All options should be considered to prevent rampages like the Minnesota school shooting that took 10 lives — including making guns available to teachers, a top National Rifle Association leader said Friday.

"I'm not saying that that means every teacher should have a gun or not, but what I am saying is we need to look at all the options at what will truly protect the students," the NRA's first vice president, Sandra S. Froman, told The Associated Press.

Has founded several groups that are to the right of their right-wing counterparts: English First (as opposed to U.S. English), Gun Owners of America (as opposed to the National Rifle Association), U.S. Border Control (as opposed to FAIR) and the antichoice Committee to Protect the Family. Resigned as co-chair of Pat Buchanan’s national campaign in 1996 after allegations linked him to militias and White supremacist organizations. A ruling elder in the Presbyterian Church in the United States.

Members of The National Press Club,

We, the undersigned bloggers, are very concerned about how liberal political bloggers are being systematically under-represented and belittled in the mainstream media, academic settings and media forums. By being intentionally excluded away from these venues, we are effectively pushed out of the discourse of opinion-leaders. The result is that the conventional wisdom about blogging, politics and journalism, as it concerns liberal blogs, becomes a feedback loop framed by the Conservatives and their media allies.

The leader of a secretive Spanish sect who said he was the true Pope and that the Vatican was controlled by the devil has died, a town hall official said Tuesday.
Gregorio XVII, 58, was the leader of a self-styled church whose followers believed he would be crucified before a kind of apocalypse would take place.

Gregorio believed God crowned him after Pope Paul VI's death in 1978 and he rejected changes made to the Catholic church in the 1960s such as saying mass in local languages rather than Latin and dialogue with other branches of Christianity.

[...]

The sect, based in the southern Spanish town of El Palmar de Troya but with members from as far away as the United States, conferred sainthood on former Spanish dictator Francisco Franco.

Before crowning himself "pope", the man formerly known as Clemente Dominguez said he had visions of the Virgin Mary and messages from God that the church in Rome, and Pope Paul VI, were being misled.

"Satan is governing in the Vatican," Gregorio was told in a vision in 1971, according to one booklet. A year later he was told, "Masons and Communism have infiltrated the Vatican."

Gregorio lost his sight in a 1976 car crash but the Virgin Mary promised he will regain it one day, church documents say.

Two years later Paul VI died and Clemente Dominguez, on a trip to Colombia, proclaimed himself pope.

As an added note: you do realize that if both Terri Schiavo and the Pope leave this mortal coil within days of each other, the Brides of Jesus (that would be Peggy Noonan & Kathryn Jean Lopez) will have a meltdown that will make Chernobyl look like a snuffed birthday candle.

Two months later I participated in a public debate on the case at Florida State University. Among the participants supporting Gov. Bush's position were Pat Anderson, one of multiple attorneys who have represented the Schindlers, and Wesley Smith and Rita Marker, two activists whose specialty is opposing surrogate removal of life-support from comatose and persistent vegetative state patients. I found myself wondering: "I'm doing this pro bono; are they?"

I did some Internet research and learned that many of the attorneys, activists and organizations working to keep Schiavo on life support all these years have been funded by members of the Philanthropy Roundtable.

The Philanthropy Roundtable is a collection of foundations that have funded conservative causes ranging from abolition of Social Security to anti-tax crusades and United Nations conspiracy theories. The Roundtable members' founders include scions of America's wealthiest families, including Richard Mellon Scaife (heir to the Mellon industrial, oil and banking fortune), Harry Bradley (electronics), Joseph Coors (beer), and the Smith Richardson family (pharmaceutical products).

Wesley Smith ... work[s] for organizations that get funding from Roundtable members. Smith is a paid senior fellow with the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based think tank that advocates the teaching of creationist "intelligent design" theory in public schools. Between 1993 and 1997, the Discovery Institute received $175,000 from the Bradley Foundation....

Roundtable members also played a role in financing the Bush v. Schiavo litigation.

The Family Research Council, which uses its annual $10 million budget to lobby for prayer in public schools and against gay marriage, filed an amicus curiae brief in Bush v. Schiavo...

George W. Bush recently nominated Stephen L. Johnson, a 24-year veteran of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), to be the agency's new administrator.

Johnson has been the acting administrator since January, and prior to that oversaw the EPA office handling pesticides and other toxic substances. In nominating Johnson, Bush described him as "a talented scientist" and having "good judgment and complete integrity."

Yet his record as the assistant administrator for Toxic Substances casts serious doubt about whether he is suited to lead the EPA, an agency directly affecting Americans' health and many significant industries, including automobiles and agriculture. During Bush's first term, Johnson was a strong supporter of pesticide testing on humans.

[...]

In 2001, the trials considered by the agency gave paid subjects doses of pesticides hundreds of times greater than levels that EPA officials considered safe for the general public. The agency evaluated three studies that year from Dow Chemicals, Bayer Corporation, and the Gowan Company. The Bayer and Gowan studies were conducted in Third World countries, where volunteers were more readily available....

