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Scientists in Germany said yesterday that they had retrieved easily obtained cells from the testes of male mice and transformed them into what appear to be embryonic stem cells, the versatile and medically promising biological building blocks that can morph into all kinds of living tissues...And the cells passed every gold-standard test used today to prove their equivalence to embryonic stem cells...German scientists have great incentive to find alternatives to human embryonic stem cells, because government restrictions on human embryo cell research in Germany are even more severe than they are in the United States, where federally funded scientists are banned from working on embryonic stem cell colonies created after August 2001.

Scientists in Germany said yesterday that they had retrieved easily obtained cells from the testes of male mice and transformed them into what appear to be embryonic stem cells, the versatile and medically promising biological building blocks that can morph into all kinds of living tissues. ...
And the cells passed every gold-standard test used today to prove their equivalence to embryonic stem cells. ...
German scientists have great incentive to find alternatives to human embryonic stem cells, because government restrictions on human embryo cell research in Germany are even more severe than they are in the United States, where federally funded scientists are banned from working on embryonic stem cell colonies created after August 2001.

Only get this, radical Islamists have no army and no nation state unlike the Nazis. And Iran is NO threat to the U.S. only a threat to Israel, and not really even a threat to Israel as Israel most likely has hundreds of nuclear bombs (no one knows for sure as they won't let anyone inspect them, hmmmm sound familiar?) Israel can damn well defend itself with it's nuclear bombs and killing Palestinians at a 4:1 that suicide bombers kill Isralis.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/42945 02.stm (Palestinians killed by Israelis)

"Today, Israel is the world's sixth most powerful nuclear state, with a stockpile of more than 100 nuclear weapons and with the components and ability to build atomic, neutron and hydrogen bombs. Israel's nuclear program began and still operates under tight secrecy, but in the 1980s a series of revelations showed the crucial role played by foreign suppliers."

(1996 data more now certainly)

http://www.wisconsinproject.org/countries/israel/n uke.html

Meanwhile even pessimists believe that Iran is years away from having any nuclear weapons capability whasoever. Why am I crying for Israel again?
According to this Washington Post article Iran is a DECADE away from having nukes: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2005/08/01/AR2005080101453.html

Tragic as it was 911 only killed as many people as die from heart attacks every 3 days, week after week, month after month, year after year. You want to stop American's dying? Declare war on McDonald's, or does doing the math require too much brain power for "patriots" and Christian religious nuts?

"Heart attacks kill approximately 460,000 people yearly in the United Sates, according to the National Institutes of Health."

http://www.saintclares.org/services/CardiacCare/He artDiseaseStats.asp

This graphic elegantly summarizes the problem with many types of electronic voting machines, especially Diebold's.

If Wal-mart should be paying for medical insurance, then make a law stating that unskilled-labour businesses like wal-mart should pay for medical insurance Otherwise they won't.

This is what the state of Maryland did.
It seems that they realized that it was the only way to make Wal-Mart give their employees health coverage.

And when I discuss Microsoft's "competitive" activities, I tend to think of elementary school kids running the 100 yard dash where Microsoft, instead of simply running as fast as it can, resorts to tying the laces of the shoes of other kids or to tripping them in some fashion.

Actually, Washington DC has greater than 2% infection rate. 1 in 50 are living with full-blown AIDS, and the city doesn't even know how many have HIV. I don't know at what point the label "pandemic" becomes meaningful, but when a disease can be carried and transmitted for 15+ years, 2+% of a population provides a lot of hosts.

Uh ... I'm not necessarily agreeing with the GP, but I think if you want to make claims like that, you're going to have to back them up.

I've lived in a lot of small towns, and have universally found them to be decidedly more pleasant places to live than in the major* city I live in now -- which is significantly more polluted and has higher crime than where I used to live. The only reason I'm here, along with quite a few other people, are because it's where the jobs are. I haven't lived in any small town that had anywhere near the type of social, environmental, and criminal problems that this place does. Granted, they were all very low-population-density, high-income towns, but that's part of the reason people want to live there.

