News Clippings Tracking the Insanity in this World
Eh, I'm a little embarrassed here. But, I'm sure all of you have been tuning in for almost a month and a half to see the completed project.
*looks around* Yeah still not done. Been busy. Work related, so you know can't talk much about it. But, I will finish the wrap. I will. I promise.
Why is it all echo-ee in here? Isn't anybody listening?
Hello?
Hello?
Anybody there?
Now pitching for ...
It's Saturday and that means one thing, Weight Watchers meeting. I
joined weight watchers 9 weeks ago when I looked at myself and
realized my attempts to lose weight on my own failed. I had lost
about 10 pounds on my
own. But, there was more to go and I needed help. I'm not good at
asking for help. But, I got over it and went to my first meeting and
didn't look back.
And today was a great meeting. Meetings usually are. It's amazing
whether I've lost weight, gained weight, or maintained I always leave
the meetings feeling energized and happy. That regardless of resutls
I've accomplished something important. I've re-committed to eating
better, exercising more, and living a better life. Even if I don't
learn anything new at the meeting, I still get that important reminder
that it's a process, losing weight, and I got to work it. And it's
inspiring hearing the other people talk about their struggles and
successs.
The best part is celebrating people's weight loss. You get little
rewards, bookmarks and magnets and such, when you lose every five
pounds. It's great seeing someone beam as they lose thier sack of
potatoes (10lbs). We clap for them. We cheer each other on. And
knowing that the girl next to me lost 20lbs I know I can do the same
thing.
One of the members today mentioned that she got really down the other
day. She was getting weighted at her gym and was thinking "I'm
workinng really hard and it'll come to an end" But, then it hit her
"it's never going to be over." And I knew exactly what she means.
We're so used to having projects with a beginnig, middle, and end.
We never get to change something in our life, accomplish a goal, and
then go back to the way things used to be. There's a reason a
definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again
expecting a different result. We never get to go back to the past.
Or if we do guess what, the same old problems are still there and the
same old outcome is the same. When true change happens, it happens.
And if you want all to keep all the good that comes with those changes
(moving more, eating better, eating less, having a slip and not a
binge) then you got to let go of the past. For me that means letting
go of the way I eat lunch during the week and drinking less wine.
Oh I haven't given up on wine. Let's not get crazy here. But, I've
changed the way I drink wine. Instead of drinking two glasses or
three glasses or the bottle at the end of the night I drink one glass.
Maybe on a special occasion I'll drink more. But, the next day it's
back to the changes and working the process and making it all apart of
my day to day life. And on Saturdays at 12:00 I get my whack, whack,
whack wake up call at the weight in. I get a mood booster and I
re-commit to being a saner human being.
So, thanks all for listening and cheers.
v.carrie
Reuters.com - US Officer Granted Latitude at Iraqi Prison-Report
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type%3DtopNews%26storyID%3D5405165
TheStar.com - Rebels raid Iraqi police station
YUSUFIYAH, IRAQ—Gunmen stormed a police station south of Baghdad yesterday, drove off poorly armed police and blew up the building in the fourth such attack in a week against Iraqi security installations.
Police in this Euphrates river town, 16 kilometres south of Baghdad, called for help from U.S. forces when they came under attack.
But the Americans didn't reach the town until about five hours later, police Lt. Satpar Abdul-Reda said.
Yep, things are going great.
:: Xinhuanet - English ::
BAGHDAD, June 12 (Xinhuanet) -- Iraq's interim Deputy Foreign Minister Gassan Kuba was assassinated in Baghdad on Saturday, al-Jazeera television reported.
Kuba was assassinated in Al-Adhamiya district in Baghdad, a Sunni Muslim neighborhood where support for Saddam Hussein's regime had been strong.
Attackers fired at the car of top civil servant in the ministry as he was on his way to work and fatally wounded him.
Kuba died of his wounds in the hospital at about 8.30 a.m.
Tampabay: TIA now verifies flight of Saudis: "
TIA now verifies flight of Saudis
The government has long denied that two days after the 9/11 attacks, the three were allowed to fly.
