblyman Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, who told counterprotesters at City Hall on Friday that while such fundamentalists may be small in number, "they're loud, they're obnoxious, they're disgusting, and they should get out of San Francisco." 

  Luce didn't flinch in the face of the counterprotest. The author, host of the "Acquire the Fire TV" cable television program and a President Bush appointee to a federal anti-drug-abuse commission, wants teens to find Bible-based solutions for the spread of sexually transmitted disease, teen pregnancy, drug abuse and suicide. 

  The villains, Luce said, range from the promiscuity and "sexualization" of young people on MTV and the popular online meeting hub MySpace.com to a corporate culture that spends millions trying to woo the under-21 crowd. 

  Battle Cry will try to bring them back to God through two days of religious rockers, speakers and the debut of what Luce called a Christian alternative to My Space.com. 

  "This is more than a spiritual war," Luce said. "It's a culture war." 

  Military metaphors abound in Luce's descriptions of the struggle. He tells young people of how "an enemy has launched a brutal attack on them." At a pre-Battle Cry rally Friday afternoon on the steps of City Hall, Luce told his mostly teenage audience that "terrorists of a different kind" -- advertisers -- were targeting them and that they were "caught in the middle of the battle." 

  "Are you ready to go to battle for your generation?" he asked, and the young people roared "yes!" and some waved triangular red flags flown from long, medieval-looking poles. 

  Luce's approach has been praised by conservative leaders from the Rev. Jerry Falwell to Fox News commentator Sean Hannity. Much of the statistical backing for the horrors Luce sees on TV is provided by the Parents Television Council, which is funded by conservative foundations such as the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. 

  Those alliances weren't lost on the 50 protesters representing a rainbow of San Francisco's left -- from abortion-rights advocates to anti-war activists to atheists -- who staged Friday's counterprotest. 

  "There is a real intolerancy to homosexuality in a lot of these organizations," said Peter Cobb, an organizer with Not In Our Name. 

  Earlier this week, the Board of Supervisors passed a resolution condemning the "act of provocation" by what it termed an "anti-gay," "anti-choice" organization that aimed to "negatively influence the politics of America's most tolerant and progressive city." 

  Luce said it was the first time one of his events has been officially condemned. 

  A Battle Cry invitation to teenagers made plain the symbolism of gathering in San Francisco for a pre-event rally at "the very City Hall steps where several months ago, gay marriages were celebrated for all the world to see." 

  Same-sex marriage "is another sign of the end of times," said Sherilyn David, referring to the apocalypse that some fundamentalist Christians believe is foretold in Scripture. The 22-year-old San Jose administrative assistant came to Battle Cry with 15 other young Christians on Friday and will be joined by 60 other friends Saturday. 

  Christian Gallion, a 15-year-old in town with his Assembly of God youth group from Humboldt County, shrugged off being called "fascists" by counterdemonstrators. 

  "It doesn't bother me," Gallion said. "It's a beautiful city, and we don't have anything against the protesters." 

  His youth pastor had no interest in engaging in political debates. 

  "I'm not here to hate anybody," Scott Thompson said. "This isn't about Bush or gays or anything other than being here to worship together." 

  That's not how some liberal leaders saw it. 

  "Even if it is done by a Barnum & Bailey crowd with a tent and some snake oil, I think we need to pay attention to it," said Supervisor Tom Ammiano, who authored the condemnation resolution. "We should not fall asleep at the wheel." 

  Separated by barricades and six feet of neutral sidewalk in front of City Hall, the two sides traded amplified calls to arms Friday. 

  On one side of the barricade was girl carrying a sign that said, "Instead of porn, show us Godly relationships." On the other, a woman held one that said, "I moved here to get away from people like you." 

  As Battle Cry organizers walked through the crowd of young people telling them, "Don't engage with them," one rain-soaked counterdemonstrator yelled, "And next time, come back in summer." 

  Luce said they will. 

  "We're going to be back here in a year, to see what kind of progress we've made," he said. "And we're going to be at AT&T Park. Or whatever it is called then." 

  E-mail Joe Garofoli at jgarofoli at sfchronicle.com. 



------------------------------------------------------------------------------


  _______________________________________________
  Mb-civic mailing list
  Mb-civic at islandlists.com
  http://www.islandlists.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mb-civic
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060327/8319bd30/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Mon Mar 27 08:20:32 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 16:20:32 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Bush Was Set on Path to War,
	Memo by British Adviser Says
Message-ID: <20060327162033.D84CD11FAF9@lax-gw07.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

INTERNATIONAL / EUROPE | March 27, 2006
Leaders: Bush Was Set on Path to War, Memo by British Adviser Says
By DON VAN NATTA Jr.
Behind closed doors, the president made clear to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain that he was determined to invade Iraq.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/27/international/europe/27memo.html?ex=1144126800&en=dfc6c344daf3a503&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060327/dbb59351/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Mon Mar 27 08:24:59 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 16:24:59 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: In an Election Year,
	a Shift in Public Opinion on the War
Message-ID: <20060327162459.4808511FB65@lax-gw07.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

WASHINGTON | March 27, 2006
In an Election Year, a Shift in Public Opinion on the War
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and ADAM NAGOURNEY
An increasingly skeptical and pessimistic public is putting pressure on Congress about the wisdom behind the war in Iraq.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/27/politics/27war.html?ex=1144126800&en=87998c44a4e60315&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060327/c408421d/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Mon Mar 27 08:29:33 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 16:29:33 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Why Can't Democrats Win?
Message-ID: <20060327162933.7FBC69FDBE@lax-gw05.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

BOOKS / SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW | March 26, 2006
'Crashing the Gate,' by Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Z?niga: Why Can't Democrats Win?
Review by PETER BEINART
Two liberal bloggers argue that the party establishment must change, or die.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/26/books/review/26beinart.html?ex=1144126800&en=3c4a6c02b122d72b&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060327/38ed1b86/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Mon Mar 27 08:32:57 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 16:32:57 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: On the Ethanol Bandwagon,
	Big Names and Big Risks
Message-ID: <20060327163257.9EF2E2373FB@lax-gw01.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

BUSINESS / YOUR MONEY | March 26, 2006
Investing: On the Ethanol Bandwagon, Big Names and Big Risks
By NORM ALSTER
How fast can the market for a gasoline alternative grow?
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/26/business/yourmoney/26etha.html?ex=1144126800&en=21b7f87c39ac632f&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060327/6ee11d22/attachment-0001.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Mon Mar 27 08:35:51 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: 27 Mar 2006 16:35:51 -0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] Headlines for March 27, 2006
Message-ID: <20060327163551.31385.qmail@trinity.democracynow.org>

Mike Blaxill  ( mblaxill at yahoo.com )
sent you this story from democracynow.org



+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  Headlines for March 27, 2006
|  http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/27/1449248
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+


- Between 500,000 and 2 Million Protest Immigration Bill in LA-
U.S. Accused of Killing 17 in Raid of Shiite Mosque-
FEMA Reneges On Promise to Reopen No-Bid Katrina Contracts-
Barbara Bush Directed Katrina Donation to Son?s Company-
Scalia: Guantanamo Detainees Have No Rights -
Thousands Mark 30th Anniversary of Coup in Argentina-
Kissinger Ordered U.S. Support for Argentine Military Junta-
South Dakota Activists Aim to Overturn Abortion Ban-
France Prepares for General Strike Over Labor Law-
Coalition of Immokalee Workers Launches McDonald?s Campaign
This story continues at: 
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/27/1449248


From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Mon Mar 27 09:20:33 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 17:20:33 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Vague Law and Hard Lobbying Add Up to
	Billions for Big Oil
Message-ID: <20060327172033.283A93AEA96@lax-gw06.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

BUSINESS | March 27, 2006
Vague Law and Hard Lobbying Add Up to Billions for Big Oil
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
Through shrewd lobbying and litigation, oil companies were able to sweeten federal incentives for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/27/business/27royalties.html?ex=1144126800&en=41f41400d1a238b4&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060327/5a48e038/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Mon Mar 27 09:20:31 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 17:20:31 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Detainee Case Will Pose Delicate Question
	for Court
Message-ID: <20060327172032.829793AEA19@lax-gw06.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

WASHINGTON | March 27, 2006
Detainee Case Will Pose Delicate Question for Court
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
Before ruling on the case of a Guant?namo Bay detainee, the Supreme Court must decide if a new law deprives it of authority.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/27/politics/27scotus.html?ex=1144126800&en=4ddb19f8c40b2b41&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060327/cfe265bd/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Mon Mar 27 09:20:49 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 17:20:49 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: A Civil Debate
Message-ID: <20060327172049.D706224B024@lax-gw02.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

OPINION | March 27, 2006
Editorial: A Civil Debate

If the president really wants a sensible immigration reform bill to reach his desk, he will have to do more than stand on the sidelines.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/27/opinion/27mon2.html?ex=1144126800&en=464c29b760f6705d&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060327/3a9162a0/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Mon Mar 27 09:23:13 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 17:23:13 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: America and Torture: Who Is Accountable? (2
	Letters)
Message-ID: <20060327172314.0D31E237491@lax-gw01.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

What we're saying...


OPINION | March 27, 2006
America and Torture: Who Is Accountable? (2 Letters)

To the Editor:.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/27/opinion/l27torture.html?ex=1144126800&en=0aa6cf93f31936bf&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060327/96f82646/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Mon Mar 27 09:23:24 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 17:23:24 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Electronic Voting Glitches
Message-ID: <20060327172324.E081D249FB2@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

What we're saying (2)...


OPINION | March 27, 2006
Electronic Voting Glitches

To the Editor:.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/27/opinion/l27vote.html?ex=1144126800&en=cabc03dfdd49dd84&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060327/2cd6a06d/attachment.htm 

From michael at intrafi.com  Mon Mar 27 10:14:12 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael at intrafi.com)
Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 18:14:12 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Bush Was Set on Path to War,
	Memo by British Adviser Says
Message-ID: <20060327181412.DDDA813B7E0@lax-gw04.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: michael at intrafi.com.

INTERNATIONAL / EUROPE | March 27, 2006
Leaders: Bush Was Set on Path to War, Memo by British Adviser Says
By DON VAN NATTA Jr.
Behind closed doors, the president made clear to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain that he was determined to invade Iraq.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/27/international/europe/27memo.html?ex=1144126800&en=dfc6c344daf3a503&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060327/50ccaf0e/attachment.htm 

From ethics_in_action at venusproject.com  Mon Mar 27 08:37:59 2006
From: ethics_in_action at venusproject.com (Bahram Maskanian)
Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 11:37:59 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] - Iranian / Persian Women Portrayed As Whores And
	Apes... -
Message-ID: <E1FNwS3-0004KX-1M@elasmtp-kukur.atl.sa.earthlink.net>




    Iranian / Persian Women Portrayed As Whores,
    Apes / Monkeys, On An American National
    Television Network, FOX Television

http://www.venusproject.com/ethics_in_action/Persian_Women_Portrayed.html

- By Bahram Maskanian - Sunday March 26, 2006

A few months ago I had a talk with an American friend who had seen a 
supposed comedy show aired on Saturday nights on FOX television, called 
MAD TV. He asked me if I had seen the show and particularly that show, 
that weekend? Since I am not a big fan of TV and particularly FOX or its 
affiliates, my answer was no. He told me about this shocking and highly 
insulting sketch / act they do on MAD TV called the - - Persian Tow 
Truck Driver - -. - Michael McDonald -, plays the role of the Persian 
Tow Truck Driver; he is a chain smoker, has a thick reddish-brown 
mustache in the show talking to - Ike Barinholtz -, the other actor to 
whom he shows a picture of an - orangutan - as his Persian wife.

As we all know, Orangutans are large apes / monkeys, who live in South 
East Asia on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra. These apes / monkeys 
mostly live on treetops. They are arboreal and swing from branch to 
branch using their arms. Orangutans have a large, bulky body, covered 
with long reddish-brown hair, a thick neck, very long, strong arms, 
short, bowed legs, and no tail. Orangutans are about 2/3 the size of the 
gorilla. - - Just to give an idea of what an Iranian / Persian women are 
portrayed as by FOX television and MAD TV show writers, producers, 
directors, sponsors, etc. - -

So I decided to watch the show and see for myself. Whenever I had a 
chance I did tune in and watched MAD TV show. What a waist of time that 
was. But finally on Saturday March 25, 2006, 11.p.m New York Eastern 
Standard Time, I did see it for myself, what the - - Persian Tow Truck 
Driver - - was all about. - Michael McDonald - played the role of the - 
- Persian Tow Truck Driver - -; wearing a thick reddish-brown mustache 
standing next to - Ike Barinholtz - the other actor in the hospital 
behind the window of nursery wards looking in at the newborn babies.

Through the course of the sketch - Michael McDonald - the - - Persian 
Tow Truck Driver - -, is talking to - Ike Barinholtz -, while smoking 
cigarettes. He establishes as facts that all through his life he had sex 
with his Persian wife only twice (2), but he has fifteen (15) children. 
As camera pans into the nursery - Michael McDonald - the - - Persian Tow 
Truck Driver - -, points out a little monkey in the nursery to - Ike 
Barinholtz -, as his newly born daughter who looks just like her mother. 
A few seconds later the little monkey is brought out of the nursery and 
handed over to - Michael McDonald - the - - Persian Tow Truck Driver - 
-. The little monkey crawled out of the white towel it was wrapped in 
and began running over the shoulders of the two men. Much and many other 
highly insulting rhetoric designed deliberately to dehumanize a nation 
was used in that few troubling and painful minutes.


* * * * * * * * * * *

Since 1978, I have been living in the US I have had many unpleasant 
racist experiences to say the least, but no one ever portrayed Iranian / 
Persian women on American National television, many times over as apes / 
monkeys. As if the barbaric Islam dehumanizing Persian / Iranian women 
was not enough to deal with, but now our mothers, sisters, wives and 
daughters are been portrayed as whores and apes / monkeys, that makes us 
the Persian / Iranian men sons of whores and apes / monkeys.

Iranians / Persians who have given birth to civilization with a longest 
and the richest history on Earth, extending to twelve (12,000) thousands 
years and eight (8,000) thousands years of written history of 
philosophy, sciences, mathematics, astronomy, madison, chemistry, 
languages, poetry and more are now reduced to whores and apes / monkeys. 
- - Shame on all of us, Iranians / Persians, to allow this to be and 
happen - -.

* * * * * * * * * * *

- Michael McDonald - is currently in his eight season as a MADtv cast 
member. This season, Michael will not only appear in front of the 
camera, but behind as well. He is scheduled to direct a few episodes of 
MADtv. Also look for Michael in a re-curring role on "7th Heaven." He 
will play Hailie Duff's alcoholic Father.

- Ike Barinholtz - is a native of Chicago. He is an alumnus of 
ImprovOlympic, Second City and the Annoyance Theater. He also spent two 
years in Amsterdam with the famed comedy troupe "Boom Chicago."

About MAD TV

MADtv is a late night sketch comedy television show. MADtv premiered in 
1995 and, over the years, has become famous for its sharp parodies of 
film, television and music.

MADtv has featured hundreds of guest stars and musical acts including: 
Susan Sarandon, Kathy Bates, Jack Black, Dennis Hopper, David Alan 
Grier, Halle Berry, George Carlin, Seth Green, Martin Short, Jackie 
Chan, Snoop Dogg, No Doubt, LL Cool J, Queen Latifah, Drew Barrymore, 
Jon Heder, Ludacris, Nicole Richie, Alanis Morrisette, Avril Lavigne, 
Nelly, Ryan Reynolds, Don Cheadle, Outkast and Green Day -- to name only 
a few.

During its 10 seasons, MADtv has created a variety of original 
characters including: Ms. Swan, Stuart, Lorraine, Dot, Trina, UBS Guy 
and Bunifa, among several others.

MADtv's cast has evolved and changed since its first season. It has 
featured over 30 full-time cast members, many of whom have gone on to 
star in film, television and radio. Current full-time cast members 
include: Bobby Lee, Arden Myrin, Daniele Gaither, Frank Caliendo, Ike 
Barinholtz, Jordan Peele, Keegan-Michael Key, Michael McDonald, Nicole 
Parker and Stephnie Weir.

MADtv has been nominated for a number of awards over the past 10 seasons 
and has won Emmys for the accomplishments of both its Hair and Wardrobe 
departments.

Currently, MADtv airs Saturday nights on FOX. It can also been seen six 
days a week on Comedy Central.

Mad TV - info at madtv.com <mailto:info at madtv.com>

http://www.madtv.com/


    Are you on - Circles Of Unity And Engagement - Ethics In Action
    Community <http://www.venusproject.com/ethics_in_action/> - mailing
    list by mistake? If yes, just say so. - You will be removed
    immediately.

    - Please Unsubscribe Me -
    <mailto:ethics_in_action at venusproject.com?Subject=Please%20Unsubscribe%20Me%20From%20%0A-%20Ethics%20In%20Action%20-%20Mailing%20List&Body=I%20no%20longer%20wish%20to%20receive%20mail%20from%20%0A-%20Ethics%20In%20Action%20->

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060327/bce57de1/attachment-0001.htm 

From hotprojects at nyc.rr.com  Mon Mar 27 11:44:40 2006
From: hotprojects at nyc.rr.com (richard haase)
Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 14:44:40 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] - Iranian / Persian Women Portrayed As Whores
	And	Apes... -
References: <E1FNwS3-0004KX-1M@elasmtp-kukur.atl.sa.earthlink.net>
Message-ID: <002401c651d6$e34fd930$f1476c42@hotprojects>

the anti semetism ( as muslims are semetic people ) currently being shown to muslims is an abomination
i just had a lady executive business associate who i believe is muslim complain to me about the phenomena
in the most upset florid terms
peace and good good luck
it is horrible and you are right to be outraged

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Bahram Maskanian 
  To: undisclosed-recipients: 
  Sent: Monday, March 27, 2006 11:37 AM
  Subject: [Mb-civic] - Iranian / Persian Women Portrayed As Whores And Apes... -


        Iranian / Persian Women Portrayed As Whores,
        Apes / Monkeys, On An American National
        Television Network, FOX Television 
        http://www.venusproject.com/ethics_in_action/Persian_Women_Portrayed.html 


        - By Bahram Maskanian - Sunday March 26, 2006

        A few months ago I had a talk with an American friend who had seen a supposed comedy show aired on Saturday nights on FOX television, called MAD TV. He asked me if I had seen the show and particularly that show, that weekend? Since I am not a big fan of TV and particularly FOX or its affiliates, my answer was no. He told me about this shocking and highly insulting sketch / act they do on MAD TV called the - - Persian Tow Truck Driver - -. - Michael McDonald -, plays the role of the Persian Tow Truck Driver; he is a chain smoker, has a thick reddish-brown mustache in the show talking to - Ike Barinholtz -, the other actor to whom he shows a picture of an - orangutan - as his Persian wife. 

        As we all know, Orangutans are large apes / monkeys, who live in South East Asia on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra. These apes / monkeys mostly live on treetops. They are arboreal and swing from branch to branch using their arms. Orangutans have a large, bulky body, covered with long reddish-brown hair, a thick neck, very long, strong arms, short, bowed legs, and no tail. Orangutans are about 2/3 the size of the gorilla. - - Just to give an idea of what an Iranian / Persian women are portrayed as by FOX television and MAD TV show writers, producers, directors, sponsors, etc. - - 

        So I decided to watch the show and see for myself. Whenever I had a chance I did tune in and watched MAD TV show. What a waist of time that was. But finally on Saturday March 25, 2006, 11.p.m New York Eastern Standard Time, I did see it for myself, what the - - Persian Tow Truck Driver - - was all about. - Michael McDonald - played the role of the - - Persian Tow Truck Driver - -; wearing a thick reddish-brown mustache standing next to - Ike Barinholtz - the other actor in the hospital behind the window of nursery wards looking in at the newborn babies. 

         Through the course of the sketch - Michael McDonald - the - - Persian Tow Truck Driver - -, is talking to - Ike Barinholtz -, while smoking cigarettes. He establishes as facts that all through his life he had sex with his Persian wife only twice (2), but he has fifteen (15) children. As camera pans into the nursery - Michael McDonald - the - - Persian Tow Truck Driver - -, points out a little monkey in the nursery to - Ike Barinholtz -, as his newly born daughter who looks just like her mother. A few seconds later the little monkey is brought out of the nursery and handed over to - Michael McDonald - the - - Persian Tow Truck Driver - -. The little monkey crawled out of the white towel it was wrapped in and began running over the shoulders of the two men. Much and many other highly insulting rhetoric designed deliberately to dehumanize a nation was used in that few troubling and painful minutes. 



        * * * * * * * * * * * 
        Since 1978, I have been living in the US I have had many unpleasant racist experiences to say the least, but no one ever portrayed Iranian / Persian women on American National television, many times over as apes / monkeys. As if the barbaric Islam dehumanizing Persian / Iranian women was not enough to deal with, but now our mothers, sisters, wives and daughters are been portrayed as whores and apes / monkeys, that makes us the Persian / Iranian men sons of whores and apes / monkeys. 

        Iranians / Persians who have given birth to civilization with a longest and the richest history on Earth, extending to twelve (12,000) thousands years and eight (8,000) thousands years of written history of philosophy, sciences, mathematics, astronomy, madison, chemistry, languages, poetry and more are now reduced to whores and apes / monkeys. - - Shame on all of us, Iranians / Persians, to allow this to be and happen - -. 

        * * * * * * * * * * * 

                - Michael McDonald - is currently in his eight season as a MADtv cast member. This season, Michael will not only appear in front of the camera, but behind as well. He is scheduled to direct a few episodes of MADtv. Also look for Michael in a re-curring role on "7th Heaven." He will play Hailie Duff's alcoholic Father.  
                - Ike Barinholtz - is a native of Chicago. He is an alumnus of ImprovOlympic, Second City and the Annoyance Theater. He also spent two years in Amsterdam with the famed comedy troupe "Boom Chicago." 
             
              About MAD TV 

              MADtv is a late night sketch comedy television show. MADtv premiered in 1995 and, over the years, has become famous for its sharp parodies of film, television and music. 

              MADtv has featured hundreds of guest stars and musical acts including: Susan Sarandon, Kathy Bates, Jack Black, Dennis Hopper, David Alan Grier, Halle Berry, George Carlin, Seth Green, Martin Short, Jackie Chan, Snoop Dogg, No Doubt, LL Cool J, Queen Latifah, Drew Barrymore, Jon Heder, Ludacris, Nicole Richie, Alanis Morrisette, Avril Lavigne, Nelly, Ryan Reynolds, Don Cheadle, Outkast and Green Day -- to name only a few. 

              During its 10 seasons, MADtv has created a variety of original characters including: Ms. Swan, Stuart, Lorraine, Dot, Trina, UBS Guy and Bunifa, among several others. 

              MADtv's cast has evolved and changed since its first season. It has featured over 30 full-time cast members, many of whom have gone on to star in film, television and radio. Current full-time cast members include: Bobby Lee, Arden Myrin, Daniele Gaither, Frank Caliendo, Ike Barinholtz, Jordan Peele, Keegan-Michael Key, Michael McDonald, Nicole Parker and Stephnie Weir. 

              MADtv has been nominated for a number of awards over the past 10 seasons and has won Emmys for the accomplishments of both its Hair and Wardrobe departments. 

              Currently, MADtv airs Saturday nights on FOX. It can also been seen six days a week on Comedy Central. 

              Mad TV - info at madtv.com 

              http://www.madtv.com/
             
       


          Are you on - Circles Of Unity And Engagement - Ethics In Action Community - mailing list by mistake? If yes, just say so. - You will be removed immediately. 

          - Please Unsubscribe Me -
         



------------------------------------------------------------------------------


  _______________________________________________
  Mb-civic mailing list
  Mb-civic at islandlists.com
  http://www.islandlists.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mb-civic
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060327/81f1d771/attachment.htm 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Mon Mar 27 12:01:30 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 15:01:30 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Bush's second mistake!
Message-ID: <000801c651d9$40e01c20$1627e440@Harold>

Intl. Intelligence
Politics & Policies: Bush's second mistake
By CLAUDE SALHANI
UPI International Editor 

WASHINGTON, March 27 (UPI) -- Historians and politicians will undoubtedly argue for years to come whether the war in Iraq was worth starting or a mistake. 

Despite the obvious outcome of the war -- the positive as well as the negative -- three years into the conflict is still too early to tell. The jury is still out as far as the results of the Iraq expedition is concerned and only time will tell if President George W. Bush's actions were justifiable or if he committed a major policy error. 

What is clear, however, is that President Bush is about to make another policy decision that need not wait for historians to judge as a major mistake in Iraq, and that is inviting Iran to negotiate in Iraq's future. 

This decision recognizes Iran as a de facto regional political power broker in the Middle East and legitimizes the theocratic regime of the mullahs. It also goes counter to the current policy of wanting to encourage a change in that direction and saps away efforts by Iranian opposition forces. 

Such a move elevates the regime in Iran to the statute of being a "Potsdam-like" participant in deciding Iraq's future, even though the Islamic republic played no role in liberating Iraq from Saddam Hussein. 

As Amir Taheri, a noted writer on Iranian affairs, points out, it would be equivalent to the Allies inviting Switzerland or Poland to talks on Germany's future at the end of World War II. 

Taheri warns that asking Iran to such talks may be Washington's first major mistake. Of course, many would dispute that point, arguing that this is yet another of a multitude of mistakes, in a long-running series of political faux pas made by this administration in conducting the war and consequently in its efforts to establish peace in Iraq. 

Starting with the reason given for the invasion of Iraq, the mismanagement during the immediate aftermath of initial combat operations, and leading right up to the current running of affairs that has brought Iraq to the brink of civil war, and allowed Iran to establish a foothold in Iraq, it is reasonable to question where the first error lies. 

Again, historians might well argue that the first mistake was made by Bush 41, the father of the incumbent, Bush 43, when the perfect opportunity to oust Saddam Hussein arose during the 1990-91 Gulf War and he chose not to follow through. 

At the time all the elements were in place for Saddam to fall. All that was needed was a little more pressure, along with a little push from the U.S.-led coalition. 

However, in retrospect, it is quite possible that history is not being kind enough to Bush 41, and not crediting him enough for his clairvoyance. It may just be that he realized what kind of mayhem would be unleashed once the Iraqi Pandora's box was thrown open by the removal of Saddam. Bush 41 chose to let things stand and allowed Saddam to remain in power. Of course an unpleasant result from that decision was the senseless slaughter of some 200,000 Iraqi Shiites by Saddam's goons as revenge for their uprising. Once again, history will be the judge of that decision. 

Given recent history, and the maltreatment of Iraq's Shiites, it is quite understandable that Iran would want to play a role in Iraq's future. Iran sees itself as the protector of Muslim Shiites. And since the Islamic revolution in 1979, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini overthrew the shah and installed the Islamic republic, Iran has tried -- without success -- to export its revolution to other countries in the region. Until now. 

The war in Iraq, accompanied by the void of authority that ensued, has allowed Iran to establish an influential beachhead in Iraq via its client parties and militias. Inviting Tehran to negotiate in Iraq's future will further strengthen Iran's position. 

Taheri points out this will allow Iran a strategic corridor "through which it can communicate with Syria and Lebanon, which it considers as part of its broader glacis." Once Tehran establishes its power in Iraq as it has in Syria and Lebanon, Taheri states, "it would be able to project power in the Levant for the first time since the early 7th century when the Persian Empire under Khosrow Parviz drove the Byzantines out of Mesopotamia and what is now Syria." 

Tehran would very much like to see history repeat itself and see the new Byzantines -- the Americans -- repelled from Mesopotamia. The mystery, as writes Taheri, is "why Washington wants to give Tehran a place at the high table in Iraq." 

Once more, the answer may be found one day in the history books
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060327/32dc3c01/attachment.htm 

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Mon Mar 27 10:26:41 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 10:26:41 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] North of the Border By PAUL KRUGMAN
Message-ID: <C04D6E61.2A90B%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 27, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
North of the Border
By PAUL KRUGMAN

"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe
free," wrote Emma Lazarus, in a poem that still puts a lump in my throat.
I'm proud of America's immigrant history, and grateful that the door was
open when my grandparents fled Russia.

In other words, I'm instinctively, emotionally pro-immigration. But a review
of serious, nonpartisan research reveals some uncomfortable facts about the
economics of modern immigration, and immigration from Mexico in particular.
If people like me are going to respond effectively to anti-immigrant
demagogues, we have to acknowledge those facts.

First, the net benefits to the U.S. economy from immigration, aside from the
large gains to the immigrants themselves, are small. Realistic estimates
suggest that immigration since 1980 has raised the total income of
native-born Americans by no more than a fraction of 1 percent.

Second, while immigration may have raised overall income slightly, many of
the worst-off native-born Americans are hurt by immigration ? especially
immigration from Mexico. Because Mexican immigrants have much less education
than the average U.S. worker, they increase the supply of less-skilled
labor, driving down the wages of the worst-paid Americans. The most
authoritative recent study of this effect, by George Borjas and Lawrence
Katz of Harvard, estimates that U.S. high school dropouts would earn as much
as 8 percent more if it weren't for Mexican immigration.

That's why it's intellectually dishonest to say, as President Bush does,
that immigrants do "jobs that Americans will not do." The willingness of
Americans to do a job depends on how much that job pays ? and the reason
some jobs pay too little to attract native-born Americans is competition
from poorly paid immigrants.

Finally, modern America is a welfare state, even if our social safety net
has more holes in it than it should ? and low-skill immigrants threaten to
unravel that safety net.

Basic decency requires that we provide immigrants, once they're here, with
essential health care, education for their children, and more. As the Swiss
writer Max Frisch wrote about his own country's experience with immigration,
"We wanted a labor force, but human beings came." Unfortunately, low-skill
immigrants don't pay enough taxes to cover the cost of the benefits they
receive.

Worse yet, immigration penalizes governments that act humanely. Immigrants
are a much more serious fiscal problem in California than in Texas, which
treats the poor and unlucky harshly, regardless of where they were born.

We shouldn't exaggerate these problems. Mexican immigration, says the
Borjas-Katz study, has played only a "modest role" in growing U.S.
inequality. And the political threat that low-skill immigration poses to the
welfare state is more serious than the fiscal threat: the disastrous
Medicare drug bill alone does far more to undermine the finances of our
social insurance system than the whole burden of dealing with illegal
immigrants.

But modest problems are still real problems, and immigration is becoming a
major political issue. What are we going to do about it?

Realistically, we'll need to reduce the inflow of low-skill immigrants.
Mainly that means better controls on illegal immigration. But the harsh
anti-immigration legislation passed by the House, which has led to huge
protests ? legislation that would, among other things, make it a criminal
act to provide an illegal immigrant with medical care ? is simply immoral.

Meanwhile, Mr. Bush's plan for a "guest worker" program is clearly designed
by and for corporate interests, who'd love to have a low-wage work force
that couldn't vote. Not only is it deeply un-American; it does nothing to
reduce the adverse effect of immigration on wages. And because guest workers
would face the prospect of deportation after a few years, they would have no
incentive to become integrated into our society.

What about a guest-worker program that includes a clearer route to
citizenship? I'd still be careful. Whatever the bill's intentions, it could
all too easily end up having the same effect as the Bush plan in practice ?
that is, it could create a permanent underclass of disenfranchised workers.

We need to do something about immigration, and soon. But I'd rather see
Congress fail to agree on anything this year than have it rush into
ill-considered legislation that betrays our moral and democratic principles.

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From barbarasiomos38 at msn.com  Mon Mar 27 13:30:57 2006
From: barbarasiomos38 at msn.com (Barbara Siomos)
Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 21:30:57 GMT
Subject: [Mb-civic] If you ever wanted to see a true miracle as it happens,
	this is it...
Message-ID: <BAY114-DAV25EDCEE4ED1B2C607AAD3ABD20@phx.gbl>

From: Harvey Arden
Sent: Sat, 25 Mar 2006 12:47:09 -0800
To: 'Harvey Arden'
Cc: contact at supershorts.org.uk
Subject: WKNET: ~If you ever wanted to see a true miracle as it happens, this is it...~ /Harvey


~ If you ever wanted to see a true miracleas it happens, this is it... 


Lakota Elder Mat King used to speak to me of "the Spirit-Warriors who control the air and the Universe."


These two Spirit-Horses were surely their mounts. ~ /Harvey


http://www.supershorts.org.uk/view.html?id=512

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060327/b30cf0b2/attachment.htm 

From grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net  Mon Mar 27 12:35:52 2006
From: grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net (Golsorkhi)
Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 15:35:52 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] FW: Pahlavi was ashining oracle
In-Reply-To: <000701c651d2$66bc0d20$6401a8c0@DF2ZTG61>
Message-ID: <E1FO2cZ-0008AB-MU@elasmtp-kukur.atl.sa.earthlink.net>


------ Forwarded Message
From: "Farhad Sepahbody" <sepa at sedona.net>
Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 12:12:33 -0700
To: "Golsorkhi" <grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net>
Subject: Pahlavi was ashining oracle

 
The message is ready to be sent with the following file or link attachments:
Shortcut to: 
http://calsun.canoe.ca/News/Columnists/Jackson_Paul/2006/03/26/1506136.html

Note: To protect against computer viruses, e-mail programs may prevent
sending or receiving certain types of file attachments.  Check your e-mail
security settings to determine how attachments are handled.

------ End of Forwarded Message

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060327/92bfa98a/attachment.htm 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/octet-stream
Size: 128 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060327/92bfa98a/attachment.obj 

From grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net  Mon Mar 27 10:29:55 2006
From: grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net (Golsorkhi)
Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 13:29:55 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] FW: Asia Times Online :: Middle East News, Iraq,
	Iran current	affairs
In-Reply-To: <C048EAE5.C24E%kzii@swbell.net>
Message-ID: <E1FO2f8-0002Gv-9b@elasmtp-kukur.atl.sa.earthlink.net>


------ Forwarded Message
From: Kay Zafar <kzii at swbell.net>
Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 00:16:37 -0600
To: I-G <kzii at swbell.net>
Subject: Asia Times Online :: Middle East News, Iraq, Iran current affairs

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HC18Ak04.html



------ End of Forwarded Message


From rayafromca at webtv.net  Mon Mar 27 09:03:35 2006
From: rayafromca at webtv.net (Raya King)
Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 17:03:35 GMT
Subject: [Mb-civic] 911 Loose Change 2nd Edition with extra footage - Google
	Video
Message-ID: <E1FO4sS-0008GF-6M@elasmtp-kukur.atl.sa.earthlink.net>

Raya King <rayafromca at webtv.net> has sent you the following web link:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8260059923762628848
have you seen this ?

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060327/a13b5e9e/attachment.htm 

From ean at sbcglobal.net  Mon Mar 27 21:26:27 2006
From: ean at sbcglobal.net (ean at sbcglobal.net)
Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 21:26:27 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Who Is Killing New Orleans?
Message-ID: <E1FO6yQ-0004UN-FX@smtpauth08.mail.atl.earthlink.net>

This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060410/davis
Who Is Killing New Orleans?

by MIKE DAVIS

[from the April 10, 2006 issue]

Afew blocks from the badly flooded and still-closed campus of Dillard 
University, a wind-bent street sign announces the intersection of 
Humanity and New Orleans. In the nighttime distance, the downtown 
skyscrapers on Poydras and Canal Streets are already ablaze with 
light, but a vast northern and eastern swath of the city, including the 
Gentilly neighborhood around Dillard, remains shrouded in darkness.

The lights have been out for six months now, and no one seems to 
know when, if ever, they will be turned back on. In greater New 
Orleans about 125,000 homes remain damaged and unoccupied, a 
vast ghost city that rots in darkness while les bon temps return to a 
guilty strip of unflooded and mostly affluent neighborhoods near the 
river. Such a large portion of the black population is gone that some 
radio stations are now switching their formats from funk and rap to soft 
rock.

Mayor Ray Nagin likes to boast that "New Orleans is back," pointing to 
the tourists who again prowl the French Quarter and the Tulane 
students who crowd Magazine Street bistros; but the current 
population of New Orleans on the west bank of the Mississippi is about 
the same as that of Disney World on a normal day. More than 60 
percent of Nagin's constituents--including an estimated 80 percent of 
the African-Americans--are still scattered in exile with no obvious way 
home.

In their absence, local business elites, advised by conservative think 
tanks, "New Urbanists" and neo-Democrats, have usurped almost 
every function of elected government. With the City Council largely 
shut out of their deliberations, mayor-appointed commissions and 
outside experts, mostly white and Republican, propose to radically 
shrink and reshape a majority-black and Democratic city. Without any 
mandate from local voters, the public-school system has already been 
virtually abolished, along with the jobs of unionized teachers and 
school employees. Thousands of other unionized jobs have been lost 
with the closure of Charity Hospital, formerly the flagship of public 
medicine in Louisiana. And a proposed oversight board, dominated by 
appointees of President Bush and Governor Kathleen Babineaux 
Blanco, would end local control over city finances.

Meanwhile, Bush's pledge to "get the work done quickly" and mount 
"one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen" has 
proved to be the same fool's gold as his earlier guarantee to rebuild 
Iraq's bombed-out infrastructure. Instead, the Administration has left 
the residents of neighborhoods like Gentilly in limbo: largely without 
jobs, emergency housing, flood protection, mortgage relief, small-
business loans or a coordinated plan for reconstruction.

With each passing week of neglect--what Representative Barney 
Frank has labeled "a policy of ethnic cleansing by inaction"--the 
likelihood increases that most black Orleanians will never be able to 
return.

Lie and Stall

After his bungling initial response to Katrina, Bush impersonated FDR 
and Lyndon Johnson when he reassured the nation in his September 
15 Jackson Square speech that "we have a duty to confront [New 
Orleans's] poverty with bold action.... We will do what it takes, we will 
stay as long as it takes to help citizens rebuild their communities and 
their lives."

In the event, the White House sat on its pledges all autumn, mumbling 
homilies about the limits of government, while its conservative attack 
dogs in Congress offset Gulf relief with $40 billion worth of cutbacks in 
Medicaid, food stamps and student loans. Republicans also rebelled 
against aid for a state that was depicted as a venal Third World 
society, a failed state like Haiti, out of step with national values. 
"Louisiana and New Orleans," according to Idaho Senator Larry Craig, 
"are the most corrupt governments in our country and they always 
have been.... Fraud is in the culture of Iraqis. I believe that is true in the 
state of Louisiana as well."

Democrats, apart from the Congressional Black Caucus, did 
pathetically little to counter this backlash or to hold Bush's feet to the 
fire over his Jackson Square pledge. The promised national debate 
about urban poverty never took place; instead, New Orleans, like a 
great derelict ship, drifted helplessly in the treacherous currents of 
White House hypocrisy and conservative contempt.

An early, deadly blow was Treasury Secretary John Snow's refusal to 
guarantee New Orleans municipal bonds, forcing Mayor Nagin to lay 
off 3,000 city employees on top of the thousands of education and 
medical workers already jobless. The Bush Administration also 
blocked bipartisan measures to increase Medicaid coverage for 
Katrina evacuees and to give the State of Louisiana--facing an 
estimated $8 billion in lost revenues over the next few years--a share 
of the income generated by its offshore oil and gas leases.

Even more egregious was the flagrant redlining of black 
neighborhoods by the Small Business Administration (SBA), which 
rejected a majority of loan applications by local businesses and 
homeowners. At the same time, a bipartisan Senate bill to save small 
businesses with emergency bridge loans was sabotaged by Bush 
officials, leaving thousands to face bankruptcy and foreclosure. As a 
result, the economic foundations of the city's African-American middle 
class (public-sector jobs and small businesses) have been swept away 
by deliberate decisions made in the White House. Meanwhile, in the 
absence of federal or state initiatives to employ locals, low-income 
blacks are losing their niches in the construction and service sectors to 
more mobile outsiders.

In stark contrast to its neglect of neighborhood relief, the White House 
has made herculean efforts to reward its own base of large 
corporations and political insiders. Representative Nydia Velazquez, 
who sits on the House Small Business Committee, pointed out that the 
SBA has allowed large corporations to get $2 billion in federal 
contracts while excluding local minority contractors.

The paramount beneficiaries of Katrina relief aid have been the giant 
engineering firms KBR (a Halliburton subsidiary) and the Shaw Group, 
which enjoy the services of lobbyist Joe Allbaugh (a former FEMA 
director and Bush's 2000 campaign manager). FEMA and the Army 
Corps of Engineers, while unable to explain to Governor Blanco last 
fall exactly how they were spending money in Louisiana, have tolerated 
levels of profiteering that would raise eyebrows even on the war-torn 
Euphrates. (Some of this largesse, of course, is guaranteed to be 
recycled as GOP campaign contributions.) FEMA, for example, has 
paid the Shaw Group $175 per square (100 square feet) to install tarps 
on storm-damaged roofs in New Orleans. Yet the actual installers earn 
as little as $2 per square, and the tarps are provided by FEMA. 
Similarly, the Army Corps pays prime contractors about $20 per cubic 
yard of storm debris removed, yet some bulldozer operators receive 
only $1. Every level of the contracting food chain, in other words, is 
grotesquely overfed except the bottom rung, where the actual work is 
carried out. While the Friends of Bush mine gold from the wreckage of 
New Orleans, many disappointed recovery workers--often Mexican or 
Salvadoran immigrants camped out in city parks and derelict shopping 
centers--can barely make ends meet.

The Big Kiss-Off

In the fractious, take-no-prisoners world of Louisiana politics, broad 
solidarity of interest is normally as rare as a boulder in a bayou. Yet 
Katrina created an unprecedented bipartisan consensus around twin 
demands for Category 5 hurricane protection and mortgage relief for 
damaged homes. From conservative Republicans to liberal 
Democrats, there has been unanimity that the region's recovery 
depends on federal investment in new levees and coastal restoration, 
as well as financial rescue of the estimated 200,000 homeowners 
whose insurance coverage has failed to cover their actual damage. 
(There has been no equivalent consensus and little concern for the 
right of renters--who constituted 53 percent of the population before 
Katrina--and of public-housing tenants to return to their city.)

Yet by early November it was clear that saving New Orleans was no 
longer high on the Bush agenda, if it had ever been. As Congress 
headed toward its Christmas adjournment, the Louisiana delegation 
was in panic mode: A Category 5 plan had disappeared from serious 
discussion, and there were doubts about whether the damaged levees 
would be repaired before hurricane season returned. (In early March 
engineers monitoring the progress of the Army Corps's work 
complained that the use of weak, sandy soils and the lack of concrete 
"armoring" insured that the levees would again fail in a major storm.)

Congress ultimately voted to provide $29 billion for Gulf Coast relief. 
Yet as the Washington Post reported, "All but $6 billion of the measure 
merely reshuffled some of the $62 billion in previously approved 
Hurricane Katrina aid. The rest was funded by a 1 percent across-the-
board cut of non-emergency, discretionary programs." The Pentagon 
won approval for a whopping $4.4 billion in base repairs and other 
professed Katrina-related needs, but Congress cut out the $250 million 
allocated to combat coastal erosion. Meanwhile, Mississippi's powerful 
Republican troika--Governor Haley Barbour and Senators Trent Lott 
and Thad Cochran--persuaded fellow Republicans to support $6.2 
billion in discretionary housing aid for Louisiana and $5.3 billion for 
Mississippi, with red-state Mississippi getting five times as much aid 
per distressed household as pink-state Louisiana.

Louisiana received another blow on January 23, when Bush rejected 
GOP Representative Richard Baker's plan calling for a federally 
guaranteed Louisiana Reconstruction Corporation, which would bail 
out homeowners by buying distressed properties and packaging them 
in larger parcels for resale to developers. Local Republicans as well as 
Democrats howled in rage, and the future of southern Louisiana was 
again thrown into chaos. Although the Administration eventually 
promised an additional $4.2 billion in housing aid, the appropriation 
continues to be fought over by Texas and other jealous states.

The Republican hostility to New Orleans, of course, runs deeper and is 
nastier than mere concern with civic probity (America's most corrupt 
city, after all, is located on the Potomac, not the Mississippi). 
Underlying all the circumlocutions are the same antediluvian 
prejudices and stereotypes that were used to justify the violent 
overthrow of Reconstruction 130 years ago. Usually it is the poor who 
are invisible in the aftermath of urban disasters, but in the case of New 
Orleans it has been the African-American professional middle class 
and skilled working class. In the confusion and suffering of Katrina--a 
Rorschach test of the American racial unconscious--most white 
politicians and media pundits have chosen to see only the demons of 
their prejudices. The city's complex history and social geography have 
been reduced to a cartoon of a vast slum inhabited by an alternately 
criminal or helpless underclass, whose salvation is the kindness of 
strangers in other, whiter cities. Inconvenient realities like Gentilly's 
red-brick normalcy--or, for that matter, the pride of homeownership 
and the exuberance of civic activism in the blue-collar Lower Ninth 
Ward--have not been allowed to interfere with the belief, embraced by 
New Democrats as well as old Republicans, that black urban culture is 
inherently pathological.

Such calumnies reproduce ancient caricatures--blacks running amok, 
incapable of honest self-government--that were evoked by the 
murderous White League when it plotted against Reconstruction in 
New Orleans in the 1870s. Indeed, some civil rights veterans fear that 
the 1874 Battle of Canal Street, a bloody League-organized 
insurrection against a Republican administration elected by black 
suffrage, is being refought--perhaps without pikes and guns, but with 
the same fundamental aim of dispossessing black New Orleans of 
economic and political power. Certainly, a sweeping transformation of 
the racial balance-of-power within the city has been on some people's 
agenda for a long time.

The Krewe of Canizaro

Power and status in New Orleans have always been defined by 
membership in secretive Mardi Gras "krewes" and social clubs. In the 
early 1990s civil rights activists, led by feisty Councilmember Dorothy 
Mae Taylor, forced the token desegregation of Mardi Gras, and some 
of the clubs reluctantly admitted a few African-American millionaires. 
Despite some old-guard holdouts, Uptown seemed to be adjusting, 
however grudgingly, to the reality of black political clout.

But as post-Katrina events have brutally clarified, if the oligarchy is 
dead, then long live the oligarchy. While elected black officials protest 
impotently from the sidelines, a largely white elite has wrested control 
over the debate about how to rebuild the city. This de facto ruling 
krewe includes Jim Amoss, editor of the New Orleans Times-
Picayune; Pres Kabacoff, developer-gentrifier and local patron of the 
New Urbanism; Donald Bollinger, shipyard owner and prominent 
Bushite; James Reiss, real estate investor and chair of the Regional 
Transit Authority (i.e., the man responsible for the buses that didn't 
evacuate people); Alden McDonald Jr., CEO of one of the largest 
black-owned banks; Janet Howard of the Bureau of Government 
Research (originally established by Uptown elites to oppose the 
populism of Huey Long); and Scott Cowen, the aggressively ambitious 
president of Tulane University.

But the dominating figure and kingpin is Joseph Canizaro, a wealthy 
property developer who is a leading Bush supporter with close 
personal ties to the White House inner circle. He is also the power 
behind the throne of Mayor Nagin, a nominal Democrat (he supported 
Bush in 2000) who was elected in 2002 with 85 percent of the white 
vote. Finally, as the former president of the Urban Land Institute, 
Canizaro mobilizes the support of some of the nation's most powerful 
developers and prestigious master planners.

In a city where old money is often as reclusive as Anne Rice's 
vampires, Canizaro poses as a brave civic leader unafraid to speak 
bitter but necessary truths. As he told the Associated Press about the 
Katrina diaspora last October: "As a practical matter, these poor folks 
don't have the resources to go back to our city just like they didn't have 
the resources to get out of our city. So we won't get all those folks 
back. That's just a fact."

Indeed, it is a "fact" that Canizaro has helped shape into reigning 
dogma. The number of displaced residents returning to the city is 
obviously a highly variable function of the resources and opportunities 
provided for them, yet the rebuilding debate has been premised on 
suspicious projections--provided by the RAND Corporation and 
endlessly repeated by Nagin and Canizaro--that in three years the city 
would recover only half of its August 2005 population. Many Orleanians 
cynically wonder whether such projections aren't actually goals. For 
years Reiss, Kabacoff and others have complained that New Orleans 
has too many poor people. Faced with the dire fiscal consequences of 
white flight to the suburbs, as well as three decades of 
deindustrialization (which has given New Orleans an economic profile 
closer to Newark than to Houston or Atlanta), they argue that the city 
has become a soul-destroying warehouse for underemployed and 
poorly educated African-Americans, whose real interests--it is claimed-
-might be better served by a Greyhound ticket to another town.

Kabacoff's 2003 redevelopment of the St. Thomas public housing 
project as River Garden, a largely market-rate faux Creole subdivision, 
has become the prototype for the smaller, wealthier, whiter city that 
Mayor Nagin's Bring New Orleans Back commission (with Canizaro as 
head of the crucial urban planning committee) proposes to build. 
BNOB is perhaps the most important elite initiative in New Orleans 
since the famous "Cold Water Committee" (which included Kabacoff's 
father) mobilized in 1946 to overthrow the "Old Regulars" and elect 
reformer deLesseps Morrison as mayor. BNOB grew out of a notorious 
meeting between Mayor Nagin and New Orleans business leaders 
(dubbed by some "the forty thieves") that Reiss organized in Dallas 
twelve days after Katrina devastated the city. The summit excluded 
most of New Orleans's elected black representatives and, according to 
Reiss as characterized in the Wall Street Journal, focused on the 
opportunity to rebuild the city "with better services and fewer poor 
people."

Fears that a municipal coup d'etat was in progress were scarcely 
mollified when at the end of September the mayor charged BNOB with 
preparing a master plan to rebuild the city. Although the seventeen-
member commission was racially balanced and included City Council 
president Oliver Thomas as well as jazz musician Wynton Marsalis 
(telecommuting from Manhattan), the real clout was exercised by 
committee chairs, especially Canizaro (urban planning), Cowen 
(education) and Howard (finance), who lunched privately with the 
mayor before the group's weekly meeting. This inner sanctum was 
reportedly necessary because the full-panel meetings did not allow a 
frank discussion of "tough issues of race and class."

BNOB might have quickly imploded but for a shrewd outflanking 
movement by Canizaro, who persuaded Nagin to invite the Urban Land 
Institute to work with the commission. Although the ULI is the self-
interested national voice of corporate land developers, Nagin and 
Canizaro welcomed the delegation of developers, architects and ex-
mayors as a heroic cavalry of expertise riding to the city's rescue. In a 
nutshell, the ULI's recommendations reframed the historic elite desire 
to shrink the city's socioeconomic footprint of black poverty (and black 
political power) as a crusade to reduce its physical footprint to contours 
commensurate with public safety and a fiscally viable urban 
infrastructure.

Upon these suspect premises, the outside "experts" (including 
representatives of some of the country's largest property firms and 
corporate architects) proposed an unprecedented triage of an 
American city, in which low-lying neighborhoods would be targeted for 
mass buyouts and future conversion into a greenbelt to protect New 
Orleans from flooding. As a visiting developer told BNOB: "Your 
housing is now a public resource. You can't think of it as private 
property anymore."

Keenly aware of inevitable popular resistance, the ULI also proposed a 
Crescent City Rebuilding Corporation, armed with eminent domain, 
that would bypass the City Council, as well as an oversight board with 
power over the city's finances. With control of New Orleans schools 
already usurped by the state, the ULI's proposed dictatorship of 
experts and elite appointees would effectively overthrow representative 
democracy and annul the right of local people to make decisions about 
their lives. For veterans of the 1960s civil rights movement, especially, 
it reeked of disenfranchisement pure and simple, a return to the 
paternalism of plantation days.

The City Council, supported by a surprising number of white 
homeowners and their representatives, angrily rejected the ULI plan. 
Mayor Nagin--truly a cat on a hot tin roof--danced anxiously back and 
forth between the two camps, disavowing abandonment of any area 
while at the same time warning that the city could not afford to service 
every neighborhood. But state and national officials, including HUD 
Secretary Alphonso Jackson, applauded the ULI scheme, as did the 
editorial page of the Times-Picayune and the influential Bureau of 
Government Research.