That said, I have run into people who honestly do enjoy urban living, and respect that it does have some advantages (public transportation chief among them I think, followed by social and cultural events, nightlife, etc.).

* = City in this case is Washington, DC, which despite not being a "major" city in terms of population, does manage to be the 2003 murder capitol, member of the top-20 most polluted cities, and city with the third-worst traffic in the nation.

a country such as the US or EU which has basic respect for the rules of war (eg, the Geneva Convention)
Haha where have you been hiding?

Not really... for one, they aren't *stopping* anyone in the private sector from doing it. Remember, private sector participation is driven only by profit - if it doesn't look profitable and doable, nobody will invest.

Ok, so it's not profitable or doable for the private sector. Fine. Why should we do it then? I understand there are scientific reasons such as using the moon base as a stepping stone to send a manned mission to Mars, but there's already the ISS chewing up money with the same justification. The part that irks me is that because NASA is a bureaucratic government (read tax) funded space agency, they're not exactly "chomping at the bit" to get any help from the private sector. Or any help internationally. That would only take some of the heat off of them, and do nothing to justify the pretty expansive budget they already have.

Second, in a case like this I'm happy it's NASA doing it - private ownership of a lunar base would only lead to milking it for profit and the other woes of capitalism, rather than scientific research for the greater good.

I am instantly skeptical of anything done "for the greater good". I find it much easier to believe in doing something for money, fame, or prestige than "for the people". Maybe I've just been burned by ideologists a few too many times, but that phrase is usually pretty suspect to me.

The Washington Post reports that German scientists (working under even more severe government restrictions than in the United States) have found a way to coax testicular cells from mice into the equivalent of embryonic stem cells. If this works in human males as well, this would bypass the pitfalls that occur when the body rejects donated transplant tissue and organs coming from others (adult or fetal). The article mentions that the search is underway for a similar feature in females. The article appears at the URL

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2006/03/24/AR2006032401721.html

You heard it here first.

I also didn't mention CNOOC (Chinese oil company) not being allowed to purchase Unocal for $18.5 billion, keep in mind they outbid Chevron.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2005/06/23/AR2005062302065.html

There are a lot of US dollars on the sidelines waiting to invest in the U.S. Although these deals, amounting to billions, seem insignificant, you should account for all the others looking at what is happening, looking at their billions in reserves and scratching their heads wondering what to do with all this monopoly money. If they attempt to use USD in a meaningful way, investing in America vs buying things, they would raise the eye of the US Government hence they just sit on their reserves and sooner or later they'll get wise to the charade, the only question is when will this happen.

1. Amazon
2. Walmart
3. HP
4. IBM
5. SGI
6. Most banks

1. DPI
2. Card System Solutions
3. T-Mobile

No president *has* ever nominated supreme court judges before who advocated the position that the president actually get the power to define what the law actually means and define how the court should interpret that law. The position that the president can actually change the meaning of the law, that he can effectively amend the law, by adding a note to it during signing.

I'm not sure which is worse... that or the flagrant unconstitutionality involved in the Deficit Reduction Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 2005. Bush "signed into law" a bill that had NOT in fact been passed by Congress. The Senate passed one bill, the House of representatives passed a different bill, and Bush simply decided he liked the Senate version better and signed that one.

-

Got a link or bill number or something explicitly stating the president signed a bill before it was finalized by the House and Senate?

That isn't quite what the OP said, which was: "Just this week, Bush signed into law a bill that was not Constitutional, because it had not been agreed in the same terms by both Senate and House of Representatives."

And that is exactly what happened. It was an accident, there was a minor change in the bill due to a clerical error, so the House and Senate ended up voting on slightly different bills. But given that the nature of this particular bill, and the fact that it just barely squeaked by, the Republicans do not want it to go back to the House for another vote and risk it not passing.

Ironic considering the editorial in today's WaPo: Will Your Job Survive Globalization?

The moneyshot: "A study last year by economists J. Bradford Jensen of the Institute for International Economics and Lori Kletzer of the University of California at Santa Cruz demonstrates that it's the more highly skilled service-sector workers who are likely to have tradable jobs. And according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the proportion of jobs in the United States that require a college degree will rise by a measly one percentage point -- from 26.9 percent in 2002 to 27.9 percent in 2012 -- during this decade."