By JEAN HELLER, Times Staff Writer
Published June 9, 2004
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[Times art]
The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, better known as the 9/11 Commission, sent a list of questions to Tampa International Airport. It appears concerned with the handling of the Tampa flight.
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TAMPA - Two days after the Sept. 11 attacks, with most of the nation's air traffic still grounded, a small jet landed at Tampa International Airport, picked up three young Saudi men and left.
The men, one of them thought to be a member of the Saudi royal family, were accompanied by a former FBI agent and a former Tampa police officer on the flight to Lexington, Ky.
The Saudis then took another flight out of the country. The two ex-officers returned to TIA a few hours later on the same plane."
It's comforting to know that 12 ordinary citizens can score one for freedom and the principals that our country is supposed to stand for. Here are excerpts of the article in the Los Angeles Times
Acquittal in Internet Terrorism Case Is a Defeat for Patriot Act
The case of Sami Omar Al-Hussayen, 34, in Boise had become a test of the scope of U.S. anti-terrorism laws, including a provision of the Patriot Act that targets secondary players.
______
The verdicts point up a little-known reality of the Justice Department's war on terrorism since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. While it has won scores of highly publicized guilty pleas in terrorism-related cases — often by dropping the most serious charges — its trial record is mixed.
It has taken only two other major terrorism-related cases to trial since the Sept. 11 attacks, and at least some defendants have been acquitted in each.
In one case involving an alleged domestic "sleeper cell" in Detroit, the judge has threatened to throw out all three convictions because prosecutors allegedly withheld exculpatory information.
_______
He was eventually charged under a section of the Patriot Act that makes it illegal to provide "expert advice or assistance" to terrorists. The provision was declared unconstitutional by a federal judge in Los Angeles in January, although that ruling was not binding on the Idaho case.
"In some respects, this was the broadest reach in all of the government's anti-terrorism prosecutions," said David Cole, a Georgetown University Law Center professor.
"When President Bush and [Vice President] Dick Cheney say, 'You have not shown me a single abuse of the Patriot Act,' I think people can now say, 'Look at the Sami Omar Al-Hussayen case — a case where the government sought to criminalize pure speech and was resoundingly defeated.' "
USATODAY.com - Document warns Guantanamo employees not to talk: "The document 'suggests that there is something that needs to be hidden' about how detainees are being treated, says Scott Silliman, a Duke University law professor and a former Air Force lawyer. 'It suggests that the default should be: Don't talk.'
Gary Solis, a retired Marine lieutenant colonel, says he gave similar advice to witnesses when he was a military prosecutor. 'There's no impropriety,' says Solis, who teaches law at Georgetown University. But 'the context of this advice gives the appearance of encouraging (people) to be less than forthcoming.'
The Pentagon has been secretive about interrogation tactics at Guantanamo, where suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban operatives have been held for more than two years.
"
Colin Powell says the errors in the Terror Report were due to honest mistakes. Waxmen, who has wondered if the numbers were skewed for political reasons, has accepted Powell's explanation for the errors.
Yahoo! News - State Dept. Understated Terrorism Attacks: "The April report said attacks had declined last year to 190, down from 198 in 2002 and 346 in 2001. The 2003 figure would have been the lowest level in 34 years and a 45 percent drop since 2001, Bush's first year as president. The department is now working to determine the correct figures.
Rep. Henry A. Waxman, who had challenged the findings, said he was pleased that officials 'have now recognized that they have a report that has been inaccurate, and based on the inaccurate information they tried to take self-serving political credit for the results that were wrong.'
Among the mistakes, Boucher said, was that only part of 2003 was taken into account."
For years the conservatives have accused public radio and television of being bastions on liberals. Personally I've always found them non-partisan, presenting all sides of an issue, finding a refreshing news source NOT dependent on corporate advertising. However, increasing fair and balanced means propaganda for the right. Now, we might be losing the one truly free source of quality news and entertainment.