The BNOB recommendations presented by Canizaro in January 
faithfully hewed to the ULI framework: They included an appointed 
redevelopment corporation, outside the control of the City Council, that 
would act as a land bank to buy out heavily damaged homes and 
neighborhoods with federal funds, wielding eminent domain as needed 
to retire low-lying areas to greenbelt ("black people's neighborhoods 
into white people's parks," someone commented) or to assemble "in-
fill" tracts for mixed-income development a la River Garden. Other 
committees recommended a radical diminution of the power of elected 
government.

On the crucial question of how to decide which neighborhoods would 
be allowed to rebuild and which would be bulldozed, BNOB endorsed 
the concept of forced buyouts but equivocated over process. Instead of 
the ruthless map that the Bureau of Government Research wanted, 
Canizaro and colleagues proposed a Rube Goldberg-like temporary 
building moratorium in tandem with neighborhood planning meetings 
that would poll homeowners about their intentions. Only those 
neighborhoods where at least half of the pre-Katrina residents had 
made a committment to return would be considered serious 
candidates for Community Development Block Grants (CDBGs) and 
other financial aid.

Canizaro presented the report to Nagin in front of a public audience on 
January 11. The mayor said, "I like the plan," and he complimented the 
commissioners for "a job well done." But most locals found little charm 
in the Canizaro report. "I will sit in my front door with my shotgun," one 
resident warned at a jammed meeting in the Council chambers on 
January 14, while another demanded, "Are we going to allow some 
developers, some hustlers, some land thieves to grab our land, grab 
our homes, to make this a Disney World version of our homes, our 
lives?" Predictably, Nagin panicked and eventually disavowed the 
building moratorium. Soon afterward the White House torpedoed the 
Baker plan and left BNOB with only the state-controlled CDBG 
appropriation to finance its ambitious vision of New Orleans regrouped 
around a dozen new River Gardens linked by a high-speed light-rail 
line.

But Canizaro doesn't seem unduly worried. He has reassured 
supporters that the ULI/BNOB plan can go forward with CDBGs alone 
if necessary; in addition, he knows that independent of the local 
political weather, there are powerful external forces--lack of insurance 
coverage, new FEMA flood maps, refusal of lenders to refinance 
mortgages and so on--that can make permanent the exodus from 
redlined neighborhoods. Moreover, as anyone versed in the realpolitik 
of modern Louisiana knows, nothing is finally decided in New Orleans 
until some good ol' boys (and girls) in Baton Rouge have their say.

Power Shift

Even before the last bloated body had been fished out of the fetid 
waters, conservative political analysts were writing gleeful obituaries 
for black Democratic power in Louisiana. "The Democrats' margin of 
victory," said Ronald Utt of the Heritage Foundation, is "living in the 
Astrodome in Houston." Thanks to the Army Corps's defective levees, 
the Republicans stand to gain another Senate seat, two Congressional 
seats and probably the governorship. The Democrats would also find it 
impossible to reproduce Bill Clinton's 1992 feat, when he carried 
Louisiana by almost exactly his margin of victory in New Orleans. With 
a ruthless psephologist like Karl Rove in the White House, it is 
inconceivable that such considerations haven't influenced the 
shameless Bush response to the city's distress.

New Orleans has always vied with Detroit when it comes to the violent 
antipathy of white-flight suburbs toward its black central city, so it is not 
surprising that representatives from Jefferson Parish (which elected 
Klan leader David Duke to the state legislature in 1989) and St. 
Tammany Parish have particularly relished the post-Katrina shift in 
metropolitan population and electoral power. Both parishes are in the 
midst of housing booms that may consolidate the hollowing out and 
decline of New Orleans.

For her part, Governor Blanco, a Democrat, has expressed little 
concern about this fundamental reconfiguration of Louisiana's major 
metropolitan area. Indeed, her immediate, Bush-like responses to 
Katrina were to help engineer a state takeover of New Orleans schools 
and to slash $500 million in state spending while sponsoring tax 
breaks (in the name of economic recovery) for oil companies awash in 
profits. The Legislative Black Caucus was outraged at Blanco's 
"complete lack of vision and leadership" and went to court to challenge 
her right to make cuts without consulting lawmakers. But Blanco, 
supported by rural conservatives and corporate lobbyists, remained 
intransigent, even openly hostile, to black Democrats whose support 
she had previously courted.

Poor people have no voice inside the Louisiana Recovery Authority, 
whose gaggle of university presidents and corporate types appointed 
by Blanco is even less beholden to black New Orleans voters and their 
representatives than the Canizaro krewe. The twenty-nine-member 
LRA board, dominated by representatives of big business, has only 
one trade unionist and not a single grassroots black representative. 
Moreover, in contrast to Nagin's commission, the LRA has the power 
to decide, not merely advise: It controls the allocation of the FEMA 
funds and CDBGs that Congress has provided for reconstruction.

According to interviews in the Times-Picayune, leading members of 
the LRA believe that the sheer force of economic disincentives will 
shrink the city around the contours proposed by the Urban Land 
Institute. The authority has thus refused to disburse any of its hazard 
mitigation funds to areas considered unsafe, and presumably will be 
equally hardheaded in the allocation of CDBG spending. At a special 
session of the legislature Governor Blanco emphasized that the state, 
not local government or neighborhood planning committees, will retain 
control over where grants and loans go.

But Blanco and the elites may have overlooked the Fats Domino 
factor.

'No Bulldozing!'

Like hundreds of other flood-damaged but structurally sound homes, 
Fats Domino's house wears a defiant sign: Save Our Neighborhood: 
No Bulldozing! The r&b icon, who has always stayed close to his roots 
in working-class Holy Cross, knows his riverside neighborhood and the 
rest of the Lower Ninth Ward are prime targets of the city-shrinkers. 
Indeed, on Christmas Day the Times-Picayune--declaring that "before 
a community can rebuild, it must dream"--published a vision of what a 
smaller-but-better New Orleans might look like: "Tourists and 
schoolchildren tour a living museum that includes the former home of 
Fats Domino and Holy Cross High School, a multiblock memorial to 
Katrina that spans the devastated neighborhood."

"Living museum" (or "holocaust museum," as a black friend bitterly 
observed) sounds like a bad joke, but it is the elite view of what 
African-American New Orleans should become. In the brave New 
Urbanist world of Canizaro and Kabacoff, blacks (along with that other 
colorful minority group, Cajuns) will reign only as entertainers and self-
caricatures. The high-voltage energy that once rocked juke joints, 
housing projects and second-line parades will now be safely 
embalmed for tourists in a proposed Louisiana Music Experience in 
the Central Business District.

But this minstrel-show version of the future must first defeat a 
remarkable local history of grassroots organization. The Crescent 
City's best-kept secret--in the mainstream press, at least--has been 
the resurgence of trade-union and community organizing since the 
mid-1990s. Indeed, New Orleans, the only Southern city in which labor 
was ever powerful enough to call a general strike, has become an 
important crucible of new social movements. In particular, it has 
become the home base of ACORN, a national organization of working-
class homeowners and tenants that counts more than 9,000 New 
Orleans member-families, mostly in triage-threatened black 
neighborhoods. ACORN's membership has been the engine behind 
the tumultuous, decade-long struggle to unionize downtown hotels as 
well as the successful 2002 referendum to legislate the nation's first 
municipal minimum wage (later overthrown by a right-wing state 
Supreme Court). Since Katrina, ACORN has emerged as the major 
opponent of the ULI/BNOB plan for shrinking the city. Its members find 
themselves again fighting many of the same elite figures who were 
opponents of hotel unionization and a living wage.

ACORN founder Wade Rathke scoffs at the RAND Corporation 
projections that portray most blacks abandoning the city. "Don't believe 
those phony figures," he told me over beignets at Cafe du Monde in 
January. "We have polled our displaced members in Houston and 
Atlanta. Folks overwhelmingly want to return. But they realize that this 
is a tough struggle, since we have to fight simultaneously on two 
fronts: to restore people's homes and to bring back their jobs. It is also 
a race against time. The challenge is, You make it, you take it. So our 
members are voting with their feet."

Not waiting for CDBGs, FEMA flood maps or permission from 
Canizaro, ACORN crews and volunteers from across the country are 
working night and day to repair the homes of 1,000 member-families in 
some of the most threatened areas. The strategy is to confront the 
city-shrinkers with the incontestable fact of reoccupied, viable 
neighborhood cores.

ACORN has allied with the AFL-CIO and the NAACP to defend worker 
rights and press for the hiring of locals in the recovery effort. Rathke 
points out that Katrina has become the pretext for the most vicious 
government-supported attack on unions since President Reagan fired 
striking air-traffic controllers in 1981. "First, suspension of Davis-Bacon 
[federal prevailing wage law], then the state takeover of the schools 
and the destruction of the teachers' union, and now this." He points to 
a beat-up green garbage truck rattling by Jackson Square. "Trash 
collection in the French Quarter used to be a unionized city job, SEIU 
members. Now FEMA has contracted the work to a scab company 
from out of state. Is this what Bring New Orleans Back means?"

ACORN also went to court to insure that New Orleans's displaced, 
largely black population would have access to out-of-state polling 
places, especially in Atlanta and Houston, for the scheduled April 22 
city elections. When a federal judge rejected the demand, ACORN 
organizer Stephen Bradberry said it's "so obvious that there's a 
concerted plan to make this a whiter city." The NAACP agrees, but the 
Justice Department denied its request to block an election that is likely 
to transfer power to the artificial white majority created by Katrina.

It would be inspiring to see in this latest battle of New Orleans the birth 
pangs of a new or renewed civil rights movement, but gritty local 
activism has yet to be echoed in meaningful solidarity by the labor 
movement, so-called progressive Democrats or even the 
Congressional Black Caucus. Pledges, press statements and 
occasional delegations, yes; but not the unfaltering national outrage 
and sense of urgency that should attend the attempted murder of New 
Orleans on the fortieth anniversary of the Voting Rights Act. In 1874, 
as historian Ted Tunnell has pointed out, the failure of Northern 
Radicals to launch a militant, armed riposte to the white insurrection in 
New Orleans helped to doom the first Reconstruction. Will our feeble 
response to Hurricane Katrina now lead to the rollback of the second?

-- 
You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, 
option D (up to 3 emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options 
(option A - 1x/week, option B - 3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option D - 
up to 3x/day) please reply and let us know!  If someone forwarded you 
this email and you want to be on our list, send an email to 
ean at sbcglobal.net and tell us which option you'd like.


"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060327/89668189/attachment-0001.htm 

From activist at democrats.com  Tue Mar 28 02:42:40 2006
From: activist at democrats.com (Democrats.com)
Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 05:42:40 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] "White House Memo" Drives Stake into Heart of White
	House Lies
Message-ID: <20060328054240.750418@democrats.com>

"White House Memo" Drives a Stake into the Heart of White House Lies

Bob Fertik writes, "Something remarkable happened Monday: the Corporate Media finally got sick of Bush's endless lies about Iraq, and started to tell the truth. The immediate cause was a front-page New York Times story about the "White House Memo," which proved Bush was determined to invade Iraq no matter what.  Now we have reached a turning point in our "long march" for Truth. Everyone in the world knows in their heart that Bush lied. Soon everyone will say it out loud: Bush Lied. When millions of Americans say those two simple words - and the media finally joins us in seeking the truth - Bush's reign of fear will come to a crashing halt. Let's make that happen now."
http://www.democrats.com/white-house-memo

Truth Seeping Through Media After Ten Months
David Swanson writes, "There is something about this week that feels better than the average one for bringing a child into the world. I have hope that others will have hope, and that this will let them press hard for action. And there is something about bringing a child into the world that makes me want to push harder for a full measure of truth, and not be satisfied with the thrill of seeing bits of truth squeeze through. Someone said: He not busy being born, is busy dying. That certainly goes for democracies."
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/9847


Kit Created to Help Towns, Cities, Counties Pass Impeachment Resolutions

Brattleboro VT has joined nine other towns and cities, five state Democratic parties, and 19 local Democratic committees in passing resolutions urging the impeachment of George Bush and -- in most cases -- Dick Cheney. ImpeachPAC is working with Progressive Democrats of America and local activists to pass similar resolutions around the country, and has created a kit to assist local organizations in the task. Take a look and give it a try. Put your town on the map of the impeachment movement!
http://www.impeachpac.org/resolutions 


Calling all Vermonters

Led by the spiritual descendants of the Green Mountain Boys (including carpenter/musician Dan DeWalt), Vermont is making real progress towards impeachment. Their next goal is to persuade their state legislature to formally adopt an impeachment resolution. Send this link to everyone you know in Vermont:
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/862004571?ltl=1143521278



Impeachment Movement Gaining Steam
Funds raised by ImpeachPAC: $63,316 from 1,656 donors
Candidates Endorsed by ImpeachPAC: 3
http://impeachpac.org/candidates 

Congress Members sponsoring H Res 635: 33
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/635 

Senators Supporting Censure: 3
http://www.democrats.com 

Americans Favoring Impeachment: between 26 and 53%
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/polling 

_____________________

Tell Senators on Judiciary Committee to Support Censure on Friday


The Senate Judiciary Committee will take up Senator Feingold's censure proposal on Friday. FireDogLake.com has come up with the idea of faxing members of the Senate Judiciary Committee with these words at the top of your fax: "U.S. Constitution: Do Not Shred."

Here are the FAX numbers for the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee:
Arlen Specter, Chairman - Pennsylvania - Fax (202) 228-1229
Orrin G. Hatch - Utah - Fax (202) 224-6331
Patrick J. Leahy - Vermont - Fax (202) 224-3479
Charles E. Grassley - Iowa - Fax (515) 288-5097
Edward M. Kennedy - Massachusetts - Fax (202) 224-2417
Jon Kyl - Arizona - Fax (202) 224-2207
Joseph R. Biden, Jr. - Delaware - Fax (202) 224-0139
Mike DeWine - Ohio - Fax (202) 224-6519
Herbert Kohl - Wisconsin - Fax (202) 224-9787
Jeff Sessions - Alabama - Fax (202) 224-3149
Dianne Feinstein - California - Fax (202) 228-3954
Lindsey Graham - South Carolina - Fax (864) 250-4322
Russell D. Feingold - Wisconsin - Fax (202) 224-2725
John Cornyn - Texas - Fax (972) 239-2110
Charles E. Schumer - New York - Fax (202) 228-3027
Sam Brownback - Kansas - Fax (202) 228-1265
Richard J. Durbin - Illinois - Fax (202) 228-0400
Tom Coburn - Oklahoma - Fax (202) 224-6008
You can sign up for an eFax 30-day trial and fax for free here:
http://home.efax.com/s/r/gen-efax-plus5?VID=31629&CMP=AFC-fax4free 

_____________________

Tell The Committee Chairman To Speak Up


Senator Arlen Specter will chair the hearing on censure. Specter has repeatedly denounced Bush's illegal wiretapping. But he refuses to do anything to stop Bush from doing it! 

Call/fax/email his offices (numbers below) with this simple message:
Speak Up Specter! Censure Bush for illegal wiretapping! 

Senate switchboard: 888-355-3588
D.C. office direct line: 202-224-4254
D.C. office fax: 202-228-1229

_____________________

Two Months Later, Better Than Never, New York Times Covers White House Memo
AfterDowningStreet.org began demanding coverage of the White House Memo almost two months ago. Finally, the New York Times has written about it, and acknowldged that -- contrary to Bush's claims -- Bush was intent on going to war and not attempting in any way to avoid it.
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/9779

Read Jonathan Schwarz on Bush/Blair Excuses in Face of Evidence
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/9806

Read Bob Fertik on how the New York Times is still lying for Bush
http://www.democrats.com/node/8337 

Read Editor and Publisher on what Bush and Blair were saying publicly at time of White House Memo
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/9829

_____________________

Bi-Partisan Group of Congress Members to Call for Debate on War

A bi-partisan group in the House of Representatives has sent around this "Dear Colleague" letter asking other Members of Congress to join in calling for an open floor debate on the war.
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/downloads/opendebate.pdf

Urge your Congress Member to sign on!
http://capwiz.com/pdamerica/issues/alert/?alertid=8621401&type=CO

_____________________

There Is Blood on Our Hands

"We the People" must accept the responsibility for the killing of innocent civilians. Our tax dollars are used to fund the illegal war in Iraq and we must now act, collectively, to put an end to this.
http://bloodonourhands.us.com/demonstrate

_____________________

A New Book

In the United States, our best journalism is published in books now and talked about on the radio and the internet. If you get your news from a television or a newspaper, you live in another world. This no doubt contributes to how divided we are politically. Dave Lindorff's and Barbara Olshansky's book could help bridge this national divide. The genius of this book is in its brevity. Lindorff and Olshansky have boiled the list of Bush and Cheney's documented crimes down to an amazingly concise summary, one that however gives a real flavor of the goings on in this criminal administration. I work on these issues and still learned a great deal by reading this book. If each of us who knows some of this and is able to process it easily buys ten copies to give to people who get their news from TV, this clear crisp book might just help save this country. -- David Swanson
http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/id16.html

_____________________

UPCOMING EVENTS

ARTICLES OF IMPEACHMENT AGAINST GEORGE W. BUSH: The Evidence, and What the
Constitution Dictates
March 28, 7:30 p.m.
Amy Goodman of Democracy Now hosts a panel discussion featuring Michael Ratner, Bill Goodman, Shayana Kadidal, and Maria Lahood, attorneys from the Center for Constitutional Rights and authors of a new book, Articles of Impeachment Against George W. Bush (Melville House). At The Culture
Project, 45 Bleecker Street, NYC (corner of Bleecker and Lafayette
Streets) Admission is free - seating is limited - first come, first served.

Senate Judiciary Committee Hearings on Censure
March 31, 9:30 a.m.
Senate Dirksen 226
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/9668

March to Redeem the Soul of America
April 1 ? 14, 2006 in Texas: Irving ? Dallas ? Waco ? Crawford
ConsumersforPeace.org, Crawford Peace House, Dallas Peace Center, Texas Peace Action
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/9628

SOUTHERN REGIONAL MARCH FOR PEACE IN IRAQ & JUSTICE AT HOME
April 1, Atlanta will host the largest anti-war march in the history of the South. The date, APRIL FIRST, links the 3rd anniversary of the war, March 20, with the 38th anniversary of Dr. King's death, April 4. Activists are organizing contingents from Birmingham, Alabama; Fayetteville, North Carolina; Memphis & Nashville, Tennessee; Tallahassee, Florida and all corners of Georgia.
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/7943

Guantanamo on Capitol Hill
On April 6, 5pm
A reading of the Tricycle Theater?s production of Guant?namo in the Rayburn House Office Building, The House of Congress, Capitol Hill, Washington DC.
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/9571

Easter in Crawford, Texas
April 10-16
Join Cindy in Crawford. Everyone's welcome!
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/9585

Sign up for these events, find others, and create your own at
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/event

See Also UFPJ:
http://unitedforpeace.org/calendar.php?caltype=39&lcountry=&state=&search=Search

And PDA:
http://pdamerica.org/events/main-list.php

____________________


FORWARD THIS EMAIL 

#####

If you received this from a friend, you can subscribe at:
http://afterdowningstreet.org

To unsubscribe from AfterDowningStreet Updates, click here:
http://archive.democrats.com/unsub.cfm?email=mb-civic at islandlists.com&fieldname=L16

To unsubscribe from all Democrats.com mailings, click here:
http://archive.democrats.com/unsub.cfm?email=mb-civic at islandlists.com&fieldname=L1
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060328/8d80c7fc/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Tue Mar 28 03:53:59 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 06:53:59 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Moussaoui Says He Was to Fly 5th Plane - Washington Post
Message-ID: <442923D7.6000407@comcast.net>

Moussaoui Says He Was to Fly 5th Plane
White House Attack Planned for 9/11, Terrorist Testifies

By Jerry Markon and Timothy Dwyer
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, March 28, 2006; A01

Zacarias Moussaoui took the stand at his death penalty trial yesterday 
and declared that he was supposed to hijack a fifth airplane on Sept. 
11, 2001, and crash it into the White House in the terrorist attacks 
that killed nearly 3,000 people.

The al-Qaeda operative said his role was to head a five-man crew that 
included Richard Reid, the British citizen who later tried to set off 
explosives in his shoes aboard a transatlantic flight. Moussaoui said 
that his orders came from Osama bin Laden and that his plan was foiled 
by his arrest in August 2001.

"I was supposed to pilot a plane to hit the White House," Moussaoui told 
a riveted federal courtroom in Alexandria. "I only knew about the two 
planes of the World Trade Center in addition to my own plane."

His words were as stunning as the way in which he delivered them. When 
he pleaded guilty to conspiring with al-Qaeda last year, Moussaoui 
denied involvement in Sept. 11 and insisted that he was to be part of a 
second wave of attacks. He then launched into one of his rambling 
courtroom outbursts, ending it by screaming, "God curse America!"

The familiar Moussaoui was gone yesterday. In his place was a hardened 
terrorist operative who spoke calmly and methodically, looking straight 
at his questioners as he voiced his hatred for the nation that had put 
him on trial for his life. "I consider every American to be my enemy," 
Moussaoui, 37, said as jurors leaned forward in their seats. "For me, 
every American is going to want my death because I want their death."

The extraordinary spectacle of an admitted al-Qaeda member testifying 
about the deadliest terrorist attack in American history was later 
matched by something equally unusual. Defense lawyers read into the 
record evidence gathered in the United States' secret and controversial 
detention system, telling jurors what Khalid Sheik Mohammed, a key 
planner of Sept. 11, would have said had he taken the stand.

And Mohammed's words, given to interrogators at the undisclosed location 
where he is being held, contradicted Moussaoui's testimony.

He said Moussaoui had been slated for a second wave of attacks that 
would have included targets not hit on Sept. 11, such as the White House 
and the Sears Tower in Chicago. Mohammed noted that the Sept. 11 attacks 
on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon proceeded on schedule despite 
Moussaoui's arrest while taking flying lessons in Minnesota.

Even if Moussaoui's precise role is never certain, what was clear 
yesterday was the damage that his testimony, given over the strenuous 
objections of his lawyers, had done to his defense. Under 
cross-examination by Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert A. Spencer, 
Moussaoui admitted to the government's primary argument for his 
execution -- that he lied to the FBI after his arrest to allow the Sept. 
11 attacks to go forward.

Moussaoui acknowledged that he did not know the exact date of the 
attacks but that he knew they were to take place just after August. He 
learned of the attacks while listening to the radio while in jail in 
Minnesota, and "I immediately understood," he testified.

Moussaoui said he lied "because I wanted my mission to go ahead," adding 
that he "never told them anything about the operation."

"You hid that from them. You concealed it, right?" Spencer asked.

"Indeed," Moussaoui replied.

Legal experts said those admissions, combined with Moussaoui's chilling 
demeanor in court, probably would resonate with the jury, which is 
expected to begin deliberating this week on whether he is eligible for 
the death penalty. If jurors found him eligible, a second phase of the 
hearing would determine whether Moussaoui should be executed.

"It sounds like he's toast," said Eric Muller, a former federal 
prosecutor who teaches at the University of North Carolina. "The 
prosecution's best hope was to make him appear scary rather than crazy. 
It sounds like he was really scary."

Brian Jenkins, a terrorism expert who is senior adviser to the president 
of the Rand Corp., said Moussaoui "has destroyed much of his defense. He 
has gone as far as he possibly can to make the prosecution's case."

That case had appeared troubled only days ago. Prosecutors were 
embarrassed by the misconduct of a government lawyer, Carla J. Martin, 
who improperly coached witnesses. Moussaoui's attorneys unearthed 
government documents that showed in new detail how the FBI had ignored 
repeated warnings from its own agents that Moussaoui was a terrorist who 
wanted to hijack an airplane.

Before Moussaoui took the stand, his attorneys, with whom he does not 
speak, tried to block his testimony. One, Gerald T. Zerkin, said 
Moussaoui does not recognize the court's authority and, "as an al-Qaeda 
member, he believes it is okay to lie."

But prosecutors urged U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema to let him 
speak. Brinkema agreed, acknowledging that Moussaoui "had expressed his 
disdain of the United States" but had promised to behave in court.

Asked by a court clerk to raise his right hand and promise to tell the 
truth, Moussaoui stood motionless. He then told Brinkema he understood 
that he was required to speak truthfully, and he was allowed to take the 
stand.


From swiggard at comcast.net  Tue Mar 28 03:55:25 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 06:55:25 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Senators Back Guest Workers - Washington Post
Message-ID: <4429242D.5010100@comcast.net>

Senators Back Guest Workers
Panel's Measure Sides With Bush

By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 28, 2006; A01

A key Senate panel broke with the House's get-tough approach to illegal 
immigration yesterday and sent to the floor a broad revision of the 
nation's immigration laws that would provide lawful employment to 
millions of undocumented workers while offering work visas to hundreds 
of thousands of new immigrants every year.

With bipartisan support, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 12 to 6 to 
side with President Bush's general approach to an immigration issue that 
is dividing the country, fracturing the Republican Party and ripening 
into one of the biggest political debates of this election year. 
Conservatives have loudly demanded that the government tighten control 
of U.S. borders and begin deporting illegal immigrants. But in recent 
weeks, the immigrant community has risen up in protest, marching by the 
hundreds of thousands to denounce what they see as draconian measures 
under consideration in Washington.

"There is no issue outside of civil rights that brings out the kind of 
emotions we have seen," said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), one of 
the bill's primary sponsors, who called the controversy "a defining 
issue of our times."

Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) rushed committee 
members to complete their work to meet a midnight deadline imposed by 
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), who favors a tougher 
approach more in line with the version passed by the House last 
December. But once the committee had acted, Frist declined to say last 
night whether he would substitute the committee's legislation for his 
own, which includes no guest-worker program.

Frist's efforts to wrest control of the issue from the Judiciary 
Committee could produce a power struggle among Republicans once the 
majority leader brings up the issue for debate and votes in the full 
Senate, probably this week. Specter and the other committee leaders may 
have to muscle their bill through as an amendment if Frist refuses to 
back down.

Frist, a presidential aspirant whom Bush helped elect as majority 
leader, favors tightening control of the nation's borders without 
granting what he calls amnesty to the approximately 11 million illegal 
immigrants living in this country. But Bush favors a comprehensive 
approach, which he says must include some program to answer business's 
need for immigrant labor.

"Congress needs to pass a comprehensive bill that secures the border, 
improves interior enforcement, and creates a temporary-worker program to 
strengthen our security and our economy," Bush said yesterday at a 
ceremony to swear in 30 new U.S. citizens from 20 countries. "Completing 
a comprehensive bill is not going to be easy. It will require all of us 
in Washington to make tough choices and make compromises."

Polls indicate about 60 percent of Americans oppose guest-worker 
programs that would offer illegal immigrants an avenue to lawful work 
status, and three-quarters of the country believe the government is 
doing too little to secure the nation's borders.

But the immigrant community has been galvanized by what it sees as a 
heavy-handed crackdown on undocumented workers by Washington. The House 
in December rejected calls for a guest-worker program and instead 
approved a bill that would stiffen penalties on illegal immigrants, 
force businesses to run the names of each employee through federal 
databases to prove their legality, deploy more border agents and 
unmanned aerial vehicles to the nation's frontiers and build massive 
walls along sections of the U.S.-Mexican border.

At least 14,000 students stormed out of schools in Southern California 
and elsewhere yesterday, waving flags and chanting to protest 
congressional actions. About 100 demonstrators, including members of the 
clergy, appeared at the Capitol yesterday in handcuffs to object to 
provisions in the House bill that would make illegal immigrants into 
felons and criminalize humanitarian groups that feed and house them. 
More than a half-million marchers protested in Los Angeles on Saturday, 
following protests in Phoenix, Milwaukee and Philadelphia.

"The immigration debate should be conducted in a civil and dignified 
way," Bush said. "No one should play on people's fears, or try to pit 
neighbors against each other."

A confrontation between the Senate and House Republicans now appears 
inevitable.

"We are eager, once the Senate passes this bill, to sit down and talk 
with them, but there are certain fundamental principles which we simply 
cannot compromise on," said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who cosponsored 
the bill that passed the Judiciary Committee largely intact last night. 
"It has to be a comprehensive approach. As we all know, just building 
walls and hiring more border patrols are not the answers to our 
immigration problem."

Specter, the committee chairman, had tried for weeks to find a middle 
ground between senators advocating a generous guest-worker program and 
those categorically rejecting amnesty for illegal immigrants. In the 
end, that search for a compromise failed because advocates of the 
guest-worker program had more than enough votes to overcome conservative 
opposition.

The panel voted to accept a bill largely patterned on the measure 
sponsored by Kennedy and McCain. Specter and Republican Sens. Lindsey O. 
Graham (S.C.), Sam Brownback (Kan.) and Mike DeWine (Ohio) joined the 
committee's Democrats to win passage.

The panel's bill would allow the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants 
in this country to apply for a work visa after paying back taxes and a 
penalty. The first three-year visa could be renewed for three more 
years. After four years, visa holders could apply for green cards and 
begin moving toward citizenship. An additional 400,000 such visas would 
be offered each year to workers seeking to enter the country.

Senators also accepted a proposal by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) 
that would offer 1.5 million illegal farmworkers a "blue card" visa that 
would legalize their status. The committee also accepted a provision by 
Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) that would shield humanitarian 
organizations from prosecution for providing more than simple emergency 
aid to illegal immigrants, rejecting an amendment by Sen. John Cornyn 
(R-Tex.) to require humanitarian groups providing food, medical aid and 
advice to illegal immigrants to register with the Department of Homeland 
Security.

Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) protested that the Feinstein proposal was more 
focused on offering illegal immigrants a path to citizenship than 
meeting the labor demands of agriculture. Cornyn suggested the Judiciary 
Committee bill was moving toward creating a caste of second-class workers.

But Cornyn may have summed up Senate fears when he referred to energized 
voters protesting what they see as amnesty for people who violated the 
nation's laws and made a mockery of its borders.

"The American people are thinking, 'Fool me once, shame on you, fool me 
twice, shame on me,' " he said. "The only way we can get the confidence 
of the American people is to convince them we are absolutely serious 
about border security and law enforcement."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/27/AR2006032700684.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060328/efa86c9d/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Tue Mar 28 03:58:11 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 06:58:11 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Decency to 'Those People' - Eugene Robinson - Washington
	Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <442924D3.7060804@comcast.net>

Decency to 'Those People'
<>
By Eugene Robinson
The Washington Post
Tuesday, March 28, 2006; A23

Half a million people poured into the streets of Los Angeles on Saturday 
to protest the various Republican-sponsored proposals in Congress that 
would demonize illegal immigrants. Hundreds marched yesterday in 
Detroit, which, last I checked, is nowhere near the Mexican border. Tens 
of thousands have demonstrated in Phoenix, Denver and other cities 
across the country. In every case, the crowds were mostly Latino.

We all know that Latinos are the nation's largest minority and that most 
of the people in those demonstrations either were born in the United 
States or are here legally. But we also know that at least some of those 
protesters had gone through the experience of crossing the border 
illegally under the tutelage of avaricious people-smugglers known as 
"coyotes." At least some had been here for months or years, working to 
send money home to their families, keeping their heads down, somehow 
managing to carve out lives for themselves and their children.

Who are they? After the demonstrations were over, where did they go? Are 
they so diabolically clever at hiding in plain sight? Or is it that the 
rest of us refuse to see them, because by seeing them we would have to 
acknowledge their humanity?

That willful blindness is why the debate on illegal immigration is so 
hypocritical. If we lump undocumented immigrants into an 
undifferentiated mass of Those People, we can avoid really looking at 
the immigrant experience. And we can convince ourselves that it is 
somehow different from the periodic waves of immigration that have 
shaped this nation -- that suddenly it is not an issue, or even a 
problem, but an urgent crisis.

There are an estimated 12 million immigrants in the United States 
illegally. That many people don't just fade into the woodwork. The fact 
is, we see undocumented immigrants every day.

Maybe they vacuum your office at night. Maybe they landscape your garden 
or clean your house or cook the food at your favorite restaurant. You 
probably don't know where they live. You probably don't know their 
children's names or where they go to school. You probably don't know 
what it was like for them to buy a car or even get a driver's license. 
You probably don't know where they get medical care.

If you did know these things about individual immigrants, whether 
they're from Mexico or El Salvador or China or Brazil, I think you would 
find the debate in Congress almost grotesque.

Should we declare that they are all criminals? Should we make criminals 
of the people who give them jobs, too? Should we build a Berlin Wall 
along the border? It's possible to take such draconian measures against 
Those People -- but not against lovely Marta, who waxes your floors, or 
genial Juan, who tends your azaleas. So to side with the xenophobes, you 
have to know as little about Marta and Juan as possible.

In terms of realpolitik, the immigration issue is easy: If the 
Republican leadership in Congress wants to alienate Latino voters and 
drive them into the embrace of the Democratic Party, it's tempting to 
let them do it. But that means ignoring the reality that we're talking 
about individuals, not Those People. And it means abandoning the process 
of inflow, adaptation and renewal that has made this nation of 
immigrants so dynamic and resourceful.

I don't get many chances to say that George W. Bush is right, but I 
think he really understands the immigration issue on both the political 
and the personal level. His guest-worker program is a mess. Does he 
really expect millions of people to report for deportation? Won't 
employers have an incentive to exploit the guest workers when they know 
they will never have citizenship, and therefore will never have any 
political clout? But I do give the president credit for seeking a 
compromise that will quiet the nativists in his party and maybe buy some 
time for cooler heads to prevail.

Much better is the proposal by Sens. John McCain and Edward Kennedy that 
would declare what amounts to an amnesty for undocumented immigrants. 
They would both take issue with that characterization, because "amnesty" 
is a forbidden word, but that's what it would be -- "illegals" who 
reported to authorities would be able to stay in the country and 
eventually begin the process of seeking citizenship. It seems unlikely, 
though, that this reasonable plan will fly.

Whatever Congress does, 12 million people aren't going to pack up and go 
home overnight. They are here -- Marta and Juan, not Those People. We 
see them every day. Let's deal with them as fellow human beings.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/27/AR2006032701302.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060328/efd97a70/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Tue Mar 28 04:02:27 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 07:02:27 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] ABDUL RAHMAN: Unfathomable Zealotry - Richard Cohen -
 Washington Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <442925D3.8090006@comcast.net>

Unfathomable Zealotry
<>
By Richard Cohen
The Washington Post
Tuesday, March 28, 2006; A23

What strikes me about the threat to execute Abdul Rahman, the Afghan who 
converted to Christianity, is not that Afghanistan remains deeply 
medieval and not even remotely the democracy that George W. Bush would 
like it to be, but that with the exception of the (largely) Christian 
West, the rest of the world has been mostly silent. The Americans have 
protested, the Brits have protested, the Vatican has protested and so (I 
assume) have some others. But if there has been a holler of protest from 
anywhere in the Muslim world, it has not reached my ears. That is appalling.

The murder of a person for his religious belief ought to be 
inconceivable. It is something we in the West stopped accepting hundreds 
of years ago, and while Americans and others continued to kill on 
account of race deep into the past century, the right of the government 
to take a life on account of religion has not even been argued in the 
longest time. We are way beyond that.

Afghanistan was once under Soviet occupation, and it may have learned 
something from those days. Just as the Soviets sometimes pronounced 
political dissidents to be insane (why else would they question a 
perfect system?) so have Afghans decided that Rahman is nuts. (Why else 
would a Muslim choose Christianity?) Now that the case has been dropped 
and he has been placed in solitary confinement for his own protection, 
he will probably be spirited out of the country. To remain in 
Afghanistan is to remain in grave peril of death.

Rahman's troubles began, as they do for so many, with a divorce. In 
contesting his attempt to gain custody of his children, his wife told 
the court that Rahman would be an unfit father because he had converted 
to Christianity about 16 years earlier. This is what's known in football 
as a late hit. Nonetheless, when the prosecutor heard of the conversion, 
he promptly charged Rahman with apostasy, which is punishable by death. 
Rahman's choices were once to repudiate his conversion or plead 
insanity. The latter would have been the more sane choice.

"The world is too much with us," Wordsworth once wrote. This is 
certainly the way I feel. To be confronted on an almost daily basis with 
the horrors of Iraq is profoundly disturbing. The torture and 
decapitation of huge numbers of people, the casual homicides, the 
constant suicide bombings -- all of this makes you wonder about your 
fellow man. It is no longer possible, as it once was, to see the world 
only from your front porch, being disturbed only by the ringing of the 
bell on some passing ice cream truck. In Africa, Asia, too much of the 
world -- it is Joseph Conrad much of the time: "The horror! The horror!"

But you can say that these horrors are usually being inflicted by a 
minority. You say it is a few crazed terrorists of Iraq who are doing 
the killing. It is not most Iraqis. You can say the same about suicide 
bombers and torturers and rogue governments, like the one Saddam Hussein 
once headed. You can take solace in numbers. Most people are like us.

Then comes the Rahman case and it is not a solitary crazy prosecutor who 
brings the charge of apostasy but an entire society. It is not a single 
judge who would condemn the man but a culture. The Taliban are gone at 
gunpoint, their atrocities supposedly a thing of the past. In our 
boundless optimism, we consign them to the "too hard" file of horrors we 
cannot figure out: the Khmer Rouge, the Nazis, the communists of the 
Stalin period. Now, though, this awful thing returns and it is not just 
a single country that would kill a man for his beliefs but a huge swath 
of the world that would not protest. There can be only one conclusion: 
They were in agreement.

The groupthink of the Muslim world is frightening. I know there are 
exceptions -- many exceptions. But still it seems that a man could be 
killed for his religious beliefs and no one would say anything in 
protest. It is also frightening to confront how differently we in the 
West think about such matters and why the word "culture" is not always a 
mask for bigotry, but an honest statement of how things are. It is 
sometimes a bridge too far -- the leap that cannot be made. I can 
embrace an Afghan for his children, his work, even his piety -- all he 
shares with much of humanity. But when he insists that a convert must 
die, I am stunned into disbelief: Is this my fellow man?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/27/AR2006032701299.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060328/6cf116f3/attachment-0001.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Tue Mar 28 04:04:30 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 07:04:30 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] McCAIN: A Maverick No More? - E. J. Dionne - Washington
	Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <4429264E.60601@comcast.net>

A Maverick No More?
<>
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
The Washington Post
Tuesday, March 28, 2006; A23

In April 2004 I put in a call to John McCain's office to see if he would 
respond to a group of House Republicans who had attacked his fellow 
Vietnam veteran John Kerry.

In a preview of coming assaults, the Republicans accused Kerry of, among 
other things, "aiding and abetting the enemy" by coming to oppose the 
war in Vietnam, where Kerry had earned so many medals.

McCain's spokesman at the time said he doubted his boss would want to 
get into the controversy. But within an hour or so, McCain called back 
to denounce the attacks on Kerry. "He's my friend. He'll continue to be 
my friend," McCain said. "I know his service was honorable. If that 
hurts me politically or with my party, that's a very small price to pay."

That was McCain the Maverick, who has won much affection outside the 
ranks of his own party. McCain the Maverick fought for campaign finance 
reform, took global warming seriously, opposed Bush's tax cuts and spoke 
out against torture.

Those positions bred mistrust in McCain's own party, even though he was 
always a staunch supporter of overthrowing Saddam Hussein, a firm 
opponent of pork-barrel spending, an abortion foe and an advocate of 
private accounts carved out of Social Security.

McCain's problem is that political parties rarely nominate mavericks, 
and McCain has decided the only way he'll ever be president is as the 
Republican nominee. So today he cares very much about what hurts him or 
helps him in his own party.

The most flagrant sign of this was his February vote to continue Bush's 
dividend and capital gains tax cuts, which he once eloquently opposed. 
"It's a big flip-flop," one-time McCain foe Grover Norquist, president 
of Americans for Tax Reform, told The Washington Times' Donald Lambro, 
"but I'm happy that he's flopped."

Those of us who defended McCain in the days when the likes of Norquist 
were attacking him do see the Arizona Republican's new position as a 
major flop. But so what? Norquist has more power in Republican primaries 
than McCain's old base among pundits and reporters. Whenever a liberal 
turns on McCain these days, the senator's supporters gleefully e-mail 
the criticism to conservative activists as a sign of their man's true faith.

The prevailing view among McCain's lieutenants -- it's also the 
conventional political view -- is that since the main obstacle to his 
nomination in 2008 comes from the right and from Bush partisans, 
McCain's main task is to appease the right and make nice with Bush on 
issues (such as Iraq) where McCain actually agrees with the president. 
Liberal attacks can be ignored, since most liberals will eventually vote 
against McCain anyway. There will be plenty of time after he's nominated 
for McCain to don his maverick apparel again for the benefit of 
moderates and independents.

All terribly logical, but it's a more dangerous strategy than it seems. 
McCain's central appeal, even to people who disagree with him, has 
always been his willingness to do the nonpolitical thing -- for example, 
to defend Kerry that day in 2004 simply because he thought the attacks 
on Kerry were wrong.

If McCain spends the next two years obviously positioning himself to win 
Republican primary votes, he will start to look like just another 
politician. Once lost, a maverick's image is hard to earn back.

Moreover, McCain is winning a hearing from previously reluctant 
Republicans as the one person who might save the party if Bush's 
popularity continues to sink. But if McCain gets too close to Bush in 
the next two years, he will no longer have his independence as a selling 
point. And if Bush should make a comeback, a lot of Republicans flirting 
with McCain now out of necessity will happily abandon him for someone 
more to their liking.

Republican and Democratic friends alike object that this analysis is 
based on a misunderstanding: McCain's nonconservative, non-Republican 
sympathizers, they argue, have always overrated his progressive 
credentials. It's time to face the fact that McCain really is a 
conservative Republican and stop hoping he's something else.

Perhaps that's good advice, but I still don't regret arguing back in 
1996 that Bob Dole should pick McCain as his running mate. "Maybe the 
political climate is too quarrelsome and unforgiving to permit someone 
as interesting as McCain to get on a national ticket," I wrote then. 
"But that would be a shame."

In light of his current strategy, McCain seems to have decided that our 
even more quarrelsome and unforgiving political climate requires him to 
be less interesting and more conventional than he used to be. Call me 
naive, but I think that's a shame, too.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/27/AR2006032701300.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060328/e469918e/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Tue Mar 28 04:07:59 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 07:07:59 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] SHOULD READ: Strategies for a global counterinsurgency -
 Jonathan Morgenstein, Eric Vickland - Boston Globe Op-Ed
Message-ID: <4429271F.60000@comcast.net>


  Strategies for a global counterinsurgency

By Jonathan Morgenstein and Eric Vickland  |  March 28, 2006  |  The 
Boston Globe

US TROOPS in Iraq face an insurgency similar to those confronted by 
great powers for centuries. Insurgents hide, wait, and strike on their 
own timetables. They wear no uniforms and they utilize tactics of 
deception, ambush, and terror. The insurgents strike weaknesses and 
dictate the terms of the fight.

Iraq is now a microcosm of the global struggle we face -- a 
comprehensive insurgency inadequately described as the global war on 
terrorism. In Iraq and around the world, we will never peacefully 
dissuade those dedicated to violence against us. They must be captured 
or killed. However, the enemy is not just Al Qaeda and other jihadist 
groups that share its messianic vision. It is also organized crime, 
black markets, and sympathetic local populations, all of which sustain 
the insurgency with cash, weapons, and intelligence.

This global insurgency can only be defeated by severing the insurgents' 
connections to populations that sustain them. We must isolate and 
smother an enemy who thrives by delivering empowerment and vengeance to 
populations drowning in poverty, social humiliation, and political 
marginalization. These masses in return sustain the enemy -- passively 
with cover and actively with fighters. We have to convince those who 
passively support the insurgency that we are not their enemy. 
Unfortunately, our current strategy overemphasizing military force 
drives undecided millions into the insurgents' arms. Not only are we 
fighting the war wrong, we are fighting the wrong war.

US forces in Iraq are coming to terms with essential lessons in dealing 
with insurgency: overwhelming firepower is often counterproductive; 
comprehensive reconstruction and information efforts win hearts and 
minds; the best sources of actionable intelligence are local 
populations; and lastly, indigenous law enforcement facilitates smaller 
US footprints, multiplying the effectiveness of all other efforts. These 
same lessons must also guide how we fight our worldwide struggle against 
Islamist extremism.

Counterinsurgency concepts must form the core of our government's 
national security strategy. Counterinsurgency doctrine teaches that such 
an approach be based on five equally vital pillars: targeted military 
force, intelligence, law enforcement, information operations, and civil 
affairs.

Taken together, these pillars constitute a global counterinsurgency -- 
an innovative and cohesive paradigm with which to guide America's 
national security policy. As General John Abizaid told Congress last 
September, defeating the insurgency ''requires not only military 
pressure . . . [but] all elements of international and national power." 
Counterinsurgency doctrine tells us that the military is only one of the 
five pillars, and if we are to win, it cannot dominate the other four.

We were compelled and justified in militarily toppling the Taliban. But 
defeating future enemies will more likely demand targeted military force 
such as that being executed against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Africa 
than traditional blunt instruments typical of the Cold War. Those who 
prioritize national missile defense over either special-operations 
capabilities or non-military tools of foreign policy understand neither 
the nature of our greatest threat nor how to defeat it. Our intelligence 
capabilities -- collection and analysis of information -- must be 
expanded and diversified. We must trace technology on weapons of mass 
destruction as well as materials proliferation before they spread. We 
must strengthen social intelligence that will provide essential 
understanding of the demographic and cultural geography within which our 
enemy hides. We must reinvigorate our human intelligence networks so 
that we can penetrate their networks.

Some have downplayed the role of police work in defeating Al Qaeda. As 
9/11 Commission chairman Thomas Kean has observed, this complacency 
perpetuates the disjointed and dysfunctional nature of our law 
enforcement agencies, both within government and vis-a-vis international 
law enforcement bodies. This must change, because effective police 
operations are essential to suffocating the global insurgency.

Our information operations efforts -- instrumental in winning over the 
undecideds among whom the enemy hides and recruits -- is woefully 
inadequate. We must promote America's charity, while exposing the 
enemy's hypocrisy. Civil affairs, ''development" in non-military terms, 
is aggressive economic and political development as well as cultivation 
of civil society institutions and human rights. Only when populations in 
the developing world obtain genuine economic opportunity, social 
dignity, and political empowerment will they no longer incubate the 
global insurgency.

None of these pillars precludes other crucial components of our security 
policy: ending foreign oil dependency, reining in Iranian nuclear 
weapons development, and containing North Korea. Neither do they rule 
out wariness of rival great powers. We must rebuild the alliances that 
we need, yet have rubbed raw in the past six years, and we must close 
off geopolitical fissures that Russia and China will seek to exploit. 
However, the primary threat we face is the global insurgency, and 
defeating it will require a global counterinsurgency as the foundation 
of our national security and foreign policy doctrine.

Jonathan Morgenstein, a principal of the Truman National Security 
Project, is a program officer at the United States Institute of Peace. 
Eric Vickland is a lecturer for the Joint Special Operations University.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/28/strategies_for_a_global_counterinsurgency/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060328/0319fb0a/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Tue Mar 28 04:11:30 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 07:11:30 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Absorbing Europe's Muslims - H.D.S. Greenway - Boston
	Globe Op-Ed
Message-ID: <442927F2.7020503@comcast.net>


  Absorbing Europe's Muslims

By H.D.S. Greenway  |  March 28, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

DURING A discussion about Muslims in Europe at the American Academy in 
Berlin, where I had the opportunity to spend a few weeks this winter, a 
young man rose to ask a disturbing question.

''In Germany we have the most liberal constitution . . . and freedom of 
religion," he said. ''There is perhaps more freedom than is available in 
any other country of the world. But on the other hand there is a paradox 
which I have experienced personally as a German of Pakistani descent." 
For even though he had been born in Germany, spoke fluent German, and 
had even served in the German Army, he found Germany ''one of the most 
psychologically hostile countries towards Muslims."

''This is not concerning the state and the government, but concerning 
the hearts and minds of the German people," he said. ''There is an 
extremely negative attitude -- a hostile attitude towards Muslims. What 
can be done to overcome that and to achieve a certain kind of peaceful 
coexistence?"

Germany is not alone in having difficulties absorbing immigrants, 
especially Muslims, who make up the fastest-growing minority in Europe. 
Originally recruited as ''guest workers" who were supposed to go home 
eventually, these mostly Muslim immigrants stayed on, sent for their 
families, and now are in their second and third generations. And more 
are coming every day.

Europe simply cannot get used to the fact that it has become an 
immigrant target. From about 1800 to 1920, Europe exported some 85 
million people to the New World. Now this trend has reversed itself, and 
Europe has become a net importer. Immigrants from Africa and Asia are 
pouring in to find the same difficulties that dark-skinned immigrants 
have found elsewhere in Europe, North America, and Australia.

This is not unique to Germany, but Germany did refuse to admit that it 
had become a country of immigrants longer than most of its neighbors. 
Germany said citizenship comes through German blood, not the fact that 
you were born in Germany. Thus a descendant of Germans from Kazakhstan, 
whose family may have lived in Russia since Catherine the Great, gets a 
warmer welcome in Germany than descendants of Turks, Moroccans, or 
Pakistanis, even though the latter may have been born in Germany.

This changed in 1999 when laws were passed to free up citizenship to 
those not of German blood. But the laws can be changed faster than minds.

The gulf between Muslims and non-Muslim Europeans is growing, especially 
after 9/11, the Madrid and London bombings, and the murder of Dutch 
filmmaker Theo van Gogh at the hands of a Dutch-speaking Moroccan who 
thought van Gogh had insulted Muslims. The flap over the Danish cartoons 
has exacerbated this hostility, even though European Muslims did not 
join their co-religionists elsewhere in rioting.

Later, after the discussion at the academy, I turned on the TV news from 
the BBC. Two of the news presenters were South Asian women. Thinking of 
the young man's question, I recalled a conversation with Turkish-German 
politician Cem Ozdemir, now a member of the European Parliament, who had 
said how impressed he was with the number of dark faces he saw on 
British television compared with German television. And while Britain 
and France had plenty of immigrants playing on their national soccer 
teams, Germany, which will play host to the World Cup this summer, has 
no Germans of Turkish origin on the Germany national team -- even though 
Germans of Turkish origin make up the largest immigrant group in 
Germany. A German Turk might happily play for Berlin, for example, but 
when it comes to the national team he plays for Turkey. ''The best 
players for Turkey are from Germany," Ozdemir said.

France, too, is beginning to recognize that simply having more immigrant 
faces in the public eye can make a huge difference in changing 
anti-immigrant attitudes. Azouz Begag, a novelist and native of Lyon of 
Algerian descent, who now serves as minister for equal opportunity in 
the French government, told me how, after the November riots that shook 
France, public and private televisions companies were brought together 
to discuss how French TV might show more immigrant faces. He said that 
French President Jacques Chirac wanted ''to see more diversity on the 
screen." He conceded that the British had been more successful in this 
endeavor than the French.

Certainly seeing black and Hispanic faces on television has helped to 
break down prejudices in the United States -- a small step, perhaps, but 
one that can have surprisingly beneficial results.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/28/absorbing_europes_muslims/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060328/06ef90c7/attachment.htm 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Tue Mar 28 06:17:44 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 09:17:44 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Planet not up for quick sale: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Message-ID: <000801c65272$65f014e0$5627e440@Harold>

Story taken from the Toronto Star

HS


        

Planet not up for quick sale: Kennedy
Praises Canada in Toronto speech
Decries Bush's environmental record
Mar. 28, 2006. 06:17 AM
MADHAVI ACHARYA-TOM YEW
BUSINESS REPORTER


We must stop treating the planet as though it's a business in liquidation that's selling its assets for quick cash, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told a business conference in Toronto yesterday. 

