Phyllis Pfeiffer RIP 1922 - 2006

My grandmother has passed on into the next life. May God be with her.

I probably will not be posting until the beginning of next week.

God Bless

PS: I think this deal with the Iranians and the Russians is a red herring and bunch of hooey. Just thought that needed to be said.

Am I Gay Enough For Ya?

As I am writing this column, my lovely bride-to-be is picking the ingrown hairs out of my back and shoulders.

Wait! My story gets better…

A friend of mine and I were recently lamenting the fact that neither one of us are as naturally well groomed as a woman might want us to be. I know for sure that if there’s one thing my fiancé wished to change about me it’s that I should take more of an interest in my appearance. She wishes that I would more time in the mirror, grooming myself and making myself look pretty as a matter of pride.

I on the other hand, and my friend agreed, believed that when it doesn’t matter I shouldn’t have to put to the time in. Grooming is for special occasions and work, not for just hanging around the house. At least that’s what I used to think before my fiancés special brand of Marge Simpson’s “gentle nagging” got me to at least shave every other day or at least before she and go out at night.

This topic among many has had me thinking of late that it’s pretty ironic how woman want to be with a “man’s man” but then can’t seem to stand anything about what being a man is all about. Men like stuff, especially my generation of men, whom are admittedly a little slow to grow up.

We like video games, music, TV, movies and sports. I myself like to curl up with a good non-fiction book, but then I’m something of a nerd. My point is, my wonderful fiancé has often pointed out that I spend an inordinate amount of time focusing on exterior things than I do on myself or more intimate details of our lives.

Oh who am I kidding, I’m the say guy that managed to miss a bartender flashing her chest to the entire club in Levittown, NY but can spot someone with Bi-Polar Disorder from a mile away.

Anywho, I have come to the conclusion that on some level, I believe that my fiancé is one of many woman who wish their man was just a little gay…just gay enough to take the proper amount of time and care in their grooming habits. You know the usual suspects; plucked eyebrows, exfoliated skin, waxed bodies, clean shaven face, manicured nails, and freshly pressed clothes.

Any woman reading this would look at this list and say, “Well yeah, your not a homeless person, why shouldn’t you do all that?” And any straight man that reads that list (usually) would say, “What man has that kind of time? I have stuff to do like watch sports, work, exercise, get drunk, and/or blog (OK that last one is just me, but you see my point.)

But many men in fact do take the time to properly groom themselves. These men typically have learned these habits from mothers or sisters and do them if for no other reason than they want to meet women, women who like a well groomed man. Of course the stereotype is that any man who takes that time on themselves instead of something important (like whatever hobby they are interested in) is clearly homosexual.

There’s the rub. Women seem to want both. As a matter of fact Nan Shipley has written a book on the subject, “Is Your Straight Man Gay Enough? The Ultimate Renovation Guide.” According to a review in the Sacramento Bee, “The book purports to aid women in surreptitiously – this is crucial – remaking their hairy, distracted, sports-addled straight men into something a little more like their well-groomed, empathetic gay best friend. The one who likes to shop, listens to her pour her heart out and loves to dance.

In Shipley’s case, her gay best friend is Jason Anthony, a literary agent in New York City who is also her co-author. Together, they have written a funny book that uses stereotypes about men on the straight-gay spectrum in the hope that a clever woman can split the difference to her advantage.”

This actually makes a lot of sense. Women want a guy that will be sympathetic to their needs and one of those needs that they should be made to feel good. One way and probably the most important way is to show how much you care by looking good for her. Now that may not make a lot of sense to guys to the ladies it is the gospel according to Cupid. She becomes special by virtue of the amount of effort your lazy butt puts into your appearance.

Listening to them and being supportive especially in those times when they feel like their world is crumbling around them also helps a bunch. Men are problem solvers. We’re a fairly simplistic bunch. The thing is, sometimes their isn’t a viable solution and all the person needs is someone to vent their frustrations to. As the guy, your job is to be there and give your sweetie a safe place to vent without this need to solve the problem quickly so they can stop talking and you can watch wrestling…wait, never mind that last part.

However, getting back to stereotypes most guys think that what I just described is a little on the gay side. What guy in their right mind wants to listen to a whole lot of whining? The answer is, the guy that wants to see their relationship work, that’s who. Being sensitive to your loves needs, whether its emotional or physical is not gay, it’s the right thing to do. There’s plenty of stuff guys want from their women that under normal circumstances they wouldn’t be willing to do but they do anyway to make us happy. The least we can do is not look like a complete slop when they want to go out to dinner on a Saturday night.

So if you have to be a little “gay” to make your woman happy, what bloody difference does it make? She certainly won’t think less of you because that’s what she wanted in the first place. Like Chris Rock once said, and I’m paraphrasing here, when you were single no woman would touch, then you met one that cleaned you up and now every woman wants to sleep with you. He was exaggerating but the point is clear, if you want to make the woman happy, you have to frolic in the periwinkles of homosexuality every now and then. It’s not the worst price to pay for a lifetime of companionship.

Iran vows speedy revenge against West over Iraq shrine

What can one say about this other than, please, BRING IT ON!

The fact that the Supreme Commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps thinks, or at least is saying, that we are the ones that bombed a shrine in Iraq is ludicrous in the extreme. However, if it's a fight the Iranians want and are ready to engage in, though I've called for peaceful regime change in the past, I say let's do this. If it should come to pass that the Iranians do have their "revenge" obviously there should be no qualms about us dropping MOABS on Tehran and every other city in Iran, decimating their military, and crippling their economy. To me, if it is indeed an actual fight they want, that seems like a reasonable response (and beats the hell out of waiting for them to build a nuclear bomb).

The Supreme Commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps accused the United States, Britain, and Israel of carrying out Wednesday’s bomb attack which devastated a revered Shiite shrine in the Iraqi city of Samarra and said that God and Muslims alike would strike at them in retaliation.

Major General Yahya Rahim Safavi made the comments on Thursday night at a memorial ceremony for senior IRGC officials who were killed in a military plane crash in January. His remarks were reported by Iran’s state-controlled media on Friday.

“We condemn the insolence of the mercenaries of Zionism, the British and the Americans in their outrage against the sacred shrine of Imam Hadi and Imam Hassan al-Askari”, Safavi said.

“Those who masterminded this catastrophe should know that they will soon receive a heavy slap on the face from God and the believers in the Imams”, the Revolutionary Guards commander added.

“Muslim nations will not put up with this impudence”, he said.

Safavi called on Iranians to “show their hatred of the Zionist, British, and American mercenaries during the week-long period of mourning declared by His Eminence the Supreme Leader”.

Arab company, White House had secret agreement

Under a secretive agreement with the Bush administration, a company in the United Arab Emirates promised to cooperate with US investigations as a condition of its takeover of operations at six major American ports, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.

Well of course they did. Secret agreements is what Bush's do best!

The US government chose not to impose other, routine restrictions.

In approving the $6.8 billion purchase, the administration chose not to require state-owned Dubai Ports World to keep copies of its business records on US soil, where they would be subject to orders by American courts. It also did not require the company to designate an American citizen to accommodate requests by the government.

I can see why the mainstream media has opted to moveon.org from this story...clearly information like this isn't worth reporting. Now the VP shooting a guy in the mush, that needs to be covered for at least two weeks straight.



Anywho, for those that care, here's the rest of the IMPORTANT story:

Outside legal experts said such obligations are routinely attached to US approvals of foreign sales in other industries.

Dubai Ports agreed to give up records on demand about "foreign operational direction" of its business at the US ports, according to the documents. Those records broadly include details about the design, maintenance or operation of ports and equipment. It also pledged to continue participating in programs to stop smuggling and detect illegal shipments of nuclear materials.

"They're not lax but they're not draconian," said James Lewis, a former US official who worked on such agreements. If White House officials negotiating the deal had predicted the firestorm of criticism over it, "they might have made them sound harder."

The conditions over the sale of London-based Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Co. were detailed in US documents marked "confidential." Such records are regularly guarded as trade secrets, and it is highly unusual for them to be made public.

The Republican head of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John Warner of Virginia, planned an oversight hearing Thursday. Warner has expressed support for the agreement, describing the UAE as an important ally against terrorism.

Rep. Peter King of New York, the Republican chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said the conditions are evidence the Bush administration was concerned about security. "There is a very serious question as to why the records are not going to be maintained on American soil subject to American jurisdiction," King said.

Another critic, New York Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer added: "These new revelations ask more questions than they answer."

The disclosure of the negotiated conditions came as the White House acknowledged President George W. Bush was unaware of the pending sale until the deal had been already approved by his administration.

Bush has pledged to veto any bill Congress might approve to block the agreement, but some lawmakers said they still were determined to capsize it.

Dubai Port's top American executive, chief operating officer Edward H. Bilkey, said he would work in Washington to persuade skeptical lawmakers they should endorse the deal; several Senate oversight hearings already are scheduled.

"We're disappointed," Bilkey told the AP in an interview. "We're going to do our best to persuade them that they jumped the gun. The UAE is a very solid friend, as President Bush has said."

Under the deal, the government asked Dubai Ports to operate American seaports with existing US managers "to the extent possible." The company promised to take "all reasonable steps" to assist the Homeland Security Department.

The administration required Dubai Ports to designate an executive to handle requests from the US government, but it did not specify this person's citizenship.