Right Wing Now Hijacking PBS by Moving to Control Content: "Auletta quotes Bill Moyers: 'This is the first time in my 32 years of public broadcasting that (the Corporation for Public Broadcasting) has ordered up programs for ideological instead of journalistic reasons.' Strong words. "
Honest mistake or politcial manipulation? Either way it looks like we didn't do quite as well on reducing terrorist activity in the world as previously reported by the State Department. They reported in their annual report on glabl terrorism that Terrorism hit a 34 year low in 2003. Now it appears global terrorism may have actually risen.
According to Mary Kaplan on Air America radio today, terrorism actually rose 34%. The descrepency is due to the State Department ending it's review of terrorist activity in November, just before a series of terrorist acts including the bombing of Brittish Embassy in Turkey. Why? They had to beat a printing deadline. Also attacks in Iraq were not included as acts of terrorism. I've yet to see an article confirming Marty Kaplan's report.
Terror attacks undercounted / State Dept. accused of fudging numbers for political gain: "Washington -- The State Department is scrambling to revise its annual report on global terrorism to acknowledge that it understated the number of deadly attacks in 2003, amid charges that the document is inaccurate, dangerously outmoded and politically manipulated by the Bush administration.
The department said it was the second time that the report, considered the authoritative yardstick of the prevalence of terrorist" activity around the world
Torture memos draw fire: "WASHINGTON (AP) - Democrats say Department of Justice memos contending that a wartime president is not bound by anti-torture principles could have laid the legal groundwork for the prisoner abuses that took place in Iraq and elsewhere.
Rep. Jane Harman of California, senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, today released excerpts of one internal Bush administration memo and called its views 'antithetical to American laws and values' in arguing that torture might be justified and that the president is above the law in his role as commander-in-chief.
'This memo is shocking in that it appears to justify torturing prisoners in U.S. control,' Harman said."
Leahy is quickly becoming one of my favorite congressman. It's about time someone from government took Ashcroft to task.
Have we captured some bad guys? Maybe, but we don't really know. We have no trials. We have no guilty verdicts. Our justice system is based on simple premises, innocent until PROVEN guilty, not claims of guilt, not declaration of guilt. Public trials, transparency are enshrined in the constitution so we all may, as a society, judge the guilt or innocence of a man based on the public dessimination and CHALLENGE of evidence (that means evidence is argued). Ashcroft has thrown these principals out the window, and our country is diminished for it, in my opinion.
The Bush Administration has dissembled, misled, and lied to us.
Below is the transcript from Air America of Leahy's list of Ashcroft and the Department of Justice's failures.
Leahy to Ashcroft
Mr. Attorney General, welcome. It's been, I believe, about 15 months to pass since your last very brief appearance in March last year. Your testimony here comes today about 1,000 days after the September 11th attacks, and the subsequent launch of your efforts against terrorism.
As National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice acknowledged in her testimony before the 9/11 commission, the terrorist threat to our nation did not begin in September 2001. But the preliminary findings of the 9/11 commission suggest that counterterrorism simply was not a priority of your Justice Department prior to September 11th.
Problems ranged in your department from an understaffed foreign translation program, woefully inadequate information systems, cultural attitudes that frustrated information sharing across agencies. Just one day before the attacks, on September 10th, you rejected the FBIs request to include more money for counterterrorism in your budget proposal.
And while you have recently been critical of the so-called wall between criminal investigators and intelligence agencies, you did nothing to lower it during your first seven full months in office.
In fact, you put up exactly the same wall in your administration.
The president is fond of saying that September 11th changed everything, as if to wipe out all missteps and misplaced priorities of the first year of this administration. After the attacks, you promised a stunned nation that its government would expend every effort and devote all necessary resources to bring the people responsible for these crimes to justice. Certainly the American people would expect no less.
So a thousand days later and it is time to ask for the fulfillment of the promise you made.
Mr. Attorney General, your statement lists accomplishments of the Department of Justice since 9/11, but you leave out a number of things.
For example, of course the obvious, Osama bin Laden remains at large.
