Friday, April 15, 2005
Judicial Wars: Everyone a liberal to be targeted…
As Slate columnist Dahlia Lithwick pointed out, this new conservative line against the judiciary is broader than previous right-wing attacks on judges. Conservatives are now criticizing all federal judges, not just "liberal" judges. More precisely, many are upset with the very idea that judges act as a check on the other branches of government. The Supreme Court may be stacked with Republican nominees, and it may have handed the presidency to a Republican candidate who lost the popular vote, but that doesn't matter to Dobson. He still believes that Justice Anthony Kennedy is "the most dangerous man in America," and that stopping judicial tyranny is urgent.
Cass Sunstein, a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago Law School, stresses that Republicans have already succeeded in their efforts to remake the judiciary. In the past 30 years under Republican presidents, the federal courts have become strikingly more conservative. No current Supreme Court justices are as liberal as some we've had in the past -- as Earl Warren, or Thurgood Marshall, or William Brennan. Yet at the same time we have more extremely conservative judges -- like Antonin Scalia, or Clarence Thomas -- than we've ever had. These judges, who favor an interpretation of the Constitution that allows no room for changing times, envision a judiciary that is less interventionist than the kind of third branch that liberals would demand.
"The real danger is not Tom DeLay talking recklessly," Sunstein says. The Schiavo case presages something scarier -- the continuing "massive transformation of the federal judiciary." http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/04/11/judges/index.html
Then, there was Dana Milbank’s story in the WaPost about the Right conference on "Remedies to Judicial Tyranny":
Not to be outdone, lawyer-author Edwin Vieira told the gathering that [Justice] Kennedy should be impeached because his philosophy, evidenced in his opinion striking down an anti-sodomy statute, "upholds Marxist, Leninist, satanic principles drawn from foreign law."
Ominously, Vieira continued by saying his "bottom line" for dealing with the Supreme Court comes from Joseph Stalin. "He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: 'no man, no problem,' " Vieira said.
The full Stalin quote, for those who don't recognize it, is "Death solves all problems: no man, no problem." Presumably, Vieira had in mind something less extreme than Stalin did and was not actually advocating violence. But then, these are scary times for the judiciary. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38308-2005Apr8.html
And:
Conservatives near lock on US courts
Senators will consider new judicial nominees Thursday. GOP-appointed judges already control 10 of 13 appeals courts
As Democrats and Republicans in Washington prepare for an expected showdown over the use of filibusters to stall judicial nominees, President Bush is already well on his way to recasting the nation's federal appeals courts in a more conservative mold.
Republican appointees now constitute a majority of judges on 10 of the nation's 13 federal appeals courts. As few as three more lifetime appointments on key courts would tip the balance in favor of GOP appointees on all but one appeals court - the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.
The confrontation over judges heats up Thursday with the Senate Judiciary Committee expected to send a second appeals court candidate to the full Senate for a possible vote. The process is being closely watched because if either nomination triggers a filibuster, it could provide the vehicle for Republican senators to launch the so-called nuclear option, which would squelch filibusters. http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0414/p01s02-uspo.htm
Frist and the Christian Right: The Senate leader had kept his distance from talk about ousting “activist” judges and from Tom DeLay. But now he will participate in a telecast, “Justice Sunday,” which is an evangelical event focused on the Democrats’ ungodliness.
As the Senate heads toward a showdown over the rules governing judicial confirmations, Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, has agreed to join a handful of prominent Christian conservatives in a telecast portraying Democrats as "against people of faith" for blocking President Bush's nominees.
Fliers for the telecast, organized by the Family Research Council and scheduled to originate at a Kentucky megachurch the evening of April 24, call the day "Justice Sunday" and depict a young man holding a Bible in one hand and a gavel in the other. The flier does not name participants, but under the heading "the filibuster against people of faith," it reads: "The filibuster was once abused to protect racial bias, and it is now being used against people of faith."
Organizers say they hope to reach more than a million people by distributing the telecast to churches around the country, over the Internet and over Christian television and radio networks and stations. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/15/politics/15judges.html?ei=5094&en=0b42a55582cd9ab5&hp=&ex=1113624000&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print&position=
Estate Taxes: House again passed it; Will the Senate? The NY Times article says no, the Wall Street Journal is more “optimistic”.
