Grrr....

Just watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail What an absolute turd of a movie. If you can't bother with an ending, why start a movie?

And how on earth can you leave the French unpunished?

Isn't that cute

No sooner did Congress authorize construction of a 700-mile fence on the U.S.-Mexico border last week than lawmakers rushed to approve separate legislation that ensures it will never be built, at least not as advertised, according to Republican lawmakers and immigration experts.

GOP leaders have singled out the fence as one of the primary accomplishments of the recently completed session. Many lawmakers plan to highlight their $1.2 billion down payment on its construction as they campaign in the weeks before the midterm elections.

But shortly before recessing late Friday, the House and Senate gave the Bush administration leeway to distribute the money to a combination of projects -- not just the physical barrier along the southern border. The funds may also be spent on roads, technology and "tactical infrastructure" to support the Department of Homeland Security's preferred option of a "virtual fence."
.........
In this case, it also reflects political calculations by GOP strategists that voters do not mind the details, and that key players -- including the administration, local leaders and the Mexican government -- oppose a fence-only approach, analysts said.

Liars and Crooks.

Truth in Advertising; or Great Moments in Journalism

CNN: Microsoft warns software pirates

Microsoft Corp's upcoming Windows Vista computer operating system will include technology that is designed to prevent pirated copies from fully functioning, the software giant said.

Reduced functionality is already a part of the Windows XP activation process, but Windows Vista will have a reduced functionality mode that is enhanced, Microsoft said on its Web site on Wednesday.

What, Me Worry?

Mark Shea quotes Richard Comerford

I have a friend, who is also my hero, who went to prison for the crime of praying the Rosary on the steps of an abortion mill. He is also the local leader of Operation Rescue. We later learned that under the Clinton administration that my friend, along with other pro life activists, was placed on a terrorist watch list by the Reno Justice Department. Also on the list was the Cardinal Archbishop of New York. Prior to 9/11/01 the Justice Department spent an enormous amount of its resources trying to find a mythical pro life terror network in the United States. Meanwhile UBL plotted his moves.

Will on some future day our government torture American citizens suspected of pro life sympathies in order to prevent an alleged bombing at an abortion mill or an alleged shooting of a abortion doctor?

Will on some future day our government torture American citizens suspected of harboring homophobic thoughts?

Who is safe now?

I still remember the mini-furor when Falwell said that Hillary Clinton inspired more fear than Lucifer. But we are setting in motion a perpetual motion terrorist hunting machine. Which, should she win in 08, she would get the keys to this low mileage leviathan to with as she pleases. Maybe we can do away with filibusters in the Senate, too. Then a democratic majority could really run amok. I shouldn't worry though, it's not like we've had a democratic majority in the Senate and Democrat in the White House any time recently rolls eyes. I guess we shouldn't be surprised, these are the folks that think borrow and spend is on a much higher plane than tax and spend.

Land of the Free and home of the brave?

This is what waterboarding looks like

I voted for Bush both times.

God help me.

Bushwhacked v.2

I still remember when Bush Sr took on Dan Rather during the 88 campaign. Rather did a live interview on CBS news and tried to go after Bush about Iran-Contra, and got his backside handed to him on a platter with fries. Time had a cover story the next week titled "Bushwhacked" and it seemed the whole incident made Bush seem tougher than he had before. Now Bill Clinton has come out on top in a similar confrontation. Maybe it is a precursor to a Hillary run?

Culture of Death Watch

Yahoo News: Parents kidnap daughter to have abortion

BOSTON (Reuters) - Police charged a Maine couple on Monday of kidnapping their pregnant 19-year-old daughter, who was bound with rope and duct tape and bundled into her parents' car to force her to have an emergency abortion.

Nicholas Kampf, 54, and his wife, Lola, 53, were arrested on Friday in a New Hampshire parking lot after their daughter Katelyn escaped by persuading her parents to untie her so she could use a Kmart bathroom.

