And well they should…..

At least ten stingrays have been found dead and mutilated on Australia’s eastern coast in the last week in what conservationists believe could be revenge attacks for the death of Steve Irwin, the popular naturalist and television personality.

 

timesonline article here

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Moderate Republican Sen. Lincoln Chafee, a frequent opponent of President George W. Bush’s policies, battled for political survival against a conservative challenger on Tuesday as voters in nine states selected candidates for November’s election.

A primary election loss for Chafee in heavily Democratic Rhode Island could open the door in November for Democrats to win one of the six Republican seats they need to claim a majority in the U.S. Senate.

On the busiest primary day of the year, Maryland Democrats settled a crowded battle for a nominee to replace retiring Sen. Paul Sarbanes, while Democrats in the District of Columbia essentially picked the capital city’s next mayor.

With nominal opposition, Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York was expected to win the party’s nomination for a second Senate term in what could be a tune-up for a potential 2008 White House bid.

Scores of other contested nominations for Senate, House of Representatives and governor’s offices also will be decided in Arizona, Delaware, Maryland, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, Wisconsin and Washington, D.C.

 

article here

Please call your representatives in D.C. and let them know this is not acceptable. I’m not even sure it’s legal. Bush wants to change the law, and make it retroactive. So he’s admitted they have secret CIA prisons where they torture prisoners and now he wants amnesty from prosecution for war crimes. he’s trying to push this legislation through NOW, before the November elections…..to insure there will be no prosecutions. It’s time to stop the madness. Call your Senatorsand House Representatives.

By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 9, 2006; Page A01

The Bush administration has drafted amendments to a war crimes law that would eliminate the risk of prosecution for political appointees, CIA officers and former military personnel for humiliating or degrading war prisoners, according to U.S. officials and a copy of the amendments.

Officials say the amendments would alter a U.S. law passed in the mid-1990s that criminalized violations of the Geneva Conventions, a set of international treaties governing military conduct in wartime. The conventions generally bar the cruel, humiliating and degrading treatment of wartime prisoners without spelling out what all those terms mean.

Read more here

Kings Of Tomorrow & Nora Jones

Those Sweet Words

Academy award winning……….

Listen to this………

You know, I’m glad this woman is ok…..but I’d like to know what really happened. I don’t believe she was kidnapped. Not for a minute. I think she went somewhere on her own. I think someone at this blog may have figured it out. There’s a link there to a video interview with her parents and husband while she was still missing, and some great commentary on it. I’m sure we’ll never know, but if she wasn’t kidnapped, it’s a crime she put the people of Kyrgzstan through the whole investigation. But as always, our military had her out of there immediately upon her reappearance, so the Kyrgyzstans will never know what happened. Nor will we…….

Sept. 12, 2006 - Investigators are examining what may be inconsistencies in the story of an Air Force major who reappeared after disappearing while shopping at a mall in Kyrgyzstan, ABC News has learned.

Air Force Maj. Jill Metzger disappeared while shopping at a Kyrgyzstan mall on Sept. 5.

She surfaced three days later when she knocked on the door of a family’s home 22 miles from the shopping mall.

Her disappearance sparked a massive manhunt.

Metzger, a newlywed, was preparing to return home to the United States for her honeymoon when she vanished, and her new husband, Air Force Capt. Josh Mayo, made an emotional plea at the time of her disappearance.

“Just be strong. Don’t worry about whatever’s happened to you,” he said. “Just come on home, all right. We’re here for you. Be strong, sweetie.”

(emphasis mine)

More here

Conservatives like to divide judges into liberal “activists” and conservative nonactivists who interpret the law rather than making it. Anyone who follows the courts knows that conservative judges are as activist as liberal judges -just for different causes. A new study of Supreme Court voting patterns confirms this and suggests that the conservative Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas are actually more activist than their liberal colleagues.

(the editorial can be found by going here and clicking the NYT editorial link.)

Is anyone surprised by this? Which ideology is it that is out to change the world to fit it’s narrow vision of it? Conservative or Liberal?

So shoot me……I love Tom Jones.

WASHINGTON, August 30, 2006 - Members of Congress and their aides accepted more than $600,000 in free travel from pharmaceutical interests during a 5½-year period in which drug company profits climbed, in part due to federal legislation favorable to the industry.

Dozens of the trips were approved by lawmakers, who had significant personal interests in the pharmaceutical industry or later worked with drug-makers. Almost all of those same legislators voted in favor of the 2003 Medicare Prescription Drug Act, which led to a windfall of profits for the industry.

More here

Christina Lamb
THE former aide-de-camp to the commander of the British taskforce in southern Afghanistan has described the campaign in Helmand province as “a textbook case of how to screw up a counter-insurgency”.
“Having a big old fight is pointless and just making things worse,” said Captain Leo Docherty, of the Scots Guards, who became so disillusioned that he quit the army last month.

“All those people whose homes have been destroyed and sons killed are going to turn against the British,” he said. “It’s a pretty clear equation - if people are losing homes and poppy fields, they will go and fight. I certainly would.

“We-ve been grotesquely clumsy - we-ve said we-ll be different to the Americans who were bombing and strafing villages, then behaved exactly like them.”

More here

WASHINGTON - Most of the increase in ocean temperature that feeds more intense hurricanes is a result of human-induced global warming, according to a study published Monday that used 22 computer models to play out dozens of scenarios.

Tom Wigley, a co-author and a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., said the study “closes the loop” between climate change and powerful storms like Hurricane Katrina. The study follows research papers over the past year or so that have shown an increase in the power of hurricanes, but also skepticism from some experts who question the reliability of computer models.

Full article here