More reports from local witnesses raise even more questions:
A provincial security official said "grave mistakes occurred in the operation due to failures of information, which led to a large number of civilian deaths." The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation, said the assault was carried out without consulting with local officials.
Mansour, [a] resident, dismissed claims the site was a training camp, pointing out that the community was only 100 yards off a major highway and 1.6 miles from an army base. He said al-Kazemi,[a reported militant killed in the attacks who had been jailed by the Yemen government, then released in 2005] had lived there with his family since his release and was not in hiding.
"If he was wanted, why didn't the authorities come and arrest him all this time?" he said.
Perhaps we should listen more to locals like Mansour before we start a fourth war?
Under the new abortion provisions, states can opt out of allowing plans to cover abortion in the insurance exchanges the bill would set up. The exchanges are designed to serve individuals who lack coverage through their jobs, with most receiving federal subsidies to buy insurance. Enrollees in plans that cover abortion procedures would pay with separate checks -- one for abortion, one for any other health-care services.At one end of the majority leader's office, Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), the antiabortion senator whose support was crucial to health-care legislation, huddled with White House staff in a conference room. At the other end, Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the chamber's leading advocates of abortion rights, hunkered as far from Nelson as possible, in the office of Reid's chief of staff.
...
Because NO one could have anticipated this outcome:
The Senate healthcare bill's language on abortion "sets up a Supreme Court challenge," one senator warned Saturday. Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) asserted that the compromise on abortion contained within the bill, which would seek to segregate federal funds from subsidizing health plans covering abortion, is unconstitutional.
Let's see. Shiv women's reproductive rights to get a half-assed health INSURANCE reform bill passed. Yeah, that seems like an even trade.
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Tolerance too high a price to pay for education
Sen Gordon Howie (R-Rapid City)
Gubernatorial Candidate
Dear Sen. Howie,
Thank you for vowing to defund education if the Rapid City School Board ends its persecution of the gay. It's the proper response. What good is education if it poisons our children with a toxic respect for tolerance? Next thing you know, they'll be teaching our kids to respect brown people or even Mormons. Might as well roll over and let Satan touch us inappropriately whenever he gets a hankering.
But I'm a little disappointed you didn't oppose Charles Kruse's attempt to sneak gay tolerance language into the policy anyway. How else could his motion to add cowboys be construed? Truck drivers aside, you won't find a group as chock full of the gay as cowboys. They've even added "steer decorating" as a rodeo event. I blame the Village People for that.
Heterosexually yours,
Gen. JC Christian, patriot
Elsewhere: Charles Kruse's war against black-footed-ferretofascism.
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The head of the Catholic Church in Australia, Cardinal Pell, endorses cancer quackery.
"Yes obviously (cancer can be cured by prayer)," Cardinal Pell told ABC Television on Monday.
"And there are quite a number of examples in the books."
Cardinal Pell says that won't give sick people a false sense of security because they realise cure by prayer is a "very long shot".
Obviously?
Obviously?
Obviously not. There are no mechanisms, there are no data, only biased anecdotes from pious delusionists. There aren't any sensible examples on the books. These stories are easy to find, and they always have the same trajectory: person is diagnosed with cancer, they pray and pray and pray while getting the best medical treatment possible, and then if they get better, all the credit goes to the prayers. For example, Angela had throat cancer, and had several rounds of increasingly aggressive chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant, and when the disease goes into remission, who is responsible? A dentist she visited who believed in angels!
I'd really like to know why Pell thinks prayer is a long shot, though. Is god busy? Does he dislike some people? Does it only work for good Catholics? Is there a certain secret magic wiggle you have to do during the prayer for it to be effective? Or is it just that he knows deep down that all these cures are are rare fortunate chance events that the Catholics take advantage of to steal credit?
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And why shouldn't he?
President Hugo Chavez on Sunday accused the U.S. of violating Venezuela's airspace with an unmanned spy plane, and ordered his military to be on alert and shoot down any such aircraft in the future.
