George Felos, the attorney for Michael Schiavo, Terri's husband, spoke to reporters hours later. "I haven't made a statement for a number of days....I can just tell you that Mr. Schiavo's overriding concern here was to provide for Terri a peaceful death with dignity, and I emphasize it because this death was not for the siblings, and not for the spouse and not for the parents. This was for Terri."

Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue and the Christian Defense Coalition, will lead a memorial service for Schiavo on Thursday evening at 7:30 at the Praise Cathedral Renewal Center in Pinellas Park.

But soon after receiving word of Schiavo's death, demonstrators -- some of whom had been outside the hospice for weeks -- grieved openly with gasps, sobs, songs and prayers. (Full story)

Moments before the announcement that she had died, Schiavo's parents, Mary and Bob Schindler, hurriedly entered the Pinellas Park, Florida, hospice housing their 41-year-old daughter.

Publish or be damned

25 March 2005

A brutal prospect now faces the British Government. It is that unless and until it publishes the full documentation behind the legal advice to go to war in Iraq, the impression will grow that it took the country into an illegal war, threw its troops into battle and at the cost of the lives of tens of thousands of civilians on the basis of a false prospectus and fluctuating advice from its senior law officer.

It's a quandary entirely of Tony Blair's own making. Yesterday in the Commons, the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, repeated the old mantras that convention demands that legal advice be always kept discreet and that the advice of the Attorney General was finally clear and unequivocal. But what he also accepted was that Lord Goldsmith's advice had changed in the weeks immediately prior to the war for reasons he refused to divulge.

This is no mere matter of legal niceties or party politics. We are talking here not of some minor government political embarrassment or policy point. We are talking of a country going to war and the reasons it did so. The question of the legality of that war and the Attorney General's advice was absolutely crucial to the willingness of the armed forces to undertake the campaign, of parliament's support for it and of the public's acceptance of so drastic and terrible a step.

The point of the Attorney General's advice, given finally in a summary parliamentary answer on 17 March, is that it (alongside the evidence of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction) was used to convince the country to undertake a step they might very well have refused if they had known the full facts.

The decision to go to war had been made early on. Once it was made, the Prime Minister turned to his legal officers, and his intelligence chiefs, to find the reasons to justify that decision and give him legal cover.

We now know, thanks to the evidence before the Butler review as well as the letter of resignation of the Foreign Office lawyer, Elizabeth Wilmhurst, finally revealed this week, that the Government's legal officers initially took the view that an invasion of Iraq could not be legally justified on either grounds of self defence or on the basis of the resolutions of the United Nations, without further authority from the Security Council.

By the time Jeff Weise arrived at his school on Monday afternoon, laden with guns, he had already killed the two people who probably knew him better than anyone. Before the hour was out he had killed another seven who had no idea he was capable of such a crime.

Who knows what dark forces gripped the teenager when he woke at his grandparents' house on Monday morning? Anger, hatred, fear, confusion?

Whatever motivation was driving the 16-year-old native American, before the afternoon was over, something led him to kill both his grandparents before setting off on a shooting rampage at the high school from which he had been recently suspended. He then turned one of his guns on himself.

My question is this, if you're going to kill yourself, do it. Don't take countless innocents with you. Adolescents these days are so overwhelmed by the fact that this world is such a shitty place that wigging out and killing half of your school is a good idea. This is what troubles me, why can't someone in congress do this and take out Bush or Cheney? It's never the people that need to go. It's always the ones that haven't truely done anything wrong yet. It's just unfair. This generation of hypocrits, bigots, and rich industrialists is destroying my generation and the possibility of making the world a better place. So much for "liberty and justice" for all. It's just not right. Never has been, never will be. To the generation that is now ruling the world, "YOU ARE A BUNCH OF FUCK UPS AND YOU NEED TO RE-THINK WHAT THE FUCK YOU ARE DOING TO THIS PLANET AND ITS INHABITANTS."

I'll post the more cute and innocent things I did today later... I'm pissed and I need a drink.

