Tuesday, May 12, 2009

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Suz Redfearn: Ape Sh*t Top
You might want to sit and think a minute before taking your kid to see gorillas and the like. Look what happened when I recently took my 2.75-year old to the Great Ape House at the National Zoo in DC. After a few innocent moments watching a mom gorilla carry around her four-month-old baby gorilla and sit in a big canvas swing ignoring us, a large male entered our field of view. He sat down, his back against an ersatz tree. Then, feeling relaxed I guess, he proceeded to take a large dump, catch it in his hand, raise it to his face and sit nonchalantly feasting on it for a good four to five minutes. Just munching away at it bite by bite as if he were working on nothing more unusual than a granny smith. It was a pivotal moment. Pre-gorilla poo eating, I'd been able to protect little Eve from the dark and perplexing side of life. But post poo-eating, everything had changed. Eve looked up at me, clearly struggling with what was now suddenly an even more confounding universe. The few societal constructs of which she was aware were giving way - I could see it in her eyes. " We don't eat poop...?" she said. It was a statement, but also a question. All of this in the middle of potty training, no less. "No - we don't," I uttered. But that's all I could really muster, so floored was I by how scrambled her brain must be. Exposed to coprophagia , and so young! The first time I ever even conceptualized something eating its own poop, I was 35 and visiting the house of some pals who had a chocolate lab that seemed confused about things. But maybe I don't get out much. Eve stared at the crap-consumption for longer than I would have liked. But so did I. And I learned on the spot that I'm not one of those moms who hurries her kids away from virtual car wrecks, but instead stands there taking snapshots, craning her neck and crowding people to get a better view. "You don't really want pictures of that ," admonished a teenage boy I had unintentionally nudged aside. "Sure I do! Are you kidding?" I told him. "When am I ever going to see this again?" He moved away from me. Eve couldn't look away either. I suppose she was modeling my behavior. Better that than modeling the gorilla's behavior. Apes, orangutans and chimps. Half the time when one visits their enclosures one finds them acting like so many drunk rugby players - eating crap, throwing crap, smearing crap on the glass, pooping from 50 feet up in trees, running around all willy nilly, playing with their genitals and of course copulating all over the place. And yet, we are powerless to say, "Well, I never! " and then scurry out to see the zebras. We must stop and stare agog. Perhaps it's because gorillas are so close to us genetically; 98 percent of their DNA is the same as ours. They are of us, in us, and vise versa. I guess the turd-eating is part of that 2 percent differential. But why? Why do they do it? Lisa Stevens, curator of the National Zoo's Great Ape House and Giant Pandas Exhibit, explained to me that sometimes the weather can bring it on. The day Eve and I went, it was gray and cool, threatening to rain. Bingo. "Often, in the wild, they'll do it on rainy days, when, like us, they're hesitant to do a lot of moving from their night nest to seek food," Stevens said. Yeah, but that's when I just order pizza or Thai, I told her. She scolded me for making the comparison. Then she moved on. Poo-eating could also have something to do with the gorilla's diet and digestion, she said. They are vegetarians. Possibly, all the mulberry and maple branches that are hidden all around for them (called 'browse'), along with leaf-eater biscuits , don't fully digest the first time around and gorillas, god bless 'em, are just trying to get another crack at it. Either that, or they're just bored. "It can be an I-just-want-to-snack-on-something thing," adds Stevens. Yeah, but poop? Poop as a snack? Stevens said the zoo community really doesn't know why it happens; no extensive studies exist. But she pointed out that crap-eating is very common among mammals. Take, for instance, the rabbit, who must eat its own dung to obtain certain minerals or it will develop deficiencies and die. Nature, she is cruel to the rabbit. So, why don't we do it? It might have something to do with the meat in our diets - re-eating that and all its attendant bacteria could make us sick. Also at play: deeply ingrained ideas about how to stay alive. "Ultimately, we are highly cognitive and highly social apes, and our social rules have predominated in terms of what's expected and what's not with regard to our bodily functions," Stevens said. "We are the most populous primate and we live in very congested and highly densely populated areas. A lot of our customs about urine and feces are about sanitation and are very important for us in terms of our survivability." So, if I lived out in the country and was a vegetarian, it'd be fine? I might develop a taste for it? I didn't ask. Speaking of urine, Eve and I didn't see this -- and that is our loss -- but Stevens said that great apes (that includes gorillas, orangutans, chimps and gibbons) also drink their own liquid output. But how, when, as Eve and I did see, they just pee on the concrete and it runs in rivulets all over the place? Stevens said that if a great ape feels like it, he or she will grab whatever bowl-like container is around - a helmet, a cup - and catch it in there, then drink. Sometimes they just fashion a bowl out of their hairy hands to facilitate their thirst-quenching. This would have been another head turner for sure, but not as big a shock, as people have been drinking urine for millennia. Not me, ok? Not me. But people. Great apes are social creatures. Just as we like viewing their lives in action, they dig watching us, said Stevens. When the Ape House has to close from time to time, the gorillas seem different, Stevens said -- like they might miss us. But luckily for them, when the Ape House is open and they've had enough of us pointing and milling about in our ugly tennis shoes, there are private areas to which they can escape. This reduces the paparazzi effect for them, and any resultant Lindsay Lohan/Sean Penn behavior. The gorillas, Stevens said, are far more low-key and reserved than their Great Ape brethren; not too much of what they are doing behind the thick glass is for our entertainment. But the orangutans? They are another story. Take regurgitation and re-ingestion. It's just what it sounds like, and orangutans are fans of it. It has never been observed in the wild; it's a zoo-life-only phenomenon. Stevens says it's likely done to get a rise out of onlookers. "They will regurgitate onto the glass and lick it with great relish because they get all this attention," she said. In case you were wondering, they prefer to do this with sweet items like fruit. The one thing gorillas do seem to do largely for our edification is 'paint.' Translation: smear crap on the glass. "If we laugh and interact with them at the glass, reacting more strongly for behaviors we consider inappropriate, that reinforces them to do it," Stevens explained. And sex? Yes. If you've seen sex at the zoo, it was likely orangutans getting it on. Says Stevens, they are sexually precocious, and don't wait for the female to ovulate (like gorillas do), but instead do it almost daily, all month long, in various creative positions. In the wild, they are solitary creatures. When a male encounters a female, more often than not, he forces sex on her. There's lots of orangutan rape going on. Chimps? They're hyper-sexual too. Humans and their reactions to the apes are not of interest to Stevens, except for when it comes to sex. "It's rather amusing to me to watch visitors react. There are parents who use it as an educational opportunity, and then parents who move their child quickly away." She wishes she could tell the latter group to stay away from the tortoise area, where there's even more banging going on. Our day at the zoo was edifying, to be sure. Eve is not likely to forget it. In fact, I know she won't because it comes up now about twice a week. And at some some really unfortunate times. Last weekend, the proprietor of our local sushi place came over to ask how the toro was, and Eve told him, apropos of nothing, "I saw a gorilla eat poop! At the zoo!" "Did you tell him, 'No, no, no!'?" Chef Tao asked, laughing uncomfortably. I wanted to jump in with, "No because, you see, the gorilla may be reabsorbing fibrous materials..." but I instead elected to just sit quietly and turn red. More on Sex
 
Frances Beinecke: Tales from the Arctic and Obama's Polar Bear Decision Top
Last Friday, two intrepid explorers finished their trek across some of Greenland's most remote territory. The travelers, Larry Lunt, a member of NRDC's Global Leadership Council, and Alain Hubert, the founder of the International Polar Foundation , set out on this expedition not only for the time-honored reasons of adventure and challenge, but also to draw attention to how much the Arctic is already transformed by global warming. Read their dispatches and trace their journey at OnEarth Magazine's site . I deeply admire Larry and Alain's fortitude. Like the vast majority of the world's population, I have never been to Greenland myself. But I've come close. Last summer, as a member of the Aspen Institute's Commission on Arctic Climate Change I got to travel by boat through the Arctic Ocean east of Greenland. I was struck by what a profoundly harsh environment it is. It is a world of white, steel gray and blue, with very little of the familiar green plant life that orients us humans. Yet the Svalbard archipelago I circled has long been a jumping off point for polar exploration. We met a man who was trying to kayak to the North Pole, and I had newfound admiration for the conditions these explorers endure. That is what Larry and Alain faced in order to tell the story of Arctic melt, and I am deeply grateful. Yet as they join the ranks of illustrious polar explorers, they are facing a dramatically new terrain. A few years ago, I spoke at the Explorers' Club in New York City, and I saw the dog sledge that Admiral Peary used to cross the frozen ice on his way to the North Pole 100 years ago. Today, thanks to global warming, he would need a boat to get there. Why We Need Arctic Dispatches A monumental and potentially catastrophic change is happening in the North, and yet most of us have no idea what it looks like or what it means for our lives down here. Larry and Alain are helping bring that back home to us. We need to hear what they have to say now more than ever. Decisions are being made today that simultaneously set the course for the Arctic's future yet ignore the reality of the Arctic present. Just look at the Obama administration's decision last week to retain a controversial Bush-era ruling related to protecting polar bears under the Endangered Species Act. The ruling means that federal agencies must exclude the effects of global warming pollution on polar bears when there are drafting their protection plans. Yet government scientists agree that global warming is a primary threat to these bears! Working to Prevent an Arctic Gold Rush It is because of this kind of dissonance in decision making that the Aspen Institute convened the Commission on Arctic Climate Change. The commission is trying to create a conservation and governance structure for the region as a whole. We need a comprehensive approach, especially since eight different nations have Arctic territory, and each one of them is eager to lay claim to the oil, gas, fish, and shipping routes that have been uncovered by global warming's melting ice. To protect the increasingly fragile Arctic environment, the Aspen Commission is looking at three issues: 1. Protecting the living resources, including the fish and wildlife 2. Establishing criteria for industrial activity 3. Identifying what kind of governance regime will work best This past spring, Dr. Gro Harlem Bruntland joined the commission. I met Bruntland at the international climate negotiations in Bali last year, and I have great respect for her. She was the Special Envoy on Climate Change to the United Nations Secretary General and the former Norwegian Prime Minister. I am confident she can help integrate the latest climate science with real-world governance. I just hope we put these better management plans in place as soon as possible. If we don't, the explorers who follow in Larry and Alain path will confront a terribly altered Arctic environment. This post originally appeared on NRDC's Switchboard blog .
 
FAT ACCEPTANCE: The Best Diet Is No Diet... Authors Weigh In Top
After years of battling the bulge, conquering cravings, fighting fat, and waging war on weight gain, Kate Harding and Marianne Kirby were tired of the struggle. "Think about the language of dieting," says Kirby. "All of these things set you up as a disconnected being, as an enemy of your physical body." Both Harding, founder of the blog Shapely Prose, and Kirby, who created The Rotund blog know that life's too short to worry about weight (yours or the person sitting next to you on the plane). More on Food
 
Shuttle Atlantis Damage Doesn't Appear To Be Serious: NASA Top
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — The Atlantis astronauts uncovered a 21-inch stretch of nicks on their space shuttle Tuesday, but NASA said the damage did not appear to be serious. The damage was likely the result of debris that came off the fuel tank shortly after liftoff Monday. The astronauts were inspecting their ship while racing to the Hubble Space Telescope when they came across the nicks spread over four to five thermal tiles, on the bottom of the shuttle where the right wing joins the fuselage. "It doesn't look very serious," Mission Control said. "Those tiles are pretty thick. The nicks look to be pretty small." This repair mission is especially risky _ a rescue shuttle is on standby for the first time ever _ because of the debris-littered orbit of Hubble. Unlike other space flights, the astronauts can't reach the international space station because it is in a different orbit than the telescope. "Again, right now, everybody's feeling pretty good that it's not something particularly serious," Mission Control told the astronauts. "We just want to make sure we do the right thing and complete all the analysis." The debris strike was detected in launch images as well as sensors embedded in the wings. Damage to the shuttle during liftoff has been a worry for NASA since Columbia was doomed by a chunk of fuel-tank insulating foam that broke off during launch in 2003. Columbia's left wing was punctured, along a vulnerable edge. The nicks on Atlantis are in a less sensitive location. Flight director Tony Ceccacci told reporters "it's too early to tell" whether the astronauts will need to conduct a more detailed inspection of that area. Any additional survey, to determine the depth of the nicks, would be done Friday right before the second of five spacewalks planned for Hubble. Even before damage was discovered, NASA was preparing shuttle Endeavour to rush to the astronauts' rescue if needed. Nothing so far has been found that would require a rescue. Atlantis will catch up with the 19-year-old Hubble on Wednesday. The astronauts will capture the aging observatory and, the next day, begin the first of five grueling spacewalks to install new cameras and equipment and repair some broken science instruments. Meanwhile, Atlantis' launch pad took more of a beating than usual during Monday's launch. The heat-resistant material that covers the bricks beneath the pad was blasted off an approximate 25-square-foot area. Some nitrogen gas and pressurized air lines also were damaged. The damage to the bricked flame trench _ which deflect the flames at booster rocket ignition _ was near a previously repaired spot but not an area severely battered last year. Monday's damage was not as bad, said NASA spokesman Allard Beutel. ___ On the Net: NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/main/index.html
 
Tyler Frost SUSPENDED For Going To PROM Top
FINDLAY, Ohio — A northwest Ohio teenager has been suspended by his Christian school because he attended another high school's prom. Officials at Heritage Christian School in Findlay had warned 17-year-old Tyler Frost that he would be suspended and prohibited from attending graduation if he went to the public school dance over the weekend with his girlfriend. Frost says he didn't think going to the dance was wrong even though his fundamentalist Baptist school Ohio forbids dancing, rock music and hand-holding. Frost didn't go to school Monday. Instead, he and his girlfriend are heading to New York for a Tuesday morning TV interview. The teen says he's now getting Facebook and e-mail messages from around the world. ___ Information from: The Courier, http://www.thecourier.com
 
"Father Oprah" Defends CELIBACY Top
MIAMI — A popular Miami priest and media personality said Monday he is thinking about leaving the Roman Catholic Church for a woman he loves after a magazine ran pictures of the couple kissing and hugging. Rev. Alberto Cutie (KOO'-tee-ay) told the CBS "Early Show" on Monday he supports the church's stand that priests should be celibate and said he does not want to become the "anti-celibacy priest." "I think it's a debate that's going on in our society, and now I've become kind of a poster boy for it. But I don't want to be that. I believe that celibacy is good, and that it's a good commitment to God," Cutie said. Cutie was removed last week as head of the Miami archdiocese's international radio network and as head of his parish after the Spanish-language magazine TVnotas ran photos of Cutie embracing a woman at a bar and at a beach. Cutie headed the archdiocese's Radio Paz and Radio Peace broadcasts, heard throughout the Americas and in Spain, and earned the nickname "Father Oprah" for his relationship advice. The Cuban-American priest was born in Puerto Rico and previously hosted shows on Telemundo. He is also a syndicated Spanish-language columnist and author of the book "Real Life, Real Love: 7 Paths to a Strong, Lasting Relationship." Cutie told CBS he has been romantically involved with the woman in the photos for about two years after being friends for much longer. He said he is still deciding whether to leave the clergy and get married. "I'm now in the process of thinking about all those things, of making decisions," Cutie said. "And my bishop has given me the time to think about it. This is a difficult time. It's a time of transition, it's a time of thinking about the future." "I believe that I've fallen in love and I believe that I've struggled with that, between my love for God, and my love for the Church and my love for service," Cutie said. He appeared on CBS wearing a suit jacket and white shirt, not his priest collar. Last week, more than one hundred people gathered outside St. Francis de Sales parish in Miami Beach, waving posters and chanting their forgiveness for Cutie. "I think we all have ideals and we have ways of living," Cutie said on CBS. "We want to do things right, but sometimes we fall short. And I fell short."
 
