Bill’s Blog

“Not for the politically correct.”

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DrudgeReport.com

 Shuttle Breakup | Clinton v Dole on 60 Minutes Dull | Warren Buffett Blasts Corporate America 
Conscious First Trimester Foetuses? | Blix Hid ‘Smoking Gun’ Drone Missile
 Iraqi Drone Can Deliver Chemical Weapons | STD Explosion in Britain
  Gas Prices Changing Lifestyles 

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WASHINGTON, March 9 — The shuttle Columbia was already spinning out of control, its left wing and left maneuvering jets damaged or destroyed, in the last two seconds of data transmission, two officials close to the investigation said today, citing a new analysis by NASA.

The analysis, scheduled for release early this week, paints a picture of desperate trouble far earlier in the shuttle's re-entry than had been previously described.

Bill Clinton wore a dark red tie. Bob Dole wore a bright red tie. And that was about as striking as the contrast got last night when the two preening politicos made their debut as a debating team on "60 Minutes."

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At least the real Clinton and the real Dole were held to a strict time limit. Their little vaudeville act added nothing to "60 Minutes," but it did the show no real harm, either. Everybody knew that Clinton wouldn't be able to stay away from the TV cameras for very long -- there have even been rumors of his hosting a talk show -- and here he was proving everybody right.

The result was so boring, though, that it ranked as strictly a Pyrrhic victory.

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett said shareholders such as mutual fund managers must stop supporting bad chief executives out of fear they'll find the spotlight turned on their own pay and performance.

"Getting rid of mediocre CEOs and eliminating overreaching by the able ones requires action by owners -- big owners," Buffett wrote in his annual letter to shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway Inc, his investment company. "Unfortunately, certain major investing institutions have `glass house' problems in arguing for better governance elsewhere."

Foetuses may develop consciousness long before the legal age limit for abortions, one of Britain's leading brain scientists has said.

Baroness Greenfield, a professor of neurology at Oxford University and the director of the Royal Institution, said there was evidence to suggest the conscious mind could develop before 24 weeks, the upper age where terminations are permitted.

Although she fell short of calling for changes in the abortion laws, she urged doctors and society to be cautious when assuming unborn babies lacked consciousness. "Is the foetus conscious? The answer is yes, but up to a point," she said.

This tends to confirm that Blix isn’t pursuing his duties as chief weapons inspector dilligently.

7.45 meters is roughly the same wingspan as a fighter jet.

BRITAIN and the United States will today press the chief UN weapons inspector to admit that he has found a “smoking gun” in Iraq. Such an admission could persuade swing voters on the Security Council to back the March 17 ultimatum.

The British and US ambassadors plan to demand that Hans Blix reveals more details of a huge undeclared Iraqi unmanned aircraft, the discovery of which he failed to mention in his oral report to Security Council foreign ministers on Friday. Its existence was only disclosed in a declassified 173-page document circulated by the inspectors at the end of the meeting — an apparent attempt by Dr Blix to hide the revelation to avoid triggering a war.

The discovery of the drone, which has a wingspan of 7.45 metres, will make it much easier for waverers on the Security Council to accept US and British arguments that Iraq has failed to meet UN demands that it disarm.

“It’s incredible,” a senior diplomat from a swing voter on the council said. “This report is going to have a clearly defined impact on the people who are wavering. It’s a biggie.”

Disclosure last week by U.N. weapons inspectors that Iraq had developed drone aircraft capable of dispensing chemical weapons "should be of concern to everybody," Powell said after a meeting with Foreign Minister Francois Fall of Guinea.

"This and other information shows Iraq has not changed," Powell said in an exchange with reporters at the State Department.
 

Iraq also has developed a version of a South African cluster bomb that could disperse chemical weapons over a target, Department spokesman Richard Boucher said.

Iraq has claimed that it destroyed all chemical warheads.

Soaring rates of sexually transmitted infections are overwhelming the NHS and threatening the health of a generation of young people, according to a committee of MPs.

An inquiry into the NHS sexual health service by the Commons Health Select Committee has concluded that it is in crisis, with a shortage of resources, facilities and staff. Waiting lists are growing and delays in treatment are putting partners of infected people at increased risk, it found.

The committee, which is to meet this week to finalise its report, is expected to highlight the Government's failure to implement its sexual health strategy, published in summer 2001. The strategy was given £47.5m in funding, less than half the cost of introducing screening for chlamydia, a disease that causes infertility in women.

With gasoline prices climbing to near-record levels, some Americans are cutting back sharply back on nonessential driving or trading in their gas guzzlers.

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 OpinionJournal.com

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President Bush's words and somber tone show that he believes America could soon be at war. So it is worth more than passing partisan interest that now is the time that the Democratic Party has decided to mount a coordinated assault against Mr. Bush's Iraq policy.

There have been a couple of exceptions, notably Texas Representative Martin Frost last week, but the strategy of Democratic leaders is unmistakable. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi made Iraq the subject of her first major foreign-policy address on Friday, a critique that could have been written in Paris. Tom Daschle is in full antiwar mode, and Ted Kennedy is assailing the President on every TV show that will have him. These Democrats have every Constitutional right to do this, but Americans have a right in turn to ask: Why now?

