Personal Accounts Hit a Wall

LA Times reports Now that Bush had convinced many people that Social Security was a Ponzi scheme headed for collapse, Liddy wondered, why was he was having such a hard time selling his proposal to let younger workers open personal investment accounts? Yet as the clock winds down on Bush's self-imposed timetable for promoting his restructuring plan, some conservatives fear he has laid the groundwork for what they regard as the worst possible outcome — pressure for tax increases and benefit cuts to ensure Social Security's solvency, but a rejection of private accounts as part of the fix.

I doubt that very many conservatives think that, but I am certain that the Extremely Left Wing LA Times would love for people to think that.

"There is some worry that just for the sake of having a victory, we'll get a bill that tosses personal accounts over the side," said Stephen Moore, president of the Free Enterprise Fund, a conservative advocacy group. "We'll get a combination of tax increases and benefit reductions that won't solve what in our opinion is the fundamental problem, that people don't have individual ownership." The president and his aides say they are as committed as ever to personal investment accounts, a central element of the "ownership society" agenda regarded by some GOP strategists as a roadmap for ensuring Republican political domination for decades to come.

"I don't think they want to go into the midterm elections next year with the Democrats able to say they defended America against the undoing of Social Security," said one administration advisor who spoke on condition of anonymity. "They'd rather end up with a piece of legislation, even if it's flawed or not what they wanted."

That would be foolish. I suspect things will change before then, and there will be legislation with some level of tax increases and/or benefit cuts, but it will also have personal accounts, and the Republicans can say the Democrats (who love tax increases) forced us to include a tax increase so we could provide you with personal accounts the government can't steal.

Such concerns reflect the mixed signals being sent by opinion polls and other public feedback midway through the administration's "60 Stops in 60 Days" barnstorming tour to promote restructuring.

Surveys show majorities of Americans now agree with the president that Social Security faces a serious cash-flow problem, and some members of Congress say their constituents are expressing similar sentiments. "The president has made some headway," said Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa). "People are seeing Social Security as something Congress ought to be dealing with…. That's quite an accomplishment in the sense of where people were three months ago."

Absolutely, and just wait to see what the situation will be at the end of the 60 days

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The Courting of Bill

Village voice reports that last weekend James Ridgeway was fooled by an an April Fools' spoof by the Hotline, which said that Karl Rove had come up with a plan to Stop Hillary by Putting Bill on the Supreme Court. The hoax said Here's what's supposed to happen: Bush names either Clarence Thomas or Antonin Scalia to be chief justice. That leaves one vacancy on the court. Then he appoints Bill Clinton to the court. Oh my God!

The thought of adulterer Clinton on the court (think Monica as clerk) sends right-wingers up the wall. But wait a minute. Think it through: Next, Bill Frist—Senate majority leader, Terri Schiavo defender, and himself a presidential hopeful—immediately moves to hold up Bill's nomination. Next, Harry Reid, the Democratic minority leader in the Senate, cuts a deal to free the conservative judicial nominations now backed up in Congress in return for letting Clinton on the court.

Once on the court, Clinton is out of the picture when it comes to campaigning for Hillary or anyone else in 2008. What to do about Hillary? Americans may differ on whether she should be president, but almost everyone will agree that the country could not stand to have two Clintons dominating two branches of government.

As for what Bill might do on the court, one conservative pol opined, "He couldn't be any worse than Souter."

This plan was so outrageous that I am surprised the Village Voice was fooled by it.

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Spyware threatens to pierce Vatican walls

USAToday reports Computer hackers, electronic bugs and supersensitive microphones threaten to pierce the Vatican's thick walls next week when cardinals gather in the Sistine Chapel to name a papal successor.

The temptations to spy will be immense. The papal election will likely see keen competition, notably between reformers and conservatives. It is also expected to witness a strong push for the first non-European pope. Revelations of the proceedings could prove embarrassing to the Vatican. For instance, sensitive discussions on a papal candidate's stand on relations with Muslims or Jews, recognizing China rather than Taiwan or views on contraception would be sought-after by governments or the press.

We will never know, unless somehow someone manages to break the security, but I doubt the Cardnials will be having those discussions, and basing their decisions based on them.

In 1996, John Paul set down rules to protect cardinals from "threats to their independence of judgment." Cell phones, electronic organizers, radios, newspapers, TVs and recorders were banned. The ban on cell phones and personal data organizers makes sense, security experts say, since they can be hacked and used to broadcast the proceedings to a listener. "An eavesdropper can reach into those devices and turn on the microphone and turn it into an eavesdropping device," said James Atkinson, who heads a Gloucester, Mass., company that specializes in bug detection. "It's extraordinarily easy to do."

I don't think it is quite as easy as he implies, but it is obvious he wants them to hire him to prevent it. I suspect John Paul II's ban on cell phones and PDAs will be sufficient.

Another worry for the Vatican will be rooftop snoops with sensitive microphones. Laser microphones can pick up conversations from a quarter-mile away by recording vibrations on window glass or other hard surfaces. The Sistine Chapel has windows set near the roof. "You focus the laser on a window or on a hard object in the room, like the glass on a picture," said a New York-based security expert with Kroll, Inc., who asked that his name not be used. "When people are talking the glass will modulate with the sound of the voice and they can recover the audio."

Laser microphones can be thwarted with heavy drapes and by masking conversations with ambient noise. Tougher to root out are tiny bugs: transmitters or recorders as small as a coin. To handle those, bug-sweeping teams — acting on the pope's 1996 orders — will need to mount complex sweeps of sensitive meeting areas, taking out carpets, poking through chair cushions, opening heating ducts, testing electrical wiring, light bulbs and water pipes, Atkinson said.

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High-tech field trips

USAToday reports Jacy Borlik and her sixth-grade classmates watched as a curator for the Indiana State Museum showed how a 30,000-year-old dinosaur bone is excavated and then catalogued. "It was cool," Jacy said. But the students never left their school 15 miles southwest of South Bend and the curator never left the museum in Indianapolis. They were connected from North Liberty Elementary School by interactive videoconferencing, which educators say is becoming more common as firsthand learning experiences like field trips are cut from tight school budgets.

I wish they had this when I was in school.

Leslie Lorance, new media director for the Indiana State Museum, said museum curators conduct about 25 distance-learning field trips a month on several topics. The sessions cost about $85. Though curators follow a set outline, the programs vary with each group. "The topic can go anywhere because the students ask questions," Lorance the South Bend Tribune for a story Monday. "We can show artifacts they wouldn't get to see when they come to the museum" because some are too delicate to be brought into a workshop. Andrew Stegemiller, technology coordinator for the John Glenn school district, which includes North Liberty, said the programs are not just high-tech show and tell. Programs come with study guides and adhere to specific national and state teaching standards.