A court affidavit said her parents chased her out into the yard after an altercation, grabbed and tied her hands and feet together. Her father then gagged her and carried her to their Lexus and they drove toward New Hampshire.

"The case facts are somewhat bizarre," aid Mark Dion of Maine's Cumberland County Police Department, which is involved in the investigation. "It is a bit of a shock."

He said the Kampfs, who were arraigned in New Hampshire's Salem District Court on Monday on kidnapping charges and held on bail of $100,000 each, appeared to have been angry that their daughter was pregnant by a man who is now in jail.

It's all about choice, isn't it? I wonder how many more subtle cases occur throughout the country. It made me think of a column I read some time ago by Orthodox Writer Frederica Matthewes-Green

Roe has taught us many lessons which now govern our lives in ways we can barely perceive. Instead of being one small tool for women’s advancement, abortion opened a chasm, and a lot of unexpected things fell in. It turned out to be an irresistible force., because abortion makes things so much easier for everyone around the pregnant woman. Before Roe, unplanned pregnancy created many problems for many people-the woman’s lover, her parents, her siblings, her boss, her landlord, her dean. Abortion changes the picture instantly: just go get it taken care of, dear, and it will be as if it never happened. Women were expected to do the sensible thing and save everyone else a lot of fuss and bother. Overnight, unplanned pregnancy became her private problem, a burden for her to bear alone. Abortion rights rhetoric compounded this effect with terms emphasizing her isolation: My body, my rights, my life, my choice. The flip side of all that first-person assertiveness is abandonment. The network of support that once existed had been shattered.

To continue a pregnancy came to look like an insane choice, one which placed an unfair burden on others. Having a baby in less-than-perfect circumstances came to look like a crazy and even selfish whim. A woman in an unplanned pregnancy was not just permitted to have an abortion-she was *expected* to. And that has made all the difference.

From the "Never worked a day in his life" department

NY Times:Cities Shed Middle Class, and are Richer and Poorer for it

SOME big American cities are flourishing as at no time in recent memory. Places like New York and San Francisco appear to be richer and more dazzling than ever: crime remains low, new arrivals pour in, neighborhoods have risen from the dead. New York is in the throes of the biggest building boom in 30 years, its population at an all-time high and climbing. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg proudly promotes his city as “a luxury product.”

But middle-class city dwellers across the country are being squeezed.

This time, they are being squeezed out by the rich as much, or more so, as by the poor — a casualty of high housing costs and the thinning out of the country’s once broad economic middle. The percentage of middle-income neighborhoods in metropolitan areas like Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington has dropped since 1970, according to a recent Brookings Institution report.

The percentage of higher-income neighborhoods in many places has gone up. In New York, the supply of apartments considered affordable to households with incomes like those earned by starting firefighters or police officers plunged by a whopping 205,000 in just three years, between 2002 and 2005.

.........

Of course, cities need police officers, firefighters, teachers. But as long as they can get the labor they need from somewhere nearby, some economists say, middle-class shrinkage may not hurt. In Southern California, developers import construction workers from Las Vegas and put them up in hotels; costs go up but rich clients can pay. Firefighters who want to live in high-priced cities can work two jobs, said W. Michael Cox, chief economist for the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. “I think it’s great,” he said. “It gives you portfolio diversification in your income.” Pay for essential workers like plumbers and cabdrivers will tend to go up, he said.

If working two jobs to put a roof over your head is a good thing, why doesn't Mr. Cox give it a whirl and see how much he appreciates the "portfolio diversification of his income"? Who needs to see the wife and kids?

When you don't know what you don't know, you don't know nuttin'

Interesting interview with David Gunn, former head of Amtrak on the Philadelphia Inquirer website.

CAPE BRETON, Nova Scotia - Even now, David Gunn isn't sure who in the Bush White House wanted to kill Amtrak. What he does know is that Amtrak's opponents came very close to getting their wish.

