ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES

The incoming "CBS Evening News" anchor appears significantly thinner in a network promotional magazine photo thanks to digital airbrushing.

The touched-up photo of Couric dressed in a striped business suit appears on the inside of the September issue of Watch! which is distributed at CBS stations and on American Airlines flights.

CBS News President Sean McManus said he was "obviously surprised and disappointed when I heard about it."

The original picture was snapped in May and was widely circulated to the media as an official photo of Couric.

Couric, 49, said she hadn't known about the digitally reworked version until she saw the issue. The former NBC "Today" show host told the Daily News, "I liked the first picture better because there's more of me to love."

Gil Schwartz, executive vice president of communications for CBS Corp., said Wednesday in a phone interview the photo alteration was done by someone in the CBS photo department who "got a little zealous."

Today Fox has aired multiple segments featuring pundits who claim that a U.S. military attack on Iran is both essential and imminent. Fox anchors repeatedly parrot these arguments. Watch a compilation of clips culled from the last several hours.

A few days ago, a lawyer friend sent me a daily law journal article about the paucity of female Supreme Court clerks this year-- 19% of the 2006 clerks are women, down from 37-41% over the five previous terms. Scalia, Thomas, Alito and Souter hired only male clerks this term.

...

In a brief telephone interview, Justice O'Connor said she was "surprised" by the development, but declined to speculate on the cause. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg expressed no such surprise. In a conversation the other day, she knew the numbers off the top of her head, and in fact had noted them in a speech this month in Montreal to the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, during which she also observed with obvious regret that "I have been all alone in my corner on the bench" since Justice O'Connor's retirement in January.

Justice Ginsburg, who will have two women among her four clerks, declined during the conversation to comment further on the clerkship numbers. Why not ask a justice who has not hired any women for the coming term, she suggested.

Souter explains that this is "no more than a random variation," which is a really annoying excuse for his lack of female hires. I suppose the fact that there's only one female justice on the bench is also just a "random variation"?

On June 29, 2006, the Supreme Court ended its 2005-2006 term. The Justices employed 37 law clerks this past term, 13 of whom were women. During the 2004-05 term, 15 of 35 law clerks were women. Initial reports for the upcoming 2006-2007 term appear to indicate that the number of women will again drop. A recent article by Tony Mauro entitled "High Court Clerks: Still White, Still Male" is available here.

Just under 50 percent of new law school graduates in 2005 were women. Yet women account for only 7 of the 37 law clerkships for the new term, the first time the number has been in the single digits since 1994, when there were 4,000 fewer women among the country's new law school graduates than there are today.

...

A post on one popular legal Web site, the Volokh Conspiracy, asked, "Why so few women Supreme Court clerks?" and drew 135 comments during a single week in July. The answers included the relative scarcity of female students among the top editors of the leading law schools' law reviews — an important preclerkship credential — and the absence of women among the "feeder judges," the dozen or so federal appeals court judges who, year in and year out, offer a reliable pipeline to the Supreme Court for their own favored law clerks.

Some speculated that Justice Antonin Scalia, who hired only two women among 28 law clerks during the last seven years and who will have none this year, could not find enough conservative women to meet his test of ideological purity. (Justice Clarence Thomas will also have no female clerks this year, but over the preceding six years hired 11.)

In a brief telephone interview, Justice O'Connor said she was "surprised" by the development, but declined to speculate on the cause.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg expressed no such surprise. In a conversation the other day, she knew the numbers off the top of her head, and in fact had noted them in a speech this month in Montreal to the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, during which she also observed with obvious regret that "I have been all alone in my corner on the bench" since Justice O'Connor's retirement in January.

...

Justice William O. Douglas hired the first female clerk, Lucille Lomen, in 1944, and it was 22 years before Justice Hugo L. Black hired the second, Margaret Corcoran. The first black clerk, William T. Coleman Jr., who is still practicing law here, was hired by Justice Felix Frankfurter in 1948.

Justice Frankfurter was not, however, ready to hire a woman when the dean of Harvard Law School strongly recommended a former star student in 1960. He turned down Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The nation's median household income rose last year for the first time since 1999, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday.

Median household income climbed 1.1% to $46,326 in 2005. That means half of U.S. households earned more and half earned less. Per capita income rose 1.5% to $25,036, the Census Bureau said.

The income jump hid some somber news. Earnings actually fell for people working full-time. Household income rose because more people worked in the households, albeit at lower paying jobs. Median earnings of men declined 1.8% last year. For women, the decline was 1.3%.

In the world's biggest economy, one in eight Americans and almost one in four blacks lived in poverty last year, the U.S. Census Bureau said on Tuesday, both ratios virtually unchanged from 2004.

The survey also showed 15.9 percent of the population, or 46.6 million, had no health insurance, up from 15.6 percent in 2004 and an increase for a fifth consecutive year, even as the economy grew at a 3.2 percent clip.

It was the first year since President George W. Bush took office in 2001 that the poverty rate did not increase. As in past years, the figures showed poverty especially concentrated among blacks and Hispanics.

In all, some 37 million Americans, or 12.6 percent, lived below the poverty line, defined as having an annual income around $10,000 for an individual or $20,000 for a family of four. The total showed a decrease of 90,000 from the 2004 figure, which Census Bureau officials said was "statistically insignificant."

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called on U.S. President George W. Bush to participate in a "direct television debate with us," so Iran can voice its point of view on how to end problems in the world.

"But the condition is that there can be no censorship, especially for the American nation," he said Tuesday.

Police found more than two dozen bodies across the capital Tuesday and the government said 73 people had died in fighting in the south as violence surged despite promising signs that a U.S. crackdown is curbing sectarian killings in Baghdad.

The U.S. military also said three American soldiers and one Marine were killed the day before — two in combat in Anbar province and two from non-hostile causes. A fourth soldier died on Tuesday in Baghdad. At least 13 American service members have died in Iraq since Sunday, according to the U.S. command.

Elsewhere, an oil pipeline exploded in southern Iraq, sparking a massive fire and killing at least 36 people and injuring 45, the Interior Ministry said.

The pipeline was located six miles south of Diwaniyah, the scene of fierce clashes between the Iraqi army and Shiite militia on Monday that left 73 people dead.

The reason for the explosion was not clear, but police Lt. Raid Jabir said several people had been siphoning fuel from the pipeline when the blast occurred. Iraqis have faced severe fuel shortages since Saddam Hussein's 2003 ouster. Insurgents also have frequently targeted pipelines and oil refineries.

The latest violence both inside and outside the capital occurred despite U.S. and Iraqi officials' claims that a new operation in the capital has lowered Sunni-Shiite killings there, which had risen in June and July.

The lone air traffic controller on duty the morning Comair Flight 5191 crashed cleared the jet for takeoff, then turned his back to do some "administrative duties" as the aircraft veered down the wrong runway, a federal investigator said Tuesday.

Separately, the Federal Aviation Administration acknowledged violating its own policies when it assigned only one controller to the Lexington tower.

Jumalien keinu


Kenen korkeat jumalat keinuunsa ottavat kerta,
eivät ne häntä yhdessä kohden pidä,
he heittävät häntä
välillä taivaan ja maan -
siksi kuin järjen valon häneltä ne vievät.

Ja kuka maailmoiden mahdin kuuluttaja on,
hän tänään pilvien ääriä kulkee,
ja huomenna makaa
maassa niin syvällä
kuin koski, mi vuorten
kuilussa kuohuu.

Kuka keinussa jumalien keinuu,
ei hällä elon aika pitkä ole.
Syyn, syyttömyyden
hän huiput nähköön -
sitten tulkohon tumma yö.

The Swing Of Gods


Whom the High Gods harness to their swing,
he will not be held in one harbor safe.
He will be tossed
between heaven and earth -
until the very light of reason is extinguished.

And whoever wishes to sing of the might of the worlds
may today dance on the edge of the clouds
yet tomorrow sink deep
into the earth, as deep
as the foaming rapids
in mountain caverns.

Who dares to swing in the swing of the gods
will not survive for long in this life.
Let utmost guilt
and utmost innocence dawn -
then let come the darkening night.

Why nurturing a passionate marriage is more important than breast-feeding.
The science section of The New York Times recently featured a lengthy study on breast-feeding and its benefits. Breast-feeding, the study found, helps reduce the chances of infection, cold, diarrhea, illness, and even later childhood obesity. No one argues with any of these benefits, but what the report neglects to mention, and what I have personally witnessed when counseling couples, is how breast-feeding can come between a husband and wife.

One of the episodes of "Shalom in the Home" this season featured a young couple in Pennsylvania who were madly in love when they married, but had slowly drifted apart after the birth of two children. Indeed, a Harvard University study maintains that a couples' love life decreases by 74 percent in the first year after the birth of a child. Now, given that sex is nearly dead in the American bedroom anyway, with national sex rates in marriage figuring at about once a week, a three-quarters decrease means that sex takes place once every few months—sparse pickings indeed.

With this particular couple, the situation was even worse. Their sex life had died completely, and one of the main causes was the mother's obsession with breast-feeding well into the child's eleventh month. The baby was attached to his mother like a limb, and he even slept with her every night, consigning her husband to a different bedroom.

I told the mother that in being so devoted to her son, she had committed the cardinal sin of marriage, which is to put someone else before her spouse, even if that someone is your child. Furthermore, I said, her obsession had turned one of her most attractive body parts into a feeding station, an attractive cafeteria rather than a scintillating piece of flesh.

...

In the end, there are two effects of breast-feeding that we often refuse to acknowledge. One is the de-eroticization of a woman's body, as her husband witnesses one of the most attractive parts of her body serving a utilitarian rather than romantic purpose. This is not to say that breast-feeding isn't sexy. Indeed, the maternal dimension is a central part of womanliness. But public breast-feeding is profoundly de-eroticizing, and I believe that wives should cover up, even when they nurse their babies in their husband's presence.

I believe this same problem comes up when men witness childbirth up close. There are certain poses in which a husband should not see his wife. By all means, be there for the entire labor, as I have been for the births of each of my eight children. But I strongly agree with the advice of the ancient rabbis that husbands should not be staring at the actual delivery. That is just too erotic a part of a wife's anatomy for it to become a mere birth canal.

The erotic nature of a wife's body is one of the principal elements of attraction in marriage. When a husband ceases to see his wife as a woman, and begins to see her as "the mother of his children," a negative trend has begun in his mind that can only subvert his erotic interest.

On the eve of the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, President Bush returned to the devastated Gulf Coast today promising to continue federal assistance, and eagerly pointing out signs of progress.

"It's amazing, isn't?" he told a gathering under a sweltering sun. "It's amazing what the world looked like then and what it looks like now."

Mr. Bush, his presidency still marred one year later by the slow government response to the storm, spent the afternoon demonstrating his empathy and optimism in meetings with residents and officials along the storm-wracked coast. The trip marked an attempt by Mr. Bush to recast the legacy of the year before, when he lingered on the other side of the country before cutting short his vacation to deal with the crisis.

Mr. Bush acknowledged that, for some, rebuilding may have been so gradual as to seem non-existent. But, Mr. Bush said: "For a fellow who was here and now a year later comes back, things have changed."

"I feel a quiet sense of determination that's going to shape the future of Mississippi," he continued.

And then, in comments that could have been as applicable to the other main challenge of his administration — Iraq — Mr. Bush said: "As this part of the world flourishes, and businesses grow, people will find work and have the wherewithal to rebuild their lives."

Mr. Bush delivered his remarks at an intersection in a working-class Biloxi neighborhood against a carefully orchestrated backdrop of neatly reconstructed homes. Just a few feet out of camera range stood gutted houses with wires dangling from interior ceilings. A tattered piece of crime scene tape hung from a tree in the field where Mr. Bush spoke. A toilet seat lay on its side in the grass.

PHILOSOPHERS, scientists and other intellectuals close to the Pope will gather at his summer palace outside Rome this week for intensive discussions that could herald a fundamental shift in the Vatican's view of evolution.

There have been growing signs that Pope Benedict is considering aligning the Catholic Church more closely to the theory of "intelligent design',' taught in some US states, which advocates that some features of the universe and nature are so complex that they must have been designed by a higher intelligence. Critics say it is merely a disguise for "creationism", a literal belief in the Bible's account.