"Educators understand that this is not frivolous. This is not a Friday afternoon video," said Ruth Blankenbaker, executive director of the Indianapolis-based Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration. The group is a nonprofit organization that acts as a national clearinghouse for distance learning programs created by more than 100 different organizations. Those groups include museums, waste management districts and theater groups whose live interactive programs can be applied to almost any academic area or age group, Blankenbaker said. She said although this technology has been available for a decade, her organization is only now seeing a "burgeoning interest" because of wider availability of content and tighter school budgets. Even though some programs can cost up to $300, that is cheaper than most conventional field trips once transportation and admission fees are totaled, said North Liberty Principal Bob Lichtenberger.

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Voter Identification

Don Danz blogged This past Tuesday I voted in a local election on a city bond issue and a runoff for the school board.... I can't imagine anything more asinine than not checking a photo ID before someone is allowed to vote. Who could possibly be against checking a person's ID before they vote? Well, Democrats are opposed to it. Why? Because they say it disproportionately frightens blacks and the elderly and would keep them from voting. This is not only untrue but, also, incredibly insulting to blacks and the elderly. I guess blacks and old people don’t use checks or credit cards either because they are too scared someone will want to see some ID. What a load of c**p. The only real reason to oppose checking identification is that in some places Democrats rely on widespread voter fraud in order to be elected. There simply is no other reason to oppose mandatory photo identification before voting.

dustbury blogged You'd almost get the feeling from this conversation that the State Election Board had ordered no IDs ever be checked, lest someone be upset by having to prove his vote was, you know, legal.

The Election Board sends out a card, to the address given, with the voter's name, party registration, county, precinct number and location. A person who has this card and doesn't know where he's supposed to vote is, prima facie, probably too stupid to exercise the franchise.

Michael Bates blogged Oklahoma election officials are justly proud of our optical ballot readers, which gives us the ability to obtain quick and accurate results while still having a paper record of each vote, preserving the option of a manual count. But a ballot reader is like any other computer -- Garbage In, Garbage Out -- and it can't detect a ballot cast fraudulently. We've had too many close elections that could have been swayed by even a tiny amount of fraud: House District 78 in 2004 was decided by less than 30 votes; the 2002 Governor's race was decided by less than three votes per precinct.

In a voting system that is truly one person, one vote, only an eligible voter would cast a ballot, each voter would vote only once and would vote only in the district in which he currently lives. Oklahoma has no requirement to ensure that any of those conditions are met. For the sake of democracy, it's time we fixed that.

Michael Bates blogged "Doverspa" of
RedState.org commented on my earlier post about voter fraud that fellow RedState.org contributor Erick Erickson has helped draft a tough voter ID bill currently working its way through the Georgia legislature. Here's the
Macon Telegraph story and
Erick's entry on the bill.

Marcus Aurelius commented

• In the Washington State election it seems the main issues revolved around the validation of provisional ballots, the mailing of absentee ballots, ineligible people voting, and more ballots being cast than the number of people who were suppose to have voted
• In the Milwaukee election the main issues revolve around people supposedly voting twice, handling of absentee ballots, unprocessed voter registration cards, and data entry errors
• In the East St. Louis election the issues seem to be multiple votes from the same address and an inordinate number of absentee ballots.

In none of these instances would a person be stopped from casting a fraudulent vote if they had shown a photo ID instead of an electric bill, a bank statement, or a check from the Government.

Requiring a Photo ID would certainly make it harder for someone to vote twice. And if that photo id was one that was very difficult to fake, it would make it even harder.

Can you point to an example of actual voter fraud, which would have been stopped if a person had shown a photo ID instead of an electric bill, a bank statement, or a check from the Government? Also, the article you link to claims that a person who is not able to produce a valid picture ID will not be allowed to vote at all. Shouldn't they at least be allowed to cast a provisional ballot?

Marcus Aurelius at RedState shows examples where voter fraud did not involve the lack of a photo id. Those examples certainly should be addressed, but there is absolutely no reason why a photo id should not be a minimum requirement in order to vote.

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First iPod

No I am not saying the iPod was just released. The NYT reports President Bush spent an hour and a half on Saturday on an 18-mile mountain bike ride at his Texas ranch. With him, as usual, was his indispensable new exercise toy: an iPod music player loaded with country and popular rock tunes aimed at getting the presidential heart rate up to a chest-pounding 170 beats per minute.

Which brings up the inevitable question. What, exactly, is on the First iPod? First, Mr. Bush's iPod is heavy on traditional country singers like George Jones, Alan Jackson and Kenny Chesney. He has selections by Van Morrison, whose "Brown Eyed Girl" is a Bush favorite, and by John Fogerty, most predictably "Centerfield," which was played at Texas Rangers games when Mr. Bush was an owner and is still played at ballparks all over America. ("Oh, put me in coach, I'm ready to play today.")

The president also has an eclectic mix of songs downloaded into his iPod from Mark McKinnon, a biking buddy and his chief media strategist during the 2004 campaign. Among them are "Circle Back" by John Hiatt, "(You're So Square) Baby, I Don't Care" by Joni Mitchell and "My Sharona," the 1979 song by the Knack that Joe Levy, a deputy managing editor at Rolling Stone in charge of music coverage, cheerfully branded "suggestive if not outright filthy" in an interview last week.

At least he does not listen to the Dixie Chicks

Mr. Bush has had his Apple iPod since July, when he received it from his twin daughters as a birthday gift. He has some 250 songs on it, a paltry number compared to the 10,000 selections it can hold. Mr. Bush, as leader of the free world, does not take the time to download the music himself; that task falls to his personal aide, Blake Gottesman, who buys individual songs and albums, including Mr. Jones's and Mr. Jackson's greatest hits, from the iTunes music store.

As for an analysis of Mr. Bush's playlist, Mr. Levy of Rolling Stone started out with this: "One thing that's interesting is that the president likes artists who don't like him." Mr. Levy was referring to Mr. Fogerty, who was part of the anti-Bush "Vote for Change" concert tour across the United States last fall.... Meanwhile, Mr. Levy sized up the rest of the playlist of the 58-year-old president. "What we're talking about is a lot of great artists from the 60's and 70's and more modern artists who sound like great artists from the 60's and 70's," he said. "This is basically boomer rock 'n' roll and more recent music out of Nashville made for boomers. It's safe, it's reliable, it's loving. What I mean to say is, it's feel-good music. The Sex Pistols it's not."

