ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES

On the February 27 edition of Fox News' America's Newsroom, anchor Bill Hemmer cited the results of a "new poll" by Public Opinion Strategies that 53 percent of voters say "victory in Iraq is still possible." Hemmer failed to acknowledge that, as noted by Media Matters for America (here and here), POS has described itself as a "Republican polling firm," and a Republican pollster has reportedly stated that the question Hemmer cited was worded in a "completely unprofessional" manner.

The POS poll, conducted February 5-7, asked voters to rate their level of agreement/disagreement with the statement "Victory in Iraq, that is creating a young but stable democracy and reducing the threat of terrorism at home, is no longer possible for the US." Media Matters has noted that, according to blogger Greg Sargent, Republican pollster David E. Johnson, CEO of the Strategic Vision polling firm, criticized the poll as, in Sargent's words, "leading and designed to elicit the answers they got." Johnson also asserted, according to Sargent, that the wording of the poll's statement was "completely unprofessional" because "[i]t's designed to confuse the respondent. People are being asked whether two different things can be accomplished -- establishing democracy in Iraq and reducing the threat of terrorism at home -- and doesn't clarify which one people are talking about."

Three undecided Largo city commissioners could determine the fate of City Manager Steve Stanton tonight.

Last week, Stanton's announcement that he plans to have a sex-change operation roiled this city of 76,000, with its mobile home parks full of retirees and its feed store in the middle of downtown.

By Monday, Mayor Pat Gerard was the only member of the seven-member City Commission to say she still stands by Stanton, 48.

Three other commissioners say they intend to fire the 14-year city manager or are likely do so.

That leaves three commissioners — Gigi Arntzen, Gay Gentry and Rodney Woods — as the deciding votes. Largo's city charter requires a vote of five out of seven city commissioners to fire the city manager.

At a special meeting called to discuss Stanton, commissioners expect to face more than 500 people.

City Hall has received more than 250 e-mails about Stanton, more than 40 percent from people who identified themselves as Largo residents. Those e-mails called for his removal by a 7-to-1 ratio.

A wave of frantic selling engulfed the world's financial markets today after the biggest fall in the Chinese stock market in a decade triggered a domino effect across Asia, Europe and North America.

Fears about the health of the US economy and sabre-rattling from the White House about an air assault on Iran's nuclear plants were heightened by an almost 9% plunge in Shanghai's benchmark index, amid hints from Beijing that it was planning action to control the speculation that had driven the bourse to a record high this week.

Puncturing the recent mood of optimism that has seen financial markets across the globe recover from the post 9/11 bear market, the sell-off in Shanghai spread rapidly to Hong Kong and Tokyo, before moving westwards to Europe.

By the close of business in the City, London's index of blue-chip shares - the FTSE 100 - closed almost 150 points down on the day at 6,286.1, with the fall of 2.31% the sharpest since last June.

The federal agency that's been front and center in warning the public about tainted spinach and contaminated peanut butter is conducting just half the food safety inspections it did three years ago.

This photo provided by the Food and Drug Administration shows consumer safety officers Dean Cook, and Matthew M. Henciak, right, members of FDA's Office of Regulatory Affairs' Baltimore District import operations group, inspecting spices at the port of Baltimore in 2000. The FDA had been front and center in warning the public about tainted spinach, and contaminated peanut butter, though it is conducting about half the number of food safety inspections that it did three years ago.

The cuts by the Food and Drug Administration come despite a barrage of high-profile food recalls.

"We have a food safety crisis on the horizon," said Michael Doyle, director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia.

Between 2003 and 2006, FDA food safety inspections dropped 47 percent, according to a database analysis of federal records by The Associated Press.

That's not all that's dropping at the FDA in terms of food safety. The analysis also shows:

_There are 12 percent fewer FDA employees in field offices who concentrate on food issues.

_Safety tests for U.S.-produced food have dropped nearly 75 percent, from 9,748 in 2003 to 2,455 last year, according to the agency's own statistics.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, the FDA, at the urging of Congress, increased the number of food inspectors and inspections amid fears that the nation's food system was vulnerable to terrorists. Inspectors and inspections spiked in 2003, but now both have fallen enough to erase the gains.

"The only difference is now it's worse, because there are more inspections to do _ more facilities _ and more food coming into America, which requires more inspections," said Tommy Thompson, who as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services pushed to increase the numbers. He's now part of a coalition lobbying to turn around several years of stagnant spending.

Under normal circumstances, the recent lunch at at a Filipino cafe in Washington, D.C., between Washington Post media writer Howard Kurtz and right-wing blogger Michelle Malkin would have been an awkward affair. Kurtz was there to profile Malkin for the paper's Style section, yet Malkin in her writings had made it clear she despises the mainstream media and holds the Post in contempt. ("Washington Post Sinks To A New Low," read a Malkin blog entry on July 22, 2005.) She has written that the paper's managing editor displays an "anti-American mindset" and has specifically singled Kurtz out for being a dishonest and incompetent reporter.