A prominent anti-evolutionist and Catholic scientist, Dominique Tassot, told the US weekly National Catholic Reporter that this week's meeting was "to give a broader extension to the debate".

"Even if [the Pope] knows where he wants to go, and I believe he does, it will take time. Most Catholic intellectuals today are convinced that evolution is obviously true because most scientists say so."

In 1996, in what was seen as an unconditional capitulation to scientific orthodoxy, John Paul II declared that Darwin's theories were "more than a hypothesis".

Last week, Cardinal Christoph Schonborn of Austria revealed that evolution and creation had been chosen as the subjects for this year's meeting of the Pope's Schulerkreis - a group consisting mainly of his former doctoral students that has been gathering annually since the late 1970s. Other participants at the closed-door meeting will include the president of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Peter Schuster; the conservative ethical philosopher Robert Spaemann; and Paul Elbrich, professor of philosophy at Munich University.

The Pope also raised the issue in the inaugural sermon of his pontificate, saying: "We are not the accidental product, without meaning, of evolution."

A few months later, Cardinal Schonborn, who is regarded as being particularly close to Benedict, wrote an article for The New York Times that was seen as backing moves to teach intelligent design.

He was attacked by Father George Coyne, director of the Vatican Observatory. On August 19 Father Coyne was replaced without explanation. The announcement of his successor did not mention Father Coyne or his 28 years as observatory head.

"I think homosexuality is a lifestyle, it's a choice, and that lifestyle can be changed. I think it is a transgression against God's law, God's will. The reality is, again, … that I think we make choices all the time. And I think you make good choices and bad choices in terms of lifestyle. Our expectation is that one's genetic makeup might make one more inclined to be an arsonist, or might make one more inclined to be a kleptomaniac. Do I think that they can be changed? Yes."

Blackwell said homosexuality "is a lifestyle, it's a choice, and that lifestyle can be changed. I think it's a transgression against God's law, God's will."

The consequences of Operation Iraqi Freedom for U.S. forces are being documented by the Defense Department with an exceptional degree of openness and transparency. Its daily and cumulative counts of deaths receive a great deal of publicity. But deaths alone don't indicate the risk for an individual. For this purpose, the number of deaths must be compared with the number of individuals exposed to the risk of death. The Defense Department has supplied us with appropriate data on exposure, and we take advantage of it to provide the first profile of military mortality in Iraq.

Between March 21, 2003, when the first military death was recorded in Iraq, and March 31, 2006, there were 2,321 deaths among American troops in Iraq. Seventy-nine percent were a result of action by hostile forces. Troops spent a total of 592,002 "person-years" in Iraq during this period. The ratio of deaths to person-years, .00392, or 3.92 deaths per 1,000 person-years, is the death rate of military personnel in Iraq.

How does this rate compare with that in other groups? One meaningful comparison is to the civilian population of the United States. That rate was 8.42 per 1,000 in 2003, more than twice that for military personnel in Iraq.

The comparison is imperfect, of course, because a much higher fraction of the American population is elderly and subject to higher death rates from degenerative diseases. The death rate for U.S. men ages 18 to 39 in 2003 was 1.53 per 1,000 -- 39 percent of that of troops in Iraq. But one can also find something equivalent to combat conditions on home soil. The death rate for African American men ages 20 to 34 in Philadelphia was 4.37 per 1,000 in 2002, 11 percent higher than among troops in Iraq. Slightly more than half the Philadelphia deaths were homicides.

The death rate of American troops in Vietnam was 5.6 times that observed in Iraq. Part of the reduction in the death rate is attributable to improvements in military medicine and such things as the use of body armor. These have reduced the ratio of deaths to wounds from 24 percent in Vietnam to 13 percent in Iraq.

How does this rate compare with that in other groups? One meaningful comparison is to the civilian population of the United States. That rate was 8.42 per 1,000 in 2003, more than twice that for military personnel in Iraq.

At the behest of Rep. Bella Abzug (D-NY), in 1971 the U.S. Congress designated August 26 as "Women's Equality Day."

The date was selected to commemorate the 1920 passage of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, granting women the right to vote. This was the culmination of a massive, peaceful civil rights movement by women that had its formal beginnings in 1848 at the world's first women's rights convention, in Seneca Falls, New York.

The case does many things for us, of course. It makes us feel both titillated and virtuous; it makes us feel smart. Most centrally, it makes flattering distinctions between good parents (us) and bad parents (the Ramseys). Even if the Ramseys didn't kill their daughter, they exposed her to lascivious eyes in beauty contests, which is about as bad. Notice how much press is directed to abusing the Ramseys, to suggesting that (unlike us) their relationship to their child was unhealthy, vicious, exploitative. This whining at beauty contest parents generally is a favorite pastime of ours, as if such pageants were freakish, rather than a version of a central parenting activity: parading kids, sexualizing them, putting them on display.

And when kids are indeed abused, who is doing it? Mom and Dad and Uncle Ted and Aunt May. As little as 2 percent of child abuse is committed by strangers. Again, why are we exercised over JonBenet?

But I've yet to read a blog item or a protesting e-mail from a reader that convinces me that the article—as opposed to the deliberately provocative headline—really insults women, career or otherwise.

Some of the sensational findings presented in the Forbes piece appear to be gender-neutral and hence don't bait feminists at all. For instance, Noer holds that the literature indicates that "highly educated people are more likely to have had extra-marital sex," and "individuals who earn more than $30,000 a year are more likely to cheat." So, if career women are bad marriage bets, so are career men. It's a wash.

Noer also cautions against marrying career women because it's "financially devastating." "[D]ivorced people see their overall net worth drop an average of 77%." But if your overall net worth is going to drop an average of 77 percent, wouldn't you want your net worth to be higher, which it could be if you marry a career woman, as opposed to lower with a non-career woman?

The nine slide-show entries appear to be a holding pen for crap Noer couldn't shoehorn into his overstuffed thesis. The headline to the first one, "You are less likely to get married to her," is a non sequitur. That you are less likely to marry her can't be a reason for not marrying her. The literature cited in the second slide, which is about divorce, refers only to the number of hours women work—not their education levels—and hence doesn't seem to apply to Forbes' definition of "career women." The fourth slide, "You are much less likely to have kids," doesn't allow that many "career women" don't have kids by design. If you don't want kids and don't have them, there's no tragedy, right? The fifth slide seems to be playing fast and loose with the facts. Its headline asserts, "If you do have kids, your wife is more likely to be unhappy." The item is footnoted to an academic study and a USA Today story about the academic study. According to USA Today, the study found that affluent parents experience reduced marital happiness after spawning compared with middle-class parents. If this observation is about joint income, not a woman's career, what's it doing in the story about not marrying career women?

Before my female readers break their nails pounding out angry e-mails to me, they should consider the piece's fundamental weakness.

...

What upsets you about the piece? Bore me with your fury at slate.pressbox@gmail.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)

COUSHATTA -- Nine black children attending Red River Elementary School were directed last week to the back of the school bus by a white driver who designated the front seats for white children.

The situation has outraged relatives of the black children who have filed a complaint with school officials.

Superintendent Kay Easley will meet with the family members in her office this morning.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People also is considering filing a formal charge with the U.S. Department of Justice. NAACP District Vice President James Panell, of Shreveport, said he would apprise Justice attorneys of the situation this week. He's considering asking for an investigation into the bus incident and other aspects of the school system's operations, including pupil-teacher ratio as it relates to the numbers of white and black children, along with a breakdown of the numbers of black and white teachers employed.

"If the smoke is there, then there's probably fire somewhere else," Panell said in a phone interview from New Orleans. "At this point, it is extremely alarming. We fought that battle 50 years ago, and we won. Why is this happening again?"

...

After Richmond and Williams filed complaints with the School Board, Transportation Supervisor Jerry Carlisle asked Davis to make seat assignments for her passengers, Sessoms said.

"But she still assigned the black children to the back of the bus," she added.

And the nine children had to share only two seats, meaning the older children had to hold the younger ones in their laps.

A new solution reached Monday by School Board officials has a black bus driver driving across town to pick up the nine black children.

Women may buy the morning-after pill without a prescription -- but only with proof they're 18 or older, federal health officials decided Thursday. The Food and Drug Administration ruling culminated a contentious three-year effort to ease access to the emergency contraceptive.

Girls 17 and younger still will need a doctor's note to buy the pills, called Plan B, the FDA told manufacturer Barr Pharmaceuticals Inc.

The compromise decision is a partial victory for women's advocacy and medical groups that say eliminating sales restrictions could cut in half the nation's 3 million annual unplanned pregnancies. Opponents have argued that wider access could increase promiscuity.

The FDA said men 18 and older will be able to buy the pills without a prescription.

Guys: A word of advice. Marry pretty women or ugly ones. Short ones or tall ones. Blondes or brunettes. Just, whatever you do, don't marry a woman with a career.

Why? Because if many social scientists are to be believed, you run a higher risk of having a rocky marriage. While everyone knows that marriage can be stressful, recent studies have found professional women are more likely to get divorced, more likely to cheat, less likely to have children, and, if they do have kids, they are more likely to be unhappy about it. A recent study in Social Forces, a research journal, found that women--even those with a "feminist" outlook--are happier when their husband is the primary breadwinner.

Not a happy conclusion, especially given that many men, particularly successful men, are attracted to women with similar goals and aspirations. And why not? After all, your typical career girl is well-educated, ambitious, informed and engaged. All seemingly good things, right? Sure…at least until you get married. Then, to put it bluntly, the more successful she is the more likely she is to grow dissatisfied with you. Sound familiar?

...

To be clear, we're not talking about a high-school dropout minding a cash register. For our purposes, a "career girl" has a university-level (or higher) education, works more than 35 hours a week outside the home and makes more than $30,000 a year.

If a host of studies are to be believed, marrying these women is asking for trouble. If they quit their jobs and stay home with the kids, they will be unhappy (Journal of Marriage and Family, 2003). They will be unhappy if they make more money than you do (Social Forces, 2006). You will be unhappy if they make more money than you do (Journal of Marriage and Family, 2001). You will be more likely to fall ill (American Journal of Sociology). Even your house will be dirtier (Institute for Social Research).

But the data on young Americans tell a different story. Simply put, liberals have a big baby problem: They're not having enough of them, they haven't for a long time, and their pool of potential new voters is suffering as a result. According to the 2004 General Social Survey, if you picked 100 unrelated politically liberal adults at random, you would find that they had, between them, 147 children. If you picked 100 conservatives, you would find 208 kids. That's a "fertility gap" of 41%. Given that about 80% of people with an identifiable party preference grow up to vote the same way as their parents, this gap translates into lots more little Republicans than little Democrats to vote in future elections. Over the past 30 years this gap has not been below 20%--explaining, to a large extent, the current ineffectiveness of liberal youth voter campaigns today.

Alarmingly for the Democrats, the gap is widening at a bit more than half a percentage point per year, meaning that today's problem is nothing compared to what the future will most likely hold. Consider future presidential elections in a swing state (like Ohio), and assume that the current patterns in fertility continue. A state that was split 50-50 between left and right in 2004 will tilt right by 2012, 54% to 46%. By 2020, it will be certifiably right-wing, 59% to 41%. A state that is currently 55-45 in favor of liberals (like California) will be 54-46 in favor of conservatives by 2020--and all for no other reason than babies.

The fertility gap doesn't budge when we correct for factors like age, income, education, sex, race--or even religion. Indeed, if a conservative and a liberal are identical in all these ways, the liberal will still be 19 percentage points more likely to be childless than the conservative. Some believe the gap reflects an authentic cultural difference between left and right in America today. As one liberal columnist in a major paper graphically put it, "Maybe the scales are tipping to the neoconservative, homogenous right in our culture simply because they tend not to give much of a damn for the ramifications of wanton breeding and environmental destruction and pious sanctimony, whereas those on the left actually seem to give a whit for the health of the planet and the dire effects of overpopulation." It would appear liberals have been quite successful controlling overpopulation--in the Democratic Party.

Republican Sen. Conrad Burns, whose re-election campaign is pressing for tighter immigration controls, referred to his house painter as"a nice little Guatemalan man"and suggested that worker as well as employees of a roofing company he hired might be in the country illegally.