Mr. Jones, Mr. Levy said, was nonetheless an interesting choice. "George Jones is the greatest living singer in country music and a recovering alcoholic who often sings about heartbreak and drinking," he said. "It tells you that the president knows a thing or two about country music and is serious about his love of country music."

Betsy Newmark commented I haven't heard that Van Morrison doesn't like the President though I have heard that Van is one of his and Mrs. Bush's favorite rock singers. Good taste. And who cares if Morrison doesn't like him. Van Morrison is my favorite singer, bar none, and if I had an IPod, it would be full of his songs. But he is a known misanthrope. So what if he doesn't like Bush? He doesn't like many other people. And the Rolling Stone guy seems to knock Bush for listening to songs from the 60s and 70s. Hey, a lot of baby boomers prefer to listen to songs from the golden era of rock 'n roll. Most of what comes out now is garbage. I would hazard a guess that most men in their late 50s prefer the songs of their youth than what is played today

Lorie Byrd commented Much is made of the fact that the President enjoys music performed by people who don’t like Bush’s politics, such as Van Morrison and John Fogerty. It has long been public knowledge that Van Morrison was one of the President and First Lady’s favorite artists. I wonder if it is equally newsworthy to analyze the Republican or right-leaning performers that liberals like? I am sure that even the most left-leaning politician has enjoyed the work of Bob Hope, Fred Thompson, John Wayne, Tom Selleck, Dennis Miller, Sara Evans, Angie Harmon, Kelsey Grammar, Ted Nugent, Charlton Heston, Patricia Heaton, Jimmy Stewart, or Arnold the Terminator.

Jesse Taylor commented George W. Bush has a guy who fills his iPod, courtesy of the always useless Elizabeth Bumiller. This isn't to kvetch about Bush being an elitist, but instead to just shake my head at the idea that he's gotten into office over two straight guys he demonized as elitist. He has a guy to put songs on his plug and play MP3 player. A guy. He's the leader of the free world. I'm glad he doesn't worry about making the perfect mix. But that's not normal, and he's not a normal person.

Are you complaining that it is a guy and not a girl, or that he does not do it himself. I am glad that he does not waste his time downloading songs (after all as you said he is the leader of the free world), and I am happy that they guy filling the iPod is paying for the downloads, and not running an illegal file sharing application that might expose important secret files on his computer. And I really don't care about the sex of the aide doing the downloading.

Ann Althouse commented If Bush only has 250 songs in his iPod, he should get an iPod Shuffle. But maybe he wouldn't care about the fact that there's a much smaller iPod that weighs nothing, since he's focused on exerting himself to the point of burning 1300 calories at a time. The article quotes the observation that "it's interesting" that the President likes the music of artists who don't like him, but actually it's not interesting. It would be interesting if he paid any attention to what old rock stars thought about politics.

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Trickery Foiled Many Voters

NYT reports Many voters in last year's election were denied access to the polls through trickery and intimidation, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts told a voters' group on Sunday.... He cited examples of trickery. "Leaflets are handed out saying Democrats vote on Wednesday, Republicans vote on Tuesday," Mr. Kerry said. "People are told in telephone calls that if you've ever had a parking ticket, you're not allowed to vote."

Mr. Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee, has never disputed the outcome of the election, saying voting irregularities did not involve enough votes to change the result.

The Republican National Committee dismissed Mr. Kerry's comments. "While President Bush and members of Congress are working to move our country forward, it's disappointing that some Democrats are focused on rehashing baseless allegations more than five months after the election," said a committee spokeswoman, Tracey Schmitt.

I have never seen a leaflet with "Democrats vote on Wednesday, Republicans vote on Tuesday" but I have seen it on a bumper sticker, and if anyone is stupid enough to believe it, they are too stupid to be able to cast an intelligent vote.

Riggsveda @Corrente blogged Excuse me, Mr. Kerry, but where the f**k where you after the election when the people who believed in you were waiting to have their own knowledge of these activities given credence by your protests of the election results...protests, we know now, that never materialized. No, you just put your tail between your legs and slunk off into the night like a good little aparatchik and let these powermongers bulldoze their way through the electorate again, and despite all the folks trying to fight the good fight, here, and at Kos, and elsewhere, eventually people lost interest and yawned politely and said "oh, well, back to busines as usual", and Diebold and the men in black won the day.

To this angry guy from the left: even Kerry was smart enough to realize voting irregularities did not involve enough votes to change the result, but it is sad that he still has not gotten over the fact that he lost.

Orrin Judd blogged The big question we all want answered is how Karl Rove got them to go to that Ohio State game that Cabana Boy is always whining about on a Tuesday?

Genecis commented I absolutely abhor tampering with the validity of the election process, but must admit that anyone influenced by Kerry's examples is probably to damned dumb to be voting at all. Ala the Washington State King County fiasco; the Democratic party seems to think that lying during an election is not only abhorrent but unnecessary when you can win by outright voter fraud

Governor Breck commented And of course this is just that same old song and dance number: When Democrats win an election it's because the will of the people has been worked through our just and benevolent system. When Democrats lose an election it's because the evil and corrupt twisted GOP monsters have perverted the will of the people to their own twisted ends. The next Democrat to lose an election who says, "Well, that's the way the game is played! We'll get 'em next time!" will be the first.

LGF blogged Kerry’s source for this accusation of nefarious Republican dirty tricks was The Onionor ScrappleFace

John blogged Does John Kerry really think that his voters are so dumb that they actually believe that members of different parties are supposed to vote on different days? News flash, John: that line about Democrats voting on Wednesday is a joke. I differ with Democrats on all kinds of issues, but I would never insult their intelligence the way the leaders of their own party do. Why do rank-and-file Democrats put up with it? Beats me.

cranky blogged John Kerry does not think Democrat voters have enough intellectual horsepower to avoid being tricked, intimidated, correctly complete a ballot, stand in line, or even go vote on the correct day.

Matt blogged My guess is he could care less about the voter fraud committed by liberal groups on his behalf. This is still sad for a former presidential candidate to insinuate that his loss may have been illegitimate. Kerry and other Democrats hide behind rhetoric, such as "fixing our democracy," or "making our own democracy in America work better," but they only care about conjuring evidence of fraud in states they lost in. Kerry wouldn't want to get to the bottom of the irregularities in Wisconsin, where he barely won by a margin significantly smaller than Bush's victory in Ohio.