Q8bot is a very small bot, consisting of only 926 lines of C-code. And it has one additional noteworthiness: It's written for Unix/Linux systems. It implements all common features of a bot: Dynamic updating via HTTP-downloads, various DDoS-attacks (e.g. SYN-flood and UDP-flood), execution of arbitrary commands, and many more. In the version we have captured, spreaders are missing. But presumably versions of this bot exist which also include spreaders.

Nowadays, Cato alumni are everywhere in the Bush administration and in groups advancing the president's Social Security initiative. Former Cato analyst Andrew G. Biggs is an associate commissioner of the Social Security Administration. The director of the Alliance for Worker Retirement Security, Derrick A. Max, previously worked for Abdnor (when she was at Cato) and for Weaver (when she was at the American Enterprise Institute)...

Too bad Jeeves got fired.

Besides the usual info about how many pcs he had infected (30,000 by his count), how he had done it (found software on a site) there was this bit at the end of the article from Symantec:

According to stats released this week by computer security giant Symantec Corp., the most common computer operating system found in botnets is Microsoft's Windows 2000, an OS predominantly used in business environments. Indeed, the vast majority of bots in Witlog's network were Win2K machines, and among the bots I saw were at least 40 computers owned by the Texas state government, as well as several systems on foreign government networks. At least one machine that he showed me from his botnet was located inside of a major U.S. defense contractor.

The permanent linnk for the article can be found here.

yes, many of the people who are complaining about it have in fact read the PA. unlike the idiot congressmen & senators who PUT IT INTO LAW... TWICE!

It is absolutely unconstitutional, but if you wont take my word for it, perhaps you'll listen to U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A596 26-2004Sep29.html

or U.S. District Judge Audrey Collins

http://www.germanlawjournal.com/article.php?id=421 #_edn15

Washington will do everything (including psy-ops) that it can up until 2007 January 1, the start of the next presidential campaign season. After 2007 January 1, Washington will pull the troops out of Iraqi. On this matter, the veto-proof majority of Republicans and Democrats are united, and they will pull the troops out of this mess. The only people who disagree are George Bush, Condoleeza Rice, and Donald Rumsfeld.

I wouldn't be 100% sure on Rumsfeld. He has offered his resignation to President Bush on two different occasions. Regardless of anyone's private feelings, the job of the President's cabinet is to promote the Presiden't agenda. Now, obviously they are in his cabinet because they tend to agree with him, but they do have their own opinions.

If only our eVoting equipment was a sophisticated and secure as credit & debit cards. http://media3.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/gr aphic/2006/03/16/GR2006031600213.gif

I think when you say "spin" you really mean "bias". Which goes with the usual assumption that when a news source reports something people don't like it's evidence of "bias." And of course, the opposite of "biased" is "fair".

Apparently these "journalists" didn't bother bringing up important issues like click fraud. I suppose though, they are as much a part of the conspiracy to defraud advertisers and shareholders as Google and the people operating the clicking bot nets.

Operagost saidHave you heard of Michael Moore, Barbra Streisand, or Alec Baldwin being put on a no-fly list? Do you know anyone personally? No? See, it turns out that it's just the usual sloppy work by bureaucrats who confused similar-sounding Arabic names. Joe Caucasian Liberal has nothing to fear, and once we get our representatives to implement proper review procedures maybe we can weed out the incompetents who have screwed up the no-fly list.

Wow. The "See, it turns out that it's just the usual sloppy work by bureaucrats who confused similar-sounding Arabic names." and "Joe Caucasian Liberal has nothing to fear" bits are quite racist. Got a problem with the "brown people" do we? Maybe scarier is the fact you've received +2 insightful.

Senator Ted Kennedy on no-fly list. I didn't realize Ted Kennedy had an Arabic sounding name.

The software -- viewed by a reporter on one of the sites, which washingtonpost.com is not naming because it remains active -- displays detailed graphs showing the distribution of victims by country. At time of this publication, the site harboring Frost's information was receiving a stream of illicit data from a network of roughly 3,000 infected PCs mostly located in Spain, Germany and Britain.

