Pope John Paul the Great, whose quarter century in the Chair of St. Peter restored respect for the papacy and reinvigorated Catholicism throughout the world, falls into a very special category. He is one of those individuals whose holiness in life led the people to proclaim him a saint well before the Church would, or could, act. Indeed, in an earlier day the sense of the faithful on the matter would have been sufficient. St. Thomas Becket comes to mind, whose status as a saint in the eyes of the faithful led to Rome's proclamation of his sainthood a mere three years after his death, is a classic example of this earlier practice.

The modern process of recognizing an individual as a saint (not making a saint -- God does that through grace) is much more laborious and cumbersome. Even then, there is the possibility of waiving deadlines in cases of merit, which has been done with the late pontiff. And that leads us to this story.

For months she was known as the "mystery nun," an unidentified member of a religious order who told a Catholic Church investigator that she was miraculously cured of advanced Parkinson's disease after she and other nuns prayed to the late Pope John Paul II.

Her testimony -- describing the kind of medically inexplicable recovery that could help advance the pontiff toward sainthood -- was published anonymously on an Italian Catholic Web site. It bore the signature "A French Sister." Church officials, proceeding with a confidential inquiry into the claims, refused to name her.

On Friday morning, Sister Marie Simon-Pierre, an unassuming 46-year-old who works in a Paris maternity clinic, stepped before a bank of microphones on French national television and, in a voice choked with emotion, declared that she was the nun.

She described going to bed one night barely able to write or walk and waking up at 4:30 a.m. fully cured. "All I can say is that I was ill and now I'm healed," said Sister Marie Simon-Pierre, smiling widely. "Now the church will decide if it's a miracle."

Church officials said Sister Marie Simon-Pierre's recovery from the advanced stages of a disease with no known cure could be instrumental in the canonization process, which can sometimes take centuries to complete but has been fast-tracked for John Paul.

In Rome on Monday, Sister Marie Simon-Pierre will take part in ceremonies commemorating the second anniversary of John Paul's death and the completion of the first phase of efforts to declare the pontiff "blessed," an intermediate step toward sainthood. This step, known as beatification, requires confirmation of one miracle brought about by the posthumous intercession of the candidate.

Now let me clarify some misconceptions that some of you may have -- misconceptions that abound in this sloppy opening in the New York Times.

If the story Sister Marie Simon-Pierre told Friday is true, then Pope John Paul II exercised miraculous powers from beyond the grave. A proven physical miracle is an important qualification on the road to sainthood.

Actually, no -- no one argues that John Paul the Great exercised any miraculous powers. The miraculous powers were those of God. Rather, Catholic teaching holds that just as we on earth can pray for and intercede on behalf of our fellow man, so can the saints in heaven (all the faithful departed before the throne in heaven, not just the select few recognized by the Church). God, in His infinite wisdom and sovereign will, decides when and if He performs a miracle in response to prayer. Indeed, this dear nun says it exactly right only a few paragraphs after that sloppy writing by the Times' Elaine Sciolino.

“I have been cured,” she told journalists gathered for a news conference in Aix-en-Provence. “My healing was the work of God through the intercession of Pope John Paul II.”

Now I will praise Ms. Sciolino for including this bit of information in her article.

Pope Benedict has given mixed signals on his approach to sainthood.

In addition to putting the late pope’s canonization on a fast track, he fueled speculation that sainthood was imminent when he expressed hope last May during a trip to Poland, John Paul’s homeland, that the process would conclude “in the near future.”

As a cardinal, however, Pope Benedict said several times that he was not in favor of naming an excessive number of saints. He was believed to have been aligned with conservatives who looked askance on Pope John Paul’s record canonization of saints during his 26-year papacy.

Here we have a conflict between different pontiff's over the canonization of (granting formal recognition of) saints. The current Pope is on record, prior to his elevation to the papacy, as wanting to proceed more slowly in granting this recognition -- perhaps, one would surmise, to preserve the special nature of the formal title of "saint". John Paul the Great, on the other hand, seemed to hold to a different position, one which was intent upon recognizing the depth and breadth of holiness that exists among the Christian faithful in this world, hence his eagerness to advance the process of recognizing men and women from around the globe for their holiness of life in order to provide the Church with many more examples of sanctity in many different nations and cultures. But in the end, each of these men was coming from the same place -- the recognition that the saints are exemplars to us all of ways to live the Christian life in fidelity with the Gospel, heroes of the faith to be emulated. And if Benedict wishes to reserve the title to a select few so that it retains its special nature, while John Paul the Great sought to demonstrate the real possibility of each of us attaining that accolade through a close and faithful walk with Christ in our daily lives, there can be no dispute that each was motivated by a desire to have the lives of the saints serve as signposts on the path to Heaven.

And on a personal note, I wait with hopeful expectation for the day when the Church canonizes these five martyrs, one of whom (Sister Kathleen McGuire) I knew when she ministered at the Newman Center in Carbondale, Illinois -- for they are undeniable proof that saints are ordinary people who do the extraordinary by faithfully following their Christian vocation wherever it may lead them.

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Not only is the UK not a superpower, they don't even qualify as a great power any longer -- not if they can't stand up to Iran. And The Telegraph shows that the UK cannot do so absent support from the US, EU, or UN -- especially the US.

Diplomatic: Britain has already suffered a setback at the UN with a fairly feeble rebuke of the Iranians. In the next few days, major players such as Russia and China, who are also friendly towards Teheran, might be persuaded to become more robust. But both have trade links with Iran and would be uncomfortable about major economic sanctions.

Downing Street could order all diplomatic links to be severed, throwing out Iran's ambassador, but this would cut off the one line of communication with the regime, leaving the Navy ratings even more isolated.

Sanctions: This is probably the main area where Iran is vulnerable. While it is a huge exporter of oil it has a chronic shortage of refineries, making it necessary to import 40 per cent of refined products such as petrol and jet fuel.

Sanctions would certainly make the regime sit up but they are only likely to appear as part of the game to force Iran to give up its nuclear programme.

Whitehall might have more luck in persuading the European Union to bring in further sanctions and severing trade links. Britain and America are also hamstrung by the lack of political leverage in the Middle East as a result of the Iraq invasion - which has conversely strengthened Iran's position.

Blockade: The Strait of Hormuz is just 21 miles across, making it a highly strategic chokepoint - and consequently very heavily defended by Teheran. With Iran so reliant on the waterway for its fuel, arms imports and other goods it would be a key area to put pressure on the regime.

The Navy has prepared plans on how to enforce a blockade but it would require almost the entire Fleet at a time when it is facing cuts and many ships have been mothballed. A blockade would also substantially increase the threat of all-out war.

