This makes everything even more complicated. You have in power an Israeli hard liner with an itchy trigger finger and an Iranian nutball without any legitimacy. It's a recipe for serious misjudgment.
Tears streaming down her face, the Afghan woman sat in a corner of a room with no roof and broken windows, mourning 19 of her closest and dearest relatives. "They were parts of my heart," she said.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article6493665.ece
Dozens of communities nationwide are at risk from a coal ash spill like the one that blanketed a Tennessee neighborhood last year, but the Obama administration has decided not to tell the public about it because of the danger of a terrorist attack."The potential for a terrorist attack" is code for "it's going to be too embarrassing if we tell you, so we won't tell you." There seems to be little difference between the Bush and the Obama Administrations' use of "the threat of terrorism" and the claims of "national security" that were invoked by the Johnson and Nixon Administrations to cover up their misdeeds and lies.The Environmental Protection Agency, as part of an investigation opened after the Tennessee spill, classified 44 coal ash storage ponds in 26 communities as potential hazards.
The agency, which earlier this year pledged to be transparent and carry out its work in the public view, wanted to disclose the information until the Army Corps of Engineers said it shouldn't because of national security concerns.
They have to be really stupid to think that classifying this information will work. It should not be too hard to go on the Internet and search for "coal ash ponds". Here's a list. Georgia Power alone has three plants that have a total of 1.5 million tons of coal ash in containment ponds. PSI Energy in Gibon County, Indiana has about 900,000 tons of coal ash at one power plant, so does Dayton Power & Light in Ohio. You could get aerials of those plants from a number of sources. You can also find articles about individual plants, such as this one.
You'd have to be a real imbecile these days to think that this information is going to stay under wraps. Or you'd have to work for the Army Corps of Engineers ("Our Motto: Our Levees Usually Almost Never Fair.") to think that they can hide this stuff.
Leaving aside for the moment the gross inappropriateness of pledging allegiance to the flag, as opposed to, say, the Constitution, let's remember the circumstances under which Congress added an unconstitutional religious reference to a secular pledge.
1954 was the depths of the Cold War. New Deal liberals were being hounded out of jobs for the crime of having, in the 1930s, supported a nation that that became our most valuable ally in World War II. By 1954, those liberals had learned enough about the horrors of the USSR under Stalin to have recoiled and recanted, but that was not enough for the witch hunters.
There were multiple ground on which to condemn the Soviet Union and China (which had embraced communism in 1949), stark differences with the U.S. by which to promote American values of democracy, human rights and the rule of law.
Instead of highlighting Stalin's and Mao's dicatorial power in a totalitarian state, the purges of political opponents, the ethnic cleansing, the command economy that left millions to starve, Congress chose to focus on ... atheism.
America was better than communist nations not because of our dedication to the rule of law, not because of our Constitution that guaranteed civil rights (albeit not yet fully realized), not because of a balanced economy that encouraged small business while regulating capitalism's excesses, not because of our mixed but undeniable success in fulfilling the promise and embodying the values of the Founders.
No, Congress and President Eisenhower effectively declared that the most critical American value to hold up against communism was a value specifically kept out of the Constitution by its authors: superstitious worship.
For the full argument, see David Greenburg's 2002 piece in Slate, Why We're Not One Nation "Under God."
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The New York Times reports that a federal judge in California has ruled that former Bush administration lawyer John Yoo will have to testify in court about accusations that his work led to torture.
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After immersing herself in the rightist blogosphere over the past week, Shawna Forde- Executive Director of the Minutemen American Defense - became convinced that her arrest today for murder, burglary, and aggravated assault was due to inchoate leftist tendencies by the election of President Barack Obama. She was comforted by the knowledge that she wasn't alone, that she was joined by James Von Brunn, Scott Roeder, and Jim Adkisson in suffering the same fate.
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April Fools
For months, a blogger known as "April's Mom" has been the heroine of religious and pro-life sites, recounting how she chose to give birth to a terminally ill baby and allowed the child to die naturally hours after giving birth. April's Mom turns out to be Beccah Beushausen, 26, a social worker from outside Chicago and the entire story was a lie.
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Former Roman Catholic priest Desmond Laurence Gannon has been jailed in a fifth prosecution for child abuse in Australia. His defense in this latest case is that he was merely giving an 11-year-old boy "anatomy lessons."
Gannon, 79, was previously convicted of such abuse in 1995, 1997, 2000 and 2003 but remarkably has served only one year in jail. The latest charge stems from 1968.
What is interesting is that he is claiming that he really did not know it was abusive to have such sexual contact with children at the time: "I thought it was less formal rather than inviting him into the presbytery, and that's all … I won't say sexual abuse because at the time I didn't know what it was."
This is strikingly similar to statements made recently by former Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland in defense of abuse that occurred in Milwaukee.
The judge did not buy the anatomy lessons defense and sent Gannon away for 25 months.
It isn't long enough.
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