At least three senior Al Qaida operatives who helped plan the 9/11 attacks are in U.S. custody, but there has been no attempt to bring them to justice.
The Moussaoui prosecution has bogged down before any trial.
A German court acquitted two 9/11 co-conspirators, in part because the U.S. government and Justice Department and others refused to provide evidence to them.
Three defendants who you said had knowledge of the 9/11 attacks did not have such knowledge. The department retracted your statement and then you had to apologize to the court because you violated a gag order in the case.
The man you claimed was about to explode a dirty bomb in the U.S. had no such intention or capability, and because he's been held for two years without access to counsel, any crimes he did commit might never be prosecuted.
Terrorist attacks on Capitol Hill and elsewhere involving the deadly bioterror agent anthrax have yet to be solved, and the department is defending itself in a civil rights action brought by a man who you probably identified as a person of interest in the anthrax investigation.
U.S. citizens with no connection to terrorism have been in prison as material witnesses for chunks of time, and then, "Oops, I'm sorry," when what the Justice Department announced was a 100 percent positive fingerprint match turned out to be 100 percent wrong.
Non-citizens with no connection to terrorism have been rounded up seemingly on the basis of their religion or ethnicity, held for months without charges, and in some cases physically abused.
Interrogation techniques approved by the Department of Justice have led to abuses that have tarnished our nation's reputation and driven hundreds, if not thousands, of new recruits to our enemies to terrorism.
Your department turned a Canadian citizen over to Syria to be tortured. And then your department deported another individual to Syria over the objection of experienced prosecutors and agents who thought he was a terrorist and wanted to prosecute him.
And one of the most amazing things, your department, under your direction, has worked to deny compensation to American victims of terrorism, including former POWs tortured by Saddam Hussein's regime. You have tried to stop former POWs tortured by Saddam Hussein -- Americans -- you tried to stop them from getting compensation.
And documents have been classified, unclassified, reclassified, to score political points rather than for legitimate national security reasons.
Statistics have been manipulated to exaggerate the department's success in fighting terrorism. The threat of another attack on U.S. soil remains high, although how high depends primarily on who within the administration is talking.
Mr. Attorney General, you spent much of the past two years increasing secrecy, lessening accountability and touting the government's intelligence-gathering powers.
The threshold issue, of course, is -- and I believe you would agree with me on this -- what good is having intelligence if we can't use it intelligently. Identifying suspected terrorist is only a first step. To be safer we have to follow through.
Instead of declining tough prosecutions, we need to bring the people who are seeking to harm us to justice. That's how our system works. Instead, your practices seem to be built on secret detentions and overblown press releases.
Our country is made no safer through the self-congratulatory press conferences when we're facing serious security threats.
The government agency that bears the name of justice has yet to deliver the justice for the victims of the worst mass murder in this nation's history.
The 9/11 commission is working hard to answer important questions about the attacks and how the vulnerabilities in our system that allowed them to occur, but it can't mete out justice to those involved. Neither the 9/11 commission nor this committee can do the work of your Department of Justice.
Mr. Attorney General, since September 11th, you blamed former administration officials for intelligence failures that happened on your watch. You've used a tar brush to attack the patriotism of the Americans who dared to express legitimate concerns about constitutional freedoms. You refused to acknowledge serious problems, even after the Justice Department's own inspector general exposed widespread violations of the civil liberties of immigrants caught up in your post-September 11th dragnets.
Secretary Rumsfeld recently went before the Armed Services Committee to say that he, he Secretary Rumsfeld, should be held responsible for the abuses of Iraqi prisoners on his watch.
Director Tenet is resigning from the Central Intelligence Agency. Richard Clark went before the 9/11 commission and began with his admission of the failure that this administration bears for the tragedy that consumed us on 9/11.
And I'm reminded this week, as we mourn the passing of President Reagan, that one of the acts for which he will be remembered is that he conceded, that while his heart told him that the weapons for hostages and unlawful funding of insurgent forces in Nicaragua should not have been acts of his administration, his head convinced him that they were, and he took personal responsibility.
