ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES

Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a fallen soldier in Iraq who reinvigorated the anti-war movement, was arrested and removed from the House gallery Tuesday night just before President Bush's State of the Union address, a police spokeswoman said.

Sheehan, who had been invited to attend the speech by Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Calif., was charged with demonstrating in the Capitol building, a misdemeanor, said Capitol Police Sgt. Kimberly Schneider. Sheehan was taken in handcuffs to police headquarters a few blocks away and her case was processed as Bush spoke.

Schneider said Sheehan had worn a T-shirt with an anti-war slogan to the speech and covered it up until she took her seat. Police warned her that such displays were not allowed, but she did not respond, the spokeswoman said.

Rep. Maurice Hinchey, John Conyers, and Other Members signed the following letter to the President, warning him not to make any further misstatements in his state of the Union Address. The letter was prompted by previous misstatements by the President concerning Iraq, Weapons of Mass Destruction and efforts to obtain uranium from Niger. The text of the letter follows:

The President

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

Washington, DC 20500



Dear Mr. President:



As you prepare to deliver your fifth State of the Union address tomorrow, we write to respectfully request your personal attention to the accuracy of the information contained within your speech. We are sure you will agree that thorough fact-checking in preparation for this event is in the best interest of the welfare of the American people and our credibility around the world.



Throughout the course of American history, the impact that the State of the Union address has had upon the Congress, the American people, and the larger worldwide audience to which it is delivered cannot be overstated. In years past, this speech has reinvigorated the disheartened, consoled the grieving, and inspired the downtrodden. Three years ago, you used this address to press Congress and the American people to war against Iraq. However, they now know that information you used in delivering this battle cry was false. Just this month we have seen additional proof from the State Department of disagreement within your administration, at the time your speech was delivered, regarding your claim on Iraq seeking uranium from Africa.



Since its first delivery by President George Washington in 1790, the State of the Union address has grown beyond being merely a constitutional mandate. In fact, there are few events on the world stage where one individual commands the attention of so many on such a wide variety of issues. After your delivery of incorrect information in the past, you must now take special care to ensure that every word you speak can be proven to be accurate. Such attention to detail is crucial to repairing the trustworthiness of you- words and your presidency, as well- as our nation's integrity and leadership on global affairs.



Therefore, on January 31, we encourage you to pledge to your audience that every piece of your State of the Union address has been verified as true. Thank you for your consideration of our request. We look forward to your reply.

In a startling revelation, the former commander of Abu Ghraib prison testified that Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, former senior US military commander in Iraq, gave orders to cover up the cause of death for some female American soldiers serving in Iraq.

Last week, Col. Janis Karpinski told a panel of judges at the Commission of Inquiry for Crimes against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration in New York that several women had died of dehydration because they refused to drink liquids late in the day. They were afraid of being assaulted or even raped by male soldiers if they had to use the women's latrine after dark.

The latrine for female soldiers at Camp Victory wasn't located near their barracks, so they had to go outside if they needed to use the bathroom. "There were no lights near any of their facilities, so women were doubly easy targets in the dark of the night," Karpinski told retired US Army Col. David Hackworth in a September 2004 interview.

It was there that male soldiers assaulted and raped women soldiers. So the women took matters into their own hands. They didn't drink in the late afternoon so they wouldn't have to urinate at night. They didn't get raped. But some died of dehydration in the desert heat, Karpinski said.

Rescuers retrieved all 72 central Canadian potash miners who were trapped underground by a fire and survived until Monday by using oxygen, food and water stored in subterranean emergency chambers.

Seventy-two miners were trapped early Sunday when a fire started in polyethylene piping more than a half-mile underground, filling the tunnels with toxic smoke and prompting the miners to take refuge in the sealed emergency rooms.

The Sago miners had oxygen devices. Why don't they last longer or have oxygen available?

MSHA's standards state that mine operators must provide "self- rescue devices" adequate to protect the miner for 1 hour or longer. A person from Homeland Security was on television and informed the nation that the miners had devices that would last 7 hours. However, this was not the case. We have been told that the devices the Sago miners had were good for 1 hour. According to an MSHA specialist, the SCSRs might last 2-3 hours "if they nurse it." Some operators will store additional self rescue devices throughout the mine in case of a mine emergency, but this is not required by the government. Again, there is the fact that while mine rescue teams can be located up to 2 hours away, miners only have 1 hour of air with their self-contained self-rescue devices.