John Feffer: Give Me Abolition...But Not Yet Top
St. Augustine fooled around a lot as a young man. At one point during his philandering, according to his Confessions, the future Church Father uttered the immortal lines: "Give me chastity. But not yet." President Obama has taken a very Augustinian approach to nuclear weapons. He has identified a desired goal. But at the same time, he's reluctant to give up old habits. "Give me nuclear abolition," Obama proclaims in public. With his day-to-day policies, however, the president is conveying a slightly different message: "But not yet." Let's start with the declaration of faith. One of the great moments of the Obama administration's first 100 days was the president's speech in Prague on nuclear policy. "Today, I state clearly and with conviction America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons," he proclaimed . At the recent confab in New York to prepare for next year's Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review, Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller reiterated the administration's support for Senate ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and a new fissile material cutoff treaty, steps on the road to abolition. Obama is no peace activist. Like Henry Kissinger and George P. Shultz in their much-cited Wall Street Journal essay , Obama comes to the nuclear abolition agenda through realpolitik calculations. Accordingly, the great nuclear threat today isnt the arsenals that Moscow or Beijing control. The greatest risk is nuclear proliferation: the Taliban with ICBMs, al-Qaeda with a suitcase bomb. The more nukes in the world, the greater likelihood that they might fall into the "wrong" hands (though frankly, the fact that the nuclear football was in the "right" hands of such quarterbacks as George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan makes me think we're just lucky they never decided to throw a bomb into the opposing team's end zone). This risk of proliferation has made abolitionists out of the sternest of Cold Warriors. Not everyone is on the abolition bandwagon. Some remain wedded to the notion that nuclear weapons have made war less likely and that drastic reductions in the Russian and U.S. arsenals will make any given nuclear weapon that much more powerful and desirable. Meanwhile, Michael Krepon, in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs , argues that the nuclear threat has been "greatly exaggerated" and we should carry on with the same policies - "containment, diplomacy, deterrence, conventional military strength, and arms control agreements" - that prevented nuclear war during the Cold War. After the defections of Shultz and Kissinger, many defense intellectuals who made their living off of Cold War theorizing are digging in their heels. They reject abolition as dangerously destabilizing and prefer the more reassuring pace of arms control treaties that limit but don't eliminate nuclear weapons. And, just to make sure, they prefer that the United States hedge its nuclear bet by pushing ahead with such projects as missile defense and modernization of the nuclear complex. The influence of these Cold War diehards can be detected in the latest Department of Energy budget: a whopping $6.4 billion for the National Nuclear Security Administration. "A $6 billion-plus budget for moving forward on nuclear weapons research and development while negotiating for nuclear nonproliferation and pledging a nuclear-weapons-free world sends mixed signals to allies, provides political cover to adversaries, and makes it more difficult to persuade Iran and North Korea to roll back their nuclear programs," writes Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF) columnist Frida Berrigan in The News on Nukes . Obama isn't the only leader who waxes Augustinian in his commitment to nuclear abstinence. Kim Jong Il has devoted enormous resources to a nuclear program that has functioned as both deterrent and bargaining chip. Recently, after the United States managed to push through a UN Security Council statement condemning North Korea's April rocket launch, Pyongyang kicked out international nuclear inspectors, announced that the Six Party Talks have been a waste of time, and signaled that a second nuclear test may be in the offing. Just back from a trip to Pyongyang, FPIF contributor Gyorgy Toloraya explains that North Korea's recent actions aren't mere truculence. The leadership is holding on to its nuclear weapons because it feels poorly treated in the recent negotiations. "They did not come much closer to getting substantial security guarantees, and even the largely symbolic 'delisting' of North Korea as a terrorist state caused much controversy in the United States and elsewhere, and led to demands for new concessions from it in return," Toloraya writes in The New Korean Cold War . "North Koreans saw that as a breach of trust. Modest economic assistance was indeed promised when the accord was sealed, but only Russia carried out its obligations (200,000 tons of heavy oil), while other countries either totally abstained (Japan) or dragged their feet. North Korea felt that its concessions were not fully recognized and valued." The Obama administration's commitment to nuclear abolition is laudable and so are the concrete steps it has pledged toward that goal. But the new president has to make a much cleaner break with the past. The United States must engage in substantive negotiations with North Korea - and Iran - that provide a real deal that can substitute for denial of membership in the nuclear club. And the Obama administration shouldn't continue to lavish money on researching and building the very weapons it's negotiating away in talks with the Russians. Nor should the United States substitute for any nuclear arms reductions with a spike in other offensive capabilities. "Military superiority would be an insurmountable obstacle to ridding the world of nuclear weapons," Mikhail Gorbachev argued recently . "Unless we discuss demilitarization of international politics, the reduction of military budgets, preventing militarization of outer space, talking about a nuclear-free world will be just rhetorical." It's a great relief that, after eight years of irresponsible nuclear policies in Washington, arms control is back on the agenda. Even more reassuring, the Obama administration has uttered the previously taboo word: abolition. We have to keep up the pressure on the president to resist Augustinian loopholes. When it comes to nukes, it's time to just say no. Crossposted from Foreign Policy In Focus . To subscribe to FPIF's World Beat, click here . More on North Korea
 
Women Helping Women: Former Prostitute Helps Others Quit The Game Top
Late one Friday afternoon, a car pulled up to Jackie McReynolds on a busy city street. Three men forced her inside and drove her to an alley, where they punched, choked and raped her. That day in 1987, McReynolds started thinking about leaving the prostitution business, which she did four years later. "I thought I was going to die right then and there," she said. McReynolds, 50, still prowls the streets, only she hopes to help women who are following the same destructive path that defined her life for so many years. She tempts those who have been arrested with this offer: Spend four months with her, interning and learning life skills, for the chance to avoid up to six months in jail. More on The Giving Life
 
Rob Perks: EPA Taking Over Cleanup of Tennessee Coal Ash Disaster Top
A Tennessee town's sad saga may take a turn for the better now that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has decided to take control over the cleanup of the worst coal pollution disaster in U.S. history .  Last December, a waste pond filled with 50 years worth of liquified coal ash waste at the Tennessee Valley Authority's Kingston Fossil Plant ruptured, polluting the Emory River and covering hundreds of acres downstream with a billion plus gallons of contaminated coal sludge.  Yesterday EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson announced that her agency will be "bringing to bear its resources and expertise" to oversee the cleanup of the massive coal ash spill.  EPA had been advising TVA and state authorities on disaster response but decided to exert federal authority to ensure that the cleanup will "get the job done for the people in Roane County and downriver communities," according to the agency's statement.   "EPA will work with TVA and Tennessee to ensure that the cleanup of the site is comprehensive, based on sound scientific and ecological principles, moves as quickly as possible, and complies with all Federal and State environmental standards," said EPA Acting Regional Administrator Stan Meiburg. "Protection of public health and safety remains a primary concern, along with the long-term ecological health of the Emory and Clinch Rivers." The EPA will require that TVA remove all coal ash from the river and surrounding areas, in compliance with federal Superfund standards.  According to EPA, the spilled coal ash is contaminated with arsenic, cadmium, chromium, copper, lead, mercury, nickel, selenium and zinc -- all are hazardous substances as defined under Superfund.  (In March, NRDC issued a report on the amount and toxicity of coal ash waste at coal plants around the country.)   The disposal of the coal must meet the same level of protective standards set for landfills, which requires synthetic liners, leachate collection systems and groundwater monitoring.  In addition, TVA must provide $50,000 so the community can hire an independent technical expert to review complex technical documents in order to facilitate public involvement. This is yet another example of the Obama EPA taking responsible action to return the agency to its core mission, that of protecting America's natural resources and safeguarding public health.  In the wake of the Kingston spill, the Obama administration announced its intention to comprehensively inventory sites storing coal ash waste in liquid form and to propose federal regulations to ensure that coal waste is disposed of safely.  The next step is for EPA to finally regulate the disposal of dangerous waste from the nation's coal-fired power plants to ensure that no community in America experiences a disaster like the one that destroyed the quality of life for the residents of Roane County, Tennessee. This post originally appeared on NRDC's Switchboard blog . More on Energy
 
Tim Ferriss: Measuring Social Media Campaigns: A Philanthropic Case Study Top
Bueller? Bueller? Quantifying results need not be boring. Keep it simple to keep it interesting... and actionable. (photo: foundphotoslj ) Have you really seen ROI from Social Media? Social media marketing! Twitter consultancies! Conversational communications! Oh, these are exciting times. It seems like everyone and their grandma are getting into social media. On a whole, I think this is a good thing, but here's the problem: whenever technology becomes fashion, return-on-investment (ROI) tends to get lost in the excitement of the latest .com catwalk. It's going to help "the brand"? Show me data. It's going to drive more "awareness"? Define it, isolate it, and translate it into a sales increase. In this post, we'll look at some real numbers (total capital, conversions, redemptions, etc.) from my latest educational non-profit campaign, the Twitter-based Tweet to Beat , which was a follow-up to the blog and leaderboard-based LitLiberation campaign , which outraised Stephen Colbert 3-to-1 with no staff and no material hard costs... My hope is that more non-profits and hybrids (like the impressive Tom's Shoes ) will share their best practices and experimental findings so that everyone can benefit. Here was the basic pitch from the original post : The gist: To benefit U.S. public school students, I will bribe the entire world to follow me on Twitter for $3 each. For every new Twitter follower in the next two weeks, I will donate $1 to DonorsChoose.org , and an anonymous supporter will match $2, for a total of $3 to U.S. public school classrooms per follower. For now, the matching limit is tentatively capped at 50,000 new followers, though I'm open to increasing it later. 50,000 new followers would mean $150,000 to U.S. public school education, and I hope to double or triple this total with a few twists. The goal is directly helping 25,000 U.S. public school students in low-income and high-need areas in two weeks . This timeline is half the time dedicated to LitLiberation. My current follower count is, at the time of this writing, 22,782, so we'll round down and begin the count at 22,500. How many followers did I get (hint: about 17/hour), and how much was raised? We'll get there, but let's start with the fundamentals. First, Fundamentals and Hypotheses I run experiments for one of two reasons: 1) to produce results I feel comfortable predicting, or 2) to gather data and findings I can then (hopefully) incorporate into follow-up experiments. Let's call the latter an "investigative campaign." Tweet to Beat was an investigative campaign, as I was less comfortable with large-scale predictions about Twitter user behavior. I have mountains of data and replicable outcomes from the blog, but I did not have either for any micro-blogging platforms. That said, it is important to begin with a hypothesis or hypotheses (predictions) that you will test. Why? Because backwards correlation is bad science. If you gather enough data and measure enough variables, you will inevitably find chance correlations that you -- in lieu of predefined hypotheses -- will want to label as causal ("A causes B," when these are coincidental). For more in-depth discussions of proper study design and fascinating phenomena like negative publication bias, I highly recommended Bad Science by Ben Goldacre . Decide what you're testing upfront (e.g., "If A, then B") so you don't succumb to wishful thinking and forced causation. This is also true for online analytics. For Tweet to Beat, there were just a few assumptions I wanted to test: 1) If I redistribute monies raised, it will increase the per-person donation amount. In other words, if each person helps raise an average of $3 and I return that $3 to each person in the form of a coupon, some percentage of those donors will give more than $3 when the coupons are redeemed. 2) This can be done at close to zero cost. Tweet to Beat was done in partnership with DonorsChoose.org (DC), just as LitLiberation was done in partnership with DC and Room to Read . Since their labor costs aren't zero, the value of the campaign (whether in amount raised or actionable data) cannot be less than the ROI from investing time in other fundraising or activities. 3) People will participate more if just a single click is required. LitLiberation required fundraising or donations, whereas Tweet to Beat would require nothing more than clicking on "follow" in Twitter. The Findings Ultimately, the Twitter follower count increased from the 22,500 starting mark to 31,739, for a total follower increase of 9,237 in two weeks. The total donation (x $3 per new follower) is then $27,717 . Therefore, the third hypothesis about more engagement with less required action does not appear valid; at least, it is not independently sufficient to overcome other variables that might cause resistance. So what about increased yield from distributing donations to donors themselves? The announcement of the coupon redistribution was saved for a second-wind PR effort, as I've found phased announcements to increase yield at least 10% in the past with third parties. In post titled " Upping the Ante ," the campaign was also extended by one week and bonuses totaling $168 in value were offered to all followers ( DropBox , RescueTime , and PhoneTag ). The coupons were distributed simply: 1) Twitter followers were notified of a link via a protected update. 2) Interested followers clicked on the shortened URL, which took them to a Google Form asking for their e-mail address, to which the coupon code would be sent. The Google Form took 60 seconds to set up and is free. Google Forms: Simple and Free 3) DonorsChoose automatically generated as many codes as needed and emailed out welcome letters to each donor, including their coupon code and a link to a Project Page where they could apply it to the classroom project of their choice . 4) Donors were shown via screenshots how to use Facebook Connect to share their donation with friends via Facebook status update. There were two batches of e-mail coupons sent out. The first was a link to a $3 coupon, available to approximately 30,000 followers, while the second was a link to a $12 coupon, available to just the first 1,000 takers. Batch 1 (Wed. 3/25, 4pm EST, $3 Giving Codes) To 30,000 Followers, Open to All Total Sign-ups (coupons sent via e-mail): 1,108 ( 3.69% conversion ) Total Redeemed: 666 ( ~60% redemption ) Total Donated: $1998 4 day expiration (March 25 - 29th; Wed. - Sun.) Batch 2 (Fri. 3/27, 6pm EST, $12 Giving Codes) To 30,000+ Followers, First 1,000 Respondents Total Sign-ups (coupons sent via e-mail): 583 ( 1.94% conversion ) Total Redeemed: 352 ( ~60% redemption ) Total Donated: $4224 4 day expiration (March 27 - 30th ; Fri. - Mon.) The below block quotes, and all block quotes from this point forward in this post, are from DonorsChoose with some edits for space: Total Dollars Allocated by Tim Ferriss' Twitter Followers in the Tweet to Beat Challenge: $6222 (FYI: this is higher than the number on the project page -- $5821 -- because some of the participants may not have redeemed directly via this Giving Page ). But how much more did TweetToBeat redeemers spend in addition to their GivingCards? Total to date: $1868.34 Thus... Grand Total Dollars Allocated by Tim Ferriss' Twitter Followers in the Tweet to Beat Challenge: $8090.34 The below spreadsheet offers a bit more granularity on how many people decided to add onto their donations and the average size of donations by GivingCard denomination. Click here for a larger version. This is the eureka data set I was looking for. Things to note: -The % of $3 donors who gave more than coupon value was higher than those in the $12 donor group. -The average donation amount for those who added was greater in the $3 group than in the $12 group: $37.65 vs. $36.72. Keep in mind that the additional differential from the $3 group ($12-3 = +$8) makes the average amount $34.65 above par vs. $24.72 for the $12 group. -In sum, based on this limited sample size, we were able to increase total donations 30% ($6,221.66 --> $8,090.34) simply by distributing the amount raised back to supporters vs. writing a check to DonorsChoose directly. What this means: enable your supports to "recycle" what you raise and give directly, and you could add 30 cents to every dollar you've already raised. There are no doubt problems with the data, like the limited sample size, different days of the week for mailings, and our inability to isolate outliers or measure overlap between the $3 and $12 groups, but this preliminary data is both counterintuitive and testable. If you want to throw caution to the wind, as the downside is next to nothing if you automate coupons, it's actionable. The best part is that this ROI is based on one campaign and not Lifetime Value of each new registered donor. If we factor in the below from DonorsChoose, we see that getting $1.30 for each $1 distributed could well be a minimum assumption, with $2 - 2.60 ROI for each dollar distributed on the high end. Doing these calculations is as important for for-profits as it is for non-profits, of course. Determining your "contained" LV over 3 or 6 months, for example, helps determine what you can spend to acquire each customer while still remaining profitable. On Lifetime Value (LV or LTV): Unfortunately, we don't have a ton of historic data around LTV since we've just recently begun capturing these figures. That said, a recent analysis which sought to look at class of donors to determine how much the group would donate in subsequent years, suggests an appropriate multiplier that we could use for this case. This conservative multiplier would be 2. Obviously, there are some outliers like donors who give large sums of money, but our data suggests this is pretty close. Ex. If an average class of donors gave $100K in year 1, we can expect them to give $200K in ALL their subsequent years (~5-10 yrs) as a donor. While this doesn't necessarily equate to what the average 'individual' donor would give, it does give us a general benchmark with which we can guesstimate LTV. Also note that the time frame that we're using 5-10 yrs is based on where the data is trending towards, but not 100% exact since we've been in existence for less than 10 years. In Summary, from DonorsChoose: In terms of takeaways, I think this was a huge success for a number of reasons in addition to funds raised: 1) We acquired 300+ followers (~42% of our total followers) over the course of the campaign (from when it first launched to when the last batch of codes were mailed), lending mounds of exposure to our very nascent Twitter account 2) Even two weeks after the campaigns conclusion, your fans are still talking about it . [Note from Tim: Thank you to Jonathan Hinson for setting up this tracking page for T2B -- as another data point for building Twitter followings, it shows my current follower add rate to be 17 per hour and my current Qwitter rate as 7 per hour, for a net gain of 12 new followers per hour. From Jonathan Hinson's Tweet to Beat Mash-up Areas for improvement: 1) We should brainstorm further internally about how we can allocate deliverables quickly for campaigns over social networks. These are a lot more fast-paced than the Blogger Challenge and there was a sense of immediacy that we were not 100% prepared for. 2) We should have implemented an official hashtag from the outset (like #tweet2beat) for this campaign so as to widely broadcast it in the Twitter community (i.e., trending topic). Bottom line: I think we were all really pleased by the results and are anxious to do something similar on Twitter in the near future. We've already been talking about using Twitter as part of our social media strategy for our upcoming "Give-Back" Birthday Campaign [From Tim: read more about this
 