The toll:
· Specifically, the CBPP noted that congressional Republicans and the Bush White House want to eliminate the Estate Tax entirely by 2011. When one adds up the lost revenue and the higher interest on the national debt (Republicans admit they have no way of paying for the repeal), the “total cost of repealing the estate tax for a decade would be nearly $1 trillion.” The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that extending repeal beyond 2010 would reduce revenues by $290 billion through 2015, including $72 billion in 2015 alone.
· But the Joint Tax Committee’s estimate essentially captures only the cost of four additional years of estate tax repeal. The revenues losses associated with 10 more years of repeal — for the period from fiscal year 2012 through fiscal year 2021 — are much higher, about $745 billion.
· When the associated $225 billion in higher interest payments on the debt are taken into account, the total cost of repealing the estate tax for a decade would be nearly $1 trillion. http://www.cbpp.org/4-12-05tax.htm
Democrats Waking up? Talk is of their using this week to push the line that they are the true “party of reform”, that the Republicans are making the tax system more complicated and unjust. They had best be loud w/ this.
Meanwhile, Ben Nelson tries to sell out:
The fight over judicial nominations was finally starting to go the Dems way. The Senate confirmed a non-controversial nominee unanimously, Bill Frist found himself without the votes he needs to exercise the “nuclear option,” and two major conservative groups (the National Right to Work Committee and the Gun Owners of America) came out against the Republican plan.
And then hyper-moderate Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) decided to try and screw it all up with an unhelpful “compromise.”
Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), who is working on a bipartisan compromise to end the filibuster of judicial nominees, said he believes that his party’s practice of blocking confirmation votes on controversial nominees has put him and fellow Democratic centrists in politically difficult positions.
Business as Usual: Republicans and Health Care
By two 54-46 votes, the Senate blocked efforts Tuesday to add money for veterans’ health care to the 2005 supplemental appropriations bill.
Sens. Patty Murray, D-Wash., and Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, both members of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, sought to add $1.9 billion to the $80.6 billion wartime emergency supplemental appropriations bill to cover costs of treating returning combat veterans for war-related injuries and to cover shortfalls in funding for VA programs.
The Bush administration sought no VA money as part of its supplemental funding request, and none was included in the version of the bill passed by the House in March. http://www.armytimes.com/print.php?f=1-292925-782283.php
Business as Usual: Cover Up
The Bush administration is impeding an investigation into the Education Department's hiring of commentator Armstrong Williams by refusing to allow key White House officials to be interviewed, a Democratic lawmaker briefed on the review said Thursday.
In addition, Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., said Education Secretary Margaret Spellings is considering invoking a privilege that he said would require information to be deleted when the final version is publicly released, which is expected within days. http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Education-Investigation.html?
True Believers:
Conservative House Republicans, beset with growing distrust of the Senate, are urging the House leadership to jump ahead of the Senate on Social Security reform and pass a bill based on large personal retirement accounts and no tax increases or cuts in benefits.
They also want House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert and House Majority Tom DeLay to say publicly that any bill sent over from the Senate that doesn't meet all these requirements will not be taken up in the House. http://washingtontimes.com/national/20050413-111450-4410r.htm
Post Peak Oil: James Howard Kunstler gets us back to Energy. He notes that the Administration’s failure to prepare us “might be considered an impeachable offense”.
It will change everything about how we live.
To aggravate matters, American natural-gas production is also declining, at five percent a year, despite frenetic new drilling, and with the potential of much steeper declines ahead. Because of the oil crises of the 1970s, the nuclear-plant disasters at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and the acid-rain problem, the U.S. chose to make gas its first choice for electric-power generation. The result was that just about every power plant built after 1980 has to run on gas. Half the homes in America are heated with gas. To further complicate matters, gas isn't easy to import. Here in North America, it is distributed through a vast pipeline network. Gas imported from overseas would have to be compressed at minus-260 degrees Fahrenheit in pressurized tanker ships and unloaded (re-gasified) at special terminals, of which few exist in America. Moreover, the first attempts to site new terminals have met furious opposition because they are such ripe targets for terrorism.
Some other things about the global energy predicament are poorly understood by the public and even our leaders. This is going to be a permanent energy crisis, and these energy problems will synergize with the disruptions of climate change, epidemic disease and population overshoot to produce higher orders of trouble.