Ex-Official: Russia Moved Saddam's WMD

If this is true, it certainly explains a lot. At this point though, I don't know how much of the below story really matters. It is not as if that because now we know Russia was complicit in the "No WMD's" scandal we will cease relations with them or attempt to isolate Moscow. Whatever they did to undermind the effort in Iraq, it's over now and because of Iran, we have to go forward. But for purely educational purposes, I'm reprinting this article here. Be warned, the source is NewsMax.com, but I was able to reference this information in other areas so it seems to check out:

A top Pentagon official who was responsible for tracking Saddam Hussein's weapons programs before and after the 2003 liberation of Iraq, has provided the first-ever account of how Saddam Hussein "cleaned up" his weapons of mass destruction stockpiles to prevent the United States from discovering them.

"The short answer to the question of where the WMD Saddam bought from the Russians went was that they went to Syria and Lebanon," former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense John A. Shaw told an audience Saturday at a privately sponsored "Intelligence Summit" in Alexandria, Va. (www.intelligencesummit.org).

"They were moved by Russian Spetsnaz (special forces) units out of uniform, that were specifically sent to Iraq to move the weaponry and eradicate any evidence of its existence," he said.

Shaw has dealt with weapons-related issues and export controls as a U.S. government official for 30 years, and was serving as deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security when the events he described today occurred.

He called the evacuation of Saddam's WMD stockpiles "a well-orchestrated campaign using two neighboring client states with which the Russian leadership had a long time security relationship."

Shaw was initially tapped to make an inventory of Saddam's conventional weapons stockpiles, based on intelligence estimates of arms deals he had concluded with the former Soviet Union, China and France.

He estimated that Saddam had amassed 100 million tons of munitions - roughly 60 percent of the entire U.S. arsenal. "The origins of these weapons were Russian, Chinese and French in declining order of magnitude, with the Russians holding the lion's share and the Chinese just edging out the French for second place."

But as Shaw's office increasingly got involved in ongoing intelligence to identify Iraqi weapons programs before the war, he also got "a flow of information from British contacts on the ground at the Syrian border and from London" via non-U.S. government contacts.

"The intelligence included multiple sitings of truck convoys, convoys going north to the Syrian border and returning empty," he said.

Shaw worked closely with Julian Walker, a former British ambassador who had decades of experience in Iraq, and an unnamed Ukranian-American who was directly plugged in to the head of Ukraine's intelligence service.

The Ukrainians were eager to provide the United States with documents from their own archives on Soviet arms transfers to Iraq and on ongoing Russian assistance to Saddam, to thank America for its help in securing Ukraine's independence from the Soviet Union, Shaw said.

In addition to the convoys heading to Syria, Shaw said his contacts "provided information about steel drums with painted warnings that had been moved to a cellar of a hospital in Beirut."

But when Shaw passed on his information to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and others within the U.S. intelligence community, he was stunned by their response.

"My report on the convoys was brushed off as ‘Israeli disinformation,'" he said.

One month later, Shaw learned that the DIA general counsel complained to his own superiors that Shaw had eaten from the DIA "rice bowl." It was a Washington euphemism that meant he had commited the unpardonable sin of violating another agency's turf.

The CIA responded in even more diabolical fashion. "They trashed one of my Brits and tried to declare him persona non grata to the intelligence community," Shaw said. "We got constant indicators that Langley was aggressively trying to discredit both my Ukranian-American and me in Kiev," in addition to his other sources.

But Shaw's information had not originated from a casual contact. His Ukranian-American aid was a personal friend of David Nicholas, a Western ambassador in Kiev, and of Igor Smesko, head of Ukrainian intelligence.

Smesko had been a military attaché in Washington in the early 1990s when Ukraine first became independent and Dick Cheney was secretary of defense. "Smesko had told Cheney that when Ukraine became free of Russia he wanted to show his friendship for the United States."

Helping out on Iraq provided him with that occasion.

"Smesko had gotten to know Gen. James Clapper, now director of the Geospacial Intelligence Agency, but then head of DIA," Shaw said.

But it was Shaw's own friendship to the head of Britain's MI6 that brought it all together during a two-day meeting in London that included Smeshko's people, the MI6 contingent, and Clapper, who had been deputized by George Tenet to help work the issue of what happened to Iraq's WMD stockpiles.

In the end, here is what Shaw learned:

In December 2002, former Russian intelligence chief Yevgeni Primakov, a KGB general with long-standing ties to Saddam, came to Iraq and stayed until just before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.

Primakov supervised the execution of long-standing secret agreements, signed between Iraqi intelligence and the Russian GRU (military intelligence), that provided for clean-up operations to be conducted by Russian and Iraqi military personnel to remove WMDs, production materials and technical documentation from Iraq, so the regime could announce that Iraq was "WMD free."

Shaw said that this type GRU operation, known as "Sarandar," or "emergency exit," has long been familiar to U.S. intelligence officials from Soviet-bloc defectors as standard GRU practice.

In addition to the truck convoys, which carried Iraqi WMD to Syria and Lebanon in February and March 2003 "two Russian ships set sail from the (Iraqi) port of Umm Qasr headed for the Indian Ocean," where Shaw believes they "deep-sixed" additional stockpiles of Iraqi WMD from flooded bunkers in southern Iraq that were later discovered by U.S. military intelligence personnel.

The Russian "clean-up" operation was entrusted to a combination of GRU and Spetsnaz troops and Russian military and civilian personnel in Iraq "under the command of two experienced ex-Soviet generals, Colonel-General Vladislav Achatov and Colonel-General Igor Maltsev, both retired and posing as civilian commercial consultants."

Washington Times reporter Bill Gertz reported on Oct. 30, 2004, that Achatov and Maltsev had been photographed receiving medals from Iraqi Defense Minister Sultan Hashim Ahmed in a Baghdad building bombed by U.S. cruise missiles during the first U.S. air raids in early March 2003.

Shaw says he leaked the information about the two Russian generals and the clean-up operation to Gertz in October 2004 in an effort to "push back" against claims by Democrats that were orchestrated with CBS News to embarrass President Bush just one week before the November 2004 presidential election. The press sprang bogus claims that 377 tons of high explosives of use to Iraq's nuclear weapons program had "gone missing" after the U.S.-led liberation of Iraq, while ignoring intelligence of the Russian-orchestrated evacuation of Iraqi WMDs.

The two Russian generals "had visited Baghdad no fewer than 20 times in the preceding five to six years," Shaw revealed. U.S. intelligence knew "the identity and strength of the various Spetsnaz units, their dates of entry and exit in Iraq, and the fact that the effort (to clean up Iraq's WMD stockpiles) with a planning conference in Baku from which they flew to Baghdad."

The Baku conference, chaired by Russian Minister of Emergency Situations Sergei Shoigu, "laid out the plans for the Sarandar clean-up effort so that Shoigu could leave after the keynote speech for Baghdad to orchestrate the planning for the disposal of the WMD."

Subsequent intelligence reports showed that Russian Spetsnaz operatives "were now changing to civilian clothes from military/GRU garb," Shaw said. "The Russian denial of my revelations in late October 2004 included the statement that "only Russian civilians remained in Baghdad." That was the "only true statement" the Russians made, Shaw ironized.

The evacuation of Saddam's WMD to Syria and Lebanon "was an entirely controlled Russian GRU operation," Shaw said. "It was the brainchild of General Yevgenuy Primakov."

The goal of the clean-up was "to erase all trace of Russian involvement" in Saddam's WMD programs, and "was a masterpiece of military camouflage and deception."

Just as astonishing as the Russian clean-up operation were efforts by Bush administration appointees, including Defense Department spokesman Laurence DiRita, to smear Shaw and to cover up the intelligence information he brought to light.

"Larry DiRita made sure that this story would never grow legs," Shaw said. "He whispered sotto voce [quietly] to journalists that there was no substance to my information and that it was the product of an unbalanced mind."

Shaw suggested that the answer of why the Bush administration had systematically "ignored Russia's involvement" in evacuating Saddam's WMD stockpiles "could be much bigger than anyone has thought," but declined to speculate what exactly was involved.

Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney was less reticent. He thought the reason was Iran.

"With Iran moving faster than anyone thought in its nuclear programs," he told NewsMax, "the administration needed the Russians, the Chinese and the French, and was not interested in information that would make them look bad."

McInerney agreed that there was "clear evidence" that Saddam had WMD. "Jack Shaw showed when it left Iraq, and how."

Former Undersecretary of Defense Richard Perle, a strong supporter of the war against Saddam, blasted the CIA for orchestrating a smear campaign against the Bush White House and the war in Iraq.

"The CIA has been at war with the Bush administration almost from the beginning," he said in a keynote speech at the Intelligence Summit on Saturday.

He singled out recent comments by Paul Pillar, a former top CIA Middle East analyst, alleging that the Bush White House "cherry-picked" intelligence to make the case for war in Iraq.

"Mr. Pillar was in a very senior position and was able to make his views known, if that is indeed what he believed," Perle said.

"He (Pillar) briefed senior policy officials before the start of the Iraq war in 2003. If he had had reservations about the war, he could have voiced them at that time." But according to officials briefed by Pillar, Perle said, he never did.

Even more inexplicable, Perle said, were the millions of documents "that remain untranslated" among those seized from Saddam Hussein's intelligence services.

"I think the intelligence community does not want them to be exploited," he said.

Among those documents, presented Saturday at the conference by former FBI translator Bill Tierney, were transcripts of Saddam's palace conversations with top aides in which he discussed ongoing nuclear weapons plans in 2000, well after the U.N. arms inspectors believed he had ceased all nuclear weapons work.