Military: Britain is not a strong enough power to go it alone in a land battle with Iran, especially with so many troops committed to Iraq and Afghanistan.

America is unlikely to back military action until diplomacy and possible sanctions have forced Iran to climb down over its nuclear programme. But the SAS will have already made contingency plans for a rescue mission. It would only be seriously considered if the hostages were considered to be under severe threat of death.

Looks to me like John Bull needs Viagra or Cialis.

One of the folks I truly admire in the blogging world is "Captain Ed" Morrissey over at Captain's Quarters. If you haven't read his stuff you have to be hiding under a rock -- it is great.

Now one of the reasons I love Ed is that he makes no bones about the fact that he loves and is devoted to his wife, the "First Mate". And as regular readers know, she has major health issues, and has been awaiting a kidney transplant.

It happened yesterday.

And it was successful.

To both of them I send my best wishes and most fervent prayers for her continued recovery.

And my thanks.

As we've struggled in our household with the illnesses my dear wife (AKA he Loyal Opposition) is dealing with and the impact of them upon our life together, the Morrissey's have have inspired me and provided an example of how to make the best of a situation which adds an additional degree of difficult to the delicate balancing act that is the care and feeding of a good marriage to someone you adore. Your influence in that regard is more important to me than anything else that Ed puts on his blog.

UPDATE: FM's recovery continues to go well.

Stories like this worry me -- especially as I look out at my classroom and see one cheerleader with two knee braces (she had knee surgery last year) and a cervical collar following a landing on her neck that put her in the hospital.

For decades, they stood by safe and smiling, a fixture on America’s sporting sidelines. But today’s young cheerleaders, who perform tricks once reserved for trapeze artists, may be in more peril than any female athletes in the country.

Emergency room visits for cheerleading injuries nationwide have more than doubled since the early 1990s, far outpacing the growth in the number of cheerleaders, and the rate of life-threatening injuries has startled researchers. Of 104 catastrophic injuries sustained by female high school and college athletes from 1982 to 2005 — head and spinal trauma that occasionally led to death — more than half resulted from cheerleading, according to the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research. All sports combined did not surpass cheerleading.

New acrobatic maneuvers have turned cheerleaders into daredevils. And while the sport has retained its sense of glamour, at dozens of competitions around the country, knee braces and ice bags affixed to ankles and wrists have become accouterments as common as mascara.

With more than four million participants cheering at everything from local youth football games to the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament, female cheerleaders now commonly do tricks atop pyramids or are tossed 20 feet in the air to perform twists and flips. If all goes well, the airborne cheerleader, known as the flier, is caught by other cheerleaders. But not always.

Are there not some reasonable limits to be placed on some of these stunts -- especially for younger girls?

I was pleased to see the governor appoint someone to review workings of the scandal-plagued TYC -- but I believe that the first action of TYC czar Jay Kimbrough likely exceeds his mandate by deciding whether a sentence imposed by a court was appropriate rather than whether the the perp in question had completed the terms of her sentence. Kimbrough needs to be held in contempt of court, and the perp ordered back into custody.

Shaquanda Cotton, a 15-year-old black teenager who spent more than a year in the state's distressed juvenile prison system for shoving a teacher's aide in a case that raised questions of racial bias, was ordered released Friday.

She became the first juvenile inmate ordered freed by Jay Kimbrough, whom Gov. Rick Perry tapped Thursday to lead the troubled Texas Youth Commission out of an abuse and mismanagement scandal. Kimbrough told lawmakers Friday that the order had been given.

"He made a determination that she served her time and it was time to let that child out," said Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas.

Cotton could have been kept in a cell until her 21st birthday. But a public outcry about the case helped secure her release.

I'm sorry, but this is not about whether or not this perp has served her time -- it is about caving in to political pressure tinged with false accusations of racism. If that were not the case, Kimbrough's first decision would not have been about a situation receiving national attention for something other than the TYC scandal. And by determinging the appropriateness of the sentence rather than whether its terms had been fulfilled, Kimbrough has usurped the prerogatives of the judicial branch.

And at the same time, made it clear that here in Texas it is open season on school employees.

During the remaining time that the Texas legislature is in session, we need legislation imposing mandatory incarceration for students who assault school employees.

Doug Sohn decided to stand up to the silly geese on the Chicago City Council who passed an ordinance banning foie gras.

The city issued its first foie gras fine to a hot dog seller of all people, accusing "Hot Doug's" of violating a Chicago ban by lacing its specialty dogs with the duck liver delicacy.

Doug Sohn, who runs Hot Doug's "The Sausage Superstore and Encased Meat Emporium," agreed to pay $250 Thursday for the first-time offense.

Sohn had been openly serving foie gras-laced hot dogs since the ordinance took effect in August. He says he knew about the rule — when he got a warning letter from the city, he had it framed and placed on his counter.

He could have faced up to a $500 dollar fine under the ordinance, Health Department spokesman Tim Hadac said.

Animal rights activists oppose serving foie gras, saying it is inhumane the way geese and ducks are force-fed through a pipe to plump up their livers. They have been pressing other cities, states and chefs for similar bans. Celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck announced earlier this month that his restaurants would stop serving foie gras.

The Chicago City Council had approved the ordinance despite Mayor Richard M. Daley's objections. He called it the "silliest" ordinance they had ever passed.

I find it interesting that we keep being told by liberals that we cannot impose morality through statute -- but here we banning a safe product because of the moral objections of a handful of liberal alderman to the method of production of the product. After all, there is no public health or safety rationale for the ban on foie gras. I guess what they mean is that we cannot impose morality they object to by statute.

After all, given his association with Hamas the statement is undeniably true.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert called Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas a "terrorist" and accused him of transferring more than $1 million to militants to carry out attacks against Israel.

Haniyeh aide Ghazi Hamad said Olmert's statements were "confused and irresponsible".

Olmert's allegations, in an interview with Time magazine released on Friday, marked a sharp escalation in an Israeli campaign against Haniyeh and the unity government he formed with President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah faction this month.

Israel has been urging other countries to shun Haniyeh and the government, citing Hamas's refusal to recognise the Jewish state and renounce violence.

"Just lately Haniyeh transferred over a million dollars for a group of terrorists to carry out terrorist actions against Israeli citizens," Olmert said.

"He's a terrorist. You have a terrorist who is prime minister of the Palestinian Authority now."

Calling a terrorist a terrorist – how gauche!

I disagree with his politics, but I applaud his act of kindness to one of our soldiers.