Talk about tension. The lunch and the subsequent feature could have set off some real fireworks with Kurtz not only defending his work and the Post's reputation, but pressing Malkin hard to explain her wild and often fact-free allegations against journalists. Instead, the profile, which skated over Malkin's anti-media rants as well as her loathing of the Post, was published as a Valentine's Day week mash note, presenting Malkin as a pugnacious, on-the-rise pundit who has her liberal critics up in arms.

As Paul McLeary noted at CJR Daily: "It really takes a talented writer to paint conservative commentator Michelle Malkin as the voice of reason. ... But the Washington Post's Howie Kurtz ... manages to do just that."

Two years ago this month, Kurtz noted, "Many bloggers are careful and thought-provoking, others partisan or mean-spirited." The question is: Why has the Post has made a conscious decision to champion mean-spirited bloggers like Malkin at the expense of the thought-provoking ones?

When a psychology professor at DePauw University here surveyed students, they described one sorority as a group of "daddy's little princesses" and another as "offbeat hippies." The sisters of Delta Zeta were seen as "socially awkward."

Worried that a negative stereotype of the sorority was contributing to a decline in membership that had left its Greek-columned house here half empty, Delta Zeta's national officers interviewed 35 DePauw members in November, quizzing them about their dedication to recruitment. They judged 23 of the women insufficiently committed and later told them to vacate the sorority house.

The 23 members included every woman who was overweight. They also included the only black, Korean and Vietnamese members. The dozen students allowed to stay were slender and popular with fraternity men — conventionally pretty women the sorority hoped could attract new recruits. Six of the 12 were so infuriated they quit.

Water! Is it wet, I wonder?

If we listen with a decent sympathy, the things Giuliani and Romney say about abortion make sense. When Romney ran for governor, he made a commitment to Massachusetts voters not to attack the law he knew they supported. That was politically expedient, of course, but it also took an admirably limited view of executive power and acknowledged the independence of the legal system.

Similarly, Giuliani respects the distinctive work of judges and the separate role of the state legislatures. If Roe were overruled, those legislatures would decide how to regulate abortion. And decentralized legislation really is fairly called "part of our freedom" because the Constitution's framers saw the balance of power between the national government and the states as a safeguard against tyranny.

So I'd like to see a little more patience with what Romney and Giuliani are saying. But that doesn't mean we should be naïve. The next president will select real individuals to be judges, and no matter how diligent they are, they will bring something of their humanity to their interpretation of the law, a version of humanity that will express something of the president's cast of mind.

The McClatchy analysis found that the number of severely poor Americans grew by 26 percent from 2000 to 2005. That's 56 percent faster than the overall poverty population grew in the same period. McClatchy's review also found statistically significant increases in the percentage of the population in severe poverty in 65 of 215 large U.S. counties, and similar increases in 28 states. The review also suggested that the rise in severely poor residents isn't confined to large urban counties but extends to suburban and rural areas.

The plight of the severely poor is a distressing sidebar to an unusual economic expansion. Worker productivity has increased dramatically since the brief recession of 2001, but wages and job growth have lagged behind. At the same time, the share of national income going to corporate profits has dwarfed the amount going to wages and salaries. That helps explain why the median household income of working-age families, adjusted for inflation, has fallen for five straight years.

These and other factors have helped push 43 percent of the nation's 37 million poor people into deep poverty - the highest rate since at least 1975.

The Census Bureau's Survey of Income and Program Participation shows that, in a given month, only 10 percent of severely poor Americans received Temporary Assistance for Needy Families in 2003 - the latest year available - and that only 36 percent received food stamps.

Many could have exhausted their eligibility for welfare or decided that the new program requirements were too onerous. But the low participation rates are troubling because the worst byproducts of poverty, such as higher crime and violence rates and poor health, nutrition and educational outcomes, are worse for those in deep poverty.

Over the last two decades, America has had the highest or near-highest poverty rates for children, individual adults and families among 31 developed countries, according to the Luxembourg Income Study, a 23-year project that compares poverty and income data from 31 industrial nations.

A point seemingly missed in much early coverage of the UK withdrawal from the south (that I have seen, at least) is the potential impact of that withdrawal on the eventual withdrawal of US forces.
There already has been discussion of how vital the Baghdad-Kuwait supply line is for ongoing US operations, and this concern is well-founded. The south is not as has been portrayed in some upbeat UK and US official comments today. Southern Iraq is a very much troubled region where most localities are dominated by militias (sometimes rival militias), governance (to the extent governance linked to Baghdad exists at all beyond the symbolic in large areas) is tenuous, security forces are in most cases far more loyal to militias (often local, semi-autonomous militia elements) than legal authorities (such as the mayor of Basrah), criminality (including large-scale oil & fuel smuggling) is endemic, and low-level assassinations of the relatively few Sunni Arabs still present there is ongoing.