"The other day, the little fella who does our maintenance work around the house, he's from Guatemala, and I said,'Could I see your green card?'"Burns said at a June meeting recorded by Democrats."And Hugo says,'No.'I said,'Oh, gosh.'"

Burns spokesman Jason Klindt said the worker, Hugo Reyes, is legally in the United States, owns a painting company and the senator"never had any doubt"that Reyes is a legal resident.

"He was telling an anecdotal story about a time he took the extra step to make sure a worker was legal,"Klindt said. He added that Burns'description of Reyes as"little"was nothing more than a reference to his stature. He is 5 feet 3.

Burns, who voted against a Senate bill this year that would have offered millions of illegal immigrants a chance at citizenship, also joked about the issue at a debate against his Democratic opponent, Jon Tester, earlier this year.

Fourth-graders in traditional public schools are doing better in both reading and math than students in charter schools, the government says in a report fueling fresh debate over school choice.

Tuesday's report said fourth-graders in regular public schools scored an average of 5.2 points better in reading than students in charter schools on the 2003 National Assessment of Educational Progress test. Students in traditional schools scored an average of 5.8 points better in math.

Charter school opponents said the findings show that the schools are a failing experiment that drains resources from traditional public schools. Charter school supporters called the report flawed and outdated and said charters improve public education by creating competition.

The Bush administration supports charter schools.

The head of the government agency that produced the report cautioned against reading too much into it.

"This was a pilot study and not meant to be definitive," said Mark Schneider, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which did the report for the Department of Education.

"What does this report say to a parent? Not much, frankly," Schneider said. Still, he said the report provides solid data for researchers to do more studies.

Everybody's talking about this blurb today, and it is kind of amazing. The president who claimed he would bring honor and dignity to the white house is apparently known for puerile fart jokes --- and even emits them in the office to play jokes on his aides. Me, I much prefer a grown up president who privately has sex in the oval office than one who farts publicly. But that's just me.

But this is the part I find interesting and the little blurb doesn't elaborate at all:

A top insider let that slip when explaining why President Bush is paranoid around women, always worried about his behavior.



Forget the farting. What's with the paranoia around women? (There is apparently a clinical term for it called "gynophobia" which I've never heard of until today.) It's quite clear that he doesn't know how to behave around powerful women he doesn't control, judging from his inappropriate groping of the prime minister of Germany. And I've often wondered about his relationship to Rice, Hughes and Mieres --- the office wives. Is he afraid that he's going to accidentally pass gas or use a bad word in front of these women or does he let fly with women he knows and is just paranoid around strange women? I'm genuinely curious. This is very wierd for any 60 year old man much less a highly succesful politician.

He is such an immature person that I think it's entirely possible that he's still stuck in that pre-pubescent little boy state where girls are just "yucky." That's how his behavior comes off anyway. There's some frat boy stuff, to be sure, especially in his behavior with other men. But I'm thinking that when it comes to women, he's stuck even further back than that --- cub scouts, maybe. Did mommy lock him in the closet or something?

In his new book, State of Emergency, Pat Buchanan argues for "an immediate moratorium on all immigration." Why? To preserve the dominance of the white race in America. Buchanan explains on pg. 11:

America faces an existential crisis. If we do not get control of our borders, by 2050 Americans of European descent will be a minority in the nation their ancestors created and built. No nation has ever undergone so radical a demographic transformation and survived.

Indeed, Buchanan argues quite explicitly that only whites have the appropriate "genetic endowments" to keep America from collapsing. From pg. 164:

In 1994, Sam Francis, the syndicated columnist and editorial writer for the Washington Times…volunteered this thought:

"The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted by a different people."

"If we do not get control of our borders, by 2050 Americans of European descent will be a minority in the nation their ancestors created and built. No nation has ever undergone so radical a demographic transformation and survived."

Fear permeates Kandahar. Eyes watch every passer-by, every car. Everyone is suspect. People shrink away from me when I ask to interview them. They run when they see a camera. The few brave souls who agree to talk do so either anonymously or because they are desperate.

There is no war, no shooting, no rockets. At least not yet, although the Taliban wave is reconquering Afghanistan, and fighting is spreading through Kandahar province.

Only a few months ago, the city of Kandahar was on the road to prosperity. Newly-paved streets with proper signs - one even named after Queen Soraya, wife of the 1920s reformer King Amanullah Khan - a park with a playground for children and several smart guesthouses were part of the new image. Near the Kandahar market, the foundations of many new modern buildings and houses had been laid.

Mohammad Hikmat and his younger brother bought land here - £27,000 for 400 sq m - to build a home. Over the past five years they made good money working with foreign reporters and aid agencies. But six months ago it all came to an end. The Taliban were coming back. All construction stopped. Fear spread like a fire. Then came a series of suicide attacks and printed decrees, often hung on the walls of local mosques, ordering the people to stop supporting the government.

Mr Hikmat decided to shelve his dream of owning a house and took his family to safety, across the Afghan-Pakistan border to Quetta. The construction company where he worked as an engineer fired most of its staff.

Mr Hikmat destroyed the press cards and letters of recommendation he and his brother had collected from journalists. His brother, who worked as a cameraman, erased all footage from his tapes, all film of the city, interviews and pictures of American troops, for fear of punishment by the Taliban. An Indian company that built the road between Kandahar and Spinboldak fled when news spread that the Pakistani army was helping the Taliban to reach Kandahar. Most foreigners left.

...

"Now the Taliban are everywhere," says Alia, a nurse in Kandahar's Polyclinic Hospital. She returned from Pakistan four years ago in the hope of living and working in Kandahar and made her home in the Khoshal Mena neighbourhood, a short distance from the city centre.

"There was a doctor called Aziz in this building" she says. "The Taliban hung a leaflet on his door, telling him if he didn't stop working for the government and didn't take his children out of school, he would be killed." He and his family escaped overnight.

Now Alia says she is scared for her own family's life. She has taken down the sign on her door which carried her name and occupation. "My children are also in school and I'm worried that I may face a similar threat," she says. Najeeba has her own mocking reaction. "At least they give you a warning," she remarks, although this might be a compliment by Afghan standards.

But Alia has another reason to worry. In recent months she engaged her 16-year-old daughter to a young Afghan who works for the Western military forces. He paid the family a bride price of about £7,000. But now Alia is fearful that her daughter and her new family will also become a Taliban target. For the Taliban control most of Helmand province, where some 4,000 British troops are stationed.

Of course, there are more conspiracy theories than facts. But the reality is that fear dominates every aspect of life here. "It would be easier to live under the full control of one or another government, be it the Taliban or a US-supported Afghan government," says Rafi. "But this is like living in purgatory."

If the Americans leave, Kandahar will fall in a week. That's what people in the city's bazaar say - and they are the ones who know the Taliban and al-Qa'ida.

In our war against Islamo-fascist terrorism, we face enemies both overt and covert. The overt enemies are, of course, the terrorists themselves. Their motives are clear: They hate our society because of its freedoms and liberties, and want to make us all submit to their totalitarian form of Islam. They are busy trying to wreak harm on us in any way they can. Against them we can fight back, as we did when British authorities arrested the men and women who were plotting to blow up a dozen airliners over the Atlantic.

Our covert enemies are harder to identify, for they live in large numbers within our midst. And in terms of intentions, they are not enemies in the sense that they consciously wish to destroy our society. On the contrary, they enjoy our freedoms and often call for their expansion. But they have also been working, over many years, to undermine faith in our society and confidence in its goodness. These covert enemies are those among our elites who have promoted the ideas labeled as multiculturalism, moral relativism and (the term is Professor Samuel Huntington's) transnationalism.

We have always had our covert enemies, but their numbers were few until the 1960s. But then the elite young men who declined to serve in the military during the Vietnam War set out to write a narrative in which they, rather than those who obeyed the call to duty, were the heroes. They have propagated their ideas through the universities, the schools and mainstream media to the point that they are the default assumptions of millions. Our covert enemies don't want the Islamo-fascists to win. But in some corner of their hearts, they would like us to lose.

Opposition among Americans to the war in Iraq has reached a new high, with only about a third of respondents saying they favor it, according to a poll released Monday.

Just 35 percent of 1,033 adults polled say they favor the war in Iraq; 61 percent say they oppose it -- the highest opposition noted in any CNN poll since the conflict began more than three years ago.

Fewer than half of respondents (44 percent) say they believe Bush is honest and trustworthy; 54 percent do not.

And just 41 percent say they agree with Bush on issues, versus 57 percent who say they disagree.

Americans are about evenly split on whether their commander-in-chief understands complex issues, with 47 percent saying yes, and 51 percent saying no.

...

Bush's tepid ratings do not bode well for his party's odds in the coming congressional elections. Asked which party's candidate they would vote for if the elections were held today, 52 percent of respondents cited the Democratic Party's; 43 percent the GOP's.

If you owe back taxes to the federal government, the next call asking you to pay may come not from an Internal Revenue Service officer, but from a private debt collector.

Within two weeks, the I.R.S. will turn over data on 12,500 taxpayers — each of whom owes $25,000 or less in back taxes — to three collection agencies. Larger debtors will continue to be pursued by I.R.S. officers.

The move, an initiative of the Bush administration, represents the first step in a broader plan to outsource the collection of smaller tax debts to private companies over time. Although I.R.S. officials acknowledge that this will be much more expensive than doing it internally, they say that Congress has forced their hand by refusing to let them hire more revenue officers, who could pull in a lot of easy-to-collect money.

The private debt collection program is expected to bring in $1.4 billion over 10 years, with the collection agencies keeping about $330 million of that, or 22 to 24 cents on the dollar.

By hiring more revenue officers, the I.R.S. could collect more than $9 billion each year and spend only $296 million — or about three cents on the dollar — to do so, Charles O. Rossotti, the computer systems entrepreneur who was commissioner from 1997 to 2002, told Congress four years ago.

I.R.S. officials on Friday characterized those figures as correct, but said that the plan Mr. Rossotti had proposed had been forestalled by Congress, which declined to authorize it to hire more revenue officers.

Critics of the privatization plan point not only to the higher cost but also to what they say is a greater potential for abuse. With private companies in the mix, they say, debtors could more easily be tricked into paying money to scam artists using spoof Web sites or other schemes, a problem the I.R.S. alerted taxpayers to in April. Brady R. Bennett, collections director for the I.R.S., said that by 2008, about 350,000 past-due tax records will be distributed among about 10 private debt-collection agencies. To guard against fraud, he said, the agencies will contact taxpayers only by telephone or mail — not the Internet — and will instruct them to send all payments directly to the United States Treasury, not the private collection agency.

One of the three companies selected by the I.R.S. is a law firm in Austin, Tex., where a former partner, Juan Peña, admitted in 2002 that he paid bribes to win a collection contract from the city of San Antonio. He went to jail for the crime.

Last month the same law firm, Linebarger Goggan Blair & Sampson, was again in the news. One of its competitors, Municipal Services Bureau, also of Austin, sued Brownsville, Tex., charging that the city improperly gave the Linebarger firm a collections contract that it suggested was influenced by campaign contributions to two city commissioners.

At a press conference today:

...

BUSH: The strategy is to help the Iraqi people achieve the objectives and dreams which is a democratic society. That's the strategy. The tactics — now — either you say yes it's important we stay there and get it done or we leave. We're not leaving so long as I'm the president. That would be a huge mistake. It would send an unbelievably you know terrible signal to reformers across the region. It would say we've abandoned our desire to change the conditions that create terror.

You can tell how much Washington, D.C. is panicking by the rise of grassroots politics by looking at the now weekly declarations by politicians and pundits that they actually hate democracy. That's hyperbole, you say? Just take a look at a few comments that have come from the upper echelons of the political/media establishment - comments that finally admit to us how those who purport to legislate and report in our name really in their gut despise American democracy.

Two days after Ned Lamont beat Joe Lieberman in the primary, New York Times columnist David Brooks announced that voters shouldn't be allowed to decide elections. Yes, that's right - he wrote:

"Polarized primary voters shouldn't be allowed to define the choices in American politics."

This week, New Republic editor Peter Beinart publicly celebrated the corporate-funded Democratic Leadership Council for its effort to insulate politicians from accountability to voters - actually claiming with a straight face that such insulation means politicians will better represent voters:

"The DLC remains an organization of politicians that believes the less beholden politicians are to grassroots activists, the better they will represent voters as a whole."