We will have to accommodate ourselves to fundamentally changed conditions. http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/_/id/7203633?rnd=1113405728853&has-player=true
Michael Klare: Some of us have focused on the 14 permanent bases being readied in Iraq. The Pentagon is also relocating troops to "forward operating sites" also known as "forward operating locations," and "cooperative security locations." Get used to the lingo. Klare elaborates:
The decommissioning of older bases in Germany, Japan and South Korea and the acquisition of new facilities in other areas has been described by the White House as "the most comprehensive restructuring of US military forces overseas since the end of the Korean War." In explaining these moves, the Bush Administration emphasizes the issue of utility: Many older installations eat up vast resources but contribute little to overall combat effectiveness, and so should be closed; at the same time, new facilities are needed in areas where few American bases currently exist. But while it is certainly arguable that the closing of obsolete bases in Europe and East Asia will free resources that might be better employed somewhere else, it is also clear that a lot more is going on than mere military utility. Indeed, a close look at Pentagon statements and policy reports suggests that three other factors are at work: a new calculus of America's geopolitical interests; a shift in US strategic orientation from defensive to offensive operations; and concerns about the future reliability of long-term allies, especially those in "Old Europe."
Most significant, overall, is the revised calculation of America's geopolitical interests. During the cold war, when "containment" was the overarching strategic principle, the United States surrounded the Soviet bloc with major bases. With the end of the cold war, however, this template no longer made sense, and many of these bases lost their strategic rationale. Meanwhile, other concerns--terrorism, the pursuit of foreign oil and the rise of China--have come to preoccupy American strategists. It is these concerns that are largely driving the realignment of US bases and forces. http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20050425&s=klare
Why Antagonize Russia? William Pfaff notes that the bases encircle Russia
Moscow cooperates with the West at virtually every level of international relations. It supplies the West with oil, cooperates in Bush's war on terror, and has made no trouble over U.S. bases in Central Asia.
So why do we want to make an enemy of Putin?
The Russians are being subjected to a very high level of provocation. Russia is now encircled by American power. There are U.S. forces in Central Asia and the Caucasus. With the Baltic states now members of NATO, alliance aircraft are deployed on Russia's frontier. The Poles and others are anxious for Ukraine to join NATO and the EU.
The Russian government has been amazingly calm about all this, but it might one of these days lose that calm. Russia today is not the Soviet Union, but it could still find ways to be very unpleasant to those who chose to make an enemy of it. http://www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file=/articles/2005/04/12/news/edpfaff.html
Eric Rudolph, Christian, Anti-Abortion Terrorist... or Pot Smoker?
In any case, there may be a tighter connection to the murders than abortion or religion. Deborah Rudolph, Eric's sister-in-law, says he's a drug addict. According to the AP, she told the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report that in the early 1990s, he would "sleep all day, then stay up all night and eat pizza and smoke pot and watch movies by Cheech and Chong." He reportedly made as much as $60,000 selling hydroponic marijuana. That much pot is enough to make anyone paranoid.http://www.christianitytoday.com/global/printer.html?/ct/2003/122/22.0.html
Man, those ‘60’s were Evil…
Sports: Naming a Stadium…for the Military
Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium could be renamed Armed Forces Field at RFK under the terms of a deal being negotiated by District officials and the Department of Defense, sources close to the discussions said yesterday…
On Monday, the National Guard had agreed to a deal to pay the commission about $6 million over three years for the sponsorship, but the agreement was halted by Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.) and Lt. Gen. Steven Blum. They objected to a branch of the military paying to put its name on a sports building or playing field.
After city leaders met with Warner and Blum on Tuesday, negotiations resumed. Yesterday, the two sides had agreed that the Department of Defense would pay for recruiting and marketing opportunities at the stadium but that the city would not ask for money if the field is renamed Armed Forces Field at RFK. If that name change is agreed upon, the city would make it in honor of the military services, at no cost, according to sources familiar with the negotiations.
They said the Department of Defense wants to pay less than the Guard would have paid for the naming rights. Money from the sponsorship will go to improving youth athletic programs in the city.
