Friday, November 12, 2004
From the Mouths:
“As you have said, the war against terrorism is a new kind of war. The nature of the new war places a high premium on other factors, such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians. In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions." - AG Nominee Alberto Gonzales, to Bush
"The more Maureen Loud [sic] gets on 'Meet the Press' and writes those columns, the redder these states get. I mean, they don't want some high brow hussy from New York City explaining to them that they're idiots and telling them that they're stupid." –Zell Miller, denouncing NY Times op ed columnist Maureen Dowd
Health Care and Retirees. Haunting story about companies suing retirees.
Many companies have already cut back company-paid health-care coverage for retirees from their salaried staffs. But until recently, employers generally were barred from touching unionized retirees' benefits because they are spelled out in labor contracts. Now, some are taking aggressive steps to pare those benefits as well, including going to court.
In the past two years, employers have sued union retirees across the country. In the suits, they ask judges to rule that no matter what labor contracts say, they have a right to change the benefits. Some companies also argue that contract references to "lifetime" coverage don't mean the lifetime of the retirees, but the life of the labor contract. Since the contracts expired many years ago, the promises, they say, have expired too.
They have little to lose by trying. Typically, as such legal cases drag on, the employers save money as some of the retirees, who have to pay growing portions of their health-care costs, forgo costly care, drop out of the plans or die. If companies lose in court, the worst that happens is they have to resume paying benefits. They don't face punitive damages or penalties. And they may not have to resume benefits for those retirees who dropped out of the health plans.
The retirees, by contrast, often find themselves in a bind -- unsure of their recourse and facing, as they age, the court system's typical long waits for legal resolution. The U.S. Labor Department is of little help. Retired workers "aren't our constituents anymore," says a spokeswoman for the department.
Unions often do go to bat for retirees. The United Auto Workers and the Steelworkers have been the most active in filing suits to protect retirees whose benefits a company has unilaterally changed. But unions aren't allowed to strike or file unfair-labor-practice complaints on behalf of retirees.
Employers that want to cut union retirees' health coverage or make retirees pay a larger portion could just impose changes and wait to be sued. But by suing first, they stand a chance of choosing the jurisdiction.
Employers that sue retirees name one person or a handful. They may choose people at random, retirees who have complained, or people who were active in the union that negotiated the contract at issue. http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB110003711129469246,00.html?mod=home%5Fpage%5Fone%5Fus
Tanks Sent to Anti-War Protest Really! An LA protest with a small number merely chanting, and two tanks appeared. And, yet, no media coverage. There is a confirming video. I thought Tiananmen Square was in China.
At 7:50 PM two armored tanks showed up at an anti-war protest in front of the federal building in Westwood. The tanks circled the block twice, the second time parking themselves in the street and directly in front of the area where most of the protesters were gathered. Enraged, some of the people attempted to block the tanks, but police quickly cleared the street. The people continued to protest the presence of the tanks, but about ten minutes the tanks drove off. It is unclear as to why the tanks were deployed to this location. http://www.la.indymedia.org/news/2004/11/118865.php
Nuclear Power Industry Hopeful of Revival- Wall Street Journal:
With the re-election of President Bush, the nuclear power industry thinks the next two to three years may be the time to push hard for regulatory approval of new nuclear power plants, the Wall Street Journal reported. DOE has told two separate power consortiums that it will share the expected $500-million cost to seek approval for new reactors. The groups said they hope to win NRC approval by 2009.
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB109996476958968447,00.html?mod=todays_us_page_one
Election Fraud: Some growing media interest, though not the NY Times. Aaron Brown did a news segment that was less dismissive than Peter Jennings. The Boston Phoenix covers it:
BUSH HAS, at the moment, won Ohio by 136,483 votes, but a number of considerations throw that lead into serious doubt. For one thing, that number will likely diminish when the state’s approximately 155,000 provisional ballots are processed. Most of those who had to use provisional ballots probably were first-time voters whose names had not made it onto their precinct lists, observers say, and first-timers went 54-46 for Kerry in Ohio, according to exit polls.
