First National Sunshine Week

Important urgent action item or the world will come to an end:

Lawmaker Seeks to End Sexy Cheerleading

AUSTIN (March 18) - The Friday night lights in Texas could soon be without bumpin' and grindin' cheerleaders. Legislation filed by Rep. Al Edwards would put an end to "sexually suggestive" performances at athletic events and other extracurricular competitions.

"It's just too sexually oriented, you know, the way they're shaking their behinds and going on, breaking it down," said Edwards, a 26-year veteran of the Texas House. "And then we say to them, 'don't get involved in sex unless it's marriage or love, it's dangerous out there' and yet the teachers and directors are helping them go through those kind of gyrations."

Under Edwards' bill, if a school district knowingly permits such a performance, funds from the state would be reduced in an amount to be determined by the education commissioner.

Edwards said he filed the bill as a result of several instances of seeing such ribald performances in his district.

J.M. Farias, owner of Austin Cheer Factory, said cheerleading aficionados would welcome the law. Cheering competitions, he said, penalize for suggestive movements or any vulgarity.

"Any coaches that are good won't put that in their routines," he said. And, most girls cheering on Friday nights were trained by professionals who know better, he said.

"I don't think this law would really shake the industry at all. In fact, it would give parents a better feeling, mostly dads and boyfriends, too," Farias said.

Although cheerleaders must meet the same no-pass, no-play academic requirements of athletes, cheerleading is not a competition sanctioned by the University Interscholastic League, the governing body of Texas high school sports.

The UIL also does not have performance regulations for squads who cheer for their teams at state championships, said Athletic Coordinator Peter Contreras.

"I think it should have been cut out a long time ago," Edwards said. "It surely needs to be toned down."

Will this apply to faithful reublican Britney Spears' hot videos?

Only if they show them at athletic events and other extracurricular competitions in Texas, apparently.

The American Taliban is alive and well and ready to tell you how to live.

from salon.com

Announcing the "natural family"

On Wednesday, a coalition of conservative groups held a press conference to announce "The Natural Family Manifesto," a joint project of the Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society and the Sutherland Institute. Unveiled in the wake of Tuesday's court ruling in California declaring that a ban on same-sex marriage violated the state's constitution, the 36-page manifesto is a radical re-envisioning of the family unit in social and economic terms, and a sweeping prescription for the pro-family movement.

"It is not enough to stop public recognition of 'gay marriage,' nor to oppose 'safe sex education' in the public schools, nor to ban partial birth abortion, nor to create optional 'covenant' marriages," it reads. "Victory for the natural family will come only as we change the terms of debate."

The authors envision a state designed to protect the "integrity" of the home -- autonomous family units composed exclusively of one woman, one man, and as many children as possible. As incentive for the mother to stay home and fulfill her "aptness for motherhood," fathers would be paid a "family wage." "Home economies" would replace the "control of big government and vast corporations," whose demands have eroded the sovereignty of marriage-based families. The tax code would be amended to favor large families and small businesses.

It goes without saying that same-sex marriage does not exist in this prescribed world. In the utopia of "family homes, lawns, and gardens... ringing with the laughter of many children," gay marriage would not only be illegal -- children would be instructed with positive images of chastity, marriage, "husbandry," and "housewifery."

If it all sounds a bit over the top, consider that the manifesto has the backing of representatives from a dozen powerful conservative groups and leaders, from the Heritage Foundation to Jerry Falwell. Apparently religious conservatives are frustrated with the Bush administration's inertia on the marriage amendment and other pet issues, and the manifesto is only one part of their next line of attack.

-- Julia Scott

[12:14 EST, March 17, 2005]

link to article on salon.com http://tinyurl.com/7yryn

Another Salon article worth reading:

Mr. Magoo goes to the World Bank

The problem with Paul Wolfowitz isn't that he's an evil genius. It's that he has been consistently, astonishingly, unswervingly wrong about foreign policy for 30 years.
~snip~
Critics are wrong to portray Wolfowitz as a malevolent genius. In fact, he's friendly, soft-spoken, well meaning and thoughtful. He would be the model of a scholar and a statesman but for one fact: He is completely inept. His three-decade career in U.S. foreign policy can be summed up by the term that President Bush coined to describe the war in Iraq that Wolfowitz promoted and helped to oversee: a "catastrophic success."

Even the greatest statesman makes some mistakes. But Wolfowitz is perfectly incompetent. He is the Mozart of ineptitude, the Einstein of incapacity. To be sure, he has his virtues, the foremost of which is consistency. He has been consistently wrong about foreign policy for 30 years.
~snip~

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2005/03/17/wolfowitz_nomination/index.html

But what does all this have to do with baseball player taking steroids.