We need checks and balances. As much as gone wrong that you stubbornly refuse to admit. For this democratic republic to work, we need openness and accountability.
Now, Mr. Attorney General, your style is often to come to attack. You came before this committee shortly after 9/11 to question our patriotism when we sought to conduct a congressional oversight and ask questions.
You went before the 9/11 commission to attack a commissioner by brandishing a conveniently declassified memo and so unfairly slanted a presentation that President Bush himself disavowed your actions.
So I challenge you today to abandon any such plans for the session. Begin it instead by doing that which you have yet to do: talk plainly with us and with the American people, about not only what's going right in the war on terrorism -- and there are those things that are going right -- but also about the growing list of things that are going wrong, so we can work together to fix them.
Let's get about the business of working together to do our job, a better job of protecting the American people and making sure that the wrongdoers are brought to justice, are brought to trial and are given the justice that this country can mete out.
Anybody see those ads of Laura Bush declaring her and her husband's commitment to education? Yeah, in 2000 Bush said he was the "Education President" and he would do for the country what he did for Texas, raise test scores and lower drop out rates. He got No Child Left Behind passed based on the "Texas Miracle"
But, was their a miracle? Did Bush turn water into wine in Texas Education?
In summary, former assistant principal of Houston's Sharpton High School, Robert Kimball charges the books were cooked. Drop outs weren't counted as drop out to lower the drop out rates. Kids who might score poorly on testing given in 10th grade were held back to 9th Grade. They never tested and the test scores raised. Is it true? Here are some excerpts. Read the whole article and decide for yourself.
CBS News | The Texas Miracle | January 8, 2004?12:39:11: (CBS) It was called the “Texas Miracle,” and you may remember it because President Bush wanted everyone to know about it during his presidential campaign.
It was about an approach to education that was showing amazing results, particularly in Houston, where dropout rates plunged and test scores soared.
Houston School Superintendent Rod Paige was given credit for the school success, by making principals and administrators accountable for how well their students did.
Once he was elected president, Mr. Bush named Paige as secretary of education. And Houston became the model for the president’s “No Child Left Behind” education reform act.
Now, as Correspondent Dan Rather reports, it turns out that some of those miraculous claims which Houston made were wrong. And it all came to light when one assistant principal took a close look at his school’s phenomenally low dropout rates – and found that they were just too good to be true.
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“I was shocked. I said, ‘How can that be,’” says Robert Kimball, an assistant principal at Sharpstown High School, on Houston’s West side. His own school claimed that no students – not a single one – had dropped out in 2001-2002.
But that’s not what Kimball saw: “I had been at the high school for three years, and I had seen many, many students, several hundred a year, go out the door. And I knew that they were quitting. They told me they were quitting.”
Most of the 1,700 students at Sharpstown High are under-privileged immigrants -- prime candidates for dropping out.
One student was Jennys Franco Gomez. She dropped out of Sharpstown in 2001 for all-too-familiar reasons: she had a baby. “My baby got sick, and I don’t have nobody to take care of my baby and take it to the doctor,” she says.
The high school reported that Jennys left to get a GED, or equivalency diploma, which doesn’t count as a dropout. But Jennys says she never told school officials anything of the sort.
All in all, 463 kids left Sharpstown High School that year – for a variety of reasons. The school reported zero dropouts, but dozens of the students did just that. School officials hid that fact by classifying, or coding them as leaving for acceptable reasons: transferring to another school, or returning to their native country.
“That’s how you get to zero dropouts. By assigning codes that say, ‘Well, this student, you know, went to another school. He did this or that.’ And basically, all 463 students disappeared. And the school reported zero dropouts for the year,” says Kimball. “They were not counted as dropouts, so the school had an outstanding record.”
Sharpstown High wasn’t the only “outstanding” school. The Houston school district reported a citywide dropout rate of 1.5 percent. But educators and experts 60 Minutes II checked with put Houston’s true dropout rate somewhere between 25 and 50 percent.
“But the teachers didn’t believe it. They knew it was cooking the books. They told me that. Parents told me that,” says Kimball. “The superintendent of schools would make the public believe it was one school. But it is in the system, it is in all of Houston.”