- Invisibility in system
- Implementstion of software FireWalls leak
- Implementation of Polymorthic algorithm
- Implementation of AV Software vulnerability: AV Bases Update Breaker
- Socks5 Proxy Server
- FTP Server
- KeyLogger
- Clipboard Logger
- Implementation of WebMoney Keeper leak: WebMoney Grabber
- Implementation of E-gold security system leak
- Protected Storage Grabber
- Far FTP, TotalCommander FTP, The Bat Passwords Grabber
- Sends logs/files to http server
- Web-based Remote Control
- Implementation of IE leak: Form Grabber
- Implementation of UK banks security system leak: Memorable Info Grabber (at this moment released implementation of 6 most popular UK banks security system leak, no screenshots, only text) (List of vulnerable banks)
- Implementation of DE Banks TAN Security System leak (included security test for 4 DE Banks) (List of vulnerable banks)
- SMS warning if new TAN detected for clients of Russian BeeLine GSM Mobile Operator

The software -- viewed by a reporter on one of the sites, which washingtonpost.com is not naming because it remains active -- displays detailed graphs showing the distribution of victims by country. At time of this publication, the site harboring Frost's information was receiving a stream of illicit data from a network of roughly 3,000 infected PCs mostly located in Spain, Germany and Britain.

- Invisibility in system
- Implementstion of software FireWalls leak
- Implementation of Polymorthic algorithm
- Implementation of AV Software vulnerability: AV Bases Update Breaker
- Socks5 Proxy Server
- FTP Server
- KeyLogger
- Clipboard Logger
- Implementation of WebMoney Keeper leak: WebMoney Grabber
- Implementation of E-gold security system leak
- Protected Storage Grabber
- Far FTP, TotalCommander FTP, The Bat Passwords Grabber
- Sends logs/files to http server
- Web-based Remote Control
- Implementation of IE leak: Form Grabber
- Implementation of UK banks security system leak: Memorable Info Grabber (at this moment released implementation of 6 most popular UK banks security system leak, no screenshots, only text) (List of vulnerable banks)
- Implementation of DE Banks TAN Security System leak (included security test for 4 DE Banks) (List of vulnerable banks)
- SMS warning if new TAN detected for clients of Russian BeeLine GSM Mobile Operator

Neither of those things will make your health care affordable though, the only way it will be affordable is if you tax wealthy Americans more and use their money to pay for it. Which to me, just seems a bit too socialist.

I hate it when just because you want to tax those who have more that you're "socialist". It's stupid poo-flinging arguments like that which've made it so that 45 million Americans are uninsured. Let me quote myself in a post I made earlier on /.:

Just look at the Toyota plant in Ontario [harpers.org]; The company turned down hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies in the United States because, when compared to Canadians, U.S. workers are too hard to train, often illiterate, and expensive to insure. Also according to General Motors Corp. chairman and chief executive G. Richard Wagoner Jr. the American car manufacturers are losing [washingtonpost.com] their ability to compete in the global marketplace in large measure because of the crushing burden of health care costs.
The US is the only industrial country without a national healthcare system. We're the most dissatisfied [umaine.edu] out of the top ten. Pay almost twice as much [newsbatch.com] as number two. Yet still 45 millions are uninsured [census.gov].

You're saying to me that it's not in the best interest of the rich to have insured Americans? As Adam Smith said; it's justified to take from the rich as it's them who benefit the most from the smooth functioning of the state.

Google has NOT been ordered to "hand over all the search data". Google has not been ordered to do anything in fact. The judge has hinted that he intends to give the government a random sampling of the websites Google has indexed, but not individual search terms.

As far as the government wanting a pile of businesses data bases to search for porn or what not, that is simply illegal and would result in a prompt judicial smack down. If they want to know what is on someone's serve, they need to do it the old fashion way, with a search warrant... well, in theory at least. The executive branch these days seems to consider search warrants as being optional.

