[pyritechips]

Williams announces anti-smoking sponsorship
<img src="http://forums.techguy.org/attachment.php?s=&postid=946048" border="2" align="right" alt="F1 FIRST: Sir Frank Williams, BMW Williams F1 Team Principal, poses beside a Williams F1 car at the launch of a new sponsorship deal with GlaxoSmithkline.">
<p align="justify">
OXFORD, England - The Williams Formula One team, which relied heavily on tobacco advertising, has signed a sponsorship deal with a product to help smokers quit. Williams said the GlaxoSmith-Kline brand-name NiQuitin CQ would be displayed on its cars.

"With the impending ban for tobacco sponsorships looming, it is highly appropriate that a leading smokitlg cessation product is taking its place," Williams team owner Frank Williams said Tuesday. "This deal confirms that there is a future for Formula One after tobacco sponsorship."

Williams said the deal was for one year with an option to extend. The team gave no financial details. "This is a landmark deal for Formula One," Williams marketing director Jim Wright said. "We hope we are showing the sport the way forward." Wright said branding would be placed on the car's cockpit and nose, as well as on the sleeves of the drivers' overalls. Long a part of Formula One racing, tobacco advertising is being slowly phased out of the sport.

The European Union plans to ban tobacco advertising from the middle of 2005. FIA, the world governing body of the sport, has threatened to move Grand Prix races out of Europe and wants the EU to push its ban back to mid-2006. Williams dropped tobacco advertising three years ago after being sponsored by the Winfield and Rothmans brands. Of the 10 F1 teams competing this year, five rely on tobacco sponsorship - Ferrari, McLaren, Jordan, Renault and BAR. BAR, home to Canadian driver Jacques Villeneuve, is heavily funded by British American Tobacco.
</p>

[eggplant43]

The presses must roll
The Supreme Court's Pentagon Papers decision barred an imperious president from blocking publication of explosive government documents about an ill-conceived war. Today, journalists may not be so brave -- or judges so vigilant.

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By Gary Kamiya



July 1, 2003 | America is in the midst of a controversial, undeclared war in a distant land against a cunning and resourceful enemy. The nation is bitterly divided. Opponents of the war say that our leaders manufactured a bogus threat to justify an unnecessary and unwinnable war that is inflaming the world against us. Supporters say that a strong American stand is necessary to stop an insidious, totalitarian ideology from spreading across a strategically vital region and proclaim that the encounter is nothing less than a clash of civilizations. Despite overwhelming American military superiority, the war drags on and on. Flag-waving supporters of the administration clash with dissenters, calling them traitors. High-ranking government officials say that those who criticize the war are giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Obsessed with secrecy and convinced of the rightness of his cause, the tough-talking Republican president vows to stay the course.

2003, George W. Bush, and the war on Iraq? No: 1971, Richard M. Nixon, and the war in Vietnam. But if the similarities between the two periods are striking, what happened next has no parallel today. At least not yet.

An explosive document is leaked to the press. The papers, drawn from top-secret government files, reveal embarrassing things about the administration's conduct of the war, including the fact that U.S. officials knew that many of the official reasons given to support the war were false. The government sues to stop the press from publishing the document, saying that publication threatens national security. The case goes to the Supreme Court, which hears the case with extraordinary speed. In a passionate and contentious ruling -- one in which, extraordinarily, all nine justices feel compelled to write opinions -- the court rules, 6-3, that the government has no right to prevent the press from publishing the papers.

The Pentagon Papers case was a landmark ruling for press freedom and a historic rebuke of government's attempt to suppress it. But it is a fragile ruling. Americans like to think that the freedom of speech guaranteed them by the Bill of Rights, and the Supreme Court rulings upholding that freedom, are written in stone. Nothing could be further from the truth. As Justice Brennan wrote in an earlier free speech case, "It is characteristic of the freedoms of expression in general that they are vulnerable to gravely damaging yet barely visible encroachments." Those encroachments threaten free speech at all times -- and during war they become extreme. Civil liberty, in particular the right to free speech, is often curtailed during wartime, when fear, patriotism and the siren song of "national security" combine to overpower what can be seen as a dispensable luxury. Later, when the smoke has cleared, the attack on speech is seen as embarrassing and the laws are removed from the books -- until the next war.

A close look at the court's ruling itself, and American history both before and after 9/11, show that the right of the press to publish freely can never be taken for granted. There is reason to suspect that if a case similar to the Pentagon Papers were to come before the high court today, a very different ruling would result. And if President Bush succeeds in naming more right-wing justices to the court, that possibility would grow stronger still.

The list of America's shameful wartime retreats from civil liberties is long and starts even before the founding of the republic: during the Revolutionary War, New Hampshire declared that believing in the authority of the king of England was treasonous. President Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and seized the telegraph lines. World War I saw perhaps the worst assault on civil liberties, most notably the infamous Sedition Act of 1918, which forbade "[u]ttering, printing, writing, or publishing any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language intended to cause contempt, scorn ... as regards the form of government of the United States." So extreme and hysterical was the World War I era's attack on free speech that it spurred the courts, which throughout the 19th century rarely dealt with issues arising from the Bill of Rights, to a series of rulings that essentially created America's uniquely far-ranging body of civil liberties law.

In World War II, Japanese-Americans were sent to concentration camps simply because of their ethnicity. And after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, a shellshocked Congress approved the USA PATRIOT Act, which expanded federal power and eroded privacy and equal protection freedoms in a number of areas. To this day, hundreds of individuals who have never been charged and whose identities have not been released are being held in harsh prisons without constitutional rights, while the government exercises greatly expanded wiretapping and surveillance powers. The Bush administration asked news organizations not to run videos released by Osama bin Laden, dubiously claiming that they might contain secret messages to terrorists: The media dutifully complied. Perhaps most chillingly, political protest -- the single type of speech the Founders were most concerned to protect -- has come under legal attack. A South Carolina man was charged with the federal crime of threatening the president's safety simply for holding a sign that read "No Blood for Oil" outside the locale of a Bush speech. Few have protested these measures.

In all of these cases, attacks on the First Amendment have been justified by "national security." Today, with the apparently eternal "war on terrorism" creating a quasi-permanent national security crisis, that argument may carry even more weight, as the courts grapple with the problem of how to balance the right to free speech with the executive branch's right to secrecy. As the Supreme Court's historic ruling Thursday overturning Texas' inhumane and outmoded sodomy laws showed, courts do not operate in a social vacuum; and after one of the few large-scale foreign attacks ever carried out inside the borders of the United States, with the public fearful and an already-secretive administration demanding a blank check to fight terrorism, courts are more likely to defer to executive branch arguments that national security is at stake -- as indeed they have repeatedly done in civil liberties cases arising from 9/11.

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The Pentagon Papers came into being because of Robert McNamara's angst. The chief architect of America's Vietnam policy, an ardent anti-communist who helped formulate the administration's doctrine that the Red menace had to be rolled back in Southeast Asia lest it spread throughout the region, McNamara gradually began to realize that the war could not be and indeed could never have been won. Stricken by guilt, in 1967 McNamara commissioned a study of how the U.S. came to be in Vietnam. The study, titled "History of U.S. Decision-Making Process on Vietnam Policy," was 7,000 pages long and filled 47 volumes. It provided support for several positions that antiwar critics had long asserted: that Viet Cong leader Ho Chi Minh -- America's former ally in World War II -- was regarded as a nationalist hero throughout the country; that the U.S.'s desire to crush the communist North was largely responsible for the breakdown of the 1954 Geneva settlement for Indochina; that in 1965 South Vietnamese President Thieu had said that the communists would likely win any election held in the country; and, most significantly, that American officials realized fairly early that the war could not be won militarily, but kept the war going anyway.

In short, McNamara's study supported the position that what was really going on in Vietnam was a war of national liberation, not the rise of a dangerous communist menace bent on exporting ideological mischief. More, it made clear that at a certain point America's leaders continued the war not to contain communism but because they didn't want to lose face by being defeated -- even though they knew they couldn't win. None of these things, of course, was revealed to the American people.

The Pentagon Papers were leaked to the New York Times and the Washington Post by a former hawk turned dove, Daniel Ellsberg, who had worked on the study for the RAND Corp. Ellsberg faced 115 years in prison for his act. But he hoped that by putting the papers in the hands of the press he would convince the U.S. to pull out of Vietnam. He was wrong: Nixon mined Haiphong harbor soon afterward, and Americans fought in Vietnam for two more bloody years. Their publication did, however, lead Nixon to create a team of so-called plumbers to make sure there were no more "leaks" -- and when the plumbers bungled their way into a place called the Watergate, they set in motion a train of events that eventually drove their vindictive, paranoid leader from the White House in disgrace.