Another 92,672 votes were discarded, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, mostly due to now-familiar problems with punch-card ballots. Those punch-card machines are — surprise, surprise — predominantly used in urban areas that tend to vote Democratic. In Cuyahoga County — two-to-one Kerry country — a voter reported misaligned holes and out-of-order pages on the punch ballots to Election Protection, a nonpartisan coalition of organizations led by People for the American Way Foundation, which was monitoring elections in select states, including Ohio.
Punch cards also probably slowed down the voting process, suggests Carlo LoParo, spokesperson for the Ohio secretary of state, as voters with memories of Florida made super-extra-sure to remove the chads they produce completely. "People were a little more methodical, making sure they didn’t leave any hanging chads," agrees Dan Trevas, communications director for the Ohio Democratic Party.
But wait — wasn’t the Help America Vote Act of 2002 supposed to help rid states of these machines? Why, yes — in fact, Ohio received $133 million from the federal government specifically to replace those old clunkers with new DRE and optical-scan machines. The state even contracted with venders. But then Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell — a Republican — had a change of heart.http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/other_stories/multi-page/documents/04256171.asp
And, Keith Olbermann soldiers on:
John Kerry or no John Kerry, there could still be recounts in Ohio and New Hampshire— courtesy of the two candidates who got far more grief than votes during the presidential campaign.
David Cobb of the Green Party told a California radio station late yesterday afternoon that he is “quite likely to be demanding a recount in Ohio,” with a final decision to be reached and announced during the day
The New Hampshire Assistant Attorney General, meanwhile, told us at Countdown that negotiations are ongoing with Ralph Nader, who at a news conference yesterday not only demanded a recount in a minimum of four districts, but also added another bizarre touch to the proceedings by launching into a brief but surprisingly high-quality Richard Nixon impression. In any event, if Nader and Cobb are at the edges, questions about Ohio moved back into the mainstream yesterday with another cogent article in The Cincinnati Enquirer. The rationale for the bizarre “lockdown” of the vote-counting venue in Warren County on election night suddenly broke down when it was contradicted by spokespersons from the FBI and Ohio’s primary homeland security official.
County Emergency Services Director Frank Young said last week that in a face-to-face meeting with an FBI agent, he was warned that Warren County, outside Cincinnati, faced a “terrorist threat.” County Commissioners President Pat South amplified, insisting to us at Countdown that her jurisdiction had received a series of memos from Homeland Security about the threat. “These memos were sent out statewide, not just to Warren County, and they included a lot of planning tools and resources to use for election day security.
“In a face to face meeting between the FBI and our director of Emergency Services,” Ms. South continued, “we were informed that on a scale from 1 to 10, the tri-state area of Southwest Ohio was ranked at a high 8 to a low 9 in terms of security risk. Warren County in particular, was rated at 10.”
But the Bureau says it issued no such warning.
“The FBI did not notify anyone in Warren County of any specific terrorist threat to Warren County before Election Day,” FBI spokesman Michael Brooks told Enquirer reporters Erica Solvig and Dan Horn. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6210240/
Kerry Position:
Dan Hoffheimer, the statewide counsel for the Kerry campaign, said they are not trying to challenge the election but are only carrying out Kerry's promise to make sure that all the votes in Ohio are counted.
"We're not expecting to change the outcome of the election," Hoffheimer said.
In unofficial returns, Bush outpolled Kerry by 136,000 votes in Ohio.
Hoffheimer said the goal is to identify any voting problems and quell doubts about the legitimacy of the Ohio election being raised on the Internet. http://www.ohio.com/mld/ohio/news/state/10152922.htmI
Official Word from the Times: No problemo! Amazing how they all but ignored the disenfranchisement, dirty tricks, etc. and now pronounce the election on the up and up.
In the space of seven days, an online market of dark ideas surrounding last week's presidential election took root and multiplied.
But while the widely read universe of Web logs was often blamed for the swift propagation of faulty analyses, the blogosphere, as it has come to be known, spread the rumors so fast that experts were soon able to debunk them, rather than allowing them to linger and feed conspiracy theories. Within days of the first rumors of a stolen election, in fact, the most popular theories were being proved wrong - though many were still reluctant to let them go. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/12/politics/12theory.html?hp&ex=1100322000&en=bef1453564cd6e4e&ei=5094&partner=homepage
Appointments: Gonzales. So, is he worse than Ashcroft? The Abu Ghraib-Guantanamo memo man who trashed Geneva infuriated GOPers John Warner, Lindsey Graham and John McCain. And, he was counsel for Enron, for a time. Sounds like our kind of guy!
