A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

No matter how you feel towards the Second Amendment, this legislation is definitely a step in the right direction!

Democrats, NRA reach deal on gun bill

Measure stiffening background checks would be 1st major reform since ‘94
Jonathan Weisman, washingtonpost

Senior Democrats have reached agreement with the National Rifle Association on what could be the first federal gun-control legislation since 1994, a measure to significantly strengthen the national system that checks the backgrounds of gun buyers.

The sensitive talks began in April, days after a mentally ill gunman killed 32 students and teachers at Virginia Tech University. The shooter, Seung Hui Cho, had been judicially ordered to submit to a psychiatric evaluation, which should have disqualified him from buying handguns. But the state of Virginia never forwarded that information to the federal National Instant Check System (NICS), and the massacre exposed a loophole in the 13-year-old background-check program.
[...]

By contrast, this agreement is a marriage of convenience for both sides. Democratic leaders are eager to show that they can respond legislatively to the Virginia Tech rampage, a feat that GOP leaders would not muster after the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado. Meanwhile, the NRA was motivated to show it would not stand in the way of a bill that would not harm law-abiding gun buyers. Even so, it drove a hard bargain to quiet its smaller but more vociferous rival, Gun Owners of America, which has long opposed McCarthy’s background-check bill.

More at MSNBC.com

Sunday Talk
* Meet the Press (airing at special times in certain markets b/c of French Open): Ex-SoS Colin Powell; Jeff Gerth & Don Van Natta Jr. on HRC book
* Face the Nation: WH press sec Tony Snow; Sen. Joe Lieberman (CFL); roundtable of WaPo’s Colbert King and Politico’s Roger Simon
* This Week: Sen. John McCain (R-AZ); roundtable of Torie Clarke (R), George Will, Claire Shipman, and Time’s Jay Carney.
* Fox News Sunday: WH press sec Tony Snow; Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL)
* Late Edition: Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ); Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN); Putin spokesman Dmitri Peskov; Commerce Sec. Carlos Gutierrez; Gov. Bill Richardson (D-NM); Mike Huckabee (R-AR); Carl Bernstein

TV Alerts
* Political Capital w/ Al Hunt (Bloomberg, repeats throughout weekends): Sen. Mel Martinez (R-FL) on 6/8; ex US Amb to Russia Thomas Pickering on 6/8
* Chris Matthews Show 6/9-6/10: Howard Fineman, Katty Kay, Michele Norris, John Heilemann discuss “Remarkable personal testimony on her faith from Hillary Clinton: Will Democrats start talking about their beliefs the way Republicans do? Can Mitt Romney settle questions about his Mormonism by talking about shared beliefs? The political implications of the death of immigration reform.” Quotes here.
* Newsmakers (C-SPAN, 10am): Asst SoS Chris Miller on 6/10
* Road to the WH: Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) in NH on 6/10; Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) in NH on 6/10; Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) in NH on 6/10;
* 60 Minutes: the flawed no fly list on 6/10; Barry Diller on 6/10; Moken people & the tsuanmi on 6/10;
* Q&A (CSPAN, 8pm): The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel on 6/10
* The Daily Show: David Steinberg on 6/11; Bob Shrum on 6/12; Allan Brandt on 6/13; Angelina Jolie on 6/14;
* The Colbert Report: Michael D. Gershon on 6/11; Josh Wolf on 6/12; Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) on 6/13; Daniel B. Smith on 6/14; Toby Keith on 6/18; Anne-Marie Slaughter on 6/19; Will Schwalbe on 6/20; Vincent Bugliosi on 6/21; Tom Hayden on 6/25; Jerry Miller on 6/25; Spencer Wells on 6/26; Daniel Gilbert on 6/27; Zbigniew Brzezinski on 6/28
* Leno: Fred Thompson (R-TN) on 6/12;
* Tavis Smiley: Carl Bernstein on 6/12;
* Conan O’Brien: Tim Russert on 6/12;
* Ellen DeGeneres Show: Al Gore rerun on 6/13
* The View: Michael Smerconish on 6/14; Ted Koppel & his wife Grace Ann on 6/15; Michael Moore on 6/19;
* Letterman: Michael Moore on 6/15

Source:Newsie8200

By Lily Galili, Haaretz Correspondent
from Haaretz.com (link below)

Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the last shah of Iran, suggests taking Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s threat to annihilate Israel very seriously. However, he suggests refraining from military action against his country.

That’s not what scares the regime there,” he explains. “What scares it are the opponents from within, who should be strengthened. An attack from outside could give this regime carte blanche to do anything, and even lead to a nationalist awakening that would bring into its camp people who do not belong to it now.”