After protracted study of the documents and contentious internal deliberations, the Times -- which had been increasingly critical of the Vietnam War -- published the first installment of the massive study on Sunday, July 13, 1971, under the cautious headline "Vietnam Archive: Pentagon Study Traces 3 Decades of Growing U.S. Involvement." At first, Nixon was unconcerned, believing that the purloined papers would be more embarrassing to Kennedy and Johnson than to his administration. But national security advisor Henry Kissinger convinced him that he should fight the publication. (According to David Rudenstine, author of "The Day the Presses Stopped: A History of the Pentagon Papers Case," Kissinger even went so far as to tell him that his failure to take action "shows you're a weakling, Mr. President.")

In the debate over what to do, Nixon chief of staff H.R. Haldeman summed up the impact of the papers with admirable prescience: "But out of the gobbledygook, comes a very clear thing: [unclear] you can't trust the government; you can't believe what they say; and you can't rely on their judgment; and the -- the implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this, because it shows that people do things the President wants to do even though it's wrong, and the President can be wrong."

After the Times had published two excerpts, Attorney General John Mitchell sent a telegram to the paper, asking it to stop publishing the material and warning it that disclosing information that could jeopardize the security of the country was illegal and could result in a 10-year sentence. The Times refused. The government then asked for a temporary restraining order in a district court in New York.

By chance, the judge was a Nixon appointee, Murray I. Gurfein, who was sitting on the bench for the first day. Judge Gurfein ruled against the government -- and he did so with words of rare forcefulness and eloquence. "The security of the Nation is not at the ramparts alone," Gurfein wrote. "Security also lies in the values of our free institutions. A cantankerous press, an obstinate press, a ubiquitous press must be suffered by those in authority to preserve the even greater values of freedom of expression and the right of the people to know."

The government appealed to two circuit courts -- by now the Washington Post had begun publishing summaries of the material, further complicating the case -- one of which ruled against it, one for it. The Supreme Court granted certiorari (i.e., agreed to hear the appeal) on June 25, issuing a temporary stay that halted publication while it heard the case. The case, like Bush vs. Gore, moved with lightning speed: The Court heard arguments the next day and issued its ruling -- New York Times Co. vs. United States -- on June 30. The entire case took only 18 days from first publication to final ruling -- one of the fastest resolutions of a major case in U.S. history. This extraordinary speed bears witness to the seriousness with which the court regards governmental attempts to impose so-called prior restraints on the press, and its awareness that such cases must be resolved quickly.

If the Pentagon Papers were published, White House lawyers warned, America's security would be gravely imperiled, in part because other nations would be reluctant to deal with us if they thought their conversations would be revealed. Against this argument, the Times lawyers invoked constitutional bedrock, one of the principles upon which the United States is founded: Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press ..."

In one of the most anticipated rulings in court history -- 1,500 people lined up for the court's 174 seats -- the court ruled for the Times and against the government. In his passionate opinion for the majority, rightfully considered one of the great affirmations of the First Amendment in U.S. history, Justice Hugo Black excoriated the administration for bringing the case. "[F]or the first time in the 182 years since the founding of the Republic, the federal courts are asked to hold that the First Amendment does not mean what it says, but rather means that the Government can halt the publication of current news of vital importance to the people of this country. In seeking injunctions against these newspapers and in its presentation to the Court, the Executive Branch seems to have forgotten the essential purpose and history of the First Amendment ... I can imagine no greater perversion of history."

The elderly justice from Alabama had overcome his youthful Ku Klux Klan membership and earlier legal missteps -- he upheld the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War II -- to become a great jurist, an immovable opponent of McCarthyite hysteria and perhaps the most powerful defender of the First Amendment in court history. Black was in poor health, suffering from severe headaches: He died only three months after the case was decided. But at the end of his life, there was still power in the aging lion's legal claws -- and he used them to smite the executive branch that had tried to muzzle the press.

"In the First Amendment the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy," Black thundered. "The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government."

And then Black penned a line that has become one of the most famous in Court history -- and echoes powerfully today, as the controversy simmers over Iraq's weapons of mass destruction: "And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell."

In today's climate of acquiescence to the commander in chief, when the establishment and much of the country apparently finds the idea that the president could have lied to the country too frightening or unseemly to entertain, it is difficult to imagine a Supreme Court justice flatly accusing the government of lying about why it sent American troops "off to foreign lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell." But Black had actually wanted to use still stronger language. As Roger K. Newman recounts in his biography of the justice, while working on his opinion, Black woke up his wife, Elizabeth, in the middle of the night and asked her: "How would it be if I said that the press should be free to prevent presidents from sending American boys to foreign lands to be murdered?" She wisely told him she thought that would be a bad idea. So instead, in a twist of historic irony, he drew inspiration from one of his favorite songs, a fire-breathing old Southern ditty called "I Am a Good Old Rebel." "Three hundred thousand Yankees lie stiff in Southern dust/ We got three hundred thousand before they conquered us/ They died of Southern fever, Southern steel and shot/ And I wish it was three million instead of what we got." Black had formerly sung the song to friends and family, but stopped when George Wallace started fighting integration. Now he made use of the old Confederate song to defend the right of the press to reveal information about a war he opposed.

Black held no particular affection for the press itself. It was freedom he cherished -- the freedom to speak that he believed the Founding Fathers had granted Americans in perpetuity and virtually without exception, freedom that he wrote was the last best check against governmental tyranny. Which makes his extraordinary tribute to the Times and the Post doubly meaningful: "In my view, far from deserving condemnation for their courageous reporting, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other newspapers should be commended for serving the purpose that the Founding Fathers saw so clearly. In revealing the workings of government that led to the Vietnam war, the newspapers nobly did precisely that which the Founders hoped and trusted they would do."

At issue in the decision was prior restraint -- the power of the state to prevent the press from publishing something, as opposed to punishing it after it has published. One of the seminal Supreme Court cases involving prior restraint was a 1931 case, Near vs. Minnesota. Minnesota courts had enjoined a scandal sheet called the Saturday Press from publishing future issues. Chief Justice Hughes reversed, stating that the "chief purpose" of the First Amendment was to prevent prior restraints on publishing and making it clear that after-publication punishment was greatly preferable. This and other legal precedents imposed what the court called a "heavy presumption against [the] constitutional validity" of any governmental attempt at prior restraint and thus a "heavy burden of showing justification for the imposition of such a restraint."

But Near vs. Minnesota also contained a brief passage that included a potential exception, on grounds of national security, to its ruling against prior restraints. Writing that the "protection even as to previous restraint is not absolutely unlimited," the court said that the "government might prevent actual obstruction to its recruiting service or the publication of the sailing dates of transports or the number and location of troops."

The issue of national security would weigh heavily on the minds of at least five of the justices -- and contribute to deep divisions not only between the six justices who voted with the majority and the three who opposed, but within the majority itself.

Six justices -- Black, Douglas, Brennan, Marshall, Stewart and White -- found that the United States had not met the heavy burden required to impose prior restraint. But the number is misleading: In fact, the consensus was extremely fragile. This is reflected in the fact that the ruling itself was extremely brief, said almost nothing substantive and was handed down per curiam, or "by the court," rather than as an opinion written by a justice speaking for the rest of the majority. The fact that the ruling was issued per curiam reflected the fact that although the majority agreed that the government had not met the burden of justifying prior restraint, no five justices could agree on why it had not. As for the ruling itself, it was remarkably terse: It merely recited the precedential boilerplate that prior restraints come with a heavy presumption against their constitutional validity, and then added, "We agree." As First Amendment expert Rodney A. Smolla points out in an illuminating study of the case in his excellent book "Free Speech in an Open Society," "It is difficult to imagine an opinion of the Supreme Court in a landmark case saying less."

The court's inability to say anything substantive -- an inability that severely limited the case from serving as a precedent in future decisions -- clearly proceeded from the deep split within the majority. Only two justices, Black and Douglas -- the two most noted First Amendment "absolutists" in court history -- took the position that prior restraints could never be justified. A third justice, Brennan, allowed that there might in extremely rare circumstances be a national security exception, but he made it clear that the executive branch would have to come up with hard proof of immediate harm, not vague assertions. Justice Marshall steered a middle course.

The "absolutists," Black and Douglas, argued that the court should not even have heard oral arguments in the case -- it should have simply entered a summary judgment against the government. As Black wrote, "I believe that every moment's continuance of the injunctions against these newspapers amounts to a flagrant, indefensible, and continuing violation of the First Amendment."