WHAT DOES Jon Stewart of "The Daily Show" have in common with the
Bush administration? They're both unabashed about putting out fake news.
The Bush administration's version consists of video news releases  --
government-produced, government-funded spots packaged to look and sound like
regular television reports, complete with fake news reporters signing off
from Washington. These are intended to be, and often are, aired by local
television stations without any indication that the government is behind
them. The Government Accountability Office found this kind of phony news to
be impermissible "covert propaganda." It warned the government last month
that such prepackaged news stories must be accompanied by a "clear
disclosure to the television viewing audience" of the government's
involvement. The Bush administration is now instructing its officials to
ignore the GAO  --  which is where (in addition to the question of comedic
content) the administration and Mr. Stewart diverge. He wants you to know
his news is phony.
 Although this administration apparently isn't the first to use video
news releases, it seems more enamored of  them than its predecessors. For
example: A spot commissioned by the Transportation Security Administration
lauds "another success" in the Bush administration's "drive to strengthen aviation
security," which the "reporter" describes as "one of the most remarkable campaigns
in aviation history."
 It's humiliating that local news stations, however short-staffed and
desperate for footage, would allow themselves to be used this way. Indeed,
as the New York Times reported Sunday, some have even lopped off government
attribution when it was included or pretended the government reporter was
one of their own. Even so,   it's disingenuous for administration officials
to blame the stations, given that many releases are crafted precisely to
disguise their government origin.
This technique is both illegal and unwise. As a legal matter, the
prepackaged news releases run afoul of the prohibition on the use of
government funds for domestic "propaganda." The administration's
interpretation  --  it's okay to hide the source as long as the spot is
"purely informational"  --  is untenable: Highlighting some "facts" and leaving
out others can be even more persuasive than outright advocacy, which is why the
administration chose this device. More important, this kind of propaganda
masquerading as news is a deceitful way for a democratic government to do
business; fake journalists paid by the government to deliver its version of news
are as disturbing as real commentators paid by the government to tout its views.
White House press secretary Scott McClellan defended the video news releases on
Monday as "an informational tool to provide factual information to the American
people." Nice sentiment, but why, exactly, wouldn't the administration want to let
the people in on one of the most salient facts: who, really, is doing the talking?