Pahlavi spoke with Haaretz at a gathering in Prague of dissidents from 17 countries that was sponsored by the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies at the Shalem Center. For the past 19 years he has lived in Washington, where he married a woman of Iranian descent and fathered three daughters. He operates from the exile he entered at age 19 like a bench player who practices determinedly for the moment when he is called to step back onto the court. Two years ago he even went on a hunger strike to demand the release of political prisoners, even though he cannot escape the fact that during his father’s reign there were many political prisoners in Iran.

I am not saying there were no mistakes made under the previous regime,” he says. “But you have to remember the context of that time. Those were the days of the Cold War, and there was in Iran a sense that the Soviet Union wanted to turn us into its satellite. I can understand why the public went along with the revolution, but I also know that no one wished for the tragic result of today.”

Iranian exiles, who come from polar opposite groups, have a complicated attitude toward the Shah’s son, and their interests truly overlap only in the desire to overthrow the current regime.

Asked whether he supports a return of the monarchy, Pahlavi replies diplomatically. “The people will decide,” he says. “One of the options is indeed a parliamentary monarchy. That suits the character of our people. In heterogeneous societies, the monarchy is a symbol of unity”.

read more at HAARETZ.COM

By Amitabh Pal
from “The Progressive”

What was the Bush Administration thinking when it invaded Iraq?

If further proof was needed that the United States opened up a can of worms with its decision, check out the coming conflict between Turkey and Kurdistan, a “sideshow” of the entire Iraq mess that has received comparatively little coverage in the U.S. media. (The New York Times’s Greek edition of its overseas counterpart, the International Herald Tribune, had a lot of focus on this subject when I visited Greece in April.)

For those not following the matter closely, the Turkish armed forces have engaged in a huge buildup on the Turkey-Iraq border to intimidate (or worse) the Iraqi Kurdish leadership into ceasing to provide haven to Turkish Kurdish guerrillas (members of the Kurdistan Workers- Party, or the PKK). There’s only one problem: The Iraqi Kurds are perhaps the only friends of the United States in Iraq. So now you have Turkey, a really close U.S. ally, taking them on. Could the Bush Administration have created a bigger mess?

The Turkish government was extremely wary about the Iraq War, and understandably so. It feared that the establishment of an independent Kurdish state next door would provide a bad example to Kurds in Turkey. This is the main reason why the Turkish government refused to join in, in spite of pressure from U.S. officials such as Paul Wolfowitz, who called on the Turkish military to override the democratically elected government. Although ill-treatment of the Kurds has eased up in recent years, for decades repression was so harsh that even the Kurdish language was banned. Tens of thousands of people died in a tit-for-tat guerrilla war between the PKK and the Turkish armed forces, with both sides engaging in massive human rights abuses. (John Tirman’s “Spoils of War: The Human Cost of America’s Arms Trade” has details about the Turkish government’s brutalization of its Kurdish minority.)

The impetus for the recent Turkish show of force has been an upsurge in Kurdish guerrilla activity following a years-long relative lull after the capture of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan in 1999. The most notable incident has been a suicide bombing last month in Ankara that killed eight people. The Turkish government blames the PKK for carrying out the attack; the PKK vehemently denies it. The Bush Administration has been frantically warning the Turkish army to not invade Iraq.

The Iraqi Kurds have received generally good press in this country, partly due to (justifiably so) the repression they suffered at the hands of Saddam, and partly due to the fact that they are relatively secular and pro-Western. But the record of their leadership hasn-t been without blemish. The Kurdish administration has engaged in censorship and suppression of civil liberties. (See David Enders’s “Squelching Freedom in Iraqi Kurdistan” in the June 2006 issue of The Progressive.)

And they have discriminated against ethnic Arabs and Turkoman (another sore point for Turks) in Kurdish-dominated towns.

The Iraqi Kurdish leadership has been biding its time and waiting for the opportune moment to secede from the parent country.

Even though Iraqi President Jalal Talabani is a Kurd, and although the Kurds have a large amount of autonomy provided for in the Iraqi Constitution, it’s only a matter of time before they raise the unspeakable question. When this happens, the Kurds will be on an inevitable collision course with the Turkish government, which will be in little mood to tolerate such a step. The result would very likely be all-out war.

What does the Bush Administration plan to do then?

read other great articles at “THE PROGRESSIVE”

Aziz Huq
from “THE NATION”

Early this week, judge advocates halted two prosecutions in the Guantnamo military commissions established under the 2006 Military Commissions Act (MCA). This is not the first setback the Administration’s second-tier court system has hit; the Supreme Court invalidated an earlier iteration of the commissions in 2006. And it won’t be the last. But while this week’s setback likely will be speedily surmounted, it casts an unexpected light on the MCA’s real purposes, and what’s at stake when the Bush Administration plays politics with national security.