Dan Agin: Alzheimer's Disease and Darwinian Evolution: Is There a Connection? Top
A few years ago, a research group headed by William Seeley at the University of California San Francisco published an intriguing report of autopsy-histology analysis of the brains of 12 patients with dementia: 5 patients with frontotemporal dementia, 7 patients with Alzheimer's disease, and 7 non-neurological control subjects. (Ann. Neurol. 2006 60:660). Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) is a neurodegenerative dementia caused by neuron loss in various regions of the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain. FTD is usually first recognized in people in the their 60s, and of people under 65 FTD has about the same prevalence as Alzheimer's disease (AD). What the Seeley group reported was that FTD is apparently associated with degeneration of a specific type of nerve cell (von Economo neurons) unique to great apes and humans and more abundant in humans than in apes. Also, loss of these neurons occurs in FTD but not in AD. Like the frontal lobes in general, in addition to appearing late in evolution, von Economo neurons (named after the anatomist who discovered them) also mature late in development: they appear mainly after birth and achieve their maximum numbers at about 4 years of age. The idea that neurodegenerative dementia may have something to do with evolution is not new. More than 20 years ago, Stanley Rapoport of the National Institutes of Health suggested that Alzheimer's disease is a human phylogenetic disease, and that diseases such as AD and Down syndrome involve pathological changes in the specific genes, whatever they may be, responsible for the rapid evolution of the human brain (Med. Hypoth. 1989 29:147). More recently, only a few months ago, the Swiss neuroscientist Joseph Ghika presented a detailed analysis (including 274 references) in which he concludes that neurodegenerative diseases are age-related diseases of specific brain regions recently developed in humans via Darwinian evolution. The general idea is that the mechanisms responsible for the rapid recent evolutionary development of the human brain are new and therefore maybe more vulnerable to disease processes than older parts of the brain. What Ghika has done is make an admirable synthesis by gathering evidence of the past several decades to amplify and extend Rapoport's old conjecture about Alzheimer's disease. Ghika makes the extension to 16 different kinds of neurodegenerative syndromes--all related to recently evolved regions of the nervous system. In conclusion, Ghika calls for a change in the way we think of neurodegenerative diseases. In science, we call this potentially "hot stuff"--a new way to look at an old problem. New ways to look at old problems are among the most forceful engines to move science forward. One of the ideas floating around for many generations is that dementia diseases of old age are simply a consequence of the brain wearing out and breaking down. The idea of preventing such a breakdown seems at best daunting and at worst ridiculous. But now comes a new idea: the breakdown of mechanisms in the various neurodegenerative diseases are specific and not general--and the idea that vulnerabilities due to rapid evolution are involved may give us specific places and mechanisms to look at. If this new idea about neurodegenerative diseases pans out, it may make the problem of prevention more tractable. It won't happen tomorrow, but we seem to be moving forward. P.S. I don't know what the HBO Alzheimer's documentary will tell us tonight about this new idea. I do hope they cover it.
 
China's Sichuan Quake Anniversary Marked By Punk Rock (VIDEO) Top
Josh Chin | Global Post CHENGDU, China -- Nearly a year after her sister died in the earthquake that devastated rural Sichuan, Li Minhui found herself standing on a field of ruined sod outside the Sichuan provincial capital of Chengdu, witness to yet another ground-shaking event. This one, though, was man-made. "Music like this is for young people!" shouted Li, 40, as she squinted across the field to a stage where a Californian rock band, Army of Freshman, was treating a mob of eager Chinese teens and 20-somethings to wave after wave of concussive pop-punk. "But I think I'm starting to like it!" The Zebra Music Festival was one of three multi-day rock shows held in China over the Labor Day holiday this year. In addition to a few foreign acts, the festival featured a who's-who of Chinese underground bands and attracted more than 100,000 spectators, making it one of the largest rock festivals the country has ever seen. More notable, however, was the presence there of people like Li. A former migrant worker from Jiulong township, in Mianzhu County, Li made the two-hour journey to the festival to sell handicrafts -- in her case, animal figurines made of strung-together beads -- and cups of home-brewed rice wine out of a tent set up near the main stage by the Beijing Cultural Development Center for Rural Women. The BCDCRW, Rural Women for short, was just one of a battery of NGOs invited to participate in what organizers described as China's first ever "consciousness-raising" rock festival. The effort to promote civic-mindedness has long been a daunting one in China, where an obsession with material wealth and strict management of good works by the government has created conditions ripe for indifference -- especially amongst the country's increasingly comfortable middle-class youth. But recently things have started to change, some NGO workers and social activists say. For that, many credit the event that robbed Li of her sister. The Sichuan earthquake, which struck May 12, 2008, attracted millions of dollars in individual donations and prompted an unprecedented flood of volunteerism. The tragedy has since been widely described a watershed for civil society in China that improved the status of NGOs in the eyes of the government and mobilized members of the supposedly immobile "post-80s" and "post-90s" generations. According to Scarlet Li, CEO of Zebra Media, plans were already in the works to hold a major festival, but the earthquake convinced her to shift its focus. "After the earthquake catastrophe, to see the reactions of the youth in China, I was shocked," Li (no relation to Li Minhui) said as the festival was revving up. "I think, deep in their hearts, a lot of Chinese young people do have a sense of social responsibility, but for some reason, before, they didn't have ways of expressing it." The festival was held in a brand new 3,500-acre park in Chengdu's northeastern suburbs with sod laid down just days before. The main stage was a 25,000-square foot behemoth manned by visual effects technicians flown in from Hong Kong. Flat surfaces everywhere were plastered with signs proclaiming the festival's slogan: "I Care." Li said her goal was to create a Chinese version of the U.K.'s legendary Glastonbury, and the festival did end up, in some respects, resembling its model. There was a frantic human crush along the fencing in front of the main stage, the occasional Mohawk or dreadlocks sighting, and (on the first day) the hint of a flirtation with mud. Seventeen local and international NGOs sent representatives to set up booths, including heavy-hitters like the World Wild Life Fund for Nature (WWF) and Oxfam. One of the most successful NGOs at the festival, judged by sheer number of visitors, was a Chinese all-volunteer group called 1 KG More that had set up a booth offering festival-goers a chance to buy children's books to donate to schools in the earthquake zone. Each book cost less than $3 and came with matching numbered bracelets so the buyers could keep in touch with students who benefited from the donation. Of the 17 boxes of books the group had brought with them, only four were left midway through the second day. "We're not forcing you do to do anything," explained the group's spokesman, a 22-year-old college junior who wanted to be known as Lu Cha ("Green Tea"). "All you do is buy a book. The idea here is freedom." Still, 1 KG More had limited success reaching the festival's target group: Most of its book buyers, Lu Cha said, were parents with young children. Drinking a bottle of baijiu at the skewer stand by the DJ stage, He Long, 23, a local college student, said he wasn't surprised. "Rock music is a form of catharsis," he said, shaking his head at the festival's slogan as he sipped from his bottle. "When you come to an event like this, you don't want to think about social problems. Happiness is the most important thing." Li Erni, a 23 year-old from Chengdu who was selling homemade cards in the craft section near the entrance, was slightly more analytical. "In our parents' days, the economy was still developing, so people cared about finding enough to eat, a house, clothes. We care, too, but what we care about is enjoying life." One NGO that had some success with the festival's core audience was Aibai, a center for GLBT youth and HIV-awareness in Chengdu, which was giving away condoms printed with HIV-prevention messages. "People here really don't know much about HIV, how you can catch it, how you can avoid it," said Liao Rujun, a 22-year-old public health major at Sichuan University who was volunteering with the group. According to one of the Aibai employees, 20 percent more people were willing to accept condoms at the Zebra Fest than at the group's other promotional events, which often involve rural residents. But Aibai was also an example of the limitations the NGOs faced at Zebra -- and in China generally. Jiang Hua, director of Aibai's Chengdu branch, said a certain amount of self-censorship was the price of entry to the Zebra Fest. "From the start, the organizing committee asked us not to emphasize gay issues, so we decided to focus on HIV and gender-equality instead." The Zebra Fest was partly funded by the Chengdu government, and involved the participation of state-run media. Li said Zebra's relationship with Chengdu officials was good. "Often publicity departments get very nervous about these things, but this time, they were very very relaxed. It's because I told them, music lovers are not political animals, they like to listen to music." The level of support the city gave the festival was evident not just in the funding. According to a top official at the Poly Group Chengdu, the developer of the park where the festival was held, city officials pressed the developer to rush its work so the park would be ready in time for the event. While the true definition of civil society does not admit government involvement, NGOs in China and those who would promote them appear to have no choice but to accept it. "It's a sort of compromised civil society, but one that makes sense in China," said Tom Gold, a UC Berkeley sociologist who has studied the development of civil society in China for much of the past two decades. Liu Daqing, director of the Rural Women program that brought Li Minhui to the festival, was optimistic the position of NGOs would continue to improve on the strength of new interest generated by the earthquake and "improved communication" with the government in the months since. "2008 was year zero for NGOs in China," she says. "People have developed a consciousness of their responsibilities towards others." The people at Aibai, meanwhile, were content to work around the censorship by draping a nearby tree in a rainbow flag and sporting gay-themed T-shirts. "We use a lot of gay symbols so the comrades know what we're about," said Jiang, using China's slang term for homosexuals. "And the rest, well, we just educate them about HIV." Liao, the Aibai volunteer, agreed, saying the group's biggest problem was the shape of the gigantic condom suits they were wearing. "We had to make the tips extra big to fit our heads in, so some people thought we were toothpaste," she explained. "I think next year we'll have to write on a sign on them that says 'I'm a condom.'" WATCH: Read more from Global Post More on China
 
Farmer: It's Bad Farming, Not Meat, Responsible For Waste Top
It is not meat eating that is responsible for increased CO2; it is the corn/ soybean/ feedlot/ transportation system under which industrial animals are raised. When I think about the challenge of feeding northern New England, where I live, from our own resources, I cannot imagine being able to do that successfully without ruminant livestock able to convert the grasses into food.
 
David Fiderer: The Levin Report Prompts A Second Look At Other Bush-Era Whitewashes Top
When General Antonio Taguba investigated the abuses at Abu Ghraib, he soon realized that General Ricardo Sanchez, the army commander in Iraq, "knew exactly what was going on." But Taguba's report did not implicate Sanchez, because his assignment had a very limited scope. As directed by Sanchez, the inquiry was limited to the operations at the 800th Military Police Brigade, under the Brigadier General Janice Karpinski, beginning on November 1, 2003. Weeks before that date, Guantanamo commander General Geoffrey Miller made a 10-day visit to Iraq, between August 31 and September 9, 2003, when he recommended that soldiers start "GITMO-izing" interrogations at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. Five days after Miller's visit, Sanchez signed a memo authorizing interrogation techniques that violated both the Geneva conventions and the army field manual. A few weeks later, during October 2003, Miller briefed Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Under Secretary Steven Cambone as to his recommendations for interrogating civilian detainees in Iraq. Taguba's report had suggested that Miller's actions had contributed to the atmosphere of abuse at the prison. Nonetheless, following the release of the report in March 2004, Miller was brought back to Iraq to replace Karpinski and to assume control of Abu Ghraib operations. The story of Taguba's report reflects a truism applicable to every investigation: When large swaths of information are declared off limits, the resulting work product may be fatally flawed. The findings may be used as a whitewash, if not a cover-up. This truism is ignored constantly by the media, in stark contrast to the time of the Watergate hearings, when an 18-minute gap in Nixon's White House tapes was considered a very big deal. The Levin Report , which traces the culpability for torture at Abu Ghraib to Donald Rumsfeld, shows the limits of the Taguba report. (It also offers up abundant evidence that Miller obstructed justice and Rumsfeld committed perjury.) But the flaws of the Taguba report were always hiding in plain sight, and were always ignored. Consider Rumsfeld's response to the Levin Report: "To date there have been 12 major nonpartisan reports on detention operations. None of those reports concluded that there was any DoD policy or DoD officials that condoned or tolerated abuse." Exactly. As Seymour Hersh reported in The New Yorker : "A dozen government investigations have been conducted into Abu Ghraib and detainee abuse. A few of them picked up on matters raised by Taguba's report, but none followed through on the question of ultimate responsibility. Military investigators were precluded from looking into the role of Rumsfeld and other civilian leaders in the Pentagon; the result was that none found any high-level intelligence involvement in the abuse." Rumsfeld used those 12 reports as a distraction, a vehicle for deceit. He wants us to believe that his culpability had been investigated, when in fact the opposite is true. Hersh's article illustrates the defining characteristic of all major scandals, from Enron to the Holocaust. In every case, large numbers of people opt for willful blindness, looking the other way in the face of obvious signs of wrongdoing. Hersh describes a meeting with Rumsfeld during May 2004, several months after Taguba's report was completed, and weeks after the milder Abu Ghraib abuses had been broadcast on 60 Minutes : "Rumsfeld also complained about not being given the information he needed. 'Here I am,"' Taguba recalled Rumsfeld saying, 'just a Secretary of Defense, and we have not seen a copy of your report. I have not seen the photographs, and I have to testify to Congress tomorrow and talk about this.' "Taguba had submitted more than a dozen copies of his report through several channels at the Pentagon and to the Central Command headquarters, in Tampa, Florida, which ran the war in Iraq. By the time he walked into Rumsfeld's conference room, he had spent weeks briefing senior military leaders on the report, but he received no indication that any of them, with the exception of General Schoomaker, had actually read it... When Taguba urged one lieutenant general to look at the photographs, he rebuffed him, saying, 'I don't want to get involved by looking, because what do you do with that information, once you know what they show?' "Taguba also knew that senior officials in Rumsfeld's office and elsewhere in the Pentagon had been given a graphic account of the pictures from Abu Ghraib, and told of their potential strategic significance, within days of the first complaint." For his current defense, Rumsfeld uses the standard ploys invoked by conservatives for the past eight years. He invokes Bush-era investigations, which, circumscribed in their pursuit of evidence, were used to whitewash the truth. And he relies on the willful blindness of others, notably the media, who ignore the damning evidence hiding in plain sight. Other examples abound. David Brooks' defense of the Bush White House is typical: "Are they guilty of manipulating intelligence on WMD? That, I think, is the thing they are least guilty of. I think Randy Scheunemann mentioned the Robb report, which showed there was no political pressure...And there was a Senate intelligence report; there was a Butler report. There were all of these reports. None of them found manipulation of intelligence." The News Hour , November 5, 2005 Neither the Silberman-Robb Report , nor the July 2004 Senate Intelligence Report , nor the Butler report considered how the Bush administration dealt with WMD intelligence. Those reports, like the Taguba report, failed to pursue evidence going up the chain of command. Those WMD reports, like the Taguba report, sidestepped the timeframe that mattered most, beginning on March 7, 2003. Brooks invoked those reports to mislead PBS's viewers. Brooks was enabled by the willful blindness of mainstream media, which ignored the evidence of Bush's bad faith at the time of the invasion. On March 7, 2003, Hans Blix and Mohammed ElBaradei presented the U.N. inspectors' findings, which discredited the CIA intelligence submitted by Colin Powell. Did Bush try to reconcile the differences? Did he attempt to explain to Security Council members, or anyone else, why he thought the inspectors were wrong? Of course not. On March 7, 2003, the most up-to-date intelligence from the on-the-ground inspectors put Bush and the world on notice that the CIA's intelligence was faulty. Showing a reckless disregard for the truth, Bush invaded anyway. No investigation into the CIA's intelligence process could possibly ameliorate the willful blindness of the Bush administration after that date. Think about it. No one ever said, "You can't blame the captain because there were no iceberg warnings when the Titanic left Southampton." Yet on December 1, 2008, Charlie Gibson asked Bush, "If the intelligence had been right, would there have been an Iraq war?" Bush responded with an obvious and transparent lie, "Saddam Hussein was unwilling to let the inspectors go in to determine whether or not the U.N. resolutions were being upheld." Willfully blind, Gibson offered no follow up. The Levin report should remind us that most Bush-era investigations were circumscribed to preempt accountability and to serve as distractions to distort the mainstream media narrative. After the Pentagon withdrew its Bush-era report, which attempted to refute The New York Times article on the Pentagon campaign for Milli Vanilli journalism , Frank Rich reminded Rachel Maddow that many other investigative reports from the Pentagon's former inspector general were similarly tainted. But the problem extends far beyond the Pentagon. There are many other counterparts to the Taguba report, reports that were fatally flawed because critical evidence was kept off-limits, and which were used as distractions from the incriminating evidence hiding in plain sight. All of the Katrina reports fit that profile. None of the investigations were allowed access to communications among senior White House officials, Pentagon officials, DHS officials and the governors of Alabama and Mississippi. Yet Michael Chertoff's open refusal to follow the procedures of the National Response Plan, and his lies about it afterwards, were always hiding in plain sight. Lets not forget, that, so far, nothing related to Karl Rove has been adequately investigated. Rove has been implicated in scandals pertaining to the U.S. attorney firings, Jack Abramoff's bribery schemes, the smear campaign against Valerie Plame Wilson, and the prosecution of Gov. Don Siegelman. Rove consistently flouted the Presidential Records Act , sending 95% of his emails through an RNC account . There is abundant circumstantial evidence that Rove used the RNC as a criminal enterprise, as a vehicle for obstructing justice. If U.S. Attorney Nora R. Dannehy, the prosecutor investigating the U.S. attorney firings, fails to obtain access to Rove's emails, her investigation, like Taguba's, may be fatally flawed. More on Rachel Maddow
 