Actor Alec Baldwin was so moved by the story of an 18-year-old Army soldier who is scheduled to serve in Iraq, he’s going to help pay for her college education after she leaves the military.

Baldwin was so moved by a March 4 New York Times story about Pvt. Resha Kane’s last day with family and friends before going for training to prepare for serving in Iraq that he — not his people — tracked down Kane’s mother at a discount store where she works to offer his assistance, his spokesman said.

“I didn’t know what to say,” Kane said. “And then I asked him if he could send me his autograph. I’ve never met a star, let alone talked to one on the phone.”

Alec Baldwin is an arrogant jerk in many instances – but this move leads me to believe there is a spark of decency in the man.

What can we make of this situation?

Two Arabs involved in the sale of a Hebron building to the Jewish community have been placed under arrest, one by the Palestinian Authority, the other by Jordon.

The arrested Arabs now face capital punishment, as Palestinian Authority law dictates the death sentence for anyone found guilty of selling property to a Jew.
Orit Struk, political activist and member of the Hebron Jewish Committee, contends that the arrests "prove the sale was legal."

The Beit HaShalom, Peace House, located amongst Arab buildings between the Jewish enclave in Hebron and the neighboring large Jewish neighborhood of Kiryat Arba, was purchased two weeks ago for the sum of $700,000.

Immediately following the announcement of the transaction, Israeli police launched an investigation into the legality of the sale, and the Defense Ministry under the auspices of left-leaning Labor Chairman Amir Peretz began searching for grounds to expel the new Jewish residents of the building.

The resulting police investigation could not find any evidence of wrongdoing in the sale, and many within the police and defense establishment are acknowledging the sale was legal, albeit off-the-record.

Jewish Community Spokesman David Wilder claimed he does not see the arrests as proof of the legitimate nature of the sale. “We don’t need any proof that this was done legally, we know that the transaction was completely legal and the resulting police investigation confirmed this.”

So let’s get this straight – individuals of all races and religions can own property in Israel, but Terrorstinian law punishes the sale of property to Jews with death. Sounds rather like something out of Nazi Germany to me – but then again, since the Terrorstinians want to finish what Hitler began, I guess we should not be surprised.

I've been pointing this out for years -- Pope Pius XII and the Catholic Church saved hundreds of thousands of Jews during WWII. That is more than any other group or organization, prior to the much delayed liberation of the concentration camps at the end of the war. What records were available indicated that Hitler viewed Pius as an enemy -- and that Pius spoke out about and acted on behalf of the Jews more loudly than any other world leader.

Now there is more evidence to confirm that.

Pius XII, the wartime pontiff often condemned as "Hitler's Pope", was actually considered an enemy by the Third Reich, according to newly discovered documents.

Several letters and memos unearthed at a depot used by the Stasi, the East-German secret police, show that Nazi spies within the Vatican were concerned at Pius's efforts to help displaced Poles and Jews.

In one, the head of Berlin's police force tells Joachim von Ribbentropp, the Third Reich's foreign minister, that the Catholic Church was providing assistance to Jews "both in terms of people and financially".

A report from a spy at work in the Vatican states: "Our source was told to his face by Father Robert Leibner [one of Pius's secretaries] that the greatest hope of the Church is that the Nazi system would be obliterated by the war."

La Repubblica, the newspaper that discovered the papers, said they were sent to the heads of the Stasi, after the Second World War.

The revelations they contain will help to clear the name of Pius XII, Eugenio Pacelli, who has long been criticised for turning a blind eye to the Holocaust. During the war, the British Foreign Office even described him as the "greatest moral coward of our age".

Those who have promoted the blood libel against the Pope are those who hate the Catholic Church, and wish to present it as always on the wrong side of history. They are not even above lying to do it. Will the documentary evidence that contradicts their claims stop the slander of a great and saintly pontiff?

H/T Captain's Quarters

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Even though the evidence shows the Brits were in Iraqi waters, the Iranians are making false counterclaims regarding their location.

Iran leveled new accusations against Britain on Thursday in the crisis over 15 captured British sailors and marines, and withdrew a promise to free the only woman in the group, insisting that Britain admit fault before any captives were released.

Iran also released what it said was a second letter from a captured British sailor — the woman, Leading Seaman Faye Turney— urging Britain to withdraw its forces from Iraq.

For its part, Britain flatly refused any talk of negotiations and called the release of the letter “cruel and callous,” and said it would seek the United Nations Security Council’s support in pressing Iran to release the captives.

With the latest developments the confrontation, now in its seventh day, seemed to have reached a point where neither side had left the other much room for a face-saving compromise. Deepening the sense of crisis, a senior Iranian official hinted that the captured troops might be put on trial for unspecified offenses.

Iran has not said where the sailors and marines are being held.

The dispute turns on rival claims about the whereabouts of the Britons when they were seized last Friday in disputed waters. Iran says they were more than 500 yards inside its territorial waters, but on Wednesday Britain produced satellite navigation coordinates to support its contention that the sailors were 1.7 nautical miles, or 3,400 yards, inside Iraqi waters, on a patrol approved by the United Nations and the Iraqi government.

If these kidnap victims are not released by the end of the weekend, there needs to be a complete blockade of Iranian ports -- and the bombing of Iran's one oil refinery.

After all, if they wish to behave like savages, let's work to send them back to the Stone Age.

If this House proposal goes through, we'll get $800 a year -- less than $70 a month -- next year. That is only a drop in the bucket compared to the $5000 that Texas teachers lag behind the national average teacher salary.

House lawmakers deserted their leadership Thursday, voting overwhelmingly to drain teacher incentive programs championed by GOP Gov. Rick Perry and funnel the money to an across-the-board $800 pay raise for educators before they backed a two-year, $150.1 billion state budget.

``Bottom line, members, do we want to give teachers a pay raise?'' asked Rep. Rick Noriega. He offered the proposal to shift $583 million in funding from the incentive programs to the raise for teachers and other school personnel.

The Houston Democrat's proposal passed 90-56 in the Republican-dominated House, which gave approval to the overall budget with a vote of 129-14 after 3 a.m. today. Now it goes to the Senate for consideration.

Defenders of the incentive programs — including top GOP budget-writers — worked hard to try to ward off the provision. They argued the switch could work against deserving teachers, provide a raise that's less than intended and cost deserving campuses money.

Perry earlier Thursday, before the incentives were cut, had singled them out for praise: ``I think the performance pay that is in this budget will put Texas at the top of the heap from the standpoint of a really strong, powerful message about competition in our public schools."