Asked whether it was appropriate to have the military's name on the field, D.C. Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) said at his weekly news conference yesterday that "this has nothing to do with whether you agree or disagree with the war. I think it's actually a good fit." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A51287-2005Apr13.html?nav=hcmodule
-R
As Slate columnist Dahlia Lithwick pointed out, this new conservative line against the judiciary is broader than previous right-wing attacks on judges. Conservatives are now criticizing all federal judges, not just "liberal" judges. More precisely, many are upset with the very idea that judges act as a check on the other branches of government. The Supreme Court may be stacked with Republican nominees, and it may have handed the presidency to a Republican candidate who lost the popular vote, but that doesn't matter to Dobson. He still believes that Justice Anthony Kennedy is "the most dangerous man in America," and that stopping judicial tyranny is urgent.
Cass Sunstein, a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago Law School, stresses that Republicans have already succeeded in their efforts to remake the judiciary. In the past 30 years under Republican presidents, the federal courts have become strikingly more conservative. No current Supreme Court justices are as liberal as some we've had in the past -- as Earl Warren, or Thurgood Marshall, or William Brennan. Yet at the same time we have more extremely conservative judges -- like Antonin Scalia, or Clarence Thomas -- than we've ever had. These judges, who favor an interpretation of the Constitution that allows no room for changing times, envision a judiciary that is less interventionist than the kind of third branch that liberals would demand.
"The real danger is not Tom DeLay talking recklessly," Sunstein says. The Schiavo case presages something scarier -- the continuing "massive transformation of the federal judiciary." http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/04/11/judges/index.html
Then, there was Dana Milbank’s story in the WaPost about the Right conference on "Remedies to Judicial Tyranny":
Not to be outdone, lawyer-author Edwin Vieira told the gathering that [Justice] Kennedy should be impeached because his philosophy, evidenced in his opinion striking down an anti-sodomy statute, "upholds Marxist, Leninist, satanic principles drawn from foreign law."
Ominously, Vieira continued by saying his "bottom line" for dealing with the Supreme Court comes from Joseph Stalin. "He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: 'no man, no problem,' " Vieira said.
The full Stalin quote, for those who don't recognize it, is "Death solves all problems: no man, no problem." Presumably, Vieira had in mind something less extreme than Stalin did and was not actually advocating violence. But then, these are scary times for the judiciary. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38308-2005Apr8.html
And:
Conservatives near lock on US courts
Senators will consider new judicial nominees Thursday. GOP-appointed judges already control 10 of 13 appeals courts
As Democrats and Republicans in Washington prepare for an expected showdown over the use of filibusters to stall judicial nominees, President Bush is already well on his way to recasting the nation's federal appeals courts in a more conservative mold.
Republican appointees now constitute a majority of judges on 10 of the nation's 13 federal appeals courts. As few as three more lifetime appointments on key courts would tip the balance in favor of GOP appointees on all but one appeals court - the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.
The confrontation over judges heats up Thursday with the Senate Judiciary Committee expected to send a second appeals court candidate to the full Senate for a possible vote. The process is being closely watched because if either nomination triggers a filibuster, it could provide the vehicle for Republican senators to launch the so-called nuclear option, which would squelch filibusters. http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0414/p01s02-uspo.htm
Frist and the Christian Right: The Senate leader had kept his distance from talk about ousting “activist” judges and from Tom DeLay. But now he will participate in a telecast, “Justice Sunday,” which is an evangelical event focused on the Democrats’ ungodliness.
As the Senate heads toward a showdown over the rules governing judicial confirmations, Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, has agreed to join a handful of prominent Christian conservatives in a telecast portraying Democrats as "against people of faith" for blocking President Bush's nominees.
Fliers for the telecast, organized by the Family Research Council and scheduled to originate at a Kentucky megachurch the evening of April 24, call the day "Justice Sunday" and depict a young man holding a Bible in one hand and a gavel in the other. The flier does not name participants, but under the heading "the filibuster against people of faith," it reads: "The filibuster was once abused to protect racial bias, and it is now being used against people of faith."
Organizers say they hope to reach more than a million people by distributing the telecast to churches around the country, over the Internet and over Christian television and radio networks and stations. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/15/politics/15judges.html?ei=5094&en=0b42a55582cd9ab5&hp=&ex=1113624000&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print&position=
Estate Taxes: House again passed it; Will the Senate? The NY Times article says no, the Wall Street Journal is more “optimistic”.