As tempting as it is to go off topic on the case of the executive branch ignoring warrant laws, I'll just drop a link and declare both parties worthless and pathetic.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2006/03/14/AR2006031401519.html

I find it amazing how ignorant a lot of chinese are about their own country.
How can you guys defend a government where stuff like this goes on:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2006/02/18/AR2006021801389_pf.html

(If you don't like washingtonpost, google. There's lots of outlets running the story).

But when the US government does something, almost nobody says a word.

Pay closer attention, then. And those are just the conservatives who are normally supportive of Bush...

Less than 10 people in all of US history have been murdered by moronic anti-abortionists.

Hmm.

What about the Crusades? Those killed plenty of Jews and Arabs.

How about the long-running violence in Ireland? That's Christians killing Christians, Protestant against Catholic.

If you really want to find good bloodthirsty Christian-run killing, you're better off looking at the poorer nations. Rich, fat, happy people don't generally run around killing people. Indonesia's had plenty of killing on both halves. If you want something recent, try Nigeria.

The moral of the story? Religion is trouble, no matter what guise it comes in.

One very fallacious error that leftists make is that they claim that government should be "compassionate" and forcibly take money from the most successful in society and give it to the poor because all rich people are selfish (or some other theme).
(Mind you, it's Progressives/Social Democrats and populists who like to dish out at the rich. True Liberals don't).

Why should we take from the rich and give to the poor?

Just look at the Toyota plant in Ontario; The company turned down hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies in the United States because, when compared to Canadians, U.S. workers are too hard to train, often illiterate, and expensive to insure. Also according to General Motors Corp. chairman and chief executive G. Richard Wagoner Jr. the American car manufacturers are losing their ability to compete in the global marketplace in large measure because of the crushing burden of health care costs.
The US is the only industrial country without a national healthcare system. We're the most dissatisfied out of the top ten. Pay almost twice as much as number two. Yet still 45 millions are uninsured.

You're saying to me that it's not in the best interest of the rich to have insured Americans? As Adam Smith said; it's justified to take from the rich as it's them who benefit the most from the smooth functioning of the state.

Okay, here's the article that that report is based off of. The only bill it mentions is one that a Senator is considering; it's nowhere near being made law.

In your case I will give you the virtues of being civil, thoughtful, and polite (yes qualities I could use as well :)) unlike the parent poster, however I think your facts are a bit off the mark. According to a Washington Post article called SUV sales drop sharply on December 2nd:

"Sales of all new vehicles in the United States were off 2.8 percent in November from a year ago, with Detroit automakers bearing the brunt of the industry slowdown, according to Autodata Corp. Sales of some SUVs were off more than 50 percent from last year. Meanwhile, U.S. sales by Toyota Motor Corp. and Honda Motor Co. continued to surge.

At General Motors Corp., the world's largest automaker, sales were down 7.6 percent. The slump coincided with the company's announcement last month that it would cut 30,000 jobs by 2008 and close several plants. GM sales have lagged since it ended "employee pricing" discounts in September.

Ford Motor Co., the No. 2 automaker, said sales fell 15 percent. In response, GM and Ford announced yesterday that they will make fewer trucks in coming months while boosting car output. Ford said it will increase first-quarter car production by 21 percent from a year earlier."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2005/12/01/AR2005120100737.html

Thus for now I'll maintain an SUV sales slump is a large part of the big 3s troubles.

Well, if Canada doesn't persecute muslims as well, explain this. Al-jazeera, after being *banned* for broadcast in Canada, finally gets approved with these restrictions:

Last week, the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission announced that it had approved al-Jazeera, but required cable and satellite distributors to monitor its programs 24 hours a day. The agency also took an unprecedented step in allowing cable companies to alter or delete "abusive comments" from al-Jazeera programs. Currently, it is illegal for distributors to delete programming, but in this case, the commission made an exception.