Republican challenger Tim Walberg upset Rep. Joe Schwarz in Tuesday's GOP primary in southern Michigan, using a staunchly conservative message and help from the Washington-based Club for Growth to defeat the first-term congressman.

With 100 percent of precincts reporting, Walberg had 53 percent. Schwarz had 47 percent.

"I look at this election as probably a victory for Right to Life, anti-abortion, anti-embryonic stem cell groups but it's a net loss for the Republican party because it just pushes the party farther to the right," Schwarz said in an interview. He called Walberg to concede the race.

Schwarz, R-Battle Creek, had tried to fend off Walberg, R-Tipton, in a rematch of sorts in the 7th Congressional District. The first-term congressman defeated Walberg and four conservatives with only 28 percent of the vote in the 2004 GOP primary and was targeted this year by the conservative Club for Growth, which poured in advertising and fundraising dollars.

Walberg led Schwarz by wide margins in Lenawee County, his home, and Hillsdale County, a conservative region of the state. Schwarz led in Calhoun County and had a slight lead in Eaton County, areas he represented in the state Senate. Walberg led in Jackson County, the most populous in the district.

I do not necessarily have a problem with single-sex education in and of itself. I myself experienced a single sex educational environment for four years when I attended Mount Holyoke College. The difference there is that the educators at Mount Holyoke and similar women's colleges, both historically and today, used single-sex education as an opportunity to free students from damaging gender stereotypes. For example, as far back as 1837, Mary Lyon the founder of Mount Holyoke believed there was no limit to what women students could master in the fields of math and science (or any other field). As a result, Mount Holyoke has a tradition that carries on to this day of undergraduates performing very high level work in the sciences, especially chemistry and physics.

It appears that in the case of the Louisiana school district, however, single sex education will further entrench students of both sexes in damaging stereotypes. Note that the "anomolous males" who don't conform to supposed "gender norms" will be forced to toughen up whereas females will be spared from such toughening regardless of their proclivities. This sounds like a definite case of "separate and unequal" and I am sure the reality of it will be even worse than the theory.

But even though I firmly believe that the last people you want to trust on the subject of education, particularly girls' education, is a bunch of right wingers who want to overturn Title IX, even I was surprised to read at Happy Feminist at how boldly anti-female the sex segregation proposals are. In the plantiff's complaint against the sex segregation in Louisiana, it's clear that the proposals are aimed at teaching girls to be subservient women and to dissuade them from having careers. The proposals actively state that boys should be taught to excel and compete, whereas girls should be discouraged from competing. It's also stated that boys should be encouraged to roughhouse but that girls need to be raised to be gentle baby-tenders.

44. Mr. Murphy briefly outlined the differences in instruction that would be given to girls and to boys.

45. For instance, girls would receive character education and be subject to high expectations both academically and socially. Girls would be taught math through "hands-on" approaches. Field trips, physical movement, and multisensory strategies would be incorporated into girls' classes. Girls would act as mentors for elementary school girls.

46. On the other hand, boys' teachers would teach and discuss "heroic" behavior and ideas "that show adolescents what it means to truly 'be a man.' Boys' classes would include consistently applied discipline systems and offer tension release strategies. Boys' classes would also feature more group assignments.

47. Mr. Murphy explained that the approaches the Southside Junior High School would utilize were based on the work of Leonard Sax and Michael Gurian, two popular writers on gender differences.

. . .53. Dr. Sax is a medical doctor with a Ph.D in psychology who has styled himself an expert on and advocate for single-sex education. He does not perform scientific research and he does not have training in education.

. . . 54. In Why Gender Matters, Dr. Sax states that because of biological differences in the brain, boys need to practice pursuing and killing prey, while girls need to practice taking care of babies. As a result, boys should be permitted to roughhouse during recess and play contact sports, to learn the rules of aggression. Such play is more dangerous for girls, because girls are less biologically able to manage aggression.

. . . 57. In Why Gender Matters, Dr. Sax urges that boys be taught in competitive, high-energy teams. In contrast, teachers should assure that girls are relaxed in class. For instance, girls should be encouraged to take their shoes off. Also, girls should never be given strict time limits to complete tasks. Stress makes boys perform better and girls perform worse, according to Dr. Sax.

As Happy notes, the guidelines are so ludicriously opposed to actually educating girls that they suggest that junior high school girls "learn" math by counting petals on flowers, while boys are being taught actual algebra. The reason given for this is basically that girls are stupid.

58. In Why Gender Matters, Dr. Sax explains that because of sex differences in the brain, girls need real world applications to understand math, while boys naturally understand math theory. For instance, girls understand number theory better when they can count flower petals or segments of artichokes to make the theory concrete.

SSen. Mark Pryor (D-AR) is vice-chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee - the committee whose official mission is "to elect more Democrats to the United States Senate." Yet, Pryor says he's supporting GOP-endorsed candidate Joe Lieberman (CT) against Democratic nominee Ned Lamont. He's supporting Lieberman at the very same time he acknowledges that Lieberman's continued parroting of RNC talking points is unacceptable. Pryor's public rationale? "Don't ask me to be consistent," he told a group in Arkansas. Right, I forgot - no one should ask Democratic U.S. Senators to be consistent...what were we thinking?

Why the Democratic Leadership in the Senate isn't vigorously campaigning for Lamont and shunning Lieberman is a suicidal act in which collegial clubbiness outweighs the interests of the Democratic Party. It is also a slap in the face of democracy, since Lamont beat Lieberman in a primary based on winning the popular vote.

Lieberman excels in sanctimony and self-righteousness, but he will have no qualms whatsoever about saying "Sayonara" to the sucker Democratic senators who continue to publicly or tacitly support him.

First woman licensed to drive an automobile in America.

Miss Anne Rainsford French of Washington, D.C., whose father was a noted physician in the capital city, was awarded her "Steam Engineeer's License, Locomobile Class," on March 22, 1900. She was one of the earliest licensed women drivers in the United States. Mrs. John Howell Phillips of Chicago is said to have been licensed two months prior to Miss French, however. In the same year, 13-year-old Jeanette Lindstrom received license No. 322 and it was claimed that she had already been driving for two years.

Not to get too deep into the weeds on this, but I'm going to break with Duncan here and defend TNR's defense of Ann Coulter (which is, surely, the TNRiest article of all time). Coulter is less a political force nowadays than some sort of bizarre rorschach atop which we dump our worst impulses and greatest rages. I don't know a single person who believes she's anything less than a talk show vaudeville act, yet she remains prominent in the conversation. How her trolling retains its effectiveness is worth mining a bit, and it's to TNR's credit that, after publishing some killer takedowns of her last week, they're willing to let Elspeth Reed explore the other end.

Reed argues is that a certain fraction of what emerges when liberals face down Ann Coulter has a sexist tinge to it and that, as a woman who enjoys bare knuckle political debate, she thrills to Coulter's decidedly un-lady like willingness to tear apart her assailants. That the response to Coulter so often focuses on her looks also deserves some examination. It's not clear why the venom from a blond, leggy snake should be treated any different than the bile Hugh Hewitt spits out, yet rare is the soliloquy on how desperate the writer would have to become to hit the Hewitt. It's a fair point, and I'd extend it by wondering why liberals seem to have so few aggressive female flacks.

You want an aggressive liberal female flack? Just give me the microphone! (I sure could use the job.)

In all seriousness, there are still a lot of liberals who are generally uncomfortable with aggressive punditry, who prefer measured debate conducted in "inside voices," with which I am sympathetic; I'd prefer that, too. But it ignores the fact that our president and vice-president equate Democratic voters with terrorist-sympathizers and GOP senators like to compare gay relationships with bestiality, which is to say nothing of the diarrheic vitriol spewed by their party hacks in the media. We waved bye-bye to reasoned discourse awhile ago, because bullies can't be persuaded from bullying by dulcet tones.

Liberals who live in this fantasyland where civil discourse is still the norm seem particularly discomfited by aggressive women, as if the last bastion of decency has fallen when a Breasted One utters "the f-word," which is why I get emails inquiring why a smart girl like me feels the need to "curse," and why another blogger has been asked why he links to me, since I'm so potty-mouthed and aggressive. You've still, in some quarters, got to actually have balls to "have balls."

The lack of aggressive female flacks on the Left also certainly has something to do with the subjects about which female flacks are aggressive. Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin, for examples, are aggressive in their perpetuation of conservative ideals, including no small amount of anti-feminist rhetoric. Not only is a woman who aggressively refutes issues like gender equality and reproductive rights less threatening to retrofuck men than a woman who aggressively advocates them, but she also serves to deflect particular kinds of criticism, like charges of sexism. Male conservatives can then quote female operatives, using the sex of the original messenger as a buttress against similar complaints. (Malkin's ethnicity works to their benefit in a similar way when she leads the charge against Muslims.) One can't be sexist (or racist) when one is quoting a woman or a minority, after all. (Not true, of course, but that is the claim.) It is useful to conservatives to have a female face on their sexist positions—and, having turned the culture war into a lynchpin of their political strategy, they need the buffer of female representation more than ever.

A federal judge ruled Thursday that the government's warrantless wiretapping program is unconstitutional and ordered an immediate halt to it.

U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in Detroit became the first judge to strike down the National Security Agency's program, which she says violates the rights to free speech and privacy as well as the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution.

''Plaintiffs have prevailed, and the public interest is clear, in this matter. It is the upholding of our Constitution,'' Taylor wrote in her 43-page opinion.

It is in the nature of gambling that the gamble may lose. The dice have now been well and truly rolled, and they have come up snake eyes. The war's sole real gain—the overthrow of the murderous Saddam Hussein regime—is mocked by the chaos and suffering that have overwhelmed millions of Iraqis, whose country is again a republic of fear. The concrete losses are horrific: nearly three thousand American and "coalition" troops killed; thousands more maimed; scores of thousands of Iraqi civilians dead; a third of a trillion dollars burned through. So are the less tangible ones: the unprecedented levels of anti-Americanism throughout the Muslim world and Europe; the self-inflicted loss of America's moral prestige; the neglect of real nuclear dangers, in Iran and North Korea, while chimeras were chased in Iraq. The neoconservative project of a friendly, democratic Middle East, with Israel and Palestine living side by side in peace, is worse than a charred ruin—it is a flaming inferno.

Researchers from Germany found that four years into a relationship, less than half of 30-year-old women wanted regular sex.

Conversely, the team found a man's libido remained the same regardless of how long he had been in a relationship.

Writing in the journal Human Nature, the scientists said the differences resulted from how humans had evolved.

...

Dr Dietrich Klusmann, lead author of the study and a psychologist from Hamburg-Eppendorf University, believed the differences were down to human evolution.

He said: "For men, a good reason their sexual motivation to remain constant would be to guard against being cuckolded by another male."

But women, he said, have evolved to have a high sex drive when they are initially in a relationship in order to form a "pair bond" with their partner.

But, once this bond is sealed a woman's sexual appetite declines, he added.

He said animal behaviour studies suggest this could be because females may be diverting their sexual interest towards other men, in order to secure the best combinations of genetic material for their offspring.

Or, he said, this could be because limiting sex may boost their partner's interest in it.

PEPSICO has appointed its chief financial officer Indra Nooyi as chief executive officer, making her the second most powerful female CEO in the Fortune 500.
The changeover, effective from October 1, will give Nooyi a place in an elite group of 12 female CEOs running Fortune 500 companies.
Patricia Woertz, CEO at agricultural processor Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), ranks first. ADM is ranked 56th in the Fortune 500, while PepsiCo, the world's second-largest soft-drink company after Coca-Cola, is ranked 61st.
Nooyi will replace Steven Reinemund, who is retiring to spend more time with his family, but the announcement was not expected on Wall Street.

the candidate who supports women making personal decisions without intrusion from government and politicians, coupled with a strong emphasis on prevention, over the competing anti-choice culture of life point of view from a candidate who is anti-choice (54 percent to 27 percent).

In 1972, a year before Roe v. Wade, 53 prominent U.S. women publicly
declared in Ms. that they had undergone abortions. Among them were Billie Jean King, Anne Sexton, Susan Sontag, Anais Nin and Ms. founder Gloria Steinem.