As the Bush administration threatened to cut off funding last year, Gunn, then Amtrak's president, and other Amtrak managers feared that the beleaguered national rail line would collapse financially or that passenger safety might be jeopardized.

Gunn was fired Nov. 9 in a dispute with the Amtrak board over how to modernize the rail line. He said in an interview on his Nova Scotia farm that he warned the Bush administration that its threats to force Amtrak into bankruptcy could prompt suppliers to demand cash and creditors to seize assets, effectively shutting the rail line down.

.....

The way the Bush administration managed Amtrak "is almost a microcosm for the whole bloody administration, because it is what they have done everywhere," said Gunn, a Republican. "It has gotten them in trouble with FEMA; it has gotten them in trouble with Iraq. They just don't trust their own management."

.....
How to do that has become a huge issue. Arguing that Amtrak was an outmoded relic, administration officials last year threatened to withhold money to force the rail line's restructuring.

But Gunn said the strategy came close to backfiring. Vendors began demanding cash, an insurer resisted renewing vital liability coverage for Amtrak officers, and directors and Amtrak auditors declined to certify its financial statements.

The standoff caused Moody's Investors Service to downgrade Amtrak's debt rating, and threatened to prevent needed repairs to failing track switches, overhead power lines, bridges, and other critical infrastructure, Gunn said.

After decades of deferred maintenance, some track switches had become so unreliable that Amtrak had to assign staff to monitor them 24 hours a day. Gunn said Amtrak eventually made the necessary repairs.

"What we said was, 'Look, we have trains running at 150 miles an hour - you have human beings riding that stuff,' " Gunn said.

Throughout his conflict with the administration, Gunn said senior transportation officials repeatedly suggested that Amtrak could revitalize itself by filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection - like a bankrupt airline, it could void its labor contracts.

"Oh, I think they felt... somehow, out of the wreckage, would come a new company," Gunn said.

But he said that bankruptcy for Amtrak could have caused a service shutdown - in a way it never would for an airline - because of the nature of the passenger rail business, which is mostly unprofitable and lacks competition.

Amtrak was formed from the remains of several bankrupt private passenger lines in 1970. It is responsible for service in the heavily traveled Northeast Corridor between Washington and Boston, as well as on 16 long-distance lines traversing much of the country.

Amtrak also provides service on shorter-range lines in Pennsylvania, New York, Michigan, California and other states, which share the costs.

It has never turned a profit, and requires billions of dollars in government subsidies.

And that is the problem, Gunn said. Because no other company has Amtrak's experience running a national passenger rail service, Gunn said it was highly improbable that any other rail line could have stepped in had Amtrak gone out of business. The airline industry offers no comparison, he said, because its losses are smaller and another airline is always available to take over the business of companies that fail.

.......
Gunn took over as head of Amtrak on May 15, 2002, and quickly moved to cut costs, establishing a new bookkeeping system that gave managers a clearer idea of how much money they had and how much various Amtrak operations cost. Before he arrived, Gunn said, the rail line was charging as much as $200 million a year of day-to-day operational costs to accounts set aside for replacing bridges, rail and other infrastructure.

Among financial auditors, the practice is considered a transgression roughly comparable to a homeowner's taking out a second mortgage to pay for food and clothing.

For a time, Amtrak stabilized. Gunn reduced staffing, and began repairing aging bridges and neglected track. But his relationship with the administration abruptly changed when the White House budget cut Amtrak's federal funding from $1.2 billion to zero.

Amtrak's vendors - companies that furnished fuel oil, food and other supplies, debt holders, and rating agencies - were startled.

Its auditor, KPMG, declined for months to sign off on its financial statements or to certify that Amtrak would make it through another year. That meant Amtrak risked being in default of its loan agreements, raising the prospect that creditors could seize assets such as the high-speed Acela train, Gunn said.