Democrats Comment: Still no backbone?
"I think he's a pretty solid guy...If you had said to me six months ago I can have Gonzales or Ashcroft, it wouldn't have been a hard choice." – Joe Biden
We will have to review his record very carefully, but I can tell you already he's a better candidate than John Ashcroft." –Chuck Schumer
Of less import, but of at least marginal interest is the reportedly imminent naming of Dr. W. David Hager to run the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee. Apparently, the committee has not met for more than two years, during which time its charter lapsed. As a result, the Bush Administration must fill all eleven positions with new members. This position does not require Congressional approval.
[The FDA’s Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee makes crucial decisions on matters relating to drugs used in the practice of obstetrics, gynecology and related specialties, including hormone therapy, contraception, treatment for infertility, and medical alternatives to surgical procedures for sterilization and pregnancy termination.]
Hager is the author of “As Jesus Cared for Women: Restoring Women Then and Now.” The book blends biblical accounts of Christ healing women with case studies from Hager’s practice. His views of reproductive health care are far outside the mainstream for reproductive technology.
Hager is a practicing OB/GYN who describes himself as “pro-life” and refuses to prescribe contraceptives to unmarried women.
In the book Hager wrote with his wife, entitled “Stress and the Woman’s Body,” he suggests that women who suffer from premenstrual syndrome should seek help from reading the bible and praying.
What’s Happening, Iraq:
Fallujah: The military try to put on a success face, trumpeting their advance. But, since we’ve been hearing about this attack for almost 2 months, it’s no surprise that a large percentage of the population, including the fighters, have left. Today’s news is of widespread attacks elsewhere, especially in Mosul, where police stations were overrun and looted. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/12/international/middleeast/12mosul.html?oref=login&pagewanted=all
Naomi Klein has a take:
In another demonstration of their commitment to freedom, the first goal of the U.S. soldiers in Fallujah was to ambush the city's main hospital. Why? Apparently because it was the source of the "rumours" about high civilian casualties the last time U.S. troops laid siege to Fallujah, sparking outrage in Iraq and across the Arab world. "It's a centre of propaganda," an unnamed senior American officer told The New York Times. Without doctors to count the dead, the outrage would be presumably be muted – except that, of course, the attacks on hospitals have sparked their own outrage, further jeopardizing the legitimacy of the upcoming elections.
According to The New York Times, the Fallujah General Hospital was easy to capture, since the doctors and patients put up no resistance. There was, however, one injury, "an Iraqi soldier who accidentally discharged his Kalashnikov rifle, injuring his lower leg."
I think that means he shot himself in the foot. He's not the only one. http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/20459
Casualties Fuzzy math? 69 wounded or 227?
Eighteen U.S. troops have been killed and another 69 wounded in this week's offensive to take control of the rebel-held Iraqi city Falluja, a senior U.S. Marine Corps commander said on Thursday.
A spokeswoman at the U.S. military's Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, the usual destination for seriously wounded U.S. troops stationed in Iraq or Afghanistan, said 102 Americans arrived from Iraq in two plane loads on Thursday. They joined 125 wounded troops who arrived there from Monday to Wednesday. http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=578&e=3&u=/nm/20041111/ts_nm/iraq_falluja_killed_dc
Meanwhile, tragic and humbling for Allawi to have relatives kidnapped.
More Election Post-Mortems
Blame it on gay marriage? Laura Conaway, Village Voice
Maybe you're not willing to blame John Kerry's statistically narrow defeat on the 11 state initiatives banning same-sex marriage. Go ahead, wrangle the numbers until you reach a rosier conclusion. Then ask yourself this: If you voted for Kerry, or at least against George Bush, wouldn't you have perhaps preferred that the gay marriage question come up some other time, any other time?
To a point, I can sympathize. In 2000, I certainly thought Ralph Nader should have picked some other time. His run seemed to me quixotic and immoral, as did the votes of almost all his supporters. The whole enterprise was self-indulgent and doomed, and the Naderites should just have come off it. They didn't, and it changed the immediate fate of the free world.