Now, in 2006, with Roe under serious threat, Ms. is relaunching the campaign with a call for women to sign an abortion rights petition headed "We had abortions." See https://msmagazine.com/donations/ms/womenspetition0725.asp for details. Those who have not had abortions can sign separately, in solidarity.

The anti-choice web has gotten wind of the project and has gone into attack mode. (Google "Ms. abortion petition" and you'll see all the vitriol it's spawned.)

Pharmaceutical company Berlex pays [Corey] Wisnieski and 79 other registered nurses to help people with multiple sclerosis take a drug called Betaseron. Other MS drug makers as well as companies that make diabetes medications do the same. The goal: to teach patients how to give themselves shots and manage the side effects.

But physicians who oversee patients don't necessarily have a vested interest in a particular drug. Sylvia Lucas, a neurologist at the Western Multiple Sclerosis Center in Seattle, says pharma nurses are a Godsend:

SYLVIA LUCAS: The bottom line is that if this drug is not working, we know that. If there's progression of disease, we're gonna change the drug.

Even so, the patient programs are offered only for patients who use the company's product, which can be an incentive for doctors to prescribe the drug in order to tap the free educational benefits being dangled by the companies for their patients.

"I don't want to call it pressure. But the expectation is they have to be on a Lilly product" in order to receive the free training, said Terry D. Ridge, a nurse practitioner who works with diabetic patients for an American Health Network doctor's office on Indianapolis' Westside.

I would love it to have two hours to spend with each patient, saying this is where you inject, these are the side effects you should expect. This isn't a cure, but it really is supposed to prevent picking up disease down the line. You know, it's almost like insurance.

Academics who study this sector are especially critical of sales pitches that drug companies make directly to consumers. That includes promoting drugs for complaints that can often be treated without prescription medicines.

Even as these moves have come under a microscope, however, drugmakers must discover new ways to boost sales. Simply adding more sales reps won't fly. They are already so numerous that physicians are now holding sales visits down to an average of 90 seconds.

In such a context, the nursing programs are attractive to the drugmakers because they help hold patients to the recommended drug regimen.

From the New Yorker:

Who is Peter Wallsten?
(a) the partially blind reporter whom George W. Bush mocked ("Are you going to ask that question with shades on?") for not removing his sunglasses while addressing the President
(b) The wheelchair-using senior citizen whom George W. Bush mocked ("You look mighty comfortable") for not standing in the presence of the President
(c) The CIA employee who, after delivering the "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." briefing, was told by George W. Bush, "All right, you've covered your ass now."
(d) The Iraq-war amputee with whom George W. Bush tried to bond by telling him about a scratch he got during "combat with a cedar" while clearing brush.

As you can possibly see, I have an injury myself — not here at the hospital, but in combat with a cedar. I eventually won. The cedar gave me a little scratch. As a matter of fact, the Colonel asked if I needed first aid when she first saw me. I was able to avoid any major surgical operations here, but thanks for your compassion, Colonel.
-- George W. Bush, after visiting with wounded veterans from the Amputee Care Center of Brooke Army Medical Center, San Antonio, Texas, Jan. 1, 2006

All of the possible answers are things that actually happened, but in this case "Peter Wallsten" is (a).

The system at the "charity" hospital is a total disaster, a massive fuckup, a guaranteed death sentence. Not just for me, but for 4,000 poor uninsured people who desperately need health care every month. I'm slipping through the system's cracks: medically, there's no continuity, I never see the same person twice, no one can figure out what's going on, locate my records, or find out which doctor said what or why. And I'm slipping through the cracks financially: because I have a small amount of money left in my IRA, my "liquid assets" disqualify me from receiving free care, until every single penny I have is gone. Which at this rate could be in about three weeks....

And the struggle to figure out how to deal with the financial monstrosity. I deeply appreciate the Paypal offers, but you know, we're talking about maybe $60,000 a month? Probably more. Astronomical. Impossible. Ruinous.

I'm not going into this all detail out of self-pity, or to whine about how it's so unfair to me. This situation is not just about me. There are millions of people out there in the same sinking boat I'm in, with nowhere to turn. It's just unimaginably horrible. I sat there and watched several hundred such people suffer today, and most of them looked completely defeated, thoroughly resigned. The tired dead-eyed hopelessness in their faces still haunts me.

"...a lot of Right Wing America lives on the frontier between civilization and Trailer Park choas. The reason they are so terrrified by change and the prospect of sexual and personal freedom is that where they come from all those things are aftereffects of social breakdown."

"Armchair speculation (the most entertaining form of speculation, requiring only tenuous links to reality) leads me to wonder whether open relationships might be under-rated in our society."

"Be that as it may, I think conservatives are right about one thing: if the institution of marriage is going to survive, it does need defending. Not because marriage is the only or best source of truly moral living, but precisely the opposite: marriage is increasingly irrelevant in modern society. In the absence of many good reasons for marriage to even exist, those who value it as a tradition are going to be more and more hard-pressed to perpetuate it."

"One final note: None of this is meant to belittle the efforts of same-sex marriage advocates to legalize marriage for all Americans regardless of sexual orientation. That battle has an importance quite distinct from the question of what marriage does or does not do in our society."

"The thousand provisions in various laws are not favoring just hetero- over homo-sexual marriage. It also favores a particular, narrowly defined type of relationship over all others, including over living alone. That narrow definition of marriage contains several criteria: 1) church-sanctioned, 2) state-sanctioned, 3) monogamous, 4) exclusive, 5) heterosexual, 6) fertile, 7) indefinite (till death do us part).
------snip--------
Vast increase in life-span, invention of contraceptives, cures for most STDs, gender equality, increasing secularity, as well as economic forces are making the 7 criteria obsolete, whether you like it or not."

To have our government define as “legitimate families” only those households with couples in conjugal relationships does a tremendous disservice to the many other ways in which people actually construct their families, kinship networks, households, and relationships. For example, who among us seriously will argue that the following kinds of households are less socially, economically, and spiritually worthy?

· Senior citizens living together, serving as each other’s caregivers, partners, and/or constructed families

· Adult children living with and caring for their parents

· Grandparents and other family members raising their children’s (and/or a relative’s) children

· Committed, loving households in which there is more than one conjugal partner

· Blended families

· Single parent households

· Extended families (especially in particular immigrant populations) living under one roof, whose members care for one another

· Queer couples who decide to jointly create and raise a child with another queer person or couple, in two households

· Close friends and siblings who live together in long-term, committed, non-conjugal relationships, serving as each other’s primary support and caregivers

· Care-giving and partnership relationships that have been developed to provide support systems to those living with HIV/AIDS

Marriage is not the only worthy form of family or relationship, and it should not be legally and economically privileged above all others. While we honor those for whom marriage is the most meaningful personal ­– for some, also a deeply spiritual – choice, we believe that many other kinds of kinship relationship, households, and families must also be accorded recognition.

"Forget the fantasy of solving the challenges of modern personal life by re-institutionalizing marriage. In today's climate of choice, many people's choices do not involve marriage. We must recognize that there are healthy as well as unhealthy ways to be single or to be divorced, just as there are healthy and unhealthy ways to be married. We cannot afford to construct our social policies, our advice to our own children and even our own emotional expectations around the illusion that all commitments, sexual activities and care-giving will take place in a traditional marriage. That series has been canceled.
--------snip------
People will continue to marry, but it is too late to "defend" marriage; Coontz says flatly that it will never again be an important cultural institution. It strikes me that the strident debate about gay marriage masks a deep anxiety; it might well be a distraction from acknowledging the diminishing importance of marriage. Isn't it ironic that those who now sentimentalize marriage are denied entry?"

"Yes, gay marriage and the evolution of straight marriage go hand-in-hand. But Kurtz is afraid of it, instead of celebrating it. This is yet another step in a long line of advances towards equality of sexes. First, women managed to win the battle for not being their husband's property. Later, they won the right to own property. Choosing a husband, not paying dowry, divorcing , working outside the house, voting, taking contraception, having an abortion, running for office, .... those are all victories that women won over the past century or so, always against the screaming horror of conservatives who thought, at each of these junctures, that the fabric of the society is unravelling and that the End of the World will result from those immoral shameless practices."

"The history of marriage can be seen as a constant struggle between the two ideologies, one bent on keeping the moral authority of the white straight adult rich male, the other fighting for equality of all people. Every change in the definition of marriage was a blow to the conservative core model, and a victory for the liberal worldview. Giving women right to own property, granting legal equality, allowing contraception, or divorce, allowing inter-racial marriage and, currently, allowing same-sex marriage, are some of the stages of evolution of marriage, from a feudal economic arrangement designed for the strengthenig of the clan, towards marriage as a love relationship between two equal human beings."

Culturally, the disability activism against the telethon has real ramifications for the ideology surrounding disability in U.S. society. Marilynn Phillips* calls a telethon an "occasion of ideology," rather than an "occasion of social reality" in U.S. culture. Occasions of ideology invoke pity and charity in belief of a cure, whereas occasions of social reality summon feelings of resentment and confusion over the "abnormality" of people with disabilities. During occasions of ideology, discourse focuses on the "defect" of the person, and disabled persons are homogenized as one. Phillips says, "primarily, these are events which define culturally appropriate handicapped behavior (being a good cripple), and which serve to demonstrate predictable interactions between nondisabled and disabled persons."

Their bodies are seen as inferior in their physical functioning when compared with people who do not have muscular dystrophy. When the body becomes the focus of humanness, this inferiority of body means the people become inferior as social beings as well (Liachowitz). David Hevey explains how charities use bodies for the visual associations needed for awareness among the public:

The task for the (charity) agency is to find an image which gives the impairment and its effects a symbolic but social identity. Since the impairment has to be the site of disablement, it follows that the body of the person with an impairment will be constructed as both the essence and symbol of disablement. Their body becomes fragmented and refocuses on the major fragment--the impairment. The object of this first stage, then, is to place the symbol of the impairment into social orbit but labelled as the property or concern of the affiliated charity. (34)

With this in mind, people with muscular dystrophy are therefore constituted as inferior or subordinate to people without muscular dystrophy.

In an interview sequence between Lewis and Matt Schuman, a former poster child who works as a sports reporter for the Greeley (Colo.) Tribune, Lewis always stands. In the first shot of Lewis and Schuman together, Schuman's face is covered by the two lines of call-in numbers at the bottom of the television screen. The spatial difference exists because Schuman is seated in a wheelchair and Lewis, who is tall, is standing. This causes Schuman's presence in the shot to be negated because the call-in numbers cover his face part of the time and because only his head and shoulders are visible in the bottom left corner of the TV screen at other times. All attention is directed toward Lewis because he is standing. These spatial relations exist not just with Schuman but are repeated throughout the telethon whenever Jerry Lewis interacts with someone who uses a wheelchair. One way to diminish this superior-inferior special structure would have been to have an interview comer in which Lewis sits to talk to people who use wheelchairs. But instead Lewis stands throughout the days of the telethon.

Throughout the telethon, he hugs and caresses the children and adults with muscular dystrophy, all of whom he calls his "kids." When Schuman completes his short speech, Lewis rubs and pats the back of Schuman's head. It is not a "good job" touch from one adult to another, as a pat on the back or a shake of the hand might be. It is a parent patting the head of a child to indicate the child has pleased him. In reality, Schuman is a working adult who happens to have a physical disability.

"I agree that more could be done to ensure more accessability for those that still have the ability to remain independent (ramps, parking, etc.), but money also needs to be raised so that future generations won't needlessly remain at a disadvantage, and nothing brings in donors like pity."

"I can't believe you attack him just because he doesn't do it the way YOU think is the right way. Get a life."

"It's sad that those poor unfortunate persons with disabilities hate the man who tries to help them."

"If you keep pushing people away because you can't agree with everything they say or how they do things, don't be surprised when people stop working to raise more than $100,000,000 a YEAR to help people in your situation."

Don't watch the telethon. Tell your local station ahead of time why you won't. Give directly to the MDA and not during telethon time. Tell them why you are choosing to do that. Also tell the MDA that Jerry Lewis has got to go. He has had years to change the message and has chosen not to do so. Their mailing address and phone number are at their website. (http://www.mdausa.org)

Look up the Muscular Dystrophy Association of Canada (MDAC) and see how fundraising can be successfully done without pity.