But he maintained that the Bush administration never took the possibility of collapse seriously, although its officials seemed to take every opportunity to make matters worse.

After the administration released its budget, the Amtrak board of directors barred Gunn and other rail managers from asking Congress for money, as they had in the past.

In May, in another move that Gunn interpreted as a tightening of the financial vise, Mineta wrote Gunn to inform him that the Transportation Department would withhold about $60 million in cash reserves until the department was sure Amtrak would survive. Gunn and the Transportation Department agree that Congress required Mineta to inform Gunn that the money would be withheld to pay for shutdown costs if the rail line failed.

But Gunn said Mineta greatly complicated matters by releasing the letter to the public. Vendors deluged the rail line, demanding cash. Particularly concerned, Gunn said, were the credit card companies that Amtrak customers used to purchase their tickets.

He said Amtrak managers worried that those companies might demand faster payment or, worse, require Amtrak to post as much as $100 million in reserves to insure payment if Amtrak went bankrupt. Gunn said the credit card companies never forced the issue, but if they had, Amtrak would have been bankrupted.
........
"We managed our way through; it wasn't them [the Bush administration]," Gunn said. "They didn't do anything to help us. They did a lot to hurt us."

When you have to remind someone there are human beings riding passenger trains, it seems like there is not much basis for hope. Maybe the administration will get its wish soon and bankrupt Amtrak. When the Northeast corridor comes to a halt and the already overloaded roads and highways in the region are even more jammed (and many people just cannot get to work at all) I'm sure it will enhance their reputation as competent administrators of the public good.

Bread and Circuses

The Nation:Born-Again Rubinomics

When Robert Rubin speaks his mind, his thoughts on economic policy are the gold standard for the Democratic Party. The former Treasury Secretary, now executive co-chair of Citigroup, captured the party's allegiance in the 1990s as principal architect of Bill Clinton's governing strategy, the conservative approach known as "Rubinomics" (or less often "Clintonomics"). Balancing the budget and aggressively pushing trade liberalization went hard against liberal intentions and the party's working-class base. But when Clinton's second term ended in booming prosperity, full employment and rising wages, most Democrats told themselves, Listen to Bob Rubin and good things happen.

So it's a big deal when Robert Rubin changes the subject and begins to talk about income inequality as "a deeply troubling fact of American economic life" that threatens the trading system, even the stability of "capitalist, democratic society." More startling, Rubin now freely acknowledges what the American establishment for many years denied or dismissed as inconsequential--globalization's role in generating the thirty-year stagnation of US wages, squeezing middle-class families and below, while directing income growth mainly to the upper brackets. A lot of Americans already knew this. Critics of "free trade" have been saying as much for years. But when Bob Rubin says it, his words can move politicians, if not financial markets.

Rubin has launched the Hamilton Project, a policy group of like-minded economists and financiers who are developing ameliorative measures to aid the threatened workforce and, he hopes, to create a broader political constituency that will defend the trading system against popular backlash. A strategy paper Rubin co-wrote defines the core problem: "Prosperity has neither trickled down nor rippled outward. Between 1973 and 2003, real GDP per capita in the United States increased 73 percent, while real median hourly compensation rose only 13 percent."

Astorm is coming, Rubin fears. He wants a new national debate around these facts. In an interview, he explains the danger he foresees for global trade: "Where there's a great deal of insecurity, where median real wages are, roughly speaking, stagnant...where a recent Pew poll showed 55 percent of the American people think their kids will be worse off than they are, I think there is a real danger of heightened difficulty around issues that are already difficult, like trade.... Look at the difficulty around immigration."

Princeton economist Alan Blinder, a Hamilton participant and Federal Reserve vice chair in the Clinton years, describes the "difficulty" in more ominous terms: "I think the prospects for the liberal trade order are not great," he says. "There's a whole class of people who are smart, well educated and articulate, and politically involved who will not just sit there and take it" when their jobs are moved offshore. He thinks CNN commentator Lou Dobbs, who has built a populist following by attacking globalization and immigration, "is just the beginning--nothing compared to what's going to happen in the future."