"What was most disturbing in those tapes," Tierney said, "was the fact that the individuals briefing Saddam were totally unknown to the U.N. Special Commission."

In addition, Tierney said, the plasma uranium programs Saddam discussed with his aids as ongoing operations in 2000 had been dismissed as "old programs" disbanded years earlier, according to the final CIA report on Iraq's weapons programs, presented in 2004 by the Iraq Survey Group.

"When I first heard those tapes" about the uranium plasma program, "it completely floored me," Tierney said.

Saudi Women Breaking Into Politics

They said that Rome wasn't built in a day. For Saudi Arabia, it appears that they are inching ever so slowly toward an open society held up on the pillars of democracy. I hope this is a sign of things to come. Between Irans nuclear gambit and the recent parlamentary election of Hamas, it can sometimes seem like the situation in the Middle East is eight shades of hopeless. But for every terrible story there's one like this which provides a modicum of hope (and it's certainly better than continuing coverage of Fudd-Gate).

Certainly in the history of mankind, each nation has had to take its own journey of self-discovery and equality among the sexes. To this day there are those that believe that mega-political elite, Hillary Clinton can't become president simply because she's a women. When you consider that there have been many women in high positions of power; governors, CEO's, senators, Secretaries of State etc. it's hard for me to understand how anyone can still believe that a woman cannot ascend to leader of the free world.

This is why I can't be too hard on Saudi Arabia. We are talking about a stringent and modest society of very conservative people (for the most part). Change does not come easy for anybody, least of all those whom so desperately cling to old structures of power.

That being said, best of luck to the women whom are blazing trails in Saudi political society.

A minor revolution has spread to this sprawling oil town, with six women running this week for seats on the local chamber of commerce in this deeply conservative country where Islam dictates strict segregation of the sexes.

Although winning won't be easy - of the 12,000 merchants eligible to vote, fewer than 500 are women - the election is a marker of change in Saudi Arabia, where progress toward a more open political system, including greater rights for women, is measured in inches, not miles.

"We're setting an example. Women and men can do things together," said candidate Samia Al-Edrisi, an energetic 55-year-old wearing a jeans jacket under a black abaya, a pair of stiletto-heels poking from under the cloak. "It's a very exciting time to be a Saudi woman."

Al-Edrisi and her colleagues in the Eastern Province, home to the world's richest oil fields, have climbed aboard a very small bandwagon. In an unprecedented November chamber of commerce election in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia's second-largest city, a pair of businesswomen became Saudi Arabia's first female elected officials.

Al-Edrisi and her abaya-clad running mates - one of whom wears a veil covering her face - are competing with 40 men for 12 seats on the Chamber of Commerce and Industry board after long being barred from public life.

Minister of Commerce and Economy Hashem Yamani will appoint six other members. Voting started Saturday, and results are expected Thursday. The chamber board has no political authority and serves only an advisory role in economic decisions.

Women are still banned from running or voting in municipal government elections, Saudi Arabia's first democratic experiment, which started last year. Electoral officials have said women might gain the right to cast ballots in political elections in 2009.

Saudi women lack many rights taken for granted in most of the rest of the world. They are not allowed to drive or to work in the same offices as men. Their ownership of businesses has, until recently, been restricted to ventures like hair salons, boutiques and spas.

Even the Chamber of Commerce building, a shiny glass-and-concrete tower along the Dammam highway, is off-limits to women during working hours.

But that's changing.

"It's going to be hard for them," candidate Suad Al-Zaydi, an interior designer, said of the chamber's male board members. "They've been sitting alone, just men, for all these years. They won't be able to speak their minds anymore. They'll have to understand there are women in the room."

King Abdullah, who took the throne in August after the death of his half brother Fahd, has spoken in favor of a larger role for women. The six women candidates credited Abdullah's personal intervention for their opportunity to run.

Al-Edrisi, a clothing importer, says the kingdom's future depends on women joining public life. But she also believes Saudis won't tolerate rapid change, noting the chaos in Iraq after U.S. forces ousted Saddam Hussein.

"Iraq is horrifying for all of us," Al-Edrisi said. "We don't want upheaval no matter how much we want democracy. Stability is not overrated, especially in the Middle East."

But pressure for change is everywhere, including from the Bush administration, which Al-Edrisi says harms their cause by identifying it with America.

There's motivation aplenty from within Saudi Arabia, particularly from educated women who might choose to leave if denied meaningful careers, Al-Edrisi said. She cited her two college-educated daughters, who she said will not stay in Saudi Arabia if reform is too slow.

"It's a global economy now. They'll seek opportunities wherever they are," she said, gesturing with her mobile phone.
Saudi attitudes on women appear to be ahead of government policy. Working women were once viewed as headstrong and had trouble finding husbands. Now, the women said, a career helps attract a husband.

Al-Edrisi said she is among the first generation of educated Saudi women professionals, a product of the roaring 1960s and '70s, when the country seemed bent on Western-style advancement - a phase which slowed significantly during the Islamic backlash that started in the 1980s.

Four of the six women candidates worked for state oil giant Saudi Aramco, once an American-owned company where the working language is English. Aramco is one of few Saudi companies that allows women and men to work together.

Now, the candidates hope, reforms are starting again. If elected, they vow to push for workplace integration and female ownership of industrial businesses.

Winning will be difficult. Most businesswomen were stricken from voter rolls on what the candidates describe as a technicality - lack of a commercial license.

"If any of us gets in, we are going to back her up with all our resources," Al-Edrisi said. "We want to make sure this experiment succeeds because we want it to continue."

Here’s the Bullets Friend, Now Let Me Turn My Back…

I can only assume that the Bush policy going forward is that we expose ourselves as much as we can to potential fanatical Arab/Muslim violence and then be in a constant state of reactive war. In other words, we’ll just give Al Qaeda et al every opportunity to kill American citizens and then when the dust settles, we’ll blow somebody up. This will be fine because as we all know, “Freedom is on the march.”

The latest news out of Washington is that our good friends, the United Arab Emirates, are in line to control the security of America’s most valuable ports. Mind you, this is the same UAE that insists the Israeli’s are a terrorist state and is also the UAE that was used as both an operational and financial staging ground for the 9/11 attack.

The deal is not set in stone just yet as some Democrats believe that handing over port security to quasi-hostile Arab nations is probably not in our best interest.

The Washington Post reports, ”The U.S. government should urgently review the security implications of a $6.8 billion deal granting a Dubai-based company management over key ports including New York, U.S. lawmakers said on Thursday, citing terrorism concerns.

Analysts and port sources doubted the takeover of British company P&O by Dubai Ports World would have any impact on security. They cited multiple layers of screening and protection involved in global shipping, particularly among such major operators.

P&O shareholders voted on Monday in favor of the multibillion-dollar bid, giving the United Arab Emirates-backed firm control over the management of P&O's global operations, including in the major U.S. ports of New York and New Jersey, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New Orleans and Miami.

The deal makes Dubai Ports World the world's third largest ports group.”

But the Bush administration has promised that all is well and that the Arabs in this scenario can absolutely be trusted. The Secretary of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, said the Government built in "certain conditions or requirements that the company had to agree to".

A deal such as this reveals the real intent of the Bush administration when it comes to national security. Bush and company are CEO’s and that is exactly how they run this country. America is a business and their job is to help the business make quick money, regardless of any ethics violations or potential for destruction.

The United Arab Emirates is become the new Saudi Arabia. According Al Bawaba, “Statistics issued by the American Ministry of Commerce show that the volume of trade between the UAE and the USA doubled to Dh 36.5 billion ($9.95 billion) last year, up from Dh 19.2 billion ($5.2 billion) in the previous year, say a 90% growth.

According to Al-Khaleej newspaper, which cited the US statistics, the value of the American trade surplus with the UAE jumped to Dh 25.7 billion ($7 billion) last year, up from Dh 10.6 billion ($2.9 billion) in the previous year, i.e. a 140% growth.
© 2006 Mena Report (www.menareport.com)

Al Bawaba also reports, “Soaring oil prices and a vibrant UAE economy are expected to further boost the private wealth of UAE citizens in the coming three years, according to recent estimates.

With some 53,000 dollar millionaires, the UAE already has a greater networth of billionaires than does the United States-- the world's richest nation, reported Khaleej Times.

UAE's private wealth sector is expected to grow by a staggering 12.5 percent per year, exceeding the average rate throughout the Gulf.

The country's GDP grew 16 percent to $120 billion in 2005 from $103 billion in 2004, and has a per capita income currently of $28,138, one of the highest in the world.

It also boasts the fourth largest gas reserve and third largest oil reserves in the world, and is the second largest economy in the GCC after Saudi Arabia.

Furthermore, some 67.4 percent of the country's fiscal revenue is derived from non-oil sectors.

Much like China, ethics and humanitarian concerns fly right out of the window where trade and commerce are concerned.

As a matter of fact, one US company is banking on a continued rise in capital investments in the UAE as they stand to make money off of space tourism.

The AP reports that, ”A day after Space Adventures announced it was in a venture to develop rocket ships for suborbital flights, the company said Friday it plans to build a $265 million spaceport in the United Arab Emirates.

The commercial spaceport would be based in Ras Al-Khaimah near the southern end of the Persian Gulf, and the UAE government has made an initial investment of $30 million, the Arlington, Va.-based company said in a statement.

The spaceport announcement comes on the heels of Space Adventures' new partnership with an investment firm founded by major sponsors of the Ansari X Prize to develop rocket ships for suborbital flights.