First, the Bush administration withdraws a regulation that would have revised MSHA's 15-year old mine rescue regulation, kills a regulation that would have helped prevent conveyor belt fires, changes mine ventilation rules that experts say will allow fires to spread more rapidly through the mine, cutting off miners' fresh air -- and now this from today's Charleston Gazette:

Just two years ago, the Bush administration rejected a proposal to give coal miners text-messaging devices that could warn them of underground fires and explosions.

If the Sago Mine had had these devices, 13 miners trapped underground could have been told it was safe for them to just walk out after a Jan. 2 explosion.

If workers at the Aracoma Alma No. 1 Mine three weeks later had had text-messaging devices, they could have been warned sooner of a dangerous fire that killed two workers.

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MSHA already could have acted to accept text-messaging proposals that labor and industry officials made after a major mine disaster in Alabama.

The nation's 42,000 underground coal miners already could have communication devices to help them escape potentially deadly mine accidents, according to a review of public records and interviews with mine safety experts.

U.S. coal companies have known about the devices — called Personal Emergency Devices, or PEDs — since at least the late 1980s. But without an industry-wide mandate, few operators have installed the systems in their mines. Only 19 of about 800 underground U.S. mines use PEDs, according to MSHA records.

These devices, manufactured by an Australian firm, Mine Site Technologies, use ultra-low frequency electromagnetic fields to send text messages from the surface to the fields -- warning miners to evacuate and best evacuations routes, for example.

The devices have been used for almost 20 years in Australia. Following the September 2001, explosions at the Jim Walter Resources No. 5 Mine outside Tuscaloosa, Alabama that killed 13 miners, the United Minworkers recommended that MSHA require the devices. In that incident, four miners were injured by an initial explosion, but the others were killed attempting to rescue the injured miners, not knowing about the explosion or the dangers of another explosion.

The devices were used successfully in the US in a 1998 fire at the Willow Creek Mine in Carbon County, Utah, where the entire workforce of mine was successfully evacuated from a serious mine fire.

Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Wendy Wasserstein died today after a battle with lymphoma. She was 55 and she leaves behind a body of work that includes hits such as "The Heidi Chronicles" (1988) and "The Sisters Rosensweig" (1993) and a little daughter named Lucy Jane.

Wasserstein was well liked on stage and off, quick with a smile and a quip in person and always popular at the box office. Indeed, her plays were pack 'em in crowdpleasers and critics sometimes dismissed her wry Manhattaneque comedies as the stuff of a female Neil Simon but that commentary abjectly misses the significance of her work. Before Wasserstein, there was no room for smart, funny, independent women on Broadway, women who stood on their own terms, not as foils for male characters who really ran the show. The playwright made a place for women on Broadway to make their own choices about love, life, parenthood and feminism.

A Message From Your Host

We will have a Jesse Jackson piñata , a dunk tank where you'll get the chance to sink my wife who will be dressed as Hilary Clinton, and a special guest appearance by my uncle - Rep. Timothy V. Johnson who will be giving away "Proud to be G.O.P." American Flag windbreakers. Bring a side dish if you like. We will have burgers, hot dogs, chili, and pizza, but nothing vegetarian! This party is family friendly, so feel free to bring children. It's never too early to get them involved!

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects a balanced budget by 2012. A number of CBO's assumptions underlying this projection are, to say the least, problematic. For example, CBO's projections assume that all of the President's 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, as well as all other temporary tax cuts, are allowed to expire and that the Alternative Minimum Tax is not fixed before it digs further into middle-class incomes. CBO is also required by law to assume that there will be no more appropriations for the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and for Gulf Coast reconstruction; that the pending reconciliation budget will have no effects; and that discretionary spending will not grow at all, in inflation-adjusted terms. With all these caveats in place, CBO's budget baseline is extremely unrealistic.

With this ring I thee wed,
my dearest Abstinence,
but I'll still give head.

It doesn't count as intercourse,
this I know for a fact.
And though this is banal,
neither does anal,
or anything that leaves my hymen intact.

Teenagers who take virginity pledges -- public declarations to abstain from sex -- are almost as likely to be infected with a sexually transmitted disease as those who never made the pledge, an eight-year study released yesterday found.

Although young people who sign a virginity pledge delay the initiation of sexual activity, marry at younger ages and have fewer sexual partners, they are also less likely to use condoms and more likely to experiment with oral and anal sex, said the researchers from Yale and Columbia universities.