Those low dropout rates – in Houston and all of Texas - were one of the accomplishments then-Texas Gov. George Bush cited when he campaigned to become the “Education President.”
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Investigators checked half of the city’s regular high schools. They reviewed the records of nearly 5,500 students who left those schools, and checked how the schools coded, or explained, it. They found that almost 3,000 students should have been, but weren’t, coded as dropouts. THEY FOUND THAT ALMOST 3,000 STUDENTS SHOULD HAVE BEEN, BUT WEREN'T, CODED AS DROPOUTS. (emphasis added) The audit substantiated Kimball’s allegations.
60 Minutes II also tried to talk to Paige himself, but he declined. His spokesman said the dropout controversy broke after Paige left Houston to become education secretary. And he said the phony statistics at Sharpstown were the work of a few individuals.
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Houston also won national acclaim for raising the average scores on a statewide achievement test that was given to 10th graders. Principals were judged on how well their students did on the test.
But at Houston schools, Kimball says, principals taught addition by subtraction: They raised average test scores by keeping low-performing kids from taking the test. And in some cases, that meant keeping kids from getting to the 10th grade at all.
“What the schools did, and what Sharpstown High School did, they said, ‘OK, you cannot go to the 10th grade unless you pass all these courses in the 9th grade,” says Kimball.
What's wrong with that? Wouldn't this help students get the basics down before moving on?
“Because you failed algebra, you may be in the ninth grade three years, until you pass the course. But that’s not a social promotion if you just allowed the student to go to 10th grade, just you know, let him take algebra again, and work on it there.”
That’s just what happened to Perla Arredondo. She passed all her courses in ninth-grade, but was then told she had to repeat the same grade and the same courses.
“I went to my counselor’s office, and I told her, ‘You’re giving me the wrong classes, because I already passed ‘em,” says Perla. “So she said, ‘Don’t worry about it. I know what I’m doing. That’s my job.’”
Perla spent three years in the ninth-grade. She failed algebra, but passed it in summer school. Finally, she was promoted – right past 10th-grade and that important test -- and into the 11th. Without enough credits to graduate, Perla dropped out. While she worked as a cashier, a secretary, and a waitress, she learned an important lesson: “I know I can’t get a good job without a high school diploma. You know? I can get a job as a waitress. I mean, and I don’t wanna be doing that all my life.”
Why? “For my dad and mom. You know, I wanna give ‘em, I want them to be proud, you know,” says Perla. “That’s another thing I want. I want them to be, you know, proud of what I am.”
There is no state audit to back up this claim, but Moreno points out that many Houston high schools have bulging ninth-grades, and very small 10th-grades. One school, he says, held back more than 60 percent of its ninth-graders.
School officials say students are held back because they’re not ready for the next grade. They deny that they were held back to avoid the test.
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NORIEGA SAYS HOUSTON SCHOOL OFFICIALS FOCUS ON STATISTICS INSTEAD OF REAL PROBLEMS: (emphasis added) “That’s the issue. It’s the kids, stupid. And people continue to wanna spin around it all, and lose sight of it all. And it’s Kimball, and it’s just one school, and it’s this and it’s that. And it’s not.”
And in the case of whistle-blower Kimball, school officials have denounced him as incompetent, and transferred him to a primary school for kindergarten through second grade, where he is the second assistant principal.
“The district felt that, by sending me down there, somebody who’s taught at university level, taught at high school level, and middle school level, would be humiliated at a low primary school, but I’m telling you that I love it,” says Kimball, who adds he isn’t going to quit.
"
So, it's been awhile since I've posted anything. But, I'm going to try to do something with this, since well I'm on vacation and maybe no one else reads this, but it amuses me, and keeps the fan burning for my disdain for this Bush Administration.
Charged with Alien Smuggling After 18 Die Trucker
Okay, I know this is a tragedy, but when I first read the headline I though it meant alians from outerspace. That made me laugh. So, I'm an idiot.