On the opposite side of the spectrum, three justices -- Chief Justice Burger, Harlan and Blackmun -- dissented, arguing that the First Amendment's protection of speech was limited by another equally compelling interest, what Burger called "the effective functioning of a complex modern government and specifically the effective exercise of certain constitutional powers of the Executive. Only those who view the First Amendment as an absolute in all circumstances -- a view I respect, but reject -- can find such cases as these to be simple or easy." The dissenting justices argued that the court had heard the case in "irresponsibly feverish" haste, making it impossible to determine whether the documents would actually harm national security. And in the dissenters' view, the executive branch's right to conduct foreign policy carried far more weight than the majority allowed.

Just as Black had issued a remarkable, personal rebuke of the executive branch, so Chief Justice Burger singled out the New York Times for harsh moral criticism. "To me it is hardly believable that a newspaper long regarded as a great institution in American life would fail to perform one of the basic and simple duties of every citizen with respect to the discovery or possession of stolen property or secret government documents. That duty, I had thought -- perhaps naively -- was to report forthwith, to responsible public officers. This duty rests on taxi drivers, Justices, and the New York Times." In sharp distinction to Black, who stated that the press's role was to "censure" the government, Burger argued that the Times, rather than disgracing itself by receiving stolen goods, should have played ball with the president -- what Smolla calls a "we're all in this together" position. In Burger's view, the press should work together with the executive branch -- which Burger implicitly argued could be trusted to behave honorably and honestly -- to determine whether national security was in danger.

That today Burger's position is more accepted and observed by the press itself than by the court is a development that does not bode well for those who share the Founders' views that a fair but independent and even adversarial press is the best bulwark against governmental abuse.

The dissenters took very seriously the government's claim that national security could be compromised. Ominously, Justice Blackmun closed his dissent by writing, "I hope that damage has not already been done. If, however, damage has been done, and if, with the Court's action today, these newspapers proceed to publish the critical documents and there results therefrom 'the death of soldiers, the destruction of alliances, the greatly increased difficulty of negotiation with our enemies, the inability of our diplomats to negotiate,' to which list I might add the factors of prolongation of the war and of further delay in the freeing of United States prisoners, then the Nation's people will know where the responsibility for these sad consequences rests."

But it is the opinions written by the two justices who voted with the majority, but disagreed with their four brethren about the reasons, that truly reveal the fragility of the ruling. Justices White and Stewart both wrote that if Congress had passed specific and limited legislation upholding the government's right to prior restraint in such cases, they might have upheld the lower court's injunction. White wrote, "I do not say that in no circumstances would the First Amendment permit an injunction against publishing information about government plans or operations. Nor, after examining the materials the Government characterizes as the most sensitive and destructive, can I deny that revelation of these documents will do substantial damage to public interests. Indeed, I am confident that their disclosure will have that result."

White was wrong. The real-world consequences of the publication of the Pentagon Papers (not just the Times and Post but other publications also ran excerpts or synopses) vindicated the court's decision and undermined the arguments of those who said that publication of the papers would damage the public interest. The near-consensus among scholars and analysts is that the publication of the Pentagon Papers only embarrassed the government -- it did not damage America's security. Like the boy who cried wolf, the Nixon administration's heavy-handed invocation of national security only succeeded in raising skepticism about this all-too-convenient recourse of the executive branch -- and at least for a time, perhaps, tilted public, legislative and ultimately judicial opinion away from deference to such claims.

But the fault lines running beneath the court's murky decision remain, and could crack open at any time.

In one sense, that is as it should be. There is not, nor should there be, an unlimited right to free speech. As Justice Blackmun noted in his dissent, "First Amendment absolutism has never commanded a majority of this Court." The notorious case cited by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes of someone falsely shouting "fire" in a crowded theater is the most obvious type of unprotected speech. Others include obscenity, false commercial speech, incitement to unlawful behavior, and defamation of a private person. But of all these exceptions to First Amendment protection, executive-branch claims of national security are perhaps the most difficult to evaluate, and thus reveal the most about justices' attitudes toward free speech and the state -- not just its right to suppress speech but its trustworthiness. Such claims pose a difficult question: Do the press's right to publish, and the public's inherent right to know, as a matter of principle outweigh generally untestable governmental claims that publication will harm national security?

For conservative jurists, this question throws into sharp relief the same tension or ambiguity that besets conservative politicians: the schism between a libertarian ideology rooted in Jefferson, Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill and an authoritarian ideology rooted in Christianity, nationalism and patriarchy. Whenever a judge is torn in two directions, the decisive factor is often his or her attitude to the parties or concepts involved in the dispute -- whether a given administration, a war, or the notion of free speech.

(The case of Justice Scalia vividly illustrates this point. Scalia bitterly opposed the court's landmark decision last week striking down Texas's sodomy statute, arguing that the majority overreached the law in their desire to accommodate the "so-called homosexual agenda." But Scalia himself has not been averse to bending the rules in a far more troubling way -- and departing from his entire previous judicial philosophy -- to accommodate the more immediate agenda of putting a fellow right-winger in the White House. Just as Scalia's lofty arguments about judicial restraint proved dispensable when Gore was threatening to become president, so his rage at the Texas ruling proceeds more from his deeply rooted belief that gays do not deserve the transcendental, historic rights the court saw fit to give them, than any grand principle.)

The Pentagon Papers case did create a precedent in support of free speech. But it is a murky and shaky precedent, subject to the vicissitudes of history, the willingness of future justices to defer to the executive branch, and the tough-mindedness of journalists. (That governments will continue to use national security to attempt to restrict civil liberties is a foregone conclusion.) And optimism is not warranted.

Justice Black's argument that the public has the right to all information, because only the marketplace of ideas assures the security of the nation -- a notion that ultimately goes back to John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty" -- may have resonated for the Founders, but it is increasingly out of step with our security-obsessed age. Today, when the president's spokesman tells us we should "all watch what we say," John Ashcroft is in charge of law enforcement and the PATRIOT Act in force, Black's statement that "the guarding of military and diplomatic secrets at the expense of informed representative government provides no real security for our Republic" sounds positively radical.

History shows that governmental claims that unfettered press freedom will harm national interests are unfounded. Transparency is a virtue the civilized world rightfully insists is a prerequisite for good governance. The United States has long been the world leader in free speech. Even now, during the endless "war on terrorism" -- especially during that war -- it must continue to practice what it preaches.

The moral of the Pentagon Papers case is that constant vigilance in defense of the First Amendment is necessary -- all the more so, as Chief Justice Hughes wrote many years ago, in time of war. The six justices who stood up to a sitting administration during wartime were the last line of defense against the unwarranted use of governmental power. There were powerful forces pulling at them: the siren songs of flag and war, the power of the presidency. But, though divided, they did not abandon their posts. And by so doing, they provided a signpost and a beacon for all Americans, who, in an age of fear, need to be reminded that presidents come and go, wars come and go, but the right of the press to publish, and the people to know, must not be allowed to perish.


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About the writer
Gary Kamiya is Salon's executive editor.

[plschwartz]

Ananova:


Ananova:
Hospital serves wine to heart patients

A hospital is giving two glasses of red wine a day to heart attack victims on its wards.

Nurses are serving cardiac patients at the Great Western Hospital, in Swindon, a daily tipple in an attempt to reduce further heart problems.

Research has shown that two glasses a day can cut the chances of suffering a heart attack by 50 % and a stroke by 20%.

The Wiltshire hospital believes it is the first in Europe to really test the theory on patients.

The wine is paid for by the hospital's own charity, not the NHS.

It is the idea of heart surgeon Dr William McCrea, who said red wine's antioxidants are the key to its success.

"These are the chemicals which stop blood clotting and stop the build up of cholesterol in blood vessels," he said.

Wines such as Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Noir and Shiraz have the grapes thought to be best at reducing heart problems.

The move is a popular one with many patients who say they can feel it doing them good.

But the hospital has stressed it will not be encouraging patients with previous alcohol problems to take part.

Story filed: 18:20 Wednesday 2nd July 2003

A hospital is giving two glasses of red wine a day to heart attack victims on its wards.

Nurses are serving cardiac patients at the Great Western Hospital, in Swindon, a daily tipple in an attempt to reduce further heart problems.

Research has shown that two glasses a day can cut the chances of suffering a heart attack by 50 % and a stroke by 20%.

The Wiltshire hospital believes it is the first in Europe to really test the theory on patients.

The wine is paid for by the hospital's own charity, not the NHS.

It is the idea of heart surgeon Dr William McCrea, who said red wine's antioxidants are the key to its success.

"These are the chemicals which stop blood clotting and stop the build up of cholesterol in blood vessels," he said.

Wines such as Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Noir and Shiraz have the grapes thought to be best at reducing heart problems.

The move is a popular one with many patients who say they can feel it doing them good.