Those who supported the pay raise said money for the incentive programs could be restored later. But, said Rep. Rene Oliveira, D-Brownsville, "This is the only time this session you will be able to vote for a pay raise for your teachers back home."

I've got nothing against incentive pay programs -- once we get teacher pay up to something resembling the national standard. Until then, Texas teachers are simply being left behind.

UPDATED AGAIN -- Since PayPal won' work, let's try Amazon! Or you can use the PayPal link in the right column, which is working. Or you can just go directly to PayPal.com and use it to send to rhymeswithright@gmail.com.

UPDATED TO FIX THE BUTTON

You guys know my darling wife had a pair of serious hospitalizations last year. She has also had some additional medical issues arise in the last few weeks, and over night she was hospitalized again. Frankly, medical bills are creating a difficulty for us at this time.

I've been trying to monetize the blog lately to cover some of these expenses, but this latest hospitalization just makes things a little more difficult.

If you are so inclined, please click the link below. Any amount will be appreciated and acknowledged.

Now back to the hospital.

I'll update this as appropriate and possible.

3/28/07 -- 0600 Central Time: My darling wife is still hospitalized for tests as they attempt to see what is causing the symptoms for which she was admitted. Depending upon the results of tests, she could be home today or could need surgery -- or anything in between.

3/29/07 -- 0600 Central Time: Brought her home last night, after getting the doctor to concede that one more night at the hospital waiting for one last blood test really wasn't necessary -- treatment would still be antibiotics at home after discharge, which would simply be delayed by 14 hours until he came in to check the results. So I got her home in time for American Idol, and she has been resting comfortably. The long and the short of it is that she had a virus that caused the vomiting, and it continued after she developed a low-grade allergic reaction to the first antibiotic they gave her, adding yet another to the list of antibiotics she can't take. All other test results fairly normal except one, and that has to be followed up with the GP because it will likely cause a medication change for her.

Thanks to everyone for their prayers and kindness.

It's hard work, if you can get it.

Durex has launched its first UK recruitment drive for thousands of condom testers.

The condom maker wants a panel of 5,000 people who are single, married, or in couples to report their experiences of using its condoms and lubricants.

Men and women of all ages, ethnic groups or sexual orientation have been asked to apply on its website.

Durex was inundated with 14,000 applicants on the first day it started a similar scheme in France.

UK panellists will be expected to report online on how enjoyable the condoms and lubricants were to use and whether their sex lives have improved.

"The idea is to create a massive panel of testers who can try Durex condoms, have sex and then give us feedback about their experiences - in strictest confidence, of course," a Durex spokeswoman said.

"It isn't some crazy kind of '60s love-in," she added.

Durex sales in the six months until September 2006 increased by 7% compared to the same period in the previous year, driven by a surge in sales of personal devices and lubricants.

Unfortunately, there are no directions for how to apply for this job.

Shame, Dr. Dobson! Shame!

Focus on the Family founder James Dobson appeared to throw cold water on a possible presidential bid by former Sen. Fred Thompson while praising former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who is also weighing a presidential run, in a phone interview Tuesday.

"Everyone knows he's conservative and has come out strongly for the things that the pro-family movement stands for," Dobson said of Thompson. "[But] I don't think he's a Christian; at least that's my impression," Dobson added, saying that such an impression would make it difficult for Thompson to connect with the Republican Party's conservative Christian base and win the GOP nomination.

Mark Corallo, a spokesman for Thompson, took issue with Dobson's
characterization of the former Tennessee senator. "Thompson is indeed a Christian," he said. "He was baptized into the Church of Christ."

In a follow-up phone conversation, Focus on the Family spokesman Gary Schneeberger stood by Dobson's claim. He said that, while Dobson didn't believe Thompson to be a member of a non-Christian faith, Dobson nevertheless "has never known Thompson to be a committed Christian—someone who talks openly about his faith."

"We use that word—Christian—to refer to people who are evangelical Christians," Schneeberger added. "Dr. Dobson wasn't expressing a personal opinion about his reaction to a Thompson candidacy; he was trying to 'read the tea leaves' about such a possibility.

In other words, Dobson and his spokesman are redefining the word “Christian” to mean something other than a baptized, believing, practicing Christian. How Clintonian – indicating that Focus on the Family has adopted a linguistic relativism in which words mean anything they want them to mean when they use them, even if that meaning is contradictory to the commonly understood dictionary definition of the word. Perhaps someone need to ask Dr,. Dobson what the meaning of “is” is.

This offers the best explanation of why Congress really has no role in this entire question – and how the Supreme Court has already dealt with the issue of firing Executive Branch appointees in the past.

The contrived controversy over the firing of eight U.S. Attorneys is largely an exercise in imaginary indignation. Congressional Democrats suggest that some of the firings may have been improper and demand to know the reasons for each of them. By what authority they make such demand is not clear, since the Supreme Court has ruled that, with limited exceptions, Congress has no voice in the dismissal of federal officers. After the Civil War the radical Republicans in Congress sought to limit the power of the executive to dismiss political appointees. A statute passed in 1876 provided that postmasters should be appointed to a term of four years with the advice and consent of the Senate, just as the law provides now for the appointment of U.S. attorneys. However, the 1876 act also provided that a postmaster could not be removed by the president except with the advice and consent of the Senate. In 1920, President Wilson removed a postmaster whose term had not yet been completed. The postmaster sued in the Court of Claims to recover the salary he would have been owed from the day of his dismissal to the end of his term. The Court of Claims ruled against him and he appealed to the Supreme Court.

In 1926, the Supreme Court held that the requirement for Senate approval of a dismissal was unconstitutional. Chief Justice William Howard Taft, writing for the majority, stated that in order for the president to fulfill his constitutional duty, he must be able to discharge federal officers whose performance in office was not in accordance with his desires and that this responsibility could not be shared with Congress. Neither the statute providing for the appointment of U.S. attorneys nor the Supreme Court opinion makes any attempt to define what would constitute proper or improper reasons for dismissal. In fact, nowhere is there any suggestion that the president would need any reason to dismiss a federal officer who is not covered by the Civil Service Act.

If Congress can have no voice in the removal of U.S. attorneys and no reason is required to dismiss them, then by what authority do members of Congress demand to know why the attorneys were fired? Well, they do have subpoena power. However, since none of the documents they demand can possibly relate to any legitimate legislative purpose, it is not clear that the courts would uphold such subpoenas if the president refused to produce the documents.

Now I realize that the Democrats view the Constitution as so flexible that it can mean exactly the opposite of what it clearly says at any given time, but one would think that the demands of fidelity to past Supreme Court precedent – “settled law”, as the Democrats called it during recent confirmation hearings – would require that they not stick their nose into an area that is clearly an Executive branch prerogative. But of course, this isn’t a question of principle – it is a question of creating the appearance of impropriety where none exists, for purely political purposes.