If people from Canada knew the incredible censorship this country participates in, they'd be outraged. Instead, they illegaly pirate US satellite programming and declare the fact they can enjoy doing that "freedom". Ha!

i find it rather funny that all these bot-net owners are getting so much publicity right now. The washington post recently had another article about another botnet owner. this is nothing new. people have been exploiting various networks and running botnets for at least a decade (that I'm aware of). these new botnets aren't any larger than the ones back in the day, either. in fact exploiting systems back then was way easier since security wasn't nearly as important to many people and firewalls were pretty rare. either way, ITS LAME

We try and we try to protect ourselves and our constituents and the government, in its
infinite wisdom, quest for appearing as eGovernment, and pandering to special interests
screws us anyway....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2005/05/24/AR2005052401347.html/
http://www.opcva.com/watchdog/

P.S. regarding those statistics about online identity theft comprising only 10% of the total. I think its 10% of the total where the victim knows where it happened. Big difference.

Oh? Can you give me a chapter/page number? The only references I find are in chapter 2, chapter 4, and chapter 10, and they don't support the contention other than saying that the Bush administration believed it. Most of the mentions (e.g. Bin Ladin had in fact been sponsoring anti-Saddam Islamists in Iraqi Kurdistan) and most of the press reports would seem to argue against your claim.

It Also confirmed that there was no credible intelligence PRIOR to the invasion indicating that the WMDs weren't where we expected them to be.

I suppose that UN weapons inspectors, who were trained in such matters and actually went there don't count as credible? There were, as you know, lots of reports indicating that the weapons weren't there--in fact, the vast majority of the intelligence argued against it, which is why the Bush administration have been accused of "cherry picking" the facts to support the policy they had already decided on. But of course, I suppose you can just write them all off as "incredible," as Bush seems to have done.

Further, we went in based on a whole host of other reasons, that are either accidentally overlooked or deliberately ignored... For example, we've been in a HOT shooting war with Iraq for 15 years. He's been jerking us around about WMDs for that entire time.

Nice dodge. There may have been many motivations for the people who sold us this war to have done so, but they can't be counted as reasons why we bought it unless they told us about them. For example, when people were being asked by pollsters "should we go to war with Iraq?" why didn't any of them say "That's a silly question--we're already at war with Iraq"? For that matter, why was there a stink when it was learned that Bush had started (or rather, stepped up) bombing before getting the authorization from congress? If everyone knew that we'd been in a "HOT shooting war with Iraq for 15 years" there wouldn't have been any surprise at all.

You can't seriously claim that We The People authorized this war based on things we weren't told, but that the things we were told had nothing to do with it, can you?

And, as an aside, how could he have been "jerking us around" about WMD unless he actually had some?

--MarkusQ

"ice melting due to warming"

actual subhead in friday's dead-tree version of http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2006/03/02/AR2006030201712.html

i'll scan it when i get home;-)

Not there yet. The GOP example just copped 8 1/3 years:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2006/03/03/AR2006030300290.html

Cut funding? I wish. Complete and utter BS:

From http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2005/09/07/AR2005090702462.html

"In Katrina's wake, Louisiana politicians and other critics have complained about paltry funding for the Army Corps in general and Louisiana projects in particular. But over the five years of President Bush's administration, Louisiana has received far more money for Corps civil works projects than any other state, about $1.9 billion; California was a distant second with less than $1.4 billion, even though its population is more than seven times as large."

"..overall, the Bush administration's funding requests for the key New Orleans flood-control projects for the past five years were slightly higher than the Clinton administration's for its past five years. Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, the chief of the Corps, has said that in any event, more money would not have prevented the drowning of the city, since its levees were designed to protect against a Category 3 storm, and the levees that failed were already completed projects."

So WTF have they been doing with the money?

"By 1998, Louisiana's state government had a $2 billion construction budget, but less than one tenth of one percent of that -- $1.98 million -- was dedicated to levee improvements in the New Orleans area. State appropriators were able to find $22 million that year to renovate a new home for the Louisiana Supreme Court and $35 million for one phase of an expansion to the New Orleans convention center."

I've wasted enough time on this, you can google the rest yourself.

The liberal leadership in New Orleans reaped exactly what it sowed for so many years.

Using this political forum, I simply want to apologize to all you left wing nuts and say "you were right". I give up trying to defend anything Bush has to say anymore personally or on-line (not that I've done it here recently).