What should we make of Rubin's heightened concern for the "losers" who, he now recognizes, include a vast portion of the populace? Many view the Hamilton Project as just more talk-talk. I regard it as an important event--a "course correction" in elite thinking that, given Rubin's influence, may reshape the familiar trade debate, at least among Democrats. Rubin's central objective, however, is to control the terms of debate: to address the economic disparities globalization has generated but without disturbing anything fundamental in the global system itself.

His program consists mostly of familiar ideas that might soften the pain for displaced workers. But I doubt the Hamilton proposals will do much, if anything, to reduce the global forces that are depressing incomes for half or more of the American workforce. Even Rubin is uncertain. When I ask if his agenda will have any effect at all on the global convergence of wages--the top falling gradually toward the rising bottom--he says: "Well, I think that's a question to which nobody knows the answer. I think the proposals and approach we are proposing are the way to get the best possible outcome for the United States in a complicated world.... But whether that's going to stop the global convergence of wages, I don't know the answer to that. I would guess the answer is no."

........

The "soft" ideas in the Hamilton Project playbook are mostly old ideas--improve education and retraining, provide "wage insurance" payments to dislocated workers, increase public investment in industrial development and infrastructure. All are worthy things to do, but they seem like tinkering around the edges. Ron Blackwell, chief economist of the AFL-CIO, observes, "What they've got going are these little ideas that sound like they are forward-looking and respond to the problem of living standards, but they don't speak to power."

The right-of-center tilt of Rubin's group is reflected in some secondary proposals that are sure to rattle Democratic constituencies: Reform education by weakening teacher tenure, linking it to student performance; reform the system for tort litigation to eliminate what Rubin describes as "vast excess today" (his own firm suffered from tort litigation when it had to pay billions to settle investor lawsuits for Citigroup's role in the financial fraud at Enron and other corporate scandals).

The "hard" economic propositions in Rubin's agenda are essentially the same ones he pushed successfully in the Clinton Administration: Balance the budget to boost national savings and thereby (Rubin assumes) reduce the country's horrendous trade deficits and enormous capital borrowing from abroad, where the creditors are led by China and Japan; advance more trade agreements if possible, but don't tamper with the trading rules or international institutions that currently govern the system.

So we keep doing what is wrecking our economy and pump up unemployment compensation, build (or repair) more infrastructure, allow corporations to stiff arm people they wrong (Bhopal here we come!), bust the teachers' unions and put them on a piecework basis (I'm sure special ed and inner city students will be well served), and spend more retraining folks to train their replacements from India. Basically anesthesia for the heart transplant donor. Oh and we're going to do all this while balancing the budget (at least until the whole edifice collapses as the bottom 95% see their income go into free fall, kinda hard to balance the budget when no one has income to tax, eh?)

Strange things

Ford Shotgun
One Word: Why?

Yahoo/AP:Feline felon suspected in glove thefts

PELHAM, NY ......As if the gardeners of Pelham don't have enough to worry about, with the rocky soil and the slugs and the big trees casting too much shade, a feline felon has been sneaking into their back yards and carrying off gardening gloves.

Goche's flower-patterned number may soon take its place on the clothesline that's strung across the front fence at Willy's home, which he shares with Jennifer and Dan Pifer, their 19-month-old son Hudson and a mutt named Peanut Chew.

Above the line is a sign that says, in words and pictures, "Our cat is a glove snatcher. Please take these if yours."

On Thursday morning, nine pairs of gardening gloves and five singles were strung up, nicely framed by the Pifers' flourishing tomato and basil plants. Willy, looking innocent, was playing with a beetle under the Subaru in the driveway and occasionally dashing after Hudson.