This may be among the dumber things I’ve heard of a school doing to “motivate” students for the TAKS test.

Parents at a Katy school were outraged after students were separated by race for TAKS test assemblies.

School officials confirmed that it did indeed happen, leaving parents and students alike wondering why.

At Mayde Creek High School right before spring break, African American students were singled out and called to a special assembly.

Later, an assembly was called just for Hispanic students.

Then, yet another was called for white students.

“To me, that’s segregation. I don’t feel that those kids are getting treated fairly,” concerned parent Deon Franklin, whose daughter is in the 9th grade at the school, said.

It really makes no sense – but the school and district still want to justify it.

The district said the students were brought together to be lectured on the upcoming TAKS test.

It was supposed to be a sort of rally – encouragement for the kids to do well on the test.

And race had what, exactly, to do with encouraging them to do well on the test?

“But why should they have to be separated to have this kind of meeting when they should’ve been having this meeting with all the kids,” Franklin said.

But the district insists the state is the one behind the multiple meetings, calling them “targeted interventions.”

“The state of Texas when they look at how our students perform, they break it down by ethnicity,” Katy ISD spokesman Steve Stanford said.

But the state also breaks the data down by factors like district and campus, among others.

“It’s not about color. It’s about how well they do on the test,” Franklin said.

Yeah, they do break results down along many lines. They do a racial breakdown – which means that Asians and Native Americans should also have had separate rallies. They also break it down by gender – will there be separate male and female rallies coming up? And what about some of the other targeted populations – like low-income, migrant, and special education – will they be having separate rallies, too, due to the various ways students are statistically broken down for reporting and evaluation purposes? Of course not – which makes the district’s argument ring quite hollow.

And it happens to be a test that many of the students were already nervous about taking.

The meetings were only held for students in the district labeled at risk for failing the exam.

Hmmmmmm…. If you are really only dealing with a much smaller subset of students, the ethnic breakdown makes even less sense. I suspect that only one meeting or rally could have been held.

And while Mayde Creek was the only school in the district to hold the meetings, Katy ISD officials say it will be up to the individual principals if the meetings will be held again next year.

I wonder what the Texas Education Agency, the US Department of Education, and the Civil Rights division of the Department of Justice have to say about doing this next year?

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As a boy, my father instilled a great sense of reverence for these men in me -- heroes who fought despite the odds being stacked against them in a society still dominated by racism. As he often told me -- "The color of a man's uniform is the only one you should see or care about."

When Charles E. McGee slid his P-51 fighter, "Kitten," onto the tail of the fleeing German FW-190 in the skies over Austria in 1944, he fired his six big machine guns and struck a blow for civil rights back home.

Walter L. McCreary did the same a few months later, when his P-51 was hit by flak on a strafing run over Hungary and the cockpit floor began to slosh with what he thought was leaking gasoline.

And so did Woodrow W. Crockett's ground crews a few months after that, when they stopped a supply train and commandeered special gas tanks so their pilots could fly without running out of fuel.

Today, members of the famed black World War II aviation cadre now called the Tuskegee Airmen will be honored in the Capitol Rotunda for their history-making feats.

In a ceremony at 1 p.m., the airmen, including McGee, McCreary and Crockett, will receive the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest honor that Congress can give to civilians. President Bush is scheduled to speak, along with Colin L. Powell, former secretary of state, who received the medal in 1991.

The achievement of men such as McGee, McCreary and Crockett was simple: They were bold in battle and capable in command -- at a time when many in the military thought blacks could be neither.

"What we accomplished hasn't always been recognized for, really, what it meant to the country," McGee said this week. "There was meaning there, you might say, in a civil rights area that preceded what we know as the civil rights movement."

Not only did they pre-date the civil rights movement, I'd argue that their accomplishments and story made it possible, given the respect they earned from bomber pilots they protected. Any honor they receive is deserved -- and I applaud this one, which is long overdue.

It seems more and more likely.

Law & Order" star and former U.S. senator Fred Dalton Thompson is considering a bid for the White House that would test whether Hollywood can once again launch a Republican to the world's premier political stage.

His interest, confirmed in a brief interview this week, is generating buzz in Washington. He was third among Republican-leaning voters in a recent Gallup-USA Today survey, behind Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) and former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and ahead of former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.

The onetime senator from Tennessee is known to many Americans for playing New York District Attorney Arthur Branch on "Law & Order" and an admiral in the film "The Hunt for Red October." But his real-life record as a no-nonsense lawmaker who also served as the minority counsel to the Senate Watergate committee is appealing to party activists dissatisfied with the current crop of Republican hopefuls.

"He has a conservative bearing and a conservative presence, but he's independent in his thinking and his voting record," said Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), who added that Thompson is "seriously considering" a presidential campaign at the urging of many friends. "He has a commanding television presence that makes every other politician in America jealous."

Such a run would be a long-shot in this front-loaded presidential process, where so many have committed to candidates. But Thompson has appeal, name and face identification, and shows up well in the polls. Could he be a force to be reckoned with in 2008?

There are some valid points in this piece on apologies for slavery -- but it still does not overcome my objection to making such apologies for the actions of those long-dead.

While I applaud the efforts of Texas State Sen. Rodney Ellis and State Rep. Senfronia Thompson to pass a resolution of formal apology for slavery, their proposal does not go far enough. It may be a necessary first step, but Texas and Virginia, and the other slaveholding states, have much more to apologize for than just the institution of slavery, hideous though it was.

Particularly during the post-Reconstruction and Jim Crow periods, African-Americans in the South were treated with extraordinary brutality and cruelty, from the second-class citizenship status formalized in segregation to the epidemic of lynching that swept across the South and up into the Midwest as far north as Duluth, Minn., between about 1880 and 1930. Almost 500 documented lynchings took place in Texas alone, a greater number than in any other state except Georgia and Mississippi.

These lynchings included some of the most atrocious of the so-called "spectacle lynchings," a species of mass entertainment that probably began on Feb. 1, 1893, in Paris, Texas, with the prolonged torture/murder with hot irons and a bonfire of Henry Smith, a retarded black man, before a cheering mob of 10,000 spectators. In addition to the violence directed at individuals, there were also periodic "race riots," which usually meant pogroms directed at blacks. In 1886, all blacks were completely driven out of Comanche County by vigilantes. My father, who grew up in Comanche County in the 1920s, remembers stories of signs posted on the edge of town that read, "Nigger, don't let the sun set on you here."