Greg blogged Is he delusional? In denial? Just plain nuts? Or just deceptive on a scale that makes Clinton look honest by comaprision?

Armchair Genius blogged At least no one did anything illegal like slash the tires of all the transport vans used to offer rides to the polls... oh, wait, the Democrats did that in Wisconsin...

Bookworm blogged Clearly, the problems about which Kerry complains will magically vanish once those felons have the vote

Captain Ed blogged With every newspaper reporting Election Day as Tuesday, with every Democratic precinct calling voters to get the vote out on that day -- with the Constitution making clear that the vote must occur on the Tuesday following the first Monday in November -- Kerry expects us to sympathize with people stupid enough to fall for a joke e-mail telling Democrats that they vote on Wednesday? Perhaps Kerry wants us to ensure that the irretrievably gullible get special treatment when Election Days roll around, but in my opinion, anyone that stupid shouldn't be voting anyway. Phone calls telling people not to vote if they have a parking ticket fall into the same category, if they occurred at all, and no one has ever proved that they did. At some point, Kerry needs to take some responsibility for losing the election, as does his party.

AnalogKid blogged Could somebody please get this guy some cheese to go with his whine!

Mark blogged Let's not forget the democrats who slashed the tires of vans rented by Republicans to drive voteres to the polls.

Headmistress has a number of examples of dirty tricks against Republicans.

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Getting Used to Spam

Technology News reported We're not any less annoyed by spam. We're just more accepting of it. So says a study released Sunday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

Fifty-three percent of adult e-mail users in the United States now say they trust e-mail less because of spam, down from 62 percent a year ago and about the same as a June 2003 Pew survey.

Pew also found that 22 percent of e-mail users say they are spending less time on e-mail because of spam, down from 29 percent last year. In 2003, it was 25 percent.

"This shows some level of tolerance that people are manifesting," said Deborah Fallows, a senior research fellow at Pew and the study's author. "Maybe it's their getting used to it. Maybe it's like other annoying things in life -- air pollution, traffic -- they are just learning to live with it."

Other news organizations varied in how they reported this study

• Spam: You just don't care
• Spam, an Acquired Taste
• Spam still annoys, but we're used to it
• Spam hatred subsides -- it's just part of life
• US net users more accepting of spam

It is not easy to write a headline for this subject, but I don't think any of these capture the real feelings of most computer users. Just think how big a story it was when Spammer got a nine year prison sentance. Many ISPs have developed systems for deleting a lot of spam, and many users have also installed their own software to do it. In my case, I have installed Spam Inspector, and the combination of it and what my ISP (Cox) has done, plus my use of filters in Outlook Express to send message from people I communicate with frequently into special folders for the subjects they usually email me about, has lowered my spam to 20 or 30 messages a day that get past all three systems, and I have learned how to deal with them, and I usually only am fooled into reading at most one or two spam messages a day.

I certainly care about spam, I am not used to it, nor do I accept it, but like other problems in life, I deal with it.

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Wailing Wall compound

abc.net.au reported Middle East Correspondent Mark Willacy reports from Jerusalem's Old City.

MARK WILLACY: I'm standing right in front of the most disputed site in all of the Israeli Palestinian conflict. Before me is the Wailing Wall, the most holy site in Judaism. Looming above it is the Golden Dome of the Rock – Islam's third holiest site.

Committee for Accurate Reporting reported The Temple Mount is the site of the first and second Jewish Temples, destroyed in 586 BCE and 70 CE, respectively–a historic fact accepted even by Muslim authorities. Nevertheless, that fact has not stopped some journalists from reporting on the Temple Mount’s significance in Jewish history cautiously, as if its status is a matter of Jewish faith, or “belief,” and not archeologic evidence.

Thus, in the context of anticipated demonstrations by right-wing Israeli Jews, Reuters’ Jonathan Saul reported on April 7:

The ancient mosque compound is Islam’s third holiest site. It is Judaism’s most sacred site, the place were Jews say a biblical Jewish temple was razed by the Romans in 70 A.D. ("Non-Muslims Banned from Flashpoint Jerusalem Shrine")

Likewise, the New York Times’ Steve Erlanger reported yesterday in the second paragraph of his article “Israeli Troops Kill 3 Teenagers In Buffer Zone at Gaza Border”:

The shootings sharply raised tensions ahead of a planned protest in Jerusalem on Sunday by Israeli militants who oppose a pullout from Gaza and want to demonstrate at one of Islam’s holiest places, Al Aksa Mosque.

Much further down, in the second to last paragraph, he notes:

In Jerusalem, thousands of police officers fanned out in and around the Old City to prevent the threatened march on Al Aksa mosque. Jews believe that the site, also known as the Temple Mount, housed the second temple, which was destroyed by the Romans in A.D. 70.

But it is not Jews who “say” or “believe” that the site housed both Jewish temples. Indeed, Muslim conquerors selected that site to build the Al Aqsa Mosque precisely because the Temples stood there. This fact is not under dispute even among Muslim authorities, (Yasir Arafat’s protestations to the contrary at Camp David in 2000 notwithstanding.) For instance, the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, a pro-Arab source edited by John Esposito, notes that the Muslim armies:

First built at [the Temple Mount’s] southern end their congregational mosque (al-Aqsa), and by 692, had completed at is center the splendid shrine called the "Dome of the Rock," revered both as the terminus of [Mohammed’s] Night Journey and the biblical site of Abraham’s sacrifice and Solomon’s Temple.(page 368)

It is true that this area is the Temple Mount, revered as the site of the two Jewish temples. The same spot is revered by Muslims as the Haram al Sharif, which contains Al Aksa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. Therein lies the reason for the extreme attachment by both Jews and Moslems for this area

• From the Jewish perspective it is the location for the first two Jewish temples, and the place where they want to rebuild a major temple
• From the Islamic perspective it is the place where the prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven.

Both religions want their capital to contain this site. Clearly that cannot happen. It is my opinion that the only way to resolve this is for neither to have its capital here. I believe that the entire area including Jerusalem to Bethlehem should be an International Area, open to people of the Jewish, Islamic, and Christian faiths, and goverened by a board containing religious leaders from all three faiths and secular leaders from many nationalities. Their objective should be to make sure that the rights of all three faiths are protected.