"To me, environmental advocacy is not about just protecting the fish and the birds for their own sake. It's about recognizing that nature is the infrastructure of our communities," the environmental lawyer and activist said. "When we destroy nature, we diminish ourselves. We impoverish our children." 

Kennedy made the remarks at a packed keynote speech at the 2006 Top Employer Summit at the Four Seasons hotel in downtown Toronto. The two-day conference, which continues today, gives advice on how companies can make themselves more attractive to prospective employees. Speakers offer tips on competition and benefits packages, as well as how to get employees to become active in the community. 

Kennedy's family name is among the most revered in U.S. politics, four decades after the assassinations of his uncle, president John F. Kennedy in 1963, and his father, senator Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. 

He gave a passionate and wide-ranging speech, talking about his fondness for Canada, the pollution caused by coal-burning utilities and the failings of the U.S. media. 

The activist was unequivocal as he criticized U.S. President George W. Bush's record on the environment. "From an environmental standpoint, this is by far the worst administration we've had in American history," he said. "They've put polluters in charge of all the agencies that are supposed to be protecting the public from pollution." 

Warning of the dangers of pollution from coal-burning plants, Kennedy noted that each of his sons has asthma. The administration under former president Bill Clinton was in the process of prosecuting some of the worst polluters when Bush came into power. One of Bush's first acts was to order the justice department to drop those cases, Kennedy told the crowd. 

Coal producers have made some $100 million (U.S.) in campaign donations to Bush and the Republican Party. 

"I will see my children gasping for breath on bad-air days because somebody gave money to politicians. This should be on the front page of the newspapers every day and yet you won't read about it in the American media," Kennedy said. 

"Americans today know more about Britney Spears than global warming. We are the most-entertained and the least-informed people on the face of the Earth," he added. 

Kennedy is the senior attorney and national spokesperson for the Natural Resources Defense Council and is president of the Waterkeeper Alliance, a coalition of more than 100 environmental groups dedicated to protecting North American waterways. He lives in New York state. 

Toronto Mayor David Miller introduced Kennedy as a "tremendous environmental leader," who has been named one of the "heroes of the planet" by Time magazine. "He makes things happen by energizing people and talking to them about what they can do about the future," Miller said. 

Kennedy, who said he and his children regularly come to Canada on wilderness trips, drew laughter and a smattering of applause when he quipped, "I often think of the United States as the 14th province of Canada."
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060328/3618e4c9/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Tue Mar 28 08:09:02 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 16:09:02 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Big Oil's Big Windfall
Message-ID: <20060328160902.29CAA237167@lax-gw01.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

OPINION | March 28, 2006
Editorial: Big Oil's Big Windfall

An oil industry already rolling in record profits does not need more tax breaks. 
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/28/opinion/28tue1.html?ex=1144213200&en=5b7d25131efea42e&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060328/aefe01b2/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Tue Mar 28 08:11:23 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 16:11:23 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Enemy of Our Enemy
Message-ID: <20060328161125.97D7583D45@lax-gw03.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

OPINION | March 28, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor: Enemy of Our Enemy
By PETER BERGEN
The goals and worldviews of Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda were diametrically opposed, and no number of sketchy intelligence documents is going to bring them closer.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/28/opinion/28bergen.html?ex=1144213200&en=1e6b5ab2865e9aa6&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060328/435ed218/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Tue Mar 28 08:17:32 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 16:17:32 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Weeks After Killing It,
	NASA Resurrects Mission to Visit Asteroids
Message-ID: <20060328161735.F0871236F78@lax-gw01.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

SCIENCE / SPACE & COSMOS | March 28, 2006
Weeks After Killing It, NASA Resurrects Mission to Visit Asteroids
By KENNETH CHANG and WARREN E. LEARY
Dawn, a spacecraft that will visit two of the solar system's largest asteroids ? Vesta and Ceres ? will blast off in summer 2007.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/28/science/space/28asteroid.html?ex=1144213200&en=36284608a594dc57&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060328/e76c4d24/attachment-0001.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Tue Mar 28 08:19:09 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: 28 Mar 2006 16:19:09 -0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] Headlines for March 28, 2006
Message-ID: <20060328161909.7635.qmail@trinity.democracynow.org>

Miike Blaxill  ( mblaxill at yahoo.com )
sent you this story from democracynow.org



+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  Headlines for March 28, 2006
|  http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/28/1431253
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+


- Senate Committee Approves New Immigration Bill
- 40,000 Students Stage Walk-Out in LA  to Protest-
Iraqi Accuses U.S. of Massacre At Shiite Mosque-
U.S. Push For New Iraqi Prime Minister-
Moussaoui Claims He Was Meant to Fly Fifth Plane on 9/11- New York Times Finally Reports On Secret UK Iraq Memo-
Ex-Liberian President Charles Taylor Reported Missing In Nigeria-
Judge Refuses to Delay April 22 Election in New Orleans-
Amnesty: Police Have Killed 150 With Taser Stun Guns-
Ex-Generals Call for Scalia To Be Recused From Gitmo Case-
Hundreds of Thousands on General Strike In France
This story continues at: 
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/28/1431253


From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Tue Mar 28 08:14:12 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 16:14:12 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: French Youth at the Barricades,
	But a Revolution? It Can Wait
Message-ID: <20060328161415.A543113B9DD@lax-gw04.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

INTERNATIONAL / EUROPE | March 28, 2006
French Youth at the Barricades, But a Revolution? It Can Wait
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
Protests against a new labor law use the revolutionary methods of the streets in defense of the status quo.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/28/international/europe/28france.html?ex=1144213200&en=26acf90c68bd0ad9&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060328/66ce98f2/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Tue Mar 28 09:23:40 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 17:23:40 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Judge Orders New Orleans to Proceed With
	Election
Message-ID: <20060328172341.0F7AE237109@lax-gw01.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

So much for representative democracy...


NATIONAL / NATIONAL SPECIAL | March 28, 2006
Judge Orders New Orleans to Proceed With Election
By ADAM NOSSITER
In the absence of thousands of voters, community groups and activists challenged the legitimacy of the April 22 election.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/28/national/nationalspecial/28election.html?ex=1144213200&en=008b191fbb239b30&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060328/b3f42b1d/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Tue Mar 28 09:24:41 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 17:24:41 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Freed by DNA Test,
	Texas Man Cautiously Returns to Society
Message-ID: <20060328172441.AB7F2249CE3@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

When - O good Lord, when - will this country finally realize that the death penalty is wrong, and that innocent people have, and will continue to, die as a result of it?


NATIONAL | March 28, 2006
Freed by DNA Test, Texas Man Cautiously Returns to Society
By NATHAN LEVY
After spending 18 years in prison, Arthur Mumphrey is finding that being on the outside can be overwhelming.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/28/national/28mumphrey.html?ex=1144213200&en=a3a54a660b469670&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060328/7c103b88/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Tue Mar 28 09:26:06 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 17:26:06 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: How the Iraq War Was Planned and Launched
Message-ID: <20060328172606.A084A3AE5FB@lax-gw06.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

BOOKS | March 28, 2006
Books of The Times | 'Cobra II': How the Iraq War Was Planned and Launched
By SEAN NAYLOR
This account of the invasion, by Michael R. Gordon and Gen. Bernard E. Trainor, reveals how decisions early on precipitated the insurgency.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/28/books/28nayl.html?ex=1144213200&en=533dc3fdb945fefc&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060328/8b7d784e/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Tue Mar 28 09:28:40 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 17:28:40 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Reading, Rehashing, 'Rithmetic (6 Letters)
Message-ID: <20060328172841.89E42249DF7@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

What we're saying... As an aside, no one has pointed out that if science, social studies and history are sacrificed, then we will be creating adults who will be that much easier to control: if they are not learning history etc. in school, then it will become the province of government - which can teach any "version" of history that it wishes to... 


OPINION | March 28, 2006
Reading, Rehashing, 'Rithmetic (6 Letters)

To the Editor:.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/28/opinion/l28educ.html?ex=1144213200&en=1553c20eb9a32194&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060328/a64b803c/attachment-0001.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Tue Mar 28 09:28:41 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 17:28:41 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Is It Time to Say Enough in Iraq? (3
	Letters)
Message-ID: <20060328172842.0FAE4249E78@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

What we're saying (2)...


OPINION | March 28, 2006
Is It Time to Say Enough in Iraq? (3 Letters)

To the Editor:.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/28/opinion/l28iraq.html?ex=1144213200&en=c1e929f1977d55b6&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060328/d5f63601/attachment-0001.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Tue Mar 28 09:25:44 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 17:25:44 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Testers Slip Radioactive Materials Over
	Borders
Message-ID: <20060328172547.186CB13B833@lax-gw04.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

This doesn't bode well...


WASHINGTON | March 28, 2006
Testers Slip Radioactive Materials Over Borders
By ERIC LIPTON
Undercover Congressional investigators successfully smuggled into the United States enough radioactive material to make two dirty bombs, a new report says.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/28/politics/28radiation.html?ex=1144213200&en=28b0e797c0a74eb9&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060328/45d8837d/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Tue Mar 28 10:25:00 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (Ian)
Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 13:25:00 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Article and Letter
Message-ID: <006701c65294$ed7f2cd0$99ca6c42@iancn2ccrvzt0j>

The following article is from The New York Times today.  Following that is my letter in response.

Peace.

------------

Rumsfeld Marks 9/11 Crash Site With Medallion Given to Troops 
By THOM SHANKER
SHANKSVILLE, Pa., March 27 - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld gazed across a rolling meadow on Monday, its grass yellow in late winter's grip, and toward the stand of hemlock trees marking the area where Flight 93 crashed on Sept. 11, 2001. He then bent and wordlessly placed a medallion at the base of a temporary memorial here.  Known as the defense secretary's "coin," the medallion is an elaborately pressed memento that Mr. Rumsfeld hands out to troops he meets in combat zones overseas.

His visit was his first to the site where passengers of Flight 93 overpowered their hijackers and sent an airliner crashing into the countryside instead of its intended target, the Capitol in Washington. His gesture was intended to link that event, through the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, to the wars started by the Bush administration in Afghanistan and Iraq.  At a time when polls indicate waning public support for the mission in Iraq, Mr. Rumsfeld called Shanksville "the place where America really started to fight back."

He spoke later to officers at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., where he asserted that previous failures to fight back against terrorists had only emboldened them.  "The West was ambivalent about how to counter extremist ideology and that type of aggression," he said. "We should have learned the timeless truth that weakness is provocative."  By implication, he criticized those who called for quickly withdrawing American troops from Iraq. Instead, he said, the opponents there should be confronted, not only militarily but also in a contest of ideas and values.

But when asked by one of the officers how America was faring in its test of ideologies with extremists, Mr. Rumsfeld conceded, "If I were grading, I would say we probably deserve a D or a D-plus as a country as to how well we're doing in the battle of ideas that's taking place in the world today."

----------

Re Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's visit to the 9/11 crash site in Pennsylvania, you say it was "the site where passengers of Flight 93 overpowered their hijackers and sent an airliner crashing into the countryside..." ("Rumsfeld Marks 9/11 Crash Site With Medallion Given to Troops," Mar. 28).  This has never been proven.

Indeed, there is evidence to support the belief that Flight 93 was shot down.  At least five eyewitnesses - some as close as half a mile away - saw a white "military plane" following Flight 93 just moments prior to the crash.  And pieces of the wreckage were found as far as eight miles from the crash site, which would only be possible if the plane were blown apart in mid-air.  In addition, the FBI took possession of the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder, and refuses to release the contents of either.  Thus, we have only their claim that passengers "overpowered their hijackers."

Most direct, however, is Mr. Rumsfeld's own statement, made in December 2004, that the plane was "shot down."  And although the Pentagon later claimed that Mr. Rumsfeld "misspoke," given the above and other evidence it would seem that his original comment is the one that has the ring of truth.

Rev. Ian Alterman
New York City

For the fact-finder:

1.  "Eyewitnesses" re military plane:

http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/flight_93.html

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/page.cfm?objectid=12192317&method=full&

2.  "Wreckage" found 8 miles from crash site:

http://thewebfairy.com/killtown/flight93.html  See second quote on right side of home page, reported by CNN.

http://www.flight93crash.com/flight93_secondary_debris_field.html  See 5th paragraph.


3.  Rumsfeld comment and "retraction":

http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/12/27/rumsfeld.flt93/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060328/62626b77/attachment.htm 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Tue Mar 28 10:44:02 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 13:44:02 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Who should pay the cost of rescues, online poll result
Message-ID: <000901c65297$9a298730$8027e440@Harold>


A recent online poll in Canada that was taken in consideration of the Christen Peacekeeper Teams and their rescue from captivity in Baghdad.
I support the yes side myself.

Harry

PS, 2 of the CPT's are Canadian.

Poll question;

      Should organizations be required to pay the cost of the rescue if their personnel are kidnapped in a country where they have been advised not to go?
     
     

      Yes   13915 votes     (76 %) 
     
      No   4354 votes     (24 %) 
     
    
      Total Votes: 18269




     
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060328/3bf7a6dc/attachment.htm 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 43 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060328/3bf7a6dc/attachment.gif 

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Tue Mar 28 11:02:06 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 11:02:06 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] In Disgrace and Facing Death - Kristof
Message-ID: <C04EC82E.2A9D2%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 28, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
In Disgrace, and Facing Death
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

KHANPUR, Pakistan

Aisha Parveen will live another day. Indeed, at least another week.

Ms. Parveen, the young Pashtun woman I wrote about on Sunday, was kidnapped
at the age of 14 and imprisoned in a brothel here in southeastern Pakistan
for six years. She escaped in January and married the man who helped her
flee, but now a Pakistani court has charged her with adultery and is
threatening to hand her back to the brothel owner ? even though she is
adamant that he will then torture and kill her.

Ms. Parveen's court hearing was yesterday, and I was afraid that would be
the end. But the court adjourned the case for one week for further
investigation. And Ms. Parveen's lawyer thinks the mood is different now:
the Pakistani press picked up on my column, and the attention will make
judges more careful about handling her.

So the publicity may save her life, but it won't make much difference for
thousands of other Aisha Parveens around the world. Asma Jahangir, the
chairwoman of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, said she sees cases
like Ms. Parveen's all the time.

"There is no such thing called justice in Pakistan," said Ms. Jahangir, a
prominent lawyer in Lahore. "It has simply collapsed."

Ms. Jahangir fights heroically for poor women who have been charged ? like
Ms. Parveen ? with zina offenses under Islamic law. Zina encompasses
fornication and adultery, and accusations of zina are effective weapons
against women.

Landlords often evict women tenants, for example, by accusing them of zina.
Worse, women who go to the police to report rapes can be arrested for zina,
because they have acknowledged illicit sex and yet usually cannot provide
four male witnesses to prove that it was rape.

Even professionals like Ms. Jahangir are targeted if they confront the
government. Last year, for example, the police attacked her and a group of
other middle-class women demonstrating for women's rights. She says that an
aide to President Pervez Musharraf gave the police instructions about her:
"Teach the [expletive] a lesson. Strip her in public." Sure enough, the
police ripped off her shirt.

Ms. Parveen, now living in hiding after several kidnapping attempts in the
last few days, faces an even more brutal struggle. Her only stroke of luck
is having her new husband, Mohamed Akram, who rescued her from the brothel,
on her side. The young couple are lovebirds, and each keeps talking about
being so lucky to have found the other.

But Mr. Akram, while unwavering in his love, has disgraced his family by
marrying a supposedly fallen woman, and his older sister is suffering.

"My brother-in-law sent me a message: 'Unless you divorce her, I will
divorce your sister,' " Mr. Akram lamented. "She has two kids. And he's also
beating her now. He's very upset because I married a girl who was in a
brothel, who is not a virgin."

The couple cannot seek refuge with Ms. Parveen's parents, because Pashtun
parents routinely protect their family honor by killing daughters accused of
zina.

"I cannot go back there because if I do, they'll kill me," Ms. Parveen said.
"In their eyes I'm dishonored, because even if a girl is kidnapped, then in
their eyes she still should be killed."

Saddest of all, her story isn't newsworthy in a classic sense. There's
nothing at all unusual about a young Asian woman suffering years of sexual
enslavement, or judicial malpractice or murder.

And that's the challenge for us all, Asians and Americans alike ? to change
our worldview and put gender issues like sex trafficking higher on the
global agenda.

A quarter-century ago, Jimmy Carter plucked human rights abuses from the
backdrop of the international arena and put them on the agenda. Now it's
time to focus on gender inequality in the developing world, for that is the
greatest single source of human rights violations today.

Political dissidents tend to get the world's attention. But for every
dissident who is beaten to death by government torturers somewhere in the
world, thousands of ordinary women or girls die prematurely because of the
effects of discrimination. In India, for example, girls 1 to 5 years old are
50 percent more likely to die than boys of the same age, because the boys
are favored. That differential accounts for the death of a young Indian girl
every four minutes.

Since these victims usually are voiceless, I'll give Ms. Parveen the last
word so she can prick our consciences.

"God should not give daughters to poor people," she said in despair. "And if
a daughter is born, God should grant her death."

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    




From michael at michaelbutler.com  Tue Mar 28 11:09:58 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 11:09:58 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Who Moved My Fromage - Tierney
Message-ID: <C04ECA06.2A9D6%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 28, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Who Moved My Fromage?
By JOHN TIERNEY

As student protesters and workers try to paralyze France today, I don't
suppose many of them are looking to America to come to their country's aid.
Nor do I suppose many Americans are in the mood for a new Marshall Plan. But
I have a modest proposal anyway.

Someone needs to rescue France from its self-proclaimed malaise. Close to a
quarter of its young people are unemployed, but they're too busy burning
cars to look for jobs. They're protesting a new policy allowing workers
under age 26 to be hired for a two-year trial period during which ? quelle
horreur! ? they could be easily fired.

This policy, intended to encourage companies to take a chance on
inexperienced workers, is being denounced for producing "slave jobs." It
would be "like living beneath a guillotine," said Charlotte Billaud, a
Sorbonne student.

"We're not disposable ? we deserve better," said another student, Aurelie
Silan. "Aren't we the future of France?"

Yes, mademoiselle, you are. That's the problem. What kind of college student
wants a lifetime employment guarantee for the first job out of school?
France's future is a generation of students whose idea of a good career ?
chosen by 75 percent of them in one poll ? is a government job.

The leaders of the French Revolution called for constant daring: "L'audace,
l'audace, toujours l'audace." Today's street protesters have another motto:
"Contre la Pr?carit?." Against Precariousness!

Legend has it that when Napoleon's Imperial Guard was cornered by the
British at Waterloo, its leader boldly declared: "The Guard dies. It does
not surrender." Today's French can't even stand up to unarmed foreigners.
When French young adults were asked what globalization meant to them, half
replied, "Fear."

Beneath that facade of arrogance, the French are suffering from a condition
apparent to any American. They have low self-esteem. They're not feeling
empowered. They need that great engine powering our economy: the American
self-help industry.

The French produce great Camembert, but they haven't absorbed the wisdom of
Spencer Johnson's modern classic, "Who Moved My Cheese?: An A-Mazing Way to
Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life." They haven't heeded Donald
Trump's instructional CD, "Think Like a Billionaire." They haven't mastered
Stephen Covey's "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" or Anthony
Robbins's "Awaken the Giant Within."

A few French men and women have looked across the ocean for guidance ?
Robbins says he advised Fran?ois Mitterrand ? but the French masses still
haven't awakened their inner giants. And they won't, unless we help them
help themselves by sending over the titans of the American
self-actualization movement.

This Marshall Plan B wouldn't cost American taxpayers much beyond a few
French lessons, plane tickets and hotel rooms. The French might initially
resent the intrusion ? they have that fear of new things ? but we can
reassure them: there's a precedent. The U.S. government sent them the
pioneer of self-help literature, Benjamin Franklin, and Paris loved him.

The only serious objection I expect is from Americans worried about our
G.N.P.: Could the American economy struggle along without these gurus? But I
think we're ready to go it alone, thanks to the billions of dollars of
wisdom we've already stockpiled.

We've learned secrets like "Be Proactive" and "Think Win/Win" (two of
Covey's seven habits). We now realize, thanks to Robbins, that "the past
doesn't equal the future." We've paid $19.95 for Johnson's revelation:
"Movement in a new direction helps you find new cheese."

We can afford to share this knowledge with the French. If they understood
Covey's radical Win/Win theory ? "Seek agreements and relationships that are
mutually beneficial" ? French students might not be marching today. They
might wonder why they'd want to spend the rest of their lives (well, at
least until they retire in their 50's) working for someone who doesn't want
them around.

If the French students studied Johnson ? "The quicker you let go of old
cheese, the sooner you can enjoy new cheese" ? they might even consider the
possibility of changing jobs. We could send them French versions of Donald
Trump's CD, "How to Launch a Great Career," which does not include
instructions for burning cars.

Eventually we could introduce them to Trump's television show, but not right
away. There's a good reason "The Apprentice" hasn't made it to French TV.
For now, "You're fired" translates as "We riot."

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From harperalexander at mail.com  Tue Mar 28 11:32:40 2006
From: harperalexander at mail.com (Alexander Harper)
Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 16:32:40 -0300
Subject: [Mb-civic] The fear of causing offence in our stupidly timid age.
Message-ID: <20060328193240.437AE101DA@ws1-3.us4.outblaze.com>

This article by Terence Blacker in today's Indie may strike a chord.

Al B

Terence Blacker: The fear of causing offence in our stupidly timid age 
Those concerned about our health will soon turn their attention to behaviour, language, ideas 
Published: 28 March 2006 
Half a century after it sent out trills of outrage and delight from the Royal Court Theatre, Look Back in Anger will soon be causing trouble again. John Osborne's play famously attacked the stodgy, dim certainties of post-war Britain. Now, in a way that would have given its author an apoplectic fit were he alive today, it is in danger of offending different modern sensibilities. 

Jimmy Porter, the angry young man who is the play's protagonist, is an unusual rebel by today's standards, not least because he is a resolute smoker of a pipe. It is this habit, rather an important indicator of the character and the times in which he lived, which has been causing problems for Sir Peter Hall as he prepares a 50th anniversary production. Pipe-smoking has been permitted at the Theatre Royal, Bath, where the play opens, but is likely to fall victim next year of the new smoking legislation when it becomes law.

"There aren't any good, brave causes left," Porter complains during Look Back in Anger and, for most people, the right to stink out a theatre with pipe tobacco would rank low on any list of causes that are good or brave. All the same, there is something paradoxical about putting on a play that rages about the restrictions of the past, of class and of gender, only to see it fall victim to our own nannyish constraints on citizens.

Peter Hall has, with commendable mildness, commented that there was a whiff of political correctness about banning smoking on stage - it was a form of censorship, he said - and his remarks cover other media. The law against lighting up at work or in a public place will, we are told, affect film and television studios. An actor playing Winston Churchill may have to do without a cigar. Great tobacco-based comic props, the ridiculous fat corona on which Boycey chomps in Only Fools and Horses, the cigarette which for Patsy of Absolutely Fabulous is a sort of life-support machine, will be lost. In film, as perhaps in life, the post-coital smoke will become a historical curiosity.

It is possible, I suppose, that children will learn from the screen that tobacco is an evil, socially reprehensible substance and that smoking is not funny, clever or sexy, but once the law starts sanitising the life and humour out of stories and characters, something creepy is taking place. Those who are so concerned today about our health, vulnerability to temptation, the future of innocent little kiddies, will soon turn their attention to other areas of on-screen inappropriateness - behaviour, language, ideas. After all, if a studio is to be deemed a public place, virtually any kind of deviance from polite normality can presumably be banned.

Yet it is the theatre, and Jimmy Porter's pipe, that are particularly enraging. Apart from the hysterical stupidity of the idea that a man exhaling a bit of smoke will be doing terrible things to the health of those in the stalls and the circle, there is the small but not unimportant question of choice. A person who does not wish to risk contamination by watching an actor smoking a pipe (or, for that matter, is anxious not to be offended by what is said or done on stage), is faced by a simple matter of choice. Plenty of inoffensive, smoke-free evenings are available elsewhere.

We have become habituated to the idea that the world described by John Osborne is repressed and backward-looking. Certainly Look Back in Anger is not the masterpiece that it was once thought to be, and its author's later writings served to confirm the suspicion that there was something misogynistic and mean-spirited about its rage. On the other hand, it was at least free of the fearfulness that has become part of 21st-century life, our society's need to play safe under the guise of protecting the vulnerable. There are, after all, not that many plays in today's West End which address head-on contemporary shibboleths of class, power and gender.

In fact, looking back without anger, it is possible to conclude that there was a brave idealism in the late 1950s and early 1960s that was subsequently lost. Five years after that production of Look Back in Anger, the new spirit of cultural liberalism was challenged in the courts and, as Andrew Davies's television play The Chatterley Affair recently reminded us, a real and united spirit of courage was shown by those who testified in court - not just academics and writers, but churchmen, too. Would there be that degree of uncompromising solidarity in defence of free speech today? The evidence of the past few weeks suggests not. In a dirty-minded age, the idea advanced in court that DH Lawrence's view of sexuality, and the language in which it is expressed, is sacramental and at the very core of our humanity would be regarded as overblown and pretentious. No bishop would dream of standing up to defend a sexually graphic novel.

Lawrence himself, presented in court back in 1960 as one of the great novelists of the 20th century, has fallen profoundly out of fashion. With dubious attitudes towards politics and gender, he lacks that contemporary relevance which is thought to be important on university campuses today.

Perhaps these are small matters of sex and cigarettes. Possibly John Osborne and DH Lawrence have fallen from favour for good reason. But, in their different ways, these two angry men and those who stood up for them have something to teach us in our timid, sophisticated age.


-- 
___________________________________________________
Play 100s of games for FREE! http://games.mail.com/



From michael at michaelbutler.com  Tue Mar 28 11:33:54 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 11:33:54 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Enemy of Our Enemy By PETER BERGEN
Message-ID: <C04ECFA2.2A9DD%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 28, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
Enemy of Our Enemy
By PETER BERGEN

Washington

BUSH administration defenders, right-wing bloggers and neoconservative
publications are crowing about Iraqi documents newly released by the
Pentagon that, they say, prove that Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were in
league.

Even though the 9/11 commission found no "collaborative relationship"
between the ultrafundamentalist Osama bin Laden and the secular Saddam
Hussein, the administration's reiterations of a supposed connection ? Vice
President Dick Cheney has argued that the evidence for such an alliance was
"overwhelming" ? have convinced two out of three Americans that they had
"strong" links.

Some administration supporters have drawn an analogy to the 1939
Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, in which Stalin and Hitler put aside ideology in
favor of pragmatic goals (carving up the Baltic states, Poland and Finland).
But history is not a good guide here: not only was the ideological divide
between Al Qaeda and Baathist Iraq far greater than that between the two
20th-century dictators, but unlike Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, the
two sides had nothing practical to gain by working together.

What do the new documents establish? According to ABC News's translation of
one of the most credible documents, in early 1995 Mr. bin Laden ? then
living in Sudan ? met with an Iraqi government representative and discussed
"carrying out joint operations against foreign forces" in Saudi Arabia. The
document also noted that the "development of the relationship and
cooperation between the two parties" was "to be left according to what's
open [in the future] based on dialogue and agreement on other ways of
cooperation."

The results of this meeting were ... nothing. Two subsequent attacks against
American forces in Saudi Arabia ? a car bombing that year and the Khobar
Towers attack in 1996 ? were carried out, respectively, by locals who said
they were influenced by Mr. bin Laden and by the Saudi branch of Hezbollah,
a Shiite group aided by Iranian government officials.

As for the other new documents, there is one dated Sept. 15, 2001, that
outlines contacts between Mr. bin Laden and Iraq, but it is based on an
Afghan informant discussing a conversation with another Afghan. It is
third-hand hearsay.

And, strangely, another document, dated Aug. 17, 2002, from Iraq's
intelligence service explains there is "information from a reliable source"
that two Al Qaeda figures were in Iraq and that agents should "search the
tourist sites (hotels, residential apartments and rented houses)" for them.
If Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda had a relationship, why was it necessary for
Iraqi intelligence to be scouring the country looking for members of the
terrorist organization?

Another striking feature about the supposed Qaeda-Iraq connection is that
since the fall of the Taliban, not one of the thousands of documents found
in Afghanistan substantiate such an alliance, even though Al Qaeda was a
highly bureaucratic organization that required potential recruits to fill
out application forms.

All this goes to the central problem faced by proponents of the Qaeda-Iraq
connection. It's long been known that Iraqi officials were playing footsie
with Al Qaeda in the mid-1990's, but these desultory contacts never yielded
any cooperation. And why should they have? Al Qaeda was able to carry out
the embassy attacks in Africa in 1998, the bombing of the destroyer Cole in
2000 and 9/11 with no help from Iraq. The Iraqi intelligence services, for
their part, could handle by themselves low-level jobs like bumping off Iraqi
dissidents abroad. And after the botched attempt to assassinate former
President George H. W. Bush in Kuwait in 1993, Saddam Hussein never
attempted terrorism against an American target again.

We know, too, that Mr. bin Laden had long distrusted Saddam Hussein; months
before the Kuwait invasion in 1990 he angrily warned colleagues that Iraq
had designs on Persian Gulf states. He even offered his own fighters to the
Saudis in that war, making it clear that he yearned for the "infidel"
dictator to be overthrown.

If there was a method to Saddam Hussein's madness, it was that he wanted to
remain in power. Al Qaeda, however, wanted theocratic regime change across
the Middle East. In the end, their goals and worldviews were diametrically
opposed, and no number of sketchy intelligence documents is going to bring
them closer.

Peter Bergen, a fellow at the New America Foundation, is the author of "The
Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of Al Qaeda's Leader."

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From kathyguthrie at fcnl.org  Tue Mar 28 14:43:22 2006
From: kathyguthrie at fcnl.org (Kathy Guthrie)
Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 17:43:22 -0500 (EST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] =?iso-8859-1?q?Iraq=3A_=93I_think_we_will_be_here_fore?=
	=?iso-8859-1?q?ver=94_=2C_says_a_U=2ES=2E_soldier_-_FCNL?=
Message-ID: <E1FON8o-0008It-2H@elasmtp-spurfowl.atl.sa.earthlink.net>

--Balad Air Base, Iraq -- The concrete goes on forever, vanishing into 
the noonday glare, 2 million cubic feet of it, a mile-long slab that's 
now the home of up to 120 U.S. helicopters

--At another giant base, al-Asad in Iraq's western desert, the 17,000 
troops and workers come and go in a kind of bustling American town, 
with a Burger King, Pizza Hut and a car dealership

--At a third hub in the (stet) south, Tallil, they're planning a new 
mess hall, one that will seat 6,000 hungry airmen and soldier
(To see the full map of the Iraq bases visit www.fcnl.org/iraq/bases.htm)

These descriptions of U.S. bases in Iraq, from a reporter who visited 
the country earlier this month, vividly illustrate why many Iraqis are 
convinced the U.S. is planning to permanently occupy their country. And 
it isn't only the Iraqis who have this perception. The Associated Press 
reporter who visited these bases interviewed a 29-year-old soldier from 
Wilkes-Barre, PA: "I think we will be here forever," the 
soldier said. Read the full report in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer at 
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1107AP_Iraq_Future_Bases.html

The perception that the U.S. intends to permanently occupy Iraq is 
fueling the conflict in that country. In early 2005, FCNL crafted the 
Iraq STEP (Sensible Transition to an Enduring Peace) Resolution as a 
legislative tool that would allow the Congress to make a statement 
declaring, "It is the policy ofthe United States policy to 
withdrawal all U.S. military troops and bases from Iraq." Read the 
STEP Resolution at 
http://www.fcnl.org/issues/item.php?item_id=1353&issue_id=35

Your letters, phone calls, and visits with members of Congress over the 
last year made a difference. Just in the last month, FCNL has recorded 
thousands of letters sent from FCNL constituents to members of Congress 
urging support for a clear statement that the U.S. will withdraw all 
military troops and bases from Iraq. Over the St. Patrick's Day recess, 
participants in the FCNL network took War Is Not the Answer signs to 
demonstrations, vigils, and other events marking the anniversary of the 
war. We received reports of events all over the country. Photos of 
people carrying the War Is Not the Answer signs appeared in major 
newspapers in Memphis, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC.

*Your message is being heard in Washington*

The House of Representatives voted earlier this month to bar the U.S. 
from establishing permanent military bases in Iraq -- the first 
positive step toward enacting FCNL's Iraq STEP resolution. In an 
amendment to the administration's request for supplemental funding for 
the war in Iraq, the House stated "None of the funds in this Act 
may be used by the U.S. government to enter into a basing rights 
agreement between the United States and Iraq." Read about the 
House vote at 
http://www.fcnl.org/issues/item.php?item_id=1761&issue_id=35

But the administration continues to insist, as the president declared 
last week, that U.S. troops will be in Iraq for years to come. In fact, 
the supplemental appropriations legislation that will be debated by the 
Senate in mid-April includes hundreds of millions of dollars for 
continued construction of military bases in Iraq. The Congressional 
Research Service reports that U.S. spending on the wars in Iraq and 
Afghanistan is averaging about 44 percent more per month this fiscal 
year than last. These are not the actions of a country preparing to 
withdraw from Iraq.

*The Senate Must Act*

The U.S. House of Representatives has provided people in Iraq, the 
international community, and within the United States the first step 
toward a clear statement of U.S. policy. Now it is up to the Senate. 
The Senate should attach a resolution to the Iraq war 
"supplemental" spending bill stating "it is the policy 
of the United States to withdraw all U.S. military troops and bases 
from Iraq" and initiate steps for a withdrawal this year.

*Lobby Your Senators During Easter Recess*

Your senators will be back in your state during the congressional 
Easter recess (April 8 to 23). This is an ideal time to contact your 
senators and urge them to offer an amendment to the Iraq war 
supplemental funding legislation. Check the FCNL website for details at 
www.fcnl.org/iraq

_______________________________________

The Next Step for Iraq: Join FCNL's Iraq Campaign, http://www.fcnl.org/iraq/

Contact Congress and the Administration: 
http://capwiz.com/fconl/dbq/officials/

Order FCNL publications and "War is Not the Answer" campaign 
bumper stickers and yard signs:
http://www.fcnl.org/pubs/
http://www.fcnl.org/forms/forms.php?type=bump

Contribute to FCNL:
http://www.fcnl.org/donate/

Subscribe or update your information to this list:
http://capwiz.com/fconl/mlm/. To unsubscribe from this list, please see 
the end of this message.

Subscribe to other FCNL legislative, policy, and action alert lists:
http://www.fcnl.org/forms/forms.php?type=ls.

________________________________________

Friends Committee on National Legislation
245 Second St. NE, Washington, DC 20002-5795
fcnl at fcnl.org * http://www.fcnl.org
phone: (202)547-6000 * toll-free: (800)630-1330

We seek a world free of war and the threat of war
We seek a society with equity and justice for all
We seek a community where every person's potential may be fulfilled
We seek an earth restored.

---
If you no longer wish to receive e-mail from us, please visit 
http://capwiz.com/fconl/lmx/u/?jobid=67148157&queueid=668843161.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060328/9aaca486/attachment.htm 

From IHHS at aol.com  Tue Mar 28 12:04:26 2006
From: IHHS at aol.com (IHHS at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 15:04:26 EST
Subject: [Mb-civic] panexa
Message-ID: <E1FONUJ-0007bP-EU@elasmtp-spurfowl.atl.sa.earthlink.net>

http://www.panexa.com/

PLEASE READ THIS SUMMARY CAREFULLY, THEN ASK  YOUR
DOCTOR ABOUT PANEXA AND HOW TO PROVIDE YOU WITH LARGE
QUANTITIES.  THIS ADVERTISEMENT DOES NOT TAKE THE PLACE
OF ADVICE FROM YOUR DOCTOR;  RATHER, IT PROVIDES YOU
WITH NEW INFORMATION ABOUT NEW DRUGS YOU COULD  BE
USING.

PANEXA is a prescription drug that should only be
taken  by patients experiencing one of the following
disorders: metabolism,  binocular vision, digestion
(solid and liquid), circulation,  menstruation,
cognition, osculation, extremes of emotion. For
patients  with coronary heart condition (CHC) or two
separate feet (2SF), the dosage of  PANEXA should be
doubled to ensure that twice the number of pills  are
being consumed. PANEXA can also be utilized to
decrease the risk of  death caused by not taking
PANEXA, being beaten to death by oscelots, or  death
relating from complications arising from seeing too
much of the  color lavender. Epileptic patients should
take care to ensure tight, careful  grips on containers
of PANEXA, in order to secure their contents in  the
event of a seizure, caused by PANEXA or otherwise.
Get a prescription  from your doctor now, and experience the effects!
 
note:
(paid for by the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld re-election committee)




-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060328/ba660747/attachment.htm 

From michael at intrafi.com  Tue Mar 28 16:04:17 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (Michael)
Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 19:04:17 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Article from Tom Dispatch
Message-ID: <200603290004.k2T04HLb011518@thor.thenation.com>

An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060328/01f6a151/attachment.htm 

From nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca  Tue Mar 28 16:14:15 2006
From: nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca (CBC News Online)
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 00:14:15 UT
Subject: [Mb-civic] CBC News - PROSECUTION RESTS IN ENRON TRIAL AS SOME
	CHARGES DROPPED AGAINST SKILLING, LAY
Message-ID: <20060329001415.165113EA7B@web02.nm.cbc.ca>

An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Url: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060329/e64e4708/attachment.diff 

From nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca  Tue Mar 28 16:14:15 2006
From: nwonline at toronto.cbc.ca (CBC News Online)
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 00:14:15 UT
Subject: [Mb-civic] CBC News - PROSECUTION RESTS IN ENRON TRIAL AS SOME
	CHARGES DROPPED AGAINST SKILLING, LAY
Message-ID: <20060329001415.686863EA7B@web02.nm.cbc.ca>

An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Url: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060329/12b7495f/attachment.diff 

From ean at sbcglobal.net  Tue Mar 28 16:38:20 2006
From: ean at sbcglobal.net (ean at sbcglobal.net)
Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 16:38:20 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: Stop liquidating our planet
Message-ID: <E1FOP11-0001vF-6Q@elasmtp-spurfowl.atl.sa.earthlink.net>

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout
/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1143499812043&call_pageid=96835007219
7&col=969048863851


Planet not up for quick sale: Kennedy
Praises Canada in Toronto speech
Decries Bush's environmental record
Mar. 28, 2006. 06:17 AM
MADHAVI ACHARYA-TOM YEW
BUSINESS REPORTER


We must stop treating the planet as though it's a business in liquidation
that's selling its assets for quick cash, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told a
business conference in Toronto yesterday. 

"To me, environmental advocacy is not about just protecting the fish and
the birds for their own sake. It's about recognizing that nature is the
infrastructure of our communities," the environmental lawyer and activist
said. "When we destroy nature, we diminish ourselves. We impoverish our
children." 

Kennedy made the remarks at a packed keynote speech at the 2006 Top
Employer Summit at the Four Seasons hotel in downtown Toronto. The two-
day
conference, which continues today, gives advice on how companies can make
themselves more attractive to prospective employees. Speakers offer tips
on competition and benefits packages, as well as how to get employees to
become active in the community. 

Kennedy's family name is among the most revered in U.S. politics, four
decades after the assassinations of his uncle, president John F. Kennedy
in 1963, and his father, senator Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. 

He gave a passionate and wide-ranging speech, talking about his fondness
for Canada, the pollution caused by coal-burning utilities and the
failings of the U.S. media. 

The activist was unequivocal as he criticized U.S. President George W.
Bush's record on the environment. "From an environmental standpoint, this
is by far the worst administration we've had in American history," he
said. "They've put polluters in charge of all the agencies that are
supposed to be protecting the public from pollution." 

Warning of the dangers of pollution from coal-burning plants, Kennedy
noted that each of his sons has asthma. The administration under former
president Bill Clinton was in the process of prosecuting some of the worst
polluters when Bush came into power. One of Bush's first acts was to order
the justice department to drop those cases, Kennedy told the crowd. 

Coal producers have made some $100 million (U.S.) in campaign donations 
to
Bush and the Republican Party. 

"I will see my children gasping for breath on bad-air days because
somebody gave money to politicians. This should be on the front page of
the newspapers every day and yet you won't read about it in the American
media," Kennedy said. 

"Americans today know more about Britney Spears than global warming. We
are the most-entertained and the least-informed people on the face of the
Earth," he added. 

Kennedy is the senior attorney and national spokesperson for the Natural
Resources Defense Council and is president of the Waterkeeper Alliance, a
coalition of more than 100 environmental groups dedicated to protecting
North American waterways. He lives in New York state. 

Toronto Mayor David Miller introduced Kennedy as a "tremendous
environmental leader," who has been named one of the "heroes of the
planet" by Time magazine. "He makes things happen by energizing people 
and
talking to them about what they can do about the future," Miller said. 

Kennedy, who said he and his children regularly come to Canada on
wilderness trips, drew laughter and a smattering of applause when he
quipped, "I often think of the United States as the 14th province of
Canada."


-- 
You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, 
option D (up to 3 emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options 
(option A - 1x/week, option B - 3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option D - 
up to 3x/day) please reply and let us know!  If someone forwarded you 
this email and you want to be on our list, send an email to 
ean at sbcglobal.net and tell us which option you'd like.


"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060328/d07471ca/attachment.htm 

From ean at sbcglobal.net  Tue Mar 28 16:40:52 2006
From: ean at sbcglobal.net (ean at sbcglobal.net)
Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 16:40:52 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Condoleezza Rice Revisits The Scene Of Us Crimes
Message-ID: <E1FOP1l-0002cr-Lo@elasmtp-spurfowl.atl.sa.earthlink.net>

Today's commentary:
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2006-03/25vltchek.cfm

==================================

ZNet Commentary
Condoleezza Rice Revisits The Scene Of Us Crimes

 March 27, 2006
By Andre  Vltchek 

     "Do you know how Chileans first learned about Indonesia?" asks Jorge
     Insulza, foreign secretary of the Chilean Communist Party. "Long
     before the coup of Pinochet, right wingers were intimidating members
     of progressive movements and parties: 'Watch out, Jakarta is
     coming!'"

     Thus the reference to the 1965 military coup led by General Suharto
     which was full-heartedly supported by western politicians and
     companies. In a matter of months, between 1 and 3 million Indonesian
     Communists, atheists and members of the Chinese minority were
     mercilessly slaughtered in what can be described as easily the most
     intensive massacre of the 20th century.

     A few days after talking to Insulza I was facing Chilean victims of
     the 1973 coup who had come to see my documentary film
     "Terlena--Breaking of a Nation," about the Indonesian dictatorship,
     at Universidad Arsis in Santiago. One elderly woman, apparently
     shaken, came close to me and whispered: "we heard it was bad there,
     in Indonesia?
but we had no idea that it was so bad. Apparently,
     Chile and Indonesia not only share the same ocean, they also share a
     horrific past."

     In March, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice decided to embark on
     a round-the-world journey, visiting Chile, Indonesia and Australia.
     The symbolism of her trip conveniently escaped the attention of
     almost all mass media outlets.

      In both countries, dictatorship officially collapsed under
      tremendous popular pressure: in Chile in the late 80's, in Indonesia
      almost 10 years later. But both former client states developed in a
      radically different way: one proudly embarked on a democratic path
      emphasizing social development, while the other struggled under a
      feudal system with most people living in outright misery.

     The reason for Ms. Rice's visiting Chile was the inauguration of new
     Chilean President, Michelle Bachelet - a socialist, single mother of
     three and an agnostic. Ms. Rice had to sit through and swallow an
     inaugural speech in which President Bachelet paid homage to her
     father, Alberto Bachelet, an air-force general kidnapped, tortured
     and murdered in prison for opposing the 1973 coup against the
     democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende.

     Michelle Bachelet herself survived imprisonment, torture and exile,
     by-products of  US foreign policy. But now she was proudly taking her
     oath at the crowded Hall of Honor of Chile's Congress in the
     historical and stunning port city of Valparaiso, surrounded by her
     friends - leaders of left-wing governments from all over South
     America.

     "South America has changed," declared Hugo Chavez, the President of
     Venezuela who has managed to survive a US-supported coup. "A worker
     is president of Brazil - there comes Lula; an Indian is president of
     Bolivia; a woman is president of Chile, and in Venezuela, a
     revolutionary soldier, which is what I am."

     Condoleezza Rice described the elections in Chile as a "triumph of
     democracy," omitting the fact that the triumph took more than 3
     decades to achieve at the cost of more than 4 thousand dead and
     millions of men, women and children who were tortured, dispossessed
     or exiled. But a triumph nevertheless!

     That was Chile, Ms Rice's first visit. Chile with a GDP per capita of
     over 6,000 dollars, with modern infrastructure, elegant cities and
     with a majority of citizens now belonging to the middle class. Chile
     which stripped Pinochet of his immunity and put former assassins - at
     least some of them - behind bars. A country with a well-educated
     population that can freely choose between the candidates of numerous
     political movements, including those of Humanist and Communist
     parties.

     The next stop of Ms. Rice was Indonesia.

     There she discussed a "strategic partnership" in this "tolerant" and
     "moderate" country in a troubled region. Indonesia is indeed so
     tolerant and moderate that it doesn't allow the Communist Party, any
     religion except five basic ones, atheism and agnosticism,
     homosexuality and cohabitation of unmarried men and women. It is so
     moderate that young Christian girls are being decapitated in broad
     daylight and human rights activists poisoned on board by airline
     pilots, while bombs go off in crowded markets, at tourist beaches and
     in front of foreign embassies. White-robed religious fanatics are
     marching through the streets of major cities, attacking bars and
     places of bad repute, as well as churches.

     But Ms Rice didn't come here to argue tolerance, moderation and
     democracy. This is what Steven R. Weisman of The New York Times 
wrote
     about her visit: "Referring to Indonesia, both Rice and the
     Indonesian foreign minister, Noer Hassan Wirajuda, used the phrase
     "strategic partnership." This reflects American interest in building
     up this country as a major commercial and military power in the
     region, in part to help counter the growing influence of China."

     And above all, Ms. Rice came to increase military cooperation after
     the decision last year to resume military aid to Indonesian armed
     forces, accused for decades of gross human rights violations.

   The Indonesian military is in a league of its own. It is thoroughly
   unprofessional, overstaffed, badly armed, untrained and corrupt. Its
   top brass are driving luxury sedans and SUVs on maximum salaries of 200
   dollars per month. Soldiers as well as high ranking officers are
   moonlighting as bouncers and guards for nightclubs and local as well as
   foreign companies (Freeport confessed it has paid millions of dollars
   in exchange for protection in Papua).

      It is no secret that the armed forces couldn't defend Indonesia
      against any foreign adversary, but its huge barracks are spread all
      over the archipelago, in all cities, towns and in many villages,
      intimidating the civilian population. While laughable as a defense
      force, there is no military on earth that could "pride" itself on
      massacring as many unarmed civilians inside its own country as the
      Indonesian military.

     The grand total killed by this maniacal "defense force" is unknown,
     but it consists of 1 to 3 million men and women during the 1965 coup,
     hundreds of thousands in Papua (although the official count is "over"
     100 thousand), more than 200 thousand in formerly occupied East Timor
     (one third of the population), tens of thousands in Sulawesi, and
     still unknown numbers in Aceh.

     So far, no high ranking official has been put on trial. 16 out of 18
     government and army officials involved in the East Timor massacres
     were acquitted. Those responsible for massacres in all the above
     mentioned places are enjoying impunity; some are bragging openly
     about their deeds. While Chile elected a victim of torture as its
     President, Indonesia elected a former General who is, on top of that,
     married to a daughter of one of the army officials responsible for
     the 1965 massacres.

     "The military is an important institution in Indonesia. It's by no
     means completely made its reform, but we believe those reforms are
     underway and that we can have a more positive effect on the reforms
     by being part of it?
" That's what Condoleezza Rice said. What she
     forgot to clarify is "what reforms, exactly?" But that's not
     surprising, given that her administration is well used to mixing up
     expressions like "war" and "peace," "attack" and "defense,"
     "democracy" and "terror."

     The Indonesian government and top ranking military officers in
     Indonesia must be now laughing their eyes out. They are getting
     rewarded for doing absolutely nothing, for their terrible performance
     in Aceh (where the military was stealing food from aid agencies and
     re-selling it on the black market), for their campaign of terror in
     Papua and Sulawesi.

     But then, Indonesia is historically a country of deceit, and as long
     as it continues on a firm course to maintain its savage capitalism
     (to hell with the majority of the people who live on less than a
     dollar a day: a fact that is never admitted anyway), it can count on
     almost unlimited support from the west, which is hooked on its
     natural resources and its grossly underpaid and intimidated labor
     force.

     Michelle Bachelet didn't remember only her murdered father. She also
     paid tribute to "our armed forces, which are again the armed forces
     of all Chileans."

     While Chileans knew about Indonesia long before their own progressive
     government came under attack, Indonesians seem to know close to
     nothing about the recent developments in South America. No wonder:
     the local media is owned by those who are guarding a terrible status
     quo. But the old phrase used to intimidate Chilean leftists should
     probably be reinvented, reversed and used on the desperate streets of
     Jakarta: "Santiago is coming!"

END

ANDRE VLTCHEK is a novelist, journalist and filmmaker, working in Asia 
and
the South Pacific. He is a co-founder of Mainstay Press, a progressive
publishing house for political fiction (www.mainstaypress.org). He can be
reached at: andre-wcn at usa.net


-- 
You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, 
option D (up to 3 emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options 
(option A - 1x/week, option B - 3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option D - 
up to 3x/day) please reply and let us know!  If someone forwarded you 
this email and you want to be on our list, send an email to 
ean at sbcglobal.net and tell us which option you'd like.


"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060328/85695e06/attachment-0001.htm 

From ean at sbcglobal.net  Tue Mar 28 16:41:38 2006
From: ean at sbcglobal.net (ean at sbcglobal.net)
Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 16:41:38 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Apocalyptic President  + CA voting action
Message-ID: <E1FOP42-00053f-7l@elasmtp-spurfowl.atl.sa.earthlink.net>

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/032406A.shtml

Apocalyptic President
    By Sidney Blumenthal
    The Guardian UK
    Thursday 23 March 2006

  Even some Republicans are now horrified by the influence Bush has given to
the evangelical right.

    In his latest PR offensive President Bush came to Cleveland, Ohio, on 
Monday to answer the paramount question on Iraq that he said was on
people's minds: "They wonder what I see that they don't." After mentioning
"terror" 54 times and "victory" five, dismissing "civil war" twice and
asserting that he is "optimistic", he called on a citizen in the audience,
who homed in on the invisible meaning of recent events in the light of two
books, American Theocracy, by Kevin Phillips, and the book of Revelation.
Phillips, the questioner explained, "makes the point that members of your
administration have reached out to prophetic Christians who see the war in
Iraq and the rise of terrorism as signs of the apocalypse. Do you believe
this? And if not, why not?"

    Bush's immediate response, as transcribed by CNN, was: "Hmmm." Then e
said: "The answer is I haven't really thought of it that way. Here's how I
think of it. First, I've heard of that, by the way." The official White ouse 
website transcript drops the strategic comma, and so changes the eaning to: 
"First I've heard of that, by the way."

    But it is certainly not the first time Bush has heard of the apocalyptic
preoccupation of much of the religious right, having served as evangelical
liaison on his father's 1988 presidential campaign. The Rev Jerry Falwell
told Newsweek how he brought Tim LaHaye, then an influential rightwing
leader, to meet him; LaHaye's Left Behind novels, dramatizing the rapture,
Armageddon and the second coming, have sold tens of millions.

    But it is almost certain that Cleveland was the first time Bush had
heard of Phillips's book. He was the visionary strategist for Nixon's 1968
presidential campaign; his 1969 book, The Emerging Republican Majority,
spelled out the shift of power from the north-east to the south and
south-west, which he was early to call "the sunbelt"; he grasped that
southern Democrats would react to the civil-rights revolution by becoming
southern Republicans; he also understood the resentments of urban ethnic
Catholics towards black people on issues such as crime, school integration
and jobs. But he never imagined that evangelical religion would transform
the coalition he helped to fashion into something that horrifies him.