Check out the Muscular Dystrophy Family Foundation (MDFF). It was founded by people with MD and their families. They provide the same kinds of services as the MDA. Their pitch is based on empowerment. (http://www.mdff.org) Their spokepeople are rock musicians who have had MD since childhood.

Compare Lewis' MDA pity pitch to that of Easter Seals with their focus on discrimination and architectural barriers; United Cerebral Palsy with their emphasis on careers, education and family; and the United Negro College Fund with its focus on the wrongness of wasted human resources. Tell other people about your conclusions.

Society, Kemp charged, saw disabled people as "childlike, helpless, hopeless, nonfunctioning and noncontributing members of society." And, he charged, "the Jerry Lewis Muscular Dystrophy Association Telethon with its pity approach to fund raising, has contributed to these prejudices."

Kemp contended that such prejudices "create vast frustration and anger" among disabled Americans, then numbered at 36 million. Kemp charged that disabled people suffered far more from lack of jobs, housing -- lack of access to society -- than from the diseases MDA sought to cure. He accused the Telethon's "pity approach . . . with its emphasis on ('poster children' and 'Jerry's Kids' " -- of creating prejudice. He called upon the Telethon to reform; to portray disabled people "in the light of our very real accomplishments, capabilities and rights." The Telethon, he insisted, "must inform the public of the great waste of money and human life that comes from policies promoting dependence rather than independence."

"I realize my life is half, so I must learn to do things halfway. I just have to learn to try to be good at being half a person. I may be a full human being in my heart and soul, yet I am still half a person."

"Much attention is given to the kids who may not live to adulthood, but for those of us who do live on, not one word or one dime is devoted to the concept of independence.... No one is negating research or the individual's desire to be cured... [just] the attitude that stresses that, no matter what one does, life is meaningless in a wheelchair."

"If your attitude is representative of the Muscular Dystrophy Association as a whole, then I must conclude that the Association's problems go much deeper than just the offensiveness of the Telethon.... It seems to me that MDA has condoned, and even participated in, the widespread institutionalization of people with disabilities in this nation. . . . MDA, with its medical-model approach, has done little to provide independent living services and supports or to free its clients from the confinement of nursing homes."

"All right, let me try to get through to the regular people." Applause. "For all of the 54 years that I've raised over $2 billion for children that needed it" -- applause, cheers -- "only in Chicago does this happen." He referred to the protestors "sitting in the chairs that I provided, but they want me to stop the telethon because I make them look pitiful. What is more pitiful than this?"

"I don't believe Jerry Lewis would go to such lengths to raise money for research if he truly had a disdainful attitude for the disabled. I think his intent is one out of goodness and caring, despite perhaps a lack of personal insight into actually living as a disabled person. I agree that more could be done to ensure more accessability for those that still have the ability to remain independent (ramps, parking, etc.), but money also needs to be raised so that future generations won't needlessly remain at a disadvantage, and nothing brings in donors like pity."

"You guys are making a mountain out of a molehill. So what if he said they are half a person. He did say the have the heart and brains of a whole person. I hate to break it to you, but it is true - physically.... I guess you want Jerry Lewis to be a little more Politically Correct? I can't believe you attack him just because he doesn't do it the way YOU think is the right way. Get a life. I bet you would bite someones head off if they opened the door for you wouldn't you? You would yell 'I don't need your pity!', when all they would be doing was helping someone in need."

"It's sad that those poor unfortunate persons with disabilities hate the man who tries to help them. True, he's made mistakes. True, he can be an ass at times. True, he's the only person in the world who is NOT perfect. lol It must be hard to be spiritually disabled and bitter on top of being physically disabled. I have a wheelchair-bound son-in-law. He hasn't let his disability turn him into a hateful ingrate. I pity you poor souls."

"These protesters should be ashamed of themselves! While some of Jerry's comments could certainly be construed as insensitive, at least he tries to help people. And I don't mean he helps people with M.D., I mean gets out and contributes in some way to trying to make life better for ANY of his fellow human beings. So many people today do NOTHING charitable, NOTHING to help ANYONE. However misguided or naive his attempts to put himself in the place of someone with M.D., he HAS spent over 40 years working to help people....

"If you don't want pity, don't be in a wheelchair. I will always pity people who cannot run and jump like I can, who can't play frisbee or hike or ride a motorcycle like I can. I'm sorry if this compassion is truly a character flaw of mine, but I will always feel pity for those I perceive as having less than me, whether they are crippled, poor, or just mentally incompetent. This compassion and sympathy is what drives people to do things like, I dunno, make transportation wheelchair accessible and work to unsure that the disabled have the same employment opportunities as the rest of us.

"Perhaps we should just drop that pity and say "Screw you, you'll just have to figure out a way to get that wheelchair up the stairs. It's your problem, not mine."

"If you keep pushing people away because you can't agree with everything they say or how they do things, don't be surprised when people stop working to raise more than $100,000,000 a YEAR to help people in your situation.

"But rest assured, the people who would fight Jerry Lewis because they don't like they WAY he works to raise so much money for a charity get no pity from me. They deserve only my disgust."

Can the Muscular Dystrophy Association Telethon and Jerry Lewis support people with muscular dystrophy without being perceived as paternalistic, pitying, and demeaning of disabled people?

Pocket-size wallets and pocket-size purses plus contents (for example money, credit cards, identity cards etc (not handbags

Travel documents essential for the journey (for example passports and travel tickets)

Prescription medicines and medical items sufficient and essential for the flight (eg, diabetic kit), except in liquid form unless verified as authentic

Spectacles and sunglasses, without cases

Contact lens holders, without bottles of solution

For those travelling with an infant: baby food, milk (the contents of each bottle must be tasted by the accompanying passenger) and sanitary items sufficient and essential for the flight (nappies, wipes, creams and nappy disposal bags)

Female sanitary items sufficient and essential for the flight, if unboxed (eg tampons, pads, towels and wipes)

Tissues (unboxed) and/or handkerchiefs

Keys (but no electrical key fobs). All passengers must be hand searched, and their footwear and all the items they are carrying must be X-ray screened.

Pushchairs and walking aids must be X-ray screened, and only airport-provided wheelchairs may pass through the screening point.

In addition to the above, all passengers boarding flights to the USA and all the items they are carrying, including those acquired after the central screening point, must be subjected to secondary search at the boarding gate.

Can Hooters support the fight against breast cancer all without being perceived as capitalistic, misogynistic, or otherwise demeaning to women?

I'm of the opinion that we ought to get every penny we can from them, but stop short of giving any hint that we actually endorse their business…although I'd wonder if even asking them for their assistance is granting them respectability, or if acknowledging the assistance of Hooters would turn a serious event into a joke.

I'm of the opinion there is no way to turn Hooters into a charity bastion. I completely expect them to turn breast cancer awareness into a "Save the Whales" level fiasco, prompting wealthy men to save the endangered Great Tit. I can envision the t-shirt campaign now: a tight white middrift with the word "Save Me" in a thought bubble eminating from the bosoms. Hellz no.

There seems to be a big difference between Europe and the United States in how the naked body is perceived and how much of it is permitted to be shown. I couldn't understand the fuss about Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction - you didn't even get to see a nipple! Then there was the brouhaha in the livejournal community about banning default userpics showing breastfeeding. Generally speaking, in Germany and other parts of Europe, we tend to see more completely naked people on tv or in magazines and full-frontal male nudity is shown, too.

Part of this might have to do with the fact that we don't automatically connect the nude body with sexuality and see it more as a 'natural state' of the human being. Even if the nudity is shown in a sexual context there is less censorship involved - it's quite interesting to compare the age restrictions of movies - in Germany, violence is more often the reason for restricting the audience of a film and films that feature full frontal nudity here can be seen by a twelve-year-old or even by a six-year-old if there is no strong sexual content.

I've also noticed how for some Americans being in your underwear already equals being naked which I think goes a bit far! But there are also women who'd say that they feel naked without their make-up on.

I grew up in a pseudo-hippy family, so running around naked at home isn't a big deal for me. Going to the nudist beach with my family was okay, but puberty made me slightly more ashamed (though I must say that swimming in the nude is much nicer than in a bathing suit) and I stopped going with them. Today, I'm still quite comfortable in my skin, but have started worrying about silly stuff like showing bodyhair etc.

An odd, and probably too self-revealing an aside: the bikini seems to have made a big comeback. I don't remember seeing so many the past few vacations.

My first thought was that a sizeable cohort of teenagers made the jump from little girls to young women over the winter and so there were just more bikini wearers everywhere I looked. This was unsettling, because I try very hard not to ogle anyone who is not old enough to serve in the United States Senate. Not because I'm so mature or such a gentleman. It's just too embarrassing to be caught looking at a 16 year old even if she does have the body of a centerfold and is not dressing to disguise the fact.

But there were plenty of their mothers in bikinis to distract me. Now another odd fact. I am ambivalent about the idea of women in their 30s and 40s and up wearing bikinis, no matter how good they look in them. I can't get over the idea that for older women wearing a bikini is as appropriate as wearing a pinafore and patent leather shoes.

I think that's cultural conditioning on my part. Too many Beach Boys tunes in my youth plus the fact that one piece bathing suits were the fashion for the last twenty odd years and I learned to appreciate the middle aged female form in a tank suit.

I'm against men wearing bikinis too. No man of any age, no matter in how good a shape he's in, should wear a Speedo unless he's on his high school, college, or Olympic swim team and actually competing at the moment.

Much has been written and said about how the Media's constant exploitation of a certain standard of female beauty to sell stuff creates anxiety and self-loathing in young women in respect to their bodies. Presented with an impossible ideal, they learn to hate their own looks and long for an alternative self-image that of course they can't achieve, leading to more anxiety and self-loathing, but which they spend inordinate amounts of time and money on trying to attain anyway.

But I think that there's another, equally damaging effect.

The constant fetishization and eroticization of female beauty in magazines and on TV teaches many young women to eroticize and fetishize their own bodies.

I don't think it's too much to say that they fall in love with their own reflections.

I wouldn't go as far as blaming the whole Girls Gone Wild phenomenon on a generation of narcissists falling in love with their own reflections. But I do think there are probably more women, young and middle-aged, who learned to admire themselves as objects of desire and who need to have eyes upon them to know they exist. They need the camera's gaze, not simply the male gaze.

They need to see themselves reflected in order to see their own reflections.

The problem, of course, with falling in love with a body, your own or anyone else's, that's 15, 16, 17 years old is that you won't have it to admire for long. A teenage body, even a 20 year old body, is an unfinished body in the process of finishing itself in a hurry.

Bones keep growing into your thirties, which means that no matter how hard they resist it, through dieting, excercise, and surgery, young women get bigger as they advance towards middle-age.

The result of this for a lot of them is that they get ugly in their own eyes.

I think this explains why so many of the professionally narcissistic---young actressess---have taken to starving themselves. They are trying to maintain the adolescent body shape they fell in love with in the mirror (the mirrors in their bedrooms and the mirrors in magazines and on TV), a body shape they only approximate through an excessive thinness that very few straight men respond to.

A middle-aged man has only to pick up a hammer and start banging to fool himself into thinking he's young, virile, and sexy. A middle-aged woman is still required to stand still and pose.

I think that's changing. As women become more active, not simply in their professional lives, but as they play more sports and exercise more and take on more formerly male-only tasks, like picking up hammers and wrenches, they are beginning to redefine female beauty as an active ideal too.

The female ideal of beauty will become like the male ideal a body in motion.

Dr B probably didn't intend this response on my part, but I'm sorry, I can't help myself, and I hope, if she reads this, she won't mind. The most atttractive aspect of her nude self-portrait is that she describes herself always as a body in motion.

To be honest I'm not sure why more men don't blog about sex. Or, more accurately, why more don't blog non-pornographically about sex.

------------------snip-------------------

[click on the link for some steamy prose here]

I *love* writing about that!

But while those sorts of things are probably the most *fun* part of sexuality, it's not always the most *important* part. Sometimes it's just as important to talk about the obstacles to sexuality -- our conflations of virginity and commodity; our false dichotomy of reproductive penis and imperial phallus which overlooks the cock as the only human organ evolved expressly to caress; and extensive catalogings of good vs. immoral sex acts while stinting again and again the taxonomies of consent, alienation, and commitment.