Between the destabilization / chaos going on in Iraq as the Bush admin. clearly didn't plan or forsee what was going to happen after Saddam, and now the absolute, irrevocable proof that Bush does lie and cover up (in this case, Katrina), it's getting REALLY HARD to get behind the president on anything these days... It just makes the Bush admin look like a bunch of inept, CYA idiots whose guiding principal is cronyism. When Bush opens his mouth, most non-koolaid drinking conservatives should now wonder just what agenda does he have.

BUT, I'm STILL not voting Democratic because (A) they are just as bad as the Republicans, and (B) they very much want to take away the right to persue my hobbies with all the strength they can muster (ie, off-road vehicle driving).

Using this political forum, I simply want to apologize to all you left wing nuts and say "you were right". I give up trying to defend anything Bush has to say anymore personally or on-line (not that I've done it here recently).

Between the destabilization / chaos going on in Iraq as the Bush admin. clearly didn't plan or forsee what was going to happen after Saddam, and now the absolute, irrevocable proof that Bush does lie and cover up (in this case, Katrina), it's getting REALLY HARD to get behind the president on anything these days... It just makes the Bush admin look like a bunch of inept, CYA idiots whose guiding principal is cronyism. When Bush opens his mouth, most non-koolaid drinking conservatives should now wonder just what agenda does he have.

BUT, I'm STILL not voting Democratic because (A) they are just as bad as the Republicans, and (B) they very much want to take away the right to persue my hobbies with all the strength they can muster (ie, off-road vehicle driving).

there is plenty of oversight. Red Cross visits

And they have documented "inumane treatment" of prisoners.

"Proven" torture at Gitmo? You mean allegations of torture by people who've been released from Gitmo.

Umm, the government has admitted to using torture at Gitmo.

And I like how torture has been watered down to being anything that might discomfort anyone at any point in time, compared to say, the torture that Americans at Hanoi Hilton received

And I love how the Bush administration has redefined torture so narrowly as to only cover injury serious enough to cause death or organ failure. You are sticking your head in the sand if you think that none of the techniques we use on prisoners qualify as torture.

Listen to bedwetters like you whine incessantly is torture in and of itself.

Why does questioning the use of force by the state make you a pussy? I never understood that. If anything, apologetics for those in power always seemed a lot more cowardly to me.

And I guarantee listening to people whine about our government abusing its power is not nearly as bad as being waterboarded.

*blah blah * bush *blah blah* Is that really the entire substance of your argument?

Examples of EU/EC corruption:
Auditors reject EU accounts again
For E.U. Critics, a Cautionary Tale
Kinnock EU whistleblower 'hung out to dry'
EU accounting worse than Enron, says whistleblower
New scandal hits EC over insider trading
EU in turmoil after executive commission resigns

Wow, you are right, the EU/EC is a regular shining white pillar of purity. I'm being sarcastic, BTW. I found these examples with 3 minutes and google. Yes, there where many more. ~nate

The US Military believes that playing games makes people more violent

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2006/02/13/AR2006021302437.html

More and more information is coming to light that materials that are normally harmless can be extremely hazardous when distributed on a nanoparticle scale. Quoting from a recent Washington Post article:

Animal studies have shown that at least some can cause deadly airway blockages or can migrate from nasal passages into the brain and other organs, where they may cause metabolic problems. Other studies suggest they can trigger environmental damage that would be difficult to reverse once the minuscule particles disperse into soil and water.

So when all this nifty paint starts flaking off and nanoparticles of copper start setting up shop in your organs, are we going to have to go through something like the whole asbestos abatement process again? Don't get me wrong, I'm as excited about the potential of nanoparticles and nanotech in general, but it seems we should be figuring out how to control this before we start figuring out how to use it.

Yeah, may I assume you are joking?

Because if what he said was true, he would get a warrant. No judge would or could deny a warrant to tap the phone of an Al Qaeda suspect.

The ENTIRE issue is: why didn't he get the warrant?

You might also note the FBI complaints that the program generated thousands of tips, and all of them worthless. They had to investigate thousands of Americans who had absolutely no connection to terrorism (not just AlQaeda).

And even worthless tips would be o.k. if they were legal; the question is, why no warrant to make them legal?