Suburban Guerrilla: "Terrorism is simply a term for the murder of non-combatants for political ends."

Top 25 Most E-Mailed Articles From the New York Times: "




Most popular articles sent by NYTimes.com readers in the last 24 hours.
Lifting the Veils of Autism, One by One by One
Investigators, armed with new technologies and a growing research budget, are slowly beginning to dislodge some of autism�s secrets.

C.I.A. Was Given Data on Hijacker Long Before 9/11
American investigators were given the first name and telephone number of one of the hijackers two and a half years before the attacks, officials say.

Op-Ed Columnist: The Americano Dream
Contrary to what the political scientist Samuel Huntington says, Latin American immigrants are assimilating into American culture.

Forecast of Rising Oil Demand Challenges Tired Saudi Fields
Saudi Arabia�s oil fields are in decline, raising questions about whether the kingdom will be able to satisfy the world�s thirst for oil.

Congress Is Urged to Begin Process to Amend Constitution
President Bush said he wants to stop activist judges from changing the definition of the 'most enduring human institution.'

Op-Ed Contributor: Lawyers, Guns and Mayors
Rather than make our streets safer, Congress proposes basically to immunize the gun industry from litigation.

Op-Ed Contributor: A Wall as a Weapon
What Israel is really doing with its so-called security fence is taking Palestinian lands.

Education Chief Calls Union �Terrorist,� Then Recants
Education Secretary Rod Paige criticized the National Education Association for resisting many provisions of a school improvement law pushed through Congress in 2001.

Op-Ed Contributor: Quayle, Reconsidered
Using influence to get into the National Guard and out of Vietnam is no longer disqualifying to a candidate; it�s assumed."

Mike's Link Blog - Very Scary Shit About John Ashcroft: "'These are the areas where historically we've been held back' by statute, they told him. Thus was born a major congressional act � as well as other, more ambitious administrative actions desired by Ashcroft and his men. Now government was permitted to listen in on attorney-client conversations without a court order, sanction secret searches in the name of national security, impose a gag on those who were searched, jail Americans indefinitely without counsel, and detain immigrants on secret charges, while withholding their names and even their numbers from the public. Government agents have been dispatched to houses of worship. With minimal oversight, they are now allowed to monitor e-mail traffic, discover which Web sites are being visited, track some online purchases, and more easily access medical histories, credit files, and even library selections. Hundreds of surveillance and bugging operations have been launched since 9/11; 113 emergency authorizations for secret warrants were issued in the first year alone � more than twice the number granted in the previous 23 years, the most extensive investigation in the history of the United States, as the Justice Department has noted."

Suburban Guerrilla: "The UCS report describes several specific examples of the Bush administration deliberately ignoring or distorting scientific results for purely ideological purposes:

* A flat refusal to believe the (by now) almost unanimous scientific consensus that human activity is contributing to global warming. In one case, the EPA had to scrap an entire section on climate change because the White Hous simply wouldn't accept any form of wording that was even remotely true to the scientific evidence.

* The White House suppressed data on mercury emissions not because the science was wrong, but because it interfered with their plans to reduce regulation of coal-fired power plants. They also suppressed an EPA report on a bipartisan Senate alternative to their 'Clear Skies' proposal because it concluded that the Senate version would do a better job of cutting pollution.

* The Bush administration has interfered with CDC research on teen pregnancy that doesn't support its position on abstinence-only sex education programs. It has replaced condom information on government websites with questionable data emphasizing condom failure rates. And it has tried to push a link between abortion and breast cancer that is supported by no reputable scientific data.

* A USDA researcher was prohibited from publishing his findings on health hazards posed by airborne bacteria resulting from farm waste. In addition, 'a directive issued in February 2002 instructed USDA staff scientists to seek prior approval before publishing any research or speaking publicly on 'sensitive issues'....'

* The administration ignored scientific analysis of Iraq's aluminum tubes that suggested they had nothing to do with uranium enrichment. We know all about that, don't we?

* A team of scientists who drew peer-reviewed conclusions about the management of the Miss"

Cursor.org - Table of Contents page: "The Boston Globe reports on a new analysis by the Project on Defense Alternatives, that takes the Pentagon to task for refusing to discuss, or make any public effort to tally, civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. The report terms the tactic 'casualty agnosticism,' which it says is an effort 'to sink the whole issue of war casualties in an impenetrable murk of skepticism.'
'To talk about the price of the Iraq war strictly in terms of U.S. casualties and tax dollars is an obscenity,' writes Naomi Klein. 'Yes, Americans were lied to by their politicians. Yes, they are owed answers. But the people of Iraq are owed a great deal more, and that enormous debt belongs at the very centre of any civilized debate about the war.'"