    In American Theocracy, Phillips describes Bush as the founder of "the
first American religious party"; September 11 gave him the pretext for
"seizing the fundamentalist moment"; he has manipulated a "critical
religious geography" to hype issues such as gay marriage. "New forces were
being interwoven. These included the institutional rise of the religious
right, the intensifying biblical focus on the Middle East, and the
deepening of insistence on church-government collaboration within the GOP
electorate." It portended a potential "American Disenlightenment,"
apparent in Bush's hostility to science.

    Even Bush's failures have become pretexts for advancing his
transformation of government. Exploiting his own disastrous emergency
management after Hurricane Katrina, Bush is funneling funds to churches as
though they can compensate for governmental breakdown. Last year David
Kuo, the White House deputy director for faith-based initiatives, resigned
with a statement that "Republicans were indifferent to the poor".

    Within hours of its publication, American Theocracy rocketed to No 1 on
Amazon. At US cinemas, V for Vendetta - in which an imaginary Britain,
ruled by a totalitarian, faith-based regime that rounds up gays, is a
metaphor for Bush's America - is the surprise hit. Bush has succeeded in
getting American audiences to cheer for terrorism.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
------
    Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Clinton, is
    the uthor of The Clinton Wars.

***

From: "Richard Dawson" <rcdawson at att.net>
Sent: Sunday, March 26, 2006 10:09 PM
Subject: Fwd: Diebold Takes Aim at Open Voting

Once again we need to let our legislators know that we are paying
attention, and that,  if we are to have electronic voting, we want honest,
secure software running the machines.  AB 2097, Jackie Goldberg's bill to
require public disclosure of the software used to run voting machines,
will soon be heard by the Assembly Elections and Redistricting Committee. 
They need to hear that we understand the importance of the bill and that
we want it passed.

Diebold and friends are out to kill AB 2097.  The bill is particularly
critical since the Schwarzanegger-appointed Secretary of State has chosen
to approve Diebold voting mahines despite continuing questions as to their
accuracy and their vulnerability to fraud.

The ITAA (Information Technology Association of America)  lobbied against
Jackie's resolution ACR 242 two years ago that asked Secretary of State to
investigate using open source software for elections.   We won that time.
They're taking the challenge of open-source software even more seriously
this time.  It's going to be a tough battle.

PLEASE HELP.  Phone, email, and/or fax the members of the Assembly
Elections and Redistricting Committee.  If you haven't the time or
inclination to contact them all, at least be sure to contact the Chair of
the committee, Tom Umberg.  Addresses follow.  Beyond those addresses is a
copy of the letter that I sent.  Please feel free to copy as much as you
want, but it is better if you can be a bit original.

Thanks
Rich


Tom Umberg, Chair  Dem-69 (916) 319-2069
Contact his staff, Larry Sokol and Ethan Jones.
Fax:  1 916 319 2169

Mark Wyland, Vice Chair  Rep-74 (916) 319-2074
 Assemblymember.Wyland at assembly.ca.gov
Fax:  1 916 319 2174

Betty Karnette  Dem-54 (916) 319-2054
Assemblymember.Karnette at assembly.ca.gov
Fax:  1 916 319 2154

Johan Klehs  Dem-18 (916) 319-2018
Fax:  1 916 319 2118

Mark Leno  Dem-13 (916) 319-2013
Assemblymember.leno at assembly.ca.gov
Fax:  1 916 319 2113

Lloyd E. Levine  Dem-40 (916) 319-2040
Assemblymember.levine at assembly.ca.gov
Fax:  1 916 319 2140

Michael N. Villines  Rep-29 (916) 319-2029
assemblymember.villines at assembly.ca.gov
Fax:  1 916 319 2129



There must be some Republicans as well, but they will probably all vote
against the bill anyway.  Let's just be sure that the Democrats are on
board.

My letter:

Return Address
Date

Honorable XXXX YYYY
Elections and Redistricting Committee
California State Assembly
Sacramento, CA 94249-0053

Dear Representative YYYY:

I urge you to support AB 2097, a bill to help ensure the integrity of
California's elections and to bolster public confidence in the honesty of
those elections.

AB 2097, scheduled for an April hearing in the elections and redistricting
committee, would make California's use of a particular electronic voting
system contingent upon the public disclosure of the details of that
system's hardware and software.

All of the currently available electronic voting systems use proprietary
software. As a result, the software and the algorithms that it implements
remain secret, known only to the manufacturer. The public, and for that
matter the Secretary of State, have no way of independently verifying that
the software will faithfully record and accurately tally the vote.

Impartial evaluations, including those upon which California's Secretary
of State relied to approve Diebold machines, have found the available
systems to be vulnerable to manipulation. In other states where the
equipment has been used, election results, for which there was no
independent verification, were wildly inconsistent with exit polls.
None-the-less, California's Secretary of State approved Diebold machines,
and all of the manufacturer's continue to assert that their equipment will
perform properly.

Public disclosure would allow completely independent evaluations with the
opportunity for debate and correction of the problems. Such debate would
quickly resolve unfounded criticisms and help build public confidence.
Furthermore, depending upon the licensing agreements in place, having the
source code available would enable the state to correct software problems
without having to wait for a response from the manufacturer. At the same
time, the software owner's interest in the software would be protected by
copyright and by any patents that applied.

California cannot afford to take for granted the integrity of our
elections, nor can we depend entirely upon government officials to protect
election integrity. Recently, a whistle-blower who disclosed information
about deficiencies in Diebold equipment, information suggesting possible
criminal behavior, was himself charged with a criminal breach of
confidence. Rather than go after the criminal behavior of Diebold and
defend against election fraud, the state is going after the messenger.
Requiring public disclosure of voting machine operational details will
give the public the opportunity to evaluate voting equipment without
facing criminal charges.

Please support AB 2097 when it comes before the Elections and
Redistricting Committee.

Sincerely,

-- 
You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, 
option D (up to 3 emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options 
(option A - 1x/week, option B - 3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option D - 
up to 3x/day) please reply and let us know!  If someone forwarded you 
this email and you want to be on our list, send an email to 
ean at sbcglobal.net and tell us which option you'd like.


"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060328/4b5f455d/attachment.htm 

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Tue Mar 28 17:05:35 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 17:05:35 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] V For Vendetta
Message-ID: <C04F1D5F.2AA40%michael@michaelbutler.com>

Subject: Claire Wolfe's Review - V FOR VENDETTA


http://www.clairewolfe.com/wolfesblog/00001983.html

V FOR VENDETTA. 

I finally saw it Saturday.

After the disappointment of Serenity I'd tried not to get my hopes up about
this one. But the beautiful posters kept luring me. "No moviemaker who put
so much craft and restraint into those posters could possibly have flubbed
the film," I kept telling myself. And then there was that slogan: People
should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of
their people. Yeahhhhh ...

So I kept letting my hopes build up ... and up ... and up.

And you know what? V for Vendetta exceeded them. It was better than my most
hopeful imaginings.

(Itty bitty teeny minor spoilers follow)

I haven't been so emotionally engaged by a freedom film since Braveheart. I
haven't seen a more important freedom film since The Matrix. No. Strike
that. V for Vendetta is more important than The Matrix because its message
is so unabashedly here-and-now. So in-your-face. Not to mention that like
The Matrix it wraps its message in one hell of an action-adventure story.

This is a movie without compromise. No words minced. No concepts softpedaled
or cleverly coded. V for Vendetta overtly advocates the right, even the
duty, of individuals in the twenty-first century to defend themselves
violently against government tyranny. And the government in question is a
recognizable near-future descendent of ones that now lie oozing and
festering before our very noses.

The movie government isn't a Bush administration clone, as some conservative
critics whimpered (it's British, for one thing). But it's familiar enough
that the Wachowski brothers, who wrote the screenplay, are obviously
warning, "Look, tyranny isn't some distant threat that happens only to
foreigners. When you begin hearing words like 'rendition' or 'detention'
from your own government, it's time to be very, very watchful. And very,
very angry. And to act."

Since I'm late coming in, and since words would fail me anyhow, I won't
attempt a real review. I'll just say if you haven't seen it yet go. Now.
Experience it yourself. And I 100 percent guarantee you it'll be an
experience.

It's not a perfect movie. Its imperfections mostly come from its DC Comics
background. ("How can one guy with six knives best a dozen dudes with
full-auto weapons trained on him?" and "Oh, c'mon, surely the security
experts would have anticipated that.") But it is a great movie. Great.
Exciting. Important. Heartrending. Encouraging. This is one to buy the
instant it comes out on DVD. This is one of those rare, rare movies whose
talk is as powerful as its action and whose action will have you cheering
and weeping and clenching your fists. This is one for the freedom film
pantheon.

Yeah, it's imperfect. But it soars beyond its own few flaws. It soars like
its own fireworks.

One last thought. I was curious about why so many critics sniffed that this
film constituted a "defense of terrorism." Having seen it, I understand
where they're coming from. But V isn't a terrorist and this film isn't about
terrorism at all.

V, the man in the Guy Fawkes mask (Hugo Weaving), never once attacks an
innocent person. Never once targets a "civilian" building. He attacks only
government agents, government spokesthings, and government facilities.

Even then (unlike baby-killer Tim McVeigh, the beasts of 9-11, or the
Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld cartel) he does so in a way that minimizes casualties.

Since a terrorist is someone who attacks citizens in hopes of influencing
governments, V is by definition not a terrorist.

Aaron Zelman had a spot-on comment about those "terrorist" critics: "Funny
how no one condemning the movie is complaining about the horrors inflicted
on people by the government." Yeah. Funny, that. The government kills tens
of thousands and torments millions more. But V is the "terrorist" and tsk
tsk how shocking it is for the Wachowskis or us to side with him.

Well, he's no terrorist. But he's also not a "good guy." It's almost funny
watching the negative critics try to claim that the filmmakers want us to
believe that V is a conventional (if also unconventional) hero. Egads.

V does heroic, heartbreaking, heart-lifting things -- and deeply evil ones.
As the character Evey (Natalie Portman) calls him and as he himself later
agrees, he's a monster. A monster created by government arrogance, savagery,
and injustice.

That's also what a terrorist is. A terrorist just chooses innocent targets.

Like Frankenstein's creation, V is a more interesting character because he's
both a monster and a sympathetic, heart-touching one.

-----

P.S. If you go see the movie, stick around for the first couple of minutes
of the credits. You'll be rewarded for the extra time. You might also get a
laugh to discover that one of the companies involved the making V for
Vendetta was Anarchos Productions. :-)

Posted by Claire @ 10:14 AM CST



From barbarasiomos38 at msn.com  Tue Mar 28 17:50:56 2006
From: barbarasiomos38 at msn.com (Barbara Siomos)
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 01:50:56 GMT
Subject: [Mb-civic] Fw: 8th Annual Cesar Chavez Walk to Occur Sat.--Sign up
	Today!
Message-ID: <BAY114-DAV102C4499644E91FF0EF1B3ABD00@phx.gbl>

Remember those great marches in the 60's for Cesar Chavez? AND never ever eating grapes????
peace,
barbara


-----Original Message-----
From: United Farm Workers
Sent: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 15:02:33 -0800
To: Barbara Siomos
Subject: 8th Annual Cesar Chavez Walk to Occur Sat.--Sign up Today!

http://www.ufwaction.org/ufw/events/cecwla06/details.tcl?member_key=wn3ugig2y7wd85b&

Join thousands in continuing the call for social justice by
participating in the 8th Annual CESAR CHAVEZ WALK 

  Walk alongside Chavez family members, students, elected
officials, celebrities, and community membersand celebrate Cesar
Chavez Day 2006. 

Presenting Walk sponsors include Los Angeles Mayor Antonio R.
Villaraigosa and Councilmember Jose Huizar, 14th District.

SATURDAY, April 1st, 2006, 8:00am 
at Historic Olvera Street
(Main Street between Arcadia and Cesar Chavez Avenue)
125 Paseo de la Plaza, Los Angeles, CA 90012

Join us for music, educational booths, and fun!

Musical Guests: 

Chicano reggae artists, Quinto Sol: 
Winner of "LA Weekly?" Best Latin Artist of the Year? two years
in a row

the conscious hip hop of Malverde

And the movement music of and Los Perros

For more information, contact:
Felicia Montes, Walk Coordinator, 323-722-0118,
cesarchavezwalk at yahoo.com 

Please RSVP & let us know you're joining the Walk Today!
go to: https://secure.ga6.org/08/ufw/events/cecwla06/purchase.tcl?member_key=wn3ugig2y7wd85b&

Make a pledge: Click here to download Walk Sponsor Form
Go to: http://www.ufwaction.org/ct/_pAhqB61dPWo/sponsorform

Spread the Word: Click here to download Official Walk Flyer
Go to: http://www.ufwaction.org/ct/ApAhqB61dPWP/flyer06

For more information, contact:
Felicia Montes, Walk Coordinator, 323-722-0118,
cesarchavezwalk at yahoo.com 

Your spare change can create change. Please make a donation
today. Go to: https://secure.ga6.org/08/donations/nA7AhqB610u6T?

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Visit our new revamped web site at: www.ufw.org and keep up with
the latest news. 

Moved? New E-mail address? Update your profile at your
Subscription Management Page at http://www.ufwaction.org/ufw/smp.tcl?show_subs=profile&nkey=wn3ugig2y7wd85b&

If you received this message from a friend, you can sign up for
the United Farm Workers at:
http://www.ufwaction.org/ufw/join.html?r=A7AhqB610u6TE&

United Farm Workers, 29700 Woodford-Tehachapi Rd., P.O. Box 62,
Keene, CA, 93531 www.ufw.org

Privacy Policy at: http://www.unionvoice.org/ufw/privacy.tcl

If you would like to unsubscribe from the UFW List Serve, please
visit your subscription management page at: 
http://www.ufwaction.org/ufw/smp.tcl?nkey=wn3ugig2y7wd85b&


***************************************
Powered by GetActive Software, Inc.
Member Relationship Management Solutions
That Recruit, Engage, and Retain (tm)
http://www.getactive.com
***************************************


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060329/d9c12770/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Tue Mar 28 20:57:36 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (Ian)
Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 23:57:36 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] 9/11 Truth
Message-ID: <00c001c652ed$4d25d690$99ca6c42@iancn2ccrvzt0j>

Hopefully, many of you are aware that actor Charlie Sheen has come out strongly for the 9/11 truth movement, in two interviews with 9/11 truth leader Alex Jones, which were picked up by one of CNN's showbiz programs, which then interviewed Jones.  This is the first time that a serious discussion of alternative theories of the events of 9/11 has been aired on major media.  Indeed, the person who interviewed Jones, CNN host AJ Hammer, has now himself come out in personal support of the movement.  (Links to the audio of both interviews, plus the CNN video segment, follows this e-mail.)

As of yesterday, both Ed Asner and Sharon Stone have voiced their strong public support for Sheen's statements and position.  Others are expected to join over the next days and weeks.

You might ask why anyone would or should listen to or believe actors, especially on such a controversial issue.  There is a good answer to this.  If you or I come out and make controversial public statements about such an issue, we have little to lose: we will either be ignored or simply pegged as "conspiracy nuts."  However, these are major actors who are putting their careers on the line by coming out so publicly on such a controversial issue.  Not only can they lose their fans and viewer bases, but the industry could "blackball" them, or simply consider them "too high risk" for joining the "conspiracy nuts."

In other words, these actors have nothing to gain - and much to lose - by voicing their strong support of the 9/11 truth movement.  Their voices are most welcome, and one can only hope that because they are such high-profile people, the issue of 9/11 truth will now become something that others - both high-profile persons and average citizens, many of whom are afraid of being lumped in with the "conspiracy nuts" - will no longer be afraid to discuss, or express their feelings about, alternative beliefs re the events of 9/11.

There may not be a "smoking gun" re 9/11, but at least now there is a chance that much of the evidence that has been suppressed, ignored or ridiculed will come to light and be made part of the discourse - maybe even leading to a groundswell of public outrage.  And legitimate, widespread outrage - about the lies, deception, stonewalling and spin  re 9/11 - has been in short supply.

Peace.

Original interview of Charlie Sheen by Alex Jones:

http://prisonplanet.tv/audio/200306sheen.htm

Video of CNN segment covering the story:

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/march2006/240306alexvideo.htm

Follow-up interview of Charlie Sheen by Alex Jones:

http://www.prisonplanet.tv/audio/240306sheen.htm
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060328/b05668e1/attachment-0001.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Wed Mar 29 03:39:46 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 06:39:46 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Scientific American: Climate Model Predicts Greater
 Melting, Submerged Cities
Message-ID: <442A7202.2020704@comcast.net>

Climate Model Predicts Greater Melting, Submerged Cities 

Scientific American  |  March 24, 2006  |  Science News
       
Over the past 30 years, temperatures in the Arctic have been creeping 
up, rising half a degree Celsius with attendant increases in glacial 
melting and decreases in sea ice. Experts predict that at current levels 
of greenhouse gases--carbon dioxide alone is at 375 parts per 
million--the earth may warm by as much as five degrees Celsius, matching 
conditions roughly 130,000 years ago. Now a refined climate model is 
predicting, among other things, sea level rises of as much as 20 feet, 
according to research results published today in the journal Science.

Modeler Bette Otto-Bliesner of the National Center for Atmospheric 
Research in Boulder and paleoclimatologist Jonathan Overpeck of the 
University of Arizona matched results from the Community Climate System 
Model and climate records preserved in ice cores, exposed coral reefs, 
fossilized pollen and the chemical makeup of shells to determine the 
accuracy of the computer simulation. Roughly 130,000 years ago, the 
Arctic enjoyed higher levels of solar radiation, leading to increased 
warming in the summer and the retreat of glaciers worldwide. The model 
correctly predicted the extent of the resulting Arctic ice melt, enough 
to raise sea levels by roughly nine feet.

"Getting the past climate change correct in these models gives us more 
confidence in their ability to predict future climate change," 
Otto-Bliesner says. "These ice sheets have melted before and sea levels 
rose. The warmth needed isn't that much above present conditions."

But sea levels rose as much as 20 feet 130,000 years ago and Overpeck 
speculates that may have been the result of additional melting in 
Antarctica. After all, the ice there is not all landlocked; some rests 
in the ocean and a little warming in sea temperatures could melt it or 
pry it loose. And this time around, the warming is global, rather than 
concentrated in the Arctic. "In the Antarctic, all you have to do is 
break up the ice sheet and float it away and that would raise sea 
level," he says. "It's just like throwing a bunch of ice cubes into a 
full glass of water and watching the water spill over the top."

Such a sea level rise would permanently inundate low-lying lands like 
New Orleans, southern Florida, Bangladesh and the Netherlands. Already 
sea level rise has increased to an inch per decade, thanks to melting 
ice and warm water expansion, according to Overpeck. And evidence that 
the Arctic is exponentially warming continues to accumulate. Indeed, in 
another paper in the same issue of Science, Goran Ekstrom of Harvard 
University reported a marked increase in so-called glacial earthquakes 
(seismic events recorded throughout the world when Greenland's glaciers 
slip past rock) since 2002. In fact, last year alone saw twice as many 
quakes as in previous years, with most of that increase coming during 
the summer months.

"We need to start serious measures to reduce greenhouse gases within the 
next decade," Overpeck says. "If we don't do something soon, we're 
committed to [13 to 20 feet] of sea level rise in the future."

http://www.sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=0007FA05-10BC-1423-90BC83414B7F0000
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060329/353ec4d6/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Wed Mar 29 03:41:27 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 06:41:27 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Card's Departure Seen as a Sign President Hears Words of
 Critics - Washington Post
Message-ID: <442A7267.9060803@comcast.net>

Card's Departure Seen as a Sign President Hears Words of Critics

By Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 29, 2006; A01

A few weeks ago, President Bush's spokesman dismissed talk of an 
impending staff change as "inside Washington babble."

White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr.'s resignation yesterday 
suggests that Bush was listening.

Through one full term and the first year of the second, a signature of 
this administration was the indifference -- even contempt -- it showed 
for the capital's political and media culture, and for the endless flow 
of commentary and unsolicited advice that its inhabitants deliver daily 
to all presidents.

Bush, his advisers say, has by no means changed his view of what he 
derisively calls the "chattering class." But the Card move is only the 
latest sign that -- with his presidency under the stress of low public 
approval ratings, an unpopular war and a stalled legislative agenda -- 
Bush is more often deferring to the expectations of Washington 
conventional wisdom.

On Iraq, he has not shifted policy but has modified his message in 
response to legislators and GOP operatives who said he needed to more 
directly address the arguments of opponents instead of simply 
disparaging them as defeatists. On his domestic agenda -- after last 
year proved that doubters of both parties on Capitol Hill were right 
when they said his planned overhaul of Social Security was far too 
ambitious -- Bush has returned this year with a series of small 
proposals such as incentives for alternative energy sources.

At the same time, the president who set out five years ago to circumvent 
what he considered the "filter" of Washington's mainstream media, has 
started having off-the-record, get-to-know-you-better chats with White 
House reporters.

"When you run into brick walls, you need to figure out ways around it," 
said a high-ranking administration official, who acknowledged that a 
White House that once prided itself on tuning out the views of op-ed 
pages and cable talk shows is now more likely to tune in. "Part of what 
you are seeing is some adjustment to the political realities."

These accommodations are of the sort that many presidents have made 
before, and Bush's steps should not be overstated. He has not summoned a 
respected Capitol Hill figure to join his staff, as Ronald Reagan did 
when he tapped Howard Baker as his chief of staff after the Iran-contra 
scandal in 1987. He did not invite a well-known figure from the other 
party into his fold, as Bill Clinton did when he recruited commentator 
David Gergen to help right a stumbling presidency in 1993.

What's more, Bush's team well knows that making nods to 
inside-Washington expectations can affect its political fortunes only at 
the margins. As Bush himself said at a news conference last week, his 
"political capital" is nearly all invested in Iraq, and that war is 
almost certainly what will determine his political success or failure in 
the balance of his presidency.

Still, longtime Bush observers are struck by the stylistic changes on 
display.

"The first term was about discipline, driven by a big event -- Sept. 11 
-- that shaped the era, and maybe it saved them for a while," said Ed 
Rogers, a Republican with close ties to the White House. "It allowed 
them to do things that were inconsistent with the currents and ways of 
Washington. Now absent a big event that has upset the political order 
and laws of political physics, they are back playing by the rules that 
govern this universe."

Ari Fleischer, Bush's spokesman in the first term, said the president is 
simply conforming to a new political reality. "Tough times force you to 
adjust," he said. "When times are tough and poll numbers are down . . . 
the president is more open to change for whatever good comes with that 
change."

Fleischer said there is no doubt that the Card resignation was at least 
partly the result of Republican calls for a staff shake-up. "There was a 
drumbeat out there that the president's staff could not miss and Bush 
could not miss," he said. Publicly, White House officials said it was 
Card who decided to resign, but a top aide said Bush gradually came to 
the conclusion that it was the right thing to do.

The president-vs.-Washington battle is not a new phenomenon. Washington 
has long had its own unique culture governed by a set of unspoken but 
generally understood political and social mores. By custom, presidents 
are expected to reach out to the social and political elite. The people 
in that elite almost always have the same advice: Listen to the top 
pundits, do more to reach across the partisan aisle, embrace foreign 
travel, shake up the staff when polls go in the tank. Most recent 
presidents, to some extent, came to town intent on playing by their own 
set of rules, and most end up striking some sort of truce.

"There are certain lessons you learn," said Leon E. Panetta, who became 
Clinton's second chief of staff in 1994 after an unseasoned White House 
staff made many errors in the first year. Presidents such as Bush and 
Clinton, who came from outside Washington, "kinda look down on 
Washington," Panetta added, but ultimately realize that "if you do not 
learn how to work in the Washington setting, it will basically eat you up."

Bush brings some personal history to the subject. After watching the 
travails of his father's presidency, he came to town with an attitude 
that bad decisions are often made when presidents pay too much attention 
to party insiders who wring their hands or don't dare to take chances, 
longtime aides said. He considered many in Washington too quick to turn 
on friends and their core principles during troubled times, and too 
scared to "shape history."

Bush's strategy often worked, according to John D. Podesta, a former 
Clinton chief of staff. But even some Republicans said it was less the 
result of Bush's strategy than the Sept. 11 attacks, which spurred twin 
emotions of fear and patriotism among voters and in Congress that 
allowed Bush to set the agenda and strike a defiant stance. One person 
close to Bush said this created a false sense of power and success at 
the highest reaches of the White House.

Bush's fatal mistake, Podesta said, was going too far in the direction 
of avoiding, if not alienating, important people in Washington. "You 
have to tip your hat enough to the chattering class so they don't spend 
every day thinking about how to flay you," Podesta said.

The Card resignation by itself does not signal a radical shift for this 
White House. But aides said more changes will come and that Bush is 
strongly considering adding one or two well-known Republicans to help 
soothe relations with Congress.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/28/AR2006032801806.html?referrer=email
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060329/bdcf3f6a/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Wed Mar 29 03:43:53 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 06:43:53 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Bringing Evolution, Not Revolution - Washington Post
Message-ID: <442A72F9.20606@comcast.net>

Bringing Evolution, Not Revolution
New White House Chief of Staff Defined by Efficiency Rather Than Ideology

By Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 29, 2006; A04

Joshua B. Bolten doesn't find it fun to say no. He once called himself a 
"softer person" than his predecessor as White House budget chief.

But he has found his own ways to make a point. He shows up at policy 
meetings with a giant calculator to add up the cost of anyone's 
ambitious ideas. And when someone strays off course, he throws a yellow 
penalty flag onto the conference table like a football referee.

Now it has fallen on this dry-witted Washington native to get the White 
House itself back on course. Tapped by President Bush yesterday to 
replace White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr., Bolten will take 
over a political operation gone astray -- mired in an overseas war, 
stalled in its domestic agenda, sagging in the polls and alienated from 
congressional Republican allies.

Like Card, Bolten is a Bush loyalist, known as self-effacing and 
efficient, not especially ideological, not a promoter of his own agenda, 
a quiet professional in a town filled with vast egos. Yet this 
workaholic bachelor and self-described "policy geek" in glasses is the 
picture of contradictions. Bolten, 51, spends his few off-hours racing 
down the highway on his prized Harley-Davidson Fat Boy or bowling in the 
White House alley or banging out tunes in a rock band he named Deficit 
Attention Disorder.

His office in the Dwight D. Eisenhower Executive Office Building 
adjacent to the White House attests to his personality. Rather than 
stock it with pictures of Bush, as many aides do, Bolten hung a large 
portrait of Eisenhower in military uniform above the fireplace and put a 
Harley-Davidson book on the mantle. Nearby is a motorcycle menorah. Not 
one to take himself too seriously, Bolten even hung a drawing by a niece 
that a visitor recalled was titled "Uncle Josh's Poop Calendar."

"He is very funny, he always kept the staff laughing," said Assistant 
Secretary of State Kristen Silverberg, who worked for Bolten during the 
2000 presidential campaign and Bush's first term. At the same time, she 
said, "Josh has a great moral core" and a passion for bold ideas. "If 
you had to pick one person who was the architect of all the big 
first-term domestic policy initiatives," it would be Bolten.

Karl Rove, Bush's political adviser, said Bolten will reinvigorate the 
White House.

"People get energized -- new leadership has a way of doing that," Rove 
said. "He has strong views, but he is very adept at not allowing them to 
short-circuit a robust policy process." Bolten encourages aides to 
propose ideas he disagrees with, Rove added. "He would challenge them to 
think outside the box."

Yet Bolten was hardly an outside-the-box choice. He is not the 
Washington graybeard many Republicans urged Bush to recruit. By most 
accounts, Bolten will bring evolution, not revolution. Within hours of 
his appointment, talking points distributed among Democrats described 
his selection as rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

"He strikes me as pretty much cut from the same bolt as Andy Card, so I 
don't see this as a shift by the White House, replacing one insider with 
another," said Rep. John Spratt (S.C.), ranking Democrat on the House 
Budget Committee. But Spratt expressed "high regard" for Bolten: "He's 
bright, a quick study, yet cool and unflappable."

The son of a career CIA officer and a George Washington University 
teacher, Joshua Brewster Bolten grew up in Washington, attending public 
schools until enrolling at St. Albans for high school. After earning 
degrees at Princeton University and Stanford Law School, Bolten returned 
to Washington to work as a lawyer at the State Department and the Senate 
Finance Committee.

"He has this ethic of public service in his bones," said Daniel Price, a 
longtime friend.

Bolten joined the Bush team in 1989, working as general counsel of the 
U.S. trade representative and then as a White House lobbyist under 
President George H.W. Bush. He spent five years in London for Goldman 
Sachs International before being recruited at Christmas 1998 to go to 
Texas for the next Bush campaign. "I fell in love with the governor and 
the whole operation, the whole spirit of the operation," Bolten told 
C-SPAN last year.

Giving up the Goldman Sachs money, Bolten developed the campaign's 
policy platform, then helped enact it as deputy White House chief of 
staff in President Bush's first term. He was instrumental in pushing 
through tax cuts and the education plan known as No Child Left Behind. 
He also spearheaded a $15 billion plan to fight AIDS around the world, 
battling with Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., the director of the Office of 
Management and Budget, who objected to the cost.

When Daniels resigned in 2003, Bush tapped Bolten to take over OMB and 
the annual $2.8 trillion federal budget.

Bolten produced two consecutive budgets that cut discretionary, 
nonsecurity spending, but the cost of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as 
well as soaring Medicare expenses have pumped up deficits.

Within the administration, Bolten earned a reputation as tight-fisted 
and more "overtly demanding" than Card, as one colleague put it, while 
making few enemies. "He's well-liked by all who know him, even if they 
don't agree with every decision that he makes," said former commerce 
secretary Donald L. Evans. "You can't help but say Josh Bolten is a fair 
and good man."

And Bolten repaired some relations on Capitol Hill frayed under Daniels, 
who was seen as less deferential to congressional egos. Bolten stroked 
the likes of Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens 
(R-Alaska), terming him the "Incredible Hulk" of lawmakers. Bolten "is 
respected as a straight shooter and good listener," said Rob Portman, a 
member of the House leadership before becoming U.S trade representative 
last year.

Bolten views himself as an honest broker and eschews public attention. 
"It's best that you keep yourself out of the equation," he told C-SPAN, 
"and in that way make sure that others have confidence that you're not 
running your own agenda -- you're just running the president's agenda, 
which was my objective. Still is."

Still, he will not bring fresh legs to the assignment. Many Republicans 
around Washington attributed at least some of Bush's political problems 
to a tired White House staff that has remained largely intact since the 
beginning of his presidency. Card served longer than any other chief of 
staff in half a century.

Bolten has been with Bush since the start, as well, working as many if 
not more hours than Card. Although he gets into the office later than 
Card, just in time for the 7:30 a.m. senior staff meeting, Bolten is 
regularly seen at the office until 10 or 11 at night before climbing 
into his 12-year-old Ford pickup to drive home. (After long resistance, 
Bolten recently accepted the car and driver service entitled to 
high-ranking White House officials, according to colleagues.)

Nonetheless, some believe Bolten offers enough change to make a 
difference. "It's a significant change because he brings a different 
skill set than Andy did," said Cesar Conda, a former aide to Vice 
President Cheney. "Josh will bring some energy to the policymaking 
apparatus at the White House. And he'll bring good relations with the Hill."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/28/AR2006032801804.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060329/c8b344d1/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Wed Mar 29 03:46:11 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 06:46:11 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] IMPORTANT: A Party Waiting to Pounce - David Ignatius -
 Washington Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <442A7383.4070501@comcast.net>

A Party Waiting to Pounce
<>
By David Ignatius
The Washington Post
Wednesday, March 29, 2006; A19

If you're a Democrat, life is good right now. The Republicans are mired 
in Iraq and domestic political difficulties. The White House is 
rearranging the deck chairs. For now, Democrats can sit back and watch 
the GOP self-destruct: "They're on fire," says one party strategist. 
"Don't say anything. Let them destroy themselves."

The experience of being out of power and being the targets of Karl 
Rove's relentless attacks has made the Democrats a tougher and more 
cynical party. They think more about winning than about governing. Some 
strategists even see a virtue in the party's lack of a clear agenda or 
leader -- since it denies the Republicans easy targets. This strategy 
may not serve the country in the long run, but for angry Democrats this 
year, there is only the short run -- taking back control of Congress in 
the midterms and the White House in 2008.

Today it's the Bush administration that's struggling with its image and 
credibility. Yesterday's announcement that OMB Director Josh Bolten will 
replace Andrew Card as White House chief of staff drew tart comments 
from Democrats. "They've reached all the way across the driveway for new 
blood," says John Podesta, who became Bill Clinton's chief of staff in 
1998, during a similar period of disarray. "When you're in a deep hole, 
you have to do more than that."

If the Democrats have a problem, it's what I would call the "Clinton 
blockage." As of today Sen. Hillary Clinton is the clear front-runner 
for the 2008 presidential nomination. Clinton "hovers over the 
presidential field like the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor," 
writes political analyst Walter Shapiro this week in the online magazine 
Salon. The problem is that Clinton is casting such a big shadow that it 
blocks out the sunlight in which other candidates might grow.

Clinton is building her own version of the Democratic National 
Committee, outside the control of accident-prone DNC Chairman Howard 
Dean. She has the best financial machine in American politics, and her 
fundraisers are signaling some big donors that the Clintons will be 
unhappy if they give to Hillary's rivals. Meanwhile, former White House 
aide Harold Ickes is creating a powerful database for grass-roots 
fundraising though his Data Warehouse project, and Podesta is building a 
solid policy-planning operation at his Center for American Progress.

Clinton's timetable is also a problem. Running for reelection to the 
Senate from New York this year, she has a strategy of campaigning as if 
she cares more about Utica and Schenectady than Washington. That's 
understandable, but it leaves the Democrats in a pickle. Clinton doesn't 
want to speak for the party right now, but she doesn't want anyone else 
to take center stage -- especially not her husband.

That is the most unfortunate blockage caused by Hillary Clinton's 
presidential ambitions. Her undeclared candidacy denies her party and 
the country the full benefit of Bill Clinton's leadership. 
Paradoxically, the Republicans are making better use of the former 
president than are the Democrats. It's endearing to see him pal around 
with former president George H.W. Bush and his son, but it blunts Bill 
Clinton's impact.

Democratic leaders in Congress are gathering the ammunition to win back 
the House and Senate this year. They have crafted an upbeat, patriotic 
(and also somewhat vapid) slogan: "America Can Do Better." And they are 
beginning to roll out the pieces of a low-key 2006 version of Newt 
Gingrich's "Contract With America," which helped the GOP capture the 
House in 1994. The first installment, on "Honest Leadership," was 
presented in January; the second, on "Real Security," is this week. 
Three more segments are planned, on "Economic and Retirement Security," 
"Affordable Health Care for All" and "Educational Excellence."

The Democrats think they can turn the tables this year because of GOP 
mistakes. A top aide to Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid says the 
party has been studying the formula for victory proposed in 2004 by Bush 
media adviser Mark McKinnon: "Who do you like? Who do you trust? Who's 
on your side?" This year, says the aide, that calculus plays for the 
Democrats. Even on their weak issue of national security, they have 
closed a 30-point gap in public trust to roughly four or five points, 
according to some polls. The Democratic message is: "The Republicans 
have gone too far. They're not on your side. They're not competent to lead."

The 2008 election is still a long way off -- too long, in terms of 
America's need for the clarity and change a new president could offer 
the country. Meanwhile, America is struggling with big problems, from 
Iraq to immigration. Will Democrats help the Bush administration find 
solutions? In the age of Karl Rove, are you kidding?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/28/AR2006032801214.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060329/7a643edd/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Wed Mar 29 03:47:37 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 06:47:37 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] The GOP Walks A Border Tightrope - Ruth Marcus -
 Washington Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <442A73D9.5010808@comcast.net>

The GOP Walks A Border Tightrope
<>
By Ruth Marcus
The Washington Post
Wednesday, March 29, 2006; A19

Karl Rove must be seeing Pete Wilson in his nightmares.

President Bush's architect has been laboring to build up the GOP among 
Hispanic voters, and he's been succeeding: Bush won more than 40 percent 
of the Hispanic vote in 2004, double the level attained by Bob Dole 
eight years earlier. Some of that is attributable to Hispanic voters' 
particular affinity for Bush, a former border state governor. But the 
change has been marked enough to make some smart Democrats fear they're 
at risk of losing their hold on a large and fast-growing slice of voters.

Now, though, with thousands demonstrating against a House-passed 
immigration bill that is all crackdown and no mercy, Rove's project is 
imperiled. The GOP -- riven between an enforcement-only approach and 
Bush's kinder, gentler immigration reform -- is risking a national 
repeat of Wilson's experience as governor of California over a decade ago.

Wilson pushed for Proposition 187, the 1994 initiative to deny state 
services to illegal immigrants, and won -- with disastrous results for 
the California GOP. Hispanic turnout in the next election surged, and 
the GOP's share of the Hispanic vote fell, from 31 percent between 1988 
and 1994 to 23 percent from 1996 through 2000.

The current immigration debate, said Leslie Sanchez, who advises 
Republicans on Hispanic issues, "is Prop. 187 on steroids. It's real 
easy for a lot of my fellow Republican pollsters to say, 'This is red 
meat for conservatives, let's go out and pound this issue.' The deeper 
ramifications are that it turns off women and other ethnic minorities 
and turns on Hispanics, who are now mobilized against us."

Former Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie invokes as 
well the more recent experience of Virginia gubernatorial candidate 
Jerry Kilgore, who ran anti-immigration ads and lost. "Anti-immigration 
rhetoric is a political siren's song, and Republicans must resist its 
lure . . . or our majority will crash on its shoals," he told the 
Federalist Society last week.

The difficulty for Republicans, though, is that their short-term 
political interests -- winning in November -- are arguably at odds with 
their long-term viability as a majority party. Their base is demoralized 
about the party's performance and riled up about immigration. Pushing 
for tough restrictions and resisting anything that has the whiff of 
leniency toward those who entered the country illegally may be the best 
way for Republicans to get their voters to the polls in November. And 
the recent protests, as unnerving as they are for Rove's dream of a 
GOP-inclined Hispanic electorate, also have the perverse effect of 
further enraging those already inflamed about immigration.

"White suburban voters who voted for George Bush are disaffected now," 
says Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio. "Would I rather be talking about 
immigration reform with these voters or the war? Immigration reform or 
gasoline prices? Sometimes, in order to avoid or avert the tidal wave, 
you have to do things that short-term make a little more sense than they 
do in the long term."

Public polls bear out Fabrizio's assessment. A recent NBC-Wall Street 
Journal poll, for example, found that 71 percent of voters said they 
would be more likely to favor a candidate who supports tighter controls 
on immigration; just 11 percent said that would tilt them to oppose. The 
percentage of voters who said the government was not doing enough to 
secure the nation's borders has gone from 54 percent in November 2001 to 
78 percent, according to a Fox News poll.

And voters, especially Republicans, are hostile to proposals to ease the 
legal path for those in the country illegally. A February poll by the 
Quinnipiac University Polling Institute showed 62 percent (71 percent of 
Republicans and 55 percent of Democrats) opposed to making it easier for 
illegal immigrants to become citizens. A narrower majority, 54 percent 
(59 percent of Republicans, 52 percent of Democrats) opposed making it 
easier for illegal immigrants to work here. Some strategists argue that 
voters would support stepped-up enforcement plus reform, but that may 
contain more than a dollop of wishful thinking: Fueled by the kerosene 
of talk radio and cable news, this is not exactly a nuanced debate.

But if Republicans are about to hand Democrats a gift on immigration, 
Democrats have been treating the issue more like a hot potato. Spooked 
that immigration may become a GOP base-energizing issue, much like gay 
marriage in 2004, they are torn between trying to protect themselves 
against charges that they are soft on the issue and trying to seize the 
opportunity to attract Hispanic voters.

An illustration of that ambivalence came with the House vote in December 
in which 36 Democrats, including all the vulnerable incumbents, voted 
for the House bill. Much as with Democrats' self-imposed silence on the 
Bush tax cuts during the 2002 campaign, it's a bit hard to capitalize on 
an anti-immigration vote backed by some of your own troops.

And indeed, Democrats aren't doing much in the way of capitalizing. A 
New American Media poll of legal immigrants, released yesterday, found 
that while only 22 percent said the Republican Party was doing a good 
job on immigration, the approval rating for the Democrats wasn't all 
that impressive either: 38 percent. "There's anger out there" among 
immigrants, says Democratic pollster Sergio Bendixen, who conducted the 
survey. "But there's also a feeling that the Democrats are not much better."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/28/AR2006032801223.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060329/d1ddfbe2/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Wed Mar 29 03:50:35 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 06:50:35 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Xenophobia's Threat to Prosperity - Charles Prince -
 Washington Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <442A748B.3070401@comcast.net>

Xenophobia's Threat to Prosperity
<>
By Charles Prince
The Washington Post
Wednesday, March 29, 2006; A19

Citigroup employs 300,000 people in 100 countries. We are a guest in 
every one of those countries. We've bought companies in many of them 
and, with a few notable exceptions during periods of war and revolution, 
we've been welcomed with great hospitality everywhere for over a century 
-- just as the United States has welcomed many companies based in other 
countries. I sincerely hope things stay that way.

But that could prove a challenge in the current political environment. 
There are now upward of 30 proposals in Congress to make changes in the 
Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), a 
little-known body that has the authority to suspend or prohibit any 
acquisition, merger or takeover of a U.S. corporation that is deemed to 
threaten national security. The committee, made up of representatives 
from a dozen federal agencies, has recently come under intense scrutiny, 
even though it has not allowed a single breach of national security 
since it was established in 1988.

Some of the proposals would place new and potentially damaging 
restrictions on foreign investment in the United States. Legitimate 
national security concerns are one thing, but introducing overt 
political considerations into decisions regarding the allocation of 
capital has the potential to undermine investor confidence -- both 
domestic and foreign -- in U.S. markets and to jeopardize the continued 
vibrancy, depth and liquidity of those markets.

Like the investments made overseas by Citigroup, IBM, General Electric 
and countless other U.S.-based global firms, investment in the United 
States by companies based outside this country is essential for job 
creation and innovation. The same is true of individual and 
institutional investors in the United States and in other countries. 
U.S. assets owned by individuals or companies outside the United States 
total about $11.5 trillion. These investors have helped to finance the 
housing boom in the United States and have contributed significantly to 
the rise in home values and ownership. They bought nearly $227 billion 
of U.S. agency debt in 2005, and they currently hold more than $900 
billion of such debt.

Non-U.S. companies established in the United States support nearly 5.3 
million jobs in this country, spread throughout all 50 states. Put 
another way, 4.7 percent of Americans holding private-sector jobs are 
employed by companies based outside the United States. These employees 
receive compensation totaling $318 billion annually, and their numbers 
are growing rapidly. Indeed, the very presence of these companies in the 
United States creates a multiplier effect throughout local and national 
economies -- including tax revenue -- that benefits all Americans.

In an increasingly global economy, labels such as "foreign" and 
"domestic" have become less relevant. Many non-U.S. multinational firms 
have moved their U.S. personnel into senior global positions. For 
instance, many chief executives of U.S. subsidiaries, most of whom are 
American citizens, have gone on to become CEOs of the global company, 
including Don Shepard of Aegon, Don Robert of Experian, Marjorie 
Scardino of Pearson and Klaus Kleinfeld of Siemens.

At the same time, many companies based outside the United States have 
moved senior managers with global responsibility for an entire business 
unit or function to the United States. The leadership role played by the 
employees of these companies, and their operations, benefit the U.S. 
economy and must be taken into account when balancing the value 
conferred by non-U.S. companies against notions of national interest.

I respectfully urge Congress to take only those actions that will 
enhance the security review process for foreign investment in the United 
States, and to avoid endorsing proposals that could undermine America's 
support for access to capital markets and the free movement of capital. 
We must avoid measures taken in the name of national security that are 
isolationist and xenophobic, and could have the effect of choking off 
vital investments in America. Such a path could threaten job creation in 
the United States, impede American economic growth and jeopardize U.S. 
efforts to open foreign markets for American companies, consumers and 
investors. Any changes to the CFIUS process should result from an 
informed, sober and fact-based assessment of all of our interests.

Genuine threats to U.S. national security must be met with resolve and 
purpose -- no deal can be worth the safety of our citizens. But at the 
same time, challenges to U.S. economic success must be met with the same 
commitment to international leadership and engagement that has for 
decades contributed to increasing prosperity in this country and 
throughout the world. This is not a choice between protecting vital 
national interests and building a more prosperous future. These two 
goals are vitally important, but they are also compatible, and Americans 
will hold their leaders accountable for working to achieve both of them.

The writer is CEO of Citigroup Inc.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/28/AR2006032801236.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060329/c6563e67/attachment-0001.htm 

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Tue Mar 28 21:08:59 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 21:08:59 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Bring The Sixties Out of The Closet
Message-ID: <C04F566D.2AA6C%michael@michaelbutler.com>

Hi,
This is a great article by the Editor of AlterNet. It will resonate with
most of us. It is right on.
Michael
--Those who have experienced altered forms of consciousness, by whatever
means, never forget that space in which they have been. Now that they have
learned how to function within the system, it is time they act to run it. MB



-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/octet-stream
Size: 61770 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060328/ed832e94/attachment-0001.obj 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Wed Mar 29 03:54:22 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 06:54:22 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] MUST READ: A madness for war - Derrick Z. Jackson -
 Boston Globe Op-Ed
Message-ID: <442A756E.2040900@comcast.net>


  A madness for war

By Derrick Z. Jackson  |  March 29, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

PRESIDENT BUSH said he invaded Iraq to rid the world of a madman. It is 
ever more clearer Bush went mad to start it.

This week, the New York Times reported on a confidential memo about a 
meeting between Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair on Jan. 31, 
2003. It was just before Secretary of State Colin Powell would go before 
the United Nations to convince the world of the planetary threat of 
Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and ask for a second UN resolution to 
condemn him.

In his Feb. 5 presentation, Powell used excerpts of monitored 
conversations and satellite photographs to paint a picture of an Iraq 
where Saddam was feverishly concealing weapons of mass destruction. 
Powell, whose credibility lay in his image as one of the few members of 
the Bush team to have actually fought in war, said, ''We have first-hand 
descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails." He 
said Iraq's ''sophisticated facilities" could produce enough biological 
agents in a single month ''to kill thousands upon thousands of people."

Powell's punch line was, ''Every statement I make today is backed up by 
sources, solid sources. These are not assertions."

But Bush already realized the sources were not panning out. According to 
a Times review of the entire Jan. 31 memo, written by Blair's foreign 
policy adviser, David Manning, it showed that ''the president and the 
prime minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been 
found inside Iraq."

With no weapons, Bush talked about provoking Saddam. ''The US was 
thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over 
Iraq, painted in UN colors," the Times quotes the memo as saying. ''If 
Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach."

Bush had come up with an official start date of March 10 which, 
according to the memo, ''was when the bombing would begin." The war 
actually began on March 19. The memo summarized the president as 
assuming, ''The air campaign would probably last four days, during which 
some 1,500 targets would be hit. Great care would be taken to avoid 
hitting innocent civilians."

Bush thought the impact of the air onslaught would ensure the early 
collapse of Saddam's regime. Bush thought that the air strikes ''would 
destroy Saddam's command and control quickly," Iraq's army would ''fold 
very quickly," and Saddam's Republican Guard would be ''decimated by the 
bombing." Bush also assumed in the rebuilding of Iraq that it was 
''unlikely there would be internecine warfare between the different 
religious and ethnic groups."

Even though his growing fears about finding no weapons of mass 
destruction had reached the incredible point of considering fakery to 
make it look like Saddam started the war, Bush had the gall to go before 
the press on Jan. 31 after his meeting with Blair and show no doubt. A 
reporter asked Bush, ''Mr. President, is Secretary Powell going to 
provide the undeniable proof of Iraq's guilt that so many critics are 
calling for?"

Bush responded, ''Well, all due in modesty, I thought I did a pretty 
good job myself of making it clear that he's not disarming and why he 
should disarm. Secretary Powell will make a strong case about the danger 
of an armed Saddam Hussein. He will make it clear that Saddam Hussein is 
fooling the world, or trying to fool the world. He will make it clear 
that Saddam is a menace to peace in his own neighborhood. He will also 
talk about Al Qaeda links, links that really do portend a danger for 
America and for Great Britain, anybody else who loves freedom."

Powell would deliver on Bush's boast five days later, saying, ''There 
can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the 
capability to rapidly produce more, many more. . . . With this track 
record, Iraqi denials of supporting terrorism take their place alongside 
the other Iraqi denials of weapons of mass destruction. It is all a web 
of lies."

The web spun by Bush has now cost the lives of 2,300 US soldiers, 
another 200 British and coalition soldiers, and tens of thousands of 
Iraqi civilians. Iraq is closer to civil war than stability. Three years 
later, it is the United States that is not disarming, with Bush 
admitting last week that our troops will be needed there past his 
presidency. We took out a madman with madness. At a minimum, there 
should be hearings, with Bush under oath. With any more details like 
this, the next step is impeachment.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/29/a_madness_for_war/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060329/2c32ac28/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Wed Mar 29 03:57:12 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 06:57:12 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] A nation like ours - Jeff Jacoby  - Boston Globe Op-Ed
Message-ID: <442A7618.7080602@comcast.net>


  A nation like ours

<>
By Jeff Jacoby  |  March 29, 2006  |  The Boston Globe
Second of two columns

AMERICA'S LONGSTANDING solidarity with Israel suits most Americans just 
fine, but it sets some people's teeth on edge. Two of those people are 
Stephen Walt, the academic dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of 
Government, and political scientist John Mearsheimer of the University 
of Chicago, co-authors of a sour new polemic about the insidious 
''Israel Lobby" that manipulates US policy in the Middle East and 
dragged the Bush administration into war.

Walt and Mearsheimer are not the first to wade into these swamps. In 
March 2003, US Representative James Moran inveighed against Jews at an 
antiwar rally: ''If it was not for the strong support of the Jewish 
community for this war with Iraq," the Virginian Democrat fumed, ''we 
would not be doing this." It was at about the same time that Professor 
Edward Said of Columbia University was writing, ''Wherever you look in 
the Congress there are the tell-tale signs either of the Zionist lobby, 
the right-wing Christians, or the military-industrial complex, three 
inordinately influential minority groups who share . . . unbridled 
support for extremist Zionism." A year earlier it had been South African 
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, lamenting that ''the Israeli government is 
placed on a pedestal" in the United States; no one dares oppose Israel 
''because the Jewish lobby is powerful -- very powerful."

But the truth is precisely the reverse. America's loyalty to Israel 
isn't engineered by a Zionist cabal that dupes American citizens and 
hijacks their government. US policy tends to align closely with Israel's 
because Americans like Israel. They instinctively sympathize with 
Israel's fight for survival in one of the world's most dangerous 
neighborhoods. If public opinion weren't robustly pro-Israel in the 
first place, the White House and Congress would be far less inclined to 
give Israel's advocates the time of day. There's a name for that 
phenomenon. It's called democracy.

The American consensus in support of Israel is deep-rooted and durable. 
Polls show that it cuts across all ages and both sexes. The dread power 
of some ''Israel Lobby" doesn't explain it. So what does?

Four answers:

First, Americans recognize in Israeli society a modern liberal democracy 
-- a country like their own, with vigorously contested elections, a free 
press, an independent judiciary, and a commitment to civil liberties and 
human rights that hasn't flagged despite six decades of terrorism and 
war. With all its flaws, Israel has the freest and fairest political 
system in the Middle East. Israel's Arab citizens are full-fledged 
voters -- women as well as men -- and are routinely elected to 
parliament. The region's lone Jewish state is the only one that 
guarantees complete freedom of worship to Christians and Muslims. To 
American eyes, Israel's democratic pluralism could hardly be more familiar.