Baseball players taking steroids is much, much more important than this triteness.

This Sunshine site has a killer toolkit app.

We post our opinions here on the blog, and discuss every aspect of the political world. Today, Terri Schiavo is politics. I wish to express that another piece of our very humanity is diminshed by the actions in process in our government. Last night, I could not sleep for thinking about this. Terri does not belong to the government. She is not a 'case' to be decided in public. She does not belong to a red or blue 'issue' to be debated on the house or senate floor.

We have no business being the judges over the pain that has lived with Terri and her family. No one side is more correct than the other, and to try to determine a winner by legislative edict reduces Terri to a political football, where somebody declares victory. How can anyone justify that?

I wrote a letter, late last night, and e-mailed it to eightteen senators. I simply asked them not to try to do something that Terri's family has not been able to do for a very long time. A portion of that letter is here:

......Trying to own Terri Schiavo is wrong. There can be no winner. Debate will neither cure Terri nor kill her, but it depersonalizes all of us. It reduces Terri to an "issue." Will debate answer the question of when Terri lived the measure of years allotted to her? If she was called to end her time here on Earth all those years ago, then the feeding tube impedes God's will. If the feeding tube is a bridge to a cure, will debate know when that cure is coming? And, if you don't know, do you have a right to take up a position?

The very humanity that binds us all demands that you embrace Terri and her family equally. We can take them to our hearts, and hope that they find the wisdom to do what is right. We can empathize with all of them. We can weep with them, and hope that one day there will be peace for the people who have suffered long and deeply. But, we cannot summon love to the floor of the senate and judge it.

I implore you to think not of your party, or your position. Please do not try to score something by using Terri. Please do not try to win. Before you step up and speak on behalf of your party platforms, listen to your heart, which belongs to the human party. Be graceful and good to Terri now, by not making her an object of a political speech. Terri is not a poster child for red or blue, left or right. Hasn't her life already been hard enough, without all of us trying to pin that on her too?........

I know that this publicity has been summonned by Terri's parents. The Supreme Court, in my opinion made the right decision by not taking this up. I cannot hope to understand how much pain has driven Terri's parents to seek this course out of their love for their child. There but for the grace of God.....However, Terri has a husband too, and he is as valid as a parent. Love is love, not politics.

We are all going to die. We are all subject to the hurt that the loss of a loved one brings. There is no escape from it. A law will not keep it from happening. Who are any of us to judge if this is a living death, a prolonged life, a prayer for a cure, or a subversion of God's will?

Perhaps we have reached the point where instead of subpeonaing Terri to testify, we should wonder that congress does not attempt to subpeona God for his 'opinion.' I fear that even if that were possible, there would be an attempt to silence the higher power everyone is trying to impose on Terri now if it disagrees with a political platform.

There is no way to satisfy everyone. No one comes out the better for a debate such as this. We do not belong here. Terri is not politics, and we will probably never know her opinion. Would anyone even listen to her now, if she really could speak?

A little bright spot for Dem's. The budget passed 51-49 but not a single Dem voted for it. For once at least there were no defector's.

This weekend is the International Protest Against the Occupation of Iraq. It's huge in other countries, including Australia. Our cell is doing freeway blogging and sign waving at a major intersection to remind people that we still continue in this illegal and immoral invasion and destruction of a soverign country.

We also have signs with web addresses on them, in huge letters so they can be seen from a distance. I'm broadcasting this site; others are advertising truthout, mediamatters, Lakeoff site, democracyforamerica, buyblue, etc.

The event goes the whole weekend. Get your group out and get the truth out.

Many people, including myself and the speaker from SS who came to address our county dems, believe that the SS issue was timed exactly this way in order to distract Americans from the immoral horrors of the Bush Invasion. A BBC reporter recently said "Why do I have no report from Falluja lately? Because there no longer is a Falluja - it went from a bustling city of over 300,000 to a ruins with a few tents here and there. What's to report? It's rubble." Others have said similar things.

Here is a story about the over 5500 soldiers who have refused to return to Iraq, some of whom face courtmartial.

http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2005/619/619p14.htm

"On February 25, US Army officials at Fort Stewart, Georgia, announced that Sergeant Kevin Benderman, a 40-year-old army mechanic who refused to deploy to Iraq for a second tour of duty, will be court-martialed on desertion charges. If convicted, he faces up to seven years in prison.

After having spent 10 years in the US military, Benderman missed his unit's deployment flight to Iraq on January 7. Ten days earlier, he had given his commanders notice that he planned to seek a discharge as a conscientious objector, saying he had become opposed to the war after having served eight months in Iraq in 2003."

