side note: This is another example of what happens when you have incompetent people running the country….they in turn hire other incompetent folk who then spend our tax money broadcasting terrorist messages…..well done dubya!

Justin Rood
ABC News

Al Hurra television, the U.S. government’s $63 million-a-year effort at public diplomacy broadcasting in the Middle East, is run by executives and officials who cannot speak Arabic, according to a senior official who oversees the program.

That might explain why critics say the service has recently been caught broadcasting terrorist messages, including an hour-long tirade on the importance of anti-Jewish violence, among other questionable pieces. (more…)

side note: This is what these people believe: ” the universe was created in six 24-hour days a mere 6,000 years ago”. Besides the crazies who run this place….and their crazy followers who will actually visit this place…there are some disturbing facts in this article. “Only 39 percent (of Americans) answer yes to the question, “Do you believe that human beings as we know them developed from earlier species of animals?” WTF?!?!

By Gordy Slack
Salon.com
Adam and Eve frolic amid the dinosaurs in the new $27 million museum that demonstrates Darwin has nothing on the Book of Genesis.

The Creation Museum swung open its stegosaurus-guarded gates to the public Monday, and I have to say it’s out of this world. For those of us raised in natural history Meccas like the American Museum in New York, the Smithsonian in Washington, or the Field in Chicago, the beautifully designed museum induces an eerie vertigo. All the familiar characters are here: T. rex, giant skeletons of triceratops and apatosaurus, a pterosaur spreading its wings above the crowd, live exhibits of birds, amphibians and reptiles, and the dripping, hooting and chirping soundtrack of the primeval forest. There are also a couple of unfamiliar faces, for a natural history museum, in the tan and finely muscled bodies of Adam and Eve.

At the ribbon cutting, Ken Ham, the rugged-faced CEO and president of Answers in Genesis, the nonprofit ministry that built the museum, tells an enthusiastic crowd that the Creation Museum will undo the damage done 82 years ago when Clarence Darrow put William Jennings Bryan on the stand in the famous Scopes trial in Dayton, Tenn. “It was the first time the Bible was ridiculed by the media in America, and that was a downward turning point for Christendom,” Ham says. “We are going to undo all of that here at the Creation Museum. We are going to answer the questions Bryan wasn’t prepared to, and show that belief in every word of the Bible can be defended by modern science.” (more…)

side note: Thanks Matt for sending this. Hopefully this will be the most extreme measure implemented in The Netherlands. It’d be real tough economically if the Dutch decided to get rid of marijuana all together….

By TOBY STERLING
Associated Press Writer

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands (AP) – Coffee shops licensed to sell marijuana in the southern Dutch city of Maastricht will begin fingerprinting customers and scanning their IDs this summer to help prove they’re following rules governing such sales.
In particular, the measures are expected to help stores show they are not selling to underage customers and that they haven’t sold more than the maximum permitted to a customer on a given day.

“This is not something that we are doing willingly, but with pain in our hearts,” Marc Josemans, chairman of the Union of Maastricht’s Coffee Shops, said Wednesday. He said shops in Rotterdam and several Dutch border cities were considering following suit. (more…)

side note: Ladies and Gentleman, let me introduce to you, Donald C. Hudson, Jr. A private in the 82nd Airborne Division, who has a deeper understanding for what is going on over there then our own Political Leaders. This young man has the courage to write about what he sees, and how he feels, even though they are the opposite of our President. It makes me think a little about the Dems, and how they lost their war spending battle with the president. I was pissed like the rest of you, but i also understand that things in government move slow, very slow. I’m willing to give the Dems the chance they need, but come this fall, if they continue to fall in line, as the President tells them, then i guess it’s time to look for new leaders, maybe even a new party.

By Donald C. Hudson, Jr.
Clarksville, Tennessee Online

After watching his roommate fatally wounded in a roadside bombing, an Army private wonders why the lives of good men are being lost when the Iraqis pose no threat to us and don’t want us there.

Baghdad – My name is Donald Hudson Jr. I have been serving our country’s military actively for the last three years. I am currently deployed to Baghdad on Forward Operating Base Loyalty, where I have been for the last four and a half months.