The agreement between Space Adventures and the Texas-based venture capital firm Prodea would help finance suborbital vehicles being designed and built by the Russian aerospace firm Myasishchev Design Bureau.

Space Adventures is best known for sending the first three space tourists to the orbiting international space station for a reported $20 million a person.

Space Adventures' jump into the infant suborbital flight industry comes at a time when several companies already are designing spaceships to take paying passengers on short trips up into space and then back to Earth without circling the globe.”

Everyone from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on down is defending the UAE and it’s apparent right to take over security of our ports. And since the Democrats these days can’t block this administration from taking candy from a baby, despite efforts by such vaunted Senators as Ms. Clinton and Robert Menendez, let alone try to block a multibillion dollar business deal, you can bet that we will be seeing our good friends, the Arabs at our local ports very soon.

New Review: Do As I Say (Not As I Do)

The following is a brief excerpt from a review posted on PopandPolitics.com:

Politics is a full-contact sport. Since at least the 2000 presidential election, there have been followers of both the Republican and Democratic parties who are more rabid and devout than any sports fan. If you’ve been to any bar or meet-up lately, the table top conversations between average Americans who have even a passing interest in politics can get hotter than butter dripping off of a hot biscuit.

The publishing industry, where politics is concerned, is also taking a page from the record industry. Some smaller record companies will release niche albums to certain core audiences in order to compete for parcels of the marketplace that the mainstream releases would miss. These days, the book publishing industry is doing the same. On the shelves of your local chain super bookstore, there are tomes specifically intended for niche audiences and rabid, partisan fans.

“Do As I Say (Not As I Do)” by Hoover Institution fellow Peter Schweizer, is red meat for the South Park Conservative masses. Don’t get me wrong, I found it to be a fair and well-researched book, but let’s be honest here -- you’d be hard pressed to find a liberal reader willing to give this book a chance, as its intended purpose is to skewer the pantheon of Democratic Party icons.

Schweizer has chosen liberal luminaries Ralph Nader, Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Al Franken, Ted Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, George Soros, Barbara Streisand, Gloria Steinem, and Cornel West as the targets of his professed belief that elite liberals cannot and will not live by the philosophical dictates they profess. Continued

Cheney Takes Full Blame for Shooting

This is wonderful...can we please get on with some important FREAKING NEWS now?!!!!

I swear to God I hate the American media.

Vice President Dick Cheney took full blame Wednesday for shooting a hunting companion, calling it "one of the worst days of my life," but he was defiantly unapologetic about not publicly disclosing the accident until the next day.

"You can't blame anybody else," Cheney told Fox News Channel in his first public comments since the accident on a private Texas ranch Saturday. "I'm the guy who pulled the trigger and shot my friend."

Cheney said he had had a beer at lunch that day but nobody was drinking when they went back out to hunt a couple hours later. Law enforcement officials have ruled out alcohol as a factor.

The vice president has been under intense political pressure to speak out about the accident, which has become a public relations embarrassment and potential political liability for the White House. Senior advisers to President Bush worried that Cheney's silence had suggested a possible cover-up, and Cheney acknowledged that he delayed an announcement over the advice of Bush's press advisers.

"We really didn't know until Sunday morning that Harry was probably going to be OK, that it looked like there hadn't been any serious damage to any vital organ," he said. "And that's when we began the process of notifying the press."

Cheney was soft-spoken and appeared shaken as he described seeing 78-year-old Harry Whittington drop to the ground after he pulled the trigger on his 28-gauge shotgun while aiming at a covey of quail.

"The image of him falling is something I'll never ever be able to get out of my mind," Cheney told Fox's Brit Hume. "I fired, and there's Harry falling. It was, I'd have to say, one of the worst days of my life at that moment."

Cheney defended his decision not to publicly disclose what happened until the next day, when he agreed to the suggestion of ranch owner Katharine Armstrong to have her announce it to a local newspaper. "I thought that was the right call. I still do," the vice president said.

Armstrong has suggested that Whittington was at fault in the shooting because, she said, he failed to announce himself as he returned to the hunting line after breaking off to retrieve a downed bird. But Cheney, who has been hunting for at least 12 years, said in no uncertain terms that Whittington was not at fault.

"You can talk about all of the other conditions that exist at the time, but that's the bottom line and - it was not Harry's fault," he said.

Texas officials said the shooting was an accident, and no charges have been brought.

Cheney said the accident happened after Whittington stepped out of the hunting party to retrieve a downed bird in deep cover. Cheney said he and a third hunter walked about 100 yards away to where another covey had been spotted. He said immediately after he shot at a bird flying to his right, he saw Whittington in his line of fire.

He said Whittington was dressed properly in orange and the upper part of his body was visible, but he was standing in a gully with the sun behind him, which affected his view.

"I saw him fall, basically. It had happened so fast," Cheney said. "He was struck in the right side of his face, his neck and his upper torso on the right side of his body."

He said Whittington was conscious and breathing but stunned silent.

"I ran over to him," Cheney said. "He was laying there on his back, obviously, bleeding. You could see where the shot struck him."

Cheney said he had no idea if he hit a bird because he was focused on Whittington.

"I said, 'Harry, I had no idea you were there.' He didn't respond," Cheney said.

Whittington was in stable condition Wednesday at a Texas hospital, a day after doctors said one of the pellets traveled to his heart and he had what they called "a mild heart attack."

Cheney said he had agreed that Armstrong should be the one to make the story public because she was an eyewitness, because she grew up on the ranch and because she is "an acknowledged expert in all of this" as a past head of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. He also agreed with her decision to choose the Corpus Christi Caller-Times as the way to get the news out.

"I thought that made good sense because you can get as accurate a story as possible from somebody who knew and understood hunting and then it would immediately go up to the wires and be posted on the Web site, which is the way it went out and I thought that was the right call," Cheney said.

"What do you think now?" Hume asked.

"I still do," Cheney responded. "The accuracy was enormously important. I had no press person with me."

Cheney said he was concerned that if the story broke Saturday night when information was still coming in, some reports may have been inaccurate since it was a complicated story that most journalists had never dealt with before.

"I've been in the business for a long time and never seen a situation quite like this," Cheney said. "We've had experiences where the president has been shot. We've never had a situation where the vice president shot somebody."

Cheney said he personally first told the White House about the accident Sunday morning in a phone call to Chief of Staff Andy Card. He said he didn't discuss it with Bush until Monday when he was back in Washington.

Cheney said White House press secretary Scott McClellan and communications strategist Dan Bartlett urged him to get the story out quickly, but he made the decision how to handle it.

"I had a bit of the feeling that the press corps was upset because, to some extent, it was about them - they didn't like the idea that we called the Corpus Christi Caller-Times instead of The New York Times," he said. "But it strikes me that the Corpus Christi Caller-Times is just as valid a news outlet as The New York Times is, especially for covering a major story in south Texas."

Mass. says Wal-Mart must stock morning-after pill

Over the passed couple of weeks I've talked about a variety of topics, many of which garnered serious debate among the readers. One of those stories concerns Wal-Mart and the Morning-After Pill. There have been developments in that story, which call for a response:

A Massachusetts regulatory board voted on Tuesday to require Wal-Mart stores to stock morning-after contraceptives, two weeks after three women in the state sued Wal-Mart for refusing to fill orders for the pills.

If Wal-Mart complies, Massachusetts will become the second state after Illinois to require the world's biggest retailer to carry the Plan B contraceptive, which must be taken within 72 hours after sex to prevent pregnancy.

The Massachusetts Board of Registration in Pharmacy said it had sent Wal-Mart lawyers a letter informing them of its unanimous decision.

Wal-Mart has until Thursday to provide written compliance to the board's ruling and Wal-Mart spokesman Dan Fogleman has said the retailer would abide by any directive from the state pharmacy board.

First, let me clear up some lingering questions about where I was coming from in this article. I respect Wal-Mart's right to carry whatever products they see fit to sell or not carry products they believe have low demand. This is why I don't write article griping about them carrying textile products made from cheap, foreign labor. That's the marketplace and I can dig it.

What I was complaining about was Wal-Mart claiming to be store that is all about promoting the best value for their customers while opting to take a moral stance against the Morning-After Pill. Their stated defense was lack of consumer interest but I don't believe for second that that is true. The company has too long of a history of being allied with the religious right for me to think that its motives were purely economical in this case.

As for the argument about how I shouldn't complain at all and I just shouldn't shop there...thanks for the libertarian advice but I think I'll just stick up for what I believe is right, if it's all the same to you. Contrary to what is apparently popular opinion, neither my fiancé nor myself had a personal stake in this case. We live in Brandon, FL, which is a suburb outside of Tampa. There is a Walgreen’s next to one of the dozen local Wal-Marts in the area. Trust me, we have options about where to buy contraceptives.

This isn't just about free market principle. This is about purposeful manipulation by a major consumer corporation to manipulate its customer, especially in rural areas, to take up and practice a particular religious value, when they may in fact not want to adhere to said value. I don't care if I can Plan B is as many as 3 other stores within a block radius, that doesn't make what Wal-Mart is doing and has done right in the slightest.

As for the argument about the rest of the world being able to shop in other places besides Wal-Mart so nobody should protest Wal-Mart's policies, I say come out of your hole, get in your car, pack a sack lunch and go the see country. There are parts of these United States that are perpetually stuck in a time warp. Not every town has the advantages of a major city and the shopping freedom that goes with it. Hell, in Alabama, there are some places that still only have dirt roads, let alone a variety of consumer choices.