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Monday, April 11

This Day In History

• 1689   William III and Mary II were crowned as joint sovereigns of Britain.
• 1814   Napoleon Bonaparte abdicated as emperor of France and was banished to the island of Elba.
• 1898   President William McKinley asked Congress for a declaration of war against Spain.
• 1899   The treaty ending the Spanish-American War was declared in effect.
• 1921   Iowa became the first state to impose a cigarette tax.
• 1945   American soldiers liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany.
• 1947   Jackie Robinson became the first black player in major-league history when he played in an exhibition game for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
• 1970   Apollo 13 blasted off on a mission to the moon that was cut short when an explosion crippled the spacecraft.
• 1979   Idi Amin was deposed as president of Uganda as rebels and exiles backed by Tanzanian forces seized control.
• 1980   The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission issued regulations prohibiting sexual harassment of workers by supervisors.
• 1981   President Reagan returned to the White House from the hospital, 12 days after he was wounded in an assassination attempt.
• 1996   Seven-year-old Jessica Dubroff, who'd hoped to become the youngest person to fly cross-country, was killed with her father and flight instructor when her plane crashed after takeoff from Cheyenne, Wyo.
• 2001   Ending an 11-day standoff, China agreed to free the 24 crew members of an American spy plane that had collided with a Chinese fighter plane, killing its pilot.
• 2002   U.S. Rep. James A. Traficant Jr., D-Ohio, was convicted of taking bribes and kickbacks from businessmen and his own staff.
• 2003   American troops took the northern Iraqi city of Mosul without a fight.

Happy Birthday To

• 1928   Ethel Kennedy (Skakel) (widow of slain U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy)

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"Nuclear Option" Actually Will Be Used

John Dean on FindLaw's Writ said A new political campaign is underway. It was launched this week.

On one side are the Bush White House and Senate conservatives. The White House seeks to pack the federal judiciary with ultra-conservative judges and justices. Ultimately, the goal is to place far-right justices on the U.S. Supreme Court. (Given the age of several justices, and the poor health of the Chief Justice, one or more vacancies are expected at the end of the current term, in June.)

Ironically, it is the conservatives who seek to obliterate the Senate's two-hundred- year-old tradition of unlimited debate.

Actually all they are doing is gong back to the way the Senate has worked for the past 200 years; approviing judicial appointments by a majority vote. The fillibuster has been used for legislation many times in the past, and would still be available. It is only approving the President's appointments that they seek to approve with a majority vote.

Indeed, they are avid about it: On April 4, an assembly of conservative organizations held a briefing at the National Press Club -- doubtless meant to keep the pressure on Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. On the other side are Senate Democrats. They are fighting to keep the filibuster precisely so that they can block the Bush White House's nominees. They believe that some of the Bush-nominated ideologues lack the necessary temperament to be a federal judge.

What temperament would that be? A willingness to make up legislation from the bench, rather than letting the Legislative branch actually make the laws, and restricting themselves to the role the Founding Fathers invisioned the Judiciary as filling.

If the Republicans win, then whenever a judicial nomination is reported out of the Senate Judiciary Committee, a simple Senate majority vote will result in the confirmation - or failure - of the nomination. That is an extraordinary change in Senate procedure.

It is what they did for most of the past 200 years.

Typically, the minority party has used the filibuster threat - in essence, a threat to talk the nomination to death before it can be voted on - in order to ensure that the majority party's nominees have sufficient bipartisan appeal.

That is true of legislation, but not approval of the President's nominees, except for the last couple of years.

Only a cloture vote - which requires a 60-vote, three-fifths majority of the Senate - can stop a filibuster. The result has been either the nomination of moderates or, at least, of judges and justices palatable to the minority party.

Untrue. When the Democrats were in power they loaded the Judiciary with a lot of liberal judges. But now that they dont control the White House, the House of Representatives, or the Senate, they want to block conservative judges from going on the bench.

Given that the judges and justices have life tenure, for the minority party to have this kind of input seems not only reasonable, but necessary.

If the situation was reversed and if there was a Democrat in the White House, and if the Democrats held a majority in the Senate, would that still be true?

But now the Republicans want the Democrats, currently the minority, to have no input at all. That is particularly unfortunate given that Senate Democrats represent the majority of Americans - as Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne Jr. has pointed out. Dionne found, based on July 2004 Census Bureau figures, that the 44 Democratic Senators represent 148,026,027 people, while the 55 Republican Senators represent 144,765,157. (Independent Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords, who votes with the Democrats on such issues, represents 310,697, making the gap even greater.)

I don't know whether EJ Dionne realizes it or not, but the Founding Fathers specifically set up the Senate such that each state had two votes; it is the House of Representative that has proportiona representation

The Democrats do have one final weapon in their arsenal. If Republicans try to remove the filibuster option, then Democrats can try to make the Republicans play by all the Senate's Rules, construed literally. That, in turn, would bring the Senate's business to a halt - save for the barest essentials - and thus, Congress' business as well, for the House cannot pass laws without the Senate.

That would be wonderful. Congress does a lot of damage when it passes laws. Texas allows its Legislature to meet only one time every two years (unless a special session is called by the Governor) to keep them from making too much mischief. And it sounds like the Democrats are going to shoot themselves in the foot and shut down the Legislature. I hope the same thing happens to them as happened to the Republicans when they were blamed for shutting the House down.

The Senate operates largely by "unanimous consent," which enables it to waive the myriad rules of procedure. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D NV) has made clear that should the Democrats destroy the filibuster option, he will not "enter into any consent agreements" except regarding matters that affect U.S. troops or are necessary for the continuity of government operations.

I suspect he means the Republicans, but I am happy to see consent agreements will no longer be used.

In effect, the Democrats have the option of nuclear winter. If they don't rely on this counter-tactic - with the hope of restoring Republicans to their senses - they might as well pack up and go home.

That would be fine with me.

No longer would there be an opposition party in the Senate.

CrooksAndLiars (must be a Democrat) blogged "When the rest of the country understands that it was Frist who was responsible for the destruction of the Senate, his chances for the Presidency will be over."

(Update) Santorum: Frist will go nuclear : Sen. Rick Santorum (Pa.), the chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, has reassured conservative activist leaders that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) is committed to triggering the “nuclear option,” stripping Democrats of the power to filibuster judicial nominees.

Pessimist @LeftCoaster: blogged According to the well-publicized finding by law professor Herman Schwartz, in March 2000, Majority Leader Frist himself participated in the filibuster against Clinton judicial nominee Richard Paez. (In the end, Judge Paez was confirmed for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit after a cloture vote.)