By DAVID BARSTOW and ROBIN STEIN
t is the kind of TV news coverage every president
covets.
"Thank you, Bush. Thank you, U.S.A.," a jubilant Iraqi-American told a camera
crew in Kansas City for a segment about reaction to the fall of Baghdad. A
second report told of "another success" in the Bush administration's "drive to
strengthen aviation security"; the reporter called it "one of the most
remarkable campaigns in aviation history." A third segment, broadcast in
January, described the administration's determination to open markets for
American farmers.
To a viewer, each report looked like any other 90-second segment on the local
news. In fact, the federal government produced all three. The report from Kansas
City was made by the State Department. The "reporter" covering airport safety
was actually a public relations professional working under a false name for the
Transportation Security Administration. The farming segment was done by the
Agriculture Department's office of communications.
Under the Bush administration, the federal government has aggressively used a
well-established tool of public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to-serve news
report that major corporations have long distributed to TV stations to pitch
everything from headache remedies to auto insurance. In all, at least 20 federal
agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made and
distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four years, records
and interviews show. Many were subsequently broadcast on local stations across
the country without any acknowledgement of the government's role in their
production.
This winter, Washington has been roiled by revelations that a handful of
columnists wrote in support of administration policies without disclosing they
had accepted payments from the government. But the administration's efforts to
generate positive news coverage have been considerably more pervasive than
previously known. At the same time, records and interviews suggest widespread
complicity or negligence by television stations, given industry ethics standards
that discourage the broadcast of prepackaged news segments from any outside
group without revealing the source.
Federal agencies are forthright with broadcasters about the origin of the
news segments they distribute. The reports themselves, though, are designed to
fit seamlessly into the typical local news broadcast. In most cases, the
"reporters" are careful not to state in the segment that they work for the
government. Their reports generally avoid overt ideological appeals. Instead,
the government's news-making apparatus has produced a quiet drumbeat of
broadcasts describing a vigilant and compassionate administration.
Some reports were produced to support the administration's most cherished
policy objectives, like regime change in Iraq or Medicare reform. Others focused
on less prominent matters, like the administration's efforts to offer free
after-school tutoring, its campaign to curb childhood obesity, its initiatives
to preserve forests and wetlands, its plans to fight computer viruses, even its
attempts to fight holiday drunken driving. They often feature "interviews" with
senior administration officials in which questions are scripted and answers
rehearsed. Critics, though, are excluded, as are any hints of mismanagement,
waste or controversy.
Some of the segments were broadcast in some of nation's largest television
markets, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas and Atlanta.
An examination of government-produced news reports offers a look inside a
world where the traditional lines between public relations and journalism have
become tangled, where local anchors introduce prepackaged segments with
"suggested" lead-ins written by public relations experts. It is a world where
government-produced reports disappear into a maze of satellite transmissions,
Web portals, syndicated news programs and network feeds, only to emerge cleansed
on the other side as "independent" journalism.
It is also a world where all participants benefit.
Local affiliates are spared the expense of digging up original material.
Public relations firms secure government contracts worth millions of dollars.
The major networks, which help distribute the releases, collect fees from the
government agencies that produce segments and the affiliates that show them. The
administration, meanwhile, gets out an unfiltered message, delivered in the
guise of traditional reporting.
The practice, which also occurred in the Clinton administration, is
continuing despite President Bush's recent call for a clearer demarcation
between journalism and government publicity efforts. "There needs to be a nice
independent relationship between the White House and the press," Mr. Bush told
reporters in January, explaining why his administration would no longer pay
pundits to support his policies.  In interviews, though, press officers for several federal agencies said the
president's prohibition did not apply to government-made television news
segments, also known as video news releases. They described the segments as
factual, politically neutral and useful to viewers. They insisted that there was
no similarity to the case of Armstrong Williams, a conservative columnist who
promoted the administration's chief education initiative, the No Child Left
Behind Act, without disclosing $240,000 in payments from the Education
Department.  What is more, these officials argued, it is the responsibility of television
news directors to inform viewers that a segment about the government was in fact
written by the government. "Talk to the television stations that ran it without
attribution," said William A. Pierce, spokesman for the Department of Health and
Human Services. "This is not our problem. We can't be held responsible for their
actions."   Yet in three separate opinions in the past year, the Government
Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress that studies the federal
government and its expenditures, has held that government-made news segments may
constitute improper "covert propaganda" even if their origin is made clear to
the television stations. The point, the office said, is whether viewers know the
origin. Last month, in its most recent finding, the G.A.O. said federal agencies
may not produce prepackaged news reports "that conceal or do not clearly
identify for the television viewing audience that the agency was the source of
those materials."  It is not certain, though, whether the office's pronouncements will have much
practical effect. Although a few federal agencies have stopped making television
news segments, others continue. And on Friday, the Justice Department and the
Office of Management and Budget circulated a memorandum instructing all
executive branch agencies to ignore the G.A.O. findings. The memorandum said the
G.A.O. failed to distinguish between covert propaganda and "purely
informational" news segments made by the government. Such informational segments
are legal, the memorandum said, whether or not an agency's role in producing
them is disclosed to viewers.  Even if agencies do disclose their role, those efforts can easily be undone
in a broadcaster's editing room. Some news organizations, for example, simply
identify the government's "reporter" as one of their own and then edit out any
phrase suggesting the segment was not of their making.  So in a recent segment produced by the Agriculture Department, the agency's
narrator ended the report by saying "In Princess Anne, Maryland, I'm Pat O'Leary
reporting for the U.S. Department of Agriculture." Yet AgDay, a syndicated farm
news program that is shown on some 160 stations, simply introduced the segment
as being by "AgDay's Pat O'Leary." The final sentence was then trimmed to "In
Princess Anne, Maryland, I'm Pat O'Leary reporting."  Brian Conrady, executive producer of AgDay, defended the changes. "We can
clip 'Department of Agriculture' at our choosing," he said. "The material we get
from the U.S.D.A., if we choose to air it and how we choose to air it is our
choice."
Anne E. Kornblut contributed reporting for this article.
Who's suprised by any of this???  Bush has found new ways to sink lower and lower down the morality chain.
I can't believe how bad this nation has been decieved.  How many people actually know what the hell is going on!?!?!?

  By Susan Kinzie

  
First the Internet turned colleges upside down, extending classrooms and
changing the way people learned. Next came Napster and other file-sharing
tools, then Web logs. Now blogs are morphing into the next big thing on
campus: wikis.

The wiki, which got its name from the Hawaiian word for "quick," is
the scrappy little brother to the blog, an interactive Web page that can be
changed by anyone who stumbles upon it. While blogs let people  publish
their thoughts online, wikis take things a step further, creating
freewheeling, collaborative communities: Students can edit one another's
work, bounce ideas around or link to infinite other Web sites.

"Students keep pushing for more interactivity, often in ways I hadn't
thought of yet," said Mark L. Phillipson, assistant professor of English at
Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine.

Phillipson's students can go to a wiki he designed and highlight a phrase
in a poem such as John Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale." From "tender is
the night," for example, they could create links to their own essays, a scanned
image of the ink-blotted original manuscript, artwork, something about the
F. Scott Fitzgerald novel with that title  --  anything.

Sometimes wikis don't click. But at their best, wikis are provocative,
inspiring, funny and addictive. Some course sites read like journals, some
like debates and some shimmy in and out of topics with music, photos and
video pulling readers along. One of Phillipson's students drew a picture of
a poem; another made a movie. Wikis can encourage creativity, remove the
limits on class time, give professors a better sense of student
understanding and interest and keep students writing, thinking and
questioning.