But the hospital has stressed it will not be encouraging patients with previous alcohol problems to take part.

Story filed: 18:20 Wednesday 2nd July 2003

[Stoner]

http://reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml...toryID=3041035



Kuwait Awakes from Saddam Dream to New Nightmare
Sat July 5, 2003 07:28 AM ET
By Mehrdad Balali
KUWAIT (Reuters) - Kuwait's euphoria over the overthrow of its former occupier Saddam Hussein is fading as the country wakes up to the reality of economic and social problems that had long been overshadowed by the Iraqi menace.

The ousting of Iraq's president, who invaded Kuwait in 1990 and occupied it for seven months, was seen by many Kuwaitis as a harbinger of better days, but the oil-rich country is now facing growing frustration over unemployment, alleged corruption, political mismanagement and rising Islamist zeal.

These issues are coming to the forefront as U.S. ally Kuwait, the most democratic of Gulf states, gears up for its first parliamentary elections in the post-Saddam era in July.

"We are buried under a mound of problems and don't have a clue what to do about it," said Mohammad Khalifa, a member of the present parliament. "We used Saddam as an excuse all these years to do nothing. We lulled ourselves into complacency."

A bitter, mud-slinging election campaign is under way, rife with allegations of government incompetence, fraud and corruption, even against members of the ruling al-Sabah family.

Emboldened by U.S. calls for change in the Middle East, both Islamist and liberal Kuwaitis are calling on the al-Sabahs, in power since 1752, to cede more power.

"One lesson we ought to learn from Saddam's fate is to give more power to the people," said Islamist parliamentarian Waleed Tabtabai. "The top post in the government should go to an ordinary citizen so he can be accountable."

The al-Sabah family has dismissed such calls. Crown Prince Sheikh Saad al-Abdulla al-Sabah has been prime minister since 1978 and family members hold the other key government posts.

The government, one of the most pro-western in the Gulf, has launched a drive to combat Muslim militants after recent attacks on U.S. troops and civilians in the country.

But mainstream Islamists, who are entrenched in politics with a powerful bloc in parliament and loyalties among conservative bedouins, are growing in popularity. They have succeeded in segregating universities and preventing women from gaining political rights.

Liberals accuse the government of fostering ties with Islamists to frustrate liberal members of the country's feisty parliament. The government denies this. Kuwait's Islamic leaders say they have no wish to overthrow the existing order, only to make it more Islamic.

ECONOMIC REFORM

The government has also been criticized for dithering over tough decisions -- notably economic reform. After the Iraqi occupation, an obsession with security sidelined other issues.

Despite its oil wealth Kuwait has seen little economic development since the early 1980s unlike the neighboring emirate of Dubai, the region's trading and tourism center, or Bahrain, the Gulf's financial hub.

"There's a lack of vision in the government. We haven't had a major development project for three decades," said former Information Minister Saad bin-Tiflah, a liberal.

The largely state-run economy is heavily dependent on oil exports. Foreign and private investment is minimal and the bulk of state income is spent on wages in the cradle-to-grave welfare state of 2 million people, some 850,000 of whom are Kuwaiti.

Ninety percent of Kuwait's workforce is state-employed.

The government speaks of privatization but finds it hard to rid itself of its traditional role of providing jobs, cheap education, housing and health care.

"The government is up against the wall. It cannot give everyone a job and cannot force private businesses to hire them," said Ahmad al-Bagdadi, a professor of political science.

"Government offices are so overcrowded with staff that some employees are told to go home and just come at the end of the month to pick up their pay," he said.

With the population on the rise, jobs are becoming more scarce. The private sector tends to hire from the cheaper and more skilled expatriate pool, and the public sector is bloated.

Economists cite a "hidden unemployment" rate of 50 percent as most government positions are described as unproductive. Analysts predict even dimmer prospects for a new generation of baby boomers. About half of Kuwaitis are under 15.

"What we need is privatization. The government does not have the knowledge to run the industry and it does not have the courage to give it up to the private sector," said leading Kuwaiti economist Jassem al-Saddoun.

______________________________

Just don't send anyone from the Bu****e camp to show them the way to democracy

[eggplant43]

Democrats put smart money on Howard's way
Former Vermont governor takes establishment rivals by surprise with $7m presidential war chest

Lawrence Donegan in San Francisco and Alex Massie in Washington

Sunday July 6, 2003

The Observer

He is a former governor of a New England state, a Democrat and a liberal; an Ivy League intellectual who can quote from the classics to make his political case. He is married to a doctor, surrounds himself with idealists and is seen as a maverick by his party's establishment.

Meet Howard Dean - or, as his growing army of supporters like to call him, 'The Real Josiah Bartlet' - Bartlet being the fictional president from Channel 4's The West Wing.

Dean, one of nine Democrats seeking nomination for the 2004 presidential election, isn't anywhere near the White House yet, but he is no longer the distant prospect once described by many observers as too left-wing to be taken seriously.

With less than six months to go before the primary season opens, Dean leapt to the front of the pack seeking to challenge George W. Bush when it emerged last week he had raised $7.1 million in campaign funding in just three months - mostly thanks to volunteers and donors who have abandoned traditional campaigning techniques and opted for the internet.

More than 50,000 people have signed up to Dean's campaign since the start of the year, many of them under-35s attracted by his opposition to the war in Iraq, as well as his record as Governor of Vermont, where he enacted a succession of left-wing - by American standards - policies such as giving full legal status to gay couples and increasing access to health care.

Dean, who speaks with a clarity and straightforwardness rarely found in mainstream American politics, is running under the most memorable slogan of an otherwise dreary campaign: 'I represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.'

'I didn't understand the impact that line would have,' he said this week. 'I was unaware of the huge anger out there among Democrats - anger at Bush, but also against the Democrats in Washington who weren't willing to stand up to the right wing of the Republican Party.'

At the centre of Dean's extraordinary recruitment effort is a website called meetup.com (a hitherto obscure meeting place on the web for people who wanted to discuss such topics as teenage vampires, body modification and paganism). Dean's supporters meet at the site once a month to arrange events, raise money and discuss how best to advance their candidate's cause.

'We first began to notice meetup.com in January,' said campaign manager Joe Trippi. 'There were 432 people registered then and we really didn't see how this was going to work across the country. Then the numbers began to grow and we thought, "Wait a minute - what would happen if the campaign embraced this?" Ever since then it's been exponential.'

Political analysts have been drawing parallels between Dean's grassroots efforts and that of John McCain, who briefly challenged Bush for the Republican nomination in 2000 until Bush's multi-million-dollar campaign steamrolled the opposition.

Dean insists he has greater staying power than McCain. 'We're ahead of where we thought we'd be. We thought it would be very difficult to get name recognition until the primary season began,' he said. 'We need to convince Democrats there's no need to compromise with the most radical and right-wing President of my lifetime.'

In stark contrast to this optimism, the campaigns of establishment candidates such as Al Gore's 2000 running mate Joe Lieberman, and Richard Gephardt, once the most powerful Democrat in Congress, are floundering, both in terms of raising money and generating enthusiasm among party supporters.

Polls in Iowa and New Hampshire, the two small but influential states that open the primary season, have predicted that the former Vermont governor could win the Democratic nomination in both, prompting the mainstream media to devote time and space to Dean's sudden transformation from fringe candidate to serious player, and his opponents to heighten their attacks on him.

Massachusetts Senator John Kerry has raised more money than the other eight candidates and remains the favourite of the party establishment, but his camp has clearly been rattled by Dean's rise. 'He's tapped into an angry, motivated constituency who, for three months at least, have pulled out their chequebooks,' said Jim Jordan, Kerry's campaign manager.

Aides to other candidates have sought to paint Dean's campaign as 'too extremist', claiming he is 'a George McGovern for the 21st century'. (McGovern ran against Nixon in 1972 and lost one of the most one-sided presidential elections in history.) Last month the Democrat Leadership Council, the Clinton power base, called the former governor 'unelectable'.

'Everyone wants a race against Dean. Everyone has looked at the research and he looks the easiest to bring down. He has positioned himself as a liberal, and liberals don't win here,' said an aide to Lieberman. 'What Democrats want more than anything else in the nominee is someone who can beat Bush.'

Yet Dean's supporters insist it is wrong to describe him as an out-and-out liberal, pointing out his record in Vermont of maintaining a tight budget and the high marks he has received for his pro-hunting views from the National Rifle Association.

Trippi dismissed Dean's critics as 'desperate'. 'When Kerry or any of the others attack Governor Dean, it fires our people up to get more new people involved,' he said. 'They don't understand our campaign. Part of the reason they've been kept off-balance by us is because they think they're like us, and they're not. We're different.'