So he was NOT blocked by a fillibuster, debate was limited by a cloture vote and he was rushed through

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Passport ID chips

HoustonChronicle reported A government plan to embed U.S. passports with radio-frequency chips starting this summer is meeting resistance from travel and privacy groups who say the technology is untested and could create a security risk for travelers. Tembedded chips are designed to make passports work more like employee ID cards that can be passed over an electronic reader to gain access to a building.

State Department officials said the new technology, commonly known as radio frequency identification, would allow customs agents to quickly process passengers at airports and borders. The passports are to be issued to diplomats starting in August, and then the program would expand to applicants for new passports in the next year. State Department officials said the chips are part of a global effort to prevent passport fraud.

Each chip will contain a digital record of all information printed on the passport, including the holder's name and document number. The chip will also contain the passport holder's photograph, enhanced by facial recognition technology. That way, even if the paper passport is altered, customs agents would be able to compare the information on the chip with the person presenting it.

Groups representing travel-related businesses and privacy advocates say the high-tech chips would do more harm than good. Each chip has a built-in miniature antenna that uses radio waves to transmit information to a machine reader. Critics contend terrorists or thieves could use hand-held chip readers to identify U.S. citizens, even on a crowded street, anywhere they travel. Such readers are available for $500 to several thousand dollars, depending on the level of sophistication. "If you're walking around in Beirut, it would be well worth al-Qaida's money to use one of these readers to pick out the Americans from the Swedes without any problem," said Barry Steinhardt of the American Civil Liberties Union's technology and liberty program.

I doubt if that is the ACLU's real problem with them. I am not that wild about American Citizens carrying them, but I would really like to see non residents entering the US having to carry one, with an indication of the length of their Visa.

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What Can Bloggers Do That Reporters Can't?

Jack Shafer writes in Slate Not that long ago, you had to be a professional reporter to publish defective copy. Not any more. Thanks to blogs, the journalist monopoly on the wide-scale propagation of blunders, boo-boos, and bloopers has vanished. Now, complete amateurs can embarrass themselves before huge audiences.

Bloggers demonstrated their skill at botching a story last month when a swarm of them accused the Washington Post and ABC News of journalistic malpractice. The two news organizations had reported on the existence of a GOP talking-points memo about Terri Schiavo. The bloggers asserted it was a Ratherian fake.... After the Post and others proved the legitimacy of the document on April 7, bloggers proved themselves the equals of their mainstream media colleagues once more by ignoring or glossing over their goof.

The memo did turn out to be written by a low level staffer on the Republican side, but I still have not seen any evidence that the MSM was right in saying it came from the Republican leadership or that all Republicans had seen it (in fact I have seen reports to the contrary)

Paul @PowerLine blogged To the extent that Shafer includes Power Line in this verdict, his claim is baseless. On the evening of April 6, we learned from the Washington Post's Mike Allen that the Schiavo memo was written by a Martinez staffer. Earlier that day, I had characterized the memo as "questionable if not fake." As soon as I learned that a Martinez staffer was the author, I updated my post to state that the memo was not a Democratic dirty trick, and that it came from a Republican source. Since then, Rocket has written a Weekly Standard piece about the memo called "It Wasn't Fake," and has stated that he was mistaken in concluding that it was. Compare this with the conduct of CBS. It claimed for about two weeks that its fake memo was authentic. Eventually it backed away from that claim, but still has never said the memo was fake.

Mark blogged People have been having a field day with their mistaken assumption that the Schiavo memo was a Democratic trick (see this truly idiotic post by paid Dean shill Markos 'Kos' Zuniga, but be forewarned, it's full of childish profanity - and remember, folks, this is the most popular liberal blog by a LOOOONG shot). Power Line has admitted the mistake, as have, to my knowledge, all bloggers who thought the same (including myself). Incredibly, there are still those who maintain the 60 Minutes II memos were genuine, and it was precisely CBS and Rather's baffling decision to hang on to the story despite its quite obvious phoniness that did them in. None of that pertains here

Giacomo blogged Another point worth making is that there are many on the left who insist that this memo was a Republican leadership directive from which all the Republicans were working, despite an absence of facts to support that contention. While it was obviously purely speculative to surmise that it was a Democratic trick memo, it is similarly speculative to believe it is more than it currently seems - a shoddily-prepared and ill-advised memo from a freshman senator's legal staff.

Captain Ed blogged I should make clear that I disagree with Shafer's assertion that Power Line and Michelle Malkin got the Schiavo memo story incorrect. First off, Michelle never drew any conclusions from the memo story except that the initial reporting from ABC and the Washington Post left much to be desired, which is still the case. Both media outlets pushed the memo as having come from GOP party "leaders" and treated it as a smoking gun for hypocrisy, neither of which held up when the true story came out. Power Line postulated that the memo could have come from Democratic staffers as a dirty trick -- but as only one of a number of possible explanations, and clearly stated that as speculation. All of us were surprised that a Republican staffer for a freshman Senator would be stupid enough to create something this illiterate and foolish memo ... but it turned out it was.

jeff1999 blogged Here's my last word on the issue: those on the left acting all outraged at us conservative bloggers for speculating that the media used forged memos, is sort of like chastising a woman for accusing her cheating boyfriend of having another affair when this time he "only" had his hand on her butt.

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We've been wicked

CNN reported A solemn ceremony has blessed the wedding of the heir to the British throne Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles, now the Duchess of Cornwall, at which the couple each pledged to be faithful to each other....

In the wedding blessing, the couple recited a line of repentance from the Book of Common Prayer, the inclusion of which is seen as an acknowledgment of their prior adultery. "We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, which we, from time to time, most grievously have committed, by thought, word and deed, against thy Divine Majesty, provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us. "We do earnestly repent and are utterly sorry for these honest doings. The remembrance of them is grievous unto us. The burden of them intolerable."

At one point in the service, Williams asks the couple, first Charles and then Camilla, to be faithful to each other in their marriage and understand the covenant of marriage and recited words common in Western marriage ceremonies -- "for richer for poorer" and "for better for worse" and "till parted by death." Both were asked if they will have "resolved" to be faithful" and "forsake all others" as long as they live. And they both said separately "that is my resolve with the help of God."

And this wicked man thinks he should be the next King of England? ROF,L

Al Jazeerah reported Fashion experts were full of praise for mother-of-two Camilla, who wore an ivory silk coat over a chiffon dress for the ceremony, then a porcelain blue outfit for the blessing.

