SD Congressman Charged with Manslaughter

SD Congressman Charged with Manslaughter

At least this story saw fit not to mention his political party affiliation until the 10th paragraph. I'll update this later with notes at to where other major news outlets menion it.Welcome to the Mercury News on Bayarea.com

FLANDREAU, S.D. - U.S. Rep. Bill Janklow was charged Friday with second-degree manslaughter in the death of a motorcyclist, killed when the congressman allegedly ran a stop sign at more than 70 mph.

No Liberal Bias Here

No Liberal Bias Here

And Arnold's a liberal. Go figure.

Media Ignore Poll Showing Schwarzenegger in Lead

Franken: To Lie or not to Lie?

Franken: To Lie or not to Lie?

Al Franken: Throwing Punches and Punch Lines (washingtonpost.com)

"First of all, I'm funny," Franken said. "It's done for comedic purpose. And I don't lie."

Al Franken In Sorry State

AUGUST 20--Comedian Al Franken last month wrote an apology letter to Attorney General John Ashcroft, admitting that he was not truthful when he previously sought Ashcroft's views on abstinence.

Franken's Letter to Ashcroft which says, in part,

"I claimed that I had received testimonies from several conservative leaders, which I had not. . . . None of the people in the orginal letter had sent me their abstinence stories."

But he wouldn't lie in his new book, would he?

Blue Exodus

Blue Exodus

Blue-State Pols Are Emptying Their Own States

Will the last person leaving the blue states please turn out the lights.

Black? Yeah! Female? Great! Conservative? Unqualified!

Black? Yeah! Female? Great! Conservative? Unqualified!

Liberals assail Bush pick for federal court in D.C. - The Washington Times: Nation/Politics

Two influential liberal interest groups yesterday said it would be 'disastrous' if the Senate approved a black female judge from California who President Bush nominated in July to serve on the federal circuit court of appeals here in Washington.

A joint report by People for the American Way and the NAACP said California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown is 'committed to using her power as a judge' to work against civil and constitutional rights.

Justice Brown is the first black woman to sit on California's Supreme Court, where she is seen as the most conservative judge on that court. She would also be the first black woman to sit on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, which handles many high-profile federal cases and is considered a steppingstone to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Bush is Such a Baby!

Bush is Such a Baby!

'Baby Bush' Born in Baghdad

BAGHDAD, Iraq — It's a fair bet that one Baghdad baby won't run into anybody else in Iraq with the same name.

An Iraqi couple has named their 6-week-old baby boy George Bush (search) to show their appreciation for U.S. efforts to force Saddam Hussein (search) out of power.

New EPA Plant Rules

New EPA Plant Rules

Keep in mind: they will increase generating efficiency; they will not be allowed to surpass CURRENT pollution level controls; and this will encourage investment and upgrading in our powerplants and factories. Of COURSE it's a bad idea! (/sarcasm) Read on.FOXNews.com

WASHINGTON — Thousands of older power plants, refineries and factories have been exempted from having to install costly clean air controls when they update equipment to improve efficiency, the Bush administration announced Wednesday.
A new rule adopted by the Environmental Protection Agency (search) is intended to encourage modernization. But environmentalists say it constitutes a major revision to clean air rules that will contribute to pollution.

The EPA will allow up to 20 percent of the costs of replacing each plant's production system to be considered 'routine maintenance' that doesn't require costly anti-pollution controls. Under prior rules, any significant changes to equipment required the addition of costly new pollution-fighting devices.

Environmental groups opposed to the rule describe the changes as disastrous for people's health, especially those living near or downwind of some 17,000 industrial plants affected.
They contend that emissions will increase as a result of the rules, which will enable modernized plants to spew out millions of tons of additional pollution.

'It's an accounting gimmick that eliminates any possibility of pollution controls,' said John Walke, director of Natural Resources Defense Council's (search) clean air program. 'It's a total disaster. It's the effective repeal of this clean air program, through illegal administrative means.'

The EPA assistant administrator in charge of air quality said that while industries can now complete upgrades without additional pollution restrictions, they still must operate within a plant's overall permitted limits and other state and federal programs for pollutants.
'We can say categorically that pollution will not increase as a result of this rule,' Jeffrey Holmstead said.

Iraq WMD Claim Not Sexed Up - Blair

Iraq WMD Claim Not Sexed Up - Blair

Blair Questions Credibility of BBC Report

LONDON — Prime Minister Tony Blair told an inquiry Thursday that his office did not exaggerate estimates of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and said that he would have had to resign if it had.

