Signs of the times.TBOGG recounts the terror felt by those Bush supporters who are just too paralyzed with fear to actually put Bush-Cheney signs on their lawns, because of possible violent retribution from wild-eyed savagelike Kerry supporters. Bush supporters are obviously granola-fearing wimps.
Compare their situation with Rhonda Nix's. Her Kerry sign was "stabbed to death," as she relates in this Errol Morris-directed spot, one of a big series.
Amid the fierce debate over limits on medical-malpractice suits, many states have enacted limits of their own that are having a sweeping impact. One of the most common types -- caps on damages for pain and suffering, or so-called noneconomic caps -- is turning out to have the unpublicized effect of creating two tiers of malpractice victims.
Cases involving high earners or big medical bills move ahead. Lawyers can still seek economic damages for the wages these patients lost or to pay for continuing medical bills. But lawyers are turning away cases involving victims that don't represent big economic losses -- most notably retired people, children and housewives such as Ms. [Shelly] Thompson-Mooney [the focus of the full article].
Vice President Dick Cheney mentioned the Bush administration's wish to enact nationwide caps on noneconomic damages in his debate this week with John Edwards, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee and a former plaintiffs' lawyer himself. But groups such as AARP, the organization for older Americans, and the National Organization for Women are mounting campaigns against such moves. "When you put a cap on noneconomic damages," says NOW President Kim Gandy, "quite literally [women's] lives are valued lower."
The Republican platform: the housewife has no economic value, so her pain and suffering has no economic value.
The Education Department this summer destroyed more than 300,000 copies of a booklet designed for parents to help their children learn history after the office of Vice President Dick Cheney's wife complained that it mentioned the National Standards for History, which she has long opposed.
In June, during a routine update, the Education Department began distributing a new edition of a 10-year-old how-to guide called "Helping Your Child Learn History." Aimed at parents of children from preschool through fifth grade, the 73-page booklet presented an assortment of advice, including taking children to museums and visiting historical sites.
The booklet included several brief references to the National Standards for History, which were developed at UCLA in the mid-1990s with federal support. Created by scholars and educators to help school officials design better history courses, they are voluntary benchmarks, not mandatory requirements.
At the time, Lynne Cheney, the wife of now-Vice President Cheney, led a vociferous campaign complaining that the standards were not positive enough about America's achievements and paid too little attention to figures such as Gen. Robert E. Lee, Paul Revere and Thomas Edison.
[...]
Retired UCLA professor Gary Nash, co-chairman of the effort to develop the National Standards for History, said he found the decision to destroy the booklets after Cheney's office complained "extremely troubling."
"That's a pretty god-awful example of spending the taxpayers' money and also a pretty god-awful example of interference — intellectual interference," Nash said. "If that's not Big Brother or Big Sister, I don't know what is."
[...]
Recently, when the department decided to update "Helping Your Child Learn History," Cheney's office became involved because of her long-standing interest in American history.
Cheney is prominently quoted in the booklet as a "noted author and wife of the vice president." Two books on history that she wrote for children are mentioned in the booklet.
The acknowledgments also credit her office for helping with the guide, which cost $110,360 to print, Aspey said.
"Noted author" and taxpayer-funded self-promoter Lynne Cheney should fund her historical propaganda efforts herself, with the "royalties" of her "books." (The Amazon reader review of her book Sisters at the "royalties" link is especially curious.)
People soon will be able to carry guns and other dangerous weapons onto the grounds and parking lots of Reagan National and Dulles International airports, after officials yesterday eased what they said were overly restrictive rules.
Without debate, the board of the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority unanimously agreed to permit passengers and other airport visitors to carry guns, knives and other weapons as long as they keep them out of terminals and other buildings that access airfields. Passengers who are taking guns with them on flights still will be allowed to carry them into the terminal but are supposed to make arrangements with airlines in advance, officials said.
The action comes after pressure from an increasingly high-profile Virginia gun rights group whose members have taken to wearing firearms on their hips in public places to make their case.
Dressed in humble prison khakis, the former treasurer of Enron [Ben Glisan Jr.] told a jury Wednesday that one of the most lucrative and intellectually stimulating things about working at Enron was creatively hiding its long-running and deep-seated economic woes from investors.
[...]
Glisan told defense attorney Tom Hagemann that he doesn't think he worked at one of America's finest companies but rather at an energy company where aggressiveness fostered both pride and escalating corruption.
In calm, confident tones, Glisan described a workplace tolerant, if not encouraging, of systematic deception.
"The company had long-running, very deep and difficult" economic issues, said Glisan, a former CPA with a master's degree from the University of Texas. But, he said, one of the joys of working there was solving the extremely difficult problems that came with "masking those issues."
"I felt it was my job to help Enron look stronger than it was," said Glisan, who is scheduled to continue on cross-examination today.