My friend has a new signature on her email: she has a link to truthout, and then in bold red lettering, "Don't just complain, DO SOMETHING."

Action, action, action.

What happened in Fallujah?
Here is a testimony by a doctor who spoke under condition of anonimity. He was there!

http://dahrjamailiraq.com/weblog/archives/dispatches/000196.php

The American army turned the city in a middle east Stalingrad... Nothing is left but hatred.

Two-Year Anniversary of Iraq Invasion

March 18, 2005

This weekend marks the two-year anniversary of the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq. Although Iraq's recent elections signal a positive turn, far more remains uncertain. The administration's disastrous post-war occupation has hindered reconstruction and security efforts. Corruption and violence are endemic. And the costs in American lives and taxpayer dollars continue to mount. We know one thing for certain; the administration's predictions and statements before the war were all wrong.

The Bush administration's rationale for war was dead wrong. All of the rationales posed by the White House as justification for the war have been thoroughly debunked. There were no weapons of mass destruction. Saddam Hussein had no collaborative ties to al Qaeda. Bush's talk of freedom and democracy appear to be afterthoughts to justify a war of choice. Although these are laudable goals, they were not the stated reasons for sending U.S. servicemen and women to die. The administration misled the nation into war and now wants us to believe its motives were noble.

The war did not pay for itself and U.S. forces were not greeted with open arms. In the days after the invasion two years ago, the White House famously predicted the war would pay for itself. Today, the U.S. is on track to spend close more than $200 billion for the Iraq war. Two years ago, the White House claimed U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators by the Iraqi people. In July 2003, there were an estimated 5,000 insurgents fighting against U.S. troops. Today, that estimate is closer to 18,000. And while a year ago, there was an average of 14 attacks against U.S. troops per day, now it's more than 70.

Americans have spoken: they do not believe the war was worth fighting. According to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, 53 percent of Americans said the war was not worth fighting and 70 percent said the number of U.S. casualties is an unacceptable price. Despite the administration's unrelenting propaganda about Iraq, Americans understand the consequences of the administration's actions and don't like what they see.
Daily Talking Points is a product of the American Progress Action Fund.

Posted by: tutterfly at March 18, 2005 10:33 AM
Spoken from a true heart, tutterfly... thank you.

Montana gov wants Nat'l Guard troops home.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/13/national/13montana.html?pagewanted=print&po

All of us should pressure our state governors to bring the Guard troops home.
Becasuse of heavy rains, the wildfire season will be very dangerous. The Guard becomes frontline fire-fighters and will be badly needed.

Why Iraq Withdrawal Makes Sense
By Norman Solomon
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/031805Z.shtml
[snip]
It is the will of the Iraqi people." Enders cites a recent survey by Iraqi pollster Saadun Al-Dulaimie, who found that 85 percent of Iraqi people want U.S. troops out of their country as soon as possible.

"The U.S. does not provide security for the average Iraqi, and it never has."

"The U.S. has not prevented a civil war from taking place. If anything, it has exacerbated it."

"It is not morally derelict to pull out; it's morally derelict to stay. Returning real control and sovereignty to Iraqis is the most effective way to prevent the country from breaking apart. U.S. troops complain Iraqis don't want to stand up and fight for themselves, and a big part of the reason is the occupiers' presence."

Bush makes Pukes puke:

Senate Rejects Bush's Cuts
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-budget18mar18,0,4188870,print.story?coll=la-home-headlines

"This is not a vote against fiscal responsibility," said Sen. Gordon H. Smith of Oregon, a moderate Republican and the Medicaid amendment's principal author. "This is a vote for cutting the deficit in an orderly way…. We're letting the budget drive the policy, instead of the policy driving the budget."

...snip...

The Senate's actions set up a confrontation with the House, which earlier Thursday approved its own version of the budget — one that hews more closely to Bush's initial spending and tax proposals.

They also shone a spotlight on fissures in the Senate's GOP majority. Four Republicans broke ranks with their party to vote against the overall bill; seven voted to restore funds for Medicaid but to study ways to save money in the future.

...snip...

If the two chambers cannot reach agreement, they would be forced to go without a plan, as they did last year.

A budget breakdown would be an embarrassment for the GOP leadership, which had expected that the larger Republican majorities in both chambers — and particularly in the Senate — would allow easy passage of the president's proposals.

It also could doom a top energy priority: allowing oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. A measure smoothing the way for drilling legislation is included in the Senate's version of the budget and is considered likely to emerge intact from a compromise with the House.

The absence of a budget would also short-circuit the House and Senate budget committees' plans to instruct other congressional committees to write legislation cutting farm benefits, food stamps and other programs.