In the wake of the nearly-universal condemnation of Tim Hardaway's statements to a radio interviewer, the substantive issue remains. Is it a reasonable for an NBA basketball player (or a soldier in basic training, for that matter) to feel uncomfortable sharing intimate quarters with a homosexual, or does this represent an outrageous, irrational fear? In response to the Hardaway controversy, several sports columnists compared his resistance to the idea of playing alongside gay teammates to the racism of previous years when white players tried to avoid competing with (or against) blacks.

The analogy is ridiculous, of course. There is no rational basis for discomfort at playing with athletes of another race since science and experience show that human racial differences remain insignificant. The much better analogy for discomfort at gay teammates involves the widespread (and generally accepted) idea that women and men shouldn't share locker rooms. Making gay males unwelcome in the intimate circumstances of an NBA team makes just as much sense as making straight males unwelcome in the showers for a women's team at the WNBA. Most female athletes would prefer not to shower together with men not because they hate males (though some of them no doubt do), but because they hope to avoid the tension, distraction and complication that prove inevitable when issues of sexual attraction (and even arousal) intrude into the arena of competitive sports.

Tim Hardaway (and most of his former NBA teammates) wouldn't welcome openly gay players into the locker room any more than they'd welcome profoundly unattractive, morbidly obese women. I specify unattractive females because if a young lady is attractive (or, even better, downright "hot") most guys, very much including the notorious love machines of the National Basketball Association, would probably welcome her joining their showers. The ill-favored, grossly overweight female is the right counterpart to a gay male because, like the homosexual, she causes discomfort due to the fact that attraction can only operate in one direction. She might well feel drawn to the straight guys with whom she's grouped, while they feel downright repulsed at the very idea of sex with her.

Amy Hoffman, editor-in-chief of the Women's Review of Books, recently reported that she attended a lecture at the Radcliffe Institute by Barry Gewen, an editor at the New York Times Book Review. In what even he described as a "Larry Summers moment" he explained that the reason so few women reviewers appear in the NYTBR is that they just can't write for a general audience about such topics as military history. He explained that NYTBR editors find reviewers by talking to colleagues and reading publications such as The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The New Republic, insisting that he and his colleagues are not overtly prejudiced people but admitted they might have subconscious prejudices.

But in an exclusive interview with ABC News, Vice President Dick Cheney said the move was actually good news and a sign of progress in Iraq.

"Well, I look at it and see it is actually an affirmation that there are parts of Iraq where things are going pretty well," Cheney told ABC News' Jonathan Karl.

"In fact, I talked to a friend just the other day who had driven to Baghdad down to Basra, seven hours, found the situation dramatically improved from a year or so ago, sort of validated the British view they had made progress in southern Iraq and that they can therefore reduce their force levels," Cheney said.

Iraq's Sunni vice president, Tariq al-Hashemi, warned that advance publicity on the security operation had given Shiite militias time to flee the city for bases elsewhere in the country.

``I have information that numerous of their leaders are now in Basra and other southern provinces in safe havens,'' he told Al-Arabiya television. ``I believe that those who were behind the bloodshed and the chaos should be pursued and criminals must face justice.''

All British troops will be pulled out of Iraq by the end of 2008, starting with the withdrawal of 1,000 in the early summer, the Guardian has learned.

Tony Blair is to announce the moves - the result of months of intense debate in Whitehall - within 24 hours, possibly later today, according to officials.

The prime minister is expected to say that Britain intends to gradually reduce the number of troops in southern Iraq over the next 22 months as Iraqi forces take on more responsibility for the security of Basra and the surrounding areas.

In comments, C&G suggests that Blair's decision may be grounded in an expectation of some sort of imminent conflict between the U.S. and Iran. That, of course, is pure speculation, but it certainly is the case that even cross-border incidents between U.S. troops and Iran, let alone larger-scale military confrontations, would leave British troops in Southern Iraq most vulnerable both to retaliatory attacks and the risk of inadvertent involvement. It is reasonable to assume (though an assumption is all it is) that the increasingly likely prospect of escalation played at least some role in the deliberations leading up to the British withdrawal announcement.

It was at Palmyra in Syria that I began to tell the story of Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, and the rebellion that she led against imperial Rome. I was living within the grounds of the Temple of Bel, and at night, when the great gates of the temple were shut, I came closer to the spirit of the time and place than probably anyone has ever done before. I know that I felt very close to Zenobia, which made the book a joy for me to write.

Picking up on something from the comments, I'm curious if the medical establishment's obsessive concern with potential fetuses is a relatively new thing or not. I gather that when obtaining just about any prescription or medical treatment which could impact fetal health in any tiny way, women have to convince doctors that not only are they not pregnant, but that they couldn't possibly be. This of course requires having abstained or abstaining from intercourse for a nontrivial amount of time.

Ladies, is this new?


...to be clear, I'm not talking about inquiring about whether it's been a bit long since your last period or other evidence that you genuinely "might be" pregnant, I'm talking about a somewhat lower standard here, that you "could be."