A reporter describes a scene at the Daytona 500: "Then Bush's motorcade drove by. One middle finger went up in the crowd, then another, and soon they were everywhere

TAPPED: "BUSH'S BLUNDER. James Webb, secretary of the Navy during the Reagan administration, argues in USA Today that:
Bush arguably has committed the greatest strategic blunder in modern memory. To put it bluntly, he attacked the wrong target. While he boasts of removing Saddam Hussein from power, he did far more than that. He decapitated the government of a country that was not directly threatening the United States and, in so doing, bogged down a huge percentage of our military in a region that never has known peace. Our military is being forced to trade away its maneuverability in the wider war against terrorism while being placed on the defensive in a single country that never will fully accept its presence.
There is no historical precedent for taking such action when our country was not being directly threatened. The reckless course that Bush and his advisers have set will affect the economic and military energy of our nation for decades. It is only the tactical competence of our military that, to this point, has protected him from the harsh judgment that he deserves."

Meanwhile, barely noticed, the United States still has some 75,000 soldiers in Germany, 41,000 in Japan, 41,000 in Korea, 13,000 in Italy, 12,000 in the United Kingdom, and so on, down through a list of more than a hundred countries -- plus some 26,000 sailors and Marines deployed afloat. The new jobs keep coming, and the old ones don't

Psychoanalysis Is Dead ... So How Does That Make You Feel?: "Arguably no other notable figure in history was as wrong as Freud was about every important thing he had to say"

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Poverty 'is world's worst threat': "The leader of Catholics in England and Wales, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, says the biggest challenge confronting the world is not terrorism but poverty"

Yahoo! Groups : bpd-supportgroup Messages : Message 1145 of 1146: "Jewel, I think we can all relate to what you are saying. This is a hard way to live. We have all had our ups and downs. Today I feel great - first time in months. I want to get out of therapy and off meds and take over the world. But I know that's not real. Tomorrow may not be great, and I may do something stupid. That's just reality. Everyday is a battle here. I know that I deal with alcohol problems, self-injury, and bad relationships. I have days when I can't get out of bed and times when I think of suicide. It's true. But this is also the only life we have, which is why I think we're part of this group - because we want to make the most of it and getting support helps. Hang in there, Miranda"

Media Whores Online: "During Thursday's Rush Limbaugh show, Rush was attempting to convince a gay caller that the only reason gay people got married was for 'the fringe benefits' (specifically, favorable tax recognition as a married couple, the ability to see one's partner when he or she was in the hospital, health care benefits, etc.)

Rush then stated to the caller that men and women don't get married for those reasons 'unless they're John Kerry, Heh, Heh, Heh.'

Setting aside the brazen lunacy of taking marital observations, much less advice from a two-time loser in the 'I Do' Derby, I realized that his generalization fails the laugh test.

Consider, if you will, the story of a divorced single mother with several children who is making ends meet working as an aerobics instructor in Florida. In her free time, she meets an older, bulbuos, twice-divorced admitted loner millionaire living in New York via the Internet. Meetings occur, courtship and marriage ensue. Looks like she cashed in on the fringe benefits!!

WOOPS!! That's the story of Rush's third and current marriage.

Lynn Greeley"

Media Whores Online: "Mrs. Howard Kurtz: McCain Not a Real Republican
Mrs. Howard Kurtz and Chris Matthews discuss the latest Bush cover-up (appointing members of the commission charged with examining the misuse of intelligence 'intelligence failures'):
CHRIS MATTHEWS: It�s not credible he picks the commission, is it?

SHERI ANNIS, REPUBLICAN MEDIA STRATEGIST: Well, it�s credible because he basically wants to say. 'I�m going to be able to talk about this no matter what. I'm going to�I'm taking charge here.' He doesn't want to say, 'I�m leaving this to someone else.' He wants to show he�s leading this.

MATTHEWS: Leading what? The cover up?

ANNIS: He will describe it obviously as not a cover up. If McCain gives him a lot of cover. That�s his�I think McCain is actually most of his cover. Even though he�s Republican.

MATTHEWS: But isn�t the usual way to pick a bipartisan commission is to let the other party pick their share of the commission? That�s how it becomes bipartisan.

ANNIS: That�s how�But with McCain there, it�s seemingly bipartisan.

MATTHEWS: But he's a Republican.

ANNIS: But he's not a real Republican."

These people have actually become warped. How have they gotten this way?