Adam Istvan: Standing Proud with Notre Dame Top
Controversy swirling around President Barack Obama's commencement address at the University of Notre Dame this weekend has generated more heat than light. As a Notre Dame alumnus and former student body president, I invite civil dialogue about this issue -- especially since part of our university's mission is to foster "the presence and voices of diverse scholars and students." Regrettably, those more concerned with scoring political points and stoking the flames of our nation's culture wars have attempted to thwart this proud intellectual tradition. Let's look at the facts. For decades, presidents of both political parties have come to Notre Dame as commencement speakers to address such profound issues as poverty, peace building, international affairs and human rights. When I was a student, George W. Bush visited the university. Along with many other Catholics, I found his positions on the death penalty, imprudent use of military power and contempt for international human rights treaties unconscionable. But he was the president of the United States. His visit fostered open discussion of, and free inquiry into, urgent issues of our time. Why should president Obama's visit be viewed any differently? Most students and professors at my alma mater are proud that our nation's first African-American president will speak at the graduation ceremony. Whether worshiping amid the stained-glassed beauty of Sacred Heart Basilica or studying in the scholastic silence of Hesburgh library, Notre Dame taught us the virtues of prudence and reasoned engagement with the world outside the confines of our college community. I have fond memories of my days exploring science, religion and literature in classrooms where faith and reason did not clash, but together nourished minds and hearts in the pursuit of excellence. Many of us hope that outside interest groups will not hijack this treasured heritage. Catholic teaching about the sanctity of human life is clear. As Notre Dame President Fr. John Jenkins has stated, this invitation is not an endorsement of all of President Obama's political views. Instead, it is a proper recognition of a president who is leading our nation in perilous times, and who engaged young citizens in the political process in ways unseen in a generation. President Obama has spoken eloquently about the American experience and his speech should provide a unique opportunity for students to hear personally from a committed world leader facing daunting challenges. As John Quinn, Archbishop Emeritus of San Francisco has said about President Obama's appearance, it "is in the interest of both the church and the nation if both work together in civility, honesty, and friendship for the common good where there are grave divisions, as there are on abortion." While acknowledging fundamental disagreements on issues, both the Vatican and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops sent congratulatory messages to President Obama after his election victory. Catholic Charities USA and other faith-based advocates for the poor have applauded his federal budget proposal as a welcome break from policies that favored the privileged few over the common good. The president has reached out to pro-life leaders and directed his senior staff, including the Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships, to support a range of programs that will help strengthen families and prevent abortions. When it comes to fighting for health care as a human right, compassionate immigration reform and a range of social programs that help uplift the poor, President Obama's policy priorities align with traditional Catholic values. President Obama will not have the opportunity to shake every student's hand or meet individually with each professor. But I do hope he takes some time to listen as well as speak during his visit. In the voices of students, priests and professors, the president will hear from Catholics resolute in faith, gracious in spirit and eager to engage with him about our most urgent moral and political challenges. This is the Notre Dame I remember and love. This is the ideal of a Catholic university at work in the world. The writer was the Student Body President at the University of Notre Dame in 2004-2005. More on Barack Obama
 
Obama White House Not Challenging EPA; AP Gets It Wrong Top
The AP has what looks like a blockbuster story today: "White House memo challenges EPA finding on warming." The Obama White House bashing the EPA process for regulating greenhouse gases! That's huge! Only the AP got the story completely wrong. More on Barack Obama
 
Daisy Whitney: CBS Expanding Original Web Video for New Personal Finance Site Top
Launched last month, online personal finance destination CBSMoneyWatch.com is fast increasing its video in by creating original programming and integrating more financial-related content from the CBS News and its affiliate stations, network executives say. CBS is currently building a set and studio for MoneyWatch at its 28th Street offices in New York and site's Jill Schlesinger, editor-at-large, will start producing daily segments, said Stephen Howard-Sarin, VP CBS Interactive Business Network, during an interview with Beet.TV at the CBS Interactive headquarters in San Francisco on Tuesday. The video-centric site, which features a prominent video player on the landing page, produces at least three original videos each week and adds about four to five videos to the site each day from the network's existing financial and business coverage from news programs like "The Early Show" and "The CBS Evening News." "CBS was doing this for local stations. We could tap into that," Howard-Sarin said. "We are part of a giant TV network that produces video." CBS launched the personal finance property in April as a hub for business programming for the media company. Many of the site's experts are or will be contributors to the network, stations and radio outlets. Eric Schurenberg, former managing editor of Money magazine, is the editor in chief of the site and frequent on air personality. The launch of the new multimedia business network comes during a time of tremendous economic upheaval as the country adjusts to the worst economic climate in decades. Because of that, business and financial reporting is one of the few areas in the news business that growing, according to information provided by the Radio and Television News Directors Association at its recent conference in Las Vegas. MoneyWatch.com is being heavily cross promoted by CBS Interactive and CBS TV. Daisy Whitney, Senior Producer You can find the original post on this on Beet.TV
 
Sweden Rules 'Gender-Based' Abortion Legal Top
Swedish health authorities have ruled that gender-based abortion is not illegal according to current law and can not therefore be stopped, according to a report by Sveriges Television.
 
Shahid Buttar: Bush v. Gore Rears Its Head (Part III): Souter's Resignation as an Invitation to Balance a Politicized Court Top
Any vacancy on the Supreme Court, regardless of the historical context, presents questions of monumental significance. With life tenure and the power to interpret the Constitution as requiring whatever they collectively see fit, the Court's Justices are among our nation's most powerful figures. But as observers examine potential nominees to replace the retiring Justice Souter, most have overlooked the extraordinary importance of this particular nomination. As President Obama's first opportunity to help shape the Court, his choice will determine whether the nation's jurisprudence will follow -- or instead be freed from -- the politicized grip of conservative judicial insurgents. Parts I ( The Politicization of Voting Rights ) and II ( The Triumph of Politics Over Law ) of this series reviewed the Roberts Court's recent cases affecting reproductive rights, the right to equal education, workplace discrimination, environmental protection, punitive damages, fraud liability, access to justice, and more. Across all of these judicial doctrines, what once passed for law has been usurped by an institutionally aggressive Supreme Court wielding a political agenda. In this context, the timing of Souter's resignation appears to reflect not only a brilliant man's pursuit of a simpler life, but also an invitation to the Obama Administration to boldly reshape the Court and restore its eroded legitimacy as a guardian of neutral legal principles. At a minimum, the Administration should choose a nominee who brings vision , depth , and assertiveness to the Court, "one who sets agendas, forges consensus and has a long-term vision about how to shape the law ." This article examines the timing and context of Souter's retirement, suggests criteria for his replacement, and identifies Stanford law professor Pamela Karlan and Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm as the potential nominees most suited to this historical moment. The Court's Politicized Decisions... Numerous observers have noted that among President "Bush's lasting legacies will be the politici[z]ation of democratic institutions ," including the Justice Department and the Supreme Court. Shortly before the 2008 election, The New York Times agreed that President "Bush...had a profound impact on the judiciary, reshaping it with a conservative tilt that could long outlast his administration ." Some who overlook conservative policy-making from the bench have characterized the Court as "balanced" under the leadership of Chief Judge Roberts. For instance, former Rehnquist clerk R. Ted Cruz suggests that "this is very much an almost exquisitely balanced court , with Justice Kennedy remaining at the fulcrum of most -- if not practically all -- close decisions." But a split between competing blocks of nearly equal voting strength does not establish the Court's "balance," especially since those blocks are skewed to the right. Reacting to the mid-20th century jurisprudence that expanded individual rights & liberties, Presidents Nixon and Reagan each shifted the Court sharply to the right , transforming the Court over the past 50 years. Today, four Justices practice a moderate jurisprudence lacking overarching principles, such as the fairness or opportunity norms that animated decisions like Brown v. Board , Miranda v. Arizona , and Roe v. Wade . The five Justices in today's majority actively promote a conservative political agenda, and casually discard long established precedents. Meanwhile, the constitutional tradition that proudly defined the Court in the mid-20th century has been entirely extinguished. Justice Stevens noted as much in the Parents Involved decision that in 2007 gutted Brown by striking down voluntary busing programs that school districts initiated to prevent racial isolation in schools. As he wrote then in dissent, " no Member of the Court that I joined in 1975 would have agreed with today's decision." Similarly, as Stanford law professor Pamela Karlan recently noted, Justice Souter "was not a true liberal, and he would not have been a liberal on the court of the 1960s or 1970s . But he believed in privacy and civil rights and precedents. That made him a liberal on the court today." ...Raising Tensions on the Bench As the Court slid to the right over the past generation, the depth of the Court's division also deepened and may now be unprecedented. After Roberts and Alito were appointed in 2006, the right-wing majority undermined individual rights & liberties and defended corporations even more aggressively than it had under Rehnquist. More experienced Justices reacted with concern , indicated through the frequency, assertiveness and tone of their dissenting opinions, as well as the previously rare practice of reading them from the bench . In the 2008 Heller case, conservatives conjured a novel reading of the 2nd Amendment never before accepted in our nation's 230-year history. Justices Stevens and Scalia traded sharp barbs in their competing opinions : Scalia likened Stevens to "a mad hatter" and accused him of "flatly misread[ing] the historical record," while Stevens argued that Scalia's approach was "feeble," as well as "strained and unpersuasive," and "fundamentally failed to grasp the point" of rudimentary analytical principles. Roberts & Alito sparked the most recent the escalation when they joined the bench in 2006. Linda Greenhouse of The New York Times wrote at the end of their first Term that " members of the court...gave voice to their frustration and pique with colleagues who did not see things their way." Their full year on the bench found moderate Justices voicing extraordinary dissent in several cases. Justice Breyer read his dissent in Parents Involved from the bench for nearly half an hour, presenting the functional effect of the majority's 2007 decision as betraying the "promise of Brown ." The same year, Justice Ginsburg followed suit in two cases that restricted women's rights: Carhart , which " circumruled " Roe by forcing women to carry pregnancies to term even when doing so could threaten their health; and Ledbetter , which limited relief for women subjected to pay discrimination in the workplace. Challenging the biased and pejorative language pervading Justice Kennedy's controversial analysis in Carhart , Justice Ginsburg observed that " [t]he Court's hostility to the right Roe ...secured is not concealed ." Justice Ginsburg's forcefulness, according to Marcia Greenberger, was " a signal of how alarming she found the majority decision....[H]ow unusual it was for her to [read a dissent from the bench], let alone twice in such a short period of time....She sounded the alarm, but all in America need to hear it." Justice Souter's resignation may represent a second source now sounding the same alarm. He was reportedly disillusioned after Bush v. Gore, and " visibly angry" during an oral argument last month in a case that could potentially witness the most significant portions of the Voting Rights Act being struck down as unconstitutional. The departing Justice may have resigned for the sake of institutional fidelity, to make space for the kind of jurist able to resist the Court's conservative majority. Aspiring Towards an Assertive Appointment The resignation of David Souter will do little to reduce tensions between the Court's judicial moderates and its conservative majority. But Souter's replacement could have an enormous impact on the Court in other ways -- if the nominee holds a strong vision of the law and the tools to express it in compelling terms. A nominee in Souter's moderate mold would disappear quickly into the footnotes of history. Casting the same votes as would Souter, without mounting a meaningful challenge to the conservative majority's jurisprudence, he or she also would fail to capture the interest of civil society or inspire lay observers to care about the legal system. In contrast, an assertive progressive visionary could transform the Court over time. First, a Justice able to articulate a compelling overarching vision of the law -- which the moderates lack -- could lay a foundation in dissenting and concurring opinions for future rulings to cite. Moreover, someone able to translate the arcane world of legal theory into accessible, memorable, and ideally even entertaining opinions could engage civil society and lay observers in the Court's otherwise inaccessible work. Translating the law in this way has transformed the Court before: Justice Scalia has done so adeptly and is an apt model to emulate. When he first joined the Court in 1986, his arguments were often viewed as extreme, untenable expressions of conservative judicial fancy. But Scalia's strident and often witty opinions achieved several ends. First, Scalia built a textual trail in his dissenting opinions, which later Justices who shared his vision were able to cite in support of their own arguments. Second, as a leading light of the conservative movement, he captured the attention of lay conservative activists who, in various ways, helped promote his vision of the law. Some called their Senators demanding support for conservative circuit court nominees, who in turn either issued rulings that Scalia could uphold on appeal or, in some cases, ultimately joined him on the bench. Other activists reinforced Scalia's legal theories in the academy, slowly shifting the legal culture through scholarship and lectures. Some promoted legislation in their towns and states to force contested social questions into the courts, leveraging the presence of their judicial allies on the bench. And the direct actionistas of the political right took to the streets, for instance, by parading at public gatherings with gruesome images of abortions to build opposition to fundamental reproductive rights. President Obama's nominee will either stride onto the Supreme Court and begin laying a foundation for the recovery of law as a neutral institution, or capitulate to the right-wing judicial revolution of the last generation. Judges vs. Justices The ideal nominee to replace Souter would, like Scalia (before his 1982 appointment to the D.C. Circuit), come from the legal academy. Roberts has noted with praise that, "for the first time in its history, every member of the Court was a federal court of appeals judge before joining the Court...." But the lack of experiential diversity on the bench is not worthy of praise. Judges today are hardly known for the "empathy" of which President Obama has spoken highly. Observers have noted the President's "disdain for formalism , the idea...that law can be decided independent of the political and social context in which it is applied." A competing functionalist legal paradigm, focused on the impact of rulings on the parties and interests before the Court, has a long and proud history in the law but has fallen out of favor over the past generation. A Justice whose philosophy remains untainted by years of applying laws based on an outmoded formalist model would be best positioned to articulate a new alternative, even one building on well-established historical roots. In addition, many of our nation's brightest legal lights evaded lower courts on their path to the Court. Justices Earl Warren and Sandra Day O'Connor both joined the bench only after successful political careers. While politicians are not necessarily known for empathy, either, they at least hear regularly from real people about their concerns. Legal academics -- especially those who actively champion social causes -- share many of those same concerns themselves, and also interact constantly with young people. The President, of course, was an engaged legal academic before embarking on his career in politics, and as a hands-on participant in the selection process for Souter's replacement, can presumably relate to potential nominees from either arena. In contrast, appellate judges are removed from society, unfamiliar with daily life on the ground, and therefore especially unqualified to resolve our nation's most pressing disputes. The Ideal Nominee At this point, the President's preferences among Souter's potential replacements are inscrutable. Without statements indicating his perspective of the nomination, few indicators are more relevant than President Obama's own assertiveness on other issues. Unfortunately, that measure offers cause for concern. As an example, whether the President remains committed to restoring the Rule of Law has grown unclear. His Administration continues to maintain the secrecy of FBI policies that mandate racial & religious profiling . And the President remains reluctant to hold his predecessors accountable for torture and war crimes. Each decision suggests a hesitance to wield the President's formidable political capital. If the Administration proceeds with equal caution when choosing a nominee, it will decide upon a moderate, allowing conservatives to continue to dominate the Court. But
 
