Friday, February 13, 2004
Ahhhh!!! The first sign of the Apocalypse!!!
History was made at 11:06 a.m. today at San Francisco City Hall when Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon took their wedding vows, becoming the first same-sex couple to be officially married in the United States.
(By mid-afternoon, at least 15 same-sex weddings were performed and officials issued about a dozen more marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples, the Associated Press reported.)
Mabel Teng, the city's assessor-recorder, officiated over the first ceremony, inserting the phrase "spouse for life'' in place of "husband'' and "wife.''
About 20 people witnessed the ceremony; many of them were moved to tears as the couple, who have been together for five decades, were wed.
The wedding came just two days after Mayor Gavin Newsom announced that he wanted San Francisco to take the lead in bestowing the same marriage rights to gays and lesbians as are awarded to straight couples, saying he is duty-bound to fight discrimination.
Congratulations!
posted by chris at 9:43 AM
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Thursday, February 12, 2004
Woo-hoo!
Fifteen years after they first appeared on US TV screens, the Simpsons are to make their feature debut in a movie devised by the show's creators, Matt Groening and James L Brooks. The film will be backed by Fox, which also plays host to The Simpsons TV series.
Not much more.
posted by chris at 11:34 AM
Antidepressants and suicide
19-year-old college student who had shown no outward signs of depression killed herself over the weekend at an Eli Lilly & Company laboratory in Indianapolis where she had been participating in a company drug trial for an experimental antidepressant.
The student, Traci Johnson, was one of 25 healthy patients at an Eli Lilly clinic who were being given larger than therapeutic doses of duloxetine, which will be known as Cymbalta if it is introduced as an antidepressant. Four days before her death, Ms. Johnson was taken off Cymbalta and given a placebo.
While Eli Lilly asserted that it had properly screened Ms. Johnson before the study started to ensure that she was healthy and had no mental problems, her death is being used by critics of a popular class of antidepressants to bolster their case that the widely used drugs carry the risk of suicidal tendencies for a small number of people, particularly young people.
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Whether antidepressants cause some people to commit suicide was an issue that flared briefly in the early 1990's but had been largely dismissed by mainstream researchers until last summer. That is when GlaxoSmithKline warned that a series of studies had found that children and teenagers given Paxil were more likely to attempt or think about suicide than those given a placebo.
Wyeth soon followed with a warning suggesting that its antidepressant, Effexor, should not be given to children. British and American drug regulators set to work studying the problem. The British soon concluded that most antidepressants in this class should not be used in children and teenagers since they have not proved effective in that population and could be linked to suicide.
The F.D.A. continues to study the issue, said Susan Cruzan, an agency spokeswoman.
Story.
posted by chris at 10:43 AM
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Wednesday, February 11, 2004
Not quite right
President Bush plans to endorse a constitutional amendment that would define marriage as the union of a man and a woman in response to a Massachusetts court decision requiring legal recognition of gay marriages in that state, key advisers said yesterday.
Bush plans to endorse language introduced by Rep. Marilyn Musgrave (R-Colo.) that backers contend would ban gay marriage but not prevent state legislatures from allowing the kind of civil unions and same-sex partnership arrangements that exist in Vermont and California.
Really? It won't prevent states from legalizing civil unions? Let's look at that amendment, shall we?
Musgrave's proposal, called the Federal Marriage Amendment, states: "Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution or the constitution of any State, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups."
"Legal incidents thereof?" I dunno. Sounds like it prevents the establishment of civil unions to me.
posted by chris at 9:47 PM
Remember this?
Chile's mission to the United Nations was spied on in the run-up to war in Iraq, the former envoy has alleged.
Technicians inspecting the telephones found they had been tampered with, Juan Gabriel Valdes said in an interview.
At the time, Chile was one of several countries seen as undecided on whether to back a proposed resolution sanctioning the use of force in Iraq.
UK media reports at the time alleged the US was monitoring communications from envoys from those countries.
"We called technicians to see if the Chilean mission's phones at the UN had been tampered with," he said.
"The result was positive. We discovered the great majority of phones had been tampered with."
Story.
posted by chris at 1:42 PM
What the 9/11 commission is NOT investigating
A very interesting article in the New Yorker:
There was scarcely a dry eye in the Senate hearing room where 10 commissioners are probing the myriad failures of our nation’s defenses and response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. But answers? Not many. The most shocking evidence remains hidden in plain sight.
The politically divided 9/11 commission was able to agree on a public airing of four and a half minutes from the Betty Ong tape, which the American public and most of the victims’ families heard for the first time on the evening news of Jan. 27. But commissioners were unaware of the crucial information given in an even more revealing phone call, made by another heroic flight attendant on the same plane, Madeline (Amy) Sweeney. They were unaware because their chief of staff, Philip Zelikow, chooses which evidence and witnesses to bring to their attention. Mr. Zelikow, as a former adviser to the pre-9/11 Bush administration, has a blatant conflict.