Facing the worst crisis of his six years in office, Blair questioned the credibility of a British Broadcasting Corp. report that his government distorted the threat presented by Saddam to bolster the case for an Iraq war.
'It was an extraordinary allegation to make and an extremely serious one,' he told an inquiry into the death of a government weapons expert who was caught up in a political storm over the government's Iraq policy.
'This was an absolutely fundamental charge ... this was an allegation that we had behaved in a way that, were it true ... would have warranted my resignation,' he added.

Ann Coulter on Rebuilding Iraq

Ann Coulter on Rebuilding Iraq

Ann Coulter: Liberal arguments: Still a quagmire

But liberals are indignant for every day that we haven't turned a barbaric land into Vermont. They were willing to give Stalin 36 years for the awkwardness of his revolution. We have essentially imposed a revolution on Iraq – and liberals give us a month to work out the bugs. U.S. forces in Baghdad say that Iraq is well on its way to establishing American-style representative democracy and might even be holding its first free elections in less than a year. Within three years, the Iraqi people could be recalling their first governor.

Indeed, the war is going so well that now liberals have to create absurd straw-man arguments no one ever uttered in order to accuse the Bush administration of horrible miscalculations. Amid her sneering, PMS-induced anger toward the Bush administration, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd claimed the Bush administration was "shaken" to discover "the terrible truth: Just because we got Odai and Qusai, Iraqi militants are not going to stop blowing up Westerners." I'd love to see the quote where anyone in the Bush administration – anyone in the universe – said that.

Admittedly, Republicans were not mourning the deaths of Odai and Qusai the way Democrats were, but only a moron would think that killing these two monsters would mark the end of the war on terrorism. Normandy didn't end World War II. That didn't make it a failure. MacArthur was still in Tokyo straightening out Japan in 1950 – five years after V-J Day. Not only was Japan an advanced and ethnically unified country, but U.S. forces also made things easier for MacArthur by killing several million of the most militant anti-American Japanese during World War II. Paul Bremer doesn't.

Arnold's Positions

Arnold's Positions

FSchwarzenegger Gives Positions on Abortion, Drugs, Gays, Other Topics

LOS ANGELES — Arnold Schwarzenegger (search) spelled out his views on issues ranging from abortion to taxes Wednesday, in an exclusive call to the syndicated Sean Hannity (search) radio show, which also was broadcast live on Fox News Channel.

The Republican said he is in favor of legalizing marijuana for medicinal purposes, abortion rights, an assault-weapons ban and background checks on gun purchases. He said he is opposed to offshore drilling, gay marriage and granting driver's licenses to illegal immigrants.

Arnold Interview - Not What You Might Think

Arnold Interview - Not What You Might Think

I think that some of the quotes The Smoking Gun uses it takes out of context, but overall a very interesting piece concerning the CA Governorship candidate. Read on.

Schwarzenegger's Sex Talk

AUGUST 27--Arnold Schwarzenegger once told a magazine interviewer about participating in an orgy with other bodybuilders, noting that 'everybody jumped on' the woman involved and 'took her upstairs where we all got together.' The California Republican added that not every muscleman participated in the gang bang, 'just the guys who can f**k in front of other guys. Not everybody can do that. Some think that they don't have a big-enough c**k, so they can't get a hard-on.'

Schwarzenegger's lewd talk appeared in the August 1977 issue of Oui, a now-defunct adult magazine published by Playboy. The five-page Schwarzenegger interview was conducted by author Peter Manso and flagged on the magazine's cover with the headline, 'Arnold Schwarzenegger on the Sex Secrets of Bodybuilders.'

WMD in Iraq - Latest News

WMD in Iraq - Latest News

CIA Adviser Kay Amasses Evidence of Saddam’s WMD

That rejoinder will draw on the paper and on-the-ground evidence amassed day by day by a new coalition intelligence research project launched a month ago under Dr. David Kay, a former UN weapons inspector, to winkle out hard evidence of Saddam Hussein’s proscribed weapons programs.

Thursday, July 31, Dr. Kay reported to the US Senate Intelligence Committee that his 1,400-strong team of American, British and Australian researchers had found in just over a month’s operation physical evidence of Iraqi activity on weapons of mass destruction. Without going into detail, Kay told the senators that the most progress had been made on biological weapons.

He was responding to the concern voiced by Senator Jay Rockefeller (Dem.-West Virginia) that the searches were being diverted away from finding the actual weapons. “Signs of a weapons program are very different from the stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons that were a certainty before the war,” said Rockefeller. “We did not go to war to disrupt Saddam’s weapons program, we went to war to disarm him.”

The Kay team spent the first month of its mission sorting into three batches what he described as “an estimated seven and-a-half miles of documents”, many of them collected by US military from Iraqi official buildings, but many others handed over by Iraqi civilians.