You could say the very same about gay people's desire to marry.
Except that we're not talking about a protest vote for a minor candidate. We're talking about full citizenship for one of this nation's most denigrated minorities. http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0445/conaway.php
Frank Rich: Enough talk about the Red States and moral values.
There's only one problem with the storyline proclaiming that the country swung to the right on cultural issues in 2004. Like so many other narratives that immediately calcify into our 24/7 media's conventional wisdom, it is fiction. Everything about the election results - and about American culture itself - confirms an inescapable reality: John Kerry's defeat notwithstanding, it's blue America, not red, that is inexorably winning the culture war, and by a landslide. Kerry voters who have been flagellating themselves since Election Day with a vengeance worthy of "The Passion of the Christ" should wake up and smell the Chardonnay.
The blue ascendancy is nearly as strong among Republicans as it is among Democrats. Those whose "moral values" are invested in cultural heroes like the accused loofah fetishist Bill O'Reilly and the self-gratifying drug consumer Rush Limbaugh are surely joking when they turn apoplectic over MTV. William Bennett's name is now as synonymous with Las Vegas as silicone. The Democrats' Ashton Kutcher is trumped by the Republicans' Britney Spears. Excess and vulgarity, as always, enjoy a vast, bipartisan constituency, and in a democracy no political party will ever stamp them out. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/14/arts/14rich.html?oref=login&pagewanted=print&position=
Arctic and Global Warming: Good news? Hard to spin this one, but some are trying.
The polar route has clear attractions for shippers -- from Osaka, Japan, to Rotterdam, the Netherlands, a trip around the polar sea could save about two weeks on a 45-day voyage through the Suez or Panama Canals.
Yet the Arctic report also says a thaw may add complexities. The Northwest Passage through a maze of islands north of Canada, for instance, might become more clogged by icebergs if ice bridges blocking northern channels thaw out.
The report, by 250 scientists, says the Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the planet partly because darker ground and water, once uncovered, soak up more heat than snow and ice. http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=Z3MULXRXFK1SMCRBAEZSFFA?type=scienceNews&storyID=6771552&pageNumber=1
-R
“As you have said, the war against terrorism is a new kind of war. The nature of the new war places a high premium on other factors, such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians. In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions." - AG Nominee Alberto Gonzales, to Bush
"The more Maureen Loud [sic] gets on 'Meet the Press' and writes those columns, the redder these states get. I mean, they don't want some high brow hussy from New York City explaining to them that they're idiots and telling them that they're stupid." –Zell Miller, denouncing NY Times op ed columnist Maureen Dowd
Health Care and Retirees. Haunting story about companies suing retirees.
Many companies have already cut back company-paid health-care coverage for retirees from their salaried staffs. But until recently, employers generally were barred from touching unionized retirees' benefits because they are spelled out in labor contracts. Now, some are taking aggressive steps to pare those benefits as well, including going to court.
In the past two years, employers have sued union retirees across the country. In the suits, they ask judges to rule that no matter what labor contracts say, they have a right to change the benefits. Some companies also argue that contract references to "lifetime" coverage don't mean the lifetime of the retirees, but the life of the labor contract. Since the contracts expired many years ago, the promises, they say, have expired too.
They have little to lose by trying. Typically, as such legal cases drag on, the employers save money as some of the retirees, who have to pay growing portions of their health-care costs, forgo costly care, drop out of the plans or die. If companies lose in court, the worst that happens is they have to resume paying benefits. They don't face punitive damages or penalties. And they may not have to resume benefits for those retirees who dropped out of the health plans.
The retirees, by contrast, often find themselves in a bind -- unsure of their recourse and facing, as they age, the court system's typical long waits for legal resolution. The U.S. Labor Department is of little help. Retired workers "aren't our constituents anymore," says a spokeswoman for the department.
Unions often do go to bat for retirees. The United Auto Workers and the Steelworkers have been the most active in filing suits to protect retirees whose benefits a company has unilaterally changed. But unions aren't allowed to strike or file unfair-labor-practice complaints on behalf of retirees.
Employers that want to cut union retirees' health coverage or make retirees pay a larger portion could just impose changes and wait to be sued. But by suing first, they stand a chance of choosing the jurisdiction.