Foreign Aid, Arms Shipped By Same Firms: Report Top
UNITED NATIONS, May 12 (IPS) - The military conflicts raging across Africa, Asia and Latin America have been significantly influenced by the heavy flow of illicit small arms, cocaine and rich minerals. But, ironically, some of the air cargo companies involved in these profitable - and politically destabilising - smuggling operations are also delivering humanitarian aid and supporting peacekeeping operations, according to a new report released Tuesday by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). In some cases, these companies are delivering both aid and weapons to the same conflict zones, including in countries such as Sudan, Somalia, Liberia, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Guinea-Bissau. The 70-page detailed report reveals that 90 percent of the air cargo companies identified in arms trafficking-related reports have also been used by major U.N. agencies, the European Union (EU), members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), defence contractors and some of the world's leading non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to transport humanitarian aid, peacekeepers and peacekeeping equipment. The report, titled 'Air Transport and Destabilizing Commodity Flows,' points out that some U.N. missions have continued to contract aviation services from companies that have been named in Security Council reports for wholly illicit arms movement and have been recommended by the United Nations for a complete aviation ban. Co-authored by Hugh Griffiths and Mark Bromley, the study cites several such cases, including the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Sudan which has continued to use Badr Airlines even after the Security Council recommended an aviation ban for violating a U.N. arms embargo. The U.N. children's agency UNICEF and the International Medical Corps have been cited for using the services of Juba Air Cargo after the operator had been documented by the United Nations as violating its arms embargo. The clients listed by Juba Air Cargo also include the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP), the U.N. Office of Project Services (UNOPS), the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the International Committee of the Red Cross, Concern Worldwide, Action Centre la Faim and the Swedish Free Mission. Additionally, Ababeel Aviation holds contracts with U.N. agencies such as the World Health Organisation (WHO) even though the operator has been accused of violating U.N. arms embargoes. Asked what role the United Nations could play in preventing such anomalies, Griffiths told IPS: "The U.N. is not very good at policing its backyard. There is a need for an independent institute to do this effectively." He also said the United Nations should cooperate with the EU in order to solve the problem and also attend an upcoming expert meeting in Brussels on May 14. The SIPRI report shows how air cargo carriers involved in humanitarian aid and peacekeeping operations have also transported a range of other conflict-sensitive goods such as cocaine, diamonds, coltan and other precious minerals. Bromley, a co-author of the report, told IPS the United Nations has an important role to play, but the EU has a unified stance on this matter and has explicitly recognised the problems of air cargo carriers transporting arms in their framework control strategy against the illicit smuggling of small arms and light weapons (SALW). "The U.N. framework SALW control document (2001) and the Programme of Action does not make any reference to transport and does not recognize air cargo carriers as a problem," he added. Asked for a response from the United Nations, U.N. Associate Spokesman Farhan Haq told IPS that none of the air operators cited in the SIPRI report are registered as "bona fide" air carriers by the U.N. Department of Field Support (DFS). "That means they're not listed flight vendors by the U.N. Secretariat," Haq said. And thus, they cannot, and have not been commercially contracted by DFS for long-term charter in peacekeeping operations, he added. In terms of how DFS goes about contracting flight vendors, Haq explained that the department has a Quality Assurance Programme, which involves potential flight vendors having to go through a pre-qualification process for registration as flight vendors, followed by an on-site inspection of the prospective air operator. "These are done to ensure that any air carriers under U.N. sanctions are not considered for registration/operations with the United Nations," he said. As part of the ongoing process of enhancing safety, quality and the security of U.N. aviation operations, both DFS and the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (along with the World Food Programme and the International Civil Aviation Organisation in advisory roles), have established an Aviation Technical Advisory Group (ATAG) comprised of aviation experts from DFS, WFP and ICAO. The ATAG's main objective is to develop U.N. Common Aviation Standards for humanitarian and peacekeeping air transport operations and ensure that risks are mitigated in DFS aviation operations, and any exposure to potential liabilities is reduced, Haq said. The report presents a range of inexpensive options which could be adopted to tackle the problems. U.N. agencies, governments, defence contractors and NGOs could make humanitarian aid and peacekeeping contracts conditional by requiring air cargo carriers to adhere to an ethical transportation code of conduct. The EU could also utilise its existing air safety regulations to put companies involved in arms trafficking or destabilising commodity flows out of business. Additionally, the EU could provide specialised training for its civilian and military peacekeepers to better identify suspect air cargo carriers operating in Africa and Eastern Europe. A coordinated response by the EU and the humanitarian aid community could require companies to chose between transporting arms or aid to conflict zones while air safety enforcement could put hardcore arms dealers out of business, said Bromley. "Our research shows that companies named in arms trafficking-related reports have poor safety records. Safety regulations represent their Achilles heel, and can do to them what tax evasion charges did to Al Capone," he said. Get HuffPost World On Facebook and Twitter! Read more from Inter Press Service. More on United Nations
 
Anthony Papa: Should Marijuana Be Legalized? Ethan Nadelmann Debates Stephen Baldwin Top
Last week California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger became the latest and most high-profile U.S. elected official to call for a debate on legalizing marijuana. On May 12th, CBS News.com ran pro and con marijuana legalization opinion pieces by Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance and actor Stephen Baldwin. Here is what they have to say on marijuana legalization. What do you think? Who do you support? Make Marijuana Legal By Ethan Nadelmann, founder, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance Marijuana should never have been made illegal in the first place. Ask why it was made illegal -- by many state governments and eventually the federal government during the first four decades of the past century -- and the answer cannot be found in expert medical testimony or any objective assessment of the costs and benefits of prohibiting marijuana. In many western states, it was simply a matter of prejudice against Mexican-Americans and Mexican migrants, with whom marijuana was popularly associated. Rancid tabloid journalism also played a role, as did Reefer Madness-like propaganda and legislative testimony. We know the result. Marijuana became dramatically more popular after its prohibition than it ever was before. Over one hundred million Americans have tried it, including the three most recent occupants of the Oval Office. Billions, perhaps tens of billions, of dollars are spent and earned illegally on it each year. Marijuana is routinely described as the first, second or third most lucrative agricultural crop in many states. And taxpayers are obliged to spend billions of their own dollars each year in support of futile efforts to enforce an unenforceable prohibition. Clearly marijuana prohibition is unique among American criminal laws. No other law is both enforced so widely and harshly yet deemed unnecessary by such a substantial portion of the populace. Police made roughly 800,000 arrests last year for possession of marijuana, typically tiny amounts. That's almost the same number as are arrested each year for cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, Ecstasy and all other drugs. Meanwhile recent polls show that over 40% of Americans think that marijuana should be taxed and regulated like alcohol; and it's closer to 50% among Democrats, independents, adults under age 30, and voters in a growing number of western states. This is an issue on which politicians can be counted on to follow, not lead, public opinion. But some at last are saying publicly that legalizing marijuana needs to be on the table. For California Governor Schwarzenegger, it's the prospect of new tax revenue and costs savings when the state's budget deficit has never been larger. For Arizona Attorney General Terry Goodard and the City Council of El Paso, Texas, it's the realization that legalizing marijuana would help reduce the violence and profits of Mexican drug gangs. Others point to the fact that marijuana prohibition is a remarkable failure in the eyes and ways of young people. Over eighty percent of high school seniors say that marijuana is easy to obtain -- and even easier to buy than alcohol. It's hard to see how making marijuana legal for adults would make it any more available to young people than it is already. Is marijuana addictive? Yes, it can be, in that some people use it to excess, in ways that are problematic for themselves and those around them, and find it hard to stop. But marijuana may well be the least addictive and least damaging of all commonly used psychoactive drugs. Most people who smoke marijuana never become dependent. Withdrawal symptoms pale beside those of other drugs. No one has ever died from a marijuana overdose, which cannot be said of most other drugs. Marijuana is not associated with violent behavior and only minimally with reckless sexual behavior. And even heavy marijuana smokers smoke only a fraction of what cigarette addicts smoke. Lung cancers involving people who smoke marijuana but not tobacco are virtually nil. It's no surprise that the Drug Enforcement Administration's own administrative law judge, Francis Young, came to the conclusion in 1988 that "marijuana may well be the safest psychoactive substance commonly used in human history." But when all is said and done, the principal, and most principled, argument in favor of ending marijuana prohibition is this: whether or not I or anyone else consume marijuana should be none of the government's business-so long as I'm not behind the wheel of a car or otherwise putting others at risk. It's time to get the government off my property and out of both my pockets and my body when it comes to marijuana. Enough is enough. Common Sense Says, "No Thanks!" Guest Column: co-written by Stephen Baldwin & Kevin McCullough America doesn't want its pot...American potheads do! Sure the debate is raging presently, but it's as fictional in its need as whether pigs can fly or whether Superman was or was not faster than that bullet. In the modern trumped up controversy over whether marijuana should be legalized for the masses, the biggest canard of all is the supposed demand that exists. As a team that produces a weekly talk radio show now heard on 195 stations, we can earnestly say one thing is definitively true in the discussions we've launched about the revival of the "Should pot be legal?" question: "America doesn't want its pot...American potheads do!" Almost to a person, callers to our broadcast who have asserted the need for weed's legality are also toking up on a regular basis. Considering that Stephen starred in "Biodome," one of the more famous marijuana movies of all time, and that he has testified to smoking enough of the substance prior to his conversion to Christianity to fund a third world junta or two, we are able to compare the pleas of the modern marijuana movement and measure them for what they are -- cries of economically struggling potheads who want to get high cheaply, next generation be damned. Nothing could be more foolish and nothing could be more unnecessary. We have no desire to prevent doctors from prescribing specified care, or authorizing specific treatments for patients that simply cannot find any more compassionate or effective means. We do, however, also recognize that the medical community has expanded its array of treatments in instances for cancer and other diagnoses that might render the need for marijuana completely useless. What we oppose with ferocity is making it as common for children to obtain as alcohol and cigarettes are now. Legalizing it across the board creates easier access for children who we suppose would still be legally prevented from "purchasing" it. This doesn't even preface the fact that cigarettes are now thought of as a greater evil to children than sex offenders. Marijuana proponents claim that the benefit to society would be enhanced by fewer offenders being sent to prison, tax revenues that would be generated, and the establishment of marijuana farming systems. A major untruth that they spread is that for every criminal it would prevent from being sent to prison, dealing with the increasingly prevalent use by underage users would be doubled or even tripled. What they also will not tell you is that for every ounce of tax revenues raised, a ton of cost is exacted upon society by intoxicated drivers, child addicts, counseling, rehabilitation, etc. And the farming argument is just dumb. What the rabid dealers and addicts will not admit is that the primary reason they are making this push is multi-purposed. First, they believe having a former user in the White House will give them the cover they need to make this process speedy, efficient, and successful. And second, they are convinced that it will give them easy access to the "high" they want, as well as give the pushers a new line of clientele. The pot-heads of America believe that their new day has dawned. But for the sake of our kids and the generations to come, it is still not too late to "just say no!" (Stephen Baldwin & Kevin McCullough produce Xtreme Radio with Baldwin/McCullough, heard on 195 stations nationally. They can be reached at BMXRadioNow@gmail.com, or at 903.200.HOPE.)
 
Chris Guillebeau: Overland Journey from Guyana to Suriname Top
My sleep schedule is still off from the 3:30 a.m. arrival a couple of nights earlier, but it's an early morning wake-up to get to the Guyana taxi station. I fall asleep at 2:00 a.m., and the alarm goes off at 4:45. Nice. By 5:15 I'm downstairs paying the bill and waiting for my first ride of the day. The car drops me at the station, I pay $3, and I'm immediately surrounded by would-be chauffeurs. Five guys make a simultaneous grab for my carry-on, but I keep my hand on it too. Naturally, they all want my business for the first half of the journey to the border. In situations like this, it's not all about who's cheapest -- it's also important to find out who's leaving first. I settle for a guy who says he has eight passengers in his van and is almost ready to go. I count six, but that's close enough. For the next 20 minutes he keeps saying, "One more! One more!" -- as in, we need one more passenger before departure. Three more passengers get in, but who's counting? We finally take off. For the next three hours, we drive on mostly good roads through towns and countryside. I'm tired from the lack of sleep the night before, but it's not a bad journey. Along the way we drop people off one-by-one, and at a couple of stops more people get in. In the end, it's just me, the driver, and a Guyanese woman. The woman is meeting her friend at the ferry terminal. I'm going further - across the river, and out of Guyana and into Suriname. Next up, the ferry. Part II: Crossing the River The waiting game starts at the ferry terminal. I don't like the waiting game, but if you hate it too much, you'll be an eternally frustrated traveler. The waiting game is where you spend an undetermined amount of time, usually at least one hour, waiting around for something to happen. In some cases, the waiting can be as much as 50% of the total travel time. I like forward motion. I like going places. Waiting is stationary, but a necessary part of travel. I buy my $10 ticket and wait at the ferry terminal. It's 9:30 a.m. now, and the ferry is scheduled to leave at 11:00. Or maybe it's 12:00 -- no one's sure. It looks good for 11:00, because the ferry arrives from the other side at 10:30 and everyone goes to queue up. Except nothing happens. We wait in the queue for 30 minutes, then half the people go back inside to sit down. False alarm. Another 45 minutes later and we hop on board. I have a love/hate relationship with ferries, and the quality of the relationship is determined by how long the ferry takes, how crowded it is, and how rocky the waves are. In this case I win on all three counts. The ferry takes 30 minutes, it's full but not overcrowded, and the water is smooth. It's a good ferry. I spend the time talking with an Ethiopian Muslim who is traveling with another group of Muslims (from several countries) for three weeks in the Guyanas and Caribbean. He tells me to read the Koran when I get home. On the other side, the waiting game resumes. We arrive at a shack that serves as the immigration stop for Suriname. One guy is doing immigration for everyone -- about 50 of us. He's not in a hurry, either. One other guy is watching the whole time, and when the immigration finishes for everyone, he starts doing the customs check one-by-one. As to why they didn't perform the tasks simultaneously, no one knows, but I'm not the only one who's wondering. Another hour goes by standing in the queue, but it's finally over. I hop in another mini-taxi for the third and final part of the journey. Only four more hours to go. Part III: Surinamese Border to Paramaribo The first taxi was like the ferry -- full but not overcrowded. This taxi, however, was a tight fit before they put the luggage in. I sit with my laptop bag on my knees for the whole journey. A Surinamese girl falls asleep on my shoulder, and an old man who's been allocated the front seat alternates between smoking and coughing. We stop for supplies at a gas station. I change $10 and buy cookies and a bottle of water. The old man and I split the bag of cookies for the rest of the journey. He offers me cigarettes -- no thanks. The roads in Suriname are much worse than in Guyana, which surprises me since my impression is that Suriname is a more well-off country overall. We pull into Paramaribo at sundown and the driver starts dropping people off. I'm last on the list, but the benefit is that I see the city en route to my hotel. I make it to the Hotel Zeelandia , where I had booked a room in advance for two nights with the option to stay a third if I like it. It has a bed, wifi, and is next to an Indian restaurant, so I do like it. At the Indian place I eat my first meal of the day at 7:30 p.m. just after arrival. It's been a long day, but it was a good day. The beer is cold, and they have good channa masala . Later on I realize that the meal costs $22, but when I consider that it's my only meal of the day, I decide that $22 is not a bad per-diem for food on a 13-hour journey. Here I am in Suriname. Country #109. I feel like I'm far away from where I came from, and that's just fine with me. ### Suriname House by Ahron More on Travel
 
Sen. Barbara Boxer: Nominate a Woman Top
Women make up 51% of our nation's population. Yet only 17% of the seats in Congress are held by women. Only 3% of corporate CEOs are women. And just one out of nine Supreme Court justices is a woman. President Obama can change that. Since Sandra Day O'Connor's retirement from the Supreme Court four years ago, Ruth Bader Ginsburg has been the sole female Justice. Now, with Justice Souter's recent retirement announcement, President Obama has a chance to nominate an intelligent, well-qualified person to the Supreme Court -- and I believe that person should be a woman. We need a Supreme Court that is more representative of all Americans, so that its decisions better reflect the diversity of life experiences and points-of-view in America. Join me now by sending an email to the White House urging President Obama to nominate a woman to the U.S. Supreme Court! Many pundits have warned President Obama to make his choice based on merit -- and I agree. In fact, there are many highly qualified women to choose from. When 96 percent of all Supreme Court Justices throughout our history have been men, clearly it is evident that we need another woman on the Court. It's time to change that. President Obama may select his Supreme Court nominee in a matter of days -- so it's critical that you join me and make your voice heard now. Please forward an email to the White House now -- and urge President Obama to nominate a woman to the U.S. Supreme Court! Then invite your friends and family to email the White House as well! More on Barack Obama
 
Kate Gosselin: I Didn't Cheat With My Bodyguard Top
NEW YORK — Reality TV star Kate Gosselin said she isn't cheating on her husband, Jon, and called the accusations disgusting and unthinkable. In a story published Tuesday on People magazine's Web site, Gosselin said she's the target of tabloid lies romantically linking her with a bodyguard who frequently travels with the family. She spoke out following recent accounts that portrayed her as the victim of her husband's infidelity. The Gosselins, along with their eight children, star on the TLC reality show "Jon & Kate Plus 8," which captures on-camera the challenges of raising a large family. But TV stardom has brought its own challenges in the form of unsought media attention. Last week, Jon Gosselin denied reports of an affair with a 23-year-old schoolteacher, while apologizing for having put his family in an "awkward situation." Now, it's Kate Gosselin's turn. "The next story coming out from the animals that stalk us is about our security person and his family," she said, referring to bodyguard Steve Neild. "Already the allegations they're making about me are disgusting, unthinkable, unfathomable, and I am horrified." She voiced regret that the family's friends had been drawn into the media frenzy, and said she was "totally panicking" that the scandalous publicity might drive them away. "I keep calling them, begging, `Seriously, I'm so sorry. Don't run away from us.' They keep saying, `We're fine, we're fine.' But they have paparazzi in front of their house. It's so upsetting." The fifth season of "Jon & Kate Plus 8" premieres May 25. ___ On the Net: http://tlc.discovery.com/tv/jon-and-kate/jon-and-kate.html
 
Bolivia's Chacaltaya Glacier Almost Gone: Scientists Top
Scientists in Bolivia say that one of the country's most famous glaciers has almost disappeared as a result of climate change. More on Latin America
 
Vatican Called Out For Denying Pope's Admitted Hitler Youth Membership Top
The Vatican blundered into a fresh public relations fiasco on Tuesday after seeking to rewrite the biography of Pope Benedict XVI by denying that he was ever a member of the Hitler Youth. More on Religion
 
Egyptian Court 'Bans Porn Sites' Top
A court in Cairo has issued a ruling that bans pornographic websites in Egypt, state news agency Mena reports. More on Egypt
 
So Many Green Living Tips, So Little Time (VIDEO) Top
A lot of eco-tips are delivered alone, in bite-sized bits. This can be helpful for comprehension of the tip, but sometimes it feels futile. For example, if I tell you everything you need to know about changing your showerhead, you'll get it, but you might think, "what's the net effect?" That's why I love the video I'm about to show you. It's a video by the author of "Sleeping Naked Is Green," Vanessa Farquharson. She gives us a tour of some of the green features of her home, which she presents in a totally non-daunting way, which is pretty impressive when you consider that she's done something that makes me green with envy: she's gone refrigeratorless! By the end, you do get the feeling that doing so many small things really adds up. WATCH: More on Video
 
Martha Stewart Gets $5M, Plus Driver, Other Perks Top
Despite this, we just couldn't ignore Martha's new employment contract in the 10-Q filed by the company yesterday, which includes a $3 million "retention payment" for the domestic goddess. That's in addition to a $2 million salary, which according to the proxy the company filed last month, represents a $1.1 million raise. The contract also includes a wide range of other goodies, including "automobiles and drivers seven days a week", reimbursement for all business, travel and entertainment expenses (which seems like a pretty broad definition), security expenses and even internet and telephone expenses at her various homes.
 