Early e-mail lists, newsgroups and chat rooms were ephemeral, like a
passing conversation, said Steve Jones, a communication professor at the
University of Illinois at Chicago. Now computers and networks are fast
enough that many people can share text, videos, sound and art and work on
them together, he said, building a body of knowledge over time. Wikis,
including interactive encyclopedia Wikipedia, have been around for several
years but they're just on the cusp of becoming mainstream; as the technology
improves, they're popping up in a few classrooms and offices, and people are
finding all sorts of uses for them.

It's the plugged-in version of a long tradition in literature, said wiki
user Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, an assistant professor of English at the
University of Maryland. Hundreds of years ago people kept "commonplace
books," in which they would write down poems, passages from books, and
observations to share. Most people think of writing as solitary, he said  --
"the lonely poet taking long walks in the woods, but there's another type of
writing that's social and reactive."

In many cases, professors are scrambling to keep up with changes driven
by students. Some graduate students create wikis for collaborative science
research projects. At Johns Hopkins University, junior Asheesh Laroia talked
with a teaching assistant about setting up a wiki for a section of a course
on Baltimore. In the summer, Matt Bowen, a senior at U-Md., dreamed up a
wiki to help struggling writers; now, he and others post drafts online, and
his friends at other colleges can click onto his wiki and rewrite the
stories, add a poem, or take a scene and spin it into something new
entirely.

 "Sometimes things improve," Bowen said, "sometimes they get
worse.
Sometimes they just get funnier."

Blogs already have seeped into everyday life on campus. At Johns Hopkins,
two juniors just set up a service for students and faculty to start their
own blogs. Georgetown University tinkered with software to make it easy for
professors to create blogs. There are course blogs on religion, war,
literature, even cattle, at Texas A&M University.

"It's more power to the student," said junior John Dorman, whose
Georgetown government class blog bubbled with a debate over morality and
politics recently, with students posting comments from 7:30 p.m. until
nearly 7:30 the next morning.

Students in sophomore Craig Kessler's English class got hooked, and he
said they became closer and more engaged than in any class he has taken.
When the semester ended this winter, students asked the professor, David
Lipscomb: Could they keep writing the blog?

Lipscomb quickly found he had to put limits on the posts  --  some
students wrote so much that he could hardly keep up. Most professors who use
blogs and wikis said they set ground rules early on and act quickly to stamp
out problems.

As the technology goes mainstream, universities will have to think about
libel and intellectual property issues, Kirschenbaum said.

Now there are wikis here and there cooked up by whiz-kid professors and
students, but he thinks schools soon will build frameworks. Georgetown's
Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship hopes to offer faculty
wikis-made-easy technology by the fall semester.

What else is ahead? Maybe wikis to go. At American University this fall,
students posted updates from political events to "moblogs" with their mobile
phones. Jones predicts that kind of thing will happen more, as gizmos make
it easier to write and send photos and videos from anywhere.

Milad Doueihi, a communications and contemporary society instructor at
Johns Hopkins, said that this summer, students will be able to listen to his
lectures anytime: He will broadcast them on the class wiki using his
Pod  --  a technology called  --  what else?  --  podcasting.

"It's much more productive," he said, as though sitting in a classroom
were  hopelessly outdated.

Just gotta get over the fact that we all have our imperfections. No use beating yourself up about them or getting sad. Terminal cancer is reason to be sad. I always raise up and feel better taking a look at people that are successful in life that have imperfections. Look at Mic Jagger....OK don't. Talk about a damn ugly human being! Sang like a bird and made millions! Beethoven, deaf and a manic depressant, musical genius. Bill Gates, Nerd...richest man in the world. Jessica Simpson..total idiot...making millions! (did I just use Jessica Simpson as an example? Geez! I meant Homer!) The list could go on and on (It goes on and on...sorry! broke into some M.G.). Use your imperfections as attributes, you just never know how good life can be until you give it a shot and forget all the superficial B.S. (everything is skin deep)

06 March 2005

If you want to know why America is agonising over whether and where to display the Ten Commandments in public, blame it all on Cecil B DeMille.

It was DeMille, of course, who directed the Hollywood version of the Biblical story - twice: the first time as a silent movie, and the second time with a full-bearded Charlton Heston bringing the tablets down from Mt Sinai in full 1950s Technicolor. But it was also DeMille who encouraged a Cold War-era military group called the Fraternal Order of the Eagles to sponsor a Ten Commandments monument in the grounds of the Texas state capitol building in Austin.