Could part of it be a reaction to the gnarly, birth defect producing shit
the F.D.A. allows to be sold these days?


Women who are deficient in Folic Acid can cause some horrendous genetic birth defects.
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Women who are deficient in Folic Acid can cause some horrendous genetic birth defects.


THEREFORE ALL PRE-PREGNANT WOMEN MUST TAKE FOLIC ACID.

Jesus H. Christ people.
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THEREFORE ALL PRE-PREGNANT WOMEN MUST TAKE FOLIC ACID.


Not saying that at all, and Folic Acid deficiency could lead to your child being born without a brain. It's a vitamin for god sakes.
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I design radiation therapy treatment plans for cancer patients and we make sure none of our patients is pregnant before they begin treatment. A whole body dose of just a few Gy is enough to kill a large adult and we routinely deliver 50-74 Gy to small treatment areas. There's not a threapist, dosimetrist (me), physicist, or doctor who is going to treat a pregnant woman. The risk of damaging/killing the fetus and/or getting sued are just too high. I supposed xrt for cancer qualifies as non-trivial and may not obtain to this discussion.

Well, what's with all the advertising for men's erectile or follicle dysfunction that warn that women should not handle said medications if "they might become pregnant"?

testosterone?
i dunno the chemo-stuff about pregnancy, but stuff that gets a guy's hair to grow mightn't be conducive to prenatal health...

i was denied palliative pain treatment for endometriosis in the ER until they determined I wasn't pregnant. Several hours and just excruciating.

The word "scrotum" does not often appear in polite conversation. Or children's literature, for that matter.

Yet there it is on the first page of "The Higher Power of Lucky," by Susan Patron, this year's winner of the Newbery Medal, the most prestigious award in children's literature. The book's heroine, a scrappy 10-year-old orphan named Lucky Trimble, hears the word through a hole in a wall when another character says he saw a rattlesnake bite his dog, Roy, on the scrotum.

"Scrotum sounded to Lucky like something green that comes up when you have the flu and cough too much," the book continues. "It sounded medical and secret, but also important."

The inclusion of the word has shocked some school librarians, who have pledged to ban the book from elementary schools, and reopened the debate over what constitutes acceptable content in children's books. The controversy was first reported by Publishers Weekly, a trade magazine.

It is not the first time school librarians have squirmed at a book's content, of course. Some school officials have tried to ban Harry Potter books from schools, saying that they implicitly endorse witchcraft and Satanism. Young adult books by Judy Blume, though decades old, are routinely kept out of school libraries.

Ms. Nilsson, reached at Sunnyside Elementary School in Durango, Colo., said she had heard from dozens of librarians who agreed with her stance. "I don't want to start an issue about censorship," she said. "But you won't find men's genitalia in quality literature."

"At least not for children," she added.

Behind the door of Army Spec. Jeremy Duncan's room, part of the wall is torn and hangs in the air, weighted down with black mold. When the wounded combat engineer stands in his shower and looks up, he can see the bathtub on the floor above through a rotted hole. The entire building, constructed between the world wars, often smells like greasy carry-out. Signs of neglect are everywhere: mouse droppings, belly-up cockroaches, stained carpets, cheap mattresses.

This is the world of Building 18, not the kind of place where Duncan expected to recover when he was evacuated to Walter Reed Army Medical Center from Iraq last February with a broken neck and a shredded left ear, nearly dead from blood loss. But the old lodge, just outside the gates of the hospital and five miles up the road from the White House, has housed hundreds of maimed soldiers recuperating from injuries suffered in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Maj. Gen. George W. Weightman, commander at Walter Reed, said in an interview last week that a major reason outpatients stay so long, a change from the days when injured soldiers were discharged as quickly as possible, is that the Army wants to be able to hang on to as many soldiers as it can, "because this is the first time this country has fought a war for so long with an all-volunteer force since the Revolution."

Stepp follows three high school girls and six college women through a year in their lives, chronicling their sexual behavior. These girls and women don't date, don't develop long-term relationships or even short, serious ones -- instead, they "hook up." Hooking up, Stepp writes, "isn't exactly anything." It can "consist entirely of one kiss, or it can involve fondling, oral sex, anal sex, intercourse or any combination of those things. It can happen only once with a partner, several times during a week or over many months . . . . It can mean the start of something, the end of something or the whole something." If that sounds as if hooking up can mean almost anything but "fried fish for dinner," Stepp goes on to offer something more definite: What makes hooking up unique is that its practitioners agree that there will be no commitment, no exclusivity, no feelings. The girls adopt the crude talk of crude boys: They speak of hitting it, of boy toys and filler boys, "my plaything" and "my bitch."

Why hook up? According to Stepp, college women, obsessed with academic and career success, say they don't have time for a real relationship; high school girls say lovey-dovey relationships give them the "yucks."

Stepp is troubled: How will these girls learn how to be loving couples in this hook-up culture? Where will they practice the behavior needed to sustain deep and long-term relationships? If they commit to a lack of commitment, how will they ever learn to be intimate?