Matt Littman: Cheney in 2012? It's Cheney in 2010 Top
There are those who write that Dick Cheney should have run for President in 2008. There are those, on this Web site in particular, who say he should run in 2012. But Dick Cheney's outspokenness, his attacks on President Obama, and his remarks in favor of torture and Rush Limbaugh, have put him front and center for the next big elections, those that come just over a year from now. Dick Cheney is on the ballot in 2010. Most Americans have a very, very negative view of Cheney. I'm being kind. Cheney's approval ratings hover at around 13%. There's not much room below that. At 13%, stand up comics stop making jokes about you, because you are a joke and so it is redundant. Darth Vader becomes a poor man's Dick Cheney. Ahmadinejad won't be seen with Cheney because it would make Ahmadinejad less popular in America. I never thought I'd say these words: George W. Bush is a role model. He left office, and now he is quiet because ex-Presidents give their successors room to move without criticism. Actually, when Al Gore ceded the election to George W. Bush, he did much the same thing. He went away for awhile. That's usually the model for those who leave office. It's the classy thing to do. However, W.'s surrogates, such as Ari Fleisher and Condi Rice, are often speaking for their Administration, defending the W. Era. Not an easy sell. And it gets worse for them because the Defender getting the most attention is Dick Cheney. When it comes to defending your reign, do you want to have the least popular person out there talking about you? Of course not. If I had a product to sell, would I want the most disliked person in America selling it? My opinion: Cheney's gone rogue. He's not checking in with Bush Central. He's not on the defending Bush circuit with Fleisher or Rice. Cheney sees himself as Jack Bauer; in his mind, he is defending the nation from its enemies and doing whatever it takes to keep the people safe. In our minds, Cheney himself is doing the torturing. Isn't that the image most of us have? It's not Cheney, sitting in a remote office, on the phone, ordering a suspected terrorist to undergo torture; it's Cheney himself, kicking everyone out of the room, yanking off his tie, grabbing a suspected terrorist, administering the pain and yelling, "WHERE IS THE CANNISTER?" Cheney has now said that Obama's foreign policy and policy on questioning terrorists makes for a less safe country. He has also gone after Colin Powell, and said he prefers the views of Rush Limbaugh to those of Powell. Now, if you're building a party, do you want to denounce Colin Powell? If you were a Republican, wouldn't you suggest that both Powell and Limbaugh's views are welcome in the Big Tent Party? I guess Cheney doesn't believe in the Big Tent; he believes that the Republicans are the party of the Little Corner of the Room, huddled together. Cheney continues to put himself front and center. He's the face of the Old Republican Party, the Party that was denounced by the American people in 2006 and 2008. He's not going to become more popular. The more he is out there, the more he reminds us that we are incredibly thankful that he is not in power. As long as he appears to be the spokesman for the Republicans, elections will go the other way. So, in 2010: Cheney will again be the face of the Republican Party. And once again, the Democrats will be victorious. More on Colin Powell
 
Karin Badt: Now in Paris: Valadan and Utrillo Top
"It makes no sense to compare," Marc Restellini, director of the Pinacotheque Museum in Paris told me when I asked him why Maurice Utrillo was the famous painter of Montmarte, while his mother Suzanne Valadan has generally been forgotten. Restellini's exhibit, ongoing now at the Pinacotheque, places the mother-son paintings side-by-side, and it becomes a natural question -- I think -- why one painter was once considered "better" than the other. It is also interesting to see the world portrayed by two people of the same family. The exhibit portrays the two equally, suggesting a life-long mother-son influence. Utrillo's empty landscapes of buildings and streets -- haunted by a sense of loneliness -- hang next to the bold paintings of his mother, with their extra-bright trees outlined in dark strokes. Yet the two artists, despite sharing an odd sensibility, seem to have only one aesthetic in common: a t times, a similar choice in pastels ("Obviously," Restellini told me. "They shared the same palette.") Aside from this vague similarity, the two are dramatically different. The mother makes the body the subject: she is known for her nudes which really are "nakeds": no airbrushed prettiness, but slumps and curves and wrinkles. She dared to paint what she saw: a scandalous choice for a woman, it seems. Restellini told me that women artists -- even in the early twentieth century -- rarely left the subject matters considered respectable for women: sewing, children, family scenes. Indeed, Valadan's "Adam and Eve" was censured not because the nudes lacked a fig-leaf, but because the artist was a woman. Another scandalous painting: a portrait of a woman playing a viola. Even today, the sexism persists: "She paints like a man," catalogues announce. As for Utrillo: he was an drunk since age 9, in despair because his sexy adventurous mother often left him alone as she pursued her art and her loves, including some of the most well-known painters at the time and a wealthy businessman who later married her. Maurice was to be shunted to insane asylums and alcoholic wards all his life, the mother first spurred to get him institutionalized by her businessman husband who could not take it anymore. His paintings are landscapes of edgy stillness: buildings and streets. "The walls of Utrillo have a painful secret," Jean Fabris, curator and long time-friend of Utrillo's widow, told me that a critic once told him. "They have the odor of piss." For me, Utrillo's buildings are reassuring structures, like hard-edged teddy bears that a child might erect around himself when the parents have left. The grey-white streets -- such as the famed "Rue Norvins" (1909) -- have a rainy melancholy even when there is no rain. In his "Eglise de Banlieu," a lonely whitish light emanates from the steeple, from the safely curved road. My favorite: the blue-roofed lonely chapel of Roscoff (1911), crooked on a dull-green isle, with turbulent waves. Unlike in the mother's paintings, the human face is missing. In "Rue Muller at Montmare," the steps go up, with people's backs turned, the black and red windows impenetrably closed, with a block of deep green to the left. It is -- like all of Utrillo's work -- a very calming painting. In "Derriere la Maisson," we see leaves falling in a murky pin-grey sky, snow on a long lamp-post and dark figures with their backs turned. "The backs are always turned," Restellini told me. The buildings are more alive than the people, some slanting inward or breathing, while the windows are dark and closed. We can't see in, just as we can't see into Utrillo. His paintings are constrained, reserved, strong and dignified. Which brings up an interesting question: in real life, Utrillo had no dignity. He sold his paintings for a bottle of bad wine, and had alcoholic tantrums of paranoia which made him "horrible" with people, the curator told me. Photographs of him show the kind of person one sees early in the morning at a local smoky bar in Paris: wrinkled and red-cheeked, bowed down. The kind of person one winces at. And yet all this pain and self-destruction becomes noble and dignified in his art--and is today celebrated by a vast public. As for Suzanne Valadon, his mother: she, daughter of a laundress, once reviled for her loose morals, is now celebrated as well. Her bold lines have become unforgettable. For example, who could forget her vivid "Vue de Corte" (1913), a stunning city carved in a hill, outlined like a pile of pebbles, each rounded and imposing, with black borders? It is, like all her work, bright and bold, but not cheerful. Her trees are also unforgettable: twisted with rich green color and dense black outlines. As is her "Still Life with Hare, Pheasant and Apples" where a tied up hare hangs next to a dead pheasant plopped on a white drape -- a simulacrum of a dying old man on a bed -- along with five rounded reddish apples. The mother's most memorable painting: her disturbing self-portrait in her middle age, which even the publicist for the exhibit confessed she could not bare to look at. Valadan is crooked before a mirror, her breasts sagging, her eyes pained with disappointment. "Her lover had left her," Fabris the curator confided. Or perhaps it was some other lifelong frustration. The two -- Valadan the loose woman and Utrillo her drunken son -- were on the fringes of Paris society during their time, a marginality, the exhibit suggests, due to their lower-class position as well as their artistic difference from the elite painters of the period: the "Ecole de Paris." But now -- for the first time -- both http://www.pinacotheque.com/index.php?id=5 "> Valadan and Utrillo are at the center: literally a stone's throw from the Seine in the classy Madeleine plaza, at the most chic museum on the right bank.
 
Wajahat Ali: Obama in Egypt: Talking to the Muslim World Top
By choosing Cairo, Egypt as the platform for his long-awaited address to the global Muslim community, President Barack Obama predictably leans on a reliable dictatorship suffocating a country that is teetering toward religious and political irrelevance. Indeed, modern Egypt resembles its ubiquitous tourist attraction, the Sphinx, the symbolic temple guardian adorned with a human head on a prostrate lion. Similarly, the near-30-year, brutal autocracy of Hosni Mubarak weighs heavily on the immobilized body of an exasperated, stifled and proud populace who've wearily observed their country, a former beacon for Arab nationalism, transformed into a loyal watchdog and stooge for anti-democratic, "pro-western" policies. Perhaps Turkey, which Obama visited last month, served as a more ideal and dynamic location due to its successful marriage of secular democracy and Islam, as evidenced by the election of the AKP party, a moderate, pro-western political party with Islamic leanings. Or Obama could have chosen Indonesia, the most populous Muslim nation in the world, which recently held free elections and whose citizens roundly rejected right-wing, deeply conservative Islamic parties in favor of non-sectarianism and moderation. Obama's speech in Cairo in June will mark the third time he has addressed the Muslim world, seeking partnership and conciliation with Muslims jaded by George Bush's unrelentingly belligerent and humiliating "war on terror" policies and his divisive, poisonous rhetoric. In his first major speech to Al-Arabiya, Obama proclaimed: "My job to the Muslim world is to communicate that the Americans are not your enemy." Yet, Obama's choice of Egypt is an implicit endorsement and validation of Mubarak's dictatorship, and it reiterates the oft-spoken but albeit true cliché in the Muslim world that US merely covets selfish policy interests instead of democratisation, autonomy and self determination by and for the Arab and Muslim people. During a visit to Egypt last week , Robert Gates, the US secretary of defense, affirmed that America's $2 billion in aid to Egypt will continue, thus assuring Egypt's perennial spot as one of US's closest allies and recipients of monetary benevolence. This charity flows annually despite the Egyptian government's brutal crackdown on political opposition, the free press, dissidents and even critical bloggers whose punishment runs the ignominious gamut from harassment and arrests to torture and "mysterious disappearances". For example, a Christian blogger, Hani Nazeer Aziz, turned himself in after the government's security apparatus arrested two of his brothers and used them as hostages, forcing his surrender. Mubarak's Egypt also shares a lucrative outsourcing arrangement with the US. Instead of telecommunication and tech support services, Egypt, along with Syria, specializes in torture, so US can conveniently bypass laws, due process and international human rights. Mamdouh Habib, who was eventually sent to Guantánamo Bay, was outsourced by the US to Egypt, where he said he was "hung by his arms from hooks, repeatedly shocked, nearly drowned and brutally beaten," according to the Washington Post . Partaking in what is now a routine and convenient pastime for dictators of Muslim countries, Mubarak casually manipulates the constitution like Play-Doh. His government recently amended the document to outlaw opposing "religious parties" like the Muslim Brotherhood -- an influential, extremely conservative Islamic political party that won 20% of parliamentary seats in 2005 elections -- and neuter judicial supervision over future sham elections, thus ensuring the Mubarak dictatorship dynasty is passed on to his son, Gamal. Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Jordan follow this brazen display of forceful attempts to stifle democracy. All of them are long-term US allies whose respective leaders have shared cozy, mutually beneficial relationships. Sadly, the US seems more committed to supporting reliable despots who toe the line than to dealing with democratic parties representative of the people's desires and values. If Obama is sincere in treating Muslims as partners and engaging them with mutual respect, his very pretty words must inspire legitimate policy reform. First, he must use this opportunity to empathize with the people's concerns by denouncing the heinous crimes and oppressive, intolerant conduct of client autocrats, such as Mubarak and the Saudi royal family -- just to name a couple. Second, he must implement a long-term policy initiative that nurtures the emergence of vibrant democratic parties representing the people's voice throughout the Middle East, especially in Egypt, which has been paralyzed by a faltering national economy and decades of unrelenting dictatorships. Although Obama's shameful silence on Israel's massacre in Gaza and his increasingly unsuccessful and casualty-inducing drone attacks in Pakistan have left many Muslims frustrated, his words of conciliation, dignity and respect continue to inspire optimistic Egyptians and Muslims abroad, whose only currency now is hope for an new era of changed, enlightened US relations with the Middle East that does not depend on dictatorships and prostration.
 
Ryan Haydon and Stefani Piermattei: Building the Housewife Franchise Top
Another 12 week basic cable season, another Real Housewife crew. This time, Bravo's taking us to New Jersey - a region that, unlike previous H-Wife locales, doesn't produce any produce. Clearly, Bravo is running out of locations; the last thing anyone wants is Real Housewives of Idaho (though at least then the ladies could hold potatoes). We're here to help. Cross-over promotions are nothing new . But it's an easy strategy for GE (owner of NBC Universal, owner of Bravo) - package together known quantities, and help both of them gain exposure. And while the producers at Bravo seem to be old hands at this , we have some humble suggestions as well: Real HouseWifeSwap - NeNe switching houses with Alex and dealing with Simon? You wouldn't watch that? Like a million times? Are you Smarter Than a Real Housewife? The title says it all. Real Housewives of South Park- Kenny falls in love with the ever animated Ramona but then he dies when he uses her skin care products. America's Next Top Model/Chef - You have 75 minutes to create an original look with this snake , and then cook it for 45 of New York's most discerning dinner guests. The Real Housewives Matchmaker - We hope Jeff rests in peace, but who wouldn't watch that schnoz try to set up Gretchen? Or Bethenny? We don't know what we'd cheer for more - two of our favorite technically non-Housewives finding love or going on an endless string of bad first dates? Mario Puzo presents Real Housewives - Oh wait. Bravo already thought of this . Join us for a special 2 hour liveblog tonight! Reunion and premiere, endings and beginnings, fighting and... fighting. More on Reality TV
 