"This all started about the time people began working in their gardens, I guess March or April," Jennifer Pifer said. "Willy would just show up with a glove, or we'd see them on the front steps. I guess it's better than if he was bringing home dead birds."
.......
She doesn't know how far afield Willy goes to find a glove, but she has learned it takes him two trips to bring home a matched pair.

Willy, born to a stray last spring and taken in by the Pifers as a newborn, stays out some nights but seems to assemble his collection in daytime raids.
........
Willy couldn't care less about the gloves after they're captured. On Thursday he could not be enticed into a grab-the-glove game.

In winter, when gardening gloves are hard to find, Willy switches to his offseason prey, dirty socks, which he brings from the laundry room.

"We find them in the hallway, on the stairs," she said. "I used to think, `Oh, I must have dropped it on the way down.' But now I know better."

Despite his criminal nature, neighbors get a kick out of Willy. Cassone said the cat likes to accompany the mailman up and down the block, all the way to each front door. Willy also likes to climb trees and bat at the heads of people below.

Isn't this classy?

Day by Day

Let's see here, we'll equate Jack Murtha with Cindy Sheehan then we'll accuse him of being a selfish coward. Who says Republicans aren't working to elevate the discourse?

The guy may be many bad things but he's hardly a stereotypical limp wristed "other cultures are superior to ours" liberal. Could we maybe have something a bit more adult than "you're a coward/you're not a patriot" as a response to policy disagreements?

Argh!!!

Haven't posted for a while. It's amazing how 70+ hour workweeks keep one occupied. Hopefully things will settle down soon.

Get a room!

Tribune Star:Officials to address crime at Fairbanks

The Terre Haute Park Board hopes to meet with law enforcement officials June 28 to address problem activity in the northern end of Fairbanks Park, park Superintendent Greg Ruark said Friday.

Ruark said the board hopes to meet with city police Chief George Ralston and Vigo County Sheriff Jon Marvel to discuss ways park officials can minimize illegal activity in that park.

The invitation to law enforcement officials follows a police raid on Fairbanks and Mills Dam parks earlier this month in which five men were arrested for acts of public indecency.

The parks board discussed the northern end of Fairbanks Park at their Wednesday meeting, with council members recommending possibilities from closing the road leading to the north end of the park to fencing off part of the park as a preventive measure.
...........

Some City Council members at the meeting stressed that a particular segment of the population was not being attacked in addressing the recent arrests at Fairbanks Park....

Gee, I wonder what "segment of the population" they are referring to? If a guy and a gal are arrested for doing it in a park there wouldn't be any hand wringing about making a "segment of the population" feel "attacked". We'd demand an appropriate punishment and cluck under our breath about those nitwits the cops caught in the park (especially given the fact that there are a couple hotels within a few blocks). Whatever your orientation, it isn't too much to ask you take care of your needs in a private place.

This has been a well known problem in the city for years and our community "leaders" won't step up to the plate and deal with the issue. A big part of that is the university, the ever growing tumor in the center of our city, which provides a never ending supply of activists to protest on behalf of the perversion of the day (and the continual expansion of the university). Then of course there are the few members of the university community who participate in such illegal activities. Those of us who work for a living don't have the free time to go to every meeting and publicly protest every decision. We just vote. And the last two mayors have been voted out in primaries because nothing is done about the problems in the city (this is one of the very trivial ones).

Caught with their hands in the cookie jar

Autoblog: Network truck stop showdown at the Flying J

A consortium of networks including ABC, CBS, Fox, Turner Entertainment and Disney have banded together to file a federal lawsuit against the Flying J truck stop chain.

Apparently, the chain of 178 travel plazas and fuel stops has taken to substituting outside commercials for their own spots in every location that has a trucker's lounge playing a service called Plaza TV. Basically, this is made possible by a little box called the segOne 2000 LS, which detects commercials in normal broadcasts, them replaces them with new ones. In this case, trucker-specific ads for Flying J, which itself turns around and charges other companies $31,250 per month for a 30-second spot on Plaza TV.