He said meeting earnings targets was the name of the game at Enron and one of his jobs was to run a team that devised transactions that "helped Enron lie about the health of the company." Inflating earnings and hiding debt, he said, garnered big individual bonuses.
To Enron's senior management, not only is lying a creative and lucrative act — it's intellectually stimulating. Systematic deception was "one of the joys of working there."
This explanation reveals the evil genius of co-conspirator Dick Cheney in the fewest words possible. After all, these were the same people he selected to secretly write US energy policy in the earliest months of his administration, in meetings whose minutes he has steadfastly refused to make public. To Cheney, systematic deception is intellectually stimulating, one of the joys of working the White House.
Edwards's bobbles of truthfulness were considerably smaller in scope than Cheney's whoppers (see for yourself), so the headline attempts to make equal what are two totally different things: Edwards's forgotten details of fundamentally true charges, and Cheney's outright deceptions in matters big and small.
Profound Cheney lie: "I have not suggested there's a connection between Iraq and 9/11."
Idiotic Cheney lie: "The first time I ever met you was when you walked on the stage tonight."
Watching the veep debate. If you have cable and are not interested in the spin, I recommend watching C-SPAN. It was fascinating in the fifteen minutes before the first presidential debate to watch Jim Lehrer stage-manage the audience, which as far as I know was only seen unedited and live on C-SPAN. Another bonus of C-SPAN is the total absence of hairdos like on CNN screaming that this debate may be the most important thing ever in our lifetimes, until the next day when they take it all back because what actually happened didn't follow what's written in the spin bible.
The U.S. didn't have enough troops in Iraq immediately following the ouster of Saddam Hussein and "paid a big price" for it, the former head of the U.S. occupation there said Monday.
L. Paul Bremer said he arrived in Iraq on May 6, 2003, to find "horrid" looting and a very unstable situation.
"We paid a big price for not stopping it because it established an atmosphere of lawlessness," Mr. Bremer said during an address Monday in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, to an insurance group, which reported his comments.
"We never had enough troops on the ground," he said.
[...]
His comments raise eyebrows because they are similar in tone to criticism in March 2003 from then-Army chief of staff Gen. Eric Shinseki that the U.S. needed several hundred thousand troops to keep the peace in postwar Iraq. Gen. Shinseki's comments were rebuked by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other Pentagon superiors.
Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, locked in tight race with President Bush, has fired similar criticism at the White House on the campaign trail.
[...]
He also disputed criticism that the Bush administration had no plans for post-war Iraq.
"There was planning, but planning for a situation that didn't arise," he said, including a large-scale humanitarian or refugee crisis. "Could it have been done better? Frankly, I didn't spend a lot of time looking back."
Not spending a lot of time looking back is a characteristic trait, hopefully a fatal flaw, of the entire administration.
A new intelligence report on the search for Iraq's illicit weapons lists hundreds of individuals and companies who, before the U.S. invasion last year, received vouchers from Saddam Hussein to purchase Iraqi oil at below-market prices, officials familiar with the report said.
The 1,400-page report by Central Intelligence Agency weapons inspector Charles Duelfer, which is scheduled to be made public Wednesday, doesn't reach a conclusion about whether use of the vouchers violated international sanctions or an individual country's laws. But it asserts that Mr. Hussein personally managed the effort and used some of the proceeds, which exceeded $1 billion in 2002, for illegal-weapons procurement, the officials said.
The report names entities in France, Russia, Poland and other countries as involved in the voucher scheme or in assisting Iraq's prewar procurement activities. Officials wouldn't say if U.S. companies or individuals were implicated.
Let's go out on a small limb here. The haze of uncertainty whether US companies or individuals are implicated in the scheme seems to imply that they are. Since the report is being issued Wednesday, and it's unclear if US companies or individuals were implicated, what are the chances that someone in the energy-industry-rich White House will be connected to the scheme? And isn't it odd that Cheney, who will undoubtedly be called upon to defend his cronyoid connections to the energy industry in this evening's debate, will not be forced to publicly address the content of this new report?
Carl Webb, 38, is a member of the Texas Army National Guard and a U.S. army veteran. In 2001 following a 7-year break in service, he enlisted in the National Guard expecting to serve for only three years. His term of service ends August 22, however, less than two months shy of the end of his service completion he was informed that his term had been involuntarily extended and he would be sent to Fort Hood for training and deployed to Iraq in November.
Webb is one of many reservists who is being compelled to serve in the war in Iraq under the "stop-loss" program. “This policy is practically an unofficial draft,” Webb said. “It is conscription against a person’s will.”
Webb's perspective is that “The war is unethical and illegal U.S. aggression,” he said. “It’s all about oil and profits.”
Carl Webb expects to serve prison time for following his conscience.