I came here as part of the first wave of this so called “troop surge”, but so far it has effectively done nothing to quell insurgent violence. I have seen the rise in violence between the Sunni and Shiite. This country is in the middle of a civil war that has been on going since the seventh century.

Why are we here when this country still to date does not want us here? Why does our president’s personal agenda consume him so much, that he can not pay attention to what is really going on here? (more…)

side note: it’s funny, if a liberal says the things that these soldiers are thinking, then we’re called “terrorist-lovers” or “weak”, and then we’re told we are undermining the troops. what happens when the troops say it, what happens when they all start saying, “what are we dong here”, “when are we coming home”, “there is no progress”, etc. are they then undermining themselves?
By Leila Fadel
McClatchy Newspapers

Spc. David Williams, 22, of Boston, Mass., had two note cards in his pocket Wednesday afternoon as he waited for Sen. Joseph Lieberman. Williams serves in the 82nd Airborne Division from Fort Bragg, N.C., the first of the five “surge” brigades to arrive in Iraq, and he was chosen to join the Independent from Connecticut for lunch at a U.S. field base in Baghdad.

The night before, 30 other soldiers crowded around him with questions for the senator.

He wrote them all down. At the top of his note card was the question he got from nearly every one of his fellow soldiers:

“When are we going to get out of here?” (more…)

JEANNINE AVERSA
AP
Huffingtonpost.com

The economy nearly stalled in the first quarter with growth slowing to a pace of just 0.6 percent. That was the worst three-month showing in over four years.

The new reading on the gross domestic product, released by the Commerce Department Thursday, showed that economic growth in the January-through-March quarter was much weaker. Government statisticians slashed by more than half their first estimate of a 1.3 percent growth rate for the quarter.

The main culprits for the downgrade: the bloated trade deficit and businesses cutting investment in supplies of the goods they hold in inventories.

“We are still keeping our head above water _ barely,” said economist Ken Mayland of ClearView Economics. (more…)

side note: It’s what we at NT have been saying for years…..dubya wants troops indefinably in Iraq.

By Steve Holland
Reuters

Washington – President George W. Bush would like to see a lengthy U.S. troop presence in Iraq like the one in South Korea to provide stability but not in a frontline combat role, the White House said on Wednesday.

The United States has had thousands of U.S. troops in South Korea to guard against a North Korean invasion for 50 years.

Democrats in control of the U.S. Congress have been pressing Bush to agree to a timetable for pulling troops from Iraq, an idea firmly opposed by the president.

White House spokesman Tony Snow said Bush would like to see a U.S. role in Iraq ultimately similar to that in South Korea in which “you get to a point in the future where you want it to be a purely support model.” (more…)

By Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti
The New York Times

As the Bush administration completes secret new rules governing interrogations, a group of experts advising the intelligence agencies are arguing that the harsh techniques used since the 2001 terrorist attacks are outmoded, amateurish and unreliable.

The psychologists and other specialists, commissioned by the Intelligence Science Board, make the case that more than five years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration has yet to create an elite corps of interrogators trained to glean secrets from terrorism suspects.

While billions are spent each year to upgrade satellites and other high-tech spy machinery, the experts say, interrogation methods – possibly the most important source of information on groups like Al Qaeda – are a hodgepodge that date from the 1950s, or are modeled on old Soviet practices. (more…)

side note: well people, here you go. Read, and then go find that Bush Backer you’ve been arguing with and shove this down their throat. No, no, i’m sorry, that’s too harsh. Take it to them, and “educate” them on this giant fact, then shove it down their throats!

By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Newsweek

In new court filings, special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald has finally resolved one of the most disputed issues at the core of the long-running CIA leak controversy: Valerie Plame Wilson, he asserts, was a “covert” CIA officer who repeatedly traveled overseas using a “cover identity” in order to disguise her relationship with the agency.

Fitzgerald cites Wilson’s covert status as part of his argument – advanced in two strongly worded memos filed in recent days – that I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, should be sentenced to up to three years in prison.

Libby was convicted last March of four counts of obstruction of justice, false statements and perjury relating to what he knew, and with whom he shared information, about Valerie Plame Wilson in the weeks prior to her outing by columnist Robert Novak in a July 14, 2003 newspaper column. Libby, who is appealing the verdict, is due to be sentenced next Tuesday by U.S. Judge Reggie Walton – an event that could well reignite a fierce political controversy over whether President Bush should pardon the former Cheney aide.