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Demonstrators in Iraq

NYT: reports Tens of thousands of Iraqis marked the second anniversary of the fall of Saddam Hussein by marching here in the capital on Saturday to demand the withdrawal of American forces. Meanwhile, one of the most lethal insurgent groups warned Iraqis against joining the army or the police force. Most protesters were followers of Moktada al-Sadr, the rebel Shiite cleric who has led several armed uprisings against American forces but who has recently begun to take part in democratic politics.

Moktada al-Sadr must be ticked off that even though prominant Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds are getting positions in the government, he is not among them

Cori Dauber blogged Representatives of the Association of Muslim Scholars, a leading group of Sunni clerics that has expressed sympathy for the guerrilla insurgency, said its followers had taken part in the march. (My emph.)... Guerrilla movements have the support of the population. If there's anything that should be clear by now it's that this is not a popular movement. And it's not a popular movement in large part because it targets average Iraqis. This is not a spontaneous uprising that grew up out of the people, either. (via Instapundit.) This is not the act of a popular resistance movement. Not one that would stay popular for long.

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Part of the Flock Felt Abandoned by the Pope

LA Times reported Half a world away, millions of people came together last week to mourn Pope John Paul II, but you'll hear no tearful elegies from believers such as Nery Amaya, a Catholic for all of her 28 years.

As she made the rounds as a CARE volunteer in this impoverished town, she remembered the time she offered to start a parish program to help gang members. Her priest suggested that she devote her energies to Easter week decorations instead.

Amaya charges that under the late pope, the church was too timid in its ministry to the needy, and maintains that John Paul's efforts to put the brakes on social activism cost the Latin American Catholic Church membership as well as momentum in the fight against poverty and injustice.

"The church has to come down from heaven to the reality on Earth," Amaya said. "It's not filling my spiritual needs, and I am looking for an alternative."

You can always find someone dissatisfied with just about anything, but I have heard many news reports that said under John Paul II the Catholic Church grew the most in Latin America and Africa

Hugh Hewitt blogged More Roman Catholic Church Bashing from the Los Angeles Times. This is an incredible piece of propaganda, a thinly disguised appeal for "revival of liberation theology," based on a half dozen quotes from various speakers in Latin America. Couldn't the Los Angeles Times at least get a "time-of-day" quote from their hometown Cardinal Mahoney? Evidently not.) Another "Legacy of John Paul II" article is titled "Attendance Is a Concern for Church," a Larry Stammer piece that again seizes on the Church's stances on birth control, celibacy, and women priests to explain the paper's view of the challenege to the Church's credibility, even as he concedes: "In terms of actual numbers, the worldwide Catholic population grew by almost 10 million in 2003 to a total of 1.07 billion worldwide, according to a Vatican report. But the percentage of Catholics in the overall world population edged slightly down in 2003." The Stammer piece repeatedly cherry-picks data to build a case that the Church's orthodoxy is crippling its appeal, when exactly the opposite case can be made using different data sets.

Steve Bainbridge blogged LA Times reporters Chris Kraul and Henry Chu offer up a remarkably biased screed against Pope John Paul II's crack down on liberation theology in Latin America. They quote numerous leftist activists who criticize the late Pontiff, but not a single critic of liberation theology. Worse yet, they basically dismiss as false the well-documented links between liberation theology and armed Marxist movements. As Father Richard John Neuhaus aptly summarized those links, however, liberation theology essentially "equates Jesus with Che Guevara."

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Blogging Pet Peeves

La Shawn Barber posted an outstanding blog about:

Blogging Pet Peeves
Listed in no particular order are things I don’t like about blogs and blogging:

1. Bloggers who trackback to a post on this blog but fail to link to this blog in their post.
   
   Rule of thumb: If you trackback to another blogger’s post, you must link to that blogger’s site in your post. I’d guess that 90 percent of the blogosphere would agree that this is highly irritating. What is the rationale? By leaving a trackback, you’re alerting the blog host and readers that you’re writing about the same topic. The blog host follows the trackback expecting to see what you wrote about his post.

   I completely agree with LaShawn about people leaving a trackback that does not link to them. There are three related Pet Peeves of mine

   • I hate it when a blogger quotes me but fails to leave a trackback so that I can know I was quoted.
   • I hate it when a blogger does not provide me with the ability to leave a trackback. I hate to quote someone without leaving a TrackBack, but if they don't give me the ability, I can't very well leave one. Some don't know how to enable TrackBacks (I helped one new blogger get set up with HaloScan trackback), but some have disable TrackBacks because of TrackBack Spam (this may be what LaShaws is upset about, and some don't allow either comments or trackbacks - they expect you to read their thoughts, but don't give you a way of indicating it when you agree or disagree with them
   • The one that ticks me off the most is a site that supposedly allows trackbacks, but when you capture the URL and do the trackback, it gets errors. PowerLine is one site with a bad trackback.

   (Update: It’s also about reciprocity. When you leave a trackback here, readers follow it to your blog. In turn, your readers follow the link on your blog to mine. )
2. Online news sites that don’t link to blogs mentioned in a story.
3. High-traffic bloggers who forget to link to my blog or mistakenly link to a different blog in a post where my blog is the subject.
4. Bloggers who write long posts about why they have no time to blog.
5. Bloggers who write about their latest illness, right down to the details of an infection and physical description of a rash.
6. Commenters who respond to a post without actually reading the whole post, or if they have read it, the comment doesn’t reflect it.
7. People who leave off-topic comments on a post to tell me they just e-mailed me.
8. Bloggers whose posts are mainly complaints against other bloggers.
9. Bloggers who don’t include any biographical information about themselves. Even if blogging anonymously, you can still supply basic, non-indentifying information.
10. Bloggers who either don’t list contact information or make it difficult to find.

This post will be updated as I think of other things I don’t like.

Update II: The Anchoress has ditched Blog*Spot! Visit her new WordPress home. And update your blogrolls.

Update III (4/10): A trackback is simply a way to communicate with another blogger. I will refer to a third-party trackback system called Simpletracks because each blog or commenting platform (HaloScan, WordPress, Movable Type, etc.) has a different method for tracking back to posts.

Let’s say you’re blogging about this post and you want me and the readers to know about it. If you click on “Comments/Trackbacks” and scroll to the end, you’ll see this: The URI to TrackBack this entry is:
http://lashawnbarber.com/archives/2005/04/09/peeves/trackback/.