Second, Israel is an invaluable American ally -- a stable and dependable 
base in a most unstable part of the globe. From military R&D to 
world-class intelligence services, from a deepwater port to 
sophisticated air facilities, from counterterrorist expertise to a solid 
democratic culture, Israel brings assets to its strategic relationship 
with the United States that few countries can match. And Americans don't 
have to be national-security mavens to appreciate the ally that 
destroyed Saddam Hussein's nuclear reactor in 1981, and that pulled off 
Operation Entebbe -- the rescue of 100 hostages from Idi Amin's Uganda 
-- on July 4, 1976.

Third, American history is deeply rooted in Judeo-Christian soil, 
nourishing a special kinship between America's Christians and the Jewish 
people. The founders of the American republic were deeply influenced by 
the Hebrew scriptures and believed that they, like the Jews of old, had 
been taken out of bondage by God and led by Him to a Promised Land. Long 
before there was a modern state of Israel, American leaders expressed 
''Zionist" leanings: ''I really wish the Jews again in Judea an 
independent nation," former President John Adams wrote in 1819. Nearly 
two centuries later, millions of American Christians are passionate 
supporters of the Jewish state.

Finally, Americans sympathize so strongly with the Israelis because both 
face a common enemy. Unlike Walt and Mearsheimer, who can find ''no 
moral basis" for taking Israel's side, most Americans make a clear moral 
distinction between suicide bombers and their victims. If Israeli 
terrorists were deliberately blowing up Palestinian school buses, if 
rabbis were blasting Arabs as ''the sons of monkeys and pigs," American 
sympathies might not be so clear-cut. Most Americans are not confused, 
because most Americans understand what's at stake.

''The US has a special relationship with Israel in the Middle East," 
President John F. Kennedy said in 1962, ''really comparable only to that 
which it has with Britain." Today, Kennedy's words are truer than ever 
-- even if the Kennedy School dean has yet to figure it out.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/29/a_nation_like_ours/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060329/8e86f7de/attachment.htm 

From barbarasiomos38 at msn.com  Wed Mar 29 04:36:21 2006
From: barbarasiomos38 at msn.com (Barbara Siomos)
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 12:36:21 GMT
Subject: [Mb-civic] 9/11 Truth
Message-ID: <BAY114-DAV17474B35F0AAFB741393D4ABD00@phx.gbl>

Ian... I may be missing something... seriously. What is happening? I don't mean as far as Charlie, Sharon and Ed.... They have spoken out for years on a number of issues and have always been courageous so this does not surprise me as far as they are concerned....

I know about the airplane bit hitting the pentagon that totally vanished in plain sight... but what else am I missing besides warning signs that were ignored by our administration?

No need for a lo--ong story just refresh me a bit.... and I am serious. I was ill and in the hospital a few times recently so missed out on quite a lot of the emails and have not had time to research....

thanks..
peace,
barbara 





-----Original Message-----
From: Ian
Sent: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 20:57:36 -0800
To: Civic
Cc: Jamieson, Les
Subject: [Mb-civic] 9/11 Truth

Hopefully, many of you are aware that actor Charlie Sheen has come out strongly for the 9/11 truth movement, in two interviews with 9/11 truth leader Alex Jones, which were picked up by one of CNN's showbiz programs, which then interviewed Jones.  This is the first time that a serious discussion of alternative theories of the events of 9/11 has been aired on major media.  Indeed, the person who interviewed Jones, CNN host AJ Hammer, has now himself come out in personal support of the movement.  (Links to the audio of both interviews, plus the CNN video segment, follows this e-mail.)

As of yesterday, both Ed Asner and Sharon Stone have voiced their strong public support for Sheen's statements and position.  Others are expected to join over the next days and weeks.

You might ask why anyone would or should listen to or believe actors, especially on such a controversial issue.  There is a good answer to this.  If you or I come out and make controversial public statements about such an issue, we have little to lose: we will either be ignored or simply pegged as "conspiracy nuts."  However, these are major actors who are putting their careers on the line by coming out so publicly on such a controversial issue.  Not only can they lose their fans and viewer bases, but the industry could "blackball" them, or simply consider them "too high risk" for joining the "conspiracy nuts."

In other words, these actors have nothing to gain - and much to lose - by voicing their strong support of the 9/11 truth movement.  Their voices are most welcome, and one can only hope that because they are such high-profile people, the issue of 9/11 truth will now become something that others - both high-profile persons and average citizens, many of whom are afraid of being lumped in with the "conspiracy nuts" - will no longer be afraid to discuss, or express their feelings about, alternative beliefs re the events of 9/11.

There may not be a "smoking gun" re 9/11, but at least now there is a chance that much of the evidence that has been suppressed, ignored or ridiculed will come to light and be made part of the discourse - maybe even leading to a groundswell of public outrage.  And legitimate, widespread outrage - about the lies, deception, stonewalling and spin  re 9/11 - has been in short supply.

Peace.

Original interview of Charlie Sheen by Alex Jones:

http://prisonplanet.tv/audio/200306sheen.htm

Video of CNN segment covering the story:

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/march2006/240306alexvideo.htm

Follow-up interview of Charlie Sheen by Alex Jones:

http://www.prisonplanet.tv/audio/240306sheen.htm
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060329/ab658d3e/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Wed Mar 29 07:53:33 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (Ian)
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 10:53:33 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] 9/11 Truth
Message-ID: <013601c65348$efa53450$99ca6c42@iancn2ccrvzt0j>

Barbara:

Well, I'm not sure what to provide you since I am not sure how much you already know.  If the Pentagon debacle is the only piece with which you are familiar, then there is a great deal more, including the controlled demolition of both WTC 7 and the twin towers, and the likelihood that the "passenger heroics" story re Flight 93 is bogus -  that it was shot out of the sky by a military plane.

I know you asked me not to send "alot," but since I had just put together the following for a friend who is new to the 9/11 truth movement, I thought I would send it along, both for you and for anyone else in civic who is interested in this issue but has only spotty info.  It is admittedly lengthy, but it is also pretty comprehensive.

Feel free to take your time with it.  It is alot to digest, and some of it leads to extremely disturbing conclusions, including that our government may be complicit in the murders of 3,000 of its own citizens, the increasingly failing health of thousands of others, and the unnecessary traumatization of millions more.

Peace.

---------

I am going to go through some of the evidence that something is fishy about the "official story" of the events of 9/11.  Note that when the 9/11 truth movement refers to the "official story," they usually mean The 9/11 Commission Report (which I have read in its entirety), and subsequent statements by U.S. Government officials.  I will discuss the following four things: (i) the collapse of the twin towers, (ii) the collapse of WTC 7, (iii) the crash at the Pentagon, and (iv) the plane that went down in Pennsylvania.

I have provided website links as often as possible so you can see photos and/or videos, and read researched material.  Always feel free to browse through the various websites to learn more than just those things I am referring you to.

One "caution": it is easy to get either confused or "sucked in" by various websites, based on how "deep" they get re "conspiracy theories."  The best rule of thumb is this: the more you see certain specific facts, evidence or statements, the more likely they are to be the most accurate ones.  That is, the more "overlapping" you see with various sites, the more likely you are to be on the "right track" on the various aspects of 9/11 truth.  For my money, the best sites overall for 9/11 truth info are the following:

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/quickindex/

http://killtown.911review.org/

Also, the two Alex Jones sites:

www.prisonplanet.com

www.infowars.com

---------------

1.  The Twin Towers.

The 9/11 Commission Report would have us believe that the towers fell as a result of steel support structures being weakened by the impact of the planes and the ensuing fires.  The Report claims that the fires fed on flammable materials in the building, leading to the weakening of the interior and exterior support structures, which then led to the collapse of the buildings in a "pancake effect" - i.e., one floor collapsing on top of the next, with the combined weight causing each of the buildings to collapse.  Here are some facts and questions that put the lie to that theory.

-The impact of the planes in and of themselves did "take out" some of the exterior and interior support structure.  However, the impacts themselves would not have caused the buildings to collapse.

-The initial "fireballs" of jet fuel probably caused some damage, but were not hot enough, nor for long enough duration, to cause any significant damage.  It is important to keep in mind that, in both impacts, the vast majority of the diesel fuel burned up within seconds.  More importantly, jet fuel burns, at its hottest, at around 1,800 degrees.  Yet the melting point of steel is 2,900 degrees.  So the heat from the fires - even had it been at the hottest possible temperature (which is was not) - could not have melted the support structures.  Numerous studies have been done on this, and all have concluded that there is no way that the fire was hot enough to melt steel.  (See, for example, http://www.uscrusade.com/forum/config.pl/read/1064).

-There was very little flammable material in the buildings that could have provided "fuel" for the fires, especially to create a hot enough fire to continually affect the steel.  In fact, it is very clear that the fires were not very hot at all.  For one thing, the darker the smoke, the more "fuel-starved" a fire is: and the smoke from the fires in the two towers began to get dark in less than 20 minutes, which means they had very little to "feed" on.  In addition, there are numerous photographs of people standing in the areas in which the fires were supposedly hottest: yet these people are standing there comfortably (though admittedly stranded), many in clothing that is not even black from smoke.  (See, for example, http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/january2005/170105womanwaving.htm).

-Each tower had a "central core" comprised of 47 vertical solid-steel beams.  Note that The 9/11 Commission Report completely omits this: it is as if these "central cores" did not exist!  This is because their "pancake theory" falls apart given these "central cores."  Had the floors collapsed on top of each other in perfect pancake fashion, as the Report claims, there would have been a "stutter" effect - i.e., a slight time lag - due to the existence of these "cores."  Yet it took just under ten seconds for each of the towers to collapse.  This is called "free fall" speed: i.e., the time it would take for an object dropped from the top of one of the towers to reach the ground.  But no building collapses at "free fall" speed unless the entire interior support structure is destroyed.  The only thing that could have destroyed the interior "cores" of the twin towers is explosives: i.e., a "controlled demolition."  There is simply no other way to explain how and why the towers fell at "free fall" speed.  Indeed, in some of the photographs and videos of the collapses, you can spot the "squibs" (i.e., explosive charges) blowing up just prior to each floor collapsing, and see parts of the building flying outward - and even upward - which can only be the result of explosives.  (See, for example, http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/analysis/collapses/squibs.html and 
http://www.plaguepuppy.net/public_html/collapse%20update/).

-Over 90% or more of the concrete in both towers was pulverized into fine dust: there were very few large chunks of concrete.  If the government's "pancake theory" were true, there would have been quite a few large chucks of steel flying off as the floors collapsed on top of each other.  The only thing that could have pulverized 95% of the concrete is explosives - especially given that some of this pulverizing occurred before the buildings had completely collapsed.  As well, there were no pieces of steel longer than between 12 and 24 feet.  In fact, almost all of the pieces of steel were exactly that size.  Only explosives could have created such perfectly "cut" steel pieces.  As an aside, it is unbelievably coincidental that this is the exact size that fits on a flatbed truck.  (See, for example, http://911research.wtc7.net/talks/wtc/aerialdust.html and http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/wtc2_cutter.html and http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/wtc2_cutter.html).

-The twin towers collapsed almost perfectly into their own "footprints": even though the top of one of the towers was leaning precariously, both towers fell straight down, causing the most minimal damage to the buildings around them.  This is exactly how a controlled demolition works.  (See, for example, http://home.comcast.net/~skydrifter/wtc.htm).

These are the clearest, most direct facts and questions.  There is also evidence to support the fact that there were explosions in the sub-basements of the two towers just prior to their collapse (See http://st12.startlogic.com/~xenonpup/underground/underground_explosions.htm and http://www.explosive911analysis.com/).  It is also curious that one of the companies hired to do the clean-up at the site was the same company that had been working, prior to 9/11, on strengthening the section of the Pentagon that was destroyed.  (See http://www.global-conspiracies.com/16254.htm).  And then there is the fact that, despite the WTC site being a "crime scene" - for which a thorough forensic investigation should have been done - the clean-up was done as quickly as possible, without allowing any government or independent agency to seriously examine any of the "evidence."  One widespread speculation is that, had such an investigation been permitted, someone would have discovered traces of thermite - the explosives used in controlled demolitions - on the steel beams and in the pulverized dust.

Finally, for a very good overview of the twin tower collapses, go to: http://www.lewrockwell.com/reynolds/reynolds12.html.

2.  WTC 7

At 5:02 pm on September 11, 2001, WTC 7 - a 47-story steel and concrete building - collapsed, just hours after WTC 1 and 2.

The 9/11 Commission Report does not address the collapse of WTC 7 at all.  This is an incredible oversight, given what its collapse almost certainly signifies.  FEMA did do a "report" on the collapse of WTC 7, as did NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology).  The FEMA Report is a joke, as almost none of the "facts" in the report are backed up by any evidence - and, indeed, almost all of the visual and other evidence clearly undermines that report.  The NIST Report was more "thorough," but ultimately does not conclude what caused the collapse.  (See, for example, http://911research.wtc7.net/essays/nist/).

Here are some of the facts that point to a controlled demolition, and what that means in the "bigger picture":

-WTC 7 was a 47-story steel-and-concrete building.  It was not hit by a plane.  Prior to its collapse, there were two or three small fires on various floors of the building. None of them was severe (i.e., uncontrollable), despite what firefighters later claimed.  And although the building may have been hit by some of the debris from the collapse of the north tower, this did not cause the fires.  Indeed, the origin of the fires has never been ascertained: they could have been set deliberately.

-At 5:02, WTC 7 collapsed at "free fall" speed, completely into its "footprint."  As noted above, a building cannot collapse at "free fall" speed unless the entire interior support structure is destroyed first.  And the only way that can be done is by explosives.  Similarly, as above, a building rarely if ever collapses perfectly into its "footprint" unless by controlled demolition with explosives.  These two facts alone point to a controlled demolition.  Yet the most direct evidence that WTC 7 was destroyed by a controlled demolition comes from WTC owner Larry Silverstein himself, in an interview done for a PBS documentary on 9/11.  In that interview, Silverstein clearly states that he and the fire department made the decision to "pull" the building: "pull" is construction industry terminology for a controlled demolition.  And you need only watch any of the numerous videos of the collapse of WTC 7 to see that it was unquestionably a controlled demolition: it looks exactly like all the controlled demolitions they show on TV.  See, for example, http://www.infowars.com/print/Sept11/pp_fdny.htm.  If you play the second video (click on the second "play" button), you will see the clip from the PBS video and hear Silverstein say that it was "pulled."  Note that some people are claiming that he meant that he was pulling the firefighters from the building.  However, it is very clear from his last sentence that that was not what he meant: he clearly meant "pull" the building.  Finally, note that not once in history has a steel-and-concrete building collapsed as the result of fire.  Indeed, a building very much like WTC 7 caught fire in Madrid and burned out of control at much hotter temperatures for hours on more floors than were on fire at the WTC - yet the building did not collapse.  (See photos and text at http://www.infowars.com/articles/world/madrid_towering_inferno.htm).

-WTC 7 had some very interesting tenants, including the IRS, the CIA, the Department of Defense, the Secret Service, and the Office of Emergency Management (OEM). Re OEM, this was the famous "bunker" that Giuliani built as a command center for crises.  There are many who believe that this was actually the command center for coordinating the 9/11 attacks on the WTC, and that the building was destroyed to cover up all evidence of this fact.

Indeed, given that the collapse of WTC 7 was almost certainly a controlled demolition, there is a further critical fact to consider: setting the charges for a controlled demolition takes day, if not weeks - it cannot be done in just a few hours, especially for a 47-story building, and especially when there are active fires in the building.  This means that the explosive charges had to have been set prior to 9/11.  And this leads to two conclusions, the first one obvious: if the explosive charges were set prior to 9/11, this means that someone - indeed, many people - almost certainly had prior knowledge of the attack.  And the second conclusion is that if explosive charges were set in WTC 7 in advance of 9/11, this makes it more likely that explosive charges were set in the twin towers - which means that the collapses were not the result of plane impacts and fires, but of controlled demolitions.  Indeed, there was a "power-down" in the area of the WTC just days before 9/11, which would have required that no one be in either of the twin towers working late at night: i.e., that both towers were completely empty.  (See, for example, http://69.28.73.17/thornarticles/powerdown.html).  As if that were not incredible enough, the company that provided security access to the twin towers was owned by...George Bush's brother!  (See http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/911security.html).

So what does all this mean in the "bigger picture?"  You need only put the pieces together.  WTC 7 was destroyed in a controlled demolition, as admitted to by Larry Silverstein and as seen in the numerous videos.  The charges for such a controlled demolition could not have been placed that day, so they must have been placed prior to 9/11.  This means that there was foreknowledge of the attacks.  It also means that it is far more likely that the twin towers were also destroyed by controlled demolitions, since so much evidence points that way: we now know that WTC 7 was destroyed that way, that explosive charges had to be set prior to 9/11, and that there was a power-down at the WTC that would have allowed a demolitions crew unimpeded and largely unseen access to the twin towers.

3.  The Pentagon.

Here we have the most clear-cut case of a cover-up, and the most complicated set of events, facts and possibilities.

The 9/11 Commission Report would have us believe that a Boeing 757 crashed into one wing of the Pentagon at over 500 miles per hour, causing a fireball and virtually disintegrating.  Here is both factual evidence and strange occurrences that lead to a different conclusion.

-A Boeing 757 has a wingspan of 124 feet, a length of 155 feet, and a height (at the tail) of 44 feet.  (See http://www.boeing.com/commercial/757family/technical.html).  The hole that was made in the side of the Pentagon measured 60 feet across and about 30 feet high.  It does not take a genius to realize that a plane with a wingspan of 124 feet would make a hole much larger than 60 feet across, and that the tail section would create a hole higher than 30 feet.  (See http://www.thepowerhour.com/911_analysis/plane-crash-pentagon-hole-photo.htm).

-There was very little debris of any type found.  No seats, luggage, personal effects, or large sections of plane wreckage.  Note that even if a fireball occurred at impact, all plane crashes leave wreckage of some type.  And what little wreckage was found was very suspicious: the largest pieces were found quite a distance from the impact zone, and did not appear in early photos of the scene.  Also, the wheel base found at the site did not match a 757.  (See, for example, http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/ppfinal.html).

-There is some question as to just how large the fireball was.  The only photos we have were released by the Pentagon from a single closed circuit camera some distance from the imact zone.  As an aside, it is suspicious that all other closed circuit cameras at the Pentagon happened to be shut down at the time of the impact.  And the Pentagon has only released four frames from the sole existing video.  Setting aside the additional suspicion created by the fact that the "time-stamp" on the photos is 9/12 (!), the photos are not in sequence, and it is impossible to tell what hit the building.  Yet a careful look at the photos shows two things.  First, whatever hit the building was not large enough to be a 757.  Second, the fireball was not nearly as large as one would expect from a 757 fully-laden with 10,000 gallons of diesel fuel.  In fact, if you compare the fireball with the one we all saw when the second plane hit the twin towers, it is clear that whatever hit the Pentagon could not have been the same size plane.  (See, for example, http://www.serendipity.li/wot/pentagon/spencer05.htm.  Scroll down about 2/'3 of the way to see the video stills.)

-Note also that there was video footage from at least four other cameras in the area, including a gas station and a hotel.  However, all of these videotapes from confiscated by the FBI within less than an hour of the crash, and none of it has ever been released to the public.  As an aside, this leads to another unanswered question: how did the FBI know exactly where every camera that might have caught the impact was located, and arrive at each place to confiscate those tapes with less than a couple of hours of the impact?

-Despite the impact, the windows on the third floor directly above the impact zone were undamaged.  This is highly unlikely if a plane with a height of 44 feet hit the building.  (See http://www.thewebfairy.com/killtown/flight77/building.html).  Second, despite the fireball, items directly next to the impact zone were undamaged by fire, including a wooden desk with an open book.  (See http://www.physics911.ca/Omholt:_9/11_and_The_Impossible_Pentagon.  Scroll down about 3/4 of the way and look for a daytime shot of the collapsed section of the building.  On the second floor, in the third room back, is a wooden stand on which is sitting an open book.  Neither of these items - nor anything in the rooms adjacent to the impact zone - was even singed.)

-Whatever hit the building left a perfectly circular "exit" hole.  (See http://www.rense.com/general63/pmm.htm, first and second photo).  If a plane had hit the building, it would not have left a perfectly circular exit hole, since the nose of the plane would have been the first thing smashed.  In addition, the exit hole is a long distance from where the internal end of the impact zone occurred, and even if the nose of the plane survived, it would not have travelled that distance.  Third, there is no nose cone wreckage at the exit hole.  (See also http://911review.org/brad.com/pentagon/exit_hole/ and http://www.adelaideinstitute.org/11%20September%202001/pentagon.htm).

-The lawn in front of the impact zone was completely untouched.  In other words, despite the claim that a 757 was flying virtually only a few feet above the ground when it impacted the building, there is no damage to the lawn at all, either from exhaust or "sliding" or the impact itself.  (See http://thewebfairy.com/killtown/pentalawn.html and http://killtown.911review.org/flight77/lawn.html.  Both of these websites have great photos of all aspects of the crash.  As you look at the photos of the building from different angles and at different times, you will see - without any question in your mind - that it could not have been a 757 that hit the building).

-According to the official Report, whatever hit the Pentagon did a 270-degree turn at over 400 miles per hour.  Every professional commercial pilot who was asked about this said that such a maneuver is virtually impossible - especially for a novice flyer (which the alleged Arab pilots were).  (See, for example, http://www.thepowerhour.com/911_analysis/steves-analysis.htm).

-It is highly suspicious that, despite having one of the most comprehensive and complex video, defense and anti-aircraft systems, all of these systems were inactive when the Pentagon was hit.

-It is additionally suspicious that the wing of the Pentagon that was impacted had been undergoing a "strengthening" at the very time of the impact: i.e., blast windows were being put in, and other measures were being taken to "shore up" that part of the building.  (And, as noted above, the company that was doing this is one of the four companies that just happened to be chosen for the clean-up of the WTC site...)  In addition, that wing was the furthest place possible from where all the "brass" were - including Rumsfeld himself, who was in the building at the time.  If you were a hijacker with enough info to be able to penetrate the Pentagon's defense system, you would certainly also know what part of the building had the greatest number of "important people."  So why would you deliberately avoid hitting that part of the building - making a complicated and dangerous 270-degree turn at high speed in order to hit the part of the building that would cause the least damage and loss of life?

If Flight 77 did not hit the Pentagon, this raises two serious questions.  First, what did hit the Pentagon?  And second, what happened to Flight 77 and its passengers?

There are two main theories as to what actually hit the Pentagon.  One theory holds that it was a military "drone" plane (i.e. unmanned, controlled by remote control). And there are at least two such planes which would fit the evidence that exists re the size of the hole made by the plane, the damage caused, and the size and "containment" of the fireball.  The other theory holds that it was a large missile, "dressed up" to look like a small plane at high speed.  And, again, there are such missiles that would fit all the evidence that exists.  Indeed, the missile theory may be the more probable of the two theories, since (i) a missile could be outfitted with a small bomb that would explode on impact (causing the fireball), and (ii) a missile would leave an "exit hole" much like the one in the photos.

If Flight 77 did not hit the Pentagon, what happened to it?  There is at least one truly disturbing theory.  According to the 9/11 Commission Report, two military aircraft were "scrambled" when it was discovered that a "possibly hostile aircraft" was approaching the Pentagon.  Yet these two military craft were "held" just out over the Atlantic Ocean for at least 20-30 minutes before being allowed to attempt to intercept the "plane."  The very disturbing theory has it that the two military planes actually "escorted" Flight 77 out over the Atlantic Ocean and shot it down some time before the "possibly hostile aircraft" (i.e., the military drone or missile) began its approach to the Pentagon.  Note that the time line allows for this scenario: (i) Flight 77 took off at 8:50 am and was hijacked only moments afterward; (ii) Flight 77's transponder was turned off (making the plane "invisible" to radar) by 9:00 am; (iii) whatever crashed into the Pentagon did so at 9:41 am - over 40 minutes later.  Thus, there would have been plenty of time for the military jets to make contact with Flight 77 and order the pilot to follow them - which the pilot would have done without question - then shoot it down over the Atlantic and "replace" it with the drone plane or missile.

Clearly, this theory is as disturbing, if not more so, than the idea that over 2,500 people were murdered in the controlled demolition of the twin towers.  Yet if the twin towers were brought down by controlled demolition - and evidence is piling up in that direction, as noted above - then it is no longer a "stretch" to believe that those who planned and executed the events of 9/11 would deliberately shoot down a commercial airliner, killing everyone aboard.

In any case, unlike the facts and evidence surrounding the collapse of the twin towers, the facts and evidence surrounding the crash at the Pentagon clearly lead to the conclusion that it could not have been a Boeing 757 that struck the building, and that there was clearly a "cover-up" with regard to the crash.

4.  Flight 93.

The 9/11 Commission Rport would have us believe that a "titanic struggle" occurred when passengers on the plane stormed the cockpit to try to overpower the hijackers, and that this was what caused the plane to crash into a field in Pennsylvania.  However, there is quite a bit of evidence to support the belief that Flight 93 was shot down by one or two military planes, and that no such passenger heroics ever occurred.

-Numerous eyewitnesses claim to have seen a "white military plane" following Flight 93 just prior to the crash.  And at least one military veteran believes that the sound he heard just prior to the crash was a missile.  (See http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/flight_93.html and http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/page.cfm?objectid=12192317&method=full&).

-The FBI and Pennsylvania Police cordoned off a second site where wreckage was found - almost eight miles from the crash site.  The only way that wreckage could have been strewn that far is if the plane was blown apart in mid-air.  (See http://thewebfairy.com/killtown/flight93.html (second quote on right side of home page, reported by CNN) and http://www.flight93crash.com/flight93_secondary_debris_field.html (see 5th paragraph)).

-In a speech to the troops in December 2004, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld actually stated that Flight 93 was "shot down."  The Pentagon later claimed that Rumsfeld "misspoke," but given the other evidence to support a shoot-down, it would seem that he "accidentally" spoke the truth.  (See 
http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/12/27/rumsfeld.flt93/).

Finally, it is incredibly suspicious that the FBI took possession of both the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder (the "black boxes"), and has refused to release any of the evidence from either of them.  Thus, we have only their word that the cause of the crash was passengers attempting to overpower the hijackers.

-----------

I also want to touch on a few other related issues re 9/11.

1.  According to the passenger manifests (the lists of passengers on each plane), there were no Arabs on any of the planes.  Nor is there any indication - even in The 9/11 Commission Report - that the hijackers were travelling under aliases.  So how did the hijackers get on the planes?  One theory has it that they were put on board by high-placed government or other officials.

2.  According to numerous reports, at least 5 (and perhaps as many as 7) of the hijackers whose names and photos appeared in the papers just days after the 9/11 attacks were seen alive with their families in Saudi Arabia less than a year later.

3.  The U.S. Government claimed to have "no idea" the attacks were going to occur, nor did they have any names or faces of the hijackers on 9/11.  Yet only 48 hours later - on September 13th - the Goverment released the names and photos of all 19 hijackers, including who the "ringleaders" were.  This single fact stretches credibility a long, long way.

4.  According to an in-depth investigative report (available on DVD) called the "Venice Flying Circus" (that's Venice, Florida, not Venice, Italy), there is a great deal of evidence that Mohammed Atta and the other hijackers were actually CIA operatives, or otherwise associated with the U.S. government, and were certainly not "rabid Islamic fundamentalists" carrying out the will of Osama bin Laden (who, you will remember, was the U.S. government's "man in Afghanistan" during the conflict with the Russians that ended in 1989.  It is a well-known, undisputed fact that bin Laden was supported by the CIA for years).  Consider the following facts from the "Venice Flying Circus" report:

-The majority of the hijackers were trained at two flight schools in Florida, one in Venice and one in Naples.

-Both of those flight schools were bought by Scandinavian nationals about a year or so prior to 9/11.  Both of those Scandinavian nationals were CIA operatives.

-While attending flight school, some of the hijackers were staying in a small community in Naples that was created specifically for families of CIA members.

-While attending flight school, the hijackers were "partying it up": wearing Western clothes, drinking, smoking, getting lap dances, etc.  This is hardly the way "rabid Islamic fundamentalists" would act, since all of those activities are forbidden in Islam.

-Within a few months of 9/11, the two flight schools were sold by the Scandinavian nationals, and they returned to their CIA duties in Scandinavia.

There is a great deal more in the report, which was done so quickly after 9/11 that the government did not have time to "buy everyone's silence" - so the investigator was able to interview many people who interacted with Atta and his crew.

There is also a great deal more on 9/11 in general that I have not touched on, including the EPA's lies about the safety of the air immediately after the collapse of the twin towers (which has already led to the deaths of all 16 search and rescue dogs, and at least one policeman and one firefighter - with dozens more suffering from serious respiratory conditions), the question of all the supposed cell phone calls made by passengers on some of the airplanes (since cellphones don't work at 30,000 feet), the question of whether the plane that hit the south tower was even a commercial airliner, and the suspicious fact that Bush llip-flopped on Osama bin Laden: immediately after the attacks, it was "Wanted dead or alive," "Public Enemy #1," "We'll smoke him out," and a $5 million reward for his capture.  Yet only a year later, Bush said (and I am paraphrasing), "I don't think about him much anymore.  He's been marginalized, and the war on terror is larger than one man."  But when bin Laden released a new tape last year calling for more terror attacks on the U.S., Bush flip-flopped again and said "We need to take him seriously."  Could it be that Bush never really - seriously - went after bin Laden because the two of them were in cahoots?

Of course, all of this leads to the big question: what exactly occurred on 9/11?  There are no "smoking guns" - yet.  And even the most knowledgeable 9/11 truth researchers have not put forth complete theories of the "whole picture."  I do have a theory, based on the available evidence.  However, since I am still working out some of the details, I will provide it when I am ready.

Peace!
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060329/41e684de/attachment-0001.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Wed Mar 29 08:06:40 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 16:06:40 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: It Isn't Amnesty
Message-ID: <20060329160640.B1AC19FD59@lax-gw05.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

OPINION | March 29, 2006
Editorial: It Isn't Amnesty

The immigration bill approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday is a victory for thoughtfulness and reason.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/29/opinion/29wed1.html?ex=1144299600&en=0f12287c65807226&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060329/ec233ad5/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Wed Mar 29 08:08:15 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 16:08:15 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: 'Big Love': Real Polygamists Look at HBO
	Polygamists and Find Sex
Message-ID: <20060329160817.42A2F24AFCE@lax-gw02.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

ARTS / TELEVISION | March 28, 2006
'Big Love': Real Polygamists Look at HBO Polygamists and Find Sex
By FELICIA R. LEE
Many polygamous women are calling HBO's "Big Love" a cultural benchmark, one with the potential to cast a warmer light on their lives.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/28/arts/television/28poly.html?ex=1144299600&en=99ca4e82edc2d11d&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060329/3e02a0e9/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Wed Mar 29 08:10:30 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 16:10:30 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Well Exercised and Supple,
	French Unions Flex Muscles
Message-ID: <20060329161030.DF62224AFB3@lax-gw02.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

INTERNATIONAL / EUROPE | March 29, 2006
Well Exercised and Supple, French Unions Flex Muscles
By CRAIG S. SMITH
Despite one of the lowest rates of unionization, the unions have enormous leverage over the government.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/29/international/europe/29unions.html?ex=1144299600&en=bab67652faad168b&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060329/97263fa1/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Wed Mar 29 08:14:42 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 16:14:42 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Extension of Voting Act Is Likely Despite
	Criticism
Message-ID: <20060329161442.8B1169FD55@lax-gw05.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

NATIONAL | March 29, 2006
Extension of Voting Act Is Likely Despite Criticism
By RICK LYMAN
Some Republicans question the necessity of the Voting Rights Act, but their leaders have shown little interest in battling to overturn it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/29/national/29voting.html?ex=1144299600&en=be8df18108f87891&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060329/c80864c5/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Wed Mar 29 08:15:32 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: 29 Mar 2006 16:15:32 -0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] Headlines for March 29, 2006
Message-ID: <20060329161532.18214.qmail@trinity.democracynow.org>

Mike Blaxill  ( mblaxill at yahoo.com )
sent you this story from democracynow.org



+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  Headlines for March 29, 2006
|  http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/29/154201
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+


- Kadima Wins Israeli Elections 
- Card Resigns As White House Chief of Staff 
- Supreme Court Hears Arguments in Landmark Gitmo Case
- GAO Audit Says New Orleans Lacks Hospital Beds, Clinics
- 25,000 Iraqis Displaced Since Mosque Bombing
- 14 Killed in Attack on Afghan Military Base 
- Countries Halt Training at School of the Americas
- U. of Miami Agrees to Worker Demands After Student Sit-Ins
This story continues at: 
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/29/154201


From hecate at diamonddragon.com  Wed Mar 29 09:40:35 2006
From: hecate at diamonddragon.com (Hecate)
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 17:40:35 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] BBC E-mail: Australia battens hatches again
Message-ID: <20060329_174035_066272.hecate@diamonddragon.com>

Hecate saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you
should see it.



** Australia battens hatches again **
Australia braces for its second major storm in two weeks as Cyclone Glenda heads for its north-west coast.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/asia-pacific/4855822.stm >


** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all
in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/dailyemail/ >


** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have?been verified.

If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm


From hecate at diamonddragon.com  Wed Mar 29 09:41:12 2006
From: hecate at diamonddragon.com (Hecate)
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 17:41:12 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] BBC E-mail: World marvels at total eclipse
Message-ID: <20060329_174112_017562.hecate@diamonddragon.com>

Hecate saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you
should see it.



** World marvels at total eclipse **
Skywatchers around the world were held in thrall as they caught a glimpse of the 'ultimate astronomical show'.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/4849224.stm >


** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all
in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/dailyemail/ >


** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have?been verified.

If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm


From hecate at diamonddragon.com  Wed Mar 29 09:43:10 2006
From: hecate at diamonddragon.com (Hecate)
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 17:43:10 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] BBC E-mail: eBay fights shutdown court threat
Message-ID: <20060329_174310_094303.hecate@diamonddragon.com>

Hecate saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you
should see it.

** Message **
Patent lawyer Steve Maebius said the case could have a profound effect. 

"Any time we talk about altering injunctions, we really are talking about altering the fundamental balance of power," he said. 

The Supreme Court is expected to take several months before it reaches its verdict. 



** eBay fights shutdown court threat **
Online auction house eBay is going to the US Supreme Court to prevent one of its key services being shutdown.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/business/4856370.stm >


** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all
in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/dailyemail/ >


** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have?been verified.

If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm


From hecate at diamonddragon.com  Wed Mar 29 09:44:55 2006
From: hecate at diamonddragon.com (Hecate)
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 17:44:55 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] BBC E-mail: Pacific isles get wildlife drive
Message-ID: <20060329_174454_023790.hecate@diamonddragon.com>

Hecate saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you
should see it.



** Pacific isles get wildlife drive **
A major initiative is launched in Micronesia to conserve the fragile wildlife of the islands of the Pacific.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/4855174.stm >


** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all
in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/dailyemail/ >


** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have?been verified.

If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm


From hecate at diamonddragon.com  Wed Mar 29 09:45:50 2006
From: hecate at diamonddragon.com (Hecate)
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 17:45:50 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] BBC E-mail: Lobbyist Abramoff awaits sentence
Message-ID: <20060329_174550_054376.hecate@diamonddragon.com>

Hecate saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you
should see it.



** Lobbyist Abramoff awaits sentence **
Disgraced US lobbyist Jack Abramoff is due to be sentenced in Miami on charges of conspiracy and wire fraud.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/americas/4856470.stm >


** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all
in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/dailyemail/ >


** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have?been verified.

If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm


From hecate at diamonddragon.com  Wed Mar 29 09:48:30 2006
From: hecate at diamonddragon.com (Hecate)
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 17:48:30 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] BBC E-mail: Berlusconi baby gaffe riles China
Message-ID: <20060329_174830_043650.hecate@diamonddragon.com>

Hecate saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you
should see it.

** Message **
His comments on Maoist China were first made at a rally on Sunday. 

"I am accused of having said that the [Chinese] Communists used to eat children," he said. 

"But read The Black Book of Communism and you will discover that in the China of Mao, they did not eat children, but had them boiled to fertilise the fields." 



** Berlusconi baby gaffe riles China **
Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi lands himself in hot water with comments the Chinese once 'boiled babies' for fertiliser.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/europe/4857226.stm >


** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all
in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/dailyemail/ >


** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have?been verified.

If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm


From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Wed Mar 29 10:55:32 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 18:55:32 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Ex-Prisoners With Court Debt Must Have Vote,
	Judge Rules
Message-ID: <20060329185534.28CAF13B73D@lax-gw04.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

NATIONAL | March 29, 2006
Ex-Prisoners With Court Debt Must Have Vote, Judge Rules
By ADAM LIPTAK
Washington State may not deny former prisoners the right to vote simply because they are too poor to pay outstanding court costs, a state judge ruled.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/29/national/29fees.html?ex=1144299600&en=26cefd110674dd96&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060329/eb36f5a3/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Wed Mar 29 10:56:31 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 18:56:31 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Judges on Secretive Panel Speak Out on Spy
	Program
Message-ID: <20060329185631.7DD4F249D81@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

WASHINGTON | March 29, 2006
Judges on Secretive Panel Speak Out on Spy Program
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
Former judges urged Congress to give the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court a role in overseeing domestic eavesdropping.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/29/politics/29nsa.html?ex=1144299600&en=b06a3f32e7820f9f&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060329/c2b45dc7/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Wed Mar 29 10:57:05 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 18:57:05 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Democrats Opening Assault on Bush Security
	Policies
Message-ID: <20060329185706.2E53724AEC3@lax-gw02.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

WASHINGTON | March 29, 2006
Democrats Opening Assault on Bush Security Policies
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
Leading Democrats aim to rebut the Republican accusation that they have not laid out a coherent set of alternatives.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/29/politics/29security.html?ex=1144299600&en=2dec372f10961cc6&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060329/b0858fc4/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Wed Mar 29 10:57:58 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 18:57:58 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Report Adds to Criticism of Halliburton's
	Iraq Role
Message-ID: <20060329185758.6627A24AEE2@lax-gw02.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

INTERNATIONAL / MIDDLE EAST | March 29, 2006
Report Adds to Criticism of Halliburton's Iraq Role
By JAMES GLANZ
Even as a subsidiary was absorbing criticism on a 2003 no-bid contract, the government officials cited a second contract.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/29/international/middleeast/29halliburton.html?ex=1144299600&en=c09b752a51249b5c&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060329/a3fc93d4/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Wed Mar 29 10:58:36 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 18:58:36 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: City Defends Surveillance of Protesters
Message-ID: <20060329185836.6BA2824AF9E@lax-gw02.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

NEW YORK REGION | March 29, 2006
City Defends Surveillance of Protesters
By JULIA PRESTON
Lawyers argued that New York police officers were authorized to videotape political protests under court-ordered surveillance guidelines that were expanded in 2003.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/29/nyregion/29handschu.html?ex=1144299600&en=8de360d9d023f2b4&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060329/9bde7075/attachment.htm 

From michael at michaelbutler.com  Wed Mar 29 10:59:04 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 10:59:04 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Facts and Folly - Thomas L. Friedman
Message-ID: <C05018F8.2AAD5%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 29, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Facts and Folly
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

I was leaving for a trip the other day and scooped up some reading material
off my desk for the plane ride. I found myself holding three documents: one
was the Bush administration's National Security Strategy for 2006; another
was a new study by the Economic Strategy Institute entitled "America's
Technology Future at Risk," about how America is falling behind the world in
broadband. And the third was "Teaching at Risk," a new report by the
Teaching Commission, headed by the former I.B.M. chairman Louis Gerstner
Jr., about the urgent need to upgrade the quality and pay of America's K-12
teachers.

The contrast was striking. The Bush strategy paper presupposes that we are a
rich country and always will be, and that the only issue is how we choose to
exercise our power. But what the teaching and telecom studies tell us is
that key pillars of U.S. power are eroding, and unless we start tending to
them in a strategic way, we aren't going to be able to project power
anywhere.

Because we've long been rich, there is an abiding faith that we always will
be, and those who dare question that are labeled "defeatists." I wouldn't
call Lou Gerstner a defeatist. He saved I.B.M. by acknowledging its
weaknesses and making dramatic changes ? beginning with scrapping I.B.M.'s
arrogant assumption that because it was such a great company, it could do
extraordinary things with average people. Mr. Gerstner understood that an
extraordinary company could stay that way only if it had a critical mass of
extraordinary people. This is the message of his Teaching Commission: We
cannot remain an extraordinary country without a critical mass of
extraordinary teachers.

"If teaching remains a second-rate profession, America's economy will be
driven by second-rate skills," Mr. Gerstner says. "We can wake up today ? or
we can have a rude awakening sooner than we think."

The Teaching Commission notes that "our schools are only as good as their
teachers," yet this "occupation that makes all others possible is eroding at
its foundations." Top students are far less likely to go into teaching
today; salaries are stagnant; nearly 50 percent of new teachers leave within
five years. To remedy this, the commission calls for raising teachers' base
pay, finding ways to reward the best teachers, raising standards for
acquiring a teaching degree and testing would-be teachers, on the basis of
national standards, to be certain they have mastered the subjects they will
teach (theteachingcommission.org).

Meanwhile, the report by the Economic Strategy Institute, a nonpartisan
think tank, is equally harrowing. It notes that while the U.S. led the world
in broadband Internet access in 2000, it has now fallen to 16th place. In
2000, 40 percent of the world's telecom equipment was produced in America.
That share is now 21 percent and falling. The U.S. ranks 42nd for the
percentage of people with cellphones.

In an age when connectivity means productivity, when communications
infrastructure is at the heart of any innovation ecosystem, these things
matter for job creation and growth. The lack of ultra-high-speed networks in
the U.S. "makes it impossible for U.S.-based companies to enter key new
business sectors" ? one reason venture capitalists are moving their R.&D.
start-ups to Asia, E.S.I. noted.

"The wealth and long-term economic growth of the United States," it added,
"have long depended upon technological advancement as a means of competing
with our foreign rivals. ... America's emphasis has always been on achieving
such high levels of productivity that it could be the low-cost producer
while still paying high wages." The study offers a variety of regulatory and
investment prescriptions (econstrat.org).

It's not surprising that the Bush strategy paper is largely silent about
these educational and technological deficits, as well as about the
investment we need to make in alternative fuels to end our oil addiction.
Because to acknowledge these deficits is to acknowledge that we have to
spend money to fix them, and the radical Bush tax cuts make that impossible.
It would be one thing if we were going into debt to solve these problems
that affect our underlying national strength. But we are going into debt to
buy low-interest houses and more stuff made in China.

We're like a family that is overdrawn at the bank just when the parents need
to send their kid to college, buy a computer and a D.S.L. line, and replace
a gas-guzzling furnace. Whatever "strategic plan" that family has for
advancement, it won't get anywhere until it rebalances its books.

Maureen Dowd is on a book tour.

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Wed Mar 29 10:59:17 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 18:59:17 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Fake ID's at the Border Crossings
Message-ID: <20060329185917.5F47A249CB2@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

OPINION | March 29, 2006
Editorial: Fake ID's at the Border Crossings

If border guards miss shipments of bombs or dangerous nuclear materials, the result could be catastrophic.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/29/opinion/29wed3.html?ex=1144299600&en=582864c6bf8f5125&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060329/b1999f48/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Wed Mar 29 10:59:16 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 18:59:16 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Not Quite What We Had in Mind
Message-ID: <20060329185916.DAD93249D45@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

OPINION | March 29, 2006
Editorial: Not Quite What We Had in Mind

If replacing the White House chief of staff, Andrew Card Jr., with Joshua Bolten passes for a shake-up in this administration, the next two and a half years are going to be grim indeed.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/29/opinion/29wed4.html?ex=1144299600&en=369db0ba95ff6888&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060329/7378f7c7/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Wed Mar 29 10:59:54 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 18:59:54 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: The Memo About the Road to War (6 Letters)
Message-ID: <20060329185955.363B413B7DD@lax-gw04.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

What we're saying...


OPINION | March 29, 2006
The Memo About the Road to War (6 Letters)

To the Editor:.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/29/opinion/l29iraq.html?ex=1144299600&en=f4f7fad2dd3fdbe6&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060329/304e36a8/attachment.htm 

From hecate at diamonddragon.com  Wed Mar 29 11:33:02 2006
From: hecate at diamonddragon.com (Hecate)
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 19:33:02 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] BBC E-mail: Lobbyist Abramoff gets 70 months
Message-ID: <20060329_193302_025362.hecate@diamonddragon.com>

Hecate saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you
should see it.



** Lobbyist Abramoff gets 70 months **
Disgraced US lobbyist Jack Abramoff is jailed for 70 months in Miami for conspiracy and fraud.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/americas/4856470.stm >


** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all
in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/dailyemail/ >


** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have?been verified.

If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm


From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Wed Mar 29 12:22:33 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 15:22:33 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Fear of terrorists in Alaska, 80 Eyes on 2,400 people
Message-ID: <000b01c6536e$87877fb0$1c27e440@Harold>

      This was taken from the LA Times

      To be this is absurd, to others ..????

      Harry 


     
      80 Eyes on 2,400 People

      If terrorists come to tiny Dillingham, Alaska, security cameras will be ready. But privacy concerns have residents up in arms.
      By Tomas Alex Tizon, Times Staff Writer
      March 28, 2006 


      DILLINGHAM, Alaska ? From Anchorage it takes 90 minutes on a propeller plane to reach this fishing village on the state's south-western edge, a place where some people still make raincoats out of walrus intestine.

      This is the Alaskan bush at its most remote. Here, tundra meets sea, and sea turns to ice for half the year. Scattered, almost hidden, in the terrain are some of the most isolated communities on American soil. People choose to live in outposts like Dillingham (pop. 2,400) for that reason: to be left alone.


      ADVERTISEMENT
       
      So eyebrows were raised in January when the first surveillance cameras went up on Main Street. Each camera is a shiny white metallic box with two lenses like eyes. The camera's shape and design resemble a robot's head.

      Workers on motorized lifts installed seven cameras in a 360-degree cluster on top of City Hall. They put up groups of six atop two light poles at the loading dock, and more at the fire hall and boat harbour.

      By mid-February, more than 60 cameras watched over the town, and the Dillingham Police Department plans to install 20 more ? all purchased through a $202,000 Homeland Security grant meant primarily to defend against a terrorist attack.

      Now the residents of this far-flung village have become, in one sense, among the most watched people in the land, with ? as former Mayor Freeman Roberts puts it ? "one camera for every 30 residents."

      Some don't mind, but many others are furious and have banded together to force the city to take the cameras down.

      "You better smile. You're on camera," says Roberts, 64, a barge captain. Roberts himself isn't smiling as he points out a single camera on the side of a building. The camera is aimed toward an alley.

      "It's amazing, isn't it?" he says. He drives around town in his pickup, spying on the cameras that he believes are spying on him. "Everywhere you look, there's one looking at you."

      Roberts, mayor of Dillingham from 1972 to 1978, says the cameras constitute an invasion of privacy, and beyond that, they're just plain creepy. He scratched together a petition demanding removal of the cameras and collected 219 signatures within days. He carries the ragged sheaf of names next to him in the truck.

      The City Council, which supports the cameras, threw out the petition, claiming Roberts did not follow the law, which requires that the signatories be registered voters. Now Roberts is working with others to put together a legal petition to force the issue on the October ballot.

      Roberts climbs out of his truck and slams the door.

      He is a square-jawed man with a slow, deliberate way of talking. He looks out at Nushagak Bay, which remains frozen until the end of April. No boat can enter or leave the harbour until the ice breaks up. He shakes his head. "This is Dillingham, Alaska, folks," he says. "I don't think we have to worry about Osama bin Laden."

      That is, unless Bin Laden wants to go salmon fishing.

      Dillingham is a hub in the Bristol Bay region, which is famous among fishermen for its sockeye runs.

      The inhabitants of about 30 nearby villages come to town for supplies. Slightly more than half the residents of Dillingham are Native Alaskans. The rest are white or mixed, like Roberts, who is Dutch and Yupik Eskimo.

      The village has a rumpled, flophouse feel to it, as if collapsed together by a strong wind from the Bering Sea: faded cedar shacks next to aluminum buildings next to dusty lots of dry-docked fishing boats tipped at all kinds of angles.

      It is a working town in the middle of what some might call nowhere, which, according to Police Chief Richard Thompson, is why residents must be vigilant. Terrorists intent on attacking the United States could, he says, "backdoor it" through a nowhere dot on the tundra just like Dillingham.

      Thompson, with the blessing of the City Council, applied for the Homeland Security grant last year. He is 51, wiry, with a slightly harried air about him. He has spent 22 years in the Dillingham Police Department, starting as dispatcher and becoming chief a year and a half ago.

      It's his department. He and his six officers take the oath to protect very seriously. He bristles at any reference to Big Brother.

      "Tokyo is that way," says Thompson, extending his arm to the left. He's standing near the spot in the harbour where Roberts stood the previous day.

      "Russia is about 800 miles that way," he says, arm extending right.

      "Seattle is about 1,200 miles back that way." He points behind him.

      "So if I have the math right, we're closer to Russia than we are to Seattle."

      Now imagine, he says: What if the bad guys, whoever they are, manage to obtain a nuclear device in Russia, where some weapons are believed to be poorly guarded. They put the device in a container and then hire organized criminals, "maybe Mafiosi," to arrange a tramp steamer to pick it up. The steamer drops off the container at the Dillingham harbour, complete with forged paperwork to ship it to Seattle. The container is picked up by a barge.

      "Ten days later," the chief says, "the barge pulls into the Port of Seattle."

      Thompson pauses for effect.

      "Phoooom," he says, his hands blooming like a flower.

      "Farfetched? My view is we pay people like me to think of the 'what ifs,' " Thompson says. The cameras would help authorities monitor who is entering and leaving the port. If something bad happens, the cameras at the very least could help identify suspects.

      "I'd be willing to bet that's a good reason why we got the grant," Thompson says. "The government, I think, understands the potential."

      The Department of Homeland Security, which gave Alaska more than $16 million in grants last year, takes seriously the threat of terrorists infiltrating the country through remote border areas.

      "Once a terrorist is inside Alaska, that person is inside the United States," says David Liebersbach, director of the Alaska Division of Homeland Security.

      "Phoooom," Thompson says again.

      Police headquarters is a big blue building made of aluminum. In a large room on the second floor, technicians are working out the kinks in the surveillance system. It is a German-made all-digital network that stores footage in computers. Two 42-inch Sony plasma screens on a wall show live video of street scenes, parking lots, building entrances and locations around the harbour.

      From this room, a dispatcher will monitor the busiest parts of town around the clock. Officers can also follow a crime in progress. Thompson hopes the cameras will help in day-to-day crime-fighting. During fishing season, a large transient population comes to town, and drugs and alcohol become a problem. Quaint little Dillingham, he says, becomes "a rough little town."

      He cites crime numbers for the last three years: Homicides: 3. Unclassified deaths: 6. Assaults: 271.

      Thompson tells the story of a skipper, John Henry, 51, who one winter night in 2004 fell asleep on the beach and froze to death. Today, a camera watches over the spot where he died. Thompson says if a camera had been there that night, police could have saved Henry.

      Thompson says he doesn't have the time or interest to spy on people.

      The town leadership stands behind him. Mayor Chris Napoli said the city posted the Homeland Security grant as an agenda item in a council meeting last year. He said the meeting "was poorly attended" ? a nice way of saying nobody came. The subject of surveillance cameras was not mentioned in the meeting notice. On June 2, 2005, the council adopted a resolution accepting the grant.

      Napoli doesn't understand the fuss. "We had an opportunity to enhance security and we took advantage of it," he says. "I thought we were doing what government officials are supposed to do."