The toll:
· Specifically, the CBPP noted that congressional Republicans and the Bush White House want to eliminate the Estate Tax entirely by 2011. When one adds up the lost revenue and the higher interest on the national debt (Republicans admit they have no way of paying for the repeal), the “total cost of repealing the estate tax for a decade would be nearly $1 trillion.” The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that extending repeal beyond 2010 would reduce revenues by $290 billion through 2015, including $72 billion in 2015 alone.
· But the Joint Tax Committee’s estimate essentially captures only the cost of four additional years of estate tax repeal. The revenues losses associated with 10 more years of repeal — for the period from fiscal year 2012 through fiscal year 2021 — are much higher, about $745 billion.
· When the associated $225 billion in higher interest payments on the debt are taken into account, the total cost of repealing the estate tax for a decade would be nearly $1 trillion. http://www.cbpp.org/4-12-05tax.htm
Democrats Waking up? Talk is of their using this week to push the line that they are the true “party of reform”, that the Republicans are making the tax system more complicated and unjust. They had best be loud w/ this.
Meanwhile, Ben Nelson tries to sell out:
The fight over judicial nominations was finally starting to go the Dems way. The Senate confirmed a non-controversial nominee unanimously, Bill Frist found himself without the votes he needs to exercise the “nuclear option,” and two major conservative groups (the National Right to Work Committee and the Gun Owners of America) came out against the Republican plan.
And then hyper-moderate Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) decided to try and screw it all up with an unhelpful “compromise.”
Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), who is working on a bipartisan compromise to end the filibuster of judicial nominees, said he believes that his party’s practice of blocking confirmation votes on controversial nominees has put him and fellow Democratic centrists in politically difficult positions.
Business as Usual: Republicans and Health Care
By two 54-46 votes, the Senate blocked efforts Tuesday to add money for veterans’ health care to the 2005 supplemental appropriations bill.
Sens. Patty Murray, D-Wash., and Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, both members of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, sought to add $1.9 billion to the $80.6 billion wartime emergency supplemental appropriations bill to cover costs of treating returning combat veterans for war-related injuries and to cover shortfalls in funding for VA programs.
The Bush administration sought no VA money as part of its supplemental funding request, and none was included in the version of the bill passed by the House in March. http://www.armytimes.com/print.php?f=1-292925-782283.php
Business as Usual: Cover Up
The Bush administration is impeding an investigation into the Education Department's hiring of commentator Armstrong Williams by refusing to allow key White House officials to be interviewed, a Democratic lawmaker briefed on the review said Thursday.
In addition, Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., said Education Secretary Margaret Spellings is considering invoking a privilege that he said would require information to be deleted when the final version is publicly released, which is expected within days. http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Education-Investigation.html?
True Believers:
Conservative House Republicans, beset with growing distrust of the Senate, are urging the House leadership to jump ahead of the Senate on Social Security reform and pass a bill based on large personal retirement accounts and no tax increases or cuts in benefits.
They also want House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert and House Majority Tom DeLay to say publicly that any bill sent over from the Senate that doesn't meet all these requirements will not be taken up in the House. http://washingtontimes.com/national/20050413-111450-4410r.htm
Post Peak Oil: James Howard Kunstler gets us back to Energy. He notes that the Administration’s failure to prepare us “might be considered an impeachable offense”.
It will change everything about how we live.
To aggravate matters, American natural-gas production is also declining, at five percent a year, despite frenetic new drilling, and with the potential of much steeper declines ahead. Because of the oil crises of the 1970s, the nuclear-plant disasters at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and the acid-rain problem, the U.S. chose to make gas its first choice for electric-power generation. The result was that just about every power plant built after 1980 has to run on gas. Half the homes in America are heated with gas. To further complicate matters, gas isn't easy to import. Here in North America, it is distributed through a vast pipeline network. Gas imported from overseas would have to be compressed at minus-260 degrees Fahrenheit in pressurized tanker ships and unloaded (re-gasified) at special terminals, of which few exist in America. Moreover, the first attempts to site new terminals have met furious opposition because they are such ripe targets for terrorism.
Some other things about the global energy predicament are poorly understood by the public and even our leaders. This is going to be a permanent energy crisis, and these energy problems will synergize with the disruptions of climate change, epidemic disease and population overshoot to produce higher orders of trouble.
