It's Craptastic!

Lawyers worked Friday to derail a federal grand jury investigation into an anti-war conference held three months ago at Drake University.

Federal officials have refused to say why they want information about the conference, the legal group that hosted it and four Des Moines-area peace activists involved.

But officials with the National Lawyers Guild, host of the Nov. 15 conference, said they intend to move Monday to block the subpoena, one of five delivered this week by the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force.
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Four of the subpoenas went to Des Moines peace activists, who were told to appear Tuesday before a federal grand jury. One went to Drake University, asking for information about the anti-war conference and records of the National Lawyers Guild local chapter.

The U.S. attorney's office in Des Moines convinced a judge Thursday to issue an order under seal - described by peace-movement sources as a gag order - to prohibit Drake employees from talking about the document search.

The subpoena demanded records from campus security reflecting any observations of the Nov. 15 conference, including "any records of persons in charge or control of the meeting, and any records of attendees of the meeting." Drake University President David Maxwell declined to comment Friday on how the university would respond.
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Michael Greenberger, director of the Center for Health and Homeland Security at the University of Maryland, tracks counter- terrorism efforts nationwide.

"Without knowing the details," Greenberger said, "these facts tend to evidence exactly the kinds of things that people are worried about with regard to the Patriot Act and other prosecutorial excesses. It seems like people are being challenged for their free-speech rights."

Ronald Reagan turned 93 in seclusion Friday in his Los Angeles home while schoolchildren serenaded his wife, Nancy, at his presidential library and she dedicated the cornerstone for a new pavilion to house the former Air Force One.

The 9,000-year-old remains known as Kennewick Man should be made available for scientific study, according to a federal court ruling. On Wednesday, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decided in favor of researchers who sued to stop a group of Native American tribes from burying the skeleton, which they claim as their ancestor.
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The bones, including a skull, were found on the bank of the Columbia River by two teenagers in 1996, near the town of Kennewick, Wash. After dating the remains to between 8,340 and 9,200 years ago, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which manages the land where the discovery was made, initially turned them over to Native American tribes in the Northwest, who did not want any further testing performed on them. Eight anthropologists then sued to gain access to the remains, claiming that the decision did not follow federal law. Judge John Jelderks agreed, ruling that in order to be eligible under the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA)--which aims to return museum artifacts to Native American tribes--Kennewick Man must have "a relationship to a presently existing tribe, people, or culture." But because "Kennewick Man's culture is unknown and apparently unknowable," the tribes' request to repatriate the remains was denied. The four tribes--the Colvill, the Umatilla, the Yakam and the Nez Perce--appealed the August 2002 decision.

The House Ethics Committee announced Wednesday it started an investigation almost two months ago into allegations Rep. Nick Smith was offered a bribe to vote for the Medicare prescription drug bill.

It was the first public acknowledgment the committee was looking into the matter, following public statements suggesting it was not.

On the night of the Medicare vote in November, Republican leaders worked hard to persuade Smith, a fiscally conservative Republican from Michigan who opposed the $400 billion price tag of the measure, to support the bill. In the end, he did not. (Full story)

Days later, however, he wrote in a column on his Web page that he was offered financial support for the campaign of his son, Brad, to succeed him when he retires at the end of this term.

U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert pledged for the first time yesterday that he would push a tobacco buyout plan to the House floor -- but only if Republican Alice Forgy Kerr is elected to Congress.
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Democrat Ben Chandler, who faces Kerr, said through a spokesman that he was disappointed that Hastert was "playing politics" with the buyout issue. Chandler, if elected, would continue to press for a buyout anyway, the spokesman said.
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Asked if he would still push the bill if Chandler were elected, Hastert responded: "I made a commitment to Alice. I certainly hope that she would be there to see the fruition of it."

Later, speaking to about 200 people, Hastert said he and the Congressional leadership will work with Kerr but that he couldn't say the same thing about Chandler.

"I need Alice Forgy Kerr in Congress," he said. "So I'm willing to do what I have to to help. And I'm asking you to do what you have to do to make this happen."

February 4, 2004

STATEMENT BY THE PRESIDENT

Today's ruling of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court is deeply troubling. Marriage is a sacred institution between a man and a woman. If activist judges insist on re-defining marriage by court order, the only alternative will be the constitutional process. We must do what is legally necessary to defend the sanctity of marriage.

BLITZER: How is he dealing with the addiction? How is Rush feeling?

BLACK: well, this was not an easy situation for Rush, as you can imagine.

For years, he suffered from chronic and intractable pain, particularly out of his spine and even had his coccyx bone removed, had shots in his spine. Nothing would work. Surgery didn't work. So, he had to use medication. And there are millions upon millions of people in this country who have the same thing. Pain is a disease like any other disease, and you ought to be treated for it.

And, by the way, we don't blame diabetics for using insulin and say they're addicts because they take insulin to survive.

“Obviously, he’ll be caught between now and the election,” Grassley said Monday when asked if he’s disappointed that Osama bin Laden hasn’t been killed or captured.

Texas Tech university confirmed on Tuesday that basketball coach Bobby Knight had got into a heated public argument with the university's chancellor.

Knight, who was fired from his job at Indiana in September 2000 for "unacceptable behavior," got into an argument with Tech chancellor David Smith on Monday in a local supermarket that continued into the parking lot, they said.
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According to the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, Knight approached Smith and berated him for criticizing his attitude.

The paper, citing several witnesses, said that as Smith walked away, Knight followed and continued the argument in the parking lot.

Regardless of whether Iraq had stockpiles of banned weapons, Washington would probably have decided to invade Iraq anyway because of its "intent" and its weapons-making ability, Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Tuesday.

You've got to hand it to Donald Rumsfeld and his E-Ring crew at the Pentagon. They know all the stratagems of bureaucratic politics, and they play the game well. In their latest maneuver, reported on the front page of last Thursday's New York Times, the secretary of defense has formed his own "four- to five-man intelligence team" to sift through raw data coming out of Iraq in search of evidence linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaida terrorists.

Rumsfeld has publicly continued to push this link as a prime—or at least the most easily sellable—rationale for going to war with Iraq, even after the CIA and the Pentagon's own Defense Intelligence Agency have dismissed the connection as tenuous at best. But Rumsfeld contends that the spy bureaucracies may have missed something. As his top team member, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz, put it to the Times, there is "a phenomenon in intelligence work that people who are pursuing a certain hypothesis will see certain facts that others won't, and not see other facts that others will." Since Wolfowitz is one of Washington's most forceful advocates of a second Gulf War, we can safely predict that he will find the facts he needs to make his case.

It is an old story that bears the same lesson each time a new chapter unfolds: Intelligence analysis should be kept out of the hands of those who have a vested interest in the results.

"A dirty dirty filthy titty. Filthy. You women should be ashamed of having those things! Fucking clothe those things put cloth on them lots of cloth and don't stop there man. Go get a burka and wear that thing too. Dirty filthy dirty dirty titty. Dirty dirty titty."

U.S. regulators on Monday vowed to investigate whether indecency rules were broken during the broadcast of the Super Bowl halftime show when pop diva Janet Jackson's bodice was ripped to expose her right breast.
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U.S. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell promised a "thorough and swift" investigation of the stunt aired during one of the year's most popular American television broadcasts, which draws a major worldwide audience.