      The mayor, who runs a gas station and convenience store across from the police station, bought his own surveillance camera for the store. The banks and grocery stores in town have had surveillance cameras for years. The hospital uses cameras, and the public housing authority two years ago installed 25 cameras at its apartment complex.

      Says high school wrestling coach Johnny Johnson: "If you're not doing anything wrong, what does it matter?"

      Tim Smeekens and his wife moved from Oregon to Alaska eight years ago, living for a time in a tiny native village. A job as a social worker brought Smeekens to Dillingham five years later.

      He has taken over the petition drive started by Roberts, consulting with a lawyer to put together a referendum on the cameras. Based on the number of people who voted in the last election, Smeekens says, he'll need at most about 100 signatures.

      "Not a problem," he says over breakfast at Fisherman's Cafe.

      It's a one-room restaurant with low ceilings and no discernible heat. The temperature hovers around zero. The clientele is a rough-looking crowd. Two men at a nearby table talk about bear-hunting, one claiming to have shot a "brownie" that had a 28-inch skull.

      By contrast, Smeekens looks dapper. He is 53 with roundish glasses that give him a professorial look. The town leaders "assumed they could put up these cameras and nobody would mind," Smeekens says. "Know what? We mind.

      "I value privacy. It's the birthright of every American," he says. The surveillance cameras represent "a chipping away of that right."

      Smeekens says he's fighting over principle. But many others eager to sign the petition have more pragmatic or personal concerns.

      "I guess we have to be mindful not to pick our noses in public," says Donna Shade, owner of a bed and breakfast. She describes herself as someone who naturally feels guilty anyway.

      "It's a Catholic thing," she says. The cameras bolster the sense that "we're not trustworthy."

      Ronnie Heyano, a fisherman, sums up his concerns: "Who will be watching the watchers?"

      Later that afternoon, Roberts, the barge captain, is driving around in his truck again.

      Barge work is hard to come by as long as there's ice in Nushagak Bay; he'll have time to spare until May. He spends much time giving townspeople tours of the camera sites.

      "Here's one thing that really ticks people off. See that building?" says Roberts, gesturing toward an old one-story structure near City Hall. It's the Bristol Bay Counseling Center, a mental health facility.

      "There are people embarrassed to go in there because they think those cameras are taking pictures of them," Roberts says. "You're never going to hear from them."

      On a road behind City Hall, Roberts stops his truck to talk to a fellow barge captain who has stopped his own pickup. Two idling trucks, two rolled-down windows, two men swapping news in the middle of the street. It's a common scene in town.

      "Watch out. Osama's going to get you," Roberts says.

      "Big Brother's going to get you first," says the other skipper, Dennis Johnson.

      Roberts asks if he's a registered voter. Johnson says yes and reminds Roberts to tell him when the petition is ready. The men fall silent, their truck engines quietly rumbling. With a short crisp nod, Roberts drives off.

      Roberts says if the petition fails, he may do the unthinkable: run for mayor again. He predicts he'd win and there would be a few people at City Hall looking for new jobs.

      He heaves a sigh.

      "Dillingham, Alaska," he says simply, his tone implying the lament: What has happened to you 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060329/00bb716a/attachment.htm 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/octet-stream
Size: 881 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060329/00bb716a/attachment.obj 

From autoreply at economist.com  Wed Mar 29 10:16:18 2006
From: autoreply at economist.com (autoreply at economist.com)
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 13:16:18 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] An article for you from Michael Butler.
Message-ID: <200603291747.MAA26718@stage-web-app.economist.com>


- AN ARTICLE FOR YOU, FROM ECONOMIST.COM -

Dear civic,

Michael Butler (michael at intrafi.com) wants you to see this article on Economist.com.



(Note: the sender's e-mail address above has not been verified.)

Subscribe to The Economist print edition, get great savings and FREE full access to Economist.com.  Click here to subscribe:  http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/email.cfm 

Alternatively subscribe to online only version by clicking on the link below and save 25%:

http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/offer.cfm?campaign=168-XLMT



US IMMIGRATION
Mar 29th 2006  

America is in the midst of a great debate about immigration. The House
of Representatives has passed a punitive bill that would make living in
the country illegally a federal felony, while a Senate committee has
approved a softer version that would grant immigrants citizenship.
George Bush is roughly in the middle on an issue that divides his party

ASK policymakers or journalists what the most important foreign-policy
issues facing the United States are, and you hear the predictable
answers of Iraq, terrorism, nuclear proliferation and the like. Ask
ordinary Americans, however, and a concern that crops up again and
again is immigration. This week saw action in the Senate on tackling
this issue, which threatens to divide the ruling Republican Party.

Many Americans, especially in the states close to Mexico, but
increasingly in heartland states further north, worry that the country
is drowning in a tide of foreigners. They fret that illegal immigrants
drive down wages, take jobs from Americans, bring crime and enjoy
welfare services. Even Paul Krugman, an economist and reliably
left-wing columnist for the NEW YORK TIMES, worried about immigration's
economic effects in his article this week. In the past several months,
rising fears about immigration have put pressure on Congress, and on
George Bush, to respond.

The scope of the problem is large--there are 11m or more illegal
immigrants in the United States. Mr Bush, a former governor of Texas,
spoke early in his first term, including with Mexico's president,
Vicente Fox, about regularising the status of illegal workers, the
biggest share of whom are Mexican. On this subject he has shown little
of the penchant for cowboy justice he is often accused of having. In
this year's state-of-the-union speech, he argued that immigrants help
America's economy, and said "we must have a rational, humane
guest-worker programme that rejects amnesty, allows temporary jobs for
people who seek them legally, and reduces smuggling and crime at the
border." But to the Republican base, any guest-worker programme smacks
of amnesty, regardless of what the president says. 

The month before that speech, the House of Representatives, the more
populist of the two chambers of Congress, passed a highly punitive
anti-immigrant bill. It would make living in the United States
illegally a federal felony, rather than a civil offence as it is now.
It would also punish those who protect or hide illegal immigrants, and
extend a border wall begun in California along much of America's
southern boundary. And, counter to the president's wish, it has no
guest-worker provision. This signals that the embattled Mr Bush (who
replaced his chief of staff on Tuesday in what might presage a bigger
White House shake-up) can no longer command the Republican-controlled
House, especially in a mid-term election year. The bill, opposed by
most Democrats, passed with overwhelming Republican support.

But while it might have conservative grass-roots support, the bill's
harsh tone drew criticism. This has come not only from the usual
pro-immigrant groups. A gathering of religious leaders spoke out
against the legislation in a rally on Capitol Hill on Monday, playing
on Moses's plea to Pharaoh by saying "Let our people stay." Earlier
this month, the Roman Catholic cardinal of Los Angeles said that he
would urge his priests and lay Catholics to ignore a ban on aiding
illegal immigrants. And last weekend in Los Angeles, an estimated half
a million people marched against harsh immigration laws, the biggest
protest in the city's history.

The backlash against the House bill may have pushed the Senate in a
different direction this week. On Monday, the upper chamber's judiciary
committee passed a bill which, like the House version, would boost the
number of border guards and make deporting illegal aliens easier. But
the Senate bill omits some of the House's harshest provisions, such as
making living in America illegally a felony and criminalising the
aiding of illegal immigrants. It also envisions legalising the status
of some of those millions currently in the shadows. They must stay for
six years, remaining legally employed, to get a green card. After that,
if they pay back taxes and any fines and learn English, they can become
citizens in five more years. Also in the Senate bill was a provision
for a temporary guest-worker programme. 

The bill split the committee's Republicans--four of ten supported it,
along with all of the Democrats. The measure faces a harder time before
the full chamber. Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader, who harbours
presidential ambitions, may keep it from being brought to a vote,
preferring instead to promote a tougher bill of his own. And any Senate
bill must be reconciled with the House version.

Mr Bush is somewhere in the middle, wanting the guest-worker provision
that the House excludes, but reluctant to hand Democrats a victory by
going with a Senate version that many Republicans will hate. David
Frum, famous for coining the phrase "axis of evil" for Mr Bush, wrote
on Tuesday that immigration could be "strike three" for the president,
who has already annoyed his supporters by nominating Harriet Miers to
the Supreme Court and approving the takeover of American ports by a
Dubai company.

The problem isn't just a political pickle for Mr Bush. Immigration is
an emotive issue for Americans, but it is economically far more
important to its neighbours. Mexico receives more in remittances from
emigrants than any other country in the world except China and India.
Workers abroad sent home $13.3 billion in 2003, equivalent to 140% of
foreign direct investment in Mexico that year. Globally, the World Bank
estimates that official remittances amounted to $167 billion in 2005,
with perhaps 50% more than that total going unrecorded. The bank
focused its 2006 report, "Global Economic Prospects", on migration and
remittances, saying that while the effect of remittances on overall
growth is unclear, they help to reduce severe poverty, improving
investment in education and health.

Meanwhile, rejection of the European Union's draft constitution last
summer, riots by disaffected French youths later in the year and the
row over the Danish cartoons of Muhammad highlight that America is not
alone in its queasiness about immigration. Mr Bush pleaded this week
for the debate to be conducted in a "civil and dignified way". That,
alas, could be wishful thinking.
 

See this article with graphics and related items at http://www.economist.com/agenda/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5677464&fsrc=nwl

Go to http://www.economist.com for more global news, views and analysis from the Economist Group.

- ABOUT ECONOMIST.COM -

Economist.com is the online version of The Economist newspaper, an independent weekly international news and business publication offering clear reporting, commentary and analysis on world politics, business, finance, science & technology, culture, society and the arts.
Economist.com also offers exclusive content online, including additional articles throughout the week in the Global Agenda section.

-	SUBSCRIBE NOW AND SAVE 25% -

Click here: http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/offer.cfm?campaign=168-XLMT

Subscribe now with 25% off and receive full access to:

* all the articles published in The Economist newspaper
* the online archive - allowing you to search and retrieve over 33,000 articles published in The Economist since 1997
* The World in  - The Economist's outlook on the year
* Business encyclopedia - allows you to find a definition and explanation for any business term


- ABOUT THIS E-MAIL -

This e-mail was sent to you by the person at the e-mail address listed
above through a link found on Economist.com.  We will not send you any
future messages as a result of your being the recipient of this e-mail.


- COPYRIGHT -

This e-mail message and Economist articles linked from it are copyright
(c) 2006 The Economist Newspaper Group Limited. All rights reserved.
http://www.economist.com/help/copy_general.cfm

Economist.com privacy policy: http://www.economist.com/about/privacy.cfm



From swiggard at comcast.net  Thu Mar 30 03:35:41 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2006 06:35:41 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Down on Border,
	'La Linea' Isn't So Clear - Washington Post
Message-ID: <442BC28D.1010403@comcast.net>

Down on Border, 'La Linea' Isn't So Clear
Bush to Discuss Illegal Crossings and Drug Trade at Three-Way Summit in 
Cancun

By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, March 30, 2006; A04

NOGALES, Mexico -- Troops. Barricades. Guns.

On the border, this is the vocabulary of U.S.-Mexico relations. Here at 
one of the busiest crossing points, dingy metal walls separate the 
United States from Mexico, rich from poor. The walls are spray-painted 
with crude images of American border patrol agents, their pistols 
leveled at brown-skinned men.

Even as differences over immigration and border security -- roiled this 
week by congressional debates and massive protests by Latinos across the 
United States -- threaten to dredge a deeper divide between the nations, 
it is clear that they are increasingly knit by an exchange of business, 
ideas and, above all, human beings.

On Thursday and Friday, when President Bush meets in Cancun with 
President Vicente Fox, there will be no topic more pressing than the 
border -- "La Linea," as Mexicans call it -- a barrier that dominates a 
relationship marked both by enormous potential and overwhelming 
problems. Bush arrived in Cancun Wednesday night.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper will also participate in the 
talks at the coastal resort, the second session since the formation of 
the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America, intended to 
foster cooperation among the United States, Mexico and Canada.

Historic feelings of mistrust remain strong on the Mexican side of the 
border with the United States. Business is booming, but so is crime, and 
the rapid but lopsided economic development of the region has 
highlighted the persistent differences in living standards between the 
two countries.

In 2005, the United States imported a record $170 billion in goods from 
Mexico and exported $120 billion to its southern neighbor, according to 
the U.S. Department of Commerce. Twelve years after the implementation 
of the North American Free Trade Agreement, American business people tap 
into high-speed, Wi-Fi networks in the lobbies of U.S.-style hotels in 
border towns such as Nogales.

But out in the remote deserts, the border sizzles with a different kind 
of activity. An all-time high of 1.17 million people, the great majority 
of them Mexican migrants, were arrested by U.S. agents for illegal 
border crossing between October 2004 and October 2005. A record 473 
people died while trying to cross, according to the U.S. Border Patrol.

Uncounted hundreds of thousands more make it into the United States 
illegally and blend into a nationwide pool of surreptitious, cheap 
labor. They work on cleanup crews in Houston, construction sites in 
Virginia and onion fields in California, ever one step ahead of deportation.

At the same time, Mexico remains a major conduit for illegal drugs, 
turning border towns such as Nuevo Laredo and Juarez into virtual 
shooting galleries and further complicating relations with the United 
States.

In the 700-mile corridor between El Paso and Nuevo Laredo, U.S. drug 
enforcement agents seized 1,220 kilos of cocaine in 2005, up from 700 
kilos four years earlier. The amount of methamphetamine confiscated 
between the Texas border cities of Laredo and Brownsville nearly tripled 
in those years, to 354 kilos, while marijuana seizures in the Phoenix 
border-crossing area more than doubled, to 285,000 kilos.

The torrent of drugs and migrants across the Arizona border -- an 
especially hazardous trip because of the dangers of dehydration in the 
vast desert -- has turned that state into a flash point for confrontation.

Gov. Janet Napolitano (D) issued an executive order this month allowing 
her to dispatch more National Guard troops to the border, even as she 
stated that "we are not at war with Mexico." The state legislature has 
tried to take steps of its own to marshal troops, and the volunteer 
Minuteman Civil Defense Corps launched citizen border patrols.

Outside Nogales, a city of 20,000 where the main roads funnel north to 
the Arizona border, the cycle of attempted crossings, arrests, 
deportations and more attempts revolves like a surreal game.

One recent afternoon, Abram Gutierrez, a 23-year-old migrant with 
chipped fingernails and a dirty sweat shirt, devoured a bowl of instant 
noodles outside the building housing Grupo Beta, a humanitarian aid 
program funded by the Mexican government. Hours before, he had been 
caught in Arizona and taken back to Nogales. Now he was plotting a 
second try -- and a third and fourth, if need be.

"We'll see who gets bored first," Gutierrez said, laughing. His friend, 
Lasaroa Damian, 27, said Bush and Fox should realize that migrants "are 
like cats" who find another way into a house after the front door is closed.

In the United States, debate over illegal immigration has become 
super-heated with election-year politics. The House of Representatives 
passed a bill in December that would make it a felony for a person to be 
in the United States illegally, and some members have proposed building 
a wall along the entire U.S.-Mexico border.

Now the divisive issue has moved to the Senate, where this week the 
Judiciary Committee approved a bill that would create a large 
temporary-worker program and allow an estimated 11 million illegal 
immigrants to apply for work visas after paying fines. But Majority 
Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) has proposed stiffening penalties for 
businesses that hire illegal immigrants, and many conservatives strongly 
oppose any amnesty.

The Fox government took out full-page ads last week in several major 
U.S. newspapers, including The Washington Post, urging an immigration 
pact that would allow assimilation of undocumented workers living in the 
United States. "We are your friends and neighbors. Let's work together," 
the ads read.

"Mexico and the U.S., I think, are becoming more aware that they are 
interdependent, and perhaps neither of the countries feels entirely 
comfortable with that interdependence," Geronimo Gutierrez, Mexico's 
undersecretary for North American affairs, said in an interview. "The 
relationship is at a fairly complex moment of catharsis."

But Fox, who cannot run for reelection and will leave office in 
December, has responded angrily to U.S. proposals to tighten the border. 
In a recent speech, he predicted that by 2010, the United States would 
"beg" Mexico for workers in vain, suggesting that by then the Mexican 
economy would generate enough jobs to sustain its 100 million-plus people.

"The rhetoric is more strident. The politics is driving this," Michael 
Shifter, director of the nonprofit Inter-American Dialogue, said by 
phone from Washington. "The U.S. and Mexico have a knack for bringing 
out the worst in each other."

It wasn't supposed to turn out this way. When Fox was elected in 2000, 
many here and in the United States predicted an era of what was dubbed 
"ranchero diplomacy," with the two leaders bonding at Bush's Texas ranch 
and Fox's hacienda. On Sept. 5, 2001, Bush declared that Mexico 
represented the most important international relationship for the United 
States.

Six days later, terrorists smashed planes into the World Trade Center 
and the Pentagon, and the U.S. focus shifted to the Middle East and 
South Asia. Mexico later alienated the United States by not supporting 
the war in Iraq.

Mexicans weren't entirely surprised to see their relationship drop from 
the forefront of U.S. foreign policy. But Shifter said that "the 
question Mexicans raise is, did it have to completely disappear?"

A disappearance of another sort, beyond the vigilant gaze of border 
patrol agents, is exactly what Abram Gutierrez wants. For him, the other 
side of the border represents " el color verde " -- the color green, the 
color of money. Sitting in the hot Nogales sun last week, he vowed to 
make it across this time, whether by "holes or tunnels or the desert."

Francisco Loureiro, who runs a shelter in Nogales that has housed 
600,000 migrants in 24 years, recognizes Gutierrez's determination. It 
is a quality, he said, that he has seen over and over in the men who 
pass through his shelter.

Loureiro says the only solution is a broad guest-worker program, 
something the Bush administration recently proposed. But he said his 
expectations are low for the upcoming meeting between the U.S. and 
Mexican leaders.

"Every time they talk, I have hope," he said. "But things are getting 
worse."

When the sun drops, Loureiro's little shelter will be full, as it is 
every night. When Gutierrez disappears, he knows, thousands more will 
follow.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/29/AR2006032902228.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060330/f55ccc6e/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Thu Mar 30 03:36:49 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2006 06:36:49 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Security Council Pressures Tehran - Washington Post
Message-ID: <442BC2D1.6050505@comcast.net>

Security Council Pressures Tehran
Iran Is Urged to Halt Uranium Enrichment

By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 30, 2006; A01

UNITED NATIONS, March 29 -- The Security Council called on Iran 
Wednesday to suspend its uranium enrichment program within 30 days, 
ending three weeks of deadlock between Western powers and Russia and 
China over how to pressure Tehran to prove its nuclear efforts are not 
aimed at making weapons.

The 15-member council unanimously adopted a nonbinding statement on Iran 
after the United States and five other key countries finished difficult 
negotiations on its wording. The statement does not commit the United 
Nations to action against Iran and was written to avoid language that 
might clearly set the stage for sanctions or subsequent military moves 
-- the sort of direct pressure that Russia and China have declined to 
support.

But U.S. and other Western officials said the Security Council's action 
-- its first unified statement on Iran's nuclear program -- represents 
an important breakthrough and could set the stage for a tougher line 
later if Tehran refuses to meet the council's demands. Secretary of 
State Condoleezza Rice was set to meet Thursday in Berlin with

foreign ministers of Russia, China, France, Britain and Germany to map 
out the next steps in confronting Iran over its nuclear program.

"Iran is more isolated now than ever," Rice said in a statement after 
the vote. "The Security Council's Presidential Statement sends an 
unmistakable message to Iran that its efforts to conceal its nuclear 
program and evade its international obligations are unacceptable."

Referring to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations' 
atomic watchdog, she continued: "The international community expects 
Iran to comply with the IAEA's call to suspend all enrichment-related 
activity and to return to negotiations."

Iran's U.N. ambassador, Javad Zarif, told reporters his government has 
not decided on a formal response, but said that Iran will never give up 
its right to produce nuclear fuel for a peaceful nuclear energy program.

"Iran will want to cooperate with the international community, but it 
does not accept pressure or intimidation," he said. "We have made it 
clear at the highest levels of government Iran does not want nuclear 
weapons, nor does it want to pursue development, stockpiling or 
acquisition of these inhumane weapons."

The council accord was struck just hours after Rice urged Russian 
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov during a telephone call to support a 
French and British draft statement urging Iran to suspend its uranium 
enrichment within 30 days or face increased, but unspecified, 
international pressure. The statement also calls on Iran to fully 
cooperate with the IAEA, which conducts inspections aimed at preventing 
the spread of atomic weapons.

U.S., British and French diplomats secured Russian and Chinese support 
by offering concessions that softened the tone of the statement, which 
was read by the council's rotating president, Cesar Mayoral of 
Argentina. They included extending the deadline for Iranian compliance 
from 14 to 30 days, and dropping language hinting that Iran's nuclear 
program constitutes a threat to international peace and security.

The agreement on the statement masked persistent divisions among the 
Security Council five veto-wielding powers over the threat of sanctions 
or the military force to compel Iranian cooperation.

Lavrov said in Moscow that "any ideas involving the use of force or 
pressure in resolving the issue are counterproductive and cannot be 
supported."

China's U.N. ambassador, Wang Guangya, told reporters in New York that 
the council's statement underscores the importance of pursuing a 
diplomatic settlement and letting U.N. inspectors, not the Security 
Council, take the lead.

John R. Bolton, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, insisted that 
the Security Council, which is vested by the U.N. charter with 
responsibility for responding to threats to international peace and 
security, has the obligation to prevent Tehran from producing nuclear 
weapons. He expressed frustration that Moscow and Beijing had blocked 
language in the statement highlighting the council's obligation to react 
to such threats.

"What happened here today is that Russia and China declined to quote 
from the U.N. charter," said Bolton, waving a copy of the charter. "We 
accept that . . . because the message is clear, nonetheless, that Iran's 
nuclear weapons program is unacceptable."

Russia's U.N. ambassador, Andrei Denisov, conceded that there are 
"suspicions, very strong suspicions" that Iran is developing nuclear 
weapons, but he said there is still no hard evidence and that it is up 
to U.N. nuclear inspectors to decide.

The U.N. statement expressed concern that the IAEA has not provided 
assurances, after years of investigation into covert aspects of Tehran's 
nuclear program, that Iran is not secretly developing nuclear weapons. 
It calls on Iran to comply with the agency's demand to halt all of its 
uranium enrichment activities to "build confidence" that Iran's nuclear 
activities are for an "exclusively peaceful purpose." IAEA Director 
General Mohamed ElBaradei is to report on "the process of Iran's 
compliance" in 30 days.

Iran says it needs to enrich uranium to produce electricity for an 
energy-hungry society. The IAEA has accused Iran of engaging in a 
pattern of deception and concealment that has fueled international 
suspicions. It acknowledges that Iran has the right to nuclear energy 
and that it cannot prove Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/29/AR2006032900317.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060330/02e377fd/attachment-0001.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Thu Mar 30 03:39:54 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2006 06:39:54 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Bush Wanted War - Richard Cohen - Washington Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <442BC38A.3030806@comcast.net>

Bush Wanted War
<>
By Richard Cohen
The Washington Post
Thursday, March 30, 2006; 12:00 AM

It is my firm belief that if, say, a few dozen people simultaneously did 
an Internet search for the words "Bush lied," computers all over the 
country would crash and the energy grid would buckle, producing a 
rolling blackout that would begin somewhere around Terre Haute, Ind., 
and end in Barnstable, Mass. So common is the statement "Bush lied" that 
it seems sometimes that I am the only blue-state person who does not 
think it is true. Then, last week, the indomitable Helen Thomas changed 
all that with a single question. She asked George Bush why he wanted "to 
go to war" from the moment he "stepped into the White House," and the 
president said, "You know, I didn't want war." With that, the last 
blue-state skeptic folded.

I would not go so far as to say that Bush wanted war from Day One in the 
White House, but there was plenty of evidence he had Saddam on his mind 
and in his sights from the very moment he got the news of the terrorist 
attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. We have it from 
Richard Clarke, formerly the White House's chief anti-terrorism 
official, that within a day of the attacks Bush was inquiring if Saddam 
might have had a hand in them. When told no -- "But, Mr. President, 
al-Qaeda did this," Clarke told him -- it became instantly clear that 
this was not the answer Bush wanted. "'Look into Iraq, Saddam,' the 
president said testily," Clarke writes in his book, "Against All Enemies."

Similarly, Bob Woodward says in his book, "Plan of Attack," that not 
only was Bush fixated on Iraq, but by Thanksgiving of 2001, he already 
had told Don Rumsfeld to prepare a plan for the invasion of that 
country. "Let's get started on this," the president said, cautioning the 
defense secretary not to tell anyone. Rumsfeld said that eventually he 
would have to take CIA Director George Tenet into his confidence. 
"'Fine."' Woodward quotes Bush as saying -- "but not now."

As for myself, I was told by a European intelligence official that after 
flying to Washington right after the 9/11 attacks, he was stunned to 
discover that talk had already turned to Iraq. This was particularly 
true at the Pentagon, where Paul Wolfowitz was obsessed with Iraq, and 
that seems to have been true of the White House as well. And now we know 
from various British accounts that close aides to Prime Minister Tony 
Blair recognized early on that Bush was going to go to war -- and that 
Blair, his poodle at obedient heel, would follow along. More recently we 
learned -- again from British sources -- that even though Bush went back 
to the United Nations for yet another resolution condemning Iraq, he was 
determined to make war almost no matter what.

None of this necessarily means that Bush doctored U.S. intelligence to 
make a purposely false case that Iraq was seething with weapons of mass 
destruction. There is plenty of evidence that others in the 
administration -- Dick Cheney, in particular -- exaggerated such that 
their pants must have caught fire, but nothing so far proved that Bush 
knew he was making a false case. Indeed, foreign intelligence sources 
were in agreement with Bush on Iraq's WMD and so were Clinton 
administration officials who had seen some of the same intelligence. 
Even within the Bush administration, critics of the war -- and there 
were some -- were just as convinced that Saddam had WMD. Colin Powell, 
you may recall, soiled his stellar reputation with a United Nations 
speech that is now just plain sad to read. Almost none of it is true.

There remains, though, the little matter of what was in Bush's gut -- 
not his head, mind you, but that elusive place where emotion resides. It 
was there, in the moments after 9/11, that Bush truly decided on war, 
maybe because Saddam had once tried to kill George H.W. Bush, maybe 
because the neocons had convinced him that a brief war in Iraq would 
have long-term salutary consequences for the entire Middle East, maybe 
because he could not abide the thought that a monster like Saddam might 
die in his sleep -- and maybe because he heard destiny calling.

Whatever Bush's specific reason or reasons, the one thing that's so far 
missing from the record is proof of him looking for a genuine way out of 
war instead of looking for a way to get it started. Bush wanted war. He 
just didn't want the war he got.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/29/AR2006032902057.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060330/46fdeaf4/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Thu Mar 30 03:44:52 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2006 06:44:52 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Guard the Borders -- And Face Facts,
 Too - George Will - Washington Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <442BC4B4.8010809@comcast.net>

Guard the Borders -- And Face Facts, Too
<>
By George F. Will
The Washington Post
Thursday, March 30, 2006; A23

America, the only developed nation that shares a long -- 2,000-mile -- 
border with a Third World nation, could seal that border. East Germany 
showed how: walls, barbed wire, machine gun-toting border guards in 
towers, mine fields, large, irritable dogs. And we have modern 
technologies that East Germany never had: sophisticated sensors, 
unmanned surveillance drones, etc.

It is a melancholy fact that many of these may have to be employed along 
the U.S.-Mexican border. The alternatives are dangerous and disagreeable 
conditions for Americans residing near the border, and vigilantism. It 
is, however, important that Americans feel melancholy about taking such 
measures to frustrate immigration that usually is an entrepreneurial 
act: taking risks to get to America to do work most Americans spurn. As 
the debate about immigration policy boils, augmented border control must 
not be the entire agenda, lest other thorny problems be ignored, and 
lest America turn a scowling face to the south and, to some extent, to 
many immigrants already here.

But control belongs at the top of the agenda, for four reasons. First, 
control of borders is an essential attribute of sovereignty. Second, 
conditions along the border mock the rule of law. Third, large rallies 
by immigrants, many of them here illegally, protesting more stringent 
control of immigration reveal that many immigrants have, alas, 
assimilated: They have acquired the entitlement mentality created by 
America's welfare state, asserting an entitlement to exemption from the 
laws of the society they invited themselves into. Fourth, giving 
Americans a sense that borders are controlled is a prerequisite for calm 
consideration of what policy that control should serve.

Of the nation's illegal immigrants -- estimated to be at least 11 
million, a cohort larger than the combined populations of 12 states -- 
60 percent have been here at least five years. Most have roots in their 
communities. Their children born here are U.S. citizens. We are not 
going to take the draconian police measures necessary to deport 11 
million people. They would fill 200,000 buses in a caravan stretching 
bumper-to-bumper from San Diego to Alaska -- where, by the way, 26,000 
Latinos live. And there are no plausible incentives to get the 11 
million to board the buses.

Facts, a conservative (John Adams) said, are stubborn things, and 
regarding immigration, true conservatives take their bearings from facts 
such as those in the preceding paragraph. Conservatives should want, as 
the president proposes, a guest worker program to supply what the U.S. 
economy demands -- immigrant labor for entry-level jobs. Conservatives 
should favor a policy of encouraging unlimited immigration by educated 
people with math, engineering, technology or science skills that 
America's education system is not sufficiently supplying.

And conservatives should favor reducing illegality by putting illegal 
immigrants on a path out of society's crevices and into citizenship by 
paying fines and back taxes and learning English. Faux conservatives 
absurdly call this price tag on legal status "amnesty." Actually, it 
would prevent the emergence of a sullen, simmering subculture of the 
permanently marginalized, akin to the Arab ghettos in France. The 
House-passed bill, making it a felony to be in the country illegally, 
would make 11 million people permanently ineligible for legal status. To 
what end?

Within a decade the New York and Washington metropolitan regions will 
join the Miami, Houston, Los Angeles and San Francisco regions in having 
majorities made up of minorities, partly because immigrants have higher 
birthrates than whites. Since 2000, births, not immigration, have been 
the largest source of growth of America's Latino population.

Urban immigrant communities, with their support networks, are magnets 
for immigrants. Good. Investor's Business Daily reports a new study 
demonstrating that "over the past 30 years rising immigration led to 
higher wages for U.S.-born workers. Cities that served as migrant 
magnets did better than others. Why? Hiring one worker creates wealth 
with which to hire more workers."

The president, who has not hoarded his political capital, spent some 
trying to get the nation to face facts about the bleak future of an 
unreformed Social Security system. Concerning which: In 1940 there were 
42 workers for every retiree; today there are 3.1. By 2030, when all 77 
million baby boomers will have left the work force, there will be only 
2.2. And that projection assumes net annual immigration, legal and 
illegal, of 900,000, more than double the 400,000 foreigners who, under 
the terms of proposed Senate legislation, could come here to work each year.

Today the president is spending more of his depleted political capital 
by standing to the left of much of his political base, which favors 
merely preventative and punitive measures regarding immigration. He is 
right to take his stand there.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/29/AR2006032902004.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060330/799ca81f/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Thu Mar 30 03:47:11 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2006 06:47:11 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Could Sanctions Stop Iran? - Carne Ross - Washington
	Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <442BC53F.5080708@comcast.net>

Could Sanctions Stop Iran?
Recent History Suggests That the Prospects Aren't Good
<>
By Carne Ross
The Washington Post
Thursday, March 30, 2006; A23

Now that the U.N. Security Council has agreed on a statement demanding 
that Iran restrict its nuclear program, the United States and its allies 
are doubtless considering tougher measures, including sanctions, to 
force Iran's compliance. The experience of sanctions imposed on Iraq 
(and on other countries), which I helped engineer and maintain as a 
British diplomat at the Security Council, offers some lessons.

First, no sanctions regime is effective unless its objective is widely 
shared, especially by the neighbors of the targeted state. On Iraq, even 
though the United States and Britain managed, through strenuous 
diplomatic effort, to gain Security Council approval of sanctions, there 
was considerable evasion of the sanctions by Iraq's neighbors and 
others, for whom their economic welfare was more important that the goal 
of disarming Iraq. Even if China and Russia do not block any sanctions 
resolution on Iran, no resolution will be effective unless they and 
other states choose to enforce the sanctions.

Second, oil sanctions are a double-edged sword. In the latter years of 
the 12-year sanctions regime on Iraq, Saddam Hussein often threatened to 
stop Iraq's oil exports in order to deter the United States and Britain 
from imposing measures in the Security Council to thwart his 
sanctions-busting techniques. Then as now, the gap between global oil 
demand and supply was so small that even the threat of stopping Iraq's 
exports caused damaging spikes in global oil prices. Any attempt to 
block or limit Iran's oil exports would surely have similar effects.

Third, even the most aggressive sanctions regimes, such as comprehensive 
economic sanctions, tend not to achieve their desired effects. While 
they were in effect, sanctions on Iraq prevented it from rearming -- 
despite the claims of the U.S. and British governments before the 2003 
invasion. But the sanctions did not force Iraq to comply fully with the 
United Nations' weapons inspectors. It finally took the threat of 
invasion for Iraq to cooperate with the inspectors in the months before 
the war.

Instead, comprehensive sanctions caused considerable human suffering in 
Iraq and, thanks to the control over food rationing that the 
oil-for-food program placed in the regime's hands, they arguably helped 
reinforce Hussein's rule. This mistake must not be repeated.

Fourth, any sanctions regime requires a long-term, patient and detailed 
effort to succeed. Sanctions on Slobodan Milosevic's Yugoslavia were 
effective partly because the United States and the European Union 
devoted considerable resources to targeting Milosevic's illegal 
financial holdings. Although there was lots of rhetoric, and American 
ships patrolled the Persian Gulf, sanctions enforcement on Iraq was 
sporadic, as the United States and its allies allowed Iraq's neighbors, 
particularly Jordan and Turkey, to import oil illegally. It's hard to 
believe that support for sanctions against Iran, even if they were 
imposed, would endure for very long.

Sanctions on Libya, imposed in 1992 after the bombing of Pan Am Flight 
103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, were more effective in part because they 
were more limited. The U.N. ban on arms sales and air travel to Libya 
was seen as measured and commensurate pressure on Moammar Gaddafi to 
comply with the Security Council's demand that two Libyan agents accused 
of planning the bombing be handed over for trial. Even then, it took 
many years before Libya complied. Here there is a lesson that sanctions, 
when supported politically and patiently applied, can eventually work. 
Perhaps here there is scope for something that could work with Iran: a 
package of travel bans and financial measures targeting Iranian leaders. 
Targeted sanctions are, after the Iraq experience, now the fashion.

But there is one big reason why any U.S. effort to obtain sanctions 
against Iran is unlikely to be effective. All U.N. sanctions in the past 
have been imposed on governments that have done something seriously 
wrong -- such as invading other countries (Iraq) or brazenly hosting 
terrorist organizations (the Taliban). The claim that Iran might be 
developing a nuclear bomb hardly meets this standard, particularly 
because Pakistan and India got away with it (and with U.S. sympathy) and 
because U.S. intelligence assertions on weapons of mass destruction are, 
thanks to the Iraq experience, thoroughly disbelieved. Unless Iran is 
silly enough to do something such as testing a bomb (which is not very 
likely), there will probably not be sufficient international support for 
punitive measures.

All of these reasons suggest that sanctions, as a policy option, are far 
from straightforward. Without troublemaking from Iran (which perhaps the 
United States is hoping for), they are unlikely to be agreed to under 
the current circumstances, and even if they are, they will succeed only 
if they are very carefully designed, targeted and supported by long-term 
and diligent diplomacy to shore up support.

The writer is a former diplomat who served in Britain's delegation to 
the United Nations from 1998 to 2002. He is now director of Independent 
Diplomat, a nonprofit diplomatic advisory group.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/29/AR2006032902003.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060330/ed519af0/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Thu Mar 30 03:49:52 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2006 06:49:52 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] A healthy Medicare drug plan - Boston Globe Op-Ed
Message-ID: <442BC5E0.6080103@comcast.net>


  A healthy Medicare drug plan

By Newt Gingrich and David Merritt  |  March 30, 2006  |   The Boston Globe

AMID THE SHRILL CRIES that the sky is falling on senior citizens comes 
news on how Medicare beneficiaries view their new prescription drug 
benefit. According to two recent surveys, conducted on behalf of 
America's Health Insurance Plans, of more than 800 randomly selected 
seniors enrolled in the Medicare drug benefit, 84 percent who signed up 
voluntarily experienced no problems enrolling; two-thirds say the 
benefits are worth the time and effort to evaluate their options and 
plans; 59 percent of self-enrolled seniors say they are saving money; 
and 90 percent of beneficiaries who were automatically enrolled, most of 
whom are poor, have had few problems getting their prescriptions.

The new Medicare prescription drug benefit is delivering on its promise 
of more choices at lower cost. But instead of championing the program's 
success, critics are desperate to find problems with what House 
Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi describes as ''this disastrous Republican 
Medicare prescription drug plan." With an overwhelming majority of 
seniors happy with their coverage, partisan critics have a new doomsday 
prophecy, the April 1 deadline when private insurers can stop paying for 
prescription drugs not on their formularies. Seniors are getting the 
medicines they need, and will continue to get them. Every plan is 
required to cover all medically necessary prescriptions. This means that 
a wide range of drugs, from chemotherapy drugs to antidepressants, will 
not be affected by the deadline. Plans also have extensive formularies 
that cover nearly all of the most commonly-prescribed medicines. For 
those medicines not covered, seniors can work with their physicians to 
find a generic equivalent or they can apply for an extension or 
exception and have an answer within 72 hours. No senior will go without 
the medicines their doctors prescribe -- and the majority of the costs 
for these drugs will be covered by Medicare.

Competition is driving down prices. Total federal spending will be 20 
percent lower than projections because seniors are shopping for plans 
with lower premiums. With a plethora of choices, seniors and their 
families have chosen wisely. Medicare estimated that monthly premiums 
for the new drug plans would be $37 a month. Competition and consumer 
empowerment have brought the price down to $25 per month. President Bush 
and Congress enacted bold reforms in 2003, but the transformation of 
Medicare must not stop here. Experts estimate that Medicare will have a 
shortfall of nearly $22 trillion in the coming decades. Clearly, it is 
the perfect opportunity to take the next step toward saving Medicare.

First, Medicare must effectively engage its beneficiaries in their 
health and healthcare through consumer-centric health plans. 
Tax-friendly accounts, like Health Savings Accounts, have had a dramatic 
impact in private sector healthcare in just two years. When consumers 
directly control their healthcare dollars, they are wiser purchasers and 
still get the care they need. Seniors deserve the same opportunities -- 
and benefits -- that more than 4 million other Americans now enjoy.

Second, to become wise consumers, individuals need information about the 
healthcare products and services they will purchase. Medicare will soon 
post the prices it pays for common medical procedures. But Medicare 
beneficiaries -- and all other healthcare consumers -- have the right to 
know not only the cost but also the quality of the physicians and 
hospitals they depend upon.

Third, Medicare should reimburse physicians, hospitals, and other 
providers based on the quality of care they deliver. In the current 
system, if patients are healthy, they don't see their doctors; and if 
they don't see their doctors, their doctors don't get paid. This 
perverse approach must change.

Last, Medicare must make health information technology an essential part 
of the program. Providers will deliver better quality care with 
technology, and health information technology will also empower 
consumers to manage their health better and more easily find cost and 
quality information.

These solutions will improve individual health, reduce costs, and build 
a brighter future for all Americans.

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich is founder of the Center for Health 
Transformation. David Merritt is a project director at the Center. 
America's Health Insurance Plans is a member of the Center.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/30/a_healthy_medicare_drug_plan/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060330/845d74b5/attachment.htm 

From newsletter at villagevoice.com  Wed Mar 29 22:33:41 2006
From: newsletter at villagevoice.com (Village Voice Newsletter)
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2006 01:33:41 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Today's 'Voice': The Dark Roots of New York's Hair Trade
Message-ID: <20060330063341.77501.qmail@www3.villagevoice.com>

An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060330/103f3107/attachment-0001.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Thu Mar 30 03:53:06 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2006 06:53:06 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Arab League futility - Boston Globe Editorial
Message-ID: <442BC6A2.7030303@comcast.net>


  Arab League futility

March 30, 2006  |  Editorial  |  The Boston Globe

THIS WEEK'S ARAB LEAGUE summit in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, 
appeared to validate the group's reputation for idle chatter and obtuse 
decisions.

If the site of the summit was not callous enough -- the host government 
is the perpetrator of an ongoing genocide in Darfur -- the participants 
made things worse by rejecting a proposal to supplement 7,000 
ineffectual African Union monitors in Darfur with a substantial United 
Nations peacekeeping force. In so doing, the league's 22 members were 
accepting the cynical line of Sudan's genocidal ruler, Omar al-Bashir, 
who characterized the plan for a UN peacekeeping force in Darfur as a 
violation of Sudan's sovereignty.

This gesture of solidarity with the forces behind mass murder, 
systematic rape, and the ethnic cleansing of non-Arab African tribal 
groups in Darfur cast a pall on everything else that was said, or left 
unsaid, by the dignitaries -- mostly autocrats -- in attendance in Khartoum.

The summit's pledge of solidarity with the Palestinians, in conjunction 
with a repetition of the 2002 Arab League offer of peace with Israel in 
return for a withdrawal from all Arab lands, belongs under the rubric of 
idle chatter. The vapidity of the members' stance was evident in their 
refusal to increase last year's commitment to contribute $55 million per 
month to the Palestinian Authority. The Palestinians are asking for $170 
million.

But the most dramatic -- and pathetic -- failing of the summit was its 
effort to address the twin specters of sectarian warfare and Iranian 
influence in Iraq. In a barely veiled lament at the prospect of 
US-Iranian talks about Iraq's future, the Arab League's secretary 
general, Amr Moussa, said: ''Any solution for the Iraqi problem cannot 
be reached without Arabs and Arab participation. Any result of 
consultations without Arab participation will be considered insufficient 
and will not lead to a solution."

This was a coded way of expressing deep Arab fears that the United 
States and Iran are preparing to subtract Iraq from the Arab world, 
allowing it to be absorbed into a swelling sphere of Iranian influence. 
At the summit's closing session, Iraq's foreign minister told the other 
Arab states that they shared the blame for what is happening today in 
Iraq because of their indifference to decades of Saddam Hussein's 
''authoritarian rule and wars." And he rightly said they had an 
obligation now to help Iraq in ''isolating terrorism and drying up the 
sources that finance its activities."

It is in the interest of the Arab states to heed this plea, because the 
jihadists now wreaking havoc in Iraq will likely be coming after them next.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2006/03/30/arab_league_futility/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060330/61bd59fe/attachment.htm 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Thu Mar 30 06:04:34 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2006 09:04:34 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Jill Carroll released in Iraq
Message-ID: <001a01c65402$e294ace0$763fe440@Harold>


Journalist Jill Carroll Released in Iraq

By Jonathan Finer and Ellen Knickmeyer
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, March 30, 2006; 8:42 AM



BAGHDAD, March 30 -- American journalist Jill Carroll, abducted in early January by gunmen in Baghdad, was released to a Sunni Arab political party in the capital Thursday morning after 82 days in captivity.

"I was treated very well. That's important for people to know," she said in an interview with an Arabic-speaking questioner at the headquarters of the Iraqi Islamic Party. "They never hit me, they never even threatened to hit me. I'm just happy to be free, and I want to be with my family."

Carroll, 28, a freelance reporter working for the Christian Science Monitor, was brought to party headquarters just after 1 p.m. and was able to borrow a phone from a party member and speak with her parents and her twin sister. She also spoke with a Washington Post reporter, who drove to the office and spoke with her.

While Carroll was inside the party compound, U.S. military vehicles arrived, some remaining outside to provide security, others entering the main gate. She later departed with U.S. Embassy personnel.

Clad in traditional Muslim women's garb, a light gray and blue abaya and headscarf, she said in the interview that she was "happy to be free, and I want to be with my family."

She said she did not know where she had been held captive, or why her kidnappers decided to release her. "I don't know. I don't know what happened," she said in the interview, which was broadcast later in the afternoon by the Islamic Party's Baghdad TV station . "They just came to me and said, 'Okay, we're going to let you go now.' "

The young journalist's father, Jim Carroll, spoke to reporters from the porch of the family's home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

"Obviously, we are thrilled and relieved that she has been released," he said. "We want to thank all that have supported and prayed for her. We want to especially thank The Christian Science Monitor, who did so much work to keep her image alive in Iraq."

"Unknown people," released Carroll to the Iraqi Islamic Party's branch office in Amariyah in the western part of the city, Tariq al-Hashimi, the party's secretary general, said in a telephone conversation at 12:30 p.m. local time. The party then transported her by armed convoy to its headquarters in the Yarmouk district.

"She is OK. She is safe. She is more or less scared," Hashimi said. "I told her calm down and we would take care of her."

Carroll said she spent her days sitting in a small room with one window, made opaque by curtains and frosted glass. She said she was fed well and allowed to shower whenever she wanted, but was given almost no information from the outside world.

"They didn't tell me what was going on. They would come, bring me my food, it was fine," Carroll said. "I would sit in the room. If I had to take a shower, I would walk two feet to the next door, take a shower, go to the bathroom and come back."

She said she watched television only once, and was brought a newspaper one time.

After the interview, Hashimi was shown presenting Carroll with gifts: a plaque bearing the party's emblem and a boxed copy of the Koran.

"What you have received today from the Iraqi Islamic Party is exactly the teachings of the Koran," Hashimi said, smiling. Carroll thanked him and said the copy of the Koran was beautiful.

Carroll was kidnapped Jan. 7, after arriving for an interview with Sunni politician Adnan Dulaimi in the western Baghdad neighborhood of Adil. When she left his office after Dulaimi did not show up, her car was attacked by gunmen who took her hostage. Her translator, Allan Anwiya, 29, was killed in the ambush, while her driver escaped.

In a video aired Jan. 17 on the Al-Jazeera satellite network, Carroll's captors threatened to kill her in 72 hours unless all female prisoners in American detention facilities in Iraq were released. She was shown crying and clad in a black headscarf in a second video aired without sound on Jan. 30 by a group calling itself the Vengeance Brigade.

Carroll was last seen in a Feb. 9 video broadcast on Kuwaiti television station Al-Rai. In a calm voice she asked her supporters to do whatever was necessary to gain her release and her captors gave a Feb. 26 deadline for their demands to be met.

Speaking at a news conference in Berlin, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Carroll's release "is something that people across the world have worked for and prayed for."

Her release followed a comprehensive media campaign by family members, religious and political leaders in Iraq and around the world and the Boston-based Monitor. Her parents made regular appearances on English and Arabic-language television programs and her twin sister Katie said on television Wednesday night, "We would be grateful for any new sign that Jill is well."

Kidnappings of Westerners in Iraq have grown more common in recent months. One week ago, British and U.S. soldiers freed three members of the Chicago-based advocacy group Christian Peacemaker Teams who had been abducted in late November. A fourth member of the group who was kidnapped then, Tom Fox, of Clear Brook, Va., was shot dead and dumped on a Baghdad street in early March
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060330/0a163ed4/attachment.htm 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Thu Mar 30 06:22:18 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2006 09:22:18 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Bush and Harper Soul mates
Message-ID: <001301c65405$5cc4aa40$763fe440@Harold>





This article was taken from the Miami Herald "Says Harper like Bush, has a good vs. evil view of the World" .
That is not a good thing !!

Harry

CANCUN SUMMIT
Bush will find soul mate in Canada's Harper
While meeting in Canc?n, Mexico, President Bush should find he has a lot in common with Canada's new prime minister, Stephen Harper.
BY WILLIAM DOUGLAS
Knight Ridder News Service
CANCUN, Mexico - President Bush arrives in Canc?n today for a two-day summit with Mexican President Vicente Fox and new conservative Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a political soul mate who is bent on improving his country's frosty relations with Washington.

While talks with Fox about immigration are expected to dominate the session at this Yucat?n vacation resort, Harper will be pushing his own agenda, and when Bush sits down with him on Thursday, he'll see a mirror image of himself.

Harper, a 46-year-old economist, rose to Canada's highest office by talking about his religious faith, vowing to cut taxes and end government corruption and promising to reconsider a same-sex marriage law that Canada's Parliament approved last June -- all themes that Bush campaigned on in 2000 and 2004.

In addition, Harper said he'll consider the White House's offer for Canada to join in fielding a continental ballistic missile shield, an invitation that former Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin rejected.

''If George Bush can't get along with Stephen Harper, he can't get along with any world leader,'' said David Taras, a political science professor at the University of Calgary. ``They're ideological cousins, if not twins.''

Sworn into office last month, Harper borrowed a page from Bush's playbook and secretly traveled to Afghanistan earlier this month to meet with Canadian troops, highlight his country's contribution to the war on terrorism and buck up domestic support for the mission.

The trip also sent a message to Washington, according to John Hulsman, an analyst for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.

''That was to show the cavalry is back in town, that they're not going to be anti-American,'' he said. ``Harper, like Bush, has a black-and-white, good-and-evil view of the world -- they're cut from the same cloth.''

That's a huge difference from the tattered relationships that Bush had with former Canadian Prime Ministers Martin and Jean Chretien, both members of Canada's Liberal Party.

Hoping to rise above the acrimonious past, Harper wants a ''mature relationship'' with Bush, Canadian Ambassador Michael Wilson said.

Harper and Bush may become fast friends, but they still have to overcome a number of economic hurdles.

For example, Canada is the United States' largest trading partner, but the two have been engaged in a decades-long battle over soft lumber.

Canada has accused the United States of unfairly imposing anti-dumping duties on Canadian softwood lumber to protect the U.S. lumber industry. Washington contends that Canada subsidizes its softwood lumber exports in violation of world trade rules
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060330/d8c9ceac/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Thu Mar 30 08:01:08 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2006 16:01:08 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: A Nation of Immigrants Faces the Current
	Wave (10 Letters)
Message-ID: <20060330160108.95A07249C73@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

OPINION | March 30, 2006
A Nation of Immigrants Faces the Current Wave (10 Letters)

To the Editor:.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/30/opinion/l30immig.html?ex=1144386000&en=285f41f46fafc3ab&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060330/1bbd6675/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Thu Mar 30 08:03:42 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2006 16:03:42 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: NYTimes.com: A Chance Find, and Voilà! Goodbye, Hot Flashes. Hello, Sleep.
Message-ID: <20060330160342.B560A24AEF3@lax-gw02.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

HEALTH | March 28, 2006
Personal Health: A Chance Find, and Voil?! Goodbye, Hot Flashes. Hello, Sleep.
By JANE E. BRODY
Neurontin was approved by the F.D.A. in 1994 to treat epileptic seizures, but it may also provide relief for women suffering hot flashes.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/28/health/28brody.html?ex=1144386000&en=e526c313f90a9723&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060330/9849b78b/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Thu Mar 30 08:05:46 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2006 16:05:46 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Violent Youths Threaten to Hijack
	Demonstrations in Paris
Message-ID: <20060330160546.7AE1F13B739@lax-gw04.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

INTERNATIONAL / EUROPE | March 30, 2006
Violent Youths Threaten to Hijack Demonstrations in Paris
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
Scenes of mayhem at protests over a new jobs law give the impression of a Paris under siege.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/30/international/europe/30smashers.html?ex=1144386000&en=8c0d07f444be6ee8&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060330/066a2a0f/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Thu Mar 30 08:07:45 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2006 16:07:45 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: G.O.P. Risking Hispanic Votes on Immigration
Message-ID: <20060330160746.EC5B913B740@lax-gw04.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

WASHINGTON | March 30, 2006
G.O.P. Risking Hispanic Votes on Immigration
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
Anger over a border security measure could undermine a successful decade-long effort by Republicans to court Hispanic voters.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/30/politics/30hispanics.html?ex=1144386000&en=e4d3db5b26bc0bce&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060330/6b0b8512/attachment-0001.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Thu Mar 30 08:08:35 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: 30 Mar 2006 16:08:35 -0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] Headlines for March 30, 2006
Message-ID: <20060330160835.26846.qmail@trinity.democracynow.org>

Mike Blaxill  ( mblaxill at yahoo.com )
sent you this story from democracynow.org



+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  Headlines for March 30, 2006
|  http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/30/157210
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+


- Kidnapped Reporter Jill Carroll Freed in Iraq 
- Iraqi PM Criticizes US Over Resignation Pressure 
- Taylor Returned To Liberia to Face War Crimes Charges 
- Afghan Christian Convert Granted Political Asylum in Italy 
- Ahmed Omar Abu Ali Sentenced to 30-Year Term 
- Senate Approves Lobbying Bill, Rejects Independent Oversight 
- Puerto Rican Independence Figure Arrested in San Juan 
This story continues at: 
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/30/157210


From michael at michaelbutler.com  Thu Mar 30 09:11:23 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2006 09:11:23 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Immigrants to Be Proud Of By DAVID BROOKS
Message-ID: <C051513B.2AB3D%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 30, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Immigrants to Be Proud Of
By DAVID BROOKS

Everybody says the Republicans are split on immigration. The law-and-order
types want to close the border. The free-market types want plentiful labor.
But today I want to talk to the social conservatives, because it's you folks
who are really going to swing this debate.