[eggplant43]

Has she no shame?
Of course not, and now we know why: In her new book "Treason," Ann Coulter reveals that her role model is Joe McCarthy. And her grasp of facts is even worse than her judgment..

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Joe Conason



July 4, 2003 | "Slander" is defined in Bouvier's Law Dictionary as "a false defamation (expressed in spoken words, signs, or gestures) which injures the character or reputation of the person defamed." The venerable American legal lexicon goes on to note that such defamatory words are sometimes "actionable in themselves, without proof of special damages," particularly when they impute "guilt of some offence for which the party, if guilty, might be indicted and punished by the criminal courts; as to call a person a 'traitor.'"

So how appropriate it is that in the rapidly growing Ann Coulter bibliography, last year's bestselling "Slander" is now followed by "Treason," her new catalog of defamation against every liberal and every Democrat -- indeed, every American who has dared to disagree with her or her spirit guide, Joe McCarthy -- as "traitors." And like a criminal who subconsciously wants to be caught, Coulter seems compelled to reveal at last her true role model. (Some of us had figured this out already.)

She not only lionizes the late senator, whose name is synonymous with demagogue, but with a vengeance also adopts his methods and pursues his partisan purposes. She sneers, she smears, she indicts by falsehood and distortion -- and she frankly expresses her desire to destroy any political party or person that resists Republican conservatism (as defined by her).

"Whether they are defending the Soviet Union or bleating for Saddam Hussein, liberals are always against America," according to her demonology. "They are either traitors or idiots, and on the matter of America's self-preservation, the difference is irrelevant. Fifty years of treason hasn't slowed them down." And: "Liberals relentlessly attack their country, but we can't call them traitors, which they manifestly are, because that would be 'McCarthyism,' which never existed." (Never existed? Her idol gave his 1952 book that very word as its title.)

Coulter went from cable network sideshow to full-fledged media star last year when her book "Slander," fed by the same ferocious right wing of the country that elevated both Rush Limbaugh and Fox News -- both of which did much to promote Coulter -- became a runaway bestseller. "Treason" displays many of the same mental habits as did "Slander": the obsession with "manly" men, the disparagement of women as weak-willed and whorish, the disturbed attraction to images of violence. "When Republicans ignite the explosive energy of the hardhats, liberals had better run for cover," she barks, obviously longing for the days when construction workers beat up antiwar demonstrators. And there is the same spittle-flecked name-calling, like a Tourette's sufferer without the mordant energy. Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. is "Jackie Kennedy's poodle." The late religious scholar Reinhold Niebuhr was "a big, sonorous bore." Labor leader Walter Reuther was a "sanctimonious fraud." McCarthy? "A poet," she tells us.

If so, Coulter is inspired by the same paranoid muse. She crafts images of liberals "dedicated to mainstreaming Communist ideals at home," seeking "to destroy America from the inside with their relentless attacks on morality and truth." To make such accusations requires a certain kind of mind, to put it politely. Or to put it less politely -- as the managing editor of Commentary remarked in his scathing review of "Slander" -- Coulter "pretends to intellectual seriousness where there is none." But in the marketplace for conservative ideology, her brand of fakery is hot.

The likelihood is that Coulter's many avid fans are as conveniently ignorant of the past as she seems to be. So the rubes who buy "Treason" will believe her when she accuses George Catlett Marshall, the great general who oversaw the reconstruction of Europe, of nurturing a "strange attraction" to "sedition" and of scheming to assist rather than hinder Soviet expansion.

Her duped readers will believe that Marshall and President Harry S. Truman opposed Stalin only because Republicans won the midterm elections in 1946. They probably won't know that Truman confronted the Soviets in the Mediterranean with a naval task force several months before Election Day; or that the new Republican majority cut Truman's requested military budget by $500 million as soon as they took over Congress in January 1947, nearly crippling the American occupation of Germany and Japan; or that Truman, Marshall and Dean Acheson had to plead with the isolationist Republican leadership to oppose Russian designs on Greece and Turkey.

Her deceptive style is exemplified in an anecdote she lifts from an actual historian and twists to smear Truman. She writes: "Most breathtakingly, in March 1946, Truman ostentatiously rebuffed Churchill after his famous Iron Curtain speech in Fulton, Missouri. Immediately after Churchill's speech, Truman instructed his Secretary of State Dean Acheson not to attend a reception for Churchill a week later in New York."

In that passage -- footnoted to James Chace's magisterial 1998 biography of Acheson -- Coulter demonstrates that she is both an intentional liar and an incompetent writer. The pages she cites from Chace explain quite clearly that Acheson (who was not then Secretary of State and would not be promoted to that office until 1949) was urged to avoid the New York reception by Secretary of State James Byrnes, not Truman. The British apparently didn't notice that "ostentatious rebuff," since they immediately invited Acheson and his wife to a cordial lunch with Churchill in Washington. And as for Truman, Chace notes that it was he who had invited Churchill to Missouri, his home state, to deliver the speech -- which the American president read in advance, assuring the former prime minister that his strong warning about communist intentions would "do nothing but good."

So replete is "Treason" with falsehoods and distortions, as well as so much plain bull****, that it may well create a cottage industry of corrective fact-checking, just as "Slander" did last year. (The fun has already begun with Brendan Nyhan's devastating review on the Spinsanity Web site. So far the Spinsanity sages have found "at least five factual claims that are indisputably false" in "Treason," along with the usual Coulter techniques of phony quotation, misleading sourcing, and sentences ripped from context or falsely attributed.)

Such heavy-handed deception was precisely the sort of tactic employed by McCarthy himself against Acheson and all his other targets. In his book "McCarthyism: The Fight for America," for instance, he charged that the Truman aide had "hailed the Communist victory in China as 'a new day which has dawned in Asia.'" Of course, Acheson had neither said nor written anything of the kind.

To Coulter, McCarthy is simply a great man worthy of her emulation. In her alternate universe, he isn't the slimy traducer Americans have come to know and despise. He's bright, witty, warm-hearted and macho, a sincere farm boy who exposes the treasonous cowardice of the urbane Acheson, Marshall and other "sniffing pantywaists." She seems to regard him as kind of a Jimmy Stewart type, albeit with jowls and five o'clock shadow and a serious drinking problem.

And he never, ever attacked anyone who didn't deserve it.

"His targets were Soviet sympathizers and Soviet spies," Coulter proclaims without qualification. But elsewhere she says that he wasn't even really trying to find either communists or spies, but only seeking to expose "security risks" in government jobs. Whatever his mission, it was noble and succeeding admirably until 1954, when "liberals immobilized him with their Army-McCarthy hearings and censure investigation."

Actually, McCarthy was brought down by his own televised misconduct during those hearings -- and by the outrage not of Democrats but of Republicans, including President Eisenhower and a caucus of courageous GOP senators. (Among the latter was the current president's grandfather, Prescott Bush of Connecticut, whose vote to censure McCarthy is another little fact that Coulter forgets to mention.)

The truth is that some of McCarthy's targets were or had been communists -- and therefore by definition "sympathizers" of the Soviet Union -- but he never uncovered a single indictable spy. There had been dozens of Soviet agents in government before and during World War II. But those espionage rings had been broken up by the FBI well before McCarthy showed up brandishing a bogus "list" of 57 or 205 or 81 Communists in the State Department.

Yet the Wisconsin windbag amassed sufficient power for a time to destroy innocent individuals, most notably Owen Lattimore, described smirkingly by Coulter as McCarthy's "biggest star" and the man he once named as Stalin's "top espionage agent" in the United States. "Somewhat surprisingly," as Coulter is obliged to note, Lattimore's name has yet to be found in Moscow's excavated KGB archives or in the Venona cables decrypted by U.S. Army counterespionage agents. The dearth of evidence against Lattimore matters not at all to Coulter, however. Though the eminent China expert was neither a spy nor a communist, he certainly knew and worked with some communists -- and worst of all, he disagreed with the far right about U.S. policy toward China.

Then there are names that Coulter doesn't dare name, such as Theodore Kaghan, a favorite McCarthy target who worked for the Voice of America. In fact, she doesn't mention the Voice of America investigation at all, perhaps because it was so obviously a destructive waste of time and money. Kaghan, a valiant opponent of the communists in Berlin, was dismissed from his VOA position under pressure from McCarthy. He was wholly innocent, but the reckless senator's inquisition ruined him and sabotaged Western interests. That same destructive pattern occurred in the State Department, in the Army Signal Corps, and in other government agencies. His ham-handed brutality made McCarthy an immense boon to communist propaganda abroad, especially in Europe. They loved it when his counsel Roy Cohn and his assistant David Schine junketed around the continent, tasked with removing thousands of "pro-communist" books from the shelves of U.S.-funded libraries.