In fact, Unhooked can be downright painful to read. The author resurrects the ugly, old notion of sex as something a female gives in return for a male's good behavior, and she imagines the female body as a thing that can be tarnished by too much use. She advises the girls, "He will seek to win you over only if he thinks you're a prize."And goes on to tell them, "In a smorgasbord of booty, all the hot dishes start looking like they've been on the warming table too long."

...

In the final chapter, Stepp writes a letter to mothers and daughters, in which she warns the girls: "Your body is your property. . . . Think about the first home you hope to own. You wouldn't want someone to throw a rock through the front window, would you?" And: "Pornographic is grinding on the dance floor like a dog in heat. It leaves nothing to the imagination." The ugliness of these images seems meant to instill sexual shame.

The theme of the chocolate bar give-away was "Without Contraception, you get so much more", an analogy pertaining to the tiny Hershey's Kisses that the "Condom and a Kiss" campaign hands out with condoms, compared to full sized Hershey's bars. Inside the candy wrapper it read, "It makes sense that condoms are handed out today with nothing more than a tiny chocolate kiss. This reflects how little love you can express while using one. Using contraception tells your lover, 'I don't want to share every part of myself with you.'"

Richard Wolffe and Holly Bailey write for Newsweek: "For weeks now, Iran has eclipsed Iraq as the subject of the biggest parlor game in Washington. Is the president heading to war or committed to peace? It turns out the answer is something in between. The practice of sending mixed messages -- about whether the government of Iran is involved or not, whether the proper response should be military or not, whether the intel on the country is good or not -- seems to be an intentional policy."

After self-deprecatingly apologizing to Democrats for failing to refer to their party by its actual name, Bush did it again yesterday -- three times. Even as he was talking about working with them!

On balancing the budget: "And I'd like to work with the Democrat leadership, as well as, obviously, my Republican folks, to get it done."

On health care: "I got a letter the other day from a group of Republican and Democrat senators."

On his education legislation: "[I] will reach out to Democrat members, as well as Republican members, to get this bill reauthorized."

There will be some who clamor to claim victory for my resignation, but I caution them that in doing so, they are tacitly accepting responsibility for those who have deluged my blog and my inbox with vitriol and veiled threats. It is not right-wing bloggers, nor people like Bill Donohue or Bill O'Reilly, who prompted nor deserve credit for my resignation, no matter how much they want it, but individuals who used public criticisms of me as an excuse to unleash frightening ugliness, the likes of which anyone with a modicum of respect for responsible discourse would denounce without hesitation.

This is a win for no one.

But Romney is so polished and looks so much like a president would look if television picked our presidents (and it does) that sometimes you have to ask yourself if you are watching the real deal or a careful construction.

Romney has chiseled-out-of-granite features, a full, dark head of hair going a distinguished gray at the temples, and a barrel chest. On the morning that he announced for president, I bumped into him in the lounge of the Marriott and up close he is almost overpowering. He radiates vigor.

Whenever the site is up, we get slammed and it goes down. I have to suspend the site until the fervor dies down. At this point, I think it might be a few hours before the Lookie Lous give up refreshing the site. In the meantime, here's the latest post I wrote about all the "Christians" who have written me in the past week:

Update: To correct misinformation in the comments, I was not "fired". I offered my resignation and it was accepted.

Problem with women like you, you just need a good fucking from a real man! Living in Texas myself, I know you haven't found that real Texan yet. But once your liberal pro feminist ass gets a real good fucking, you might see the light. Until then, enjoy your battery operated toys b/c most real men wouldn't want to give you the fucking you deserve b/c the shit that would come out of you ears.

i like the way you trash talk i don't particularly want to have sex with you but i would like a blow job

But Obama began his journey as an uppity young man.

Adj. 1. uppity - presumptuously arrogant; "had a witty but overweening manner"; "no idea how overweening he would be"- S.V.Benet; "getting a little uppity and needed to be slapped down"- NY Times
overweening
immodest - having or showing an exaggerated opinion of your importance, ability, etc; "brash immodest boasting"

With Faust's appointment, half of the eight Ivy League schools will have a woman as president. Her selection is noteworthy given the uproar over Summers' comments that genetic differences between the sexes might help explain the dearth of women in top science jobs, comments which sparked debates about equality at Harvard and nationwide.

Faust oversaw the creation of two faculty task forces, formed in the aftermath of Summers' remarks, to examine gender diversity at Harvard. She has been dean of Radcliffe since 2001, two years after the former women's college was merged into the university as a research center with a mission to study gender issues.

...

Some professors have quietly groused that _ despite the growing centrality of scientific research to Harvard's budget _ the 371-year-old university is appointing a fifth consecutive president who is not a scientist. No scientist has had the top job since James Bryant Conant retired in 1953; its last four have come the fields of classics, law, literature and economics.

...

While the presidential search was marked by disciplined secrecy _ committee members met behind closed doors in a Georgian mansion and were quietly ushered away in idling Lincoln Town Cars _ it also revealed an embarrassing trend: several top-tier candidates said they weren't interested.