Bayer is implicated in the development of chemical weapons. During WW1 Bayer was involved in the development and manufacture of a range of poisonous gasses used in the trenches, including chlorine gas and mustard gas. As part of IG Farben, Bayer were also involved in the development of the next generation of chemical warfare agents, toxic organophosphate compounds. Tabun was first examined for use as an insecticide in late 1936 in a program under the direction of Dr. Gerhard Schrader at the Bayer facility at Elberfeld/Wuppertal. An accidental exposure of Dr. Schrader and a laboratory assistant to Tabun vapors made it quite clear that this compound had potential military applications. Tabun was then mass produced by IG Farben during WWII although it was never used as a weapon. Schrader was also responsible for the discovery of related, but more toxic, nerve agents including Sarin and Soman...

[...]

Bayer (along with BASF and Hoechst) was an original member of the IG Farben group. During WWII, IG Farben built a synthetic rubber and oil plant complex called Monowitz close to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Inmates worked as slave labour for IG Farben, and when they were too weak to work they were killed in the gas chambers. IG Farben subsidiary Degesch manufactured Zyklon B, the gas used in the concentration camp gas chambers.

Bayer head Carl Duisberg personally propagated the concept of forced labour during WW1. The company placed itself under a large burden of guilt due to its heavy involvement in the planning, preparation and implementation of both world wars. The International War Crimes Tribunal pronounced the company guilty for its share of responsibility in the war and the crimes of the Nazi dictatorship.

On 29 July 1948, sentences for mass murder and slavery were handed down at the Nuremberg trials to twelve Farben executives. The longest sentence of only seven years was dealt out was to Dr. Fritz ter Meer, a top executive and scientist on the IG Farben managing board.

After the war, IG Farben separated into three giant corporations: Bayer, Hoechst and BASF. On 1 August 1963, Bayer celebrated its 100th anniversary at the Cologne fairgrounds. The opening speech was delivered by Dr. Fritz ter Meer, not only out of prison but--a convicted mass murderer--elevated to the position of Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Bayer.

[...]

IG Farben also conducted experiments on humans. Eva Mozes Kor, among the 1,500 sets of twins experimented on by the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele, claims that IG Farben monitored and supervised medical experiments at the Nazi concentration camp where she was interned. She claims the experiments involved toxic chemicals that IG Farben (Bayer) provided. In some of the experiments, the lawsuit states, prisoners were injected with germs known to cause diseases, "to test the effectiveness of various drugs" manufactured by IG Farben.

[I]n October of last year, Johnson strongly supported a study in which infants will be monitored for health impacts as they undergo exposure to toxic chemicals for a two-year period. The Children's Environmental Exposure Research Study (CHEERS), will analyze how chemicals can be ingested, inhaled, or absorbed by children ranging from infants to three-year olds. The study will analyze 60 children in Duval County, Florida who are routinely exposed to pesticides in their homes. Yet the EPA acknowledges that pesticide exposure is a risk factor for childhood cancer and the early onset of asthma.

Other aspects of CHEERS are equally troublesome. The participants will be selected from six health clinics and three hospitals in Duval County. The EPA study proposal noted, "Although all Duval County citizens are eligible to use the [health care] centers, they primarily serve individuals with lower incomes. In the year 2000, 75 percent of the users of the clinics for pregnancy issues were at or below the poverty level." The proposal also said, "The percentage of births to individuals classified as black in the U.S. Census is higher at these three hospitals than for the county as a whole."

The EPA is targeting the poor and African-Americans for the study, presumably in the hope that they will be less informed about the dangers of exposing their children to pesticides, and will, therefore, continue to expose them over the two-year period. The study actually mandates that parents not be provided information about the proper ways to apply or store pesticides around the home. And the parents cannot be informed of the risks of prolonged or excessive exposure to pesticides. Additionally, the study does not provide guidelines to intervene if the children show signs of developmental delay or register dangerous levels of pesticide exposure in the periodic testing.

Parents receive $970 for participating, but only if they continue over the two-year period.

Dobbs Ferry possesses a rat which slips out of his lair at night and runs a typewriting machine in a garage. Unfortunately, he has always been interrupted by the watchman before he could produce a complete story.

It was at first thought that the power which made the typewriter run was a ghost, instead of a rat. It seems likely to us that it was both a ghost and a rat. Mme. Blavatsky's ego went into a white horse after she passed over, and someone's personality has undoubtedly gone into this rat. It is an era of belief in communications from the spirit land--there is Patience Worth and there is the author of Letters of a Living Dead Man and there are many other prominent and well though of ghosts in touch with the physical world today--and all the other ghosts are becoming encouraged by the current attitude of credulity and are trying to get into the game, too.