Libby’s lawyers, and many conservative partisans of his cause, have argued that Libby should be spared prison in part because there was no underlying crime in the disclosure of Valerie Wilson’s identity. (As his trial established, Wilson’s identity was leaked to a number of reporters by several Bush administration officials who were interested in discrediting the attacks by her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, on the White House’s handling of Iraq pre-war intelligence.) (more…)

side note: Besides the quagmire dubya has gotten us into, plus all the other scandels (which have come to be a daily occurrence) ….this has got to be the biggest story of the year. We rely on bees to pollinate a third of our food……if they go…a third of our food goes…..simple as that! Plus, this could have dire consequences on our ecosystem b/c other animals rely on food that bees pollinate.

By Kevin Berger
Salon.com

A round table of experts answer all our pressing questions about the sudden death of the nation’s bees. What they have to say has a bigger sting than we ever expected.

The buzz about the alarming disappearance of bees has been all about people food. Honeybees pollinate one-third of the fruits, nuts and vegetables that end up in our homey kitchen baskets. If the tireless apian workers didn’t fly from one flower to the next, depositing pollen grains so that fruit trees can bloom, America could well be asking where its next meal would come from. Last fall, the nation’s beekeepers watched in horror as more than a quarter of their 2.4 million colonies collapsed, killing billions of nature’s little fertilizers.

But as a Salon round table discussion with bee experts revealed, the mass exodus of bees to the great hive in the sky forebodes a bigger story. The faltering dance between honeybees and trees is symptomatic of industrial disease. As the scientists outlined some of the biological agents behind “colony collapse disorder,” and dismissed the ones that are not — sorry, friends, the Rapture is out — they sketched a picture of how we are forever altering the planet’s delicate web of life.

The scientists constituted a fascinating foursome, each with his own point of view. Jeffery Pettis, research leader of the USDA’s honeybee lab, told us the current collapse is one of the worst in history. Eric Mussen, of the Honey Bee Research Facility at the University of California at Davis, maintained that it may only be cyclical. Wayne Esaias, of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, an amateur beekeeper, outlined his compelling views about the impact of climate change on bees. And John McDonald, a biologist, beekeeper and gentleman farmer in rural Pennsylvania, reminded us, if at times sardonically, of the poetry in agriculture. (more…)

side note: I thought our government was supposed to be open with the people?!?! We’ve seen countless times throughout history what happens when leaders are allowed to keep everything behind closed doors….corruption and abuse of power.

By Pete Yost
The Associated Press
Yahoo News

Washington – A lawyer for Vice President Dick Cheney told the Secret Service in September to eliminate data on who visited Cheney at his official residence, a newly disclosed letter states.

The Sept. 13, 2006, letter from Cheney’s lawyer says logs for Cheney’s residence on the grounds of the Naval Observatory are subject to the Presidential Records Act.

Such a designation prevents the public from learning who visited the vice president.

The Justice Department filed the letter Friday in a lawsuit by a private group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, seeking the identities of conservative religious leaders who visited Cheney at his official residence.

The newly disclosed letter about visitors to Cheney’s residence is accompanied by an 18-page Secret Service document revealing the agency’s long-standing practice has been to destroy printed daily access lists of visitors to the residence.

Separately, the agency says it has given Cheney’s office handwritten logs of who visits him at his personal residence. (more…)

By: Mike Allen
http://www.politico.com

Fred Dalton Thompson is planning to enter the presidential race over the Fourth of July holiday, announcing that week that he has already raised several million dollars and is being backed by insiders from the past three Republican administrations, Thompson advisers told The Politico.

Thompson, the “Law and Order” star and former U.S. senator from Tennessee, has been publicly coy, even as people close to him have been furiously preparing for a late entry into the wide-open contest. But the advisers said Thompson dropped all pretenses on Tuesday afternoon during a conference call with more than 100 potential donors, each of whom was urged to raise about $50,000.