I'd like to get you to believe what Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas
believes: that a balanced immigration bill is consistent with conservative
values. I'd like to try to persuade the evangelical leaders in the tall
grass to stop hiding on this issue.

My first argument is that the exclusionists are wrong when they say the
current wave of immigration is tearing our social fabric. The facts show
that the recent rise in immigration hasn't been accompanied by social
breakdown, but by social repair. As immigration has surged, violent crime
has fallen by 57 percent. Teen pregnancies and abortion rates have declined
by a third. Teenagers are having fewer sexual partners and losing their
virginity later. Teen suicide rates have dropped. The divorce rate for young
people is on the way down.

Over the past decade we've seen the beginnings of a moral revival, and some
of the most important work has been done by Catholic and evangelical
immigrant churches, by faith-based organizations like the Rev. Luis Cort?s's
Nueva Esperanza, by Hispanic mothers and fathers monitoring their kids. The
anti-immigration crowd says this country is under assault. But if that's so,
we're under assault by people who love their children.

My second argument is that the immigrants themselves are like a booster shot
of traditional morality injected into the body politic. Immigrants work
hard. They build community groups. They have traditional ideas about family
structure, and they work heroically to make them a reality.

This is evident in everything from divorce rates (which are low, given
immigrants' socioeconomic status) to their fertility rates (which are high)
and even the way they shop.

Hispanics and Hispanic immigrants have less money than average Americans,
but they spend what they have on their families, usually in wholesome ways.
According to Simmons Research, Hispanics are 57 percent more likely than
average Americans to have purchased children's furniture in the past year.
Mexican-Americans spend 93 percent more on children's music.

According to the government's Consumer Expenditure Survey, Hispanics spend
more on gifts, on average, than other Americans. They're more likely to
support their parents financially. They're more likely to have big family
dinners at home.

This isn't alien behavior. It's admirable behavior, the antidote to the
excessive individualism that social conservatives decry.

My third argument is that good values lead to success, and that immigrants'
long-term contributions more than compensate for the short-term strains they
cause. There's no use denying the strains immigration imposes on schools,
hospitals and wage levels in some markets (but economists are sharply
divided on this).

So over the long haul, today's immigrants succeed. By the second generation,
most immigrant families are middle class and paying taxes that more than
make up for the costs of the first generation. By the third generation, 90
percent speak English fluently and 50 percent marry non-Latinos.

My fourth argument is that government should be at least as virtuous as the
immigrants themselves. Right now (as under Bill Frist's legislation),
government pushes immigrants into a chaotic underground world. The Judiciary
Committee's bill, which Senator Brownback supports, would tighten the
borders, but it would also reward virtue. Immigrants who worked hard, paid
fines, paid their taxes, stayed out of trouble and waited their turn would
have a chance to become citizens. This isn't government enabling vice; it's
government at its best, encouraging middle-class morality.

Social conservatives, let me ask you to consider one final thing. Women who
have recently arrived from Mexico have bigger, healthier babies than more
affluent non-Hispanic white natives. That's because strong family and social
networks support these pregnant women, reminding them what to eat and do.
But the longer they stay, and the more assimilated they become, the more bad
habits they acquire and the more problems their subsequent babies have.

Please ask yourself this: As we contemplate America's moral fiber, do the
real threats come from immigrants, or are some people merely blaming them
for sins that are already here?

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Thu Mar 30 11:05:37 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2006 19:05:37 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: On Web,
	Error Is Uncovered Through Relentless Pursuit
Message-ID: <20060330190537.7664783C90@lax-gw03.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

NATIONAL | March 30, 2006
On Web, Error Is Uncovered Through Relentless Pursuit
By JOHN M. BRODER
After a group of bloggers decided that a photo on the Web site of a Congressional candidate was not actually taken in Iraq, the candidate withdrew it and apologized.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/30/national/30candidate.html?ex=1144386000&en=2f3a79123ce3c09d&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060330/cdf91a2a/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Thu Mar 30 11:05:56 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2006 19:05:56 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Twilight of Tax Privacy
Message-ID: <20060330190557.9B8C1249DEE@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

OPINION | March 30, 2006
Editorial: Twilight of Tax Privacy

Weakening tax privacy would send a dark message to law-abiding taxpayers: Obeying the law could cost you your privacy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/30/opinion/30thur2.html?ex=1144386000&en=cbc52ed1bf63d430&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060330/d97dfeff/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Thu Mar 30 11:06:32 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2006 19:06:32 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: American Dreams, Foreign Flags
Message-ID: <20060330190632.1B90C11F7FC@lax-gw07.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

OPINION | March 30, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor: American Dreams, Foreign Flags
By LINDA CHAVEZ
Like every generation of immigrants before them, Latinos start out on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder, but they don't stay there.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/30/opinion/30chavez.html?ex=1144386000&en=32c89ab7a526f936&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060330/b6864c3d/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Thu Mar 30 11:06:31 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2006 19:06:31 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: The Watchdog Awakes
Message-ID: <20060330190631.9F4A111F804@lax-gw07.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

OPINION | March 30, 2006
Editorial: The Watchdog Awakes

The Federal Election Commission finally did the right thing in ruling that the Internet must not be used as a conduit for unregulated political advertising.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/30/opinion/30thur3.html?ex=1144386000&en=0b8e52fb5a026b87&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060330/7c19e322/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Thu Mar 30 11:06:55 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2006 19:06:55 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Democracy in Iraq?
Message-ID: <20060330190655.2476B249E35@lax-gw08.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

What we're saying...


OPINION | March 30, 2006
Democracy in Iraq?

To the Editor:.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/30/opinion/l30iraq.html?ex=1144386000&en=6a0579728c3ca57f&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060330/e161086c/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Thu Mar 30 11:07:19 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2006 19:07:19 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Bush and Lincoln: They Just Don't Compare
	(3 Letters)
Message-ID: <20060330190719.8BA9413B837@lax-gw04.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

What we're saying (2)...


OPINION | March 30, 2006
Bush and Lincoln: They Just Don't Compare (3 Letters)

To the Editor:.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/30/opinion/l30brooks.html?ex=1144386000&en=7068ba8e066e0606&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060330/2d73f616/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Thu Mar 30 11:12:00 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2006 19:12:00 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Order of Victims' Names on Memorial Turns
	Out to Be Not Quite Settled
Message-ID: <20060330191201.0517224AF96@lax-gw02.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

Hmmm... It seems to me that the easiest, fairest way to list the names is in strict alphabetical order. For example: Aaron, John Analyst, Cantor Fitzgerald Adams, Chris Firefighter, 21st Battalion Adams, John Janitor, WTC 1 Allen, Mary Waitress, Windows on the World et al Doesn't that really make the most sense, and cause the lease reason for debate? Peace.


NEW YORK REGION | March 30, 2006
Order of Victims' Names on Memorial Turns Out to Be Not Quite Settled
By DAVID W. DUNLAP
Nothing about the World Trade Center site ever seems completely settled.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/30/nyregion/30memorial.html?ex=1144386000&en=1101c6f9f67de7a4&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060330/4d9979bb/attachment-0001.htm 

From tourit2 at indigo.ie  Thu Mar 30 10:47:21 2006
From: tourit2 at indigo.ie (john sullivan)
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2006 19:47:21 +0100
Subject: [Mb-civic] Immigrants to Be Proud Of By DAVID BROOKS
References: <C051513B.2AB3D%michael@michaelbutler.com>
Message-ID: <031601c6542b$3caa79d0$6c02a8c0@Jack>

Everybody knows that immigrants add value to established societies. Refugees may be a different stripe fro the lack of free will in the decision.

But the Irish migration of the 1840's added value to dig the 19th century highways, the canals of the Midwest not to mention the transcontinental railway meeting the Chinese workers from the West at Omaha. 

Then, the Irish were very distrustful of the Italians arrival in the 1920s, and they were joined by the Jews who arrived in the 1890s.  

Frankly the Italians never recovered from the discrimination of the Jews and Irish. 

The Republican WASPs always understood the refreshing economic influx of cheap labour, hard working ethnics and free capital markets. 

Let's get over it; the Spanish are lovely people - even when they arrive from Mexico. 

My parents left Ireland in the 1920s looking for opportunity in Chicago, and As a native born son of ethnic Chicago I  returned to Ireland in the 1990s, looking for opportunity. We both did well. 

The only ones I would seriously question in this whole immigration tempest in a teapot are the illegal Irish who could easily return to Ireland and become millionaires like the rest of us. 

What is in their head to want to stay in New York and Chicago?  

I bet they shacked up with native American girls who do not have a passport, never mind an adventurous vision of Europe as the happy home of the Poles, Lithuanians, Italians, Spanish, Irish, etc x 25 ethnic countries ...

America get over it - immigrants are the lifeblood of growth and innovation- ask your relatives. 

Ireland is doing a national census next month and for the 1st time in the history of Ireland the documents are in 13 languages...to record the stats of the most open labour market in Europe - the migrants produce a level of productivity that is unsurpassed in Europe. 

Airlines have scrambled to connect Central European cities with Dublin. 

The real estate market is buoyant from the rent being paid by the several hundred thousand Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, Latvians, not to mention the 50,000 Chinese to whom dozens of private schools teaches English. Ireland  passed a minimum wage per hour law of about 10 dollars an hour to keep people being exploited. 

Do the math in terms of rent for apartments, food stores, transport fares, movie tickets and airlines. The more immigrants the greater the wealth. 
They even go to Church on Sunday - unlike many natives. 

Total regard,

Dublinjack

PS I like the remark that the government politicos should be as virtuous as the immigrants!  So true, so true...
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Michael Butler 
  To: Civic 
  Sent: Thursday, March 30, 2006 6:11 PM
  Subject: [Mb-civic] Immigrants to Be Proud Of By DAVID BROOKS


  The New York Times
  Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

  March 30, 2006
  Op-Ed Columnist
  Immigrants to Be Proud Of
  By DAVID BROOKS

  Everybody says the Republicans are split on immigration. The law-and-order
  types want to close the border. The free-market types want plentiful labor.
  But today I want to talk to the social conservatives, because it's you folks
  who are really going to swing this debate.

  I'd like to get you to believe what Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas
  believes: that a balanced immigration bill is consistent with conservative
  values. I'd like to try to persuade the evangelical leaders in the tall
  grass to stop hiding on this issue.

  My first argument is that the exclusionists are wrong when they say the
  current wave of immigration is tearing our social fabric. The facts show
  that the recent rise in immigration hasn't been accompanied by social
  breakdown, but by social repair. As immigration has surged, violent crime
  has fallen by 57 percent. Teen pregnancies and abortion rates have declined
  by a third. Teenagers are having fewer sexual partners and losing their
  virginity later. Teen suicide rates have dropped. The divorce rate for young
  people is on the way down.

  Over the past decade we've seen the beginnings of a moral revival, and some
  of the most important work has been done by Catholic and evangelical
  immigrant churches, by faith-based organizations like the Rev. Luis Cort?s's
  Nueva Esperanza, by Hispanic mothers and fathers monitoring their kids. The
  anti-immigration crowd says this country is under assault. But if that's so,
  we're under assault by people who love their children.

  My second argument is that the immigrants themselves are like a booster shot
  of traditional morality injected into the body politic. Immigrants work
  hard. They build community groups. They have traditional ideas about family
  structure, and they work heroically to make them a reality.

  This is evident in everything from divorce rates (which are low, given
  immigrants' socioeconomic status) to their fertility rates (which are high)
  and even the way they shop.

  Hispanics and Hispanic immigrants have less money than average Americans,
  but they spend what they have on their families, usually in wholesome ways.
  According to Simmons Research, Hispanics are 57 percent more likely than
  average Americans to have purchased children's furniture in the past year.
  Mexican-Americans spend 93 percent more on children's music.

  According to the government's Consumer Expenditure Survey, Hispanics spend
  more on gifts, on average, than other Americans. They're more likely to
  support their parents financially. They're more likely to have big family
  dinners at home.

  This isn't alien behavior. It's admirable behavior, the antidote to the
  excessive individualism that social conservatives decry.

  My third argument is that good values lead to success, and that immigrants'
  long-term contributions more than compensate for the short-term strains they
  cause. There's no use denying the strains immigration imposes on schools,
  hospitals and wage levels in some markets (but economists are sharply
  divided on this).

  So over the long haul, today's immigrants succeed. By the second generation,
  most immigrant families are middle class and paying taxes that more than
  make up for the costs of the first generation. By the third generation, 90
  percent speak English fluently and 50 percent marry non-Latinos.

  My fourth argument is that government should be at least as virtuous as the
  immigrants themselves. Right now (as under Bill Frist's legislation),
  government pushes immigrants into a chaotic underground world. The Judiciary
  Committee's bill, which Senator Brownback supports, would tighten the
  borders, but it would also reward virtue. Immigrants who worked hard, paid
  fines, paid their taxes, stayed out of trouble and waited their turn would
  have a chance to become citizens. This isn't government enabling vice; it's
  government at its best, encouraging middle-class morality.

  Social conservatives, let me ask you to consider one final thing. Women who
  have recently arrived from Mexico have bigger, healthier babies than more
  affluent non-Hispanic white natives. That's because strong family and social
  networks support these pregnant women, reminding them what to eat and do.
  But the longer they stay, and the more assimilated they become, the more bad
  habits they acquire and the more problems their subsequent babies have.

  Please ask yourself this: As we contemplate America's moral fiber, do the
  real threats come from immigrants, or are some people merely blaming them
  for sins that are already here?

      * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
      * Home
      * Privacy Policy
      * Search
      * Corrections
      * XML
      * Help
      * Contact Us
      * Work for Us
      * Site Map
      * Back to Top



  _______________________________________________
  Mb-civic mailing list
  Mb-civic at islandlists.com
  http://www.islandlists.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mb-civic
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060330/85a2cd06/attachment.htm 

From grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net  Thu Mar 30 08:12:02 2006
From: grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net (Golsorkhi)
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2006 11:12:02 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] FW: 'The Last Helicopter'
In-Reply-To: <2E0D6F19-A8AF-4B59-BD6E-3331D68C84BF@thesamiis.com>
Message-ID: <E1FP4th-0006cX-F9@smtpauth08.mail.atl.earthlink.net>


------ Forwarded Message
From: Samii Shahla <shahla at thesamiis.com>
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 11:15:59 -0500
Subject: 'The Last Helicopter'



Begin forwarded message:

> 
> 
>  
> 'The Last Helicopter'
> 
> March 29, 2006 
> The Wall Street Journal
> Amir Taheri
> 
> link to original article
> <http://online.wsj.com/article_print/SB114360603158410910.html>
> 
> Hassan Abbasi has a dream -- a helicopter doing an arabesque in cloudy skies
> to avoid being shot at from the ground. On board are the last of the "fleeing
> Americans," forced out of the Dar al-Islam (The Abode of Islam) by "the Army
> of Muhammad." Presented by his friends as "The Dr. Kissinger of Islam," Mr.
> Abbasi is "professor of strategy" at the Islamic Republic's Revolutionary
> GuardCorps University and, according to Tehran sources, the principal foreign
> policy voice in President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's new radical administration.
> 
> For the past several weeks Mr. Abbasi has been addressing crowds of Guard and
> Baseej Mustadafin (Mobilization of the Dispossessed) officers in Tehran with a
> simple theme: The U.S. does not have the stomach for a long conflict and will
> soon revert to its traditional policy of "running away," leaving Afghanistan
> and Iraq, indeed the whole of the Middle East, to be reshaped by Iran and its
> regional allies. 
> 
> To hear Mr. Abbasi tell it the entire recent history of the U.S. could be
> narrated with the help of the image of "the last helicopter." It was that
> image in Saigon that concluded the Vietnam War under Gerald Ford. Jimmy Carter
> had five helicopters fleeing from the Iranian desert, leaving behind the
> charred corpses of eight American soldiers. Under Ronald Reagan the
> helicopters carried the bodies of 241 Marines murdered in their sleep in a
> Hezbollah suicide attack. Under the first President Bush, the helicopter flew
> from Safwan, in southern Iraq, with Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf aboard, leaving
> behind Saddam Hussein's generals, who could not believe why they had been
> allowed live to fight their domestic foes, and America, another day. Bill
> Clinton's helicopter was a Black Hawk, downed in Mogadishu and delivering 16
> American soldiers into the hands of a murderous crowd.
> 
> According to this theory, President George W. Bush is an "aberration," a
> leader out of sync with his nation's character and no more than a brief
> nightmare for those who oppose the creation of an "American Middle East."
> Messrs. Abbasi and Ahmadinejad have concluded that there will be no helicopter
> as long as George W. Bush is in the White House. But they believe that whoever
> succeeds him, Democrat or Republican, will revive the helicopter image to
> extricate the U.S. from a complex situation that few Americans appear to
> understand. 
> 
> Mr. Ahmadinejad's defiant rhetoric is based on a strategy known in Middle
> Eastern capitals as "waiting Bush out." "We are sure the U.S. will return to
> saner policies," says Manuchehr Motakki, Iran's new Foreign Minister.
> 
> Mr. Ahmadinejad believes that the world is heading for a clash of
> civilizations with the Middle East as the main battlefield. In that clash Iran
> will lead the Muslim world against the "Crusader-Zionist camp" led by America.
> Mr. Bush might have led the U.S. into "a brief moment of triumph." But the
> U.S. is a "sunset" (ofuli) power while Iran is a sunrise (tolu'ee) one and,
> once Mr. Bush is gone, a future president would admit defeat and order a
> retreat as all of Mr. Bush's predecessors have done since Jimmy Carter.
> 
> Mr. Ahmadinejad also notes that Iran has just "reached the Mediterranean"
> thanks to its strong presence in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and the Palestinian
> territories. He used that message to convince Syrian President Bashar al-Assad
> to adopt a defiant position vis-?-vis the U.N. investigation of the murder of
> Rafiq Hariri, a former prime minister of Lebanon. His argument was that once
> Mr. Bush is gone, the U.N., too, will revert to its traditional lethargy.
> "They can pass resolutions until they are blue in the face," Mr. Ahmadinejad
> told a gathering of Hezbollah, Hamas and other radical Arab leaders in Tehran
> last month. 
> 
> According to sources in Tehran and Damascus, Mr. Assad had pondered the option
> of "doing a Gadhafi" by toning down his regime's anti-American posture. Since
> last February, however, he has revived Syria's militant rhetoric and dismissed
> those who advocated a rapprochement with Washington. Iran has rewarded him
> with a set of cut-price oil, soft loans and grants totaling $1.2 billion. In
> response Syria has increased its support for terrorists going to fight in Iraq
> and revived its network of agents in Lebanon, in a bid to frustrate that
> country's democratic ambitions.
> 
> It is not only in Tehran and Damascus that the game of "waiting Bush out" is
> played with determination. In recent visits to several regional capitals, this
> writer was struck by the popularity of this new game from Islamabad to Rabat.
> The general assumption is that Mr. Bush's plan to help democratize the
> heartland of Islam is fading under an avalanche of partisan attacks inside the
> U.S. The effect of this assumption can be witnessed everywhere.
> 
> In Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf has shelved his plan, forged under pressure from
> Washington, to foster a popular front to fight terrorism by lifting
> restrictions against the country's major political parties and allowing their
> exiled leaders to return. There is every indication that next year's elections
> will be choreographed to prevent the emergence of an effective opposition. In
> Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, arguably the most pro-American leader in the
> region, is cautiously shaping his post-Bush strategy by courtingTehran and
> playing the Pushtun ethnic card against his rivals.
> 
> In Turkey, the "moderate" Islamist government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan is
> slowly but surely putting the democratization process into reverse gear. With
> the post-Bush era in mind, Mr. Erdogan has started a purge of the judiciary
> and a transfer of religious endowments to sections of the private sector
> controlled by his party's supporters. There are fears that next year's general
> election would not take place on a level playing field.
> 
> Even in Iraq the sentiment that the U.S. will not remain as committed as it
> has been under Mr. Bush is producing strange results. While Shiite politicians
> are rushing to Tehran to seek a reinsurance policy, some Sunni leaders are
> having second thoughts about their decision to join the democratization
> process. "What happens after Bush?" demands Salih al-Mutlak, a rising star of
> Iraqi Sunni leaders. The Iraqi Kurds have clearly decided to slow down all
> measures that would bind them closer to the Iraqi state. Again, they claim
> that they have to "take precautions in case the Americans run away."
> 
> There are more signs that the initial excitement created by Mr. Bush's
> democratization project may be on the wane. Saudi Arabiahas put its national
> dialogue program on hold and has decided to focus on economic rather than
> political reform. In Bahrain, too, the political reform machine has been put
> into rear-gear, while in Qatar all talk of a new democratic constitution to
> set up a constitutional monarchy has subsided. In Jordan the security services
> are making a spectacular comeback, putting an end to a brief moment of hopes
> for reform. As for Egypt, Hosni Mubarak has decided to indefinitely postpone
> local elections, a clear sign that the Bush-inspired scenario is in trouble.
> Tunisia and Morocco, too, have joined the game by stopping much-advertised
> reform projects while Islamist radicals are regrouping and testing the waters
> at all levels. 
> 
> But how valid is the assumption that Mr. Bush is an aberration and that his
> successor will "run away"? It was to find answers that this writer spent
> several days in the U.S., especially Washington and New York, meeting ordinary
> Americans and senior leaders, including potential presidential candidates from
> both parties. While Mr. Bush's approval ratings, now in free fall, and the
> increasingly bitter American debate on Iraq may lend some credence to the
> "helicopter" theory, I found no evidence that anyone in the American
> leadership elite supported a cut-and-run strategy.
> 
> The reason was that almost all realized that the 9/11 attacks have changed the
> way most Americans see the world and their own place in it. Running away from
> Saigon, the Iranian desert, Beirut, Safwan and Mogadishu was not hard to sell
> to the average American, because he was sure that the story would end there;
> the enemies left behind would not pursue their campaign within theU.S. itself.
> The enemies that America is now facing in the jihadist archipelago, however,
> are dedicated to the destruction of the U.S.as the world knows it today.
> 
> Those who have based their strategy on waiting Mr. Bush out may find to their
> cost that they have, once again, misread not only American politics but the
> realities of a world far more complex than it was even a decade ago. Mr. Bush
> may be a uniquely decisive, some might say reckless, leader. But a visitor to
> the U.S. soon finds out that he represents the American mood much more than
> the polls suggest.
> 
> Mr. Taheri is author of "L'Irak: Le Dessous Des Cartes" (Editions Complexe,
> 2002).
> 
> ?
> 



------ End of Forwarded Message

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060330/8dcf9293/attachment.htm 

From grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net  Wed Mar 29 08:38:14 2006
From: grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net (Golsorkhi)
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 11:38:14 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] FW: Warning to America from HIM the late Shah !
In-Reply-To: <65DA71CE-DB80-4B3D-A319-029C58671C0F@thesamiis.com>
Message-ID: <E1FP4yq-0007J5-Dz@smtpauth08.mail.atl.earthlink.net>


------ Forwarded Message
From: Samii Shahla <shahla at thesamiis.com>
Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 16:29:50 -0500
Subject: Warning to America from HIM the late Shah !



Begin forwarded message:
> 
> 
>  
> Amazing as how much he knew and let it happen.
>  
> http://www.iraninstitutefordemocracy.org/modules.php?name=News&file=article&si
> d=242
>  
> ?
>  



------ End of Forwarded Message

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060329/a7bfb3c5/attachment.htm 

From ean at sbcglobal.net  Wed Mar 29 20:33:36 2006
From: ean at sbcglobal.net (ean at sbcglobal.net)
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 20:33:36 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] A madness for war
Message-ID: <E1FP500-0000wt-2w@smtpauth08.mail.atl.earthlink.net>


A madness for war

By Derrick Z. Jackson | March 29, 2006 | The Boston Globe

PRESIDENT BUSH said he invaded Iraq to rid the world of a 
madman. It is 
ever more clearer Bush went mad to start it.

This week, the New York Times reported on a confidential 
memo about a 
meeting between Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair on 
Jan. 31, 
2003. It was just before Secretary of State Colin Powell would 
go before 
the United Nations to convince the world of the planetary threat 
of 
Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and ask for a second UN 
resolution to 
condemn him.

In his Feb. 5 presentation, Powell used excerpts of monitored 
conversations and satellite photographs to paint a picture of an 
Iraq 
where Saddam was feverishly concealing weapons of mass 
destruction. 
Powell, whose credibility lay in his image as one of the few 
members of 
the Bush team to have actually fought in war, said, ''We have 
first-hand 
descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on 
rails." He 
said Iraq's ''sophisticated facilities" could produce enough 
biological 
agents in a single month ''to kill thousands upon thousands of 
people."

Powell's punch line was, ''Every statement I make today is 
backed up by 
sources, solid sources. These are not assertions."

But Bush already realized the sources were not panning out. 
According to 
a Times review of the entire Jan. 31 memo, written by Blair's 
foreign 
policy adviser, David Manning, it showed that ''the president 
and the 
prime minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons 
had been 
found inside Iraq."

With no weapons, Bush talked about provoking Saddam. ''The 
US was 
thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover 
over 
Iraq, painted in UN colors," the Times quotes the memo as 
saying. ''If 
Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach."

Bush had come up with an official start date of March 10 which, 
according to the memo, ''was when the bombing would begin." 
The war 
actually began on March 19. The memo summarized the 
president as 
assuming, ''The air campaign would probably last four days, 
during which 
some 1,500 targets would be hit. Great care would be taken to 
avoid 
hitting innocent civilians."

Bush thought the impact of the air onslaught would ensure the 
early 
collapse of Saddam's regime. Bush thought that the air strikes 
''would 
destroy Saddam's command and control quickly," Iraq's army 
would ''fold 
very quickly," and Saddam's Republican Guard would be 
''decimated by the 
bombing." Bush also assumed in the rebuilding of Iraq that it 
was 
''unlikely there would be internecine warfare between the 
different 
religious and ethnic groups."

Even though his growing fears about finding no weapons of 
mass 
destruction had reached the incredible point of considering 
fakery to 
make it look like Saddam started the war, Bush had the gall to 
go before 
the press on Jan. 31 after his meeting with Blair and show no 
doubt. A 
reporter asked Bush, ''Mr. President, is Secretary Powell going 
to 
provide the undeniable proof of Iraq's guilt that so many critics 
are 
calling for?"

Bush responded, ''Well, all due in modesty, I thought I did a 
pretty 
good job myself of making it clear that he's not disarming and 
why he 
should disarm. Secretary Powell will make a strong case about 
the danger 
of an armed Saddam Hussein. He will make it clear that 
Saddam Hussein is 
fooling the world, or trying to fool the world. He will make it clear 
that Saddam is a menace to peace in his own neighborhood. 
He will also 
talk about Al Qaeda links, links that really do portend a danger 
for 
America and for Great Britain, anybody else who loves 
freedom."

Powell would deliver on Bush's boast five days later, saying, 
''There 
can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons 
and the 
capability to rapidly produce more, many more. . . . With this 
track 
record, Iraqi denials of supporting terrorism take their place 
alongside 
the other Iraqi denials of weapons of mass destruction. It is all a 
web 
of lies."

The web spun by Bush has now cost the lives of 2,300 US 
soldiers, 
another 200 British and coalition soldiers, and tens of 
thousands of 
Iraqi civilians. Iraq is closer to civil war than stability. Three 
years 
later, it is the United States that is not disarming, with Bush 
admitting last week that our troops will be needed there past his 
presidency. We took out a madman with madness. At a 
minimum, there 
should be hearings, with Bush under oath. With any more 
details like 
this, the next step is impeachment.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articl
es/2006/03/29/a_madness_for_war/
-------------- next part --------------



-- 
You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, 
option D (up to 3 emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options 
(option A - 1x/week, option B - 3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option D - 
up to 3x/day) please reply and let us know!  If someone forwarded you 
this email and you want to be on our list, send an email to 
ean at sbcglobal.net and tell us which option you'd like.


"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060329/c631b1bb/attachment.htm 

From IHHS at aol.com  Thu Mar 30 12:59:02 2006
From: IHHS at aol.com (IHHS at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2006 15:59:02 EST
Subject: [Mb-civic] Guidelines
Message-ID: <E1FP5Dr-00051l-J7@elasmtp-banded.atl.sa.earthlink.net>

Guidelines for Enlightenment
by Swami Beyondananda


1.  Be a Fundamentalist--make sure the Fun always comes before the mental. 
Realize  that life is a situation comedy that will never be canceled. A laugh 
track has  been provided, and the reason why we are put in the material world is 
to get  more material. Have a good laughsitive twice a day, and that will 
ensure  regularhilarity.

2. Remember that each of us has been given a a special  gift, just for e
ntering - so you are already a winner!

3. The most  powerful tool on the planet today is Tell-A-Vision. That is 
where I tell a  vision to you, and you tell a vision to me. That way, if we don't 
like the  programming we're getting, we can simply change the channel.

4. Life is  like photography. You use the negative to develop.

5. It is true. As we  go through life thinking heavy thoughts, thought 
particles tend to get caught  between the ears, causing a condition called truth 
decay. So be sure to use  mental floss twice a day. And when you're tempted to 
practice tantrum yoga,  remember what we teach in Swami's Absurdiveness Training 
class: *Don't get even,  get odd.*

6. If we want world peace, we must let go of our attachments  and truly live 
like nomads. That's where I no mad at you, you no mad at me. That  way, 
there'll surely be nomadness on the planet. And peace begins with each of  us. A 
little peace here, a little peace there, pretty soon all the peaces will  fit 
together to make one big peace everywhere.

7. I know great earth  changes have been predicted for the future, so if 
you're looking to avoid  earthquakes, my advice is simple. When you find a fault, 
don't dwell on  it.

8. There's no need to change the world. All we have to do is toilet  train 
the world, and we'll never have to change it again.

9. If you're  looking to find the key to the Universe, I have some bad news 
and some good  news. The bad news is: there is no key to the Universe. The good 
news is: it has  been left unlocked.

10. Finally, everything I have told you is channeled.  That way, if you don't 
like it, it's not my fault. And remember, enlightenment  is not a 
bureaucracy. So we don't have to go through  channels.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060330/becb04d5/attachment.htm 

From michael at intrafi.com  Thu Mar 30 13:27:26 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (michael butler)
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2006 16:27:26 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] TruthDig: Legalize the 'Illegals'
Message-ID: <442c4d3e2e780@intrafi.com>

Hi,

 I read this on Truthdig and thought you would find it interesting.

 =-=-=-=-=-=-=
Legalize the 'Illegals'

"This is a moment of truth for America. It is time to acknowledge that we 
need the immigrant workers as much as they need us, and to begin to treat 
them with the respect they deserve.? 

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060328_robert_scheer_immigrants/

 Copyright ? 2006 Truthdig, L.L.C. All rights reserved.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=
This is a one-time mailing from
TruthDig.com
on behalf of the sender.
Please report any misuse to editor-at-truthdig.com

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060330/ff36e800/attachment.htm 

From michael at intrafi.com  Thu Mar 30 14:09:47 2006
From: michael at intrafi.com (Michael)
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2006 17:09:47 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Article from Tom Dispatch
Message-ID: <200603302209.k2UM9lHT005035@thor.thenation.com>

An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060330/bc34d195/attachment-0001.htm 

From hecate at diamonddragon.com  Thu Mar 30 14:55:19 2006
From: hecate at diamonddragon.com (Hecate)
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2006 22:55:19 +0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] BBC E-mail: Iraq bases spur questions over US plans
Message-ID: <20060330_225519_058056.hecate@diamonddragon.com>

Hecate saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you
should see it.



** Iraq bases spur questions over US plans **
The US is spending hundreds of millions of dollars bolstering air bases in Iraq, leading some to question how long they intend to stay.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/americas/4834032.stm >


** BBC Daily E-mail **
Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all
in one daily e-mail
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/dailyemail/ >


** Disclaimer **
The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have?been verified.

If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm


From barbarasiomos38 at msn.com  Thu Mar 30 16:46:56 2006
From: barbarasiomos38 at msn.com (Barbara Siomos)
Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2006 00:46:56 GMT
Subject: [Mb-civic] Fear of terrorists in Alaska, 80 Eyes on 2,
	400 people
Message-ID: <BAY114-DAV149DD27F19706BE396AC4EABD60@phx.gbl>

Great article Harry, thanks for sending it.

peace,
barbara


-----Original Message-----
From: Harold Sifton
Sent: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 12:22:33 -0800
To: MB Civic
Subject: [Mb-civic] Fear of terrorists in Alaska, 80 Eyes on 2,400 people

      This was taken from the LA Times

      To be this is absurd, to others ..????

      Harry 


     
      80 Eyes on 2,400 People

      If terrorists come to tiny Dillingham, Alaska, security cameras will be ready. But privacy concerns have residents up in arms.
      By Tomas Alex Tizon, Times Staff Writer
      March 28, 2006 


      DILLINGHAM, Alaska  From Anchorage it takes 90 minutes on a propeller plane to reach this fishing village on the state's south-western edge, a place where some people still make raincoats out of walrus intestine.

      This is the Alaskan bush at its most remote. Here, tundra meets sea, and sea turns to ice for half the year. Scattered, almost hidden, in the terrain are some of the most isolated communities on American soil. People choose to live in outposts like Dillingham (pop. 2,400) for that reason: to be left alone.


      ADVERTISEMENT
       
      So eyebrows were raised in January when the first surveillance cameras went up on Main Street. Each camera is a shiny white metallic box with two lenses like eyes. The camera's shape and design resemble a robot's head.

      Workers on motorized lifts installed seven cameras in a 360-degree cluster on top of City Hall. They put up groups of six atop two light poles at the loading dock, and more at the fire hall and boat harbour.

      By mid-February, more than 60 cameras watched over the town, and the Dillingham Police Department plans to install 20 more  all purchased through a $202,000 Homeland Security grant meant primarily to defend against a terrorist attack.

      Now the residents of this far-flung village have become, in one sense, among the most watched people in the land, with  as former Mayor Freeman Roberts puts it  "one camera for every 30 residents."

      Some don't mind, but many others are furious and have banded together to force the city to take the cameras down.

      "You better smile. You're on camera," says Roberts, 64, a barge captain. Roberts himself isn't smiling as he points out a single camera on the side of a building. The camera is aimed toward an alley.

      "It's amazing, isn't it?" he says. He drives around town in his pickup, spying on the cameras that he believes are spying on him. "Everywhere you look, there's one looking at you."

      Roberts, mayor of Dillingham from 1972 to 1978, says the cameras constitute an invasion of privacy, and beyond that, they're just plain creepy. He scratched together a petition demanding removal of the cameras and collected 219 signatures within days. He carries the ragged sheaf of names next to him in the truck.

      The City Council, which supports the cameras, threw out the petition, claiming Roberts did not follow the law, which requires that the signatories be registered voters. Now Roberts is working with others to put together a legal petition to force the issue on the October ballot.

      Roberts climbs out of his truck and slams the door.

      He is a square-jawed man with a slow, deliberate way of talking. He looks out at Nushagak Bay, which remains frozen until the end of April. No boat can enter or leave the harbour until the ice breaks up. He shakes his head. "This is Dillingham, Alaska, folks," he says. "I don't think we have to worry about Osama bin Laden."

      That is, unless Bin Laden wants to go salmon fishing.

      Dillingham is a hub in the Bristol Bay region, which is famous among fishermen for its sockeye runs.

      The inhabitants of about 30 nearby villages come to town for supplies. Slightly more than half the residents of Dillingham are Native Alaskans. The rest are white or mixed, like Roberts, who is Dutch and Yupik Eskimo.

      The village has a rumpled, flophouse feel to it, as if collapsed together by a strong wind from the Bering Sea: faded cedar shacks next to aluminum buildings next to dusty lots of dry-docked fishing boats tipped at all kinds of angles.

      It is a working town in the middle of what some might call nowhere, which, according to Police Chief Richard Thompson, is why residents must be vigilant. Terrorists intent on attacking the United States could, he says, "backdoor it" through a nowhere dot on the tundra just like Dillingham.

      Thompson, with the blessing of the City Council, applied for the Homeland Security grant last year. He is 51, wiry, with a slightly harried air about him. He has spent 22 years in the Dillingham Police Department, starting as dispatcher and becoming chief a year and a half ago.

      It's his department. He and his six officers take the oath to protect very seriously. He bristles at any reference to Big Brother.

      "Tokyo is that way," says Thompson, extending his arm to the left. He's standing near the spot in the harbour where Roberts stood the previous day.

      "Russia is about 800 miles that way," he says, arm extending right.

      "Seattle is about 1,200 miles back that way." He points behind him.

      "So if I have the math right, we're closer to Russia than we are to Seattle."

      Now imagine, he says: What if the bad guys, whoever they are, manage to obtain a nuclear device in Russia, where some weapons are believed to be poorly guarded. They put the device in a container and then hire organized criminals, "maybe Mafiosi," to arrange a tramp steamer to pick it up. The steamer drops off the container at the Dillingham harbour, complete with forged paperwork to ship it to Seattle. The container is picked up by a barge.

      "Ten days later," the chief says, "the barge pulls into the Port of Seattle."

      Thompson pauses for effect.

      "Phoooom," he says, his hands blooming like a flower.

      "Farfetched? My view is we pay people like me to think of the 'what ifs,' " Thompson says. The cameras would help authorities monitor who is entering and leaving the port. If something bad happens, the cameras at the very least could help identify suspects.

      "I'd be willing to bet that's a good reason why we got the grant," Thompson says. "The government, I think, understands the potential."

      The Department of Homeland Security, which gave Alaska more than $16 million in grants last year, takes seriously the threat of terrorists infiltrating the country through remote border areas.

      "Once a terrorist is inside Alaska, that person is inside the United States," says David Liebersbach, director of the Alaska Division of Homeland Security.

      "Phoooom," Thompson says again.

      Police headquarters is a big blue building made of aluminum. In a large room on the second floor, technicians are working out the kinks in the surveillance system. It is a German-made all-digital network that stores footage in computers. Two 42-inch Sony plasma screens on a wall show live video of street scenes, parking lots, building entrances and locations around the harbour.

      From this room, a dispatcher will monitor the busiest parts of town around the clock. Officers can also follow a crime in progress. Thompson hopes the cameras will help in day-to-day crime-fighting. During fishing season, a large transient population comes to town, and drugs and alcohol become a problem. Quaint little Dillingham, he says, becomes "a rough little town."

      He cites crime numbers for the last three years: Homicides: 3. Unclassified deaths: 6. Assaults: 271.

      Thompson tells the story of a skipper, John Henry, 51, who one winter night in 2004 fell asleep on the beach and froze to death. Today, a camera watches over the spot where he died. Thompson says if a camera had been there that night, police could have saved Henry.

      Thompson says he doesn't have the time or interest to spy on people

      The town leadership stands behind him. Mayor Chris Napoli said the city posted the Homeland Security grant as an agenda item in a council meeting last year. He said the meeting "was poorly attended"  a nice way of saying nobody came. The subject of surveillance cameras was not mentioned in the meeting notice. On June 2, 2005, the council adopted a resolution accepting the grant.

      Napoli doesn't understand the fuss. "We had an opportunity to enhance security and we took advantage of it," he says. "I thought we were doing what government officials are supposed to do."

      The mayor, who runs a gas station and convenience store across from the police station, bought his own surveillance camera for the store. The banks and grocery stores in town have had surveillance cameras for years. The hospital uses cameras, and the public housing authority two years ago installed 25 cameras at its apartment complex.

      Says high school wrestling coach Johnny Johnson: "If you're not doing anything wrong, what does it matter?"

      Tim Smeekens and his wife moved from Oregon to Alaska eight years ago, living for a time in a tiny native village. A job as a social worker brought Smeekens to Dillingham five years later.

      He has taken over the petition drive started by Roberts, consulting with a lawyer to put together a referendum on the cameras. Based on the number of people who voted in the last election, Smeekens says, he'll need at most about 100 signatures.

      "Not a problem," he says over breakfast at Fisherman's Cafe.

      It's a one-room restaurant with low ceilings and no discernible heat. The temperature hovers around zero. The clientele is a rough-looking crowd. Two men at a nearby table talk about bear-hunting, one claiming to have shot a "brownie" that had a 28-inch skull.

      By contrast, Smeekens looks dapper. He is 53 with roundish glasses that give him a professorial look. The town leaders "assumed they could put up these cameras and nobody would mind," Smeekens says. "Know what? We mind.

      "I value privacy. It's the birthright of every American," he says. The surveillance cameras represent "a chipping away of that right."

      Smeekens says he's fighting over principle. But many others eager to sign the petition have more pragmatic or personal concerns.

      "I guess we have to be mindful not to pick our noses in public," says Donna Shade, owner of a bed and breakfast. She describes herself as someone who naturally feels guilty anyway.

      "It's a Catholic thing," she says. The cameras bolster the sense that "we're not trustworthy."

      Ronnie Heyano, a fisherman, sums up his concerns: "Who will be watching the watchers?"

      Later that afternoon, Roberts, the barge captain, is driving around in his truck again.

      Barge work is hard to come by as long as there's ice in Nushagak Bay; he'll have time to spare until May. He spends much time giving townspeople tours of the camera sites.

      "Here's one thing that really ticks people off. See that building?" says Roberts, gesturing toward an old one-story structure near City Hall It's the Bristol Bay Counseling Center, a mental health facility.

      "There are people embarrassed to go in there because they think those cameras are taking pictures of them," Roberts says. "You're never going to hear from them."

      On a road behind City Hall, Roberts stops his truck to talk to a fellow barge captain who has stopped his own pickup. Two idling trucks, two rolled-down windows, two men swapping news in the middle of the street. It's a common scene in town.

      "Watch out. Osama's going to get you," Roberts says.

      "Big Brother's going to get you first," says the other skipper, Dennis Johnson.

      Roberts asks if he's a registered voter. Johnson says yes and reminds Roberts to tell him when the petition is ready. The men fall silent, their truck engines quietly rumbling. With a short crisp nod, Roberts drives off.

      Roberts says if the petition fails, he may do the unthinkable: run for mayor again. He predicts he'd win and there would be a few people at City Hall looking for new jobs.

      He heaves a sigh.

      "Dillingham, Alaska," he says simply, his tone implying the lament: What has happened to you 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060331/c14624a6/attachment.htm 

From barbarasiomos38 at msn.com  Thu Mar 30 17:13:33 2006
From: barbarasiomos38 at msn.com (Barbara Siomos)
Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2006 01:13:33 GMT
Subject: [Mb-civic] Defend Bear Butte media release~Please Pass On
Message-ID: <BAY114-DAV2B31E14E0B1ABE17C99F5ABD60@phx.gbl>

My name is Carter Camp, I'm a Ponca Indian and I have been chosen to be the
"Eyapaha" or "Traditional Speaker" for the Inter-Tribal Coalition to Defend Bear Butte.

 ( <http://www.defendbearbutte.org/> www.defendbearbutte.org). 

As such, I would like to announce a major effort by over thirty (30) Sovereign Indian
Nations in America to stop the obscene
developments which are being built all
around the Mountain each of our Nations
hold sacred and inviolable. For over a
century our Nations have attempted to
explain to the encroaching Americans that
this Sacred Mountain is a place where we
come to pray and it holds an exquisitely
important place in the ancient religious
ways of each of our Nations. 

For example, during each of America's
World Wars, plus Korea and Viet Nam, our
Nations and our Veterans pilgrimage to
Bear Butte to pray for the victories of
American Armed Forces and the safe
return of our tribal warriors who fought in those wars in such great numbers.  In fact
all year around hundreds of Indian people make their pilgrimage to Bear Butte to
pray, fast, and hold religious ceremonies.

The Mountain holds such tremendous
meaning to our people that many of us
believe our entire way of life will be
destroyed if the continued exploitation of
the land around Bear Butte is allowed to continue by local and State governments. 

Now because those same local and state
governments refuse to hear our pleas to
mitigate the developments or in any way
cooperate with our requests for a five-mile
buffer zone around her base, we must 
attempt to convince them in a more direct
way. Therefore we have decided to hold
another "Great Gathering of the Nations"
such as the one Hunkpapa Chief Sitting 
Bull held in the mid 1800's for the same
reason. to protect our sacred grounds. 
Chief Sitting Bull gathered 6,000 of his
people; we plan on gathering over 10,000
native people on Bear Butte during this 
year's "Sturgis Bike Rally" to stand and
march in witness and protest to the destruction of our most holy site.

Each day of the "Rally" we plan on exercising our Constitutional right to
assemble on Bear Butte and march to the
Sturgis City Hall and/or the various scenes
of noisy, drunken debauchery taking place
around the slopes of our sacred mountain.

Our people will begin gathering to hold
ceremonies on the Fourth of July and we
will continue to gather our people until
August when a "Grand Council of the
Tribes" will be held to determine our
future course of actions. All Traditional
Societies will take their place in the grand
circle; Traditional Chiefs will lead societies
of Kit Fox, Dog Soldiers, Ponca He'Thuska,
and other Lakota Tokala and Akicita to 
take their places at the front of the people.

Our effort will be led principally by 
American Indian Veterans who have fought
for America in all of her wars.

The second effort will be an International
boycott of the Broken Spoke Saloon and all
booze serving campgrounds within the five-mile buffer zone. This effort will be 
spearheaded by the newly formed biker
group "BIKERS FOR BEAR BUTTE" who will
take it upon themselves to inform the biker
nation that Meade County and South 
Dakota are turning a deaf and racist ear to
Indian people and only the bikers 
themselves can take the proper steps to
enforce the buffer zone by asking all bikers
not to patronize any campground, booze
party, or concert venue within the buffer zone. They will "request" in the strongest
terms that their fellow bikers stay off 
Highway 34 and 79 within five miles of Bear
Butte. This effort has already begun and will grow much stronger before the "Rally".

In closing I would like to assure the people
of South Dakota that our gathering and
marches will be peaceful and within
Constitutional bounds. We will seek permits for our marches and gathering
places and we intend to comply with 
existing laws. But in the end, we fully
intend to protect the sanctity of our sacred
mountain no matter how long it takes; we
have done so for hundreds of years and we
intend to continue as long as she is being
shown disrespect and remains under attack. 

We further ask the people of South Dakota
to help us by writing or calling their
legislators and asking them to enact the
five-mile buffer zone as law.

In 2001 the World Trade Center ruins 
became "Sacred Ground" to all Americans
so it seems America can understand the
concept with which our people have 
regarded Bear Butte from time immemorial. 

All we're asking is that South Dakotans
give our sacred mountain the same respect
given to New York's sacred site. 

Carter Camp, Eyapaha

Inter-Tribal Coalition to Defend Bear Butte.

<http://www.defendbearbutte.org/> www.defendbearbutte.org

605-455-2508 





-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060331/aaf9b87e/attachment.htm 

From harry.sifton at sympatico.ca  Thu Mar 30 18:28:22 2006
From: harry.sifton at sympatico.ca (Harold Sifton)
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2006 21:28:22 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Cynthia McKinney
Message-ID: <000801c6546a$cbbc9c40$393fe440@Harold>

I think the white security guards should get their act together, they have had 13 years to get to know Cynthia McKinney!!

She has been there since 1993, and has even had her picture posted so that they should know her.

http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/view.php?StoryID=20060330-120057-3228r

If I were her I sue for racism, she has all the right to punch the idiot!

Later H
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060330/f8e78be5/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Thu Mar 30 19:01:53 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (Ian)
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2006 22:01:53 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Cynthia McKinney
References: <000801c6546a$cbbc9c40$393fe440@Harold>
Message-ID: <028d01c6546f$777bc160$99ca6c42@iancn2ccrvzt0j>

Harold:

Well...I agree that she might have reason to sue, but as a pacifist, I can't agree that there is any excuse for punching the guy...

Peace.
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Harold Sifton 
  To: MB Civic 
  Sent: Thursday, March 30, 2006 9:28 PM
  Subject: [Mb-civic] Cynthia McKinney


  I think the white security guards should get their act together, they have had 13 years to get to know Cynthia McKinney!!

  She has been there since 1993, and has even had her picture posted so that they should know her.

  http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/view.php?StoryID=20060330-120057-3228r

  If I were her I sue for racism, she has all the right to punch the idiot!

  Later H


------------------------------------------------------------------------------


  _______________________________________________
  Mb-civic mailing list
  Mb-civic at islandlists.com
  http://www.islandlists.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mb-civic
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060330/ed0b935e/attachment.htm 

From barbarasiomos38 at msn.com  Fri Mar 31 00:55:28 2006
From: barbarasiomos38 at msn.com (Barbara Siomos)
Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2006 08:55:28 GMT
Subject: [Mb-civic] Cynthia McKinney
Message-ID: <BAY114-DAV7124EF17293CA1EFF7BF4ABD60@phx.gbl>

Harry I agree.... WoW!!  If I were she I would have lost my cool years ago.. Thanks for posting this.

peace,
barbara


-----Original Message-----
From: Harold Sifton
Sent: Thu, 30 Mar 2006 18:28:22 -0800
To: MB Civic
Subject: [Mb-civic] Cynthia McKinney

I think the white security guards should get their act together, they have had 13 years to get to know Cynthia McKinney!!

She has been there since 1993, and has even had her picture posted so that they should know her.

http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/view.php?StoryID=20060330-120057-3228r

If I were her I sue for racism, she has all the right to punch the idiot!

Later H
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060331/8e61ebf2/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Fri Mar 31 03:41:13 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2006 06:41:13 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] 'Like Falling Off a Cliff For 3 Months' - Washington Post
Message-ID: <442D1559.8050605@comcast.net>

'Like Falling Off a Cliff For 3 Months'
Uncertainty of Captivity Ends for Reporter in Iraq

By Ellen Knickmeyer
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, March 31, 2006; A01

BAGHDAD, March 30 -- Jill Carroll wondered from day to day whether she 
would grow old or die a hostage.

"It was like falling off a cliff for three months, waiting to hit the 
ground," the 28-year-old American reporter said Thursday after being 
released by her kidnappers.

A shuffle from car to street to the branch office of a Sunni Arab 
political party and then to its headquarters brought Carroll to freedom 
on a beautiful spring day in Baghdad.

When she walked into the Iraqi Islamic Party's branch, she was still 
wearing one of the head scarves and enveloping embroidered dresses given 
to her by her captors. The black gloves of a conservative Muslim woman, 
also given to her by her captors, hid her hands.

Shortly after Carroll's arrival, the head of the party telephoned The 
Washington Post's Baghdad bureau. Carroll, a freelance journalist who 
wrote for the Christian Science Monitor, said she wanted to see familiar 
faces and had had many friends on The Post's staff since the early days 
of the war. Devoted to mastering Arabic and Middle Eastern culture and 
to covering Iraq, she was particularly close to the paper's young Iraqi 
interpreters and reporters.