And while those are the fun parts and the important parts of sexuality it's *also* important to talk about the *realities* of sexuality. The times -- days, sometimes months, weeks, sometimes years -- we spend grinding under deadline, under class schedules, under childrearing, under threat of war or poverty or illness or age, where sexuality is honored (if it's remembered at all) in the breach rather than the commission.

Three-term Sen.Joe Lieberman fell to anti-war challenger Ned Lamont in Connecticut's Democratic primary Tuesday, the first major election-year test of sentiment over the conflict that has claimed the lives of more than 2,500 U.S. troops in Iraq.

"Tonight we voted for big change," a jubilant Lamont told supporters. Unbowed, Lieberman vowed to fight on, announcing plans to run as an independent this fall.

"Of course I am disappointed by the results, but I am not discouraged," Lieberman said. "For the sake of our state, our country and my party, I cannot and will not let that result stand."

Lamont won with 52 percent of the vote, or 146,061, to 48 percent for Lieberman, with 136,042, with 99 percent of precincts reporting. Turnout was projected at twice the norm for a primary.[...]

The Connecticut Senate race dominated the political landscape, and its outcome promises to echo through the fall. The race was watched closely by the liberal, Internet-savvy Democrats who lead the party's emerging "netroots" movement, groups such as Moveon.org that played a big role in pushing Lamont's candidacy.

Critics targeted Lieberman for his strong support for the Iraq war and for his close ties to President Bush. They played and replayed video of the kiss President Bush planted on Lieberman's cheek after the 2005 State of the Union address.[...]

[...]Jubilant Lamont supporters predicted victory in November.

"People are going to look back and say the Bush years started to end in Connecticut," said Avi Green, a volunteer from Boston. "The Republicans are going to look at tonight and realize there's blood in the water."[...]

In Georgia, McKinney, her state's first black congresswoman, lost to Hank Johnson, the black former commissioner of DeKalb County, 58 percent to 41 percent.

In the heavily Democratic district, the runoff winner is likely to win in the fall.

McKinney has long been controversial, once suggesting the Bush administration had advance knowledge of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. Her comments helped galvanize opposition and she lost her seat in 2002, but won it again two years ago.

In her latest brouhaha in March, she struck a Capitol Police officer who did not recognize her and tried to stop her from entering a House office building.

A grand jury in Washington declined to indict her, but she was forced to apologize before the House. She drew less than 50 percent of the vote in last month's primary.

In other primaries Tuesday:

• In Michigan, Republican Rep. Joe Schwarz, a moderate who supports abortion rights, lost to conservative Tim Walberg, a former state lawmaker. The race drew more than $1 million from outside groups; Schwarz has received support from President Bush and Arizona Sen. John McCain.

• In Colorado, two open congressional seats have drawn crowds of candidates.

• Missouri Republican Sen. Jim Talent and Democratic challenger Claire McCaskill, the state auditor, won their party's primaries.

. On Page 175, Coulter attacked "liberals" who would "foist" sex education topics such as "[a]nal sex, oral sex, fisting, dental dams, [and] 'birthing games'" on kindergarteners. Citing a November 8, 1987, New York Times article, Coulter wrote:

But in contrast to liberal preachiness about IQ, there would be no moralizing when it came to sex. Anal sex, oral sex, fisting, dental dams, "birthing games" -- all that would be foisted on unsuspecting children in order to protect kindergarteners from the scourge of AIDS. As one heroine of the sex education movement told an approving New York Times reporter, "My job is not to teach one right value system. Parents and churches teach moral values. My job is to say, 'These are the facts,' and to help the students, as adults, decide what is right for them."9

To those who find it odd that Coulter would support her claim about "fisting" being taught to kindergarteners by quoting "one heroine of the sex education movement" and referring to students as "adults," there is a very good reason for that. The woman Coulter quoted was Dr. Beverlie Conant Sloane, then-director of health education at Dartmouth College. The Times article cited by Coulter, titled "At Dartmouth, A Helping Candor," (subscription required) was about the sex education programs available to adult students at Dartmouth -- not children in kindergarten. Not only is the article about adult students, but it is from November 1987, close to 20 years old -- hardly what would be considered to be relevant information on current sex education policies.

I am an ex-fair housing lawyer who prosecuted several civil sexual harassment cases for the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division, on behalf of aggrieved women. (I also co-wrote the article that Cyrus cited at the beginning of this diary.)

I want everyone to know that sexual harassment in housing happens a LOT. There aren't any good statistics out there, but I know from my experience on these cases that we were barely scratching the surface. Some observations, again just from my own experience and that of my colleagues: Housing harassment is not usually an isolated phenomenon...

[snip]

but rather a situation where the landlord makes it his standard operating procedure to rent to and harass vulnerable women.

Most of the time, there are multiple victims in each case. (The smallest number of victims I ever had was 7, the most was 21. I think one of my colleagues had a case with 24.)

While I have read about cases of landlords who harass middle-class tenants, the usual targets are low-income women with children. All but one of my cases involved women who qualified for public or subsidized housing. (The exception, horribly enough, was a trailer park outside of a military base, where wives of men who were in Iraq were being harassed by their landlord. A few of the women couldn't move because there was not enough base housing for families, and the other trailer parks in the area were full.) In fact, some of the women in my cases were IN Section 8 housing when they were harassed. That's right -- their landlord was receiving taxpayer dollars for the pleasure of harassing them.

...

One poster was correct in making a point about criminal liability. A lot of the conduct we would see was clearly criminal -- sexual battery, home invasion, forcible rape. The problem is that few tenants were willing to report this sort of thing to police, because they feared (probably accurately) that the police would take no action. Again, from my experience, and that of my colleagues: The landlord is invariably of a higher social status. He owns property (by definition), he is usually white, is usually in his 50s, 60s, or 70s (my office had more than one harasser try to use the "Viagra defense"). The victim is often black, very poor, and under 30. Some of the victims in my cases have had criminal records, substance abuse problems, or mental health issues, making them even more vulnerable. The very vulnerability that makes them fair game for the landlord also makes it less likely that they will feel like they can call the police, and that the police will believe them. (One woman in a case I had called the police to report that her landlord was threatening to evict her unless she had oral sex with him. The police arrested HER when they discovered she had an outstanding traffic warrant. The landlord, meanwhile, persuaded the cops that she was just a bad tenant who was trying to get even with him for attempting to evict her. Guess what happened? He evicted her.)

For Tony Minor, the pastor of the Community of Faith Assembly in a run-down section of East Cleveland, Ohio's new voter registration rules have meant spending two extra hours a day collecting half as many registration cards from new voters as he did in past years.

Republicans say the new rules are needed to prevent fraud, but Democrats say they are making it much harder to register the poor.

In the last year, six states have passed such restrictions, and in three states, including Ohio, civic groups have filed lawsuits, arguing that the rules disproportionately affect poor neighborhoods.

But nowhere have the rules been as fiercely debated as here, partly because they are being administered by J. Kenneth Blackwell, the secretary of state and the Republican candidate in one of the most closely watched governor's races in the country, a contest that will be affected by the voter registration rules. Mr. Blackwell did not write the law, but he has been accused of imposing regulations that are more restrictive than was intended.

Under the law, passed by the Republican-led state legislature in January 2006, paid voter registration workers must personally submit the voter registration cards to the state, rather than allow the organizations overseeing the drives to vet and submit them in bulk.

By requiring paid canvassers to sign and put their addresses on the voter registration cards they collect, and by making them criminally liable for any irregularities on the cards, the rules have made it more difficult to use such workers, who most often work in lower-income and Democratic-leaning neighborhoods, where volunteers are scarce.

"Quit whining," said the Rev. Russell Johnson, the pastor of Fairfield Christian Church, who chuckled while shaking his head. "We work with the same challenges that everyone else does and we're not having trouble."

Surrounded by cornfields and middle-income homes, Mr. Johnson's 4,000-member evangelical church in Lancaster, Ohio, is part of a coalition of conservative groups that aims to sign up 200,000 new voters by November, he said.

In the past several elections, Republicans have been effective in registering voters and getting them to the polls. Mr. Johnson said conservatives were better able to depend on voter registration volunteers because the conservatives had a message that attracted people who were willing to work free.

Responding to specific questions about the resolution and the conflict, Bush tirelessly dipped into his small store of stock answers, repeatedly extolling the universal appeal of liberty and asserting the importance of addressing the "root cause" of the violence -- terrorists in general, Hezbollah in particular -- as part of "the great challenge of the 21st century."
A Trap?

In their press briefings yesterday, Rice and national security adviser Stephen Hadley not coincidentally used the exact same phrase to describe what they expect will happen after the resolution is approved: "We'll see who is for peace and who isn't."

Of course, if you believe Lebanese officials, that's because the resolution is a trap.

Articles in this series are examining what has happened to men and women several decades after the women's movement began.

Previous Articles in the Series:
Men Not Working, and Not Wanting Just Any Job (July 31, 2006)
Small Colleges, Short of Men, Embrace Football (July 10, 2006)
At Colleges, Women Are Leaving Men in the Dust (July 9, 2006)

"If we left Iraq prematurely," he said, "the enemy would tell us to leave Afghanistan and then withdraw from the Middle East. And if we left the Middle East, they'd order us and all those who don't share their militant ideology to leave what they call the occupied Muslim lands from Spain to the Philippines." And finally, he intoned, America will be forced "to make a stand nearer home."

As for Mr. Rumsfeld, he suggested that lawmakers just leave everything up to him and the military command and stop talking about leaving Iraq. "We should consider how our words can be used by our deadly enemy," he said.

What interested us much more, though, was the response, in various newspapers and broadcasts, to the news of this research. The response, essentially, was the question "Will this make men redundant?" In other words, when the technology develops to the extent that it can be used on humans, will a significant number of women want to be fertilised without using sperm that has been acquired by the old-school method?

And, if they do, how will this make men feel?

Pretty bad, was my initial feeling.

After all, biologically speaking, a man is two things. He is, first, a sperm-making factory, and, second, a sperm-shooting machine. So it would not be surprising if, on some level, men felt put out - a little emasculated, even - by the "artificial" sperm production technique. Soon, if you want sperm, you will be able to get it without going to the traditional sperm factory. You might say that, for men, this is rather like owning a cotton plantation, and reading about the discovery of nylon.

Cloned sperm, of course, is a different matter. One day, some time in the near future, the scientists might get it right. And then what? Since the dawn of time, men have always known that, whatever they do, however badly they behave, they are still the only place to go if you want sperm.

Well, possibly not for much longer. Won't this affect us, somewhere deep inside our brains?

Maybe a little bit, we decided. And then we tried to imagine what would happen if the situation were reversed. If scientists discovered a way of cloning eggs from stem cells, would men even consider the possibility of doing without women? Would newspaper articles trumpet the possible redundancy of the female half of the species?

"Never," I said. "Men would never want to get rid of women."

"Yes, but that's not to say they feel the same way about us."

"How do you mean?"

"Well, look at how we revere women and their eggs. And compare that with how sperm is depicted."

The Defense Department quietly asked Congress on Monday to raise the maximum age for military recruits to 42 for all branches of the service.

Last week the Pentagon increased the number of US soldiers in Iraq to around 130,000 by extending the tours of some 3,700 combat troops by an extra 120 days to help quell the sectarian violence in Baghdad.

Our U.N. representative, John Bolton, is an admirable man and an outstanding spokesman for America, but his masters in the Oval Office and the State department have saddled him with an impossible job. Diplomacy before a war can sometimes provide an honorable alternative. "Diplomacy" in the midst of a war we are losing by failing to confront our main enemy is a euphemism for appeasement — a dead end road. The more eager our president is to rely on "the international community," the U.N., and our EU "partners," and to avoid, at all costs, any military confrontation with Iran, the more confident of ultimate victory the mullahs become. To them, and to hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world, watching Al Jazeera or its like on their TV screens, it looks like Iran is winning one glorious Islamist victory after another, striking blow after paralyzing blow at the once-mighty giant of the Christian West, while we cower in fear, afraid to strike back. We look like losers, while Iran looks invincible, and that image of invincibility is the most effective weapon Iran has in its hugely successful battle for the allegiance of the Muslim masses everywhere. Most Americans are still unaware of Iran's promise to light up the skies with a great surprise on August 22, but Muslims everywhere are keenly aware of it; most await the day with growing excitement.