In January, Thomas R. Cech, head of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a Nobel prize winner, asked the search committee to remove him from consideration. The presidents of Columbia, Brown and Princeton all said they did not want the job.

Rep. Bob Nonini, R-Coeur d'Alene, persuaded the committee to introduce his bill to outlaw the use of threats or physical force to dissuade a pregnant woman from giving birth. The measure also prohibits threatening to do "anything that the person does not have the legal right to do against the pregnant woman." That could include employers threatening to withhold a job or promotion or "a school counselor maybe describing to a young person that by having this baby you have no future, those kinds of acts," Nonini told the panel, Howell reported. Under the measure, it does not matter if the woman has the abortion.

Thinking about it, I wonder how this kind of legislation would interact with parental consent laws - another issue on which Idaho politicians aren't concerned with abiding by the Constitution. If this bill were written with actual freedom of choice in mind - where it would be a crime to forcibly keep a woman from aborting a pregnancy as well as when forcing her to abort - I think it might work nicely in tandem with parental consent legislation.

But that's not what this is about. This is the same women-can't-make-decisions claptrap that the Feminists for Life keep trying to sell, which conveniently wastes the time of pregnant women interested in abortion - who are working to a deadline, after all.

From the February 7 edition of Talk Radio Network's The Savage Nation:

SAVAGE: How can a schoolmarm like Condoleezza Rice conceptually deal with the complex problems of this world? She was appointed to the chancellorship at Stanford because of affirmative action. She was chosen by George Bush as part of an affirmative action program in order to make his Cabinet look like America. I mean, do we have to mince words for the rest of our life? She's over her head. She's way over her head. Now, you could have picked an African-American person, if you want to call people of color that, but it wouldn't have been Condoleezza Rice. It should have been a man, it should have been a man who speaks Arabic, it should have been a man because he would have more respect in the Middle East than does a woman to begin with. It has nothing to do with race, it has to do with the fact that she is a schoolmarm who has been pushed up the ladder all of her life because of social engineering.

The tone and the sentiment of some of Amanda Marcotte's and Melissa McEwan's posts personally offended me. It's not how I talk to people, and it's not how I expect the people who work for me to talk to people. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but that kind of intolerant language will not be permitted from anyone on my campaign, whether it's intended as satire, humor, or anything else. But I also believe in giving everyone a fair shake. I've talked to Amanda and Melissa; they have both assured me that it was never their intention to malign anyone's faith, and I take them at their word. We're beginning a great debate about the future of our country, and we can't let it be hijacked. It will take discipline, focus, and courage to build the America we believe in.

AN AUDIT of US reconstruction spending in Iraq has uncovered spectacular misuse of tens of millions of dollars in cash, including bundles of money stashed in filing cabinets, a US soldier who gambled away thousands and stacks of newly minted notes distributed without receipts.

The audit, released yesterday by the US Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, describes a country in the months after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein awash with dollars, and a Wild West atmosphere where even multimillion-dollar contracts were paid for in cash.

The findings come after a report last year by the inspector general which stated that nearly $9 billion (£5 billion) of Iraq's oil revenue disbursed by the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), which governed Iraq until mid-2004, cannot be accounted for.

The huge sums in cash were paid out with little or no supervision, and often without any paperwork, yesterday's audit found. The report found problems with nearly 2,000 contracts worth $88.1 million.

As Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) gears up for the second day of his House Hearings on Waste, Fraud and Abuse of Taxpayer Dollars, the focus will shift to North Carolina-based Blackwater International.

The secretive security firm made headlines in Iraq when, in March 2004, four Blackwater employees were ambushed and gruesomely killed. Six more were killed in April 2005 when their Mi-8 helicopter was shot down.

Blackwater's ill-fated presence in Iraq has been especially curious because, for many of their missions, no one could find the U.S. contract that actually authorized them to working there.

Until now. Yesterday, the Army finally disclosed who had sub-contracted Blackwater's operations -- and it's none other than our good friends Halliburton (via AP):

After numerous denials, the Pentagon has confirmed that a North Carolina company provided armed security guards in Iraq under a subcontract that was buried so deeply the government could not find it.

The secretary of the Army on Tuesday wrote two Democratic lawmakers that the Blackwater USA contract was part of a huge military support operation by run by Halliburton subsidiary KBR.

Vice President Dick Cheney ran Halliburton before he became vice president.

Several times last year, Pentagon officials told inquiring lawmakers they could find no evidence of the Blackwater contract. Blackwater, of Moyock, North Carolina, did not respond to several requests for comment.