We recommended the Dobbs Ferry rat to the Psychical Research Society. We do not pretend to know anything about the Dobbs Ferry rat at first hand. But since this matter has been reported in the public prints and seriously received we are no longer afraid of being ridiculed, and we do not mind making a statement of something that happened to our own typewriter only a couple of weeks ago. We came into our room earlier than usual in the morning, and discovered a gigantic cockroach jumping about on the keys.

He did not see us, and we watched him. He would climb painfully upon the framework of the machine and cast himself with all his force upon a key, head downward, and his weight and the impact of the blow were just sufficient to operate the machine, one slow letter after another. He could not work the capital letters, and he had a great deal of difficulty operating the mechanism that shifts the paper so that a fresh line may be started. We never saw a cockroach work so hard or perspire so freely in all our lives before. After about an hour of this frightfully difficult literary labor he fell to the floor exhausted, and we saw him creep feebly into a nest of the poems which are always there in profusion.

Archy



Common American Cockroach

He has several categories: Cats, Dogs, Birds, Other Vertebrates, Invertebrates, and Didn't Make It.

Take a look at that list: 6 categories, and 4 of them are dedicated to a single, not remarkably successful subphylum. There are roughly 30 metazoan phyla, and 29 of them are lumped into that solitary catch-all, "Invertebrates". I mean, Steve could have at least singled out the usual top-of-the-charts phyla—Porifera, Cnidaria, Platyhelminthes, Nematoda, Mollusca, Annelida, Arthropoda, Echinodermata, and Chordata—but he didn't even do that, carrying prejudice to an extreme and relegating everything without a backbone to the invertebrate ghetto, and worse, giving favored status to a minor class, the Mammalia.

Bolton drew fire from Democrats in 1994 when he said at a Federalist Society forum that "there is no such thing as the United Nations."

"If the U.N. secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference," he said.

Several officials from U.N. Security Council member states expressed astonishment that Bush would name someone they believed had a known antipathy toward the United Nations, according to a Reuters report.

• When Bush cut scheduled civil service raises for the 2004 fiscal year, he chose the Labor Day weekend to make the announcement.
  
• When the Bush Justice department signed on to the lawsuit opposing affirmative action at the University of Michegan, they made the announcement on Martin Luther King Day.
  
• He sent the man who rationalized the administration's use of torture to run the Justice Department.
  
• He began his second term by resubmitting all the judges that the Democrats objected to in his first term, confident that he now has a big enough majority to trample all objections.

People listen to their radios a lot in rural America. Maybe it has something to do with the silence of the vast landscapes where many of them live; radios break that silence, and provide the succor of human voices.

If you drive through these landscapes, getting radio reception can sometimes be iffy at best, especially in the rural West. Often the best you can find on the dial are only one or two stations.

And the chances are that what you'll hear, at nearly any hour, in nearly any locale, is Rush Limbaugh. Or Michael Savage. Or maybe some Sean Hannity. Or maybe some more Limbaugh. Or, if you're really desperate, you can catch one of the many local mini-Limbaughs who populate what remains of the rural dial. In between, of course, there will be a country music station or two.

That's what people in rural areas have been listening to for the past 10 years and more. And nothing has been countering it.

The basic conclusion, drawn from survey data, is that persuasion occurs in a variety of ways. First of all, people's opinions, over time, reflected the opinions of the hosts more after listening; second, listeners became more inclined to vote Republican; third, they became more participatory, that is, they're more likely than non-listeners to engage in politics, whether that means talking about issues, voting, contributing to or working for a campaign, sticking a bumper-sticker on their car.

Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it.

Does a stone carving in one of Rome’s biggest cathedrals know whether Pope John Paul II will survive his latest health crisis?

The monument to Pope Sylvester II, who ruled the Catholic Church 1,000 years ago, is said to moisten when the death of a pontiff is imminent.

On Friday, a priest touched the carving in Rome’s Basilica of Saint John Lateran and confirmed it was dry — good news for the pope, who had windpipe surgery Thursday after being rushed to the hospital with breathing problems.

George W. Bush won the "Razzie" worst actor of the year award on Saturday for his performance as president in "Fahrenheit 9/11" but his moment in Hollywood's dubious spotlight was eclipsed by Halle Berry, who actually turned up to receive her embarrassing accolade.

Berry was named worst actress of 2004 by the Golden Raspberry Award Foundation for her performance in "Catwoman" and she showed up to accept her "Razzie" carrying the Oscar she won in 2002 for "Monster's Ball."

"They can't take this away from me, it's got my name on it!" she quipped. A raucous crowd cheered her on as she gave a stirring recreation of her Academy Award acceptance speech, including tears.

She thanked everyone involved in "Catwoman," a film she said took her from the top of her profession to the bottom.

"I want to thank Warner Brothers for casting me in this piece of shit," she said as she dragged her agent on stage and warned him "next time read the script first."