That monument, along with a second in Kentucky, is the subject of a fractious legal case, heard by the Supreme Court last week, on the ever-contentious topic of the separation of church and state. The court, unsurprisingly, found itself deeply divided on the subject, and is not expected to issue a ruling until June.

ASHINGTON, March 1 - President Bush's drive to overhaul Social Security is in trouble, and while it is far too soon to declare it doomed, it faces obstacles on all sides.

After a week at home listening to constituents on the issue, Congressional leaders of Mr. Bush's own party have returned to Washington and immediately begun playing for time, suggesting that they may not meet his goal of passing legislation this year.

Democrats, apparently feeling little political pressure to come up with a plan of their own or work across the aisle, remain remarkably united against the main element of Mr. Bush's plan: his call for private investment accounts to be carved out of Social Security payroll taxes.

A USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll published Tuesday showed Mr. Bush receiving his lowest marks on the handling of Social Security since becoming president.

Perhaps most difficult of all for the White House, members of Congress have little sense that voters are demanding that they confront the issue now and make difficult choices that are bound to have political repercussions.

Contrary to the broad-based support that drove the last bipartisan action to overhaul an entitlement program - the addition of a prescription drug benefit to Medicare - the public has not been clamoring for a new approach to Social Security or for confronting the painful steps necessary to meet Mr. Bush's goal of ensuring its permanent solvency.

Indeed, there is no consensus even among Republicans about how to proceed. They are divided, in some cases bitterly, over issues like how big the private accounts should be, whether the nation can afford to borrow trillions of dollars to establish them and whether a tax increase can be part of any solution.

"When a boat springs so many leaks, it only floats for so long," said Tony Fabrizio, a Republican pollster, who declared that Mr. Bush was losing the momentum he had picked up after making Social Security the centerpiece of his State of the Union address. "The Democrats have certainly shot holes in it, but the Republicans have also been shooting holes."
Finish reading.

It's nice to know that social security will be destroyed by the time I become eligible to recieve it. Thank you for beating all the money taken out of every working Americans' paycheck and beating it into the ground Mr. Bush. I do have a solution to this problem though:

Usually smoked as a cigarette or joint, or in a pipe or bong, marijuana has appeared in "blunts" in recent years. These are cigars that have been emptied of tobacco and re-filled with marijuana, sometimes in combination with another drug, such as crack. Some users also mix marijuana into foods or use it to brew tea.

The main active chemical in marijuana is THC (delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol). Short-term effects of marijuana use include problems with memory and learning; distorted perception; difficulty in thinking and problem-solving; loss of coordination; and increased heart rate, anxiety, and panic attacks.

Health Hazards

Effects of Marijuana on the Brain. Researchers have found that THC changes the way in which sensory information gets into and is acted on by the hippocampus. This is a component of the brain's limbic system that is crucial for learning, memory, and the integration of sensory experiences with emotions and motivations. Investigations have shown that THC suppresses neurons in the information-processing system of the hippocampus. In addition, researchers have discovered that learned behaviors, which depend on the hippocampus, also deteriorate.

Effects on the Lungs. Someone who smokes marijuana regularly may have many of the same respiratory problems that tobacco smokers have. These individuals may have daily cough and phlegm, symptoms of chronic bronchitis, and more frequent chest colds. Continuing to smoke marijuana can lead to abnormal functioning of lung tissue injured or destroyed by marijuana smoke.

Regardless of the THC content, the amount of tar inhaled by marijuana smokers and the level of carbon monoxide absorbed are three to five times greater than among tobacco smokers. This may be due to marijuana users inhaling more deeply and holding the smoke in the lungs.

Effects of Heavy Marijuana Use on Learning and Social Behavior. A study of college students has shown that critical skills related to attention, memory, and learning are impaired among people who use marijuana heavily, even after discontinuing its use for at least 24 hours. Researchers compared 65 "heavy users," who had smoked marijuana a median of 29 of the past 30 days, and 64 "light users," who had smoked a median of 1 of the past 30 days. After a closely monitored 19- to 24-hour period of abstinence from marijuana and other illicit drugs and alcohol, the undergraduates were given several standard tests measuring aspects of attention, memory, and learning. Compared to the light users, heavy marijuana users made more errors and had more difficulty sustaining attention, shifting attention to meet the demands of changes in the environment, and in registering, processing, and using information. The findings suggest that the greater impairment among heavy users is likely due to an alteration of brain activity produced by marijuana.

Longitudinal research on marijuana use among young people below college age indicates those who used have lower achievement than the non-users, more acceptance of deviant behavior, more delinquent behavior and aggression, greater rebelliousness, poorer relationships with parents, and more associations with delinquent and drug-using friends.