Is this really legal? Researchers are looking to administer “cocaine, and either Progesterone, Flutamide, or Premarin” to “healthy men and women ages 21-35 who have used cocaine occasionally” and will pay you $425 for your trouble. I seem to recall laws against stockpiling and distributing cocaine.
A threat from al-Sadr.
“Radical anti-U.S. Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s political bloc, a key player in Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s government, threatened on Friday to withdraw from the cabinet and parliament if Maliki met U.S. President George W. Bush as planned in Jordan next week.”
Iraq goes from bad to worse.
CNN reports on the violence ravaging the country today:
I See…
Huh. It’s interesting to see Charles Krauthammer just saying this explicitly: “Look. Harry Truman used to tell derisive Jewish jokes. Richard Nixon said nasty things about Jews in government and elsewhere. Who cares? Truman and Nixon were the two greatest friends of the Jews in the entire postwar period: Truman secured them a refuge in the state of Israel, and Nixon saved it from extinction during the Yom Kippur War.”
Well, I’m not sure any especially terrible consequences flowed from Truman’s Jewish jokes, but, um, I care about stuff like that. Being a Jewish person living in the United States of America, it would trouble me for the President of the United States to be an anti-semite. Indeed, Nixon’s anti-semitism seems to have had real consequences, being part-and-parcel of his paranoia and proclivity for witch hunts. The idea that this is all made okay because someone was nice to Israel is pretty weird. Beyond weird, of course, it’s the flipside of the theory that anyone who criticizes Israel must be an anti-semite.
Senate Passes Resolution Honoring Paul Wellstone
Before adjourning last week, the Senate passed a resolution praising the accomplishments of the late progressive Senator from Minnesota Paul Wellstone, who died in a tragic plane crash on October 25, 2002.
The measure introduced by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) stated that “Senator Paul Wellstone should be remembered for his compassion and leadership on social issues throughout his career,” particularly his tireless work to advance mental health parity for all Americans.
While introducing the resolution on the Senate floor, Durbin recalled one particular moment that stood out in his mind that exemplified Wellstone’s vision and courage:
I can recall the last time I saw him. He was a few feet away from me here. It was the night we cast our vote on the Iraqi war. It was a vote that was a hard one. …
Twenty-three of us voted against the war that night. I was one, Paul Wellstone was another. It was even later than now that night, and I came to the well on the floor to say goodbye to Paul because we were both off for the reelection campaigns of 4 years ago. I came over to wish him well, and I said, “Paul, I hope that vote doesn’t cost you the election.” He said, “You know, it is OK if it does because that is what I believe and that is who I am. The people of Minnesota would expect nothing less from me.” It was the last time I ever saw him. He went home, and within 2 weeks he was killed in a plane crash with his wife and staff members.
1,000.
Number of Iraqis displaced each day since February 22 due to sectarian violence, according to a U.N. study.
Sundance versus Los Angeles
There’s something very wrong with the movies–and the air–in Los Angeles, according to the Sundance Institution.
Robert Redford’s Utah resort is famous as the site of the Sundance Film Festival, but last week it was host to a fresh, independent voice: the second Sundance Summit of mayors. The consensus among summiteers: If the federal government won’t step up and address climate change, local officials will.
Among those in attendance were co-founder and former Senator Gary Hart, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, nearly 30 mayors and representatives of other concerned groups, all gathered to discuss climate change, energy, and sustainability.
At the end of the two-day summit, the mayors unveiled a website on taking action. Redford himself has recently announced the Sundance Channel Green, coming in 2007 loaded with environmentally-conscious TV programming.
The Sundance Film Festival has made a name for itself by being what Hollywood is not. The Sundance Summit will make a name for itself by giving Los Angeles what it desperately needs: truly pollution-free air.
Rep. Tancredo: Bush Wants To Merge U.S. With Mexico and Canada
Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO), one of the leading voices on immigration for the right, claims President George W. Bush is plotting to merge the U.S. with Mexico and Canada. An excerpt from WorldNetDaily:
Tancredo lashed out at the White House’s lack of action in securing U.S. borders, and said efforts to merge the U.S. with both Mexico and Canada is not a fantasy.
“I know this is dramatic — or maybe somebody would say overly dramatic — but I’m telling you, that everything I see leads me to believe that this whole idea of the North American Union, it’s not something that just is written about by right-wing fringe kooks. It is something in the head of the president of the United States, the president of Mexico, I think the prime minister of Canada buys into it. …
You might think the right would immediately repudiate this kind of conspiracy theory. You’d be wrong. The National Review’s Andy McCarthy came to Tancredo’s defense:
This is not a fringe. It’s a wave. It’s fine to disagree with Rep. Trancredo; it’s wrong to treat him like a lunatic when he is anything but.
[I]t’s not unreasonable for people to look at Bush’s immigration policies and worry that he is insufficiently alert to the internationalist pressures (what John Fonte calls “transnational progressivism”) vigorously challenging the traditional understanding of sovereignty on many fronts.
Fox’s Neil Cavuto recently said Tancredo “owns” the issue of immigration predicted that “if he were to run for president, he just might well be president.”
ThinkFast: November 24, 2006
“Two bombs killed 22 people in northern Iraq on Friday as the government tried to tamp down violence and head off civil war a day after Sunni-Arab insurgents killed 215 people in an attack on Baghdad’s Sadr City slum that intensified Shiite anger at the United States.”
A previously undisclosed video shot in the months before the U.S. invasion in 2003, shows Saddam Hussein and his top officers demonstrating not biological or nuclear weapons, but primitive slingshots, Molotov cocktails, and crossbows.
Government whistle-blowers are facing increased retaliation for speaking out. “In the four years before the terrorist attacks, whistle-blowers filed an average of 690 reprisal complaints…annually. Since the attacks, an average of 835 complaints have been filed each year, a 21% increase.”
16,000: Number of single mothers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, “a number that military experts say is unprecedented.” A total of 155,000 women have served in both conflicts.
Leaked drug company memo: Sen. Rick Santorum’s (R-PA) loss “creates a big hole we will need to fill” and “we now have fewer allies in the Senate.” Read more
Memos from the Antipodes
John Quiggin tells us a bit about how “Australia now has its own version of the Downing Street memos, dating back to 28 February 2002. That’s when Trevor Flugge, Chairman of our (massively corrupt) grain trading monopoly AWB was told of the invasion of Iraq, and of Australia’s planned participation by our Ambassador to the UN*, John Dauth who even predicted that readmitting weapons inspectors would only produce a short delay.” This grain trading monopoly, incidentally, seems like a very poor idea based on Quiggin’s description.