"The sad story is that kids who are trying to preserve their technical virginity are, in some cases, engaging in much riskier behavior," said lead author Peter S. Bearman, a professor at Columbia's Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy. "From a public health point of view, an abstinence movement that encourages no vaginal sex may inadvertently encourage other forms of alternative sex that are at higher risk of STDs."

With 99.9 percent of votes counted, Halonen had 51.8 percent against Sauli Niinisto's 48.2 percent. Voter turnout was 77 percent.

A bit over a week ago, President Bush and his men promised to provide the legal, constitutional and moral justifications for the sort of warrantless spying on Americans that has been illegal for nearly 30 years. Instead, we got the familiar mix of political spin, clumsy historical misinformation, contemptuous dismissals of civil liberties concerns, cynical attempts to paint dissents as anti-American and pro-terrorist, and a couple of big, dangerous lies.

Fox has succeeded financially because it tapped into a deep, rich vein of unfulfilled yearning among conservative American television viewers, but it created programming to satisfy the market, not the other way around. CNN, meanwhile, finds itself largely outmaneuvered, unwilling to accept the label of liberal alternative, experimenting instead with a form of journalism that stresses empathy over detachment.

Bush's approval rating now stands at 42 percent, down from 46 percent at the beginning of the year, although still three percentage points higher than the low point of his presidency last November.

The poll also shows that the public prefers the direction Democrats in Congress would take the country as opposed to the path set by the president, that Americans trust Democrats over Republicans to address the country's biggest problems and that they strongly favor Democrats over Republicans in their vote for the House.

The political stakes this year are especially high. What happens will affect not only the final years of Bush's presidency, but also will shape what is likely to be an even bigger election for his successor in 2008. Republicans have been on the ascendancy throughout the Bush presidency, but they begin the year not only resigned to some losses in Congress but also fearful that, under a worst-case scenario, an eruption of voter dissatisfaction could cost them control of the House or Senate or both.

The U.S. Army in Iraq has at least twice seized and jailed the wives of suspected insurgents in hopes of "leveraging" their husbands into surrender, U.S. military documents show.

In one case, a secretive task force locked up the young mother of a nursing baby, a U.S. intelligence officer reported. In the case of a second detainee, one American colonel suggested to another that they catch her husband by tacking a note to the family's door telling him "to come get his wife."

The issue of female detentions in Iraq has taken on a higher profile since kidnappers seized American journalist Jill Carroll on Jan. 7 and threatened to kill her unless all Iraqi women detainees are freed.

"If you're going to make the case that this is a bipartisan scandal, you have to really stretch the imagination," says Morris. "Most individual tribes were predominantly Democratic givers through the last decade. Only Abramoff's clients switched dramatically from largely Democratic to overwhelmingly Republican donors, and that happened only after he got his hands on them."

From the January 27 edition of NBC's Today:

LAUER: Howard Dean was on this program yesterday and asserted, basically, that it is a Republican scandal. Let me play you a clip.

DEAN [video clip]: It is a Republican-financed scandal. Not one dime of money from Jack Abramoff ever went to any Democrat. Not one dime.

LAUER: Katie pressed him on that, and then we -- we did some research. We went to the Center for Responsive Politics and we found out that, technically speaking, Howard Dean may be correct. But here's what we found: that 66 percent of the money in this situation went to Republicans, but 34 percent of the money -- not from Abramoff, but from his associates and clients -- went to Democrats.

The Massachusetts senator was speaking on the margins of the World Economic Forum in the Swiss ski resort of Davos.

Coulter had told the Philander Smith College audience Thursday that more conservative justices were needed on the Supreme Court to change the current law on abortion. Stevens is one of the court's most liberal members.

"We need somebody to put rat poisoning in Justice Stevens' creme brulee," Coulter said. "That's just a joke, for you in the media."

Wait a minute, who's translating who, there? Sounds like Ted Kennedy was telling bin Laden what to say.

Now, to prove my point, folks, 'cause I've been getting some wide-eyed stares from Snerdley, today, when I say, "The Democrats look at, to me -- to me -- they look to Bush as the enemy." They don't see bin Laden as the enemy. They see Bush as the enemy.

Well, bin Laden and the Democrats sound similar, would you not agree? What is so outrageous about that? It's not -- you know what? It's not outrageous. You just can't believe I'm actually saying it.