Patricia Stark: 7 Tips to Be Confident About Your Age (No Matter What the Number!) Top
Age...ah, a tricky and often touchy subject. And, boy, do we use it as a very convenient self-sabotaging weapon at just about every stage of our lives. Do any of these lines sound familiar: "I'm too young -- I'll never be taken seriously," "I'm too old -- they'll want someone younger." At any stage in our lives we can easily use the excuse of age to stop us from trying something new, fulfilling a dream, or simply being happy in the now. The only way to stop this self-sabotage is to make a conscious choice to declare that you are the right age for right now. This is the only reality there is, isn't it? You can't be younger or older than you are right now. You simply can't change the number, but you can change the thoughts you think and the way you live your life. Here are 7 things you can do right now: 1. If you're young and inexperienced think of yourself as a fresh face, an eager learner, a clean slate, or a sponge ready to give your all to your work, your dreams, and the people in your life. Don't focus on your lack of experience, but rather on your fresh perspective and energy. 2. If you've been around the block, and have lived a little (or a lot), focus on the wisdom you have gained, the experiences that have molded you, and the unique knowledge that you have acquired that only comes with time. 3. Don't focus on wanting to stay or look young, but focus instead on staying & looking current. Don't get stuck in any one stage, that's why they call it "a stage," keep moving forward. Reinvent, redefine, and refine! 4. If you tell yourself you're too young, than you are. If you tell yourself you're too old, than you are. Just like Henry Ford said, "Whether you think you can or you can't, you are absolutely right." So if you believe you are too young or too old, chances are you're absolutely right. 5. Know that there are pros and cons at every single age -- and that you and only you are in charge of what you choose to focus on or where your attention leads you. Whether it be your pros or your cons, your focus becomes your reality. 6. Take charge. Take action. Take the age number out of the equation and create the life you want in each moment. Demand to learn and grow at every age. 7. Concentrate on health, not numbers. Studies show that a positive attitude about age (at any age) can contribute to a longer, happier life -- even more than low cholesterol or regular exercise. To paraphrase George Carlin, "Age is only mind over matter. If you don't mind...it doesn't matter." View this tip in video format: Patricia Stark is the host of Craving Confidence , a weekly show about confidence, life, and business skills. To subscribe to the show or the monthly newsletter, visit www.cravingconfidence.com
 
Mega Shark Vs. Giant Octopus (VIDEO) Top
Asylum films released the trailer for its new "mockbuster" this week: "Mega Shark Vs. Giant Octopus." The low-budget brand that has released dozens of straight-to-video movies is best known for making films that are sort of like big studio pictures, but stranger. For example their last film was "Terminators" about humans fighting cyborgs. This should not be confused with "Terminator." WATCH: Get HuffPost Comedy On Facebook and Twitter! More on Funny Videos
 
Eyck Freymann: Saberi's Release: Due Process or Political Games? Top
Journalist Roxana Saberi was released today after a month of captivity in an Iranian jail. But the timing and circumstances of her release show that it is purely President Mahmud "I'm-A-Dinner-Jacket" Ahmadinejad playing political games. The Iranian-American journalist, who has dual citizenship, was arrested in April for trumped-up charges of spying. Sentenced to eight years in prison, the international community demanded her release. Saberi, whose citizenship means that she is bound to Iranian law, went on a hunger strike to protest the political nature of her captivity. Though she was previously sentenced by a secret court, her appeal this morning was heard in a fair trial -- and she was even granted access to a lawyer! Yesterday was the filing deadline for the Iranian election, which takes place on June 12. President Ahmadinejad and another conservative face off in a four-person match against two more moderate men, according to the BBC . The moderate front-runner, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, hopes that the two conservatives will split the vote. At a time when the world views Iran as increasingly extremist, each candidate argues that he is the best one to reshape the nation's image. Saberi's arrest on ridiculous charges (it's sort of unreasonable to assume that the freelance reporter for NPR and the BBC is spying for the US government), and subsequent release in a show of judicial fairness, is Ahmadinejad's not-so-subtle way of showing the world that he can manipulate his country's judicial system. For better or for worse, he can flick on and off his courts' extremist interpretations of Muslim shari'a law. But this is more than a sign to the world that he has control over his own clerics. At the same time, I'm-A-Dinner-Jacket is using his presidential clout to show that he too can be a "reformer." And in so doing, he's undermining his opponent's platform. The election in June will be pivotal -- perhaps even more so than the Israeli election -- in deciding how the Middle East will go in the next few years. If an moderate is elected, Obama's diplomatic overtures will get a fresh look and an agreement will certainly be reached over Iran's support of Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations. If it's an extremist...well...we better start preparing for that possibility. More on Ahmadinejad
 
Norman Solomon: Election Trouble for Jane Harman Top
There are many reasons why progressives will mobilize behind the campaign of Marcy Winograd, who announced on Monday that she'll challenge incumbent Congresswoman Jane Harman in the 2010 Democratic primary. Some will speak of Harman's pro-war record. Some will recall her support for warrantless wiretapping, followed by her irony-free indignation when it turned out that NSA snoops had taped her own phone conversations. Some will recount Harman's long public silence after being briefed on torture by the U.S. government. And then there's the extensive evidence that Rep. Harman has gone over the top to do the bidding of the Israeli government and some of its most extreme supporters in the United States. But what may be most significant about Winograd's race to unseat Harman in 2010 is that it reflects -- and is likely to help nurture -- a growing maturity among progressives around the country who are tired of merely complaining about centrist Democrats in Congress. Many progressives are getting a clear take-home message: Let's stop griping about lousy members of Congress and start defeating them. Winograd, a high school teacher in South Los Angeles, is a longtime activist who founded the LA chapter of Progressive Democrats of America. Back in 2006 -- after less than three months of campaigning -- she won 38 percent of the primary vote against Harman. The launch of Winograd's new campaign (www.Winograd4congress.com) has come more than 12 months before Election Day. And the candidate's kickoff speech Monday afternoon laid out a tapestry of compelling reasons behind her second run for Congress. At the Venice Pier in the northern end of California's 36th congressional district, Winograd sounded the unabashedly progressive notes that have animated her activism over the years. Speaking of widespread economic woes in such areas as Torrance, where foreclosures have skyrocketed, Winograd declared: "It doesn't have to be this way. It is time to say NO to government waste, to trillion-dollar war budgets for endless occupations that breed more terrorists, to countless no-bid contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan that drain our treasury of hard-earned taxpayer dollars. Halliburton gets rich, while the working family in Torrance watches their home slip away." Congresswoman Harman provides a particularly spectacular example of an officeholder who has boosted militarism while helping to undermine civil liberties and human rights. But, in essence, on the Hill she's run-of-the-mill. As a matter of routine, most members of Congress avidly serve corporate interests and the warfare state. They benefit when progressives leave electoral battlefields to others while complaining bitterly about corporatists and warmongers atop Capitol Hill. Strong progressives like Marcy Winograd belong in the United States Congress. Movements that learn how to propel more candidates like her into office -- while defeating the likes of Jane Harman -- will gain strength for the long haul. ______________________________ Norman Solomon is co-chair of the Healthcare NOT Warfare campaign organized by Progressive Democrats of America.
 
Neil Hicks: Getting Half the Message on the Middle East Top
In the coming weeks, President Obama is expected to meet with Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak as part of a round of meetings with regional leaders geared towards resuscitating the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. This meeting and a likely follow-up in Egypt soon thereafter will set the tone for the bi-lateral relationship between the new U.S. administration and Egypt. The meeting will also provide an early indication of the importance the new administration will attach to human rights and democracy promotion for the Arab region as a whole. The Obama administration has acted swiftly to present a more conciliatory face of U.S. policy to the people of the Middle East. Justifiably alarmed by America's plunging popularity in the region, the administration appears to have taken to heart the view that much of this discontent was caused by unpopular U.S. policies including: the war in Iraq, the tactics pursued in the so called "Global War on Terror" - thoroughly discredited by the Abu Ghraib scandal, revelations about the use of torture by U.S. interrogators and the regime of indefinite detention without trial epitomized by the Guantanamo Bay detention center; and perceived uncritical support for the State of Israel in its continuing conflict with the Palestinians. In response to concerns about these policies the Obama administration has announced its intention to draw down U.S. military forces in Iraq; to close Guantanamo and to end the use of torture and secret detention centers; and it has made finding a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict a foreign policy priority. All of these steps have been welcomed in the region. President Obama also scores high marks for making a point of addressing an Arabic speaking audience directly in an early interview with the Al-Arabiya satellite television network and for his frequent respectful references to Islam and Muslims in his speeches, such as those he delivered during his visit to Turkey in April. As in many other parts of the globe, the new president enjoys considerable popularity in the Arab world, probably much more than the kings and presidents who rule the Arab countries. Despite these advantages and positive gestures, the Obama administration is in danger of missing one of the most important contributory factors to the widespread unpopularity of the United States in the region in recent years - the perception that the United States is the power behind the throne of the region's unpopular autocratic rulers. Administration officials now argue that President Bush's strident calls for greater freedom in the region achieved little and that a different approach is needed, but such a conclusion is not shared by many human rights activists in Egypt and other Arab countries. They do not fault President Bush for calling on their rulers to change their autocratic ways and for calling for more freedom and democracy. In fact, they see the problem as being not too much U.S. pressure for change, but too little, since the Bush administration reverted to the traditional stability first approach and eased back on exerting pressure on the Freedom Agenda as events in the region overwhelmed its ambitions half way through Bush's second term. Local activists do find much to fault President Bush for. They note the irony of the U.S. government urging its allies to uphold human rights while violating them itself, an irony that is even darker when it emerges that the torture cells of the same repressive governments the administration was urging to reform were the destination of U.S. detainees subject to extraordinary rendition. The context of making democracy and human rights promotion part of the Global War on Terror discredited these values in the eyes of much of its intended audience, which makes it even more remarkable that progress was made at all, and yet it was. Under concerted and sustained U.S. pressure between 2003 and 2005, despite all the adverse circumstances of the time, repressive Arab governments, including Egypt, made important concessions that benefited and emboldened local activists. These concessions resulted in noticeable advances in human rights conditions. In Egypt, these included the publication of more independent newspapers, the emergence of an active and visible online human rights community and the proliferation of independent human rights organizations. The Obama administration is not burdened with the unpopular baggage of its predecessor and enjoys a level of goodwill that the Bush administration could only dream about. This condition may not last forever, of course, especially once the administration becomes embroiled in the minutiae of Middle East peacemaking, but, for now, President Obama has the opportunity to speak out on the urgent need for human rights progress in the Arab world from a position of relative strength. One way the new President can ensure that his popularity in the region is not short-lived is to make clear in his meetings with President Mubarak and his public speeches in Egypt that promoting human rights and democracy in Egypt and the region remains a policy priority for the United States. More on Egypt
 
BofA Presses Fired Staff To Give Up Right To Sue Top
Bank of America Corp is telling fired employees that they cannot accept job offers from competitors for three months unless they give up either deferred compensation or their right to sue the bank, according to documents reviewed by employment lawyers. More on Bank Of America
 
Sears Tower Bombing Plot: 5 Of 6 Convicted Of Planning To Blow Up Sears Tower, FBI Offices Top
MIAMI — A federal jury in Miami has convicted five men of plotting to join forces with al-Qaida to topple Chicago's Sears Tower and bomb FBI offices in hopes of igniting an anti-government insurrection. A sixth man was acquitted. Tuesday's verdicts came after six days of deliberations in the third trial of the "Liberty City Six." The first two trials ended in mistrials when jurors could not agree on the men's guilt or innocence. A seventh man was acquitted in the first trial. The men were arrested in June 2006 on charges of plotting terrorism with an undercover FBI informant they thought was from al-Qaida. Defense attorneys said terrorist talk recorded on dozens of FBI tapes was not serious and the men wanted only money. More on Terrorism
 
World Cocaine Market 'In Retreat' Top
The international cocaine market is "in retreat" after a year of successful operations around the world, the Serious Organised Crime Agency claims.
 
Abstinence Counselor Sex Assault Alleged Top
A counselor who told police he was teaching teenage girls how to say no to sexual advances from adults is accused of sexually assaulting a 16-year-old girl in the program. Vernitt Hoheb, 31, of Stratford, had supervised a youth group at Mount Aery Baptist Church in Bridgeport until the allegations were made against him.
 
Jesse Kornbluth: A Small Town vs. Refugee Soccer Players: Is That Our Future Too? Top
White people under siege --- that's one of the themes of Warren St. John's book about the struggle of mostly African kids and their Jordanian coach to find a soccer field in the small town of Clarkston, Georgia. Like many others, I first heard about the Fugees two years ago, when Warren St. John profiled the team in the New York Times. Now he's produced Outcasts United , a book about the team and its town. At full length, the story is even more compelling. And, it seems, more relevant, for over the past few weeks "white people under siege" has become part of the national conversation. Spurred by the changes in America's demographics --- by 2050, whites may be a racial minority in the United States --- Larry Wilmore did a terrific, funny interview on "The Daily Show" featuring white kids who face a future that presents "very different opportunities" than their parents did. Elsewhere, some whites aren't laughing; as the President ponders an appointment to the Supreme Court, we persistently hear that seven white men on the Court might not be enough. So I thought: Warren St. John, fresh from a book tour and a slew of interviews, might have more to say about the issues he raises in his book. He did. A lot. Jesse Kornbluth: On the most literal level, your book is about a soccer team of refugees in a small southern town. But it's more than that, right? Warren St. John: What's happening in this little town on one square mile is just a hyper-speed version of what's happening everywhere. The older residents have watched their town be transformed into something totally unfamiliar. The refugees are transitioning into life in a new country. And the refugee kids in particular are caught between the cultures their families come from and the culture of their American peers at school. Everyone is stuck, and the choice is to figure it out, or to give in to alienation and anger. JK: For most of the book, I see anger and alienation. The mayor kicks refugee soccer teams out of the town park, then lets them in, then kicks them out again. WSJ: It's ironic. On December 24, 2006 --- the day I filed my New York Times story --- we heard the mayor had sided with the Fugees in a city council meeting. Two days later, he sent the Fugees a fax, kicking them off the field, immediately. Then he changed his story. The mayor's constituents --- at least a few vocal ones --- didn't like the idea of their park being overrun by refugees. Perhaps some felt genuinely threatened by the presence of large groups of teenagers -- there are gangs in Clarkston, after all. So the mayor's back and forth seemed a reflection of the town's anxiety and ambivalence towards the refugees. JK: "I'm not going to baby them," Luma Mufleh says about her players. I was a bit shocked at her "tough love" coaching style. These kids were denied a childhood in Africa. It doesn't seem they'll get a second chance in Clarkston. WSJ: When you are totally impoverished and culturally bereft, the idea that you could have a normal childhood by American standards --- it's unlikely. What Luma does is carve out a safe place for these kids. They have fun, they achieve, they make friends. But that can't happen if they don't get to practice and games. So she has to teach them a sense of responsibility for doing that --- because their parents can't. And look at what she's competing against? Youth gangs that want to recruit. So I can understand her philosophy. JK: Much has been made of the Fugees' four teams for boys. What about girls? WSJ: The Fugees' program is for boys only. Luma tried to start a team for girls, but many of the cultures the refugees come from don't have a long history of women in sports. There wasn't enough of a concentration in any one age group to form a team. JK: Where do the Fugees practice now? WSJ: On the same field in town park that mayor tried to kick them off of. To me, this shows our collective capacity to work through complicated social problems. JK: The book has received glowing reviews, you've cross-crossed the country --- is there anything that hasn't thrilled you about the media coverage? WSJ: Only one thing. Even in some of the favorable reviews, the Fugees are referred to as "misfits" or "scrappy". These terms diminish what these children have been through. They're child survivors of war --- they're not "misfits". JK: You were in Clarkston for months. How do you think the presence of a New York Times reporter changed what happened? WSJ: I'm not sure the presence of a reporter changed much, but I do think the stories about Clarkston had an effect --- they were a very public airing of a lot of previously privately held views. There was a lot of anger at first, but lately I've been very pleasantly surprised by the people who've reached out to the refugee community from the town's old guard. JK: How has all the attention affected the kids? WSJ: I don't think very much. The kids don't read the New York Times or watch a lot of CNN. JK: Reverse question: How has this reporting changed you? WSJ: It's completely changed my worldview. It sounds clichéd, but I don't think I can, with a good conscience, ever complain again. JK: Reading the book, I kept connecting Luma to that chestnut of a moral: "One person can make a difference." Now that you're on the far side of your reporting, your take on Luma? WSJ: She doesn't claim to have it all figured out. She doesn't have some grand philanthropic philosophy. She just does her best. She works really hard. She's passionate, occasionally hot-headed, stubborn. A person, in other words. So I hope, reading her story, people think: Why am I not doing something like this? JK: After all the conflict, your take on Clarkston? WSJ: In nearly every town I've been to on my book tour, someone has raised a hand and said, "Something similar just started happening here." So Clarkston is a glimpse of our future. The good news is, there are examples there that show what's possible when we live up to the promise of our values. [cross-posted from HeadButler.com ]
 
Loyola Hospital System Cutting 440 Jobs Top
The Loyola University Health System in Maywood will cut more than 440 jobs, or about 8 percent of its work force, as it has encountered an influx of patients who cannot pay their medical bills with current economic conditions. More on Health
 
White House Abstinence Funding May Be Provided After All Top
Although President Obama cut funding for abstinence-only sex education from his new budget, a White House official said Tuesday that some programs could eventually receive government money. More on Obama's Budget
 