Under congressional rules, approval of a budget resolution by both chambers would protect such legislation from filibusters in the Senate. As a result, spending cuts could be approved by a simple majority of 51 senators.

... & other thin glimmers of hope

Wolfowitz reaches out to Bono
http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/index.html?blog=/politics/war_room/2005/03/18/wolf/index.html

George W. Bush's nomination of Paul Wolfowitz to lead the World Bank has critics concerned that the neo-con architect of the Iraq war will use the World Bank as just another weapon in the war on terrorism. But Wolfowitz is showing that he knows a thing or two about diplomacy, too: In the last two days, he has checked in with numerous foreign officials, the leaders of international development agencies -- and Bono.

According to a Reuters report, Wolfowitz initiated two long telephone conversations with the U2 front-man, who may have been a contender for the job Wolfowitz is getting. With Europe and much of the developing world less than enthusiastic about Wolfowitz' nomination, the deputy secretary of defense knows that a good word from Bono might ease his way.

Wolfowitz spokesman Kevin Kellems said Wolfowitz and Bono "clicked." "They were very enthusiastic, detailed and lengthy conversations," Kellems said. He said that the conversations "were incredibly substantive about reducing poverty, about development, about the opportunity to help people that the World Bank presidency provides and about charitable giving and social progress around the globe."

The word from the Bono side of the conversation was a little less effusive. The government relations director for Debt, AIDS, Trade and Africa, a lobbying group Bono helped to found, told Reuters: "Bono thought it was important that he put forward the issues that are critical to the World Bank, like debt cancellation, aid effectiveness and a real focus on poverty reduction."

I've read wher Biden has set up an exploratory commitee to run for the whitehouse in '08.

I would strongly suggest that after today he not waste his time or our's.

And I really used to admire him.

I have to share that with you.

8 p.m news on TF1 and BIG, BIG REPORT WITH JOHN KERRY about Alaska, and what his environment program was... an interview with a local dweller explaining they are just going to ruin the fauna..;thae live out of cariboo's meat.

You can't see him, I did!
When I told you, we are following things closely...

Oh Joe, say it ain't so!

Isn't that special. Barbara in her pearls and outside her mutimillion dollar home says go ahead and gamble senior's SS money. She doesn't need it. It just helps pay for her pet's food.

"PENSACOLA, Fla. -- President Bush, his sales pitch for Social Security reform not yet winning over the nation, sought help on Friday from his mom.

Barbara Bush, wearing her trademark pearls, took the stage with the president..

Ira,

You're from Houston I think. Barbara is a regular client of a friend of mine who creates clothes for large women, and she praised about it. Too bad!
She wanted to settle a business in France, I had the connections, but when I knew about it, I ruined everything.
No one wants to work with someone with the Bush connection. I made sure about it.

Bush 42 is actually more reasonable than his son. That is what got him in trouble with his base in '92.

The Bush's live in Tanglewood. Next to River Oaks, the most expensive neighborhood in Houston.

I don't begrudge them their money but Bush 42 inherited his money and home in Kenny Bunkport from his patrician family.Unlike his son at least George actually paid his dues,worked, and was a responsible civil servant something W has never known. Clinton showed that the Bush family is out of touch with mainstream Americans; the one's who pay for food and medicine with each SS check. They are not buying pearls, Rembrants or cigarette boats with their SS checks.
She is a decent enough person and we share the same vet but none of the Bush's have any concept what it means to live pay check to pay check; or SS check to SS check.
Unfortunately this issue really is about class warfare. That is why Republicans don't want to do the responsible thing and lift the $90,000 cap on SS taxes what Lindsay Graham has proposed and probably the sainest idea to actually fix the problem.
But we all know that fixing SS has nothing to do with W's privatization plans.
I would take George and Barbara any day over W and Laura though. The pearls though remind me of the days of June Cleaver.

Ira,

I had to laugh when I read that the reason Barbara Bush gave for why she was stumping for SS privatization was that she was concerned about her 17 grandkids under age 50. Considering the "Bush Family Fortunes," that had to be one of the most disingenuous remarks we've seen on the subject.

If Berlusconi follows through on pulling troops out of Iraq:

Today Diane Rehm (NPR) said that the Italian withdrawal will reduce the "Coalition of the willing” to 14 countries (down from the initial count of 38).

14/38 → 37% Leadership in action

(I’m mostly avoiding news, so please excuse if everybody knows already—someday I’ll be able to stomach the view again…)

On Marketplace it is called "Coalition of the Billing" (Halliburton & similar companies got 75 cents out of every dollar that was supposed to be for Iraqi reconstruction).

A security guard can make $1000/day for a company like BRK.

& $ 8 billion of taxpayer's money has gone missing.