For example, more than two dozen government surveillance photographs show 22-year-old Caitlin Childs of Atlanta, a strict vegetarian, and other vegans picketing against meat eating, in December 2003. They staged their protest outside a HoneyBaked Ham store on Buford Highway in DeKalb County.

An undercover DeKalb County Homeland Security detective was assigned to conduct surveillance of the protest and the protestors, and take the photographs. The detective arrested Childs and another protester after he saw Childs approach him and write down, on a piece of paper, the license plate number of his unmarked government car.

But, in interviews with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, he has said those discussions -- which he previously referred to as "the K Street meetings" -- are merely to ensure Republicans are putting forward good candidates for the jobs.

As if that weren't enough to make you question the veracity of Santorum's latest denials, here's what he told the Post-Gazette about the K Street project back in November:

"The K Street project is purely to make sure we have qualified applicants for positions that are in town," Mr. Santorum said. "From my perspective, it's a good government thing."

When presidents pick someone to fill a job in the government, it's typically a very public affair. The White House circulates press releases and background materials. Congress holds a hearing, where some members will pepper the nominee with questions and others will shower him or her with praise. If the person in question is controversial or up for an important position, they'll rate a profile or two in the papers. But there's one confirmation hearing you won't hear much about. It's convened every Tuesday morning by Rick Santorum, the junior senator from Pennsylvania, in the privacy of a Capitol Hill conference room, for a handpicked group of two dozen or so Republican lobbyists. Occasionally, one or two other senators or a representative from the White House will attend. Democrats are not invited, and neither is the press.

The chief purpose of these gatherings is to discuss jobs--specifically, the top one or two positions at the biggest and most important industry trade associations and corporate offices centered around Washington's K Street, a canyon of nondescript office buildings a few blocks north of the White House that is to influence-peddling what Wall Street is to finance. In the past, those people were about as likely to be Democrats as Republicans, a practice that ensured K Street firms would have clout no matter which party was in power. But beginning with the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, and accelerating in 2001, when George W. Bush became president, the GOP has made a determined effort to undermine the bipartisan complexion of K Street. And Santorum's Tuesday meetings are a crucial part of that effort. Every week, the lobbyists present pass around a list of the jobs available and discuss whom to support. Santorum's responsibility is to make sure each one is filled by a loyal Republican--a senator's chief of staff, for instance, or a top White House aide, or another lobbyist whose reliability has been demonstrated. After Santorum settles on a candidate, the lobbyists present make sure it is known whom the Republican leadership favors. "The underlying theme was [to] place Republicans in key positions on K Street. Everybody taking part was a Republican and understood that that was the purpose of what we were doing," says Rod Chandler, a retired congressman and lobbyist who has participated in the Santorum meetings. "It's been a very successful effort."

finally hamas won and that is what i guessed would happen , fatteh is as an old shoe now , hamas will try to make palestine as an islamic country , the situation will be so bad next days , israel refused hamas and USA too, then who voted hamas will know he was mistake , hamas will not develop the palestin,s cities as people think , who vote hamas believe that hamas is fair , they dont know that it will make our life as hell , we will dont have our freedom on the street and they will try to force girls to wear veil ( new afghanistan in middle east) , then it will be big catastrophe,

Conservatives, especially evangelicals, have had free rein to offer their own recipe for social renewal: churches that restrain male selfishness, decency standards that check hedonism, social norms that discourage childbearing outside wedlock.

Reality has been dealt a stunning blow by Mr. Bush. The administration's high-handedness with the Katrina investigators comes at the same time as disclosures showing that the White House was warned in the hours just before the hurricane hit New Orleans that it might well cause catastrophic flooding and the breaching of the city's levees.

That was early on the morning of last Aug. 29. On Sept. 1, with the city all but completely underwater, the president went on television and blithely declared, "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees."

This guy is something. Remember his "Top Gun" moment aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln? And his famous taunt — "Bring 'em on" — to the insurgents in Iraq? His breathtaking arrogance is exceeded only by his incompetence. And that's the real problem. That's where you'll find the mind-boggling destructiveness of this regime, in its incompetence.

Fantasy may be in fashion. Reality may have been shoved into the shadows on Mr. Bush's watch. But the plain truth is that he is the worst president in memory, and one of the worst of all time. Many thousands of people — men, women and children — have died unnecessarily (and thousands more are suffering) because of his misguided and mishandled policies.