Chris Rodda: Code 1, Code 2, Code 3 at Bagram Airfield Top
The preferred response from the military when U.S. troops are caught red-handed committing moral and ethical atrocities or violating military regulations or the law is that it didn't happen. But, when such irrefutable evidence of an incident is uncovered that a complete denial, known as "Code 1," becomes impossible, they resort to "Code 2" -- this was an "isolated incident" -- or "Code 3" -- it was taken out of context. The video released last week by Al Jazeera of U.S. military members at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan discussing the distribution of Dari and Pashtu language Bibles to the local Afghans, a blatant violation of CENTCOM's General Order 1-A, was one of those incidents where the military couldn't use "Code 1." The video showed stacks of these Bibles on the floor, so they were undeniably there. So, this one had to be handled with "Code 2" and "Code 3" responses. For those who haven't seen the Al Jazeera video yet, here it is: Code 2 -- This was an "isolated incident" In reality, the video released by Al Jazeera is just one of countless pieces of evidence showing, without a doubt, that our military is actively proselytizing Muslims in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and has been since the so-called war on terror began. The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) has been collecting information on such cases for several years, and has proof of plenty of other "isolated" incidents. How many isolated incidents does it take before you can no longer consider these incidents isolated? Here are some examples from MRFF's stockpile of similar cases of U.S. military personnel proselytizing in Iraq and Afghanistan, starting with a few quotes from officers proudly admitting to their proselytism efforts. One Army chaplain, Lt. Col. Lyn Brown, in an article titled "Kingdom Building in Combat Boots," stated: "But the most amazing thing is that I was constantly led to stop and talk with Iraqis working at the Coalition Provisional Authority. I learned their names, became a part of their lives, and shared Jesus Christ by distributing DVDs and Arabic Bibles." This distribution of Arabic language Bibes, as already mentioned, has been going on since the war began. Here's one from the Spring 2004 issue of "Gatherings," the newsletter of the International Ministerial Fellowship. According to Army Chaplain Capt. Steve Mickel, who was doing his proselytizing while passing out food in the predominantly Sunni village of Ad Dawr: "I am able to give them tracts on how to be saved, printed in Arabic. I wish I had enough Arabic Bibles to give them as well. The issue of mailing Arabic Bibles into Iraq from the U.S. is difficult (given the current postal regulations prohibiting all religious materials contrary to Islam except for personal use of the soldiers). But the hunger for the Word of God in Iraq is very great, as I have witnessed first-hand." Obviously, by citing the regulation prohibiting the materials he was passing out as something that was hindering his proselytizing, Capt. Mickel was admitting that he knew what he was doing violated regulations. The private organizations sending Arabic Bibles and those in other native languages into Iraq and Afghanistan are too many to count, and many boast of the help they get from members of the military to distribute these Bibles. Here are a few quotes from some of these organizations. "OnlyOneCross.com recently sent a case of Arabic Bibles to a Brother who is working in a detention center in Iraq." The Salvation Evangelistic Association, which has soldiers in Iraq that their ministry converted at Fort Leonard Wood, now has these soldiers distributing the Arabic Bibles for them: "Many young men in training at Fort Leonard Wood were converted to Christ. The Lord led us on to preaching in Army camps in the US, Korea, and the Philippines. We are now supplying Arabic Bibles for distribution by our troops in Iraq." Quotes like the above are a dime a dozen. We also have missionaries who take jobs with DoD contractors to get into Iraq, and, once there, do their proselytizing with the help of U.S. military personnel. Joe Phoenix, founder of Phoenix Mission of Mercy, took a job with DynCorp International, a contractor with a $1.2 billion DoD contract to train Iraqi police officers. Phoenix has launched a number of Christian ministries in Iraq, and said of his team of DynCorp "American Highway Patrol Advisors," each of whom is assigned a U.S. military counterpart: "Each member is a Christian and has strong ministry ties with their Church back home. We as a team see to it that each ministry need is fulfilled and support them one hundred percent. Without our team of American Highway Patrol Advisors these ministries would cease to exist." Chief Warrant Officer Rene Llanos of the 101st Airborne Division, referring to a special military edition of a Bible study daily devotional published and donated by Bible Pathways Ministries, told Mission Network News that: "[T]he soldiers who are patrolling and walking the streets are taking along this copy, and they're using it to minister to the local residents," and that his "division is also getting ready to head toward Afghanistan, so there will be copies heading out with the soldiers." And, like the many civilian missionaries who see the U.S. occupation of Iraq as a window of opportunity to evangelize the Iraqi people, Chief Warrant Officer Llanos continued: "The soldiers are being placed in strategic places with a purpose. They're continuing to spread the Word." The Bible Pathways Ministries book, although not printed in Arabic, presents another problem. It has the official military branch logos on its cover, giving the impression that it is an official U.S. military publication. The stupidity of this needs no explanation. But, topping the stupidity list, we have a Lt. Col. who was being so stupid that a missionary had to tell him that he was putting his troops and other people in danger. The missionary was from Liberty Baptist Tabernacle, which had already shipped 20,000 Arabic "Soul-Winning Booklets" into Iraq, with more on the way. This Lt. Col., who knew the missionary from the states, went to his hotel and offered to use his troops to protect the people who were converting the Muslims. This is from the insane story of what this genius of an officer did to meet with the missionary, copied from the ministry's website: "On another note, a dear Christian friend, that I had met some ten years prior, who was a deacon of an independent Baptist church in Missouri was also in Iraq. I was totally unaware of this. He was in the Missouri National Guard and holds the rank of Lieutenant Colonial. Col. Koontze immediately contacted me when he found out I was in country. He was made aware of my being in Baghdad by a pastor friend of his that he had spoken with in the states. "Through his command intelligence office, he located the hotel I was staying at. When he came to the hotel, I was sitting outside with the other pastors on the hotel's terrace, waiting for Robert Lewis [Global Resource Group-Director], who was going to meet with us that afternoon. Col. Koontze must have had 15-20 soldiers with him; they literally blocked off the entire city block with tanks and humvees to secure the area. He then walked into the lobby asking if anyone could tell him where Pastor Furse was. As he was saying those words, he spotted me and immediately said, "It's good to see you again Bro. Furse." At first, I did not recognize him, until he took his helmet off. We spoke for about 20 minutes at one of the tables on the terrace of the hotel; all the while the tanks and humvees were being lined up and down the main street in front of the hotel. After renewing acquaintances, I had to tell him that it would probably be best if he and his unit left as soon as possible. "The Iraqi people in the hotel and those on the street were to say the least, very concerned. I did not want to bring that much attention to the hotel; for fear that terrorists would target the area as well [over the previous four or five days, we had heard sporadic AK-47 gunfire going off just blocks away from the hotel]. Col. Koontze agreed fully with me on that assessment and ordered his unit to leave quietly and as quickly as possible." We also have videos, like the one below of a chaplain admitting that Swahili language Bibles are being sent in to Iraq to evangelize the Ugandan workers employed by the U.S. military. In this video, from Soldiers Bible Ministry, Army chaplain Capt. Chris Rusack boasts about managing to get the Swahili Bibles into Iraq, in spite of the regulations prohibiting this. Referring to this shipment of Bibles, Chaplain Rusack said: "Actually, they're in Baghdad right now. Somehow the enemy tried to get 'em hung up there. There was a threat they were gonna get shipped back to the States and all that. We prayed, and they're gonna be picked up in a couple of days. God raised someone up right there in Baghdad that's gonna go -- a Christian colonel that's stationed there in Baghdad, and he's gonna go and get the Bibles..." The "enemy" here would presumably be a U.S. military postal worker who was doing the work of Satan by doing his or her job and flagging this shipment of Swahili Bibles -- a shipment that clearly violated the postal and customs regulations prohibiting the bulk shipment into Iraq of religious materials contrary to Islam. As you watch this video, keep in mind that Soldiers Bible Ministry is heartily endorsed by none other than the Army's Chief of Chaplains, Maj. Gen. Douglas Carver, with this statement on their website: "Thanks so much for your invaluable ministry of the Word to our Soldiers." Since posting this video elsewhere last week, MRFF has been asked how we know that these Ugandan workers were Muslims who were being proselytized to, and that they weren't already Christians who were asking for Bibles. This wouldn't dismiss the violation of having the Swahili Bibles shipped into Iraq, but it is a reasonable question considering that Uganda has a majority Christian population, so here's the answer. Last April, Soldiers Bible Ministry entered into an official partnership with an organization called Heart of God International Ministries. To announce this partnership, Heart of God International Ministries sent out an email about Soldiers Bible Ministry, featuring the Swahili Bible story, complete with how the shipment was almost stopped, as an example of the "supernatural things God is doing in Iraq" through Soldiers Bible Ministry. In that email, Heart of God International Ministries told of Jesus appearing to these Ugandan workers in their dreams, and how this led these former Muslims to come to Chaplain Rusack, and then to Christ: "Right now there are about 200 men from Uganda protecting 100 US Army soldiers in Iraq near Babylon. These men from Uganda have been having dreams, and these dreams have been of Jesus Christ as the Messiah which led them to begin asking questions about Christ to the Chaplain. Many of these former Muslims have come to Christ." The email ended with this fund raising pitch for Soldiers Bible Ministry: "The signs of the times are all around us ... Jesus, the Messiah, is coming back soon. It is our responsibility to make sure every man, woman, and child has had the opportunity to meet the Lord Jesus Christ. Seize every opportunity to share the Good News ... seize this opportunity to put the Word of God into the hands of US troops and allied forces." Shortly after MRFF brought attention to this video last week, Soldiers Bible Ministry posted a statement on their website insisting that they are not trying to convert anyone or encourage anyone to violate military regulations. Of course, they still have the video on their site of Chaplain Rusack admitting to have gotten around the military postal regulations with the help of that "Christian colonel" he spoke of in that video. MRFF also has images of other Arabic language Christian books being sent into Iraq and Afghanistan for distribution by our troops. The January 2009 newsletter of Worldwide Military Baptist Missions, for example, included these images of their English-Arabic proselytizing materials. This is from the caption for these photos: "In 2008, we shipped over 226,000 gospel tracts, 21,000 Bibles, New Testaments and gospels of John (to include English-Arabic ones!) and 404 'discipleship kits' to service members & churches for use in war zones, on ships and near military bases around the world." And then, there were the missionaries from the Christian reality TV show Travel the Road who, although making no prior arrangements or going through the usual vetting and approval process, waltzed into Afghanistan and, within two days of their arrival, were allowed to be embedded with U.S. troops as journalists while, with the full knowledge of the Army, they were proselytizing Afghans by handing out Dari language Bibles, and filming this to be broadcast to an audience of over three million people worldwide. When ABC News Nightline investigated this story, they were told that the Army had lost all records of the embedding of these missionaries. If these examples aren't enough incidents to dispel the notion that incidents of the proselytism of Iraqis and Afghans are isolated, MRFF will gladly supply more. Code 3 -- It was taken out of context According to the spokespersons from the military, two things were taken out of context in the Al Jazeera video. One was the footage of the Bible study showing the Dari and Pashtu Bibles. According to Reuters, one military spokesperson, Maj. Jennifer Willis, referring to the soldier who had obtained the Bibles, said, "He showed them to the group and the chaplain explained that he cannot distribute them." Another spokesperson, Col. Gregory Julian, told CNN that "the chaplain leading the Bible study later corrected the service member, although this does not appear on the footage we've seen." Well, that's because it doesn't appear in any of the footage of the Bible study, and Al Jazeera proved this by releasing the raw footage . The raw footage, which shows the Bible study up to the point at
 
Angry Former GOP Congressman Compares Cantor To Porn Star Top
Hey, kids! Remember how a couple weeks ago, House Minority Whip Eric Cantor was totally out of ideas, so he formed a new club with Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush called the National Council for a New America, and then went on a "listening tour" where the first and only stop was a restaurant called "Pie-Tanza" that wasn't even outside the Beltway? And there, they snacked on pizza and listened to each other say stuff that was basically indistinguishable from the stuff they had been saying all along, except this time, it was at a pizza place? Yeah. Those were good times. Like the movie Adventureland , only instead of sexy, disaffected college kids with sexy and disaffected hijinks at an amusement park, you have sad middle-aged men with sad middle-aged talking points at a pizza place. Anyway, according to the American Spectator , not even the launch of this ambitious new experiment in soggy, third-rate rebranding succeeded in making Eric Cantor happy. Cantor was most stung after last week's launch of what he termed a national "listening tour," when Stormy Daniels, an adult film actress, announced at the same time her own "listening tour" as she mulls a run for the Senate in Louisiana. "Apparently it's true: great minds do think alike," quipped a former colleague of Cantor who lost his seat last election cycle, he believes, for supporting the Bush bank bailout plan at Cantor's request. So there you have it, Eric Cantor apparently has a sad because people would much rather listen to pornstars ! Of course, there's still the mystery of the identity of Cantor's snarky former colleague! Of the fourteen Republicans who lost election last year, there were only four who voted for the bailout bill: Chris Shays of Connecticut, Joe Knollenberg of Michigan, Jon Porter of Nevada, and Randy Kuhl of New York. Care to guess? [Would you like to follow me on Twitter ? Because why not? Also, please send tips to tv@huffingtonpost.com -- learn more about our media monitoring project here .]
 
Social Security And Medicare Finances Hit Hard By Recession Top
WASHINGTON — The financial health of Social Security and Medicare, the government's two biggest benefit programs, worsened in the past year because of the severe recession. Trustees of the two programs said Tuesday that Social Security will start paying out more in benefits than it collects in taxes in 2016, one year sooner than projected last year, and the giant trust fund will be depleted by 2037, four years sooner. The trustees said Medicare was in even worse shape. They said that the trust fund for hospital expenses will pay out more in benefits than it collects this year and will be insolvent by 2017, two years earlier than the date projected in last year's report. THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below. WASHINGTON (AP) _ The financial health of the government's two biggest benefit programs may have slipped over the past year, reflecting the deep recession that has already bitten into other areas of the budget. The trustees for Social Security and Medicare are scheduled to provide their annual report on the finances of both programs on Tuesday. In advance of the release, many private analysts said they expected both programs could run out of cash sooner than last predicted. A year ago, the trustees projected that the Social Security trust fund would start paying out more in benefits than it collects in taxes in 2017 and that the trust fund would be depleted in 2041. For the Medicare trust fund, which pays for hospital care, the situation was more urgent. It was projected to start paying more in benefits than it collects in taxes within a year, and the trustees forecast that it would be depleted by 2019. But many analysts said the worst recession in decades will produce a bleaker forecast for both Social Security and Medicare in the new trustees' report. The downturn has resulted in a loss of 5.7 million payroll jobs since it began in December 2007 and an unemployment rate that hit a 25-year high of 8.9 percent in April. Fewer people working means less being paid into the trust funds for Social Security and Medicare. The Congressional Budget Office recently projected that Social Security will collect just $3 billion more in 2010 than it will pay out in benefits. A year ago, the CBO had projected that Social Security would have a much higher $86 billion cash surplus for the 2010 budget year, which begins Oct. 1. The difference in the two estimates is the result of the recession. While the smaller surplus will not have any impact on Social Security benefit payments, the government will need to borrow more at a time when the federal deficit is already exploding because of the recession and the billions of dollars being spent to prop up a shaky banking system. For years, the Social Security trust fund has taken in more than it spent on benefits, resulting in a cushion of billions of dollars that the government could spend on other programs while giving the trust fund an IOU. Even with the big drop in the Social Security surplus, Medicare's condition is more precarious, reflecting the pressures from soaring health care costs as well as the drop in tax collections. For that reason, President Barack Obama is expected to focus on Medicare before he addresses Social Security. Obama on Monday praised a pledge by the health care industry to achieve $2 trillion in savings on health care costs over the next decade, but it was unclear how much help those pledges would be in achieving Obama's goal of extending coverage to some 50 million uninsured Americans. The administration is pushing Congress to pass legislation in this area this year, preferring to tackle health care before Social Security. The trustees report is still expected to set off a heated debate over the government's two large benefit programs, with critics saying it will highlight the failure of the Obama administration to take on the most serious problems in the budget _ soaring entitlement spending, before the retirement of 78 million baby boomers makes the problems even worse. The administration on Monday revised its deficit forecasts upward to project an imbalance this year of $1.84 trillion, four times last year's record deficit, and said the deficits will remain above $500 billion every year over the next decade. More on The Recession
 
Quinn: Deeper Budget Cuts Can't Be Made Top
CHICAGO (AP) -- Gov. Pat Quinn says deeper spending cuts can't be made as the deadline for a new state budget approaches. Quinn said his proposed budget already cut "pretty darn deeply." But the Democrat governor has faced calls to cut more as he pushes a budget that includes an income tax increase. For example, Chicago's Civic Federation says the $1.1 billion in cuts in Quinn's budget proposed for this year and next should be quadrupled to more than $4 billion. Quinn said his administration is preparing to release details of a doomsday budget that will show what will happen to human services, education and health care if people who advocate "deep, deep cuts" get their way. Quinn says such a budget would harm the people of Illinois. -ASSOCIATED PRESS
 

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