Yahoo! News Message Boards Politics News: " RONALD REAGAN REMEMBERS BUSH IN ARMY"

The Art of Camouflage - David Kay comes clean, almost. By Fred�Kaplan: "Kay did his job well. His report did not tell lies. But it puffed up enough smoke to let President Bush proclaim it as a justification for the war. Bush cited, with particular enthusiasm, the bit about Saddam's 'clandestine network of laboratories and safehouses'�a phrase containing four words designed to raise the hair of anyone who's ever glanced at a spy novel.
Now that Kay has quit, he can tell the same story�but without the smokescreen"

Right in the Teeth (washingtonpost.com): "The issue may become less whether Bush acted honorably during that time than whether he is dealing with it honorably now"

Call Me a Bush-Hater | Molly Ivins | November 2003 Issue: "Among the more amusing cluckings from the right lately is their appalled discovery that quite a few Americans actually think George W. Bush is a terrible President.
Robert Novak is quoted as saying in all his forty-four years of covering politics, he has never seen anything like the detestation of Bush. Charles Krauthammer managed to write an entire essay on the topic of 'Bush-haters' in Time magazine as though he had never before come across a similiar phenomenon.
Oh, I stretch memory way back, so far back, all the way back to--our last President. Almost lost in the mists of time though it is, I not only remember eight years of relentless attacks from Clinton-haters, I also notice they haven't let up yet. Clinton-haters accused the man of murder, rape, drug-running, sexual harassment, financial chicanery, and official misconduct. And they accuse his wife of even worse. For eight long years, this country was a zoo of Clinton-haters. Any idiot with a big mouth and a conspiracy theory could get a hearing on radio talk shows and 'Christian' broadcasts and nutty Internet sites. People with transparent motives, people paid by tabloid magazines, people with known mental problems, ancient Clinton enemies with notoriously racist pasts--all were given hearings, credence, and air time. Sliming Clinton was a sure road to fame and fortune on the right, and many an ambitious young rightwing hit man like David Brock, who has since made full confession, took that golden opportunity.
And these folks didn't stop with verbal and printed attacks. From the day Clinton was elected to office, he was the subject of the politics of personal destruction. They went after him with a multimillion dollar smear campaign funded by Richard Mellon Scaife, the rightwing billionaire. They went after him with lawsuits"

TAPPED: "The U.S. Attorney's Office confirms that the investigation is a collaboration between "

: "Ritter, too, took serious punishment from his critics � and instead of doing proper due diligence or asking hard questions, the media quickly piled on. It was not Fox�s finest hour when that network gleefully painted him as a 21st-century Benedict Arnold � not that he had many prime-time advocates anywhere else. Even CNN�s usually evenhanded Paula Zahn said to Ritter six months before America unleashed its miscalculated military solution on Iraq, �People out there are accusing you of drinking Saddam Hussein�s Kool-Aid.�
"

Moore's Lore: new technology. Computing, connectivity, mobile, convergence, communications, software, etc.: "The key word in telecom policy should be competition.
Right now the industry's biggest problem is a growing shortage of competition. Telecom companies and cable companies have combined to create a Broadband Trust that can enforce high prices and ruinous conditions on consumers. The failure of the Microsoft anti-trust suit has created a Software Trust that keeps new ideas from bubbling to the surface. We already know about the Media Trust, a few huge companies controlling what is seen, heard, published and read across America.
The result of this is we're losing our edge. British journalism is dominating our media because Americans can't compete. Koreans have better broadband because Americans won't compete. The Internet is being pushed toward Linux because Windows won't compete.
America faced this same kind of situation 100 years ago, only then we were talking about industrial Trusts. There was little competition in oil, or steel, or transport, for instance.
Tools were created, and used, to break up these Trusts. The result, in every instance, was not only more competition, but more growth, and more wealth for the Trusts' owners, like J.D. Rockefeller.
While these tools remain on the books, they are not being used. There is no political will -- from either party -- to use them.
The result could well be surprising. The Trusts are not going to just go on-and-on, as they think. Instead, the falling value of the dollar will see many of them bought out, in pieces, at what to the buyers will seem knockdown prices, and what to the sellers will seem kings' ransoms.
There will be competition, one way or another. The question is whether that competition will be among American companies, or Indian, European, and Chin"

Los Angeles Times: Bush Family Values: War, Wealth, Oil: "Bushes and Walkers have been involved with the intelligence community since World War I. The importance of Sam Bush's wartime munitions-regulating role was obvious. During the 1920s, when George H. Walker was doing a lot of business in Russia and Germany, he became a director of the American International Corporation, formed during the war for purposes of overseas investment and intelligence-gathering. Prescott Bush's pre-1941 corporate and banking contacts with Germany, sensationalized on many Internet sites, appear to have been passed along to officials in government and intelligence circles.