These are the same leaders, after all, who made their case to Congress last October and lost. The Senate vote authorizing war against Saddam Hussein was 77-23, with a majority of Democrats (29 of them) in support. We list that roll of approval nearby, including the names Kerry, Daschle, Dodd, Lieberman, Clinton and Edwards. As antiwar Democratic candidate Howard Dean has noted, wasn't that the time for the war's opponents to speak up?

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FrontPageMag.com

Left Still Uses Popular Fronts 

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The National Youth and Student Peace Coalition has a website (www.nyspc.net) where the Stanford organizers of the strike are plainly listed (www.nyspc.net/strikelist.html) as the Stanford Labor Action Coalition and the Young Communist League - the youth branch of the Communist Party, U.S.A. Clara Webb, the president of the Stanford Young Communist League is listed as the contact person for both organizations.

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Jewish World Review.com

   ‘Peace’ Movement of Thirties Led to WW II | Aplogizing for Telling the Truth About Islam

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Holocaust --- by accident. Your present day anti-war allies wish quite deliberately to destroy "Jewish interests" --- and the lives of many, many Jews in the process. And this is not an unintentional byproduct of good intentions --- but for many leaders of the peace movement, a precious goal.

It was not quite thus in the 1930s. Like today, the very nicest people, the most thoughtful people, the most progressive people, the people with the highest degree of social and moral conscience, people, in short, like you and me - all aligned themselves with Hitler's interests and brought about the totally unnecessary second World War - which was very nearly lost, even after the death of 50 million people. Even though it was won in the end, it was not won soon enough to prevent making the unthinkable - the Holocaust - inevitable.

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Could FDR have done more to rescue the Jews? Whether or not he could have done so militarily, the peaceniks of the 1930s had made it impossible for him to do so politically.

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So let us make room in the exhibit space of the Holocaust Museums scattered around the world some of the names that, no doubt, are now enrolled on the list of donors. The 1930s ancestors of today's peace protestors lovingly allowed the Nazis (and their evil opposite the Communists) to flourish and begin a meticulously crafted program of murder.

Under the peace program we see today, Ba'athism, the murderous direct offspring of Nazism, has been given vital breathing space, and would, if the peace marchers had their way, continue to grow in strength until it can safely strike out at Israel, Turkey, and arm the terrorist cells among us, all the time driving its own intellectuals, Shi'ites, Assyrian Christians, Kurds, and others of proscribed faith, race, or political views, into prisons, hospitals, and grave.

As Orwell pointed out long ago, pacifism in the face of armed evil is equivalent to a blind worship of force. For those of our race - the historic victims of so many causes - it would be disastrous to make the same mistake twice, and entrust our children's fate to the hands of these sad and complicitous pacifists.

Some of these “progressives” were socialist extremists and Communists who were denying the crimes of Stalin. Having a “moral conscience” wasn’t one of their virtues.

Mentions crimes of the Communists. German National Socialism can be seen as a variant form of Communism.

A great Orwell quote.

This appears to be being hypercautious with a members of an “oppressed” minority/

The failure of Islamic clergy to condemn terrorism is a form of tacit endorsement.

One wonders if these mosques are Wahhabi-funded.

And what about the worshippers at Al Farooq [mosque in Brooklyn]? Do some number of them support Al Qaeda in particular, or just "jihad" in general? Or were they all duped into scraping together hundreds of thousands of dollars for some unknown cause?

These and other questions remain not only unanswered but unasked, unspeakable ciphers on the boundaries of acceptable national discourse. There is no help in sight from Brooklyn mosque officials, of course, who profess to be "very, very, very surprised" by the government's charges.

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Which leaves us exactly where? Left to wonder why the Islamic advocacy groups in the United States fail to rejoice in a successful government sting operation against what certainly appears to be an unholy holy man who gives Islam a bad name. And we're left to wonder why Islamic moderates remain incapable of bringing off a good old-fashioned schism to divide their peaceable selves from their violent-minded co-religionists.

Do such moderates attend the Dallas Central Mosque, where a fund-raiser for five brothers charged with doing business with the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas was held last month? How about the Islamic Center of Greater Cleveland, where mosque officials have decided to retain an imam linked by reports to the federal indictment against suspected Islamic Jihad leader Sami Al-Arian? One has uncomfortable questions, too, about the moderate views of worshippers at the Islamic Community of Tampa Bay, where Mr. Al-Arian remains imam and president.

But such questions aren't being entertained. Which brings us to the second news story, as promised above. It has to do with Lois McMahan, a bespectacled, pearl-necklace-wearing, Republican state representative who declined to take her seat in the Washington legislature this week until after Olympia imam Mohamad Joban finished opening the "session of the House of Representatives in the name of Allah...."

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What will she say? Something like, "I'm sorry for observing that certain Islamic groups hate America religiously"? Or, "I'm sorry for noticing that Islamic leaders have been tepid in their condemnations of terrorist organizations"? "I'm sorry for raising a serious concern in the hopes of fueling an honest exchange"?

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JWR

 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
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Rep. Dick Gephardt, a Missouri Democrat and presidential hopeful who recently said that the Confederate battle flag shouldn’t fly "anytime, anywhere," said that he meant the flag shouldn’t fly in public places, but that people are free to do what they want on private property.

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