To transform McCarthy into a hero, Coulter carefully airbrushes all these unpleasant episodes from his career. "This version will be unfamiliar to most Americans inasmuch as it includes facts," she explains, introducing her biographical sketch of the Wisconsin senator. Perhaps it includes some facts, but it certainly omits others.

Coulter discusses McCarthy's impressive high school record in considerable loving detail. But somehow she neglects to mention McCarthy's first moment in the national spotlight. That was his infamous 1949 campaign on behalf of Nazi S.S. officers who were convicted of war crimes for the massacre of American troops in the town of Malmedy during the Battle of the Bulge. On their orders, 83 American prisoners of war had been murdered by Waffen S.S. machine-gunners. The S.S. officers were sentenced to death, but McCarthy insisted that the entire case was a frame-up, with confessions obtained by horrific torture. He intervened in Senate hearings on the case and lied repeatedly during his defense of the Nazi murderers. His most spectacular claim was that the American investigators had crushed the testicles of German prisoners as an interrogation technique. McCarthy was later shown to have served as the pawn of neo-Nazi and communist provocateurs who were using the Malmedy case to whip up anti-American sentiment in postwar Germany. The main source for his false charges concerning Malmedy was a Germany lawyer named Rudolf Aschenauer, whose closest ties were to the postwar Nazi underground and to American right-wing isolationists, but who has also been identified as a communist agent. Aschenauer testified at U.S. Senate hearings in Germany that he had passed information about Malmedy to McCarthy. The S.S. officers were guilty, as the Senate report confirmed -- although most of them later got their death sentences commuted in a gesture to former Nazi officials who aided the West in the Cold War. But McCarthy had succeeded in his larger purpose, winning publicity for himself and casting a negative light on the war-crimes trials.

By Coulter's loose definition, his involvement in the Malmedy incident proves that McCarthy was a "traitor." He lied publicly to advance totalitarian forces in Europe against American interests. He sided with enemy forces against American soldiers. He falsely accused American officials of crimes. Moreover, he took up this tainted cause at least in part because of heavy financial support from an ultra-right-wing German-American businessman in Wisconsin. He managed to help both Nazis and communists at once, a feat rarely seen since the end of the Hitler-Stalin pact.

That irony would be lost on Coulter, as she proceeds with her single-minded smearing of Democrats and liberals. It turns out that all her raking over the ancient history of communism and anti-communism serves only as preparation to construct false contemporary analogies. Just as anyone who disagreed with McCarthy was a traitor, so was anyone who opposed the war in Vietnam or dissented from Reagan's war in Nicaragua or doubted Bush's war in Iraq.

In Coulter's beloved country there is no place for debate, only conformity. And in "Treason" there is no space for the complicated, mundane reality of American political life. Conservatives good, liberals bad, is her shrieking mantra. She knows what her audience will buy -- and that most of them aren't bright enough to notice the contradictions.

So while Patrick Buchanan is a good guy when he red-baits liberals during the Reagan era, he suddenly disappears from the pages of "Treason" when he opposes the war in Iraq. For that matter, so do all the right-wing critics of Bush's war, from Republican Rep. Ron Paul of Texas to the entire staff of the ultra-right Cato Institute. Their existence can't be acknowledged -- because if they do exist, they are "traitors," too. And there is no such creature as a right-wing traitor (which means that the dozens of Americans convicted of spying for Nazi Germany in 1942, the political leadership of the Confederacy, the Tories of the Revolutionary era, Timothy McVeigh, and Robert Hanssen all, naturally, go unmentioned in "Treason").

Likewise absent from Coulter's cracked cosmology are the liberals and Democrats who supported the Iraq war, including dozens of senators, members of Congress, the editors of the New Republic, the Democratic Leadership Council, and writers such as Paul Berman and Kenneth Pollack. According to her, Democrats voted for the war resolution only because they feared their true treasonous nature would otherwise be exposed. In fact, their votes in favor of Bush's resolution perversely proved that they were traitors!

"Liberals spent most of the war on terrorism in a funk because they didn't have enough grist for the antiwar mill. They nearly went stark raving mad at having to mouth patriotic platitudes while burning with a desire to aid the enemy." Somebody is raving here, but it isn't a liberal. With this book, Coulter has paid her homage and surpassed her master.

From now on, maybe we should call it Coulterism.


- - - - - - - - - - - -

About the writer
Joe Conason writes a daily journal for Salon. He also writes a weekly column for the New York Observer. His new book, "Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth," is now available.

[eggplant43]

The Declaration of Independence
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America

By 0, 7/4/2003

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the People.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States, for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners, refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our People, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislature.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their acts of pretended legislation:

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from Punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our governments:

For suspending our own Legislature, and declaring themselves invested with Power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free People.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the Protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

[Rollin' Rog]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/...es-oped-manual
_

Naked Power, Arbitrary Rule

By Jonathan Turley

July 21, 2003

Washington is a city that strives to satisfy every tourist want, from faux pictures with the president to tours of our most cherished scandal locations. Before coming to town last week, however, British Prime Minister Tony Blair made it clear that he would not be satisfied with the usual knick-knack souvenirs. He wanted something a bit more tangible: two British citizens scheduled for trial before U.S. military tribunals. It appears that he succeeded, though President Bush may soon regret that he could not pawn off a couple of snow globes and a T-shirt instead.

For 18 months, Bush has rebuffed growing British demands for the right to try their own citizens ? a serious blow to Blair, who faces an increasingly anti-American public and a recent motion by 200 members of Parliament, mostly from Blair's own Labor Party, calling for the return of the men for trial in Britain.

Blair's popularity is plummeting because of his steadfast loyalty to Bush and his support for the war in Iraq. The British fought bravely in Afghanistan and continue to lose soldiers in Iraq. They have asked only for the right to try their own citizens in their own courts.

In their private meeting, Blair finally convinced Bush to suspend proceedings against the two men ? Moazzam Begg, 35, and Feroz Abbasi, 23 ? pending further discussions and possible transfer of the men. Bush appears willing to fork over the men as a personal favor to Blair, but such a transfer would further erode the already thin justification for the U.S. tribunals.

If the British courts are adequate to try these two men, many in this country will ask why our courts are inadequate ? particularly after convicting more than a dozen such terrorists (including Al Qaeda members).

Moreover, other countries will now presumably renew their requests for their own citizens. Some officials also are concerned that there is little real evidence against these men and that a civilian criminal trial in Britain could result in acquittals.

The British share the overwhelming worldview that the Bush tribunals are an affront to the rule of law: denying basic rules of evidence, allowing indefinite detention of suspects, barring access to the federal courts, permitting the introduction of statements derived from torture, barring the application of constitutional and federal laws and limiting the grounds for appeal.

Indeed, the British note that American legal organizations have warned lawyers that it would be unethical to participate in such abusive proceedings. These objections have been deepened by the continual references by Bush and Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft to the detainees as guilty. It appears that the British still cling to the quaint notion that defendants should be presumed innocent until proved guilty.

When Bush's past prejudicial statements were raised in a press conference with Blair on Thursday, Bush seemed to rush to fulfill the stereotype of cowboy justice by stating: "The only thing I know for certain is that these are bad people picked up off the battlefield aiding and abetting the Taliban." Of course, John Walker Lindh was taken off the battlefield for aiding and abetting the Taliban but was charged in a real court.

However, Bush has maintained that he is not required to be either consistent or logical: "I'm the commander I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the president."

Given the fact that only six people are designated for tribunals and no more than 12 will reportedly be tried, the question is why the administration would incur such costs for so little benefit.
The answer has nothing to do with national security or any of these men.

Long before 9/11, many officials in the administration advocated the expansion of presidential powers ? views that were often rejected as extreme and dangerous. With the attacks, these same officials saw the opportunity to re-create the presidency in a new and more autocratic image. By basing the tribunals on the "war against terrorism," the administration would create precedent that would effectively allow a president to assert such extreme powers at any time.

Like "wars" against illiteracy or drugs, the war against terrorism is merely an announced policy of the administration. Thus, if the tribunals are allowed, any president can simply declare a new threat as a justification to hold people indefinitely as enemy combatants or use their own court system for executions.

The president has repeatedly acted like an American Caesar, sending some accused terrorists to federal court while others are sent for tribunal justice. In the case of these two men, Bush will allow them a fair trial in Britain as a gift to a friend in political need while he arbitrarily denies such trials to others.

The message is clear and simple: Bush alone will decide the meaning and the means of justice. Ironically, in his actions since 9/11, Bush may have handed these defendants a victory that they could not have achieved alone. The terrorists sought to destroy the American system and to show that we are hypocrites who refuse to comply with rules that we apply to others.