Bush not concerned about Bin Laden.

Bush: "So I don't know where he is. You know, I just don't spend that much time on him. … And, again, I don't know where he is. I — I'll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him."

"When he says he's going to hurt the American people again, or try to, he means it," Bush told reporters after visiting the top-secret National Security Agency where the surveillance program is based. "I take it seriously, and the people of NSA take it seriously."

In June, 2002, Republican Sen. Michael DeWine of Ohio introduced legislation (S. 2659) which would have eliminated the exact barrier to FISA which Gen. Hayden yesterday said is what necessitated the Administration bypassing FISA. Specifically, DeWine's legislation proposed:


to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 to modify the standard of proof for issuance of orders regarding non-United States persons from probable cause to reasonable suspicion. . . .


In other words, DeWine's bill, had it become law, would have eliminated the "probable cause" barrier (at least for non-U.S. persons) which the Administration is now pointing to as the reason why it had to circumvent FISA.

REPORTER: General Hayden, the FISA law says that the N.S.A. can do intercepts, as long as you go to the court within 72 hours to get a warrant. I understood you to say that you are aggressively using FISA, but selectively doing so. Why are you not able to go to FISA, as the law requires, in all cases? And if the law is outdated, why haven't you asked Congress to update it?

GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: If FISA worked just as well, why wouldn't I use FISA? To save typing? No. There is an operational impact here. And I have two -- two paths in front of me, both of them lawful: one, FISA; one, the President's authorization. And we go down this path because our operational judgment is: It is much more effective. So we do it for that reason. I think I got -- I think I've covered all the ones you raised.

A permanent police force, to be known as the 'United States Secret Service Uniformed Division,'" empowered to "make arrests without warrant for any offense against the United States committed in their presence" ... "or for any felony cognizable under the laws of the United States if they have reasonable grounds to believe that the person to be arrested has committed or is committing such felony."

The Bush administration, citing the confidentiality of executive branch communications, said Tuesday that it did not plan to turn over certain documents about Hurricane Katrina or make senior White House officials available for sworn testimony before two Congressional committees investigating the storm response.

...

The White House's stance on storm-related documents, along with slow or incomplete responses by other agencies, threatens to undermine efforts to identify what went wrong, Democrats on the committees said Tuesday.

"There has been a near total lack of cooperation that has made it impossible, in my opinion, for us to do the thorough investigation that we have a responsibility to do," Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, said at Tuesday's hearing of the Senate committee investigating the response. His spokeswoman said he would ask for a subpoena for documents and testimony if the White House did not comply.

In response to questions later from a reporter, the deputy White House spokesman, Trent Duffy, said the administration had declined requests to provide testimony by Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff; Mr. Card's deputy, Joe Hagin; Frances Fragos Townsend, the domestic security adviser; and her deputy, Ken Rapuano.

Mr. Duffy said the administration had also declined to provide storm-related e-mail correspondence and other communications involving White House staff members. Mr. Rapuano has given briefings to the committees, but the sessions were closed to the public and were not considered formal testimony.

"These dependency divas are once again using misleading statistics to convince women they are victims in order to advance their big government agenda," says Carrie Lukas, director of policy at IWF.
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The gender wage gap is a manufactured crisis borne of interest group politics, not a reflection of the reality of women's lives. The arguments advanced by feminist groups on Equal Pay Day are deliberately misleading. Worse, their underlying assumption is that women are incapable of making free and informed decisions about their lives-or for standing up for their right to fair compensation. I for one have more faith in the female sex. I know that we will continue to succeed-but on our own terms.

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Are women victims? Or can they hold their own in the workplace? Women's inequality in society is a standard refrain in the popular media and thus in the conventional wisdom. The purveyors of that point of view assume that women are systematically discriminated against on all levels of society, especially in the workplace, and that this discrimination has kept them from reaching equality with men. But the facts show otherwise.

Women may never achieve parity with men in the workplace, but that is not bad news for women. Some will choose not to work, while others will set their sights to lead the top corporations in America. The majority of women will fall somewhere in between

The reality is that, when considering men and women with similar fields of study, educational attainment, and continuous time spent in the workforce, the wage gap disappears. This is true for some women in high-paying "male" fields such as engineering, chemistry, and computer science.

Feminists have ignored how women's lives and goals differ from men's. In doing so they have overlooked the fact that it women's life choices -- not sex discrimination -- are responsible for the infamous wage gap.