There's also the issue of Wal-Mart eliminating much of the competition throughout the country. As I wrote in my previous article, the modus operandi of Wally World is to set up shop in rural areas where they will unchallenged and can monopolize the local market. In the end, locals in these forgotten towns have little to no choice but to shop in Wal-Mart, and admittedly will do so without consideration of the political ramifications.

Now what some of you have said is, "Aw poor baby! I guess you'll just have to go a bit further to buy groceries then." I can only assume that the people making this argument don't have children or have lots of expendable income. In the real world where housing and food costs tend to eat up more than 50% of your income, value shopping is of critical importance. Convenience too is important in that you don't want to spend hours on the road shopping for household needs when you have a family to attend to. There are more issues than just the free market.

I don't know why this particular story seemed to threaten so many of you who wrote me back or commented on the site. Turning the argument around, if we are to let the free market rule, wouldn't it behoove Wal-Mart to carry all manner of product available in order to maximize their sales? Sure they don't have to but as someone who has worked in many a retail story, there's nothing worse than not being able to make an easy sale just because you don't have the particular product in need.

But again, this is not about the free market. This is about doing what is right. It is not right to force your values on people, especially when you know you have a captive audience. Apparently, the Mass court thinks so as well.

Orwell, Islam and St. Valentines Day

Valentines Day. If you are with someone you love, it is an opportunity to shower that person with attention and affection befitting the Queen of Egypt (especially you men, if you know what’s good for you). If you are not involved with someone romantically, it’s either a day you’d just as soon forget or possibly (if you’ve got it like that) an opportunity to meet someone whom is just as lonely as you.

Whatever the day means to you and yours particularly, February is the month dedicated to celebration of love (and black history)). Historically, expressions of love consisted of cards or notes exchanged between lovers. These days many women regard Valentines Day as important if not more so than Christmas or their birthday (which in the minds of many women, should be regarded as a national holiday).

However, not all women in the world see Valentines Day as a positive event. For example, according to Agence France-Presse , “An Islamic separatist women's group, known for its fierce opposition to Western-style romance, vowed to prevent couples celebrating Valentine's Day in revolt-hit Indian Kashmir.

"We will not allow anyone to observe Valentine's Day as it does nothing but spread immorality among youth," said Aasiya Andrabi, firebrand leader of the separatist Dukhtaran-e-Millat or Daughters of Faith.

The group, which supports a 16-year-old separatist insurgency against New Delhi's rule in Indian Kashmir, is also engaged in a crusade to stamp out immorality in the Muslim-majority region.

Valentine's Day, which is celebrated February 14, is "against our culture and Islamic teachings," Andrabi said in a statement reported by Current News, a local news agency.

Once again we see the mighty Islam threatened by innocuous inanimate objects and symbols of very human emotions. It seems that every time we turn around, there’s another story out there about someone from the Islamic faith complaining that fairly normal behavior distracts too much from worshiping in the Muslim faith.

One has to wonder how that religion lasted as long as it has when the natural tendency for any human being is to flout convention and seek out the least common denominator.

As an aside, just to prove my point, not long after coalition forces ousted Baghdad from Baathist rule, men in Iraq sought out porn, in droves at the local Internet cafes. Now one could make the argument that they were just overcome by devilish Western immorality but I highly doubt we had much to do with it.
This is not the first time I’ve heard of Islamic states attempting to morally police their civilian populations. The BBC reported two years ago that, “Iran's morality police have made several raids in Tehran, in an apparent crackdown on women who flout the strict Islamic dress code.
Witnesses said dozens of young women were held in the raids on shopping centres and shops in the capital.

Police also confiscated several items of clothing deemed to be too revealing.

After winning parliamentary elections in February, hardliners warned they would not tolerate what they described as social corruption.”

We hear all the time about how we’re living in an Orwellian society, mostly based on how corporations manipulate the mainstream media into producing stories meant to shape the minds of an unread public. All things are possible but it seems to me that as far as Orwellian societies go, the Muslim world has us beaten hands down.

In Orwell’s “1984” the citizens of Oceania, spoke a dumbed down version of English called Newspeak meant to stave off behaviorally unacceptable or unappealing actions of their tightly controlled public. The main characters sexual life, was entirely regulated by two Newspeak words, sexcrime (sexual immorality) and goodsex (chastity).
Sexcrime spoke to all sexual misdeeds as the government perceived them such as fornication, adultery, homosexuality, and other so-called perversions, and, in addition, normal intercourse practiced for its own sake. In this quasi-fascist apocalyptic future, these acts of amour were all punishable by death.

Now “1984” was a fictional story about where the Western world seemed to be headed back in 1948. However, the more I look at what Orwell was saying about the future of society, the more his predictions seemed to be describing modern fundamentalist Islam, morality police and all.

It seems ridiculous to me that any country would spend resources to try and control peoples private behavior but then I’m just a Satanic Western infidel, so what do I know?

This does bring me to what I believe is an interesting point. The powers that be in the Muslim world are trying to rid their sphere of all Western cultural influences while desperately hanging on to Western technology and of course, Western money. Going back to the lovely ladies of Kashmir, they seem to be regarding Valentines Day as a Trojan horse of sorts, smuggling in to their pristine culture and bevy of depravity and lucidness. But, is Valentines Day just an Anglo thing or has it been adopted by all parts of the world and reframed to meet their cultural mores?

According to Thanhniennews.com, even our old Communist enemy, the Vietnamese have gotten into the spirit of love and romance.

Seeking the best gift for Valentine’s Day on February 14 has become a chance for Vietnamese youngsters to express their heartfelt feelings towards their significant other.
Since early February many souvenir gift shops in Ho Chi Minh City have been crowded with young shoppers seeking that perfect Valentines Day gift.

Personally, I say go with something thoughtfully engraved. Nothing makes a girls heart melt like a gift that was meant for HER and HER only. At least that was what my fiancé told me as we were walking through the mall during the pre-Valentines Day sales.

That’s hardly the issue here. While some radical Kashmiri women are looking to suck the fun out of yet another widely acceptable cultural phenomenon, I believe this latest episode between the East and West is a small part of a larger issue. Aside from nuclear annihilation and all of that, there is certainly more at stake in the War on Terror than I think people realize. The question boils down to whether or you want to live in the world we enjoy now or one where tokens of love and affection are sin against man.

Happy Valentines Day!

US prepares military blitz against Iran's nuclear sites

It is unclear what exactly this means. We have plans to attack all kinds of nation in the event something strange happens in the world. We are also updating these plans on fairly regularly basis. Many this means something, or maybe my fiance is right and it's only relatively meaningless until the bombs actually start falling. It's hard to say right now so all I can do is report this sort of thing when I see it.

Though I'm not the only one who thought it something of note as the story was posted on Drudge's site as well.

Strategists at the Pentagon are drawing up plans for devastating bombing raids backed by submarine-launched ballistic missile attacks against Iran's nuclear sites as a "last resort" to block Teheran's efforts to develop an atomic bomb.

Central Command and Strategic Command planners are identifying targets, assessing weapon-loads and working on logistics for an operation, the Sunday Telegraph has learnt.

They are reporting to the office of Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, as America updates plans for action if the diplomatic offensive fails to thwart the Islamic republic's nuclear bomb ambitions. Teheran claims that it is developing only a civilian energy programme.

"This is more than just the standard military contingency assessment," said a senior Pentagon adviser. "This has taken on much greater urgency in recent months."

The prospect of military action could put Washington at odds with Britain which fears that an attack would spark violence across the Middle East, reprisals in the West and may not cripple Teheran's nuclear programme. But the steady flow of disclosures about Iran's secret nuclear operations and the virulent anti-Israeli threats of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has prompted the fresh assessment of military options by Washington. The most likely strategy would involve aerial bombardment by long-distance B2 bombers, each armed with up to 40,000lb of precision weapons, including the latest bunker-busting devices. They would fly from bases in Missouri with mid-air refuelling.

The Bush administration has recently announced plans to add conventional ballistic missiles to the armoury of its nuclear Trident submarines within the next two years. If ready in time, they would also form part of the plan of attack.

Teheran has dispersed its nuclear plants, burying some deep underground, and has recently increased its air defences, but Pentagon planners believe that the raids could seriously set back Iran's nuclear programme.

Iran was last weekend reported to the United Nations Security Council by the International Atomic Energy Agency for its banned nuclear activities. Teheran reacted by announcing that it would resume full-scale uranium enrichment - producing material that could arm nuclear devices.

The White House says that it wants a diplomatic solution to the stand-off, but President George W Bush has refused to rule out military action and reaffirmed last weekend that Iran's nuclear ambitions "will not be tolerated".

Sen John McCain, the Republican front-runner to succeed Mr Bush in 2008, has advocated military strikes as a last resort. He said recently: "There is only only one thing worse than the United States exercising a military option and that is a nuclear-armed Iran."

Senator Joe Lieberman, a Democrat, has made the same case and Mr Bush is expected to be faced by the decision within two years.

By then, Iran will be close to acquiring the knowledge to make an atomic bomb, although the construction will take longer. The President will not want to be seen as leaving the White House having allowed Iran's ayatollahs to go atomic.

In Teheran yesterday, crowds celebrating the anniversary of the 1979 Islamic revolution chanted "Nuclear technology is our inalienable right" and cheered Mr Ahmadinejad when he said that Iran may reconsider membership of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

He was defiant over possible economic sanctions.