Employers that sue retirees name one person or a handful. They may choose people at random, retirees who have complained, or people who were active in the union that negotiated the contract at issue. http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB110003711129469246,00.html?mod=home%5Fpage%5Fone%5Fus
Tanks Sent to Anti-War Protest Really! An LA protest with a small number merely chanting, and two tanks appeared. And, yet, no media coverage. There is a confirming video. I thought Tiananmen Square was in China.
At 7:50 PM two armored tanks showed up at an anti-war protest in front of the federal building in Westwood. The tanks circled the block twice, the second time parking themselves in the street and directly in front of the area where most of the protesters were gathered. Enraged, some of the people attempted to block the tanks, but police quickly cleared the street. The people continued to protest the presence of the tanks, but about ten minutes the tanks drove off. It is unclear as to why the tanks were deployed to this location. http://www.la.indymedia.org/news/2004/11/118865.php
Nuclear Power Industry Hopeful of Revival- Wall Street Journal:
With the re-election of President Bush, the nuclear power industry thinks the next two to three years may be the time to push hard for regulatory approval of new nuclear power plants, the Wall Street Journal reported. DOE has told two separate power consortiums that it will share the expected $500-million cost to seek approval for new reactors. The groups said they hope to win NRC approval by 2009.
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB109996476958968447,00.html?mod=todays_us_page_one
Election Fraud: Some growing media interest, though not the NY Times. Aaron Brown did a news segment that was less dismissive than Peter Jennings. The Boston Phoenix covers it:
BUSH HAS, at the moment, won Ohio by 136,483 votes, but a number of considerations throw that lead into serious doubt. For one thing, that number will likely diminish when the state’s approximately 155,000 provisional ballots are processed. Most of those who had to use provisional ballots probably were first-time voters whose names had not made it onto their precinct lists, observers say, and first-timers went 54-46 for Kerry in Ohio, according to exit polls.
Another 92,672 votes were discarded, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, mostly due to now-familiar problems with punch-card ballots. Those punch-card machines are — surprise, surprise — predominantly used in urban areas that tend to vote Democratic. In Cuyahoga County — two-to-one Kerry country — a voter reported misaligned holes and out-of-order pages on the punch ballots to Election Protection, a nonpartisan coalition of organizations led by People for the American Way Foundation, which was monitoring elections in select states, including Ohio.
Punch cards also probably slowed down the voting process, suggests Carlo LoParo, spokesperson for the Ohio secretary of state, as voters with memories of Florida made super-extra-sure to remove the chads they produce completely. "People were a little more methodical, making sure they didn’t leave any hanging chads," agrees Dan Trevas, communications director for the Ohio Democratic Party.
But wait — wasn’t the Help America Vote Act of 2002 supposed to help rid states of these machines? Why, yes — in fact, Ohio received $133 million from the federal government specifically to replace those old clunkers with new DRE and optical-scan machines. The state even contracted with venders. But then Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell — a Republican — had a change of heart.http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/other_stories/multi-page/documents/04256171.asp
And, Keith Olbermann soldiers on:
John Kerry or no John Kerry, there could still be recounts in Ohio and New Hampshire— courtesy of the two candidates who got far more grief than votes during the presidential campaign.
David Cobb of the Green Party told a California radio station late yesterday afternoon that he is “quite likely to be demanding a recount in Ohio,” with a final decision to be reached and announced during the day
The New Hampshire Assistant Attorney General, meanwhile, told us at Countdown that negotiations are ongoing with Ralph Nader, who at a news conference yesterday not only demanded a recount in a minimum of four districts, but also added another bizarre touch to the proceedings by launching into a brief but surprisingly high-quality Richard Nixon impression. In any event, if Nader and Cobb are at the edges, questions about Ohio moved back into the mainstream yesterday with another cogent article in The Cincinnati Enquirer. The rationale for the bizarre “lockdown” of the vote-counting venue in Warren County on election night suddenly broke down when it was contradicted by spokespersons from the FBI and Ohio’s primary homeland security official.