As the AP notes, the Halliburton/Blackwater episode not only exposes the (intentionally?) impenetrable maze of military contracting; it was also likely against the law:

Henry Waxman, the veteran Representative who now chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, is following the money trail of $12 billion in shrink-wrapped $100 bills from the U.S. treasury that Bush's cronies shipped to the "Green Zone" in Baghdad between May 2003 and June 2004. The 363 tons of cash was stacked on wooden pallets, loaded onto C-130 transport planes, and shipped into the middle of a war zone.
The former viceroy of Iraq, Paul Bremer, testified yesterday that he turned over the cash to the Iraqi "Finance Ministry," but he admitted that he had disbanded the top tier of the bureaucracy, and there were an indeterminate number of "ghost employees" that received American tax dollars with no oversight of accounting.

The efforts by 2008 presidential contenders to exploit the megaphone of the blogosphere has hit a bump, it seems, as former Senator John Edwards's hiring of two controversial bloggers gathers more attention than his health care plan or even his new McMansion spread in North Carolina.

We are catching up a bit on the controversy. We first saw a kernel of this mentioned on Instapundit last week, when one of the two new bloggers, Amanda Marcotte, was supposedly caught by some other bloggers "airbrushing" some of her cruder language out of a post at her site, Pandagon.

The campaign also hired Melissa McEwan of Shakespeare's Sister. [forgive our earlier typo making sisters plural by accident.]

But now, both are under the spotlight, or rather the glare, with at least one blogger (Dean Barnett over at TownHall.com) taking up a pool as to when the two might be fired by Mr. Edwards. Some are counting the hours.

On top of the pair's vulgar language in some posts, Bill Donohue of the conservative Catholic League called on Tuesday for their ouster from the campaign's nascent Internet foray, complaining about their anti-Catholic rants. (We can't repeat here some of their writings; they are quite frequently profane. Michelle Malkin has catalogued some posts here.)

* "People don't trust the Muslims when it comes to liberty." [MSNBC's Scarborough Country, 2/9/06]

* "Name for me a book publishing company in this country, particularly in New York, which would allow you to publish a book which would tell the truth about the gay death style." [MSNBC's Scarborough Country, 2/27/04]

* "The gay community has yet to apologize to straight people for all the damage that they have done." [MSNBC's Scarborough Country, 4/11/05]

* Addressing former Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL) in a press release, Donohue said: "[W]hy didn't you just smack the clergyman in the face? After all, most 15-year-old teenage boys wouldn't allow themselves to be molested. So why did you?" [10/4/06]

* "I'm saying if a Catholic votes for Kerry because they support him on abortion rights, that is to cooperate in evil." [MSNBC's Hardball, 10/21/04]

* "We've already won. Who really cares what Hollywood thinks? All these hacks come out there. Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. It's not a secret, OK? And I'm not afraid to say it. ... Hollywood likes anal sex. They like to see the public square without nativity scenes. I like families. I like children. They like abortions. I believe in traditional values and restraint. They believe in libertinism. We have nothing in common. But you know what? The culture war has been ongoing for a long time. Their side has lost." [MSNBC's Scarborough Country, 12/8/04]

* "Well, look, there are people in Hollywood, not all of them, but there are some people who are nothing more than harlots. They will do anything for the buck. They wouldn't care. If you asked them to sodomize their own mother in a movie, they would do so, and they would do it with a smile on their face." [MSNBC's Scarborough Country, 2/9/06]

Tonight, the CW network will air an episode of Veronica Mars that is based on misleading right-wing claims about contraception. The show is about a young woman named Veronica Mars, who is both a college student and a part-time private investigator. This week, Veronica is hired by Bonnie, "a promiscuous classmate, to find out who secretly slipped her the morning after pill, causing her to have a miscarriage"

...

The morning-after pill — also known as Plan B — is not an abortion drug. It is a form of emergency contraception that when "taken within 72 hours of unprotected sex, the two-pill series can lower the risk of pregnancy by up to 89 percent." It cannot cause a miscarriage. Plan B works only when taken before a woman becomes pregnant.

Well, the Today Show wasn't kidding around when they put together this "trend" piece more or less alleging that mothers who have a glass of wine while their kids are playing nearby are bad caretakers. The story implies they don't just drink, they get drunk: "There are safety issues to consider. Who would drive to the hospital if a child were hurt?"

In the beginning they wanted to come and film my playgroup for the piece. Since our kids are now all in school full time, we don't have a weekly playgroup anymore so this was problematic. I suggested a more 'happy hour' gathering where we'd meet after school and our husband's would swing by after work for our usual family pizza night. Alicia [the NBC producer] said the mixing of dads would 'taint' the story (Read: "Make the subject more palatable because men keep their women in line and they have an auxiliary liver in their penises.") So I told Alicia it just wasn't going to work out.

Russia has flown a team of chemical experts to a Siberian region to find out why smelly, coloured snow has been falling over several towns.

Oily yellow and orange snowflakes fell over an area of more than 1,500sq km (570sq miles) in the Omsk region on Wednesday, Russian officials said.

Chemical tests were under way to determine the cause, they said.

Residents have been advised not to use the snow for household tasks or let animals graze on it.

The world's leading climate scientists said global warming has begun, is "very likely" caused by man, and will be unstoppable for centuries, according to a report obtained Friday by The Associated Press.