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Oh the humanity: silly socialists negotiate drug prices and win concessions.
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There was a major step forward for the health insurance bill working its way through the Senate. The Democratic caucus in Senate just voted for cloture on Majority Leader Harry Reid's "manager's amendment." This was considered the key vote after weeks of negotiations. Invoking a rarely used rule, Reid had the Senators vote from their desks as the roll was called.
The vote was 60 - 40. Every GOPer voted no.
Keep reading: http://www.americablog.com/2009/12/democratics-senators-end-gop-filibuster.html
The best part about a 1 am vote is that the average age of the Senate is about 132 years old, which means that they are all up about eight hours past when they are used to having a warm cup of milk and dreaming of Lawrence Welk reruns and the good old days before that rock and roll music and the internet tubes ruined everything, so their normally awful speaking style is worse than usual. Joy.
President McCain is speaking about majority will. Didn't we see that last November?
Paul Krugman suggests that credit for the health care bill goes, in part, to the Club for Growth, as they drove Sen. Arlen Specter out of the Republican party.
There is something to that, I think. There is also something to the argument that because the Republicans chose this bill to stage a partisan fistfight, they sacrificed the chance to have any influence over the contents of the bill itself. The Republicans bet the store that the Democrats would never hang together and, as of tonight, it looks like they have lost that one.
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White House unveils new family photo
Shot by famed celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz. She really did capture the essence of the Obama girls.
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Tom Coburn gets an early start on celebrating the birth of the Prince of Peace....
Going into Monday morning's crucial Senate vote on health-care legislation, Republican chances for defeating the bill had come down to a last, macabre hope. They needed one Democratic senator to die -- or at least become incapacitated.
At 4 p.m. Sunday afternoon -- nine hours before the 1 a.m. vote that would effectively clinch the legislation's passage -- Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) went to the Senate floor to propose a prayer. "What the American people ought to pray is that somebody can't make the vote tonight," he said. "That's what they ought to pray."
It was difficult to escape the conclusion that Coburn was referring to the 92-year-old, wheelchair-bound Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.V.) who has been in and out of hospitals and lay at home ailing. It would not be easy for Byrd to get out of bed in the wee hours with deep snow on the ground and ice on the roads -- but without his vote, Democrats wouldn't have the 60 they needed.
Nice. But then, Coburn is a C Street House frat boy and "Family" member, and their perversion of Christianity is all about their own wealth and power, and has nothing to do with the teachings of Joshua of Nazareth.
Now I don't much care for this health care bill in its current form. I don't like purchase mandates without industry price regulation. I don't like throwing women's health care under the bus. And I don't like that there's no requirement that insurance companies actually pay claims. But when people who make their reputations on preaching about morality are praying for others to die, I think we have to call them out for the beasts that they are.
Let's dispense with the term anti-abortion, shall we? Let's call it what it really is: The movement to deny women the ability to decide for themselves to be parents as most persons endowed by their creators with unalienable rights have the right to do. With anti-abortion measures, women are not just subject to the state, they are forced to recognize a religious presence in their lives whether they have faith or not. Men do not need to recognize any faith. They are allowed complete freedom of conscience.
In fact, a crisis of conscience is only respected when women decide to end a pregnancy. If religious people decide to kill innocent civilians as the collateral damage in a proxy religious war halfway around the world, the rest of us still have to pay taxes for this endeavor regardless of our crisis of conscience. If fundamentalists insist on an eye for an eye with respect to convicted murderers, even if some of those people are victims of mistaken identity, those of us who oppose capital punishment of innocent people are not allowed to segregate our tax dollars from theirs when it comes time to purchase materials for a lethal injection. One would think that their god would have more consistency when it comes to life ending procedures but for some unfathomable reason, he only objects to women doing it when it affects their own personal lives. If that's not the definition of inequality, I don't know what is.
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