You just have to wonder what passes through people's minds sometimes. Use someone else's programming and insert your own commercials. Gee, I wonder what will happen when "someone else" finds out about it.

JFK: the sequel

It's interesting, you've got Barack Obama, who wants to be JFK, Hillary wants to be JFK, John Edwards still has happy thoughts of being JFK and Kerry being his LBJ. But the odds of a first term Senator going to the head of the class are low. Part of the JFK legend is that he pulled off such an impossible stunt. Generally Presidents come from Governors' Mansions not down the street. But folks still try and try and try and.....

The thing is JFK's have been a pretty decent president even if he had been Governor of Massachusetts instead of Junior Senator from same. Imitating the man is more profitable than imitating the resume.

But given the long odds for Senators why do folks arrange their careers to follow that trajectory? Maybe a lack of willingness to risk being a governor? Senators may not get the big plusses a governor has in a presidential race, but they also do not face the risks. A lot of Democratic states are basket cases. I think Solomon would have a hard time making Michigan successful enough to be a good launching pad for a presidential run. Whoever replaces Ah-nold will be almost as unlikely to become president as the Austrian born bodybuilder-turned actor-turned pol. Given the woes that New York faces, who can blame Hillary for being disinterested in running the show in Albany? Plus, really building a legacy in a state often takes time, as in more than one term. By the time a pol gets to the level where they can win a Senate seat or a Governor's spot time is beginning to seem a precious commodity., so a lot of 'em head for the Senate and hope to posture enough to springboard themselves into the White House.

What an a**

FAA takes the wind out of wind farms

The federal government has stopped work on more than a dozen wind farms planned across the Midwest, saying research is needed on whether the giant turbines could interfere with military radar.

But backers of wind power say the action has little to do with national security. The real issue, they say, is a group of wealthy vacationers who think a proposed wind farm off the coast of Cape Cod in Massachusetts would spoil the view at their summer homes.

Opponents of the Cape Wind project include several influential members of Congress. Critics say their latest attempt to thwart the planting of 130 turbines in Nantucket Sound has led to a moratorium on new wind farms hundreds of miles away in Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota.

.......

Harnessing the wind is a clean and relatively inexpensive way to generate electricity without the troublesome byproducts of coal or nuclear power. But the vast collections of turbines--some of which are 40 stories tall--are derided by opponents as unreliable and unsightly.

Of the scores of projects proposed around the country, perhaps the most controversial has been Cape Wind. If approved, it will be the first offshore wind farm in the United States.

Most of the opposition focuses on the proposed location in a channel between Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard, the bucolic Massachusetts vacation areas frequented by many high-profile celebrities, business executives and politicians.

Critics of Cape Wind include members of the Kennedy family, whose summer compound is on Cape Cod. Both U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and his nephew, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have said the turbines would spoil the ocean views, threaten the local tourist economy and endanger migratory birds.

The younger Kennedy, an environmental lawyer and activist who has supported wind power in other parts of the country, said putting a wind farm in Nantucket Sound would be akin to placing one in the Grand Canyon or Yellowstone National Park.

"This isn't the right location, for a number of reasons," Kennedy said.

Another opponent is U.S. Sen. John Warner (R-Va.), who has tried several times to block the Cape Wind project. In a 2002 letter to the Army Corps of Engineers, Warner included a handwritten note saying he often visits Cape Cod, which he called a "national treasure."

But the project continued to move forward until late last year, when Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, slipped an amendment into a military spending bill. The one-sentence congressional order directs the Defense Department to study whether wind towers could mask the radar signals of small aircraft.

Since then, at the Defense Department's behest, the FAA has been blocking any new wind turbines within the scope of radar systems used by the military.

Warner's amendment also appears to have reversed the government's position on the Cape Wind proposal. Both the FAA and the Air Force had previously signed off on the project, which would be located within miles of a missile defense radar system.