George H.W. Bush may have had CIA connections before the agency's unsuccessful Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961. A number of published sources suggest that Zapata Offshore was a CIA front long before he went on to become director of Central Intelligence in 1976. As for George W. Bush, his limited ties are said to have come through investments in, and buyouts of, several of his oil businesses by CIA- and BCCI-connected firms and individuals.

Top 1% economics: Over four generations, the Bush family has been involved with more than 20 securities firms, banks, brokerage houses and investment management firms, ranging from W"

the bitter shack of resentment: "Just one day after the controversial taxpayer-funded political ads touting the President's Medicare bill hit the airwaves, AP reports that the White House gave the $9 million ad contract to National Media, Inc., the Bush-Cheney campaign's media firm. And if that is not shocking enough, the same company that is doing government-funded ads for HHS is also the primary media firm for the drug industry. Specifically, National Media has done the ads for the drug industry front group 'Citizens for Better Medicare' � an organization that has spent tens of millions of dollars on ads attacking lawmakers who have fought to lower prescription drug prices. Last year alone, National Media, Inc. raked in more than $8 million from the drug industry to produce ads eviscerating those who had the courage to fight for lower drug prices. The President and his allies in Congress have raked in more than $25 million directly from drug companies and have appointed drug industry lobbyists/executives to key government offices which make health care policy (Eli Lilly's Mitch Daniels was Budget Director, drug industry-attorney Daniel Troy is chief counsel at FDA, and PhRMA VP Ann-Marie Lynch is now a top HHS official). And the new revelations that the White House is siphoning Medicare funds into a media firm directly connected to both the drug indus"

Moore's Lore: new technology. Computing, connectivity, mobile, convergence, communications, software, etc.: " he nails the impact of the falling dollar on the U.S. economy, and even has the right quote about it, from former Citibank chair Walter Wriston. 'Money goes where it is welcome and stays where it is well-treated.'
Money is simply not being treated well in this economy. A policy of letting the dollar tank makes U.S. investments riskier for foreigners, making them less likely to buy the bonds we need to keep running our huge budget deficits. Its advantages are all short-term -- fewer savings from outsourcing, lower-priced exports, a lower trade deficit. But its disadvantages are far more real -- higher inflation is one."

The Coming Search Wars: "As a result, Google now has an immense number of users, with 200 million searches on an average day. That gives it a great advantage over its competitors, which are now trying to catch up.
'The system that has the most users benefits the most,' said Nancy Blachman, a computer scientist and author of an independent guide to using Google (www.googleguide.com). 'Microsoft faces a tremendous challenge because Google fine-tunes its system by watching how users adjust their queries.'"

To help their work, Google has been quietly developing what industry experts consider to be the world's largest computing facility. Last spring, Google had more than 50,000 computers distributed in over a dozen computer centers around the world. The number topped 100,000 by Thanksgiving, according to a person who has detailed knowledge of the Google computing data center. The company is placing a significant bet that Microsoft will be hard pressed to match its response time to the ever increasing torrent of search requests

Intelligence: Powell�s Case, a Year Later: Gaps in Picture of Iraq Arms: "After several lengthy sessions, he appeared in New York on Feb. 5, with Mr. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, seated behind him, to tell the United Nations Security Council that the evidence added up to 'facts' and 'not assertions' that Iraq had large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and that it was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program and building a fleet of advanced missiles.
Mr. Powell's testimony, delivered at a moment of high suspense as American forces gathered in the Persian Gulf region, was widely seen as the most powerful and persuasive presentation of the Bush administration's case that Iraq was bristling with horrific weapons. His reputation for caution and care gave it added credibility.
A year later, some of the statements made by Mr. Powell have been confirmed, but many of his gravest findings have been upended by David A. Kay, who until Jan. 23 was Washington's chief weapons inspector.
Doubts had surrounded much of the evidence ever since American inspectors arrived in Iraq. Yet in the days since Dr. Kay definitively declared that Iraq had no significant stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons when the invasion began in March, Washington has been seized by the question of how and why such an intelligence gap happened.
Even some Republican lawmakers are talking about a failure of egregious proportions � akin, some think, to the failure to grasp the forces pulling apart the Soviet Union in the late 1980's. President Bush is considering whether to order an investigation into the intelligence failure, an action he has so far resisted.
Some answers can be found in a dissection of the case that Mr. Powell presented, and an examination of some of the underlying intelligence information"

Our conservative estimate," Mr. Powell declared in his United Nations presentation, is that "Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent" or enough, as he put it, "to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets."