County Emergency Services Director Frank Young said last week that in a face-to-face meeting with an FBI agent, he was warned that Warren County, outside Cincinnati, faced a “terrorist threat.” County Commissioners President Pat South amplified, insisting to us at Countdown that her jurisdiction had received a series of memos from Homeland Security about the threat. “These memos were sent out statewide, not just to Warren County, and they included a lot of planning tools and resources to use for election day security.
“In a face to face meeting between the FBI and our director of Emergency Services,” Ms. South continued, “we were informed that on a scale from 1 to 10, the tri-state area of Southwest Ohio was ranked at a high 8 to a low 9 in terms of security risk. Warren County in particular, was rated at 10.”
But the Bureau says it issued no such warning.
“The FBI did not notify anyone in Warren County of any specific terrorist threat to Warren County before Election Day,” FBI spokesman Michael Brooks told Enquirer reporters Erica Solvig and Dan Horn. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6210240/
Kerry Position:
Dan Hoffheimer, the statewide counsel for the Kerry campaign, said they are not trying to challenge the election but are only carrying out Kerry's promise to make sure that all the votes in Ohio are counted.
"We're not expecting to change the outcome of the election," Hoffheimer said.
In unofficial returns, Bush outpolled Kerry by 136,000 votes in Ohio.
Hoffheimer said the goal is to identify any voting problems and quell doubts about the legitimacy of the Ohio election being raised on the Internet. http://www.ohio.com/mld/ohio/news/state/10152922.htmI
Official Word from the Times: No problemo! Amazing how they all but ignored the disenfranchisement, dirty tricks, etc. and now pronounce the election on the up and up.
In the space of seven days, an online market of dark ideas surrounding last week's presidential election took root and multiplied.
But while the widely read universe of Web logs was often blamed for the swift propagation of faulty analyses, the blogosphere, as it has come to be known, spread the rumors so fast that experts were soon able to debunk them, rather than allowing them to linger and feed conspiracy theories. Within days of the first rumors of a stolen election, in fact, the most popular theories were being proved wrong - though many were still reluctant to let them go. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/12/politics/12theory.html?hp&ex=1100322000&en=bef1453564cd6e4e&ei=5094&partner=homepage
Appointments: Gonzales. So, is he worse than Ashcroft? The Abu Ghraib-Guantanamo memo man who trashed Geneva infuriated GOPers John Warner, Lindsey Graham and John McCain. And, he was counsel for Enron, for a time. Sounds like our kind of guy!
Democrats Comment: Still no backbone?
"I think he's a pretty solid guy...If you had said to me six months ago I can have Gonzales or Ashcroft, it wouldn't have been a hard choice." – Joe Biden
We will have to review his record very carefully, but I can tell you already he's a better candidate than John Ashcroft." –Chuck Schumer
Of less import, but of at least marginal interest is the reportedly imminent naming of Dr. W. David Hager to run the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee. Apparently, the committee has not met for more than two years, during which time its charter lapsed. As a result, the Bush Administration must fill all eleven positions with new members. This position does not require Congressional approval.
[The FDA’s Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee makes crucial decisions on matters relating to drugs used in the practice of obstetrics, gynecology and related specialties, including hormone therapy, contraception, treatment for infertility, and medical alternatives to surgical procedures for sterilization and pregnancy termination.]
Hager is the author of “As Jesus Cared for Women: Restoring Women Then and Now.” The book blends biblical accounts of Christ healing women with case studies from Hager’s practice. His views of reproductive health care are far outside the mainstream for reproductive technology.
Hager is a practicing OB/GYN who describes himself as “pro-life” and refuses to prescribe contraceptives to unmarried women.
In the book Hager wrote with his wife, entitled “Stress and the Woman’s Body,” he suggests that women who suffer from premenstrual syndrome should seek help from reading the bible and praying.
What’s Happening, Iraq:
Fallujah: The military try to put on a success face, trumpeting their advance. But, since we’ve been hearing about this attack for almost 2 months, it’s no surprise that a large percentage of the population, including the fighters, have left. Today’s news is of widespread attacks elsewhere, especially in Mosul, where police stations were overrun and looted. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/12/international/middleeast/12mosul.html?oref=login&pagewanted=all
Naomi Klein has a take:
In another demonstration of their commitment to freedom, the first goal of the U.S. soldiers in Fallujah was to ambush the city's main hospital. Why? Apparently because it was the source of the "rumours" about high civilian casualties the last time U.S. troops laid siege to Fallujah, sparking outrage in Iraq and across the Arab world. "It's a centre of propaganda," an unnamed senior American officer told The New York Times. Without doctors to count the dead, the outrage would be presumably be muted – except that, of course, the attacks on hospitals have sparked their own outrage, further jeopardizing the legitimacy of the upcoming elections.