It takes little to destroy buildings and to sacrifice innocent people. It takes a president to destroy a legal system and its underlying values. Like those he seeks to execute, Bush wants justice by his own definition and by his own hand.

Jonathan Turley is a law professor at George Washington University.

[gotrootdude]

New Program for Swapping Hardware Enters Beta
http://bbspot.com/News/2003/07/hardster.html
Tombstone, AZ - A new program called Hardster which allows Internet users to share hardware much like they share MP3s and other files has just entered the beta stage.



A Hardster user prints himself
out a new LaserJet
Hardster is the brainchild Stephan Iwo who created the equally unoriginally named Kangazaa program for sharing Kangaroos online. "I got tired of downloading just software from these file sharing services. Often, I'd get a program that required a lot more computing power than I had. Then came the "Eureka" moment and Hardster was born," Iwo explained.

Unlike Napster, Hardster appears to have a sustainable business model. Users of the system must purchase a small attachment called a Hardster Module for their inkjet printer to reproduce the hardware. Each module is capable of reproducing a limited number of components before they need to be refilled.

"You just set up a component of your system to be 'shared' and then any of the users on the network can copy that piece of hardware. It's so simple that my mother just downloaded a new laser printer from a guy in Poland," said Iwo.

"This is great," exclaimed one Hardster user, "I paid $30 for a Hardster Module and I printed out a hard drive, a new P4 and an ATI card. My system rules!"

Tia Broadhurst was tired of copying her friends hardware by hand and welcomes Hardster. "Putting together a Radeon card with old video cards and duct tape is a lot harder than you think. Hardster has really made my life easier," she said.

Related News
Sony Unveils Self-destructive DVD Player

Video Card Review Sets Page Record

Dead Hard Drive Kept "Just in Case"

Hardware manufacturers, who for years have laughed at the software and entertainment industry, now have something to really worry about. "We're not sure, but we think there are laws being broken by Hardster. If there's not then there will be soon," said the Global Alliance of Hardware Makers spokesperson, Emily Sodor.

Iwo said that there was nothing preventing Hardster to be adapted to items other than computer hardware and he had experimented with printing himself up a new car though he had trouble getting it out of his office.

Sofia Dickison also loves the system. "It's great. I just bought one of the Hardster Modules then printed out a few more. It's a self-sustaining hardware reproducing system. I'm not sure if they thought of that."



Somebody Fax me some more motherboards, I got a few extra Athlons.

[pyritechips]

Owner charged after ossuary labelled fake

Jerusalem — Israeli police have arrested an antiquities dealer in connection with two alleged forgeries, including a burial box once thought to belong to the brother of Jesus.

Oded Golan appeared in a Jerusalem court Tuesday, a day after police picked him up at his Tel Aviv home.

Police allege Golan faked an inscription on the so-called James ossuary to make it appear it belonged to the brother of Jesus.

Golan said he bought the box in the 1970s, but police and antiquities inspectors started separate investigations into whether the items were recently stolen.

The limestone burial box, which was on display in Toronto last year, bears the inscription "Ya'akov [James], son of Yosef [Joseph], brother of Yeshua [Jesus]."

Israel's Antiquities Authority had already dismissed the inscription and another Golan relic, a stone tablet called the Yoash inscription, as fakes.

FROM JUNE 18, 2003: Experts dismiss James ossuary

Police showed equipment they said was discovered in Golan's home, including stencils, stones and partially completed forgeries.

Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum was home to the ossuary for two months in late 2002, where it drew large crowds. It sustained cracks when it was transported from Israel.

[Rollin' Rog]

July 29, 2003
Pentagon Prepares a Futures Market on Terror Attacks
By CARL HULSE



WASHINGTON, July 28 ? The Pentagon office that proposed spying electronically on Americans to monitor potential terrorists has a new experiment. It is an online futures trading market, disclosed today by critics, in which anonymous speculators would bet on forecasting terrorist attacks, assassinations and coups.

Traders bullish on a biological attack on Israel or bearish on the chances of a North Korean missile strike would have the opportunity to bet on the likelihood of such events on a new Internet site established by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

The Pentagon called its latest idea a new way of predicting events and part of its search for the "broadest possible set of new ways to prevent terrorist attacks." Two Democratic senators who reported the plan called it morally repugnant and grotesque. The senators said the program fell under the control of Adm. John M. Poindexter, President Ronald Reagan's national security adviser.

One of the two senators, Byron L. Dorgan of North Dakota, said the idea seemed so preposterous that he had trouble persuading people it was not a hoax. "Can you imagine," Mr. Dorgan asked, "if another country set up a betting parlor so that people could go in ? and is sponsored by the government itself ? people could go in and bet on the assassination of an American political figure?"

After Mr. Dorgan and his fellow critic, Ron Wyden of Oregon, spoke out, the Pentagon sought to play down the importance of a program for which the Bush administration has sought $8 million through 2005. The White House also altered the Web site so that the potential events to be considered by the market that were visible earlier in the day at www.policyanalysismarket.org could no longer be seen.

But by that time, Republican officials in the Senate were privately shaking their heads over the planned trading. One top aide said he hoped that the Pentagon had a good explanation for it.
The Pentagon, in defending the program, said such futures trading had proven effective in predicting other events like oil prices, elections and movie ticket sales.

"Research indicates that markets are extremely efficient, effective and timely aggregators of dispersed and even hidden information," the Defense Department said in a statement. "Futures markets have proven themselves to be good at predicting such things as elections results; they are often better than expert opinions."

According to descriptions given to Congress, available at the Web site and provided by the two senators, traders who register would deposit money into an account similar to a stock account and win or lose money based on predicting events.

"For instance," Mr. Wyden said, "you may think early on that Prime Minister X is going to be assassinated. So you buy the futures contracts for 5 cents each. As more people begin to think the person's going to be assassinated, the cost of the contract could go up, to 50 cents.

"The payoff if he's assassinated is $1 per future. So if it comes to pass, and those who bought at 5 cents make 95 cents. Those who bought at 50 cents make 50 cents."

The senators also suggested that terrorists could participate because the traders' identities will be unknown.

"This appears to encourage terrorists to participate, either to profit from their terrorist activities or to bet against them in order to mislead U.S. intelligence authorities," they said in a letter to Admiral Poindexter, the director of the Terrorism Information Awareness Office, which the opponents said had developed the idea.

The initiative, called the Policy Analysis Market, is to begin registering up to 1,000 traders on Friday. It is the latest problem for the advanced projects agency, or Darpa, a Pentagon unit that has run into controversy for the Terrorism Information Office.

Admiral Poindexter once described a sweeping electronic surveillance plan as a way of forestalling terrorism by tapping into computer databases to collect medical, travel, credit and financial records.

Worried about the reach of the program, Congress this year prohibited what was called the Total Information Awareness program from being used against Americans. Its name was changed to the Terrorism Information Awareness program.

This month, the Senate agreed to block all spending on the program. The House did not. Mr. Wyden said he hoped that the new disclosure about the trading program would be the death blow for Admiral Poindexter's plan.

The Pentagon did not provide details of the program like how much money participants would have to deposit in accounts. Trading is to begin on Oct. 1, with the number of participants initially limited to 1,000 and possibly expanding to 10,000 by Jan. 1.

"Involvement in this group prediction process should prove engaging and may prove profitable," the Web site said.

The overview of the plan said the market would focus on the economic, civil and military futures of Egypt, Jordan, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Turkey and the consequences of United States involvement with those nations. The creators of the market envision other trappings of existing markets like derivatives.

In a statement, Darpa said the trading idea was "currently a small research program that faces a number of major technical challenges and uncertainties."

"Chief among these," the agency said, "are: Can the market survive and will people continue to participate when U.S. authorities use it to prevent terrorist attacks? Can futures markets be manipulated by adversaries?"

Mr. Dorgan and Mr. Wyden called for an immediate end to the project and said they would use its existence to justify cutting off financial support for the overall effort. In the letter to Admiral Poindexter, they called the initiative a "wasteful and absurd" use of tax dollars.

"The American people want the federal government to use its resources enhancing our security, not gambling on it," the letter said.

Copyright 2003_The New York Times Company

edit

Ah, what a shame, they've scrapped it. It really could have been such fun too!

[littlemar]

COMMENTARY
Battered Wives Often Recant or Assume Blame

By Lakshmy Parameswaran - WeNews commentator

(WOMENSENEWS)--This month, professional baseball player Julio Lugo of the Houston Astros baseball team was acquitted of all charges of family-violence assault for which he was arrested in April.