To make that case, Mr. Powell unveiled before the Security Council an array of previously classified evidence on a scale not seen in that room since Adlai Stevenson appeared during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, armed with photographs of Soviet missiles. ("This was my Adlai moment," Mr. Powell joked later.) But in retrospect, the satellite photographs and tape-recordings of intercepted communications that Mr. Powell played that day now seem to describe actions that are less fearsome than they first appeared.

Nearly all evidence revolved around what Mr. Powell described as suspicious activities at sites Iraq had used before the Persian Gulf war of 1991 to manufacture chemical weapons. There was little question that huge amounts of Iraqi chemical weapons remained unaccounted for — the United Nations inspectors listed their whereabouts as a mystery in a final report after leaving Iraq in 1998 — and the prospect that those chemicals could be unleashed was a major concern as the Pentagon made final plans for war.

Among the intercepts that Mr. Powell replayed were some from November 2002 and January 2003, in which voices identified as those of Iraqi officers expressed concern at the possible discovery by United Nations inspectors of a "modified vehicle" and "forbidden ammo."

But as senior intelligence officials acknowledged in October 2003, during an interview at the C.I.A.'s headquarters, the actual evidence that Iraq had resumed production of chemical weapons was limited. They said their prewar conclusion — that Iraq still possessed the chemicals — had been based on more than just the satellite photos of "decontamination vehicles" and tarp-covered trucks covered at the facilities. It also relied, they said, on human intelligence reports of what one called "abnormal activities" beginning in March 2002 at former chemical weapons sites.

They acknowledged that some American intelligence agencies had resisted the conclusion and had voiced "very legitimate objections," including the possibility that the suspicious movements involved something far more benign: commercial chlorine-manufacturing activity.

But a National Intelligence Estimate in October 2002 had asserted with "high confidence" that the activity indicated that Iraq's chemical weapons program was once again alive. Later, from December 2002 to February 2003, the official said, "we began to see those materials, whatever they were, showing up in what we call a field ammunition storage area" as Iraq prepared "for the potentiality of war."

The New York Times: Thomas L. Friedman (Forum/Message Board): "infomaniac8 - February 1, 2004



To me Mr. Friedman brings up an interesting question. What really is america's role in the world? Perhaps conservatives are determining that role for us by reducing us to third world status. I can see where they could feel entitled to do so. I mean conservatives consist mainly of those who work at accumulating wealth. If they don't choose to pass it on to future generations then shouldn't that be their choice? They could be doing the world a favor. What has america really done for the world? We are so full of ourselves anymore that we couldn't recognize a good deed if smacked us in the face. I don't mean to be despondent here. I'm just saying this could all be for the best and is as it should be. Sure the poor are going to hurt more. I've often thought that one of the things that hurts america's poor the most however is its cruel hoax of upward mobility. Yeah, you can strike it rich. You can win the lottery too. Your odds are just a little longer. The greatest social advancements america undertook were during the great depression. Unfortunately it also caused the second world war.
"

Op-ed Columnist: Budgets of Mass Destruction: "t should be clear to all by now that what we have in the Bush team is a faith-based administration. It launched a faith-based war in Iraq, on the basis of faith-based intelligence, with a faith-based plan for Iraqi reconstruction, supported by faith-based tax cuts to generate faith-based revenues. This group believes that what matters in politics and economics are conviction and will � not facts, social science or history"

Yahoo! Groups : bpd-supportgroup Post Message: "To: bpd-supportgroup@yahoogroups.com
From: cat
Date: Sun Feb 1, 2004 1:06 pm
Subject: first post
Hi,

My screen name is Cat. I don't correspond with people much. I
look at
this as an opportunity to interact with others. I'm a 53 year old
male bipolar with bpd. I've been on disability for 17 years. A couple
of years ago I found an old house on the edge of a small town where
I'm living now. I live in social isolation as I have never been able
to maintain relationships and have given up on even initiating them.
Believe it or not I've found it rather peaceful. It was rough at
first, but what is life without a challenge? I've been keeping my eye
on the group for a while now. I think it's hard to keep tabs on
something you're not personally involved in however. So now I'm
involved. I really don't have any problems that I want to discuss at
this time. It's not that I don't have more than enough problems. I
just seem to do better when I see my situation reflected in someone
else's problems. Really, I think I've taken the biggest step in just
reaching out. Cat Stevens has a song, ' The First Cut Is The
Deepest'. That's kind of the way I feel about correspondence. I
always seem to start out with totally unrealistic expectations. It's
like starting a football game. I have to get my bell rung a couple of
times to get me in the game. You'd think an old man would have it a
little more together. Anyway, it's good to be here."