The data yielded is substantial:

Batch One: Records of Saddam’s chemical, biological and nuclear programming with notes on budgets, manpower and procurement requirements. Detailed are the Saddam regime’s plans, productions processes and timetables for WMD development as well as special programs for concealing it all from UN inspectors for twelve years. Saddam’s officials hid these thousands of documents from the United Nations Blix-ElBarardei inspection team and left them out of the voluminous “full accounting” Baghdad submitted to the UN Security Council before the war.

Batch Two: This group, which also consists of many thousands of pieces of paper, tracks the implementation of the WMD programs with time schedules and assessments of progress made in each category and inventories the stocks building up in the illegal arsenal. Scientists or engineers would often win bonuses for notable progress in their work.

Batch Three: This pile offers leads to locations where forbidden weapons may have been concealed when the records were drawn up and ways to access them, including the evidence of the transfer to Syria by Saddam’s agents of large parts of the forbidden program.

After talking in secret to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Kay declared there was a “truly amazing” deception program to throw UN weapons off the trail. We have people who participated in deceiving UN inspectors now telling us how they did it.

Scrappleface.com Satirizes CNN Death Count

Scrappleface.com Satirizes CNN Death Count

Damn, Scott. This is particularly ruthless. But true nonetheless. Wow.

CNN to Tally 'Great Society' Casualty Figures Daily

(2003-08-27) -- The Cable News Network (CNN) said today that it would begin announcing daily casualty tallies related to America's various tax-funded government-run operations.

Never Cover a Proven Scandal Of Those You Like

Never Cover a Proven Scandal Of Those You Like

Michelle Malkin: The looters liberals ignore: Part II

Three months ago, this column wondered if the New York Times would ever cover the abominable Democrat teachers' union scandal in Florida. Investigators from the FBI and Miami-Dade's Public Corruption Task Force raided the powerful United Teachers of Dade headquarters at the end of April. In July, they raided the Tallahassee home of union President Pat Tornillo.

This week, Tornillo -- the Ken Lay of the Left -- finally confessed to massive looting of teachers' union dues.

Here, in its 69-word entirety, is what the nation's paper of selective record found fit to print on Aug. 26: "Pat Tornillo, the longtime leader of the Miami-Dade County teachers union who had been accused of billing the union for $650,000 of luxuries, pleaded guilty to filing a false tax return and mail fraud in exchange for a two-year prison sentence. Court records showed he billed the union for four Caribbean vacations, several cruises, a trip to the 2000 Olympics in Sydney and other first-class travel expenses."

The Times' news brief, recycled from an Associated Press dispatch, was buried on page A16. . . .

The four-decade imperial reign of Tornillo has had a profound influence on Florida politics. He led the nation's first statewide teachers' strike, built the largest labor union in the South, amassed a $4 million annual payroll for his organization, lavished Democrat Party coffers with those union funds, and wielded his clout in dozens of Democrat elections from school board to governor. In last year's Democratic gubernatorial race alone, Tornillo's union and its local affiliates donated nearly $300,000 to the state Democrat Party, plus more than $50,000 in in-kind donations and more than $15,000 in direct contributions to its favored (and ultimately losing) candidate, Bill McBride. Tornillo lent the McBride campaign two top union officials and secretly spent more than $2 million on McBride political ads. . . .

While teachers pleaded for pay increases and fought layoff measures, Tornillo used their union dues (at $843 per year, they're the highest in the nation) to buy tailored suits from Hong Kong and python-print pajamas from Neiman-Marcus. The Herald also reported that after Tornillo returned in 1995 from an extravagant African safari junket with executives of a troubled health maintenance organization, Health Insurance Plan of Greater New York, he awarded the company a $195 million insurance contract against the recommendation of union staff. . . .

Will the New York Times editorial writers -- never ones to miss drum-beating about disclosure when it comes to corporate looters -- support the workers? Or will they stand aloof with the union thugs in snakes' pajamas?

Jonah Goldberg: Anti-globalization equals anti-American

Left and Right re: Globalization

Jonah Goldberg: Anti-globalization equals anti-American

Still, nothing unites every faction of the right more than opposition to the idea that foreign courts or governments have authority over Americans. To the fury of pretty much everyone on the right, the liberal justices on the Supreme Court increasingly cite the popular opinions, laws and judicial rulings of foreign countries in support of their interpretations of American law on such issues as the death penalty and homosexual rights . . . .

The upshot of all this is that globalization is a fact of life. The issue isn't whether it's good or bad - globalization just is. Saying you're for it or against it is like saying you're for or against gravity. That's interesting but who cares?