Weekend Odds and Ends

My book review ended up being posted a day early so now since I had nothing planned for this Friday, I figured I'd throw up yet another round-up type column. These are some stories that were either sent to me by friends or something I saw that didn't warrant a full column per se but I wanted to comment on them anyway.

But first, a word from our sponsor:



...and we're back.

The first article come from the desk of John Brodigan

AIRHEAD ADMITS THREAT

A dimwitted teen phoned in a terrifying bomb threat to LaGuardia Airport - forcing panicked passengers to evacuate a plane - so she could buy herself time to get on the flight to avoid an explosive love triangle.

Airheaded Anna Tarasov, 19, admitted to The Post yesterday that she came up with the scheme because the subway made her late for her impending flight from New York to Georgia to confront a jealous boyfriend.

"I remember thinking it wouldn't be such a big deal. It totally slipped my mind about the terrorists," the red-faced teen said...

In my program, the clients have to ascend four levels in order to successfully discharge from the program. If they don't earn their levels it's usually because myself or other clinical staff feel that they are not ready to move up. However, the client will frequently reframe it that we held said client back from getting, "their" level. In turn we on the clinical staff will say that it is only themselves that can hold them back from completing the program.

This is why I laughed at the notion that the "subway" made her miss her flight. Now I've been on the NYC subway many times and yes there are times when things happen and you get stuck, but in this case, I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the MTA. In reality, she probably didn't leave on time and didn't account for subway time, thus making herself miss the plane.

This bit about calling in a bomb threat; that just shows how the average American child views the War on Terror. They don't. Unless you have a relative overseas, I think that most kids today haven't got a clue as to what's going on the world, and unfortunately, that person has an equal vote to mine. I hope this idiot just get probation.

Now onto more serious business:

Iran, Venezuela declare war on petrodollar

Iran and Venezuela have joined forces in an effort to undermine the U.S. dollar. In October 2005, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez announced that Venezuela was ready to move the country's foreign-exchange holdings out of the dollar and into the euro. He also called for the creation of a South American central bank designed to hold in euros all the foreign-exchange holdings of the participating countries.

Beginning in 2003, Iran began demanding oil payment in euros, not dollars, although the oil itself was still priced in dollars. Iran has announced the intention of opening an Iranian Oil Bourse in March to challenge NYMEX (the New York Mercantile Exchange) and IPE (London's International Petroleum Exchange).

Saddam Hussein may well have signed his death warrant in 2000 when he began the process of convincing the United Nations that Iraq could sell Iraqi oil for euros, not dollars. Saddam ultimately received U.N. permission to convert Iraq's $10 billion oil-for-food foreign reserves from dollars to euros.

The risk to the United States does not involve how oil is priced – oil could conceivably be priced in any liquid currency, since pricing is a largely technical issue needed to establish transaction values. The real issue is foreign-currency reserves.

The United States relies on approximately 70 percent of all foreign-exchange currency to be held in dollars because we sell Treasury debt into that foreign-exchange market. Should Venezuela and Iran succeed in creating a worldwide flight of foreign-exchange reserves away from the dollar and into the euro, the move could depress the value of the dollar.

Dwindling foreign exchange dollar holdings could end up pushing the Treasury to sell debt into a smaller international supply of dollars, with the dollar not being as strong as it is today. Increasing the cost of our "twin deficits" – the budget deficit and the trade deficit – would have detrimental effects on the U.S. economy and on a Bush administration which seems to have lost traditional Republican budgetary discipline. Continued

In my commentary titled "War is Money" I talked about the Iranian oil bourse and what it means to the possibility of war against Iran. I've said it before and I'll say it again, there will be war before this administration allows Iran to cause our economy to go straight down the tubes. You can bet that if the Iranians decide to take the Russian, that is the deal in which uranium enrichment will be done in Russia rather than in Iran, somehow the US will find a way to undermine the deal, thus setting Tehran up for the kill.

On a personal note, I did spend nearly all of last year saying that something like this was going to happen. Where's my TV and/or radio deal Mr. Murdoch?

New Review: The Republican War on Science

The following is a brief excerpt from a review posted on PopandPolitics.com:

If trade and economy are the lifeblood of this country, then science and technology are its heart. To be the dominant player in the global trade arena, your country must be the one that leads in all manner of invention, whether it’s in the military, medical, or technological realm. If your country is to be competitive against an ever increasing tide of hungry countries emerging out of third world status, yours must have the superior science.
The problem these days is that most people charged with keeping the American economy humming and making us competitive against rival countries often appear to treat scientific research as a necessary evil. Sure, the average CEO loves science when it births a new product that can garner millions on the open market, but you don’t see that same level of enthusiasm when science singles out their product as being dangerous to the welfare of society. Many of our corporate leaders shun science when it is discovered that their business is causing environmental degradation or health risks.

When corporate leadership finds itself under the spotlight of scientific inquiry, they call upon their friends in Washington (both parties) to come and protect them from cost-affecting legislation. The result is that whenever a company is found to be creating say, enormous amounts of greenhouse gas that then causes global warming, instead of writing or signing legislation that would curb greenhouse gas emissions and limit environmental degradation, our elected officials act as corporate guardians and either dismiss the data that points to the problem as inconclusive or write ineffective legislation.

This is the major thrust of Seed magazine correspondent Chris Mooney’s first book. “The Republican War on Science" is about the relationship between science and politics, and though its title may lead most to believe that this is some anti-Bush, Green screed written only to smear the Republican Party in an important election year, Mooney’s efforts are far from that. In actuality, this is an incredibly fair and well researched book on how politicians, mostly Republicans but some Democrats as well, abuse the scientific community in order to please their donors in the business community. Continued

The End of Youthful Creative Expression

When I was in 10th grade, I wrote in my Honors English journal that I was depressed, angry and often thought of killing myself due to my situation at home. My father seemed miserable at his job and in my mind he appeared to be taking it out on me. He wasn’t vicious or abusive luckily, just unpleasant to be around. I felt like I couldn’t make him happy no matter what I did and that made me think I’d be better off dead.

My mother always came home angry from her job at my families chocolate confections store. Though we get along much better today, I can remember very distinctly the feeling of dread whenever she thundered through the door in the early afternoons of my teenage years.

Having been a fat kid for most of my adolescence, on top of being a white boy in a black neighborhood (as the song goes) first, then a white boy in a white neighborhood who talked like a black kid when I moved at age 12, I was picked on for almost as long as I can remember. So I was miserable at school because I was frequently teased, miserable at home because I got to feeling that my parents hated me and life in general, and so in response I wrote in my journal that I wished I was dead. I thought about killing myself to spare my parents any more misery in their life.

When my English teacher, a fairly tolerant woman, read what I had written she called my parents and warned them about my suicidal ideations. My dear ole pappy responded, “My son is not stupid enough to kill himself.”

That one statement probably changed my life. I stopped feeling sorry for myself and furthermore, just stopped trying to live for the approval of my parents. A few years later I would have my revenge by singing Rage Against the Machines “Killing in the Name Of” at my senior year rock show in front of all the school board administrators, my extended family and the PTA. If you are at all familiar with that song, you can imagine just how mortified they were every time I screamed, “Fuck you won’t do what you tell me!”

Written expressions of suicide were not my only creative outlet. I once wrote a poem comparing the neutron bomb to a chicken with its head cut off. The guitarist in my band and I made up a satire of the 2000 Year Old Man comedy sketch, called, “Interview with a Brain on Acid.” Another Mark Radulich original poem compared all of the deaths in the name of God and religion to the victims of the Holocaust in which I asked, “Is Hitler God?”

All of these works were summarily banned from the high school magazine despite the efforts of the student staff that lobbied on my behalf for their inclusion. By the time I graduated I was somewhat of a legend in that I was known for constantly flouting Plainedge High Schools practiced norms.


Was I your typical snotty suburban liberal? Absolutely. Did my teachers think I was a bit of a nut? Sure. But this was before the 1999 Columbine school shootings. This was before the usual creative expressions of teenage angst and alienation became fodder for an almost fascist repression by adults too lazy to bother understanding their children. Looking back on how my parents and teachers handled me from the years 1990 – 1994, I consider myself to be blessed.

However, David Riehm lives in the post-Columbine era and therefore his creative writing is subject to psychological analysis.

According to a story reported by Court TV, a 17-year-old Minnesota high school student, David Riehm was committed to an adult psychiatric ward after submitting two questionable pieces of creative writing. One was a, “satirical fable [that] concerned a boy who awoke from a wet dream, slipped rear-end first onto a toy cone, and then had his head crushed "in a misty red explosion" under the tires of a school bus.”

This first piece only worried his teacher and she expressed this caution in the form of criticism and a desire for him to make changes in his life. He answered her by writing another story titled, “Bowling for Cuntcheson,” a vivid dream-within-a-dream about a boy who finds a gun under a church pew and shoots his teacher, "Mrs. Cuntcheson." Obviously, with memories of a dozen or more school shootings since 1999, this teacher, a Ms. Ann Mershon, immediately acted on her authority as a mandated reported.

This action resulted in, “David [being] suspended on Jan. 24, 2005. The next night, three men — a Cook County deputy sheriff, a state trooper and a social worker — showed up at Colleen Riehm's home on the Grand Portage Indian Reservation with a court order to seize her son and commit him to a psychiatric ward 150 miles away in Duluth. (David's stepfather is Native American, but David is not enrolled in any tribe.)

With no room at the juvenile facility, David was temporarily placed in the adult unit.