In the party leader's chair-lined offices, with Sunni politicians 
looking on, Carroll and her friends were reunited. They embraced and 
cried through her first conversations in English in more than 80 days.

Then, with a cellphone borrowed from one of the politicians, Carroll 
woke up her twin sister, father and mother in the United States, 
punching in their numbers one after another.

Katie, Dad, Mom. It's Jill. I'm fine. I'm free.

She borrowed another cellphone when the first one lost power. She begged 
her family's forgiveness.

Three months without exercise had made her face round. Her captors had 
treated her well, she said, and she never dared turn down their offers 
of meals or candy for fear of giving offense. I'm fat, she said.

She asked for news of the world. She was shocked to hear of the prayers 
on her behalf, of the media coverage, of the vigils and balloon releases 
at the foot of the Eiffel Tower.

Kidnapped Jan. 7, three weeks after Iraq's national elections, she was 
shocked as well to hear that Iraq had still not formed a new government.

"You know that shelf?" she asked. She meant a mirror-backed knickknack 
cabinet in the entry of the Post house in Baghdad. For one reason or 
another, it had become a place to put photos of close friends killed 
over the nearly three years of war in Iraq.

The cabinet had three shelves. Two of the shelves already held a photo, 
both of them, coincidentally, of young women.

"I kept thinking about that shelf," Carroll said. "I didn't want to be 
that third shelf."

Post staffers had had the same thought. They removed the shelf and hid 
it the day after she was kidnapped.

One of Carroll's hardest days had been Wednesday, the day before her 
release, she said, when she broke down and cried hard, muffling the 
sound with her abaya in the room where she was being held. She prayed.

Coincidentally, her twin sister, Katie, appeared that same day on 
al-Arabiya television, saying it had been nearly two months since the 
last news or video of her sister. "I also hope that those with Jill have 
come to know her -- that they recognize what a wonderful person she is 
and realize that they can show the world that they are merciful to an 
innocent woman by returning her safely home to us,'' Katie Carroll said.

Hours later, Carroll's captors dropped her off in a Baghdad 
neighborhood, outside an office of the Iraqi Islamic Party. The 
politicians inside gave her juice, candy, water and tissues.

Composed, Carroll negotiated her way through the first of many 
politically laden conversations she would have Thursday, trying to stick 
to what she wanted and didn't want to say.

The party officials asked her to write out and sign a statement saying 
she had not been harmed in her brief time at their offices. They had her 
record a question-and-answer session on camera that they said was for 
their records. It showed up on television shortly afterward.

Party leader Tariq al-Hashimi presented her with an embossed Koran in a 
plush box. The Koran was for the true followers of Islam, Hashimi said, 
and he mentioned the Iraqi people. Accepting it, Carroll said her 
suffering was nothing compared with theirs.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/30/AR2006033001965.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060331/6cf926e7/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Fri Mar 31 03:44:10 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2006 06:44:10 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Pentagon to Test a Huge Conventional Bomb - Washington
	Post
Message-ID: <442D160A.5080708@comcast.net>

Pentagon to Test a Huge Conventional Bomb

By Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 31, 2006; A09

A huge mushroom cloud of dust is expected to rise over Nevada's desert 
in June when the Pentagon plans to detonate a gigantic 700-ton explosive 
-- the biggest open-air chemical blast ever at the Nevada Test Site -- 
as part of the research into developing weapons that can destroy deeply 
buried military targets, officials said yesterday.

The test, code-named "Divine Strake," will occur on June 2 about 90 
miles northwest of Las Vegas in a high desert valley bounded by 
mountains, according to Pentagon and Energy Department officials.

"This is the largest single explosive we could imagine doing," said 
James A. Tegnelia, director of the Pentagon's Defense Threat Reduction 
Agency, which is conducting the test.

The test is aimed at determining how well a massive conventional bomb 
would perform against fortified underground targets -- such as military 
headquarters, biological or chemical weapons stockpiles, and long-range 
missiles -- that the Pentagon says are proliferating among potential 
adversaries around the world.

Tegnelia said there is a range of technical hurdles to overcome. He 
suggested that big conventional bombs are unlikely to solve the overall 
problem of buried threats. "It's a lot easier to dig your tunnel 50 feet 
deeper" than to develop weapons that can destroy it, he told a meeting 
of defense reporters.

Such a bomb would be a conventional alternative to a nuclear weapon 
proposed by the Bush administration, which has run into opposition on 
Capitol Hill. The Pentagon for several years has sought funding for 
research into the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP) -- also known 
as the "bunker buster" -- after the administration's 2001 Nuclear 
Posture Review stated that no weapon in the U.S. arsenal could threaten 
a growing number of buried targets. Congress, however, has repeatedly 
refused to grant funding for a study on a nuclear bunker buster, instead 
directing money toward conventional alternatives.

The June test will detonate 700 tons of heavy ammonium nitrate-fuel oil 
emulsion -- creating a blast equivalent to 593 tons of TNT -- in a 
36-foot-deep hole near a tunnel in the center of the Nevada Test Site, 
according to official reports. It aims to allow scientists to model the 
type of ground shock that will be created, and to weigh the 
effectiveness of such a weapon against its collateral impact.

"To my knowledge, this will be the largest open-air chemical explosion 
that we've conducted," said Darwin Morgan, spokesman for the Energy 
Department's test site. Larger blasts have been carried out at the White 
Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, including the nation's biggest 
open-air detonation, in 1985, a Pentagon spokeswoman said.

The blast is not likely to be felt or heard outside the 
1,375-square-mile test site, and the cloud of dust is expected to 
dissipate quickly from view, Morgan said. "They don't think people will 
see it in the base camp on the south end of the test site," he said.

Officials took pains to differentiate between the June conventional 
experiment and past nuclear testing. "The U.S. has no plans to conduct a 
nuclear test. President Bush supports a continued moratorium on nuclear 
testing," said Irene Smith, a spokeswoman for the Defense Threat 
Reduction Agency (DTRA). The Pentagon agency is charged with countering 
threats to the United States from chemical, biological, radiological and 
nuclear weapons.

On a related topic, Tegnelia said the State Department and the Pentagon 
are developing a proposal for a $100 million effort to help Libya get 
rid of tons of mustard gas and some precursor chemicals being stored in 
the Libyan desert. "The Libyans requested some support" from the U.S. 
government, and a DTRA team has visited Libya to consider various 
options for eliminating the weapons, he said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/30/AR2006033001735.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060331/b31b23d3/attachment-0001.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Fri Mar 31 03:46:11 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2006 06:46:11 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] What's Happening to Boys? - Leonard Sax - Washington
	Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <442D1683.2000509@comcast.net>

What's Happening to Boys?
Young Women These Days Are Driven -- but Guys Lack Direction
<>By Leonard Sax
The Washington Post
Friday, March 31, 2006; A19

The romantic comedy "Failure to Launch," which opened as the No. 1 movie 
in the nation this month, has substantially exceeded pre-launch 
predictions, taking in more than $64 million in its first three weeks.

Matthew McConaughey plays a young man who is affable, intelligent, 
good-looking -- and completely unmotivated. He's still living at home 
and seems to have no ambitions beyond playing video games, hanging out 
with his buddies (two young men who are also still living with their 
parents) and having sex. In desperation, his parents hire a professional 
motivation consultant, played by Sarah Jessica Parker, who pretends to 
fall in love with McConaughey's character in the hope that a romantic 
relationship will motivate him to move out of his parents' home and get 
a life.

The movie has received mixed reviews, though The Post's Stephen Hunter 
praised it as "the best comedy since I don't know when." But putting 
aside the movie's artistic merits or lack thereof, I was struck by how 
well its central idea resonates with what I'm seeing in my office with 
greater and greater frequency. Justin goes off to college for a year or 
two, wastes thousands of dollars of his parents' money, then gets bored 
and comes home to take up residence in his old room, the same bedroom 
where he lived when he was in high school. Now he's working 16 hours a 
week at Kinko's or part time at Starbucks.

His parents are pulling their hair out. "For God's sake, Justin, you're 
26 years old. You're not in school. You don't have a career. You don't 
even have a girlfriend. What's the plan? When are you going to get a life?"

"What's the problem?" Justin asks. "I haven't gotten arrested for 
anything, I haven't asked you guys for money. Why can't you just chill?"

This phenomenon cuts across all demographics. You'll find it in families 
both rich and poor; black, white, Asian and Hispanic; urban, suburban 
and rural. According to the Census Bureau, fully one-third of young men 
ages 22 to 34 are still living at home with their parents -- a roughly 
100 percent increase in the past 20 years. No such change has occurred 
with regard to young women. Why?

My friend and colleague Judy Kleinfeld, a professor at the University of 
Alaska, has spent many years studying this growing phenomenon. She 
points out that many young women are living at home nowadays as well. 
But those young women usually have a definite plan. They're working 
toward a college degree, or they're saving money to open their own 
business. And when you come back three or four years later, you'll find 
that in most cases those young women have achieved their goal, or 
something like it. They've earned that degree. They've opened their 
business.

But not the boys. "The girls are driven; the boys have no direction," is 
the way Kleinfeld summarizes her findings. Kleinfeld is organizing a 
national Boys Project, with a board composed of leading researchers and 
writers such as Sandra Stotsky, Michael Thompson and Richard Whitmire, 
to figure out what's going wrong with boys. The project is only a few 
weeks old, it has called no news conferences and its Web site ( 
http://www.boysproject.net ) has just been launched.

So far we've just been asking one another the question: What's happening 
to boys? We've batted around lots of ideas. Maybe the problem has to do 
with the way the school curriculum has changed. Maybe it has to do with 
environmental toxins that affect boys differently than girls (not as 
crazy an idea as it sounds). Maybe it has to do with changes in the 
workforce, with fewer blue-collar jobs and more emphasis on the service 
industry. Maybe it's some combination of all of the above, or other 
factors we haven't yet identified.

In Ayn Rand's humorless apocalyptic novel "Atlas Shrugged," the central 
characters ask: What would happen if someone turned off the motor that 
drives the world? We may be living in such a time, a time when the motor 
that drives the world is running down or stuck in neutral -- but only 
for boys.

Leonard Sax, a family physician and psychologist in Montgomery County, 
is the author of "Boys Adrift: What's Really Behind the Growing Epidemic 
of Unmotivated Boys," to be published next year.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/30/AR2006033001341.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060331/02415a2f/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Fri Mar 31 03:48:00 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2006 06:48:00 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] A Meltdown We Can't Even Enjoy - Eugene Robinson -
 Washington Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <442D16F0.2080805@comcast.net>

A Meltdown We Can't Even Enjoy
<>
By Eugene Robinson
The Washington Post
Friday, March 31, 2006; A19

It's frustrating. The three overlapping forces that have sent this 
country in so many wrong directions -- the conservative movement, the 
neoconservative movement and the Republican Party -- are warring among 
themselves, doing their best impression of crabs in a barrel, and 
sensible people can't even enjoy the spectacle. That's because it's hard 
to take pleasure in the havoc they've caused and the disarray they will 
someday leave behind.

Factions within the conservative movement have been engaged in 
escalating skirmishes over what, exactly, the label "conservative" 
should mean. This week the fight is over illegal immigration. The 
nativists and xenophobes want mass deportation and a Berlin Wall looming 
over the Rio Grande. The cultural determinists lose their studied, 
academic poise the moment they hear brown-skinned people speaking 
Spanish or see them waving a Mexican flag. Watch your blood pressure, 
people, because Cinco de Mayo is just a few weeks away.

The social conservatives seem to be hopelessly conflicted about 
immigration. They have a kind of immune-system reaction against this 
unchecked inflow of aliens who look suspiciously like carriers of alien 
values. But, as some conservative commentators have noted, the 
immigrants flooding across the border are more likely to have 
traditional, family-and-church values than many native-born Americans. 
Does . . . not . . . compute.

Meanwhile, the small-government, tight-money conservatives have finally 
reached the point of utter disgust about another issue -- the fact that 
George W. Bush and a conservative Congress have presided over a massive 
expansion of government and an explosion of debt. For this group, having 
to point to Bill Clinton as a model of fiscal probity redefines the word 
"galling."

The neoconservative civil war is simpler to map, because it's all about 
Iraq. After a long period of denial, even the most fervent and 
evangelical of the neocons are now forced to admit that this whole Iraq 
thing hasn't quite worked out the way they expected. Those who advocate 
staying the course can read the polls. They see that bringing out their 
dictionaries, pointing to the definition of "civil war" and splitting 
hairs isn't doing much to stanch the flow of public opinion.

When one of the neocon movement's stalwarts, Francis Fukuyama, declared 
himself a turncoat recently in a new book -- he questions not only the 
war but the whole premise of neoconservatism as a real-world philosophy 
-- his erstwhile compatriots reacted with the shrill bitterness of a 
rejected lover. It's the kind of intellectual food fight that's almost 
always fun to watch, except that it's about Iraq, and there's nothing 
funny about Iraq.

The conflict within the Republican Party is about two primal urges, fear 
and ambition. Suddenly there is the chance -- not the probability but 
the possibility -- that the Republicans will lose control of the House 
or the Senate this fall. At the same time, presidential hopefuls with an 
eye on 2008 are jockeying for position. That combination of 
circumstances is turning problems into crises, and crisis management is 
not the ideal way to run a country.

That's what is happening with immigration. Majority Leader Bill Frist 
has the Senate in a lather, as if all 12 million illegal immigrants in 
the country suddenly arrived last Thursday. I'm sure that has nothing to 
do with the fact that he'd like to run for president.

It would all be entertaining if the stakes weren't so high. Iraqis and 
Americans are dying; the treasury is bleeding; real people, not 
statistics, are at the center of the immigration debate. Iran is intent 
on joining the nuclear club. Hallowed American traditions of privacy, 
fairness and due process are being flouted, and thus diminished. As the 
powers-that-be self-destruct, the powers-that-would-be -- Democratic 
leaders and all Americans who've seen enough of this movie -- need to 
put together an alternative program that will begin to undo some of the 
damage the conservative-neocon-GOP nexus has wrought.

To this point, I think the Democratic Party has done just what it needed 
to do, which was basically to sit back and watch the other side wear 
itself down. When one party is in charge of the White House and both 
sides of Capitol Hill, there's not much the other party can do anyway. 
Refusing to draw up articles of impeachment or sign on to Russ 
Feingold's censure resolution may reflect cold political calculation, 
but it also acknowledges plain reality: Not gonna happen.

Democrats have behaved with remarkable discipline, which shows how much 
they believe they need to win this fall and in 2008. What they haven't 
yet done is communicate a compelling vision of where they will take the 
country when they are given the reins. Dry position papers, drafted by 
committee, aren't enough. Make us see a better future.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/30/AR2006033001334.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060331/32ab6898/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Fri Mar 31 03:50:54 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2006 06:50:54 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] The Twilight Of Objectivity - Michael Kinsley -
	Washington Post Op-Ed
Message-ID: <442D179E.4050708@comcast.net>

The Twilight Of Objectivity
<>
By Michael Kinsley
The Washington Post
Friday, March 31, 2006; A19

CNN's Lou Dobbs -- formerly a mild-mannered news anchor noted for his 
palsy-walsy interviews with corporate CEOs -- has turned into a raving 
populist xenophobe. Ratings are up. It's like watching one of those 
"makeover" shows that turn nerds into fops or bathrooms into ballrooms. 
According to the New York Times, this demonstrates "that what works in 
cable television news is not an objective analysis of the day's events" 
but "a specific point of view on a sizzling-hot topic." Nicholas Lemann 
made the same point in a recent New Yorker profile of Bill O'Reilly. 
Cable, he wrote "is increasingly a medium of outsize, super-opinionated 
franchise personalities."

The head of CNN/US, Jonathan Klein, said that Lou Dobbs's license to 
emote is "sui generis" among CNN anchors, but that is obviously not 
true. Consider Anderson Cooper, CNN's rising star. His career was made 
when he exploded in self-righteous anger and gave Louisiana Sen. Mary 
Landrieu an emotional tongue-lashing about the inadequate relief effort 
after Hurricane Katrina. Klein has said that Cooper has "a refreshing 
way of being the anti-anchor . . . getting involved the way you might." 
In short, he's acting like a human being, albeit a somewhat overwrought one.

And now on CNN and elsewhere, you can see other anchors struggling to 
act like human beings, with varying degrees of success. Only five months 
before anointing Cooper as CNN's new messiah (nothing human is alien to 
Anderson Cooper; nothing alien is human to Lou Dobbs), Klein killed 
CNN's long-running debate show "Crossfire," on the grounds that viewers 
wanted information and not opinions. Klein said he agreed 
"wholeheartedly" with Jon Stewart's widely discussed and 
uncharacteristically stuffy remark that "Crossfire" and similar shows 
were "hurting America" with their occasionally raucous displays of 
emotional commitment to a political point of view.

But that is just a personal gripe (I worked at "Crossfire" for six 
years). More important is that Klein is right in sensing, on second 
thought, that objectivity is not a horse to bet the network on. Or the 
newspaper either.

The newspaper industry is having a psychic meltdown over the threat 
posed by the Internet. No one seriously doubts anymore that the Internet 
will fundamentally change the news business. The uncertainty is whether 
it will change only the method of delivering the product or will also 
change the nature of the product. Will people want, in any form, a 
collection of articles, written by professional journalists from a 
detached and purportedly objective point of view? Or are blogs and 
podcasts the cutting edge of a new model -- more personalized, more 
interactive, more opinionated, more communal, less objective?

It might even be a healthy development for American newspapers to 
abandon the conceit of objectivity. This is not unknown territory. Most 
of the world's newspapers, in fact, already make no pretense of 
objectivity in the American sense. But readers of the good ones (such as 
the Guardian or the Financial Times of London) come away as well 
informed as the readers of any "objective" American newspaper. Another 
model, right here in America, is the newsmagazine, all of which produce 
much outstanding journalism with little pretense of objectivity.

Opinion journalism can be more honest than objective-style journalism, 
because it doesn't have to hide its point of view. All observations are 
subjective. Writers freed of artificial objectivity can try to determine 
the whole truth about their subject and then tell it whole to the world. 
Their "objective" counterparts have to sort their subjective 
observations into two arbitrary piles: truths that are objective as 
well, and truths that are just an opinion. That second pile of truths 
cannot be published, except perhaps as a quote from someone else.

Without the pretense of objectivity, the fundamental journalist's 
obligation of factual accuracy would remain. Opinion journalism brings 
new ethical obligations as well. These can be summarized in two words: 
intellectual honesty. Are you writing or saying what you really think? 
Have you tested it against the available counterarguments? Will you 
stand by an expressed principle in different situations, when it leads 
to an unpleasing conclusion? Are you open to new evidence or an argument 
that might change your mind? Do you retain at least a tiny, healthy 
sliver of a doubt about the argument you choose to make?

Much of today's opinion journalism, especially on TV, is not a great 
advertisement for the notion that American journalism could be improved 
by more opinion and less effort at objectivity. But that's because the 
conditions under which much opinion journalism is practiced today make 
honesty harder, and doubt practically impossible.

Unless, of course, I am completely wrong.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/30/AR2006033001330.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060331/c3118b6d/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Fri Mar 31 03:54:55 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2006 06:54:55 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Transcending the evil that men do - Elizabeth Hayden -
 Boston Globe Op-Ed
Message-ID: <442D188F.6040403@comcast.net>


  Transcending the evil that men do

By Elizabeth Hayden  |  March 31, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

IT WAS A PERFECT September morning. The crisp blue sky and a rising sun 
gently awakened me. My husband began to stir. A deep sense of 
contentment wrapped me as I emerged from my sleep. I basked in the 
delight of bonus time, those few moments before the alarm commands the 
day. Everything seemed right with the world. I lay totally unsuspecting 
of the events that would unfold in the day ahead and the years to 
follow. It was a Tuesday, the 11th of September, 2001.

The alarm went off. Jim hit the snooze button, while I jumped up. The 
household tumbled into the familiar daily routines of a regular 
work-school week. I had to feed the dog and get everyone moving before 
heading off to teach my fifth grade class. My son, 17, awoke early to 
say goodbye to his dad before getting ready for school. My husband, a 
chief financial officer, was headed to Los Angeles on United 175 to make 
a presentation to investors. My 19-year-old daughter still lay sleeping 
in her college dorm room.

My husband and I met at 18 as college freshmen. We were inseparable, or 
so we believed. We married at 22 and were days away from celebrating our 
25th wedding anniversary. But Zacarious Moussaoui and fellow Al Qaeda 
terrorists had plans, plans that destroyed my family and the life I had.

There is no way I can begin to explain the full impact that the attacks 
had on me. The four and one-half years since 9/11 have been filled with 
immense pain and suffering. They have been filled with the loss of hope 
and faith. I have relived the horror of his final flight as it was 
diverted from Los Angeles to Lower Manhattan well over a thousand times. 
I continually question, ''Why didn't the airlines stop the terrorists 
from boarding the planes? Why did they not prevent them from carrying 
out their carnage?"

There are no words that can convey the enormity of the terrorist acts. 
How does one begin to measure personal loss, what my family has missed 
in the past four and one-half years, and what we will miss in the years 
to come.

My children have had to make their passage from teens to young adults 
without their dad. He will not be here to celebrate their joyous 
moments, to soften their heartaches, or counsel them in their journeys.

Four and one-half years later I am still in therapy. I was unable to 
continue in my job. I had to leave my home. I could not live there; I 
could not sell it. The God of my childhood died on September 11. He 
couldn't be all powerful as I had believed. Otherwise he would have done 
something. Today, I continue to seek the support of good priests to heal 
the damaged relationship with the God I so loved, to regain a deep and 
an abiding faith.

Does Zacarious Moussaoui deserve the death penalty? Absolutely. He 
participated in a heinous, premeditated plot to use aircraft as weapons 
to bring destruction to America. Arrested on visa violations, he was not 
given the opportunity to carry out his plan, but on September 11, 2001, 
at 9:03 a.m. his brothers in terrorism destroyed the family I had.

But there is a more important question: Should Moussaoui receive the 
death penalty? Absolutely not. Although Moussaoui deserves to die, the 
people of the United States should not impose the death penalty upon 
him. My concern is not so much with Moussaoui. My concern is with the 
9/11 survivors, the families and friends of the victims, and the people 
of our nation.

It is a human response to be enraged against those who plotted to take 
the lives of so many innocent victims. To strike back is an instinctual 
human reaction toward such an outrageous violation against mankind. Yet 
to impose the death penalty diminishes our own humanity. Do we want to 
characterize ourselves as a nation committed to pure vengeance with 
nothing more to be gained? For we surely cannot think that imposing the 
death penalty will act as a deterrent against other terrorists. Cloaked 
in the rationalization of carrying forth the will of God, the terrorists 
let their fear and hatred consume their last ounce of humanity. Let us 
not follow in their footsteps.

Let us instead distance ourselves from the evil wrapped in their warped 
behavior. Let us maintain a strand of humanity that will bond us to the 
value of life. Let us define ourselves as principled people not acting 
out of fear and hatred, but a people who under the most challenging of 
circumstances can transcend evil and prevail with reason and justice. 
Let us strive to have love for one another.

Elizabeth Hayden resides in Boston.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/31/transcending_the_evil_that_men_do/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060331/37e5221b/attachment.htm 

From swiggard at comcast.net  Fri Mar 31 03:57:09 2006
From: swiggard at comcast.net (William Swiggard)
Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2006 06:57:09 -0500
Subject: [Mb-civic] Schiavo debate is back but life's moved on - Ellen
 Goodman - Boston Globe Op-Ed
Message-ID: <442D1915.9020107@comcast.net>


  Schiavo debate is back but life's moved on

By Ellen Goodman  |  March 31, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

WHOEVER THOUGHT that Terri Schiavo would rest in peace? A year after her 
death, her parents and husband are back in the spotlight with ''his" and 
''theirs" books. A year and two weeks after her feeding tube was 
removed, they are making dueling appearances on television. Sixteen 
years after she fell into a persistent vegetative state, they have 
opposing organizations launched in her memory.

This post-mortem battle has suggested a national civil war waged in blue 
and red. Indeed since Schiavo's death, conservative groups have filed 49 
bills in 23 state legislatures seeking laws that would leave any patient 
without a living will -- such as Terri -- on life support.

But what if they gave a culture war and nobody came?

Here's the surprising fact. Those bills have stalled or been watered 
down. Public opinion has not changed an iota. A year ago, 63 percent 
thought Terri's tube should be removed. Today, they feel the same way. 
End-of-life issues have simply not become a divisive political flash 
point for the vast majority of Americans.

If you can see this in the Schiavo case, you can also see it in the 
issue of doctor-assisted suicide. Not long ago, former Attorney General 
John Ashcroft tried to upend Oregon's Death with Dignity Act by 
threatening doctors who prescribed lethal doses of drugs under the state 
law. But in January, the Supreme Court rapped the federal government 
hard on the knuckles.

Most politically savvy folks predicted proponents would rush to bring 
Oregon's law to other states and opponents would push Congress to alter 
the Controlled Substances Act. But that hasn't happened either.

The low-key response may be testimony to where we are now in the long, 
intimate, difficult discussions about the end of life, about death with 
dignity and mercy.

We've learned a few things since Florida became the site of the Schiavo 
crossfire. We've also learned a few things since Oregon became the only 
state to permit doctors to prescribe lethal drugs.

In the first seven years, only 208 terminally ill Oregonians chose that 
way of dying. That's one in a thousand. Doctor-assisted suicide frames 
the issue, as bioethicist Thomas Murray of the Hastings Center says, in 
starkly legalistic and individual terms when most of us make these 
decisions with our families, not our lawyers; together, not alone.

If the ultimate goal is to improve end of life for the 2.4 million 
Americans who die every year, we have to think about more than one-tenth 
of 1 percent.

So, as a country, we have simply moved on. Despite the Terri Schiavo 
fiasco, despite the Oregon law, Americans have actually come to 
something of a consensus. It's a stark, shared view of what we fear and 
a nuanced view of what we want for ourselves and others.

The fearful fantasy began 30 years ago with the icon of Karen Ann 
Quinlan breathing on a respirator. We fear medicine will take over. We 
fear pain. We fear dying in isolation. What we want, as Murray recounts, 
is ''better treatment of pain, some assurance we won't get caught up by 
the medical machine and we want a chance to die the way we live -- in 
networks of relationships."

This shared consensus doesn't mean that we have solved the problem. In 
the past decade there has been real improvement. More hospice patients 
die at home in Oregon than in any other state. More people have also 
signed advance directives since they saw Terri Schiavo's family locked 
in primal prime-time battle over her fate.

But we still don't treat pain aggressively enough. Doctors who 
specialize in such treatment are sometimes treated as suspected drug 
peddlers. Advance directives don't always work. Half of all cases 
involving end-of-life decisions include a conflict within the family or 
between family and professionals.

Surely, we need to resist the laws that would give the state control 
over Terri's feeding tube. Surely, doctors should be allowed to 
prescribe lethal drugs in those rare and controlled cases outlined in 
Oregon. But for the sake of 99.9 percent of Americans, we are shifting 
from a legal agenda to a personal agenda.

In a Hastings Center report last fall, Murray and co-author Bruce 
Jennings said, ''We must talk about what we dare not name, and look at 
what we dare not see. We shall never get end-of-life care 'right' 
because death is not a puzzle to be solved. Death is an inevitable 
aspect of the human condition."

This is the way we move from the culture wars to the kitchen table, from 
the high-decibel yell of politics to the quiet conversation of worried 
families.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/31/schiavo_debate_is_back_but_lifes_moved_on/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060331/0c47ee52/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Fri Mar 31 09:00:50 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2006 17:00:50 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Jack's House
Message-ID: <20060331170052.A28CB3AE645@lax-gw06.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

OPINION | March 31, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor: Jack's House
By HART SEELY
These are the men that fleeced the tribes that paid the money that made the bribes that purchased the Congress that Jack built.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/31/opinion/31seely.html?ex=1144472400&en=283043d67747078e&ei=5070&emc=eta1




----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060331/caa53453/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Fri Mar 31 09:01:31 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2006 17:01:31 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Long-Awaited Medical Study Questions the
	Power of Prayer
Message-ID: <20060331170132.798869FCF9@lax-gw05.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

HEALTH | March 31, 2006
Long-Awaited Medical Study Questions the Power of Prayer
By BENEDICT CAREY
Prayers by strangers had no effect on the recovery of people who were undergoing heart surgery, a large study has found.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/31/health/31pray.html?ex=1144472400&en=f7840ae6c0a80413&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060331/87688bc8/attachment-0001.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Fri Mar 31 09:03:12 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2006 17:03:12 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Scans Show Different Growth for Intelligent
	Brains
Message-ID: <20060331170313.2632C83DD1@lax-gw03.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

SCIENCE | March 30, 2006
Scans Show Different Growth for Intelligent Brains
By NICHOLAS WADE
The brains of highly intelligent children develop in a different pattern from those with more average abilities, researchers say.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/30/science/30brain.html?ex=1144472400&en=c789d40dbed0f43f&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060331/47a276d7/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Fri Mar 31 09:05:34 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2006 17:05:34 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: Preventable Disease Blinds Poor in Third
	World
Message-ID: <20060331170535.114CB9FD4A@lax-gw05.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

INTERNATIONAL / AFRICA | March 31, 2006
On the Brink | Trachoma: Preventable Disease Blinds Poor in Third World
By CELIA W. DUGGER
An estimated 70 million people are infected with trachoma, and two million are blind because of it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/31/world/africa/31blind.html?ex=1144472400&en=0b66c1255597ab5f&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060331/a4c6bd40/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Fri Mar 31 09:12:06 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2006 17:12:06 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: NYTimes.com: Rifts Plague Anti-Chávez Venezuelans
Message-ID: <20060331171207.14BE89FD30@lax-gw05.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: mblaxill at yahoo.com.

hear ye...dispatch from Rome...


INTERNATIONAL / AMERICAS | March 31, 2006
Rifts Plague Anti-Ch?vez Venezuelans
By JUAN FORERO
While much of the opposition is boycotting the election, Julio Borges is running for office.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/31/world/americas/31venez.html?ex=1144472400&en=7b1eff384c732668&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060331/22f32a3f/attachment.htm 

From mblaxill at yahoo.com  Fri Mar 31 09:12:55 2006
From: mblaxill at yahoo.com (mblaxill at yahoo.com)
Date: 31 Mar 2006 17:12:55 -0000
Subject: [Mb-civic] Headlines for March 31, 2006
Message-ID: <20060331171255.12139.qmail@trinity.democracynow.org>

Mike Blaxill  ( mblaxill at yahoo.com )
sent you this story from democracynow.org



+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  Headlines for March 31, 2006
|  http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/31/148248
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+


- Jill Carroll Describes Captivity in Televised Interview 
- Carroll Criticized For Saying Captors Treated Her Well
- At Least 66 Killed in Iran Earthquake
- IAEA Head Warns Against Iran Sanctions
- Israel Strikes Gaza After West Bank Suicide Bombing
- Students Question Blair on Iraq During Indonesia Visit
- Pentagon Bars Soldiers From Wearing Outside Body Armor
- N.O. Levee Repair Costs Rise to $10 Billion
This story continues at: 
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/31/148248


From michael at michaelbutler.com  Fri Mar 31 11:08:01 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2006 11:08:01 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] The Road to Dubai By PAUL KRUGMAN
Message-ID: <C052BE11.2AC4E%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 31, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
The Road to Dubai
By PAUL KRUGMAN

For now, at least, the immigration issue is mainly hurting the Republican
Party, which is divided between those who want to expel immigrants and those
who want to exploit them. The only thing the two factions seem to have in
common is mean-spiritedness.

But immigration remains a difficult issue for liberals. Let me say a bit
more about the subject of my last column, the uncomfortable economics of
immigration, then turn to what really worries me: the political implications
of a large nonvoting work force.

About the economics: the crucial divide isn't between legal and illegal
immigration; it's between high-skilled and low-skilled immigrants.
High-skilled immigrants ? say, software engineers from South Asia ? are, by
any criterion I can think of, good for America. But the effects of
low-skilled immigration are mixed at best.

True, there are large benefits for the low-skilled migrants, who may find
even a minimum-wage U.S. job a big step up. Immigration also raises the
total income of native-born Americans, although reasonable estimates suggest
that these gains amount to no more than a fraction of 1 percent.

But low-skilled immigration depresses the wages of less-skilled native-born
Americans. And immigrants increase the demand for public services, including
health care and education. Estimates indicate that low-skilled immigrants
don't pay enough in taxes to cover the cost of providing these services.

All of these effects, except for the gains for the immigrants themselves,
are fairly small. Some of my friends say that's the point I should stress:
immigration is a wonderful thing for the immigrants, and claims that
immigrants are undermining American workers and taxpayers are hugely
overblown ? end of story.

But it's important to be intellectually honest, even when it hurts.
Moreover, what really worries me isn't the narrow economics ? it's the
political economy, the effects of having a disenfranchised labor force.

Imagine, for a moment, a future in which America becomes like Kuwait or
Dubai, a country where a large fraction of the work force consists of
illegal immigrants or foreigners on temporary visas ? and neither group has
the right to vote. Surely this would be a betrayal of our democratic ideals,
of government of the people, by the people. Moreover, a political system in
which many workers don't count is likely to ignore workers' interests: it's
likely to have a weak social safety net and to spend too little on services
like health care and education.

This isn't idle speculation. Countries with high immigration tend, other
things equal, to have less generous welfare states than those with low
immigration. U.S. cities with ethnically diverse populations ? often the
result of immigration ? tend to have worse public services than those with
more homogeneous populations.

Of course, America isn't Dubai. But we're moving in that direction. As of
2002, according to the Urban Institute, 14 percent of U.S. workers, and 20
percent of low-wage workers, were immigrants. Only a third of these
immigrant workers were naturalized citizens. So we already have a large
disenfranchised work force, and it's growing rapidly. The goal of
immigration reform should be to reverse that trend.

So what do I think of the Senate Judiciary Committee's proposal, which is
derived from a plan sponsored by John McCain and Ted Kennedy? I'm all in
favor of one provision: offering those already here a possible route to
permanent residency and citizenship. Since we aren't going to deport more
than 10 million people, we need to integrate those people into our society.

But I'm puzzled by the plan to create a permanent guest-worker program, one
that would admit 400,000 more workers a year (and you know that business
interests would immediately start lobbying for an increase in that number).
Isn't institutionalizing a disenfranchised work force a big step away from
democracy?

For a hard-line economic conservative like Mr. McCain, the advantages to
employers of a cheap work force may be more important than the violation of
democratic principles. But why would someone like Mr. Kennedy go along? Is
the point to help potential immigrants, or is it to buy support from
business interests?

Either way, it's a dangerous route to go down. America's political system is
already a lot less democratic in practice than it is on paper, and creating
a permanent nonvoting working class would make things worse. The road to
Dubai may be paved with good intentions.

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From michael at michaelbutler.com  Fri Mar 31 11:10:36 2006
From: michael at michaelbutler.com (Michael Butler)
Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2006 11:10:36 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Iraq at the 11th Hour By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Message-ID: <C052BEAC.2AC56%michael@michaelbutler.com>

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

March 31, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Iraq at the 11th Hour
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

The fate of the entire U.S. enterprise in Iraq now hangs in the balance, as
the war has entered a dangerous new phase. It is the phase of barbaric
identity-card violence between Sunnis and Shiites. In the late 1970's, I
covered a similar moment in Lebanon, and the one thing I learned was this:
Once this kind of venom gets unleashed ? with members of each community
literally beheading each other on the basis of their religious identities ?
it poisons everything. You enter a realm that is beyond politics, a realm
where fear and revenge dominate everyone's thinking ? and that is where Iraq
is heading.

Jeffrey Gettleman reported last Sunday in this paper about Mohannad
al-Azawi, a quiet Sunni pet shop owner in Baghdad who was abducted from his
store and found murdered the next morning. His skin was covered with purple
welts, and his face and legs had drill holes in them. His brother Hassan,
the story noted, "carries the autopsy photos with him, along with a pistol.
'I cannot live without vengeance,' he said."

Once embedded, this cycle of fear and revenge is almost impossible to break.
People conclude that the only thing that can protect them is a militia from
their own sect, not the police or the army. Then these militias, which come
to life to protect the neighborhood, take on a life of their own. They
develop protection rackets, feel the thrill of power and, as that happens,
start to do all they can to prevent the government from restoring its
authority. Finally, as the BBC noted in a recent report from Baghdad, some
Iraqi politicians are now concluding that "they can gain more power and
influence from building on sectarian loyalties than from appeals for
national unity." When politicians decide they can get ahead by appealing
more to fear than to hope, national reconciliation goes up in smoke.

A Baghdad blogger, the Mesopotamian, quoted by AndrewSullivan.com, gave a
vivid description of his neighborhood: "The confusion and conflict between
the Americans, the army and the Ministry of Interior is producing a
situation where the citizens don't know anymore whether the security
personnel in the street are friends, enemies, terrorists or simply criminals
and thieves. Everybody is wearing the same uniforms. Whole sections of the
city have virtually fallen to gangs and terrorists, and this is especially
true for the 'Sunni'-dominated neighborhoods. People and businesses are
being robbed and the employees kidnapped en masse in broad daylight and with
complete ease as though security forces are nonexistent, although we see
them everywhere.

"I don't know anymore what can be done to rescue the situation. At least,
those who are supposed to be in positions of responsibility should stop
lying and painting a false picture. ... I regret sounding so pessimistic,
but the alarm must be sounded. ... What is happening is Baghdad is something
really awful."

Donald Rumsfeld's criminally negligent decision not to deploy enough troops
in Iraq to begin with created this security vacuum. But the insecurity was
compounded by the unique enemy that emerged to take advantage of that vacuum
? Sunni Islamo-nihilists. These are a disparate collection of groups with
one common agenda: America and its Iraqi allies must fail; they must not be
allowed to build Iraq into a Western-style, democratizing society. When you
are up against an enemy whose only goal is that you must fail, and which
does not care about how much death and destruction it inflicts on its own
people, let alone on others, it is extremely difficult to establish order.

The Iraqi Shiite community showed remarkable restraint in the face of the
murderous provocations by these Islamo-nihilist gangs during the past three
years. But that restraint is over. It's now clear that some Shiite militias
are ready to match the Sunni nihilists, killing for killing. So the slide
into a medieval barbarism has begun.

Do not believe any of the Bush team's happy talk. It doesn't matter if Iraq
is quiet in the south and quiet in the north. If Baghdad, the heart of the
country, is being ripped apart, then there is no Iraq ? because there is no
center.

There is only one hope for halting this slide and that is the formation ?
immediately ? of a national unity government in Iraq, with Shiites, Sunnis
and Kurds sharing power, and the deployment on the streets ? immediately ?
of massive numbers of troops and police, both Iraqi and American, to prevent
more of these tribal killings. If a national unity government is not formed
soon, and if these identity-card murderers gain more momentum, any hope for
building a decent Iraq will vanish.

It is five minutes to midnight.

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    * Home
    * Privacy Policy
    * Search
    * Corrections
    * XML
    * Help
    * Contact Us
    * Work for Us
    * Site Map
    * Back to Top




From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Fri Mar 31 17:10:09 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Sat,  1 Apr 2006 01:10:09 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Mb-civic] NYTimes.com: G.O.P. Is Taking Aim at Advocacy Groups
Message-ID: <20060401011009.2EAD883E0B@lax-gw03.mroute.net>

This page was sent to you by: ialterman at nyc.rr.com.

WASHINGTON | March 31, 2006
G.O.P. Is Taking Aim at Advocacy Groups
By CARL HULSE and SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Named for a part of the tax code, so-called 527 groups gained notoriety by raising unlimited amounts from private donors.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/31/washington/31groups.html?ex=1144472400&en=03015f695fe2de23&ei=5070&emc=eta1



----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

<!-- ADXINFO classification="text_ad" campaign="foxsearch2006-emailtools08-nyt1"-->/--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight Pictures ------------\

Thank You For Smoking opens March 17th

Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for Big Tobacco, makes his living defending the rights of smokers and cigarette makers in today's neo-puritanical culture. Confronted by health zealots and an opportunistic senator, Nick goes on a PR offensive, spinning away the dangers of cigarettes.

http://www2.foxsearchlight.com/thankyouforsmoking/teaser/





----------------- Advertisement --------------------------

0


----------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS E-MAIL
This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service.  For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help at nytimes.com.

NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060401/126e74ae/attachment.htm 

From geomilman at milman.com  Wed Mar 29 23:23:28 2006
From: geomilman at milman.com (George R. Milman)
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 23:23:28 -0800
Subject: [Mb-civic] Notes for Converts
Message-ID: <E1FPXow-0006lw-Ba@smtpauth04.mail.atl.earthlink.net>


Huffington Post--3-12-2006
Notes for Converts
By Jane Smiley

Bruce Bartlett, The Cato Institute, Andrew Sullivan, George Packer,  William
F. Buckley, Sandra Day O'Connor, Republican voters in  Indiana and all the
rest of you newly-minted dissenters from Bush's  faith-based reality seem,
right now, to be glorying in your outrage, which is always a pleasure and
feels, at the time, as if it is having an effect, but those of us who have
been anti-Bush  from day 1 (defined as the day after the stolen 2000
election) have  a few pointers for you that should make your transition more
realistic:

1. Bush doesn't know you disagree with him. Nothing about you makes you of
interest to George W. Bush once you no longer agree with and support him. No
degree of relationship (father, mother, etc.), no longstanding friendly
intercourse (Jack Abramoff), no degree of expertise (Brent Scowcroft), no
essential importance (Tony Blair, American voters) makes any difference.
There is nothing you have to offer that makes Bush want to know you once you
have come to disagree with him. Your opinions and feelings now exist in a
world entirely external to the mind of George W. Bush. You are now just one
of those "polls" that he pays no attention to. When you were on his side,
you thought that showed "integrity" on his part. It doesn't. It shows an
absolute inability to learn from experience.

2. Bush doesn't care whether you disagree with him. As a man who has
dispensed with the reality-based world, and is entirely protected by his
handlers from feeling the effects of that world, he is indifferent to what
you now think is real. Is the Iraq war a failure and a quagmire? Bush
doesn't care. Is global warming beginning to affect us right now? So what.
Have all of his policies with regard to Iran been misguided and
counter-productive? He never thinks about it. You know that Katrina tape in
which Bush never asked a question? It doesn't matter how much you know or
how passionately you feel or, most importantly, what degree of
disintegration you see around you, he's not going to ask you a question. You
and your ideas are dead to him. You cannot change his mind. Nine percent of
polled Americans would agree with attacking Iran right now. To George Bush,
that will be a mandate, if and when he feels like doing it, because...

3. Bush does what he feels like doing and he deeply resents being told, even
politely, that he ought to do anything else. This is called a "sense of
entitlement." Bush is a man who has never been anywhere and never done
anything, and yet he has been flattered and cajoled into being president of
the United States through his connections, all of whom thought they could
use him for their own purposes. He has a surface charm that appeals to a
certain type of American man, and he has used that charm to claim all sorts
of perks, and then to fail at everything he has ever done. He did not
complete his flight training, he failed at oil investing, he was a front man
and a glad-hander as a baseball owner. As the Governor of Texas, he
originated one educational program that turned out to be a debacle; as the
President of the US, his policies have constituted one screw-up after
another. You have stuck with him through all of this, made excuses for him,
bailed him out. From his point of view, he is perfectly entitled by his own
experience to a  sense of entitlement. Why would he ever feel the need to
reciprocate? He's never had to before this.

4. President Bush is your creation. When the US Supreme Court humiliated
itself in 2000 by handing the presidency to Bush even though two of the
justices (Scalia and Thomas) had open conflicts of interest, you did not
object. When the Bush administration adopted an "Anything but Clinton"
policy that resulted in ignoring and dismissing all warnings of possible
terrorist attacks on US soil, you went along with and made excuses for Bush.
When the Bush administration allowed the corrupt Enron Corporation to
swindle 

California ratepayers and taxpayers in a last ditch effort to balance their
books in 2001, you laughed at the Californians and ignored the links between
Enron and the Administration. When it was evident that the evidence for the
war in Iraq was cooked and that State Department experts on the Middle East
were not behind the war  and so it was going to be run as an exercise in
incompetence, you  continued to attack those who were against the war in
vicious terms  and to defend policies that simply could not work. On
intelligent  design, global warming, doctoring of scientific results to
reflect  ideology, corporate tax giveaways, the K Street project, the
illegal redistricting of Texas, torture at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib,  the Terry
Schiavo fiasco, and the cronyism that led to the  destruction of New Orleans
you have failed to speak out with  integrity or honesty, preferring power to
truth at every turn. Bush does what he wants because you have let him.

5. Tyranny is your creation. What we have today is the natural and
inevitable outcome of ideas and policies you have promoted for the last
generation. I once knew a guy who was still a Marxist in 1980.  Whenever I
asked him why Communism had failed in Russia and China, he said "Mistakes
were made." He could not believe that Marxism itself was at fault, just as
you cannot believe that the ideology of the unregulated free market has
created the world we live in  today. You are tempted to say: "Mistakes have
been made", but in fact, psychologically and sociologically, no mistakes
have been made. The unregulated free market has operated to produce a
government in its own image. In an unregulated free market, for example,
cheating is merely another sort of advantage that, supposedly, market forces
might eventually "shake out" of the system. 

Of course, anyone with common sense understands that cheaters do damage that
sometimes cannot be repaired before they  are "shaken out," but according to
the principles of the  unregulated free market, the victims of that sort of
damage are  just out of luck and the damage that happens to them is just a
sort  of "culling." It is no accident that our government is full of
cheaters--they learned how to profit from cheating when they were  working
in corporations that were using bribes, perks, and secret connections to
cheat their customers of good products, their  neighbors of healthy
environmental conditions, their workers of  workplace safety and decent
paychecks. It was only when the corporations began cheating their
shareholders that any of you squealed, but you should know from your own
experience that the unregulated free market as a "level playing field" was
the biggest  laugh of the 20th century. No successful company in the history
of capitalism has ever favored open competition. When you folks  pretended,
in the eighties, that you weren't using the ideology of  the free market to
cover your own manipulations of the playing  field to your own advantage,
you may have suckered yourselves, and  even lots of American workers, but
observers of capitalism since  Adam Smith could have told you it wasn't
going to work.

And then there was the way you used racism and religious intolerance to gain
and hold onto power. Nixon was cynical about it--taking the party of Lincoln
and reaching out to disaffected southern racists, drumming up a backlash
against the Civil Rights movement for the sake of votes, but none of you has
been any less vicious. Racism might have died an unlamented death in this
country, but you kept it alive with phrases like "welfare queen"  and your
resistance to affirmative action and taxation for programs  to help people
in our country with nothing, or very little. You opted not to take the moral
high ground and recognize that the whole nation would be better off without
racism, but rather to increase class divisions and racial divisions for the
sake of your own comfort, pleasure, and profit. You have used religion in
exactly the same way. Instead of strongly defending the constitutional
separation of church and state, you have encouraged 
radical fundamentalist sects to believe that they can take power in the US
and mold our secular government to their own image, and get  rich doing it.
The US could have become a moderating force in what  seems now to be an
inevitable battle among the three monotheistic  Abrahamic religions, but you
have made that impossible by  flattering and empowering our own violent and
intolerant Christian  right.

You have created an imperium, heedless of the most basic wisdom of the
Founding Fathers--that at the very least, no man is competent enough or
far-seeing enough to rule imperially. Checks and balances were instituted by
Madison, Jefferson, Franklin, and the rest of  them, not because of some
abstract distrust of power, but because  they had witnessed the screw-ups
and idiocies of unchecked power.  You yourselves have demonstrated the
failures of unchecked power-- in an effort to achieve it, you have
repeatedly contravened the expressed wishes of most Americans, who favor a
moderate foreign policy, reasonable domestic programs, a government that
works, environmental preservation, women's rights to contraception,
abortion, and a level playing field. Somehow you thought you could mold the
imperium to reflect your wishes, but guess what--that's what an imperium
is--one man rule. If you fear the madness of King George, you have no
recourse if you've given up the checks and balances that you inherited and
that were meant to protect you.

Your ideas and your policies have promoted selfishness, greed, short-term
solutions, bullying, and pain for others. You have looked in the faces of
children and denied the existence of a "common good". You have disdained and
denied the idea of "altruism". At one time, our bureaucracy was full of
people who had gone into government service or scientific research for
altruistic reasons--I know, because I knew some of them. You have driven
them out and replaced them with vindictive ignoramuses. You have lied  
over and over about your motives, for example, making laws that  hurt people
and calling it "originalist interpretations of the  Constitution"
(conveniently ignoring the Ninth Amendment). You have increased the powers
of corporations at the expense of every other sector in the nation and
actively defied any sort of regulation that would require these corporations
to treat our world with care and respect. You have made economic growth your
deity, and in doing so, you have accelerated the power of the corporations
to destroy the atmosphere, the oceans, the ice caps, the rainforests, and
the climate. You have produced CEOs in charge of lots of resources and lots
of people who have no more sense of reciprocity or connection  or
responsibility than George W. Bush.

Now you are fleeing him, but it's only because he's got the earmarks of a
loser. Your problem is that you don't know why he's losing. You think he's
made mistakes. But no. He's losing because the ideas that you taught him and
demonstrated for him are bad ideas, self-destructive ideas, and even
suicidal ideas. And they are immoral ideas. You should be ashamed of
yourselves because not  only have your ideas not worked to make the world a
better place,  they were inhumane and cruel to begin with, and they have
served to  cultivate and excuse the inhumane and cruel character traits of
those who profess them.

6. As Bad as Bush is, Cheney is Worse.

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060329/ec935c75/attachment.htm 

From ialterman at nyc.rr.com  Fri Mar 31 20:53:17 2006
From: ialterman at nyc.rr.com (ialterman at nyc.rr.com)
Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2006 20:53:17 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [Mb-civic] =?iso-8859-1?q?CNN=2Ecom_-_John_Dean_appears_at=A0hear?=
 =?iso-8859-1?q?ing_on_whether_Bush_should_be_censured_-_Mar_31=2C_2006?=
Message-ID: <32163291.1143867197814.JavaMail.tomcat@localhost>



*Please note, the sender's email address has not been verified.



You have received the following link from ialterman at nyc.rr.com

 
********************
 
If you are having trouble with any of the links in this message, or if the URL's are not appearing as links, please follow the instructions at the bottom of this email.
 
Title: CNN.com - John Dean appears at?hearing on whether Bush should be censured - Mar 31, 2006
CNN.com will expire this article on 04/30/2006. 
  
Copy and paste the following into your Web browser to access the sent link:
http://www.emailthis.clickability.com/et/emailThis?clickMap=viewThis&etMailToID=772032821&pt=Y
 

Copy and paste the following into your Web browser to SAVE THIS link:
http://www.savethis.clickability.com/st/saveThisPopupApp?clickMap=saveFromET&partnerID=2006&etMailToID=772032821&pt=Y

 
Copy and paste the following into your Web browser to forward this link:
http://www.emailthis.clickability.com/et/emailThis?clickMap=forward&etMailToID=772032821&partnerID=2006&pt=Y

  
 
********************


Email pages from any Web site you visit - add the EMAIL THIS button to your browser, copy and paste the following into your Web browser:
http://www.emailthis.clickability.com/et/emailThis?clickMap=browserButtons&pt=Y"


*********************



Instructions:
-----------------------------------------
If your e-mail program doesn't recognize Web addresses:
1. With your mouse, highlight the Web Address above. Be sure to highlight the entire Web address, even if it spans more than one line in your email. 
2. Select Copy from the Edit menu at the top of your screen. 
3. Launch your Web browser.
4. Paste the address into your Web browser by selecting Paste from the Edit menu.
5. Click Go or press Enter or Return on your keyboard. 
 
********************
 
 
 
 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060331/2e980b32/attachment.htm 