Thompson’s formal announcement is planned for Nashville. Organizers say the red pickup truck that was a hallmark of Thompson’s first Senate race will begin showing up in Iowa and New Hampshire as an emblem of what they consider his folksy, populist appeal. (more…)

MARCUS WOHLSEN
AP
Huffingtonpost.com

Two lost whales closed in on their ocean home Tuesday evening, passing under a busy bridge and entering San Francisco Bay after being lost in inland waterways.

The mother humpback and her calf, who have sojourned for more than two weeks in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, passed under the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge on Tuesday afternoon, the next-to-last bridge along the pair’s route.

“They’re heading very much in the right direction,” said Rod McInnis, a spokesman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

If the humpbacks can navigate south around a peninsula and an island, few obstacles would remain on their route past Alcatraz to the Golden Gate, the strait that connects San Francisco Bay to the Pacific Ocean. (more…)

side note: great article, long, but very interesting. towards the bottom of the article, there is a quote from Tom DeLay. He summed up the Repub party pretty well, when he was talking about his old friend (now they can’t stand each other) Newt Gingrich. Here’s the excerpt, “In fact, DeLay speaks of Gingrich with undisguised contempt. “He’s got this new shtick now—‘solutions,’ he calls it, like government is the new solution. Government isn’t the solution; it’s the problem.” DeLay smiled. “Did you see that he had a love match with John Kerry on global warming?” he said. “That’s not going to help him with the Presidential race.”” Government’s the problem. Apparently nobody told Tom, The American People are supposed to BE the Government. What you will also find interesting is DeLay said God spoke to him, and has given him orders. He’s supposed to rebuild the Republican party, sort of ironic, since he’s one of the reasons it’s crumbling.

The Republican implosion.
by Jeffrey Goldberg
http://www.newyorker.com

The West Wing of the White House tends to have a funereal stillness, even in the best of times, which these are not. The President’s aides walk the narrow corridors with pensive expressions and vigilantly modulated voices. By contrast, Karl Rove’s office has an almost party atmosphere. Rove, the President’s chief political adviser—the “architect,” Bush has called him, of his 2004 victory over John Kerry—has been a man of constant troubles: Valerie Plame troubles, U.S. Attorney-firing troubles, and, most of all, collapse-of-the-Republican Party troubles. Yet his voice is suffused with bonhomie, his jokes are bad and frequent, his enthusiasm is communicable; he resembles an oversized leprechaun, although one with unconcealed resentments and a receding hairline.

“Hey, what’s Snow doing here?” Rove said one recent afternoon. “Must be important, if he’s visiting us.” Tony Snow, the White House press secretary, stood in Rove’s outer office, bent over in conversation with one of several assistants. “Uh-oh, here’s the big gun,” Rove said as Peter Wehner, the White House director of strategic initiatives, came into the office. Wehner, an evangelical Christian, is known in Washington for a relentless stream of e-mails that praise George W. Bush’s allies (“The Remarkable Anthony Charles Lynton Blair,” “The Remarkable Joseph Lieberman”); that glean from the Internet any cheerful news from Iraq; and that provide links to articles by writers like the Middle East scholar Fouad Ajami and the untiring neoconservative Norman Podhoretz.

As we talked, Rove would bounce up from his chair, twice making a show of going to the dictionary to look up words. (One was “sanguinity,” as in “I’m very sanguine” about the Republican Party’s future.) He is a bookish man who plays the part of the anti-intellectual, which fits an Administration whose culture discourages displays of esoteric knowledge and, its critics say, of useful knowledge as well. (more…)

By Frank Rich
The New York Times

When all else fails, those pious Americans who conceived and directed the Iraq war fall back on moral self-congratulation: at least we brought liberty and democracy to an oppressed people. But that last-ditch rationalization has now become America’s sorriest self-delusion in this tragedy.

However wholeheartedly we disposed of their horrific dictator, the Iraqis were always pawns on the geopolitical chessboard rather than actual people in the administration’s reckless bet to “transform” the Middle East. From “Stuff happens!” on, nearly every aspect of Washington policy in Iraq exuded contempt for the beneficiaries of our supposed munificence. Now this animus is completely out of the closet. Without Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz to kick around anymore, the war’s dead-enders are pinning the fiasco on the Iraqis themselves. Our government abhors them almost as much as the Lou Dobbs spear carriers loathe those swarming “aliens” from Mexico. (more…)