We should not wait, passively, for the Iranians to unveil their surprise. We should light up the skies with our own surprise: a massive aerial bombardment that wipes out most of Iran's nuclear facilities, and decimates the ranks of its mullahs as well as those of the Revolutionary Guard and Basij forces that keep them in power, defeating these monsters and decimating their fan base by shattering their image of invincibility. Retired air force Lt. General Tom McInerney already has a plan to wipe out most of Iran's nuclear facilities from the air. As I've argued , we should augment it with additional targets and let fly, as soon as possible, with no forewarning, for maximum effect. Lt. Col. Gordon Cucullu, one of the few who argues in public for a similarly bold course sums it up this way:

By waiting for a first strike we are put in a position of playing a retaliation game after we have already endured unacceptable losses in population and perception. Once America and Israel are seen as weak enough to defeat, then the international jackals will all join in for the kill. This is what our enemies hope to accomplish…We face a crisis of major proportions. Hesitation may be fatal.

He's right. The time to act is now.

Latest polls in Connecticut show that Lieberman now trails his opponent, Ned Lamont, who has charged that the senator is too close to the Bush administration on several issues, most notably the Iraq war.

The latest Gallup poll finds that among Republicans and Republican "leaners," 46% view Lieberman favorably, while 27% view him unfavorably. Democrats are more evenly divided in their attitudes, with 38% viewing him favorably and 32% unfavorably. Currently, his support among Republicans is on the upswing. However, this is from a national sample and may not suggest a likely outcome next Tuesday.

Although many Christian churches attempt to dissuade congregants from getting a divorce, the research confirmed a finding identified by Barna a decade ago (and further confirmed through tracking studies conducted each year since): born again Christians have the same likelihood of divorce as do non-Christians.

Among married born again Christians, 35% have experienced a divorce. That figure is identical to the outcome among married adults who are not born again: 35%.

George Barna noted that one reason why the divorce statistic among non-Born again adults is not higher is that a larger proportion of that group cohabits, effectively side-stepping marriage – and divorce – altogether. "Among born again adults, 80% have been married, compared to just 69% among the non-born again segment. If the non-born again population were to marry at the same rate as the born again group, it is likely that their divorce statistic would be roughly 38% - marginally higher than that among the born again group, but still surprisingly similar in magnitude."

Barna also noted that he analyzed the data according to the ages at which survey respondents were divorced and the age at which those who were Christian accepted Jesus Christ as their savior. "The data suggest that relatively few divorced Christians experienced their divorce before accepting Christ as their savior," he explained. "If we eliminate those who became Christians after their divorce, the divorce figure among born again adults drops to 34% - statistically identical to the figure among non-Christians." The researcher also indicated that a surprising number of Christians experienced divorces both before and after their conversion.

Multiple divorces are also unexpectedly common among born again Christians. Barna's figures show that nearly one-quarter of the married born agains (23%) get divorced two or more times.

The survey showed that divorce varied somewhat by a person's denominational affiliation. Catholics were substantially less likely than Protestants to get divorced (25% versus 39%, respectively). Among the largest Protestant groups, those most likely to get divorced were Pentecostals (44%) while Presbyterians had the fewest divorces (28%).

...

Barna stated that there is no end in sight regarding divorce. "You can understand why atheists and agnostics might have a high rate of divorce, since they are less likely to believe in concepts such as sin, absolute moral truth and judgment. Yet the survey found that the percentage of atheists and agnostics who have been married and divorced is 37% - very similar to the numbers for the born again population. Given the current growth in the number of atheists and agnostics, and that the younger two generations are predisposed to divorce, we do not anticipate a reversal of the present pattern within the next decade."

Even a cursory look at the leading members of the forces of social conservatism in America reveals the same pattern. Rush Limbaugh, the top conservative talk-radio host, has had three divorces and an addiction to painkillers. Bill O'Reilly, the most popular conservative television personality, just settled a sex harassment suit that indicated a highly active adulterous sex life. Bill Bennett, guru of the social right, was for many years a gambling addict. Bob Barr, the conservative Georgian congressman who wrote the Defense of Marriage Act, has had three wives. The states that register the highest ratings for Desperate Housewives, the hot new television show, are Bush states.

On the July 31 edition of National Public Radio's Morning Edition, reporter Jacqueline Froelich aired -- without challenge -- Arkansas Republican state Sen. Jim Holt's assertion that "there are thousands of studies, actually ... over 10,000" that show "the homosexual family or the environment is problematic for the child." Froelich aired Holt's remark during a report on the Arkansas Supreme Court's recent ruling that the state's regulation banning gays from becoming foster parents is unconstitutional. Froelich did not address Holt's dubious figure of 10,000 studies, which would be possible only if a new study reaching that conclusion had been released every day for the past 27 years. Froelich also failed to mention that numerous scientific studies, including research from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the American Psychological Association (APA), support the Arkansas Supreme Court's ruling.

Kansas voters on Tuesday handed power back to moderates on the State Board of Education, setting the stage for a return of science teaching that broadly accepts the theory of evolution, according to preliminary election results.

With just 6 districts of 1,990 yet to report as of 8 a.m. Central time today, two conservatives — including incumbent Connie Morris, a former west Kansas teacher and author who had described evolution as "a nice bedtime story" — appear to have been defeated decisively by two moderates in the Republican primary elections. One moderate incumbent, Janet Waugh from the Kansas City area, held on to her seat in the Democratic primary.

If her fellow moderates prevailed, Ms. Waugh said last week, "we need to revisit the minutes and every decision that was 6-4, re-vote."

Ms. Morris lost to Sally Cauble, a teacher from Liberal, who has favored a return to traditional science standards.

Taking another seat from the conservatives in the Republican primary was Jana Shaver of Independence, a former teacher and administrator, who ran far ahead of Brad Patzer. Mr. Patzer is the son-in-law of the current board member Iris Van Meter, who did not seek reelection.

In another closely fought Republican race, in the Kansas City-Olathe district, Harry E. McDonald, a retired biology teacher, lost to the conservative incumbent John W. Bacon, an accountant.

The results seem likely to give the moderates a 6-4 edge on the 10-member board when it takes over in January. Half the members of the board are elected every two years. The election results are not final until certified by the Kansas Secretary of State, Ron Thornburgh, following an official canvas.

Both moderate Republican winners face Democratic opponents in November, but the Democrats are moderates as well, favoring a return to the traditional science standards that prevailed before a conservative majority elected in 2004 passed new rules for teaching science. Those rules, enacted last November, called for classroom critiques of Darwin's theory. Ms. Waugh, the Democrat, does not face a Republican opponent in the general election.

UNRELENTING in their zeal to cut taxes for the richest Americans and unabashed about employing the most cynical of maneuvers to achieve this goal, House Republicans left town this past weekend for their five-week August recess -- after shipping over to the Senate a noxious package that combines an increase in the minimum wage with an outrageous near-repeal of the estate tax and an extension of expiring tax breaks. The House GOP win-win political calculation here is obvious: Marrying a tax break for the rich with a wage hike for the poor dares senators in an election year to cast a vote against increasing the minimum wage. That, combined with some extra goodies, might be enough to get the estate tax cut over the 60-vote Senate hurdle that has so far, fortunately, blocked congressional action. If not, Republican leaders wager, they've at least given nervous House members cover to assert (however insincerely) that they backed a minimum wage increase, only to be stymied by Democrats.

But this is a bad bargain -- unaffordable, unnecessary and, as usual, dishonestly presented. Senators shouldn't be snookered, or intimidated, into going along with it.

Whatever the case for increasing the minimum wage -- and there are points pro and con on that subject -- it doesn't justify nearly eliminating the estate tax. The House measure would raise the minimum wage, which hasn't been increased since 1997, from $5.15 an hour to $7.25 by 2009. According to estimates by the Economic Policy Institute, which favors the change, 6.6 million workers would enjoy an average yearly wage increase of about $1,200. But even assuming that's correct -- and that employers facing higher costs wouldn't respond by cutting jobs -- the benefit pales in comparison with the riches the wealthy would reap by the cut in the estate tax. Assuming that the 2009 exemption of $7 million per couple would be otherwise left in place, according to the Brookings-Urban Institute Tax Policy Center, the estate tax cut would give an estimated 8,200 estates an average tax break of more than $1 million.

Lieberman's years in public life have been a steady drumbeat of disappointment for Connecticut Democrats, a liberal lot who do not share his often conservative views. End-of-life issues are just one example. In 1992, the state's Democratic voters picked Jerry Brown over Bill Clinton in the presidential primary. Lieberman, meanwhile, spent the 1990s joining cultural conservative Bill Bennett in a kind of Sherman's March through American culture, handing out Silver Sewer awards for sex and violence and denouncing such pornographic abominations as "Married … With Children."

Tag teaming with Bennett was one of the senator's early experiments in what he calls "bipartisanship," which often entails adopting Republican positions without leveraging any concession from the other side. Tell me how Bill Bennett moved toward the middle to accommodate Joe Lieberman. Pretty much the way Bush and Cheney moved to the center to meet Democrats on Iraq. Not at all.

Yet Lieberman's reputation in Connecticut is not purely that of an out-of-step conservative. It's much more complicated, and frustrating, than that. He's a serial raiser and dasher and re-raiser of hopes.

Gays trust him because he's voted with them on a lot of big issues, but they don't trust him because he voted for the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996. Once he even collaborated with Sen. Jesse Helms on a measure that would have stripped federal funding from public schools that counseled suicidal gay teens that their lifestyle was OK.

Women trust him because he's a reliable vote for abortion rights and don't trust him because he went off the reservation for the only significant vote (cloture) on the Supreme Court nomination of Samuel Alito. During the recent debate over requiring hospitals to provide emergency contraception for rape victims, Lieberman emitted a shockingly callous, and now famous, sound bite. He said it's never more than "a short car ride" in crowded Connecticut to a more accommodating hospital.

That's just the beginning of the catalog of gripes. Long before there were those TV love fests with Fox's Sean Hannity that so enrage lefty bloggers there were earlier love fests with none other than Pat Robertson. On the apocalyptic evangelist's "700 Club," Lieberman complained about moral relativism, said there was too little religion in public life, and said he was pleased that people of faith were taking their principles into the political arena. In 2003, Connecticut political writer Paul Bass chronicled the scramble by the senator's staff to scrub his image from a fundraising infomercial (also starring Robertson and Jerry Falwell) for a conservative religious group with which he had been involved. His 2004 campaign for the presidential nomination was so pitched toward the conservative, moralistic, Southern elements of the party that I jokingly suggested the slogan: "He may be a Jew, but he's a better Christian than you are."

I know exactly how you feel. I know its horrible asking/wanting so many people to die, because of the destruction of Damascus, but you could witness to anyone with that and not sound like a weirdo, to unsaved people, because you would be talking about something concrete hat they would know about and have seen on the news. They would have no choice but to believe that it was prophesized unless they are truly an antichrist, and then once they believe that they would willingly and with an open mind listen to your words of the grace of God and the atonement of Jesus, and I don't see how they could not believe after that.

I used to argue that progressives in this country had no choice but to support the Democrats -- even pathetic frauds like Howard Dean and inept Thurston Howell III clones like John Kerry. I used to quote Frederick Douglas's despairing comment about what the Republican Party of his day represented for African Americans: the rock; all else is the sea.

Maybe that was true, once. But I've finally come to realize that in modern-day America there is no rock -- just a vast, featureless expanse of reactionary ocean, like something from the set of Waterworld, except without a gilled Kevin Costner.

So here's my confession: At this point I really don't give a flying fuck whether the Democrats take the House or the Senate back. No, wait, that's not true. The truth is I hope they don't. It wouldn't save us from what's coming down the road, in the Middle East and elsewhere. It wouldn't force President Psychopath to change course or seek therapy. But it would make sure that the "left" (ha ha ha) gets more than its fair share of blame for the approaching debacle.

That may well be the natural role of the Democratic Party in our one-and-a-half party system, but I don't want any part of it any more. Which means that when I say it's a bad sign (consensus opinion always being wrong) that Charlie Cook now thinks the Republicans are likely to lose their House and/or Senate majorities in November, I just mean that it's a bad sign for the Democratic Party and its professional hangers on.

For the rest of us, and for whatever is left of this country's soul, it doesn't really matter. We've already lost.