Impatience Causes Media Misfires

Impatience Causes Media Misfires

Tony Blankley: The impatient

The most impatient of us all are the media. Two weeks into the Afghan war they declared a quagmire. In Iraq, they declared a quagmire within days. And now they are declaring nation building a failure after a few months. If they had been covering WWII, they would have declared defeat at Wake Island in 1942 and Kasserine Pass in 1943. A month after the D-Day landing in 1944, with our troops still bogged down in the Belgian hedgerows, they would have declared a quagmire. Nation building would, of course, have been deemed a failure. In the winter of 1946-47, the British were freezing and lacked light in their homes for want of electricity generated from coal, while they suffered by on powdered eggs and a scarcity of vegetables -- and they won the war. In Germany, bridges remained broken, canals clogged and rails twisted. Berliners were still literally starving and freezing to death. After all, the Marshall Plan was not even announced until June 5, 1947, more than two years after the Nazis surrendered. Whether to de-Nazify was never finally decided. We used what Nazis we needed, while punishing others.

Of Course, This Is Clinton's Fault, You Know . . .

Of Course, This Is Clinton's Fault, You Know . . .

Or so I am sure we will hear when mainstream media decides to explain how these improvements came about.

SAT Math and Verbal Scores Hit Highs

The nation's high school class of 2003 achieved the best score on the math section of the SAT exam in at least 36 years, while students' verbal scores hit a 16-year high.

Black on Black Politics

Black on Black Politics

Thomas Sowell: Old rhetoric in new times

When push comes to shove, the teachers' unions mean more to Democrats than the future of the next generation of blacks.

It is the same story, though not as widely known, when it comes to the environmentalists' restrictions against building, which push housing prices out of sight. These skyrocketing apartment rents and home prices are in turn pushing more and more blacks out of northern California communities controlled by liberal Democrats. Politically, green trumps black.

Another constituency whose interests trump those of blacks are groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, whose ideology favors the kinds of liberal judges who make it hard to control disruptive students in school or to keep violent criminals behind bars.

A handful of hoodlums can prevent a whole class from learning and a handful of criminals can make a ghetto neighborhood a hell to live in. But what the ACLU wants trumps what blacks need.

Then Agian, Who Cares? (Even in CA?)

Then Agian, Who Cares? (Even in CA?)

Bustamante's budget -- tough something

As GOP hopeful Peter Ueberroth told The San Francisco Chronicle on Thursday, the number of top income earners fell from 40,000 -- actually, 44,000 -- California taxpayers reporting seven-figure incomes in 2001 to only 29,000 a year later. In 2000, millionaires paid $15 billion (37 percent) of the money collected in personal income taxes; but either because they left the state or their incomes declined, a year later they paid $8 billion (25 percent).

Rich people are thinking about packing up and leaving -- and Bustamante wants to give them another reason to buy real estate in Nevada.

Global Warming Attack Dogs

Global Warming Attack Dogs

Global warming smear targets -- The Washington Times

While most of official Washington was captivated with the fight on the Senate floor to pass an energy bill before Congress left town for its August vacation, a vicious campaign was under way behind the scenes to smear two leading scientists for pointing out serious flaws in the science behind the theory of human-caused climate change.

CA Gov Race Issues

CA Gov Race Issues

I don't know if Arnold will make a good governor or not, but Debra Saunders makes some seriously good points here.

Debra Saunders: Experience something new

The scolds warn that The Terminator is not experienced. They speak as if it doesn't matter that Schwarzenegger arrived in America broke and speaking broken English, and that, by force of will, he became a big-box-office movie star, wildly successful investor and political player. Arnold's experience is living the American dream to the hilt.

Davis has political experience in spades -- yet he dragged his feet on the energy crisis and state budget woes.

Marriage Issues

Marriage Issues

The Marriage Strike

The Rutgers report — admittedly based on a small sample — found ten prevalent reasons. The first three:
— They can get sex without marriage;
— They can enjoy 'a wife' through cohabitation; and,
— They want to avoid divorce and its financial risks.

Activist Extremism

Activist Extremism

Going to Extremes

Violence is the worst possible 'strategy' for anyone who seeks social reform. It is not only immoral and illegal, it is also counter-productive to the cause being advocated. The first time an innocent human being is injured, a movement using violence loses all moral credibility; it also creates a justified backlash of anger from the public and repression from authorities.

FOXNews.com

JunkScience on Dioxins and the EPA

EPA Ignores Congress in Power Grab

It's time for Congress to stop politely 'requesting' that the EPA's dioxin reassessment be reviewed by the National Academy of Sciences and sternly 'order' that it be done immediately.

Bork on Security v. Freedom

Bork on Security v. Freedom

A very long article with lots of good points.Civil Liberties After 9/11

When a nation faces deadly attacks on its citizens at home and abroad, it is only reasonable to expect that its leaders will take appropriate measures to increase security. And since security inevitably means restrictions, it is likewise only reasonable to expect a public debate over the question of how much individual liberty should be sacrificed for how much individual and national safety.