"He was scared to death," David's attorney told Courttv.com. "He didn't know what was going to happen from one minute to the next."

A physician later determined David was neither mentally ill nor dangerous, and more than 100 letters of support, written by classmates, faculty and parents, were presented at a court hearing, his attorney said.

David was ordered released from the hospital 72 hours after he had been taken into custody. His mother received $6,000 in medical bills.

It’s no wonder many kids today just give up and give in to drugs. Obviously it doesn’t make it right but it would be hard for me not to understand where many of them are coming from. The gap of understanding between adults and children is widening more everyday as both side stick fingers in their ears and scream, “La la la la, I’m not listening.” It’s sad really. It saddens me that in the 12 short years since I graduated from high school the notion of children as being a mild but nurtured nuisance seems to have devolved into regarding children as mass murdering pariahs.

I never thought I’d say this but thank God for the ACLU. It’s not fair to judge every child, especially with all the subversive influences out there, by the same measuring stick as the kids who were obviously ill and rampaged through their schools. Had I been born 10 years later, who knows how my parents would have reacted to the childish antics of my youth.

Though they weren’t always pleased with my choices, more often than not they supported me in my creative endeavors instead of opting to drug me and ship me off to a program. In the case of the teachers, it’s one thing to be concerned, as I’m sure she had a right to be, but we can’t over react every time a kid writes a nasty story. What is the message that sends? Only the most innocuous and uninteresting stuff is worthy of consideration in today’s school, lest someone help himself or herself to their grandfather’s arsenal?

Maybe a better plan would be for adults to start talking to their children again, parents and teachers alike before an entire generation of kids is lost to an endless stream of drugs, therapy and malaise.

There are More Countries than Iraq and Iran, Horatio

It’s not always about the Middle East. Sure some Muslims are setting fires to buildings and we’re all worried about Iran’s nuclear program but outside of the occasional story that breaks into the mainstream news, our singular focus on the Arab world has blinded us to the very real threat of rising super power nations like China and India. It has also blinded us to the re-emergence of old super power nemeses like Russia.

I realize that there are most likely plenty of smart people in Washington who realize that we are not the America of the 1950’s and are writing policies to deal with a changing world, but from my vantage point, it doesn’t seem like this administration nor the people of this country really know that world has categorically changed to favor East Asian hegemony.

China presents the biggest issue. So many of the world’s strings are tied directly to what is quickly becoming the global community’s workshop. Last year I wrote about how the Chinese are building up their military such to the point that some thought an invasion of Taiwan was imminent. This idea was furthered by joint war games between the Chinese and Russian militaries with the stated goal of fighting Chechen terrorism and Taiwanese secession. Needless to say, with a law on the books stating that if the Chinese invade Taiwan, we will intervene with our military, a few hairs were raised on Capitol Hill.

To date we’ve been lucky that the Chinese are contented with limiting their political muscle to bullying Google and such but that doesn’t mean the Chinese aren’t still a mounting threat. For example, according to the Kenya Times, ”As part of the Pentagon report delivered to Congress last month, China is now prepared and has the capability of neutralising Japan and striking US cities with submarine launched nuclear missiles from far out in the pacific. Richard Fisher, the Vice President of the think tank asserted: ''China is in the midst of perhaps the largest military build up the world has witnessed since the end of the Cold war.'' John Tkacik- a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation raised similar alarm: ''Beijing's weapons modernisation and military reforms is aimed at projecting national power.'' This is a wake up call to the Bush administration, Taiwan government and US allies in the Asia Pacific region.

The current foreign-policy focus of the US is upon the Middle East and more broadly upon the Muslim world, given the ongoing war in Iraq and the continuing threat from Islamic terrorism. However, the region with the most dynamic growth today-and with the greater potential weight in world politics in the future- is East Asia. And the most dynamic and weighty country in that region is China.

The problem is entirely about their military either. And this is what cracks me up about the American left; often you’ll hear many a tree-hugging-liberal whine and cry about how the US is destroying Mother Earth with our use of fossil fuels and other pollution causing industries. But there’s nary a word mentioned about the damage caused by other countries, which in the case of China, has the potential to surpass any and all ecological damage done by the US. It is this very reason that President Bush opted not to sign the Kyoto Protocol (at least that was the stated reason).

However, Bloomberg reports that, ”China faces massive environmental challenges, especially in providing clean water, that threaten its economic growth, said Elizabeth Economy, director for Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York…Three hundred million people, out of a population of 1.3 billion people, are drinking contaminated water every day, and 190 million people drink water that makes them physically ill, Economy said.

The country has 20 of the world's 30 most polluted cities, mostly because of the heavy use of coal and increasing numbers of cars and other motorized vehicles, according to the World Bank. Automobile pollution standards lag European measures by a decade, it said.”

China may be the new powerhouse on the block but as Iran is finding out, you are only as strong as the allies you keep. The fact of the matter is that nothing has changed since Mao and Stalin first forged an alliance together (contrary to popular opinion that there was in fact a schism). Though the names have changed and certainly the context, it is plain to see that Moscow and Beijing are one city joined in their desire to wrest military and economic power from Washington DC.

A recent example of Russia’s commitment to their Chinese allies is a statement made Monday regarding the “one-China policy.”

Russia said in a statement on Monday that it firmly opposes "Taiwan independence" in any form and adheres to the one-China policy.

"Lately, Taiwanese authorities have made several statements that became a matter of serious concern to Russia. In particular, we were bewildered by the ideas put forth by Chen Shui-bian on January 29, which run counter to his earlier promises and commitments," Itar-Tass reported, citing a statement issued by the Russian Foreign Ministry…Russia firmly believes that "there is only one China in the world, and Taiwan is its inalienable part," the ministry stressed. (Source)

The last part of the new triumvirate of course is our good friends India. As I’ve reported in the past, India has made many moves to align itself with our current foes as a way of hedging their power base in the world forum. New Delhi and Moscow are forming closer relations every day, especially economic ties.

The Indian Express reports that, “Bilateral trade relations between India and Russia will take off in a big way after the comprehensive agreement between the two countries is signed by the year end, said Russian minister of trade and economy, German Gref, at a CII meet on Monday.

Gref also said that the importance the two countries attached to each other was evident from the fact that he had met his Indian counterpart Kamal Nath, four times in the last few months.

But nothing says “I love you” like a new cache of nukes from a country you previously traded arms with. Apparently the Israeli’s have learned from our example that trading weapons with anybody that has the dough is a lucrative business and loyalty be damned.

Once again, The Indian Express writes that, ”In an indisputable sign that Indo-Israeli defence ties have matured, the governments of both countries have signed their first-ever joint weapons development contract to design and produce the Barak-II next-generation air defence missiles for warships.

After 17 months of complex inter-government negotiations, the deal was concluded on January 27 but kept under wraps for ‘‘political reasons’’, sources said. The Barak-II will be jointly developed by the Israeli Aircraft Industries (IAI), the Barak programme’s secondary integrator Rafael and by the Hyderabad-based Defence Research & Development Laboratories (DRDL), with the two countries splitting the approximately $330 million kick-start investment.”

Now my fiancé, whom is as beautiful as she is full of good ideas, has been steering me towards topics like the aforementioned Wal-Mart story or the VA. She believes, and to date has been proven right, that nobody cares about this foreign policy stuff and that I should write about more mainstream topics. Of course she is exactly right about this. However, I do not want to hear people crying that the America they once knew, you know, the one where we were the unchallenged kings of the universe, is dead and gone. I do not want to hear anyone crying that they are now living in a world where China and Russia are equal or more powerful than the US and, “how did this happen?”

Read all of the above stories again. That is how it happened. The problem is not that I’m not writing mainstream stories, the problem is we as a country still want to be isolationists and the rest of the planet is far beyond that philosophy.

We are all global citizens, you and I. It’s time to at least start taking an interest, in my humble opinion.

Got Ink, Got Bombs, Got Controversy

This passed week was quite busy for me. I had relatives in town, a few dinner engagements and a few late nights at work. Having said that, because as is typical these days, life got in the way of my usual news reading. What little I was able to glean seemed to indicate that nothing was happening in the news except for an attack on the known universe by a pair of political cartoons. One of the cartoons earned a letter of response by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and some more annoyed op-eds. The other one seems to have upended the entire Muslim religion, resulting in riots and arrests of editors.

It’s nice to see the tolerant people of Islam on the march showing us just how ridiculous a caricature of Muhammad with bomb in his turban is.

According to the Brussels Journal, ”The Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten is being protected by security guards and several cartoonists have gone into hiding after the newspaper published a series of twelve cartoons of the prophet Muhammad. According to the Islam it is blasphemous to make images of the prophet. Muslim fundamentalists have threatened to bomb the paper’s offices and kill the cartoonists.

The newspaper published the cartoons when a Danish author complained that he could find no-one to illustrate his book about Muhammad. Jyllands-Posten wondered whether there were more cases of self-censorship regarding Islam in Denmark and asked twelve illustrators to draw the prophet for them. Carsten Juste, the paper’s editor, said the cartoons were a test of whether the threat of Islamic terrorism had limited the freedom of expression in Denmark.”

Apparently, in the Muslim tradition, Muhammad is so weak and his people so easily threatened that even caricatures must be destroyed, as the entire of Islamic faith will be abandoned if somebody makes fun of it. If Christianity were made of the stuff Islam is made of, Bill Maher would have already destroyed it during his first season of Real Time.

So the Muslim expressed their fear and distrust of two-dimensional drawings by protesting in the streets and demonstrating that one should not associate Islam with bombs.