Catherine Evans, assistant district attorney for Harris County, Texas, said that Mabely Lugo had softened her accusations against her husband by the time she arrived at the courthouse for opening statements, saying that she had exaggerated her account and he had not intended to hurt her. At the end of the
trial, press reports say Catherine Evans sighed in relief and smiled.

Lugo, who had been dropped from the Houston Astros after his arrest made headlines, seems to have emerged with his reputation fully resuscitated. Some jurors even asked Lugo, now playing for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, for his autograph.

At the time of the arrest, Mabely Lugo alleged that her husband smacked her face and banged her head on the car window just before a game. After signing sworn statements attesting to the attack, she wound up testifying that she had exaggerated the incident and that her husband did not mean to harm her. The bump on her forehead was explained by the defense as self-inflicted while she was attempting to "pull away" from her husband.

Taking the Blame Can Feel Like Control

Mabely Lugo may not be a battered wife; but she has done what many battered wives do, which is recant their original story. Women often take the blame for a man's violence toward them. Their reasons may range from guilt to fear of facing the future alone. Taking the blame can also provide them a certain false sense of control in a chaotic situation in which control seems to mainly belong to the abuser.

"If I am responsible for this mess," the woman might tell herself, "I can do something to fix it."

Men who batter women can be reputable. They can be good ball players, carpenters, lawyers and executives. They can even be good friends and leaders. This is precisely why women, inexplicably to outsiders, stay with them. The women start thinking that, since the men have a "good" reputation, it must be
their fault when they are abusive at home.

This is not to say that women don't ever provoke their men or retaliate against them. Few women are angels who suffer in silence. Mabely Lugo may indeed have a tendency to exaggerate as she herself admitted in court. The fact remains, however, that when the police arrived, she was found sitting in her van crying
with a bump and bruises, while he had gone inside the stadium to do his job--play ball. It's an all-too typical scenario.

In 1996 the case against then-pro-quarterback Warren Moon came up for prosecution in Fort Bend County, Texas. The Associated Press reported that Moon allegedly had struck his wife in the head, choked her until she had almost lost consciousness and, later, when the two of them were in separate vehicles,
pursued her in a car chase that reached 100 mph. In the much-publicized trial that followed, Felicia Moon took the stand. She also took the blame for starting the fight. Warren Moon was acquitted and the couple reportedly ran into each other's arms after the verdict was read.

The Moons are now divorced. The Lugos may now reconcile, according to reports.

Spousal Privilege Abolished in 1995

In 1995, Texas joined other states in abolishing spousal privilege in cases involving spousal violence. This eliminated the right of victims to refuse to testify against their abusive spouses. I was a family-violence counselor then and I was happy to see this amendment of the spousal-privilege statute because it affirmed family violence as a crime against the state and removed the
opportunity for perpetrators and their lawyers to pressure the victims against testifying. When a victim asserts herself--by leaving the perpetrator or by testifying against him--she is placing herself in grave danger. With the new law, a wife could now testify and say truthfully that she had no choice.

While the prosecution can build a case without the victim's cooperation, a victim's testimony adds strength, for she may be the only witness to the crime.

"Of the misdemeanor family violence cases, only 1 out of 9 or 10 victims testified for the prosecution in our county in 2002. The rest either didn't show or testified for the defense," says Stuti Patel, assistant district attorney for Fort Bend County.

Nonetheless, due to the psychological and emotional pressures involved in these cases, the prosecution still takes a risk when a victim takes the stand. The accusers often change their stories, as in the cases of Lugo and Moon.

The laws may be strengthened; the accuser may be compelled to testify using the spousal-privilege statute, or she may come forward on her own. None of this, however, really mitigates the psychological or emotional pressures on the accuser or guarantees that she will stick with her original story.

Lakshmy Parameswaran is a family counselor and founder and president of Daya Inc., serving South Asian survivors of domestic violence in the Houston area. Her writings have appeared in such publications as The Houston Chronicle, Texas Psychologist and Rediff.com.

COMMENT:

I don't understand why spousal abuse has been looked at as the right of the other party (male or female)

[columbo]

There has been much discussion in Canada lately regarding "racial-profiling" by the police. Recently, the police dept. in Kingston, Ontario announced that over the next 12 or 18 months (can't remember which) they will make it mandatory for their officers to compile statistical information regarding race on everyone they stop/arrest (including whether or not these individuals were convicted of the crime(s) they were charged with).

I personally don't really buy into the whole idea of a widespread-racism inherently found in police departments across North America, but that is just my opinion.

Thomas Sowell has written an interesting article (below) on the subject (forgive me if Mulder or another has already posted it, I know that he is a fan of Sowell).

Are Cops Racist?
Thomas Sowell
July 31, 2003

In much of the liberal media, large-scale confrontations between police and people who are breaking the law are usually reported in one of two ways. Either the police used "excessive force" or they "let the situation get out of hand."


Any force sufficient to prevent the situation from getting out of hand will be called "excessive." And if the police arrive in large enough numbers to squelch disorder without the need for force, then sending in so many cops will be called "over-reacting." After all, with so little resistance to the police, why were so many cops necessary? Such is the mindset of the media.

Add the volatile factor of race and the media will have a field day. If an incident involves a white cop and a black criminal, you don't need to know the facts to know how liberals in the media will react. You can predict the words and the music.

Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute does have the facts, however, in her new book, Are Cops Racist? <purchase> <read Townhall.com's review> Unfortunately, those who most need to read this book are the least likely to do so. They have made up their minds and don't want to be confused by facts.

For the rest of us, this is a very enlightening and very readable little book. Ms. Mac Donald first tackles the issue of "racial profiling" by the police and shows what shoddy and even silly statistical methods were used to gin up hysteria. Then she moves on to police shootings and other law-enforcement issues.

Suppose I were to tell you that, despite the fact that blacks are just 11 percent of the American population, more than half the men fined for misconduct while playing professional basketball are black -- and concluded that this shows the NBA to be racist. What would your reaction be?

"Wait a minute!" you might say. "More than half the players in the NBA are black. So that 11 percent statistic is irrelevant."

That is exactly what is wrong with "racial profiling" statistics. It is based on blacks as a percentage of the population, rather than blacks as a percentage of the people who do the kinds of things that cause police to stop people and question them.

A professor of statistics who pointed this out was -- all too predictably -- denounced as a "racist." Other statisticians kept quiet for fear of being smeared the same way. We have now reached the dangerous point where ignorance can silence knowledge and where facts get squelched by beliefs.

Heather Mac Donald also goes into facts involving police shootings, especially when the cops are white and the suspect is black. Here again, an education awaits those who are willing to be educated.

People in the media are forever expressing surprise at how many bullets were fired in some of these police shootings. As someone who once taught pistol shooting in the Marine Corps, I am not the least bit surprised.

What surprises me is how many people whose ignorance of shooting is obvious do not let their ignorance stand in the way of reaching sweeping conclusions about situations that they have never faced. To some, it is just a question of taking sides. If it is a white cop and a black suspect, then that is all they feel a need to know.

The greatest contribution of this book is in making painfully clear the actual consequences of cop-bashing in the media and in politics. The police respond to incentives, like everyone else.

If carrying out their duties in the way that gets the job done best is going to bring down on their heads a chorus of media outrage that can threaten their whole careers, many cops tend to back off. And who pays the price of their backing off? Mainly those blacks who are victims of the criminals in their midst.

Drug dealers and other violent criminals have been the beneficiaries of reduced police activity and of liberal judges throwing out their convictions because of "racial profiling." These criminals go back to the black community -- not the affluent, suburban and often gated communities where journalists, judges, and politicians live.

The subtitle of Are Cops Racist? is: "How the War Against the Police Harms Black Americans."

[plschwartz]

...On that day in 1923, the dashing, dissolute President Warren Gamaliel Harding—the handsomest of all American Presidents, historians concur—died suddenly, in San Francisco. In the rock opera “President Harding Is a Rock Star” (now playing in SoHo), for which Jarrow wrote the music and the lyrics, and which Timbers directed, the twenty-ninth President is subjected to the “Behind the Music” Some say he contracted a fatal case of food poisoning after eating bad crtreatment. In 1920, on his fifty-fifth birthday, Harding, a not very bright schoolteacher, newspaperman, and insurance salesman from Marion, Ohio, won the Presidency in a landslide. By his fifty-eighth birthday, he had reportedly staked and lost the White House china in a poker game, his cronies had used the nation’s naval oil reserves to line their own pockets (a scrape that became known as Teapot Dome), he had trysted with at least one young woman in the Oval Offic , and, worse, he had died.
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/conten...lk_schillinger
[

[eggplant43]

The theory of "immaculate conception of foreign policy"




http://www.policyreview.org/aug03/garfinkle.html