"My wife’s call was the first specific information the airline and the government got that day," said Mike Sweeney, the widowed husband of Amy Sweeney, who went face to face with the hijackers on Flight 11. She gave seat locations and physical descriptions of the hijackers, which allowed officials to identify them as Middle Eastern men—by name—even before the first crash. She gave officials key clues to the fact that this was not a traditional hijacking. And she gave the first and only eyewitness account of a bomb on board.
posted by chris at 1:29 PM
Victory
Federal authorities retreated Tuesday in their investigation of an Iowa anti-war demonstration, withdrawing grand jury subpoenas delivered last week to four peace activists and Drake University.
The shift came as the investigation drew nationwide condemnation from civil liberties advocates, politicians and peace activists.
Also Tuesday, a federal judge lifted a gag order on Drake, where employees had been ordered not to discuss an inquiry into a meeting the anti-war activists held there Nov. 15. Federal authorities had asked for records of the campus chapter of the National Lawyers Guild - which hosted the anti-war conference - and for the impressions campus police had of the gathering.
Story.
posted by chris at 1:03 PM
Winter games
A federal judge blocked severe restrictions on snowmobiles in Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks Tuesday, nearly two months after they were put in place.
U.S. District Judge Clarence Brimmer in Wyoming ruled the restrictions would cause irreparable harm to companies that rely on snowmobiling in the parks due to lost business.
Yeah, cause protecting the snowmobile industry is so much more important than protecting our national parks.
posted by chris at 11:01 AM
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Tuesday, February 10, 2004
How to avoid the war without really trying
Washington Post columnist and former National Guardsman Richard Cohen has a few things to say about National Guard service during the Vietnam War.
In my case, it was something similar -- although (darn!) I was not rich. I was, though, lucky enough to get into a National Guard unit in the nick of time, about a day before I was drafted. I did my basic and advanced training (combat engineer) and returned to my unit. I was supposed to attend weekly drills and summer camp, but I found them inconvenient. I "moved" to California and then "moved" back to New York, establishing a confusing paper trail that led, really, nowhere. For two years or so, I played a perfectly legal form of hooky. To show you what a mess the Guard was at the time, I even got paid for all the meetings I missed.
In the end, I wound up in the Army Reserve. I was assigned to units for which I had no training -- tank repairman, for instance. In some units, we sat around with nothing to do and in one we took turns delivering antiwar lectures. The National Guard and the Reserves were something of a joke. Everyone knew it. Books have been written about it. Maybe things changed dramatically by 1972, two years after I got my discharge, but I kind of doubt it.
posted by chris at 2:04 PM
A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down
The public version of the U.S. intelligence community's key prewar assessment of Iraq's illicit arms programs was stripped of dissenting opinions, warnings of insufficient information and doubts about deposed dictator Saddam Hussein's intentions, a review of the document and its once-classified version shows.
As a result, the public was given a far more definitive assessment of Iraq's plans and capabilities than President Bush and other U.S. decision-makers received from their intelligence agencies.
The stark differences between the public version and the then top-secret version of the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate raise new questions about the accuracy of the public case made for a war that's claimed the lives of more than 500 U.S. service members and thousands of Iraqis.
The two documents are replete with differences. For example, the public version declared that "most analysts assess Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program" and says "if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon within this decade."
But it fails to mention the dissenting view offered in the top-secret version by the State Department's intelligence arm, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, known as the INR.
That view said, in part, "The activities we have detected do not, however, add up to a compelling case that Iraq is currently pursuing what INR would consider to be an integrated and comprehensive approach to acquire nuclear weapons. Iraq may be doing so, but INR considers the available evidence inadequate to support such a judgment."
The alternative view further said "INR is unwilling to ... project a timeline for the completion of activities it does not now see happening."
There's so much more.
BONUS! Compare and contrast the two versions from the privacy of your own home! Here's the official version and here's the public one.
posted by chris at 1:40 PM
This seems like a strange thing to say
The movement of American factory jobs and white-collar work to other countries is part of a positive transformation that will enrich the U.S. economy over time, even if it causes short-term pain and dislocation, the Bush administration said Monday.
The embrace of foreign outsourcing, an accelerating trend that has contributed to U.S. job losses in recent years and has become an issue in the 2004 elections, is contained in the president's annual report to Congress on the health of the economy.
"Outsourcing is just a new way of doing international trade," said N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of Bush's Council of Economic Advisors, which prepared the report. "More things are tradable than were tradable in the past. And that's a good thing."
People are tradable, you know, like commodities.
And does this mean that we're going to get more Wal-Marts?
Although trade expansion inevitably hurts some domestic workers, the benefits eventually will outweigh the costs as Americans are able to buy cheaper goods and services and as new jobs are created in growing sectors of the economy, the report said.
posted by chris at 11:52 AM
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Monday, February 09, 2004
Taxman
You remember, of course, that Congress passed, and President Bush signed, major tax-cut legislation last year. But you may not recall that the Bush administration opted not to fully adjust withholding tables -- used by employers to determine how much income to set aside for taxes -- following those midyear reductions, leaving millions of taxpayers over-withheld for the year. . . .