Understanding the significance of this week’s ruling means delving into a bit of procedural arcana. The devil in the MCA is, almost literally, in the details–and unless we attend closely to the rococo details of the statute, we’ll miss the ways in which the Administration intends to slowly erode our liberties.

At the beginning of this week, the military commissions’ two judges–Army Col. Peter Brownback and Navy Capt. Keith Allred–dismissed charges filed against Omar Khadr and Salim Hamdan. The rulings focused on a question of categorization–basically, the judges found that Khadr and Hamdan had been wrongly classified. But how did this happen?

The MCA, which created the military commissions, states that only an alien who is an “unlawful enemy combatant” can be tried in a military commission. It also defines “unlawful enemy combatants” in tremendously sweeping terms to include anyone who has “materially supported hostilities.” Many civil libertarians, including myself, expressed grave concerns about the scope of this provision. Read in tandem with recent Supreme Court cases, it might be taken not merely as a gateway to trial by military commission but also as a sweeping new executive detention authority.

The MCA doesn’t say how a person gets designated as an “unlawful enemy combatant.” But all except one of the detainees at Guantnamo have already all been classified as enemy combatants by a procedure known as a CSRT, or Combatant Status Review Tribunal. (The one exception is a prisoner recently transferred to the base.) CSRTs are shoddy summary procedures in which the detainee has barely a role and cannot respond to the secret evidence used to detain him.

read more at THE NATION

By Jeff Franks

HOUSTON (Reuters) - The space shuttle Atlantis winged toward a rendezvous with theInternational Space Station on Sunday, lugging the heaviest payload ever for the orbital outpost and troubled only by a small tear in a heat-protecting thermal blanket.

Atlantis was scheduled to link up with the station at 3:38 p.m. EDT (1938 GMT) for a week-long stay in which the shuttle crew will install electricity-generating solar panels on the half-finished station.

On Saturday night, Atlantis astronauts tested tools for the planned rendezvous more than 200 miles above the earth and fired the ship’s engines to speed it on its way after it launched from Florida on Friday.

The shuttle is carrying a 45-foot-(14-metre) long, 35,678-pound (16,183 kg) aluminum structure that will become part of the station’s structural backbone and includes the solar panels. Its crew members are scheduled to perform three spacewalks to install the new parts and retract an old solar array.

Among the seven Atlantis astronauts is Clayton Anderson, of Ashland, Nebraska, who will join Russian cosmonauts Fyodor Yurchikhin and Oleg Kotov on the station, replacing Sunita Williams.

Williams, after six months on the $100 billion outpost that is a joint project of 16 nations, will catch a ride home on Atlantis.

NASA plans to fly 12 more missions to complete the station. It also wants to make two flights to store spare parts and service the Hubble Space Telescope a final time before its three’shuttle fleet is retired in 2010.

read more at YAHOO! NEWS

from YAHOO! NEWS

LOS ANGELES - A meat supplier has greatly expanded a ground beef recall, which now includes about 5.7 million pounds of fresh and frozen meat that may be contaminated with E. coli.

David Goldman, acting administrator of the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service, announced on Saturday that the recall would be expanded to include products with sell-by dates from April 6-April 20. The beef, sold in 11 Western states, was distributed by California-based United Food Group LLC.

Goldman said that none of the latest batch of suspect beef is in stores now because the product would be well past its expiration date, but consumers may still have some of the meat at home.

“It is important for consumers to look in their freezers,” Goldman said.

The meat has been blamed for an E. coli outbreak in the Western states that resulted in 14 illnesses, spanning April 25 through May 18. All the patients have recovered.

On Wednesday, United Food Group expanded an initial recall of 75,000 pounds of ground beef, adding another 370,000 pounds based on “unspecified concerns” raised by the California State Department of Health Services. This meat had sell-by dates from April 29-May 6.

The recalled products were shipped to stores in Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming. They were sold under the brand names Moran’s All Natural, Miller Meat Company, Stater Bros., Trader Joe’s Butcher Shop, Inter-American Products Inc. and Basha’s.

The affected grocery stores included Albertson’s, Basha’s, Grocery Outlet, Fry’s, “R” Ranch Markets, Save-A-Lot, Save-Mart, Scolari’s Wholesale Markets, Smart and Final, Smith’s, Stater Bros. and Superior Warehouse.

read more at YAHOO! NEWS