Those who committed these evils are, by and large, long dead. So are their victims and those with living memory of them. And while we must not forget them, we must not apologize for these events either, for such apologies constitute an admission of our moral culpability for them -- something this generation does not have.

And in a state like Texas, where Republicans today dominate, such an apology is inappropriate -- for slavery and Jim Crow were institutions supported by the Democrats, while the GOP actively opposed them. Let the Democratic party apologize for its role in institutionalizing and supporting these practices, both by its policies and its active support of the Klan.

And if any apology, acknowldgement, or condemnation does come from state government, make sure that the role of that malignant political entity is acknowledged prominently in the text, along with Republican efforts to stop and oppose them. After all, that is history as well -- a history that some would rather hide.

And personally, I think this approach -- dealing with today's issues -- is much more important. Human trafficking goes on today, and must be stopped with the full resources of every level of government.

Frankly, I welcome this trend -- which highlights a difference between legal immigrants and the border-jumping immigration criminals invading our country.

The number of naturalized citizens in the United States grew to nearly 13 million between 1995 and 2005, a historic increase that reflects the nation's changing ethnic makeup and could increase the power of immigrants to affect public policy at the ballot box, according to a study released yesterday by the Pew Hispanic Center.

More than half of the nation's legal immigrants are now naturalized citizens, "the highest level in a quarter century and a 15 percent increase since 1990," when the proportion of naturalized immigrants reached historic lows, the study said. Since 1995, the average number of yearly naturalizations has surpassed 650,000, compared with 150,000 in 1970.

Maryland was one of five states where more than 70 percent of eligible immigrants became citizens. The number of naturalizations in Maryland rose to 274,000 in 2005 from 120,000 in 1995.

Sixty-five percent of Virginia's eligible immigrants were naturalized in 2005, along with 50 percent of eligible immigrants in the District.

"We've seen dramatic changes in countries across the board," said Jeffrey Passel, the Pew Hispanic Center's senior research associate. "Today's immigrants are interested in becoming U.S. citizens," he said.

Mexicans were by far the largest group to naturalize, at more than 1.5 million. The number represented a 144 percent increase over 10 years, and it could have been much higher because Mexicans are the least likely of all groups to naturalize, Passel said. Another 3 million are eligible.

Immigrants from Cuba, China and the Philippines followed Mexicans as the largest groups to naturalize, Passel said. Most settled in four states -- California, New York, Texas and Florida.

I'm an advocate of strong enforcement of our immigration laws -- but I welcome those who follow them, and am pleased to see them join us as citizens of this great country.

This is one reason we in the online community need to be vigilant for the cyber-jihadis in our midst.

"We were told to fight against Israel, America and non-Muslims," said Muhammed Bakhtiar, 17, explaining why he wanted to become a suicide bomber. "We are so unhappy with our lives here. We have nothing," he said.

Last month, Bakhtiar and his school friend, Miraj Ahmad, also 17, left their home, families, and boarding school in Buner, a district of the Malakand Division of the Northwest Frontier Province. Their destination was the Muridke madrassa right outside of Lahore, Pakistan’s second-largest city. The madrassa or religious school is run by the Jama’at-ud-Da’awah, the charity linked to the outlawed terrorist organization, Lashkar e Taiba. And Lashkar e Taiba has links to al-Qaida.

he grounds of this madrassa looks much like the campus of any exclusive boys boarding school – except for the bearded armed guards sporting Kalashnikovs checking all those who come and go. There is a cricket field, swimming pool, all sorts of sport activities, and horses too. In addition to religious instruction, the school offers computer sciences, engineering and pre-med classes for students ranging in age from six to 17.

It also offers jihad.

"We read about jihad in books and wanted to join," said Ahmad. "We wanted to go to the Muridke madrassa so we would have a better life in the hereafter."

Not only do we need to be vigilant, but law-enforcement needs to enforce laws against servers that host such terrorist supporting sites.

I've written about dating sites in the past, and noted that they often cater to specific needs and interests of those who patronize them. I've recently been informed of this Black Dating site, for those who are looking to date black men or women.

Now some might argue that such sites promote segregation, but I disagree. Just as there are those who do not date outside their faith or prefer individuals of certain backgrounds, race and ethnicity are important issues in personal relationships. And so I encourage you, if you sincerely seek a relationship with an African-American man or woman, look at this Black Dating site as one resource for you.

Paid Endorsement.

Probably, which is a good thing, considering that the TYC is the juvenile jail program for the state of Texas. Do we really want felons guarding troubled kids?

Jay Kimbrough, given new power Wednesday as conservator of the Texas Youth Commission, vowed to clean house at the embattled agency, beginning with the likely firings of perhaps dozens of convicted felons working there.

He said he also will ask a number of high-level agency executives and state school superintendents to reapply for their jobs.

Strike me that a lot of those high-level employees need to be let go in the housecleaning that is needed -- they didn't dhow even basic concern for sexual abuse of kids, or the punishment of those who resisted advances by TXC employees.

Well, I guess it isn't just outsiders who WalMart uses its resources to go after -- they spare no expense when investigating rules violations, too.

The investigator flew to Guatemala in April 2002 with a delicate mission: trail a Wal-Mart manager around the country to prove he was sleeping with a lower-level employee, a violation of company policy.

The apparent smoking gun? “Moans and sighs” heard as the investigator, a Wal-Mart employee, pressed his ear against a hotel room door inside a Holiday Inn, according to legal documents. Soon after, the company fired the manager for what it said was improper fraternization with a subordinate.

Wal-Mart, renowned to outsiders for its elbows-out business tactics, is known internally for its bare-knuckled no-expense-spared investigations of employees who break its ironclad ethics rules.

Over the last five years, Wal-Mart has assembled a team of former officials from the C.I.A., F.B.I. and Justice Department whose elaborate, at times globetrotting, investigations have led to the ouster of a high-profile board member who used company funds to buy hunting equipment, two senior advertising executives who took expensive gifts from a potential supplier and a computer technician who taped a reporter’s telephone calls.

The investigators — whose résumés evoke Langley, Va., more than Bentonville, Ark. — serve as a rapid-response team that aggressively polices the nation’s largest private employer, enforcing Wal-Mart’s modest by-the-books culture among its army of 1.8 million employees.

WalMart is already famous for its strong-arm tactics for dealing with customers and others who litigate against it -- one older lady of my acquaintance was injured when a damaged changing station fell open as she passed it, striking her on the head and sending her tot he hospital. WalMart offered her a settlement for less than the amount of her medical bills, despite the fact that the evidence pointed to their own shoddy maintenance -- telling the injured 75-year-old that if she didn't accept it the company would "keep this thing in court until after you die, and we know that you need money to pay your medical bills now."