"This has nothing to do with wind," said Michael Polsky, president and chief executive officer of Invenergy, a Chicago company with projects in Illinois and Wisconsin that have been blocked by the government. "It has everything to do with politics."

Warner's office did not return telephone calls seeking comment. A spokesman previously released a statement saying the Defense Department study "ensures that Congress will possess as much information as possible on wind farms' impact on military operations."

So Warner will send the FAA on a fools errand and stiff arm sustainable energy developers nationwide so he and his fat cat buddies can have a lovely(er) time vacationing at Cape Cod. Talk about NIMBY taken to the extreme. Warner is fine with his constituents living next door to a wind farm but God forbid he have to vacation in the same zip code as one. The Kennedys and Warner may not know what they can do for their country but they certainly know what their country can do for them.

Inspirational

Chicago Daily-HeraldA Carol Stream firefighter's long journey back to normal

It would be far too easy for Jerrod Goebel to just forget the past year.

Forget it ever happened. Forget about the pain. Forget the physical therapy that helped him learn to walk again.

And forget all the little details of a yearlong recovery from a car accident that killed his wife.

It would be far too easy for the Carol Stream firefighter to forget why he wanted to be a firefighter in the first place.

"It's going to be on my mind a long time," Goebel, 26, said in his Lisle home, a modest ranch at the end of a street overlooking the Reagan Tollway.

Jerrod Goebel, seriously injured in a car crash that killed his wife, returned to the Carol Stream Fire Protection District last week.

......

Just two weeks into his first full-time job as a firefighter, Goebel lay comatose in intensive care as family members prepared to bury his wife. He'd just completed eight days of department orientation and was to begin his first shift as a Carol Stream firefighter last Memorial Day.

Goebel had no insurance and an uncertain chance for survival, but his colleagues mobilized to keep his job safe.

Fellow firefighters donated sick days and covered his shifts. They took turns traveling to Rockford Memorial Hospital to keep vigil at his bedside. They organized fundraisers, took up collections and sold raffle tickets, ultimately raising $15,000 for his medical expenses and donating 720 sick hours.

...........

To be sure, Goebel's challenge isn't over. He will likely never retrieve memories of the week leading up to the accident.

The efforts of his colleagues at the fire department ensured he would qualify for the department's insurance plan. They covered his shifts during the first month after the crash so he could qualify for insurance because he needed to be on the job for a month to do so.

There's days the world seems like a pretty terrible place, then you realize 1) you don't have it that bad, and 2) there really a lot of great people out there who will go the extra mile to help someone.

Party of the Corporations

CNN - Coming Soon:The Web Toll

Welcome to the brave new Web, brought to you by Verizon, Bell South, AT&T and the other telecommunications giants (including PopSci and CNN.com's parent company, Time Warner) that are now lobbying Congress to block laws that would prevent a two-tiered Internet, with a fast lane for Web sites able to afford it and a slow lane for everyone else.

Specifically, such companies want to charge Web sites for the speedy delivery of streaming video, television, movies and other high-bandwidth data to their customers. If they get their way (Congress may vote on the matter before the year is out), the days of wide-open cyberspace are numbered.

The Republicans keep selling out their base (or at least the 99.99% that are not well connected CEOs). We may not have all the bucks, but we can still put their sorry butts back on the street. I didn't sign up for the K Street agenda. If we have to endure a few years of Democrats to purge the "for sale to highest bidder" Republicans so be it.

Driven over by Miss Daisy

CNN: Homeless men die and 2 women get rich

The ties between two elderly women and a homeless man killed in a hit-and-run were strong enough to raise police suspicions five years ago, but it took a second death with eerie similarities for police to make arrests.

Helen Golay, 75, and Olga Rutterschmidt, 73, were charged last week with eight counts of federal mail fraud for collecting more than $2 million from policies they held on the two homeless men, Paul Vados and Kenneth McDavid.