According to The New York Times, the Fallujah General Hospital was easy to capture, since the doctors and patients put up no resistance. There was, however, one injury, "an Iraqi soldier who accidentally discharged his Kalashnikov rifle, injuring his lower leg."
I think that means he shot himself in the foot. He's not the only one. http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/20459
Casualties Fuzzy math? 69 wounded or 227?
Eighteen U.S. troops have been killed and another 69 wounded in this week's offensive to take control of the rebel-held Iraqi city Falluja, a senior U.S. Marine Corps commander said on Thursday.
A spokeswoman at the U.S. military's Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, the usual destination for seriously wounded U.S. troops stationed in Iraq or Afghanistan, said 102 Americans arrived from Iraq in two plane loads on Thursday. They joined 125 wounded troops who arrived there from Monday to Wednesday. http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=578&e=3&u=/nm/20041111/ts_nm/iraq_falluja_killed_dc
Meanwhile, tragic and humbling for Allawi to have relatives kidnapped.
More Election Post-Mortems
Blame it on gay marriage? Laura Conaway, Village Voice
Maybe you're not willing to blame John Kerry's statistically narrow defeat on the 11 state initiatives banning same-sex marriage. Go ahead, wrangle the numbers until you reach a rosier conclusion. Then ask yourself this: If you voted for Kerry, or at least against George Bush, wouldn't you have perhaps preferred that the gay marriage question come up some other time, any other time?
To a point, I can sympathize. In 2000, I certainly thought Ralph Nader should have picked some other time. His run seemed to me quixotic and immoral, as did the votes of almost all his supporters. The whole enterprise was self-indulgent and doomed, and the Naderites should just have come off it. They didn't, and it changed the immediate fate of the free world.
You could say the very same about gay people's desire to marry.
Except that we're not talking about a protest vote for a minor candidate. We're talking about full citizenship for one of this nation's most denigrated minorities. http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0445/conaway.php
Frank Rich: Enough talk about the Red States and moral values.
There's only one problem with the storyline proclaiming that the country swung to the right on cultural issues in 2004. Like so many other narratives that immediately calcify into our 24/7 media's conventional wisdom, it is fiction. Everything about the election results - and about American culture itself - confirms an inescapable reality: John Kerry's defeat notwithstanding, it's blue America, not red, that is inexorably winning the culture war, and by a landslide. Kerry voters who have been flagellating themselves since Election Day with a vengeance worthy of "The Passion of the Christ" should wake up and smell the Chardonnay.
The blue ascendancy is nearly as strong among Republicans as it is among Democrats. Those whose "moral values" are invested in cultural heroes like the accused loofah fetishist Bill O'Reilly and the self-gratifying drug consumer Rush Limbaugh are surely joking when they turn apoplectic over MTV. William Bennett's name is now as synonymous with Las Vegas as silicone. The Democrats' Ashton Kutcher is trumped by the Republicans' Britney Spears. Excess and vulgarity, as always, enjoy a vast, bipartisan constituency, and in a democracy no political party will ever stamp them out. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/14/arts/14rich.html?oref=login&pagewanted=print&position=
Arctic and Global Warming: Good news? Hard to spin this one, but some are trying.
The polar route has clear attractions for shippers -- from Osaka, Japan, to Rotterdam, the Netherlands, a trip around the polar sea could save about two weeks on a 45-day voyage through the Suez or Panama Canals.
Yet the Arctic report also says a thaw may add complexities. The Northwest Passage through a maze of islands north of Canada, for instance, might become more clogged by icebergs if ice bridges blocking northern channels thaw out.
The report, by 250 scientists, says the Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the planet partly because darker ground and water, once uncovered, soak up more heat than snow and ice. http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=Z3MULXRXFK1SMCRBAEZSFFA?type=scienceNews&storyID=6771552&pageNumber=1
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