URI is short for Uniform Resource Identifier. This is more information than you need to know to trackback, but in case you’re curious…

When using Simpletracks, you will need to copy and paste the trackback URI above (which is different with each post), the name of your blog, your post title, post URI, and an excerpt of the post, and put them in the appropriate place, and hit “Send Ping.”

Your blog will ping my blog, and the trackback will show up in “Comments/Trackbacks” like this:

The ten habits of highly irritating bloggers
According to La Shawn Barber, anyway: 1. Bloggers who trackback to a post on this blog but fail to link to this blog in their post. I’m usually pretty good about…

Trackback by dustbury.com — 04.09.05 @ 3:06 pm

Clicking on “dustbury.com” will take you directly to the post where this post is mentioned. In WordPress, trackback entries are truncated and post titles are in bold. Depending on which blog publishing system you use, trackbacking will be slightly different. For instance, Movable Type automatically pings URIs in the post, so it’s unnecessary to enter URIs manually. In WordPress (version 1.2.2), I have to copy and paste trackback URIs just below the post. If you’re using HaloScan, you have to go to the site to send a trackback.

Trackbacking sounds more complicated than it should. The concept is very simple.

Usually I just quote a few lines of a blogger's post, but this one is so good I am going to post the entire thing, and not just in my primary blog, but I am also evaluating several blogging packages for an article in next month's I/O Port Newsletter and I am going to post it in each of them, because when the readers of that article check out the sample sites I posted, I want to be sure they read her thoughts. I will only TrackBack the post from my main site, so as not to clutter up her TrackBack list with a bunch of duplicate posts, but I will TrackBack the posts on the evaluation blog packages to my post, if any one wants to see them.

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Are Bloggers Journalists

Dan Bricklin blogged There has been a lot written about Apple going after bloggers and the question about whether or not bloggers have the same protections that journalists do. I just saw a little different answer. My next door neighbor Chris Daly is an Associate Professor who teaches journalism at Boston University and he weighed in with an essay titled "Are Bloggers Journalists? Let's Ask Thomas Jefferson". I found his perspectives helpful. As I read what Chris wrote, these sentences stood out (though the whole thing is worth reading):

Common Sense and other pamphlets like it were precisely the kind of political journalism that Jefferson had in mind when he insisted on a constitutional amendment in 1790 to protect press freedom -- anonymous, highly opinionated writing from diverse, independent sources. In historical terms, today's bloggers are much closer in spirit to the Revolutionary-era pamphleteers than today's giant, conglomerate mainstream media.

So, it's the BigPubs that need to show that they are covered by the First Amendment -- blogs are the easier case, not a harder case that needs to be proven. Newspapers as we know them now are a 19th and 20th century invention, the Constitution is from the 18th century.

And one might say that blogs are a 21st century invention.

The other thing Chris points out is the difference between reporting and other forms of journalism. This is an important distinction and the history matters for legal questions. Saying "journalism" or "journalists" as if they are all doing the same thing is as bad as saying "blogging" is all the same.

This is a very valid point. Most bloggers are publish opinion rather than news, however the opinion columnists, pundits, etc both in newspapers and on radio/tv consider themselves journalists.

(There are other terms I think we need to be careful about, such as the different types of "editors" -- some editors pick and choose and may change what you mean while others help you say what you want to say clearer and without grammatical mistakes.) Chris also talks about the difference between prior restraint and liability after the fact.

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Bloggers Make The Time 100

Micro Persuasion reports Congratulation to Craig Newmark of Craig's List and New York State Attorney General Elliot Spitzer. As far as I can tell, they are the only bloggers who made Time Magazine's list of the world's most 100 influential people.

Wouldn't http://www.xprizenews.org/ count for Burt Rutan?

Bill Clinton used to have one at http://billclintondailydiary.blogspot.com but it has apparently disappeared.

There is one that supposedly is by Martha Stewart, but it only has one entry http://marthastewart.blogeasy.com/

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Sunday, April 10

This Day In History

• 1847   Newspaperman Joseph Pulitzer was born in Hungary.
• 1849   Walter Hunt of New York City patented the safety pin.
• 1866   The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was incorporated.
• 1912   The luxury liner Titanic set sail from Southampton, England, on its ill-fated maiden voyage.
• 1925   ''The Great Gatsby,'' by F. Scott Fitzgerald, was published.
• 1932   German president Paul von Hindenburg was re-elected; Adolf Hitler came in second in the voting.
• 1959   Japan's Crown Prince Akihito married a commoner, Michiko Shoda.
• 1963   The nuclear-powered submarine USS Thresher and its crew of 129 was lost off Cape Cod, Mass.
• 1972   Some 70 nations, including the United States and the Soviet Union, signed an agreement banning biological warfare.
• 1974   Golda Meir announced her resignation as prime minister of Israel.
• 1981   Imprisoned IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands won election to the British Parliament.
• 1992   Financier Charles Keating Jr. was sentenced in Los Angeles to nine years in prison for swindling investors when his Lincoln Savings and Loan collapsed. (The convictions were later overturned).
• 1992   Comedian Sam Kinison was killed in a car crash at age 38.
• 1996   President Clinton vetoed a bill that would have outlawed a technique that opponents call ''partial-birth'' abortion.
• 1998   Negotiators in Northern Ireland reached a landmark settlement that called for Protestants and Catholics to share power.
• 2001   Republican Jane Swift took office as the first female governor of Massachusetts.
• 2001   The Netherlands legalized mercy killings and assisted suicide for patients with unbearable, terminal illness.
• 2002   Eight Israelis were killed by a suicide bomber aboard a bus in Haifa.
• 2003   The House passed a bill creating a national Amber Alert system and strengthening child pornography laws.

Happy Birthday To

• 1829   William Booth (founder of the Salvation Army; author: In Darkest England, The Way Out; died Aug 20, 1912)
• 1847   Joseph Pulitzer (publisher: St. Louis Dispatch, New York World; died in 1911: his will left $2 million for establishment of school of journalism at Columbia Univ. and a fund which established annual prizes for literature, drama, music and journalism; died Oct 29, 1911)
• 1915   Harry Morgan (Bratsburg) (Emmy Award-winning actor: M*A*S*H [1979-80]; Dragnet, You Can?t Take It with You, Pete and Gladys, HEC Ramsey, December Bride, The D.A., Aftermash)
• 1951   Steven Seagal (actor: Executive Decision, Under Siege series, On Deadly Ground, Out for Justice, Marked for Death, Hard to Kill, Above the Law)

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