Nobody plays the game harder than WalMart.

This book is one that has just jumped to the front of my “must-read” list.

While recovering from surgery recently, I had the good fortune to read a fine new book about political dissent in the North during the Civil War. The book, Copperheads: The Rise an Fall of Lincoln’s Opponents in the North, by journalist-turned-academic-historian Jennifer Weber, shines the spotlight on the “Peace Democrats,” who did everything they could to obstruct the Union war effort during the Rebellion. In so doing, she corrects a number of claims that have become part of the conventional wisdom. The historical record aside, what struck me the most were the similarities between the rhetoric and actions of the Copperheads a century and a half ago and Democratic opponents of the Iraq war today.

I made a similar connection some time back – and am quite interested in learning more about the treason of the Democrat Party in the past, as we deal with its subversion in the present.

And here they kept saying that the surge would be a failure – now they are complaining that it is too successful.

Hundreds of Iraqis detained in the Baghdad security crackdown have been crammed into two detention centers run by the Defense Ministry that were designed to hold only dozens of people, a government monitoring group said Tuesday.

The numbers suggested that the security plan’s emphasis on aggressive block-by-block sweeps of troubled neighborhoods in the capital had flooded Iraq’s frail detention system, and appeared to confirm the fears of some human rights advocates who have been predicting that the new plan would aggravate already poor conditions.

After all, we can’t subject terrorists to less-than-optimal conditions, can we? It’s not like there are cold-blooded enemies of America and Iraq who are murdering civilians.

You know, a similar move by a GOP candidate so close to an endorsement would be seen as scandalous.

Sen. Hillary Clinton has agreed to help former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, who endorsed her Monday, pay off his $400,000 campaign debt.

Clinton (D-N.Y.) will put the arm on her donor network for Vilsack, who quit the presidential race Feb. 23 citing financial difficulties.

Clinton spokesman Phil Singer said it was a normal gesture to make and called suggestions of any endorsement quid pro quo "ridiculous."

"One thing's got absolutely nothing to do with the other," he said. "They've known each other for years. If she weren't running for President, she'd be doing whatever she can to help retire his debt."

Three weeks ago, Vilsack said his main focus was closing down his campaign debt and that he would not make an endorsement until the end of the year - if then. "I think the chances are good that I'll do that, but I don't know that for certain," he said.

Clinton has already run into problems with the appearance of buying endorsements.

I’m not saying it is illegal. I’m not even saying it is unethical (though she is a Clinton). What I’m saying is that it looks improper – and appearances are sometimes more important than realities in politics.

An over-indulgent mother who has taught her that nothing is her fault and anything that goes against her is the result of discrimination.

A teenager has been jailed for more than a year for shoving a teacher's aide at her high school, a case that has sparked anger and heightened racial tensions in rural East Texas.

Shaquandra Cotton, who is black, claims the teacher's aide pushed her first and would not let her enter school before the morning bell in 2005. A jury convicted the 15-year-old girl in March 2006 on a felony count of shoving a public servant, who was not seriously injured.

The girl is in the Ron Jackson Correctional Complex in Brownwood, about 300 miles from her home in Paris. The facility is part of an embattled juvenile system that is the subject of state and federal investigations into allegations that staff members physically and sexually abused inmates.

Under the sentence handed down by Lamar County Judge Chuck Superville, she will remain at the facility until she meets state rehabilitation standards or reaches her 21st birthday.

But her family and civil rights activists say they want her home now. They are condemning the sentence as unusually harsh and say it shows a justice system that punishes young offenders differently, depending on their race.

Personally, I don’t care what momma and the “civil rights activists” want. Momma rejected the misdemeanor plea bargain that would have kept her child out of jail and on probation, but found that too harsh and went to trial. She lost.

And besides – I think any kid who lays hands on a teacher or school staff member ought to be in a juvenile facility until age 21 – or charged with an adult and facing hard time in a state prison.

It is good the school acted -- but it is much too late and much too weak.

Columbia University has warned or censured eight students who were involved in disrupting speakers from the Minuteman Project last October in a melee that cut short the program, a university spokesman said yesterday.

In the televised fracas, protesters stormed a stage at the university and were attacked by others, shutting down speeches by the group, which opposes illegal immigration and has mounted civilian border patrols. The event hurtled the university back into the debate over free speech. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg chastised Columbia at the time.

The warnings and censures will be noted on the students’ transcripts for varying lengths of time, said Robert Hornsby, a Columbia spokesman. None will remain on the records after graduation. But if students face other disciplinary proceedings, they will face harsher penalties. “All of these punishments have a gravity to them and they should not be taken lightly,” Mr. Hornsby said.

Unfortunately, at least one disciplined student sees this as a victory for his side.

David Judd, a third-year student studying computer science who was one of the students who received a warning, said, “I view the fact that I got the lightest possible punishment as a small victory.”

And that's the problem -- the slap-on-the-wrist penalty says that nothing significant will happen to students who engage in attempts to shut down speech they disagree with.

I'm curious -- would the penalty have been so light if, instead of a speech by the Minutemen, a group of students had taken the stage and shut down a speech by Rev. Al Sharpton or Sen. Hillary Clinton? If instead of a program sponsored by the College Republicans, it had been a speech sponsored by a gay or Muslim group? I think we all know what would have happened in such cases.

I'm a little shocked by this news.

Coach Gary Kubiak disclosed Tuesday that the Texans might select a left tackle in the first round of the draft despite signing free agent Jordan Black and re-signing Ephraim Salaam.

Although the Texans need another wide receiver to play opposite Andre Johnson, Kubiak said they might target a left tackle because Charles Spencer is only 50-50 to make it back by the first game of the season.

The Texans have been working to address this issue during the off-season, but they think they still have a hole that needs to be filled. If they really do, they need a proven commodity at that spot.

Why not sign Detroit Lion free-agent Cory Redding, a UT alum and product of Houston's own North Shore High School?

Cory Redding is not only a fantastic player, but also a fantastic human being who would fit well with the clean-cut image the Texans have cultivated during the team's short history. Redding would bring immediate credibility to the Texan's defense.

And as a local product, the move would have immediate impact upon fan support. After all, Redding was popular in high school and at UT. Bringing him home would be welcome by those who have followed his career for years and watched him become a top-drawer player.

I'm curious -- what other violations of federal law does the New York Times want local governments to aid and abet?