Denmark has been the main target of arson and threats. In Syria, protesters torched the Danish and Norwegian embassies. Iran recalled its ambassador to Denmark, following the example of Syria, Saudi Arabia and Libya. Lebanon's Interior Minister resigned after protesters burnt the Danish consulate. Thousands protested in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In Indonesia, protesters attacked the building housing the Danish embassy. Threats against Europeans and their diplomats spread around the Muslim world.

All sarcasm aside, if there is one element of the Islamic world that seems to always show itself at times like this, it’s that the majority of them appear to be spoiled brats with a tremendous propensity for throwing tantrums. This isn’t the first time something like this has happened and it’s not the first time they collectively cried about it, blew something up and then demanded an apology. The drug addled children I work with would know a lot about this behavior could teach the Muslims a thing or two about why throwing temper tantrums ultimately gets you no where.

Of course the other issue is that they not only want to kill and maim when their beloved Muhammad gets assaulted by ink and pen, but then they respond in kind with their own artwork that completely misses the point of the argument, much like a child.

According to Haaretz, “As the case spiraled from outrage to arson this week, a surreal test case presented itself. The Arab European League, a Dutch-Belgian Islamic political group, posted a cartoon on its Website portraying Anne Frank, the best-known Dutch victim of the Nazi Holocaust, in bed with Adolf Hitler. A second cartoon questioned whether the Holocaust had actually taken place.

Dyab Abou Jahjah, the party's founder and best-known figure, defended the action on Dutch television, again arguing on the basis of a double standard.

"Europe has its sacred cows, even if they're not religious sacred cows," he said.

This might well be the time to point out that a double standard can cut two ways.

Everyone who lives in the Middle East knows that one reason for the longevity of the hideous Jew-baiting cartoons of Der Sturmer, is the popularity of hideous Jew-baiting cartoons in popular publications in places like Cairo, Damascus, and Gaza City. Some of the same places, that is, where outrage over the Danish cartoons boiled over into violence, torching embassies, and death threats.”

I saw all of the cartoons from the Danish newspaper, including the one in question with the bomb in Muhammad’s head. I wasn’t impressed. I think it is unfair to assume that all Muslims are potential bombers. Muslims typically are no different than anyone else. They want to live in relative peace and be able to go about their day without getting involved in politics. These acts of violence tend to show the worst kind of a people, not the majority itself. After all, it just takes one nut to burn down a building.

However, it is very hard to compartmentalize all of this into appropriate versus inappropriate when all you see are the violent acts all over TV. And it is not as if other religions have not suffered indignities as well, Islam aside. I believe it was that bastion of tolerance itself, New York City that gave us a crucifix submerged in a jar of urine as artwork, which was called, “Piss Christ.” Insulting? Absolutely but as much as somebody would have liked to, the museum was not burnt to the ground.

Having said that, in some cases the Muslims are coming to see that trying to put out a fire by blowing up the building is not the best way to make you heard. ”Lebanon apologized Monday to Denmark after thousands of rampaging Muslim demonstrators set fire to the building housing the Danish mission in Beirut - the most violent in a growing string of worldwide protests over caricatures of Islam's Prophet Muhammad. In Afghanistan hundreds of demonstrators clashed with police and soldiers, leaving one dead and four injured.

The prime ministers of Spain and Turkey issued a Christian-Muslim appeal for calm, saying "we shall all be the losers if we fail to immediately defuse this situation."”

In all, the Muslims have got to develop thicker skin when it comes to stuff like this. Rioting and calling for the death of journalists only gives these caricatures more strength as the average Westerner will always associate bombs with Islam if when you make fun Islam, as you would any religion, something goes BOOM!

Wal-Mart Says: Women and Children First Last

It’s still very much a man’s world isn’t it? Sure women have every opportunity to fail or succeed based on their inherent ability and desire. There have been plenty of successful women whom have proven emphatically that every girls dream can come true if only they would apply themselves. Why the very face of America is a single, black, career woman. Perhaps the next president of the United States may very well be a woman. Stranger things have happened and it’s not wholly unimaginable when you consider that some of the most powerful CEO’s in America are also women.

So then why is it that the comforts afforded to men in the marketplace are not extended to women in the land of “always low prices” Wal-Mart? In other words, why is that men can purchase drugs to correct erectile dysfunction (presumably for recreation and not to make babies) but women cannot purchase emergency contraception (EC) (also known as Emergency Birth Control (EBC), the morning-after pill, or postcoital contraception)? There appears to be a rather hypocritical value judgment being made with respect to the needs of men and women respectively that is ultimately very harmful to society at large.

According to the AP, ”Backed by abortion rights groups, three Massachusetts women sued Wal-Mart on Wednesday, accusing the retail giant of violating a state regulation by failing to stock emergency contraception pills in its pharmacies.

The lawsuit, filed in state court, seeks to force the company to carry the morning-after pill in its 44 Wal-Marts and four Sam Club stores in Massachusetts.

The plaintiffs argued that state policy requires pharmacies to provide all "commonly prescribed medicines."

Wal-Mart carries the morning-after pill in Illinois only, where it is required under state law, said Dan Fogleman, a spokesman for Bentonville, Ark.-based Wal-Mart.

Fogleman said the company "chooses not to carry many products for business reasons." He would not elaborate. But in a letter to a lawyer for the plaintiffs, a Wal-Mart attorney said the store chain does not regard the drug as "commonly prescribed."

I’m getting pretty sick and tired of being told by Wal-Mart how one should conduct their behavior in private. I haven’t been this angry since I bought the double covers Metallica album “Garage Inc.” and realized that it had been censored. It is not the responsibility of Wal-Mart to promote “values” as dictated by chain store that employs sweatshops and wages far below the cost of living.

From what I understand, despite their claim that not carrying any version of the morning-after pill was a “business decisions,” in reality, the impetus of this decisions stems from their first allegiance to the religious right in America.

According to a May, 2005 article by Jeff Sellers in Christianity Today -- America's leading Evangelical Christian magazine, “Indeed, based in the Bible Belt town of Bentonville, Arkansas, Wal-Mart has a tradition of tailoring its service to churchgoing customers. It sells only the sanitized versions of hip-hop CDs bearing warnings of objectionable content. Responding to a campaign by the largest evangelical mutual fund group, The Timothy Plan, to keep Cosmopolitan magazine covers out of view of Wal-Mart customers, the company slapped plastic sheathes over suggestive women's periodicals and banned 'lad mags' such as Maxim.”

So essentially, the rub here is that the good Christians running Wal-Mart figure that if they don’t sell the product, its absence will somehow encourage abstinence among their female patrons. Yes, Sally Mae will not be able to get her fill of Preven and thus will just give up her desire for premarital sex. As God as my witness, the people who made this decision have apparently never met an illegitimate or unwanted child in their money grubbing lives.

First off, their whole premise is false. Wal-Mart and other pro-life advocates have lumped Preven, Plan B or any number of emergency contraception together as drugs that cause abortions. This of course is the gospel of misinformation.

Wikipedia states that the difference between an emergency contraception like Plan B, and an abortion causing drug is that, “(EC’s are) hormones that act both to prevent ovulation or fertilization, or the subsequent implantation of a fertilized egg (zygote). ECPs are not to be confused with chemical abortion drugs like Mifepristone (formerly RU-486) that act after implantation has occurred.”

Even if you believe that life begins at conception, technically, what an EC is supposed to do is prevent conception from taking place at all. There is no abortion because at the time of ingesting the drug, there is no baby per se. When you consider the facts in case like this, the entire argument purported by the religious community does not pass muster. But hey, this is America, where logic is a dead philosophy.

Looking at this situation from a different angle, suppose Wal-Mart is in the right and there is an ethical issue that needs to be considered here. OK, so now you have a situation where there will by less resources available to teenage girls and adults who, despite well-intentioned abstinence programs, will find themselves in the throws of passion and will most likely be stricken with an unwanted or unplanned pregnancy. It is always the conservatives who make it damn near impossible for real human beings to avoid having children they didn’t want in the first place and then turn around and make it even harder for those people or that woman to care adequate for said bastard.

Having said that, the societal consequences of bringing yet more unwanted children into this mortal coil are far worse than any imagined sin against man due to premarital sex. According to Nancy Felipe Russo, Ph.D., Arizona State University and Henry P. David, Ph.D., Transnational Family Research Institute in an opinion piece they wrote on 3/05/02, ”Both unintended and unwanted childbearing can have negative health, social, and psychological consequences. Health problems include greater chances for illness and death for both mother and child. In addition, such childbearing has been linked with a variety of social problems, including divorce, poverty, child abuse, and juvenile delinquency. In one study, unwanted children were found less likely to have had a secure family life. As adults they were more likely to engage in criminal behavior, be on welfare, and receive psychiatric services. Another found that children who were unintended by their mothers had lower self-esteem than their intended peers 23 years later.

The adverse health consequences of teenagers' inability to control their childbearing can be particularly severe. Teenage mothers are more likely to suffer toxemia, anemia, birth complications, and death. Babies of teenage mothers are more likely to have low birth weight and suffer birth injury and neurological defects. Such babies are twice as likely to die in the first year of life as babies born to mothers who delay childbearing until after age 20.

Wal-Mart’s new slogan should be, “Viagra first, Woman and Children Last.” Women may have made great political and economic gains but ultimately if Wal-Mart is any kind of indicator, it is clear that woman and children are still considered on some level to be second-class citizens.