The scientists - using their strongest language yet on the issue - said now that world has begun to warm, hotter temperatures and rises in sea level "would continue for centuries" no matter how much humans control their pollution. The report also linked the warming to the recent increase in stronger hurricanes.

"The observed widespread warming of the atmosphere and ocean, together with ice-mass loss, support the conclusion that it is extremely unlikely that global climate change of the past 50 years can be explained without external forcing, and very likely that is not due to known natural causes alone," said the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - a group of hundreds of scientists and representatives of 113 governments.

The phrase "very likely" translates to a more than 90 percent certainty that global warming is caused by man's burning of fossil fuels. That was the strongest conclusion to date, making it nearly impossible to say natural forces are to blame.

What that means in simple language is "we have this nailed," said top U.S. climate scientist Jerry Mahlman, who originated the percentage system.

The senior authors of the report, from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a U.N. body convened every five years or so, have been inundated with e-mail messages and calls from some of the 650 other authors and outside experts eager to see findings tweaked in one direction or another.

With the clock ticking down and translators juggling six official languages, and government representatives trying to ensure that findings do not clash with national interests, tussles have intensified between climate experts and political appointees from participating governments.

Scientists involved in the discussions said today that the U.S. delegation, led by political appointees, was pressing to play down language pointing to a link between intensification of hurricanes and warming caused by human activity.

Hi, friends, if you're like me either because you know Lisa or just love her column in the NY Times on the precarious balance between life and work that each of us is trying our best to accomplish (survive?) every week you may have been surprised last week when you couldn't find the column. It turns out that the Times has squished the careers section into the business section -- and Lisa's column along with it! Kinda rude to do to someone who has more comments and emails about her column than anyone except Maureen Dowd and Tom Friedman. And then I thought again, that it's actually an affront to all working women. How much less important could we women, the majority of subscribers, be to the NY Times!! This from a paper that has just one other regular columnist who is a woman!!

So, I wanted to ask for your help in moving the Grey Lady with an email campaign? I think we should wait until this Sunday so we can say that we may have missed the column last week but felt for sure that it would pop up again this week -- but alas, the column written specifically by and for us working women has disappeared!

Send an email to Bill Keller, the managing editor of the times (bkeller@nytimes.com) starting on Sunday with the following talking points: (feel free to put it into your own words, don't want him to think that it is a canned campaign):

* Love the column and can't find it
* Feel slighted that the issue of work/life seems to have taken a back seat there
* Wonder what it would take for the Times to take women subscribers and women columnists seriously
* Why not move the column to the front of the business section or the op-ed page, on serious real estate, where it belongs?

I don't think you have to be a subscriber to find this offensive, just a woman trying to balance everything is enough!

Please pass this message onto your girlfriends who are also doing their very best to balance work and life.

MATTHEWS SCANS THE LOBBY: To help you grasp the soul of your "press corps," let's return to the charity event we glancingly described in October 2005. (See THE DAILY HOWLER, 10/24/05. Scroll down to "Culture Corner.") The emcee that night was Kathleen Matthews, then of Washington's Channel 7. On the way out of the Mayflower Hotel, we saw her husband, TV talker Chris Matthews, chatting with DC journo Mark Plotkin. We don't know Plotkin, but we know Chris a tad. So we decided to stop for a chat rather than walking on by.

"Tough crowd tonight," we thoughtfully said. Chris then offered us a look at the odd soul of the Washington press corps. His eyes stared past ours, scanning the Mayflower's block-long lobby in a classic thousand-yard stare. "I just saw the most incredible prostitute," he weirdly said. (Instead of "prostitute," he may have said "hooker.")

To Plotkin's credit—again, we don't know him—he seemed to be just as surprised as we were by Chris' oddball comment. But Chris wasn't through with his weird discussion; his eyes continued to scan the long hall as he said something like, "Yeah, you have to ask for the 'pink sheet' rooms when you check in." (Not an exact quote.) At no point did Plotkin seem to think that this was a recognizable topic. For ourselves, we'd have to say it was the strangest thing any man has ever said to us. No, it simply isn't our experience that men make such weird comments to other men—much less, to men whom they barely know. Men like Matthews apparently think that this is standard male discussion. (We googled and Nexised "pink sheet" the next day. We found no usage which conformed to what Chris had said.)

We mention this oddness, fifteen months later, because we've finally come to feel that people simply must get the fullest picture of the people who run their "press corps." We also mention it in the face of Matthews' endless rude remarks about Hillary Clinton—rude, sneering, gender-based insults which continue to show one part of the soul of this millionaire cohort.

Until the day he's made to stop, Matthews will continue his sneering remarks about Clinton. He'll call her "Dukakis in a dress." He'll say she reminds him of "a stripteaser." He'll pretend, as he did last Thursday and Friday, that Bill Clinton has called her an "uppity woman" (text below). These sneering, gender-based comments and insults will be available each evening on Hardball.