We will have to accommodate ourselves to fundamentally changed conditions. http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/_/id/7203633?rnd=1113405728853&has-player=true
Michael Klare: Some of us have focused on the 14 permanent bases being readied in Iraq. The Pentagon is also relocating troops to "forward operating sites" also known as "forward operating locations," and "cooperative security locations." Get used to the lingo. Klare elaborates:
The decommissioning of older bases in Germany, Japan and South Korea and the acquisition of new facilities in other areas has been described by the White House as "the most comprehensive restructuring of US military forces overseas since the end of the Korean War." In explaining these moves, the Bush Administration emphasizes the issue of utility: Many older installations eat up vast resources but contribute little to overall combat effectiveness, and so should be closed; at the same time, new facilities are needed in areas where few American bases currently exist. But while it is certainly arguable that the closing of obsolete bases in Europe and East Asia will free resources that might be better employed somewhere else, it is also clear that a lot more is going on than mere military utility. Indeed, a close look at Pentagon statements and policy reports suggests that three other factors are at work: a new calculus of America's geopolitical interests; a shift in US strategic orientation from defensive to offensive operations; and concerns about the future reliability of long-term allies, especially those in "Old Europe."
Most significant, overall, is the revised calculation of America's geopolitical interests. During the cold war, when "containment" was the overarching strategic principle, the United States surrounded the Soviet bloc with major bases. With the end of the cold war, however, this template no longer made sense, and many of these bases lost their strategic rationale. Meanwhile, other concerns--terrorism, the pursuit of foreign oil and the rise of China--have come to preoccupy American strategists. It is these concerns that are largely driving the realignment of US bases and forces. http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20050425&s=klare
Why Antagonize Russia? William Pfaff notes that the bases encircle Russia
Moscow cooperates with the West at virtually every level of international relations. It supplies the West with oil, cooperates in Bush's war on terror, and has made no trouble over U.S. bases in Central Asia.
So why do we want to make an enemy of Putin?
The Russians are being subjected to a very high level of provocation. Russia is now encircled by American power. There are U.S. forces in Central Asia and the Caucasus. With the Baltic states now members of NATO, alliance aircraft are deployed on Russia's frontier. The Poles and others are anxious for Ukraine to join NATO and the EU.
The Russian government has been amazingly calm about all this, but it might one of these days lose that calm. Russia today is not the Soviet Union, but it could still find ways to be very unpleasant to those who chose to make an enemy of it. http://www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file=/articles/2005/04/12/news/edpfaff.html
Eric Rudolph, Christian, Anti-Abortion Terrorist... or Pot Smoker?
In any case, there may be a tighter connection to the murders than abortion or religion. Deborah Rudolph, Eric's sister-in-law, says he's a drug addict. According to the AP, she told the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report that in the early 1990s, he would "sleep all day, then stay up all night and eat pizza and smoke pot and watch movies by Cheech and Chong." He reportedly made as much as $60,000 selling hydroponic marijuana. That much pot is enough to make anyone paranoid.http://www.christianitytoday.com/global/printer.html?/ct/2003/122/22.0.html
Man, those ‘60’s were Evil…
Sports: Naming a Stadium…for the Military
Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium could be renamed Armed Forces Field at RFK under the terms of a deal being negotiated by District officials and the Department of Defense, sources close to the discussions said yesterday…
On Monday, the National Guard had agreed to a deal to pay the commission about $6 million over three years for the sponsorship, but the agreement was halted by Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.) and Lt. Gen. Steven Blum. They objected to a branch of the military paying to put its name on a sports building or playing field.
After city leaders met with Warner and Blum on Tuesday, negotiations resumed. Yesterday, the two sides had agreed that the Department of Defense would pay for recruiting and marketing opportunities at the stadium but that the city would not ask for money if the field is renamed Armed Forces Field at RFK. If that name change is agreed upon, the city would make it in honor of the military services, at no cost, according to sources familiar with the negotiations.
They said the Department of Defense wants to pay less than the Guard would have paid for the naming rights. Money from the sponsorship will go to improving youth athletic programs in the city.
Asked whether it was appropriate to have the military's name on the field, D.C. Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) said at his weekly news conference yesterday that "this has nothing to do with whether you agree or disagree with the war. I think it's actually a good fit." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A51287-2005Apr13.html?nav=hcmodule
-R