. . . The over-withholding occurred because the tax cuts, though enacted in May, were retroactive to the beginning of the year. The withholding tables used by employers until that point, of course, were based on the higher tax rates. When it issued new tables, the Treasury Department could have adjusted them to take the earlier, higher withholding into account so that taxpayers could get more money sooner, and would come out about where they usually do in terms of a refund.
But that would have made the withholding too low to be used for a full 12 months, thus requiring yet another adjustment at the beginning of this year, one that might have looked to a lot of people like a tax increase. So when the new tables lowered withholding, beginning last July, they matched the new, lower tax rates at that point but ignored the previous higher withholding. When workers file their 2003 returns they'll get back last spring's over-withholding as a lump, which they may choose to spend and perhaps boost the economy in an election year.
Interesting how this fancy arithmetic was done during an election year.
posted by chris at 4:22 PM
Bush's reality
From Slate's William Saletan:
Again and again on the Meet the Press, Tim Russert asked Bush to explain the discrepancies. Again and again, Bush replied that such questions had to be viewed in the "context" of a larger reality: I see the world as it is. Threats exist. We must be realistic.
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The more you study Bush's responses to unpleasant facts, the clearer this pattern becomes. A year and a half ago, the unpleasant facts had to do with his sale of stock in Harken Energy, a company on whose board of directors he served, shortly before the company disclosed that its books were far worse than publicly advertised. Bush dismissed all queries by noting that the Securities and Exchange Commission had declined to prosecute him. "All these questions that you're asking were looked into by the SEC," Bush shrugged. That conclusion was his measure of reality. As to the different version of reality suggested by the evidence, Bush scoffed with metaphysical certainty, "There's no 'there' there."
On Meet the Press, Bush handled questions about his service in the National Guard during Vietnam the same way. Russert reminded Bush, "The Boston Globe and the Associated Press have gone through some of their records and said there's no evidence that you reported to duty in Alabama during the summer and fall of 1972." Bush replied, "Yeah, they're just wrong. There may be no evidence, but I did report. Otherwise, I wouldn't have been honorably discharged." That's the Bush syllogism: The evidence says one thing; the conclusion says another; therefore, the evidence is false.
More.
posted by chris at 3:49 PM
Reading what they wanted to read
In its fall 2002 campaign to win congressional support for a war against Iraq, President Bush and his top advisers ignored many of the caveats and qualifiers included in the classified report on Saddam Hussein's weapons that CIA Director George J. Tenet defended Thursday.
In fact, they made some of their most unequivocal assertions about unconventional weapons before the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) was completed.
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For example, when Bush on Sept. 24, 2002, repeated the British claim that Iraq's chemical weapons could be activated within 45 minutes, he ignored the fact that U.S. intelligence mistrusted the source and that the claim never appeared in the October 2002 U.S. estimate.
On Aug. 26, 2002, Cheney said: "Many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon." The estimate, several weeks later, would say it would take as many as five years, unless Baghdad immediately obtained weapons-grade materials.
In the same speech, Cheney raised the specter that Hussein would give chemical or biological weapons to terrorists, a prospect invoked often in the weeks to come. "Deliverable weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a terror network, or a murderous dictator, or the two working together, constitute as grave a threat as can be imagined," Cheney said.
It would be more than a month later that a declassified portion of the NIE would show that U.S. intelligence analysts had forecast that Hussein would give such weapons to terrorists only if Iraq were invaded and he faced annihilation.
There are many more examples.
posted by chris at 2:47 PM
Globalization: Keeping women down, globally
Global retailers, including British supermarkets are, systematically inflicting poor working conditions on millions of women workers to conduct price wars and feed ever-rising consumer expectations of cheap produce, Oxfam said yesterday.
A study of employment conditions in 12 countries which supply items from jeans to gerberas to international brands such as Walmart and Tesco found that the largely female workforce in many suppliers is working longer hours for low wages in unhealthy conditions and failing to reap any benefit from globalization.
Women in developing countries are estimated to occupy between 60 and 90 per cent of the jobs in the labor-intensive stages of the clothing industry and the production of fresh fruit and vegetables destined for supermarket shelves in Europe and America.
Oxfam claims the buying policies of the new breed of global retailers as they use competition between suppliers as far apart as Thailand and Kenya to demand lower prices and increased efficiencies have resulted in imposing worsening labor conditions on those at the bottom of the supply chain.
More.
posted by chris at 12:47 PM
Mo' AWOL
Calpundit gets the skinny on the torn document and discusses its significance.
posted by chris at 11:56 AM
The Patriot Act in action
In what may be the first subpoena of its kind in decades, a federal judge has ordered a university to turn over records about a gathering of anti-war activists.
In addition to the subpoena of Drake University, subpoenas were served this past week on four of the activists who attended a Nov. 15 forum at the school, ordering them to appear before a grand jury Tuesday, the protesters said.
In addition to records about who attended the forum, the subpoena orders the university to divulge all records relating to the local chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, a New York-based legal activist organization that sponsored the forum.
Story.
posted by chris at 11:24 AM
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