In cities and suburbs across America, the confluence of homes, big-box stores and striving immigrant men has created an informal, often unruly job marketplace that has survived every effort to ban it or harass it out of existence.

This market, of Latino day laborers, is hardly the only manifestation of the shadow immigrant economy, but it is the hardest to ignore. These are the immigrants whom localities seem the most desperate to subdue, usually with laws against loitering and job solicitation. A Los Angeles suburb, Baldwin Park, is the latest of dozens to tackle the problem, with an antisoliciting bill written broadly enough to cover cookie-selling Girl Scouts but really meant for the Latino men at Home Depot.

Such crackdowns are constitutionally dubious and usually fail, and some lawmakers are having doubts about them. Last week, on Long Island, the Suffolk County Legislature defeated a bill to drive away day laborers by forbidding them to “obstruct” county roads. The majority understood that the dimly reasoned measure would have simply diverted workers and contractors’ trucks onto other roads while inviting civil-rights lawsuits. It would not have reduced the population of day laborers the least bit.

It was a good outcome for a bad bill, but the county is still stuck where it has been for years — wondering how to handle a volatile mixture of men and trucks in a suburb that wishes they would go away. A good next step for Suffolk would be to come around to a solution that other communities have tried, with generally positive results: a hiring site.

One can oppose illegal immigration and still approve of hiring sites, places where laborers can find shade, toilets and a safe place to negotiate jobs with contractors and homeowners. The most obvious reasons are crowd control and traffic safety.

But an equally compelling reason is that hiring sites impose order on free-market chaos. An unregulated day-labor bazaar wallows in the mud flats of capitalism, benefiting sleazy contractors and fostering rock-bottom wages and working conditions for all laborers, legal or not. Hiring sites that register and monitor contractors and laborers can hold them all to account. Employers who undercut competitors and rob workers will find it hard to return to a well-established hiring site, and drunks and belligerents among the laborers will be pressured to toe the line. These places are sometimes called “shape-up sites,” an apt term in more ways than one.

Some lawmakers have gotten over the notion that hiring sites are gifts to illegals, and have concluded that approaching day laborers as community members, with rights and civic responsibilities, is smarter than ranting about them as pests. It is heartening that some local officials are willing to confront the realities of a flawed immigration system and to work responsibly to lessen its troublesome side effects.

Then there are those who hold out hope that with just one more crackdown, one more ticketing blitz, the men who make our suburbs gleam will take their sweat and muscle elsewhere and leave us alone to tend our homes and hedges by ourselves. Government officials on Long Island, as elsewhere, have tried stiff-necked hostility to day laborers, and have reaped years of failure. They should consider hiring sites as the next, positive step — one that promises not only to be practical and humane, but also effective.

You know what -- I bet that government sponsored crack-sales sites would be a good idea as well. After all, it would help to regulate an unruly illegal market, and make the illegal purchase of illegal goods much easier -- as well as stop the harassment of an often unruly drug marketplace that has survived every effort to ban it or harass it out of existence

hey, it makes as much sense as the idea of government sponsored hiring sites for border-jumping immigration criminals.

Well, that's my question in response to this new recommendation.

A major medical group is recommending for the first time that women at greatest risk of breast cancer undergo MRI exams every year to try to catch more tumors at their earliest, most treatable stages.

The American Cancer Society is issuing new guidelines today that urge annual MRIs for women at high risk because of a strong family history of the disease, a genetic predisposition or other reasons. As many as 1.6 million women in the United States fall into this high-risk category.

For these women, the recommendation adds the MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) exam to the standard tools that doctors should use routinely to detect breast cancer, marking the most significant change in the society's influential screening guidelines since doctors started recommending annual mammograms. The more sensitive MRI exams can pick up small tumors that mammograms frequently miss.

"The goal here is to do a better job of finding breast cancer early, when they are much more likely to be treated successfully," said Robert A. Smith, the society's director of screening.

The guidelines stop short of recommending annual MRI breast screening for all women, saying that there is insufficient evidence to support wider use of the relatively costly exams. But they say that women at a lesser, but still elevated, risk because, for example, they are breast cancer survivors or have a family history of the disease, should consult with their doctors about undergoing regular MRIs as well.

The guidelines stress that the exams should be done in addition to annual mammograms and regular physical exams in the hope of driving down the death toll from the common, widely feared malignancy.

Some question whether or not there is sufficient MRI capacity in the country to meet this call -- but I have no doubt that the machines can be manufactured and the operators trained in relatively short order. After all, look at the number of private imaging centers springing up around the country.

The issue is cash. Will insurance companies and government programs be prepared to regularly make the sort of payments this will require, as millions of new MRIs are done each year for cancer screening. After all, MRIs are around $500 a pop. This is out of reach of many patients without insurance help or other programs.

It strikes me that there may be a more productive way of showing your desire to help children than taking a bunch of them hostage.

A day-care center owner hijacked a busload of his students and teachers and drove them to Manila's city hall Wednesday to demand better housing and education for the children.

Jun Ducat and at least one other hostage-taker scribbled in large letters on a sheet of paper, taped to the bus' windshield, that they were holding 32 children and two teachers and were armed with two grenades, an assault rifle and a pistol, officer Mark Andal said.

One child with a fever was released after four hours, and then was driven away in an ambulance.

They said they were demanding improved housing and education for 145 children in a day-care center in Manila's poor Tondo district where the incident, televised live around the world, appeared to have begun. The driver was released soon afterward.

"I love these kids; that's why I am here," Ducat, identified by police and parents as the day-care center owner, told DZMM radio by cell phone. "We have a field trip. I invited the children for a field trip.

"You can be assured that I cannot hurt the children. In case I need to shed blood, I will not be the first to fire. I am telling the policemen, have pity on these children."

If he really loved these kids, would he be holding them with guns and grenades?

After Scooter Libby was convicted over discrepancies that are reasonably explained as faulty memory, why would anyone ever voluntarily give any information to any government investigation? Monica Goodling has nothing to hide -- merely the sense to recognize that the fix is in and any evidence that contradicts the scenario preferred by the Democrats will result in prosecution.

Monica Goodling, a Justice Department official involved in the firings of federal prosecutors, will refuse to answer questions at upcoming Senate hearings, citing Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination, her lawyer said Monday.

"The potential for legal jeopardy for Ms. Goodling from even her most truthful and accurate testimony under these circumstances is very real," said the lawyer, John Dowd.

He said that members of the House and Senate Judiciary committees seem already to have made up their minds that wrongdoing has occurred in the firings.

When witch-hunters determine set out to confirm there are witches they have already said they are certain exist, why would anyone choose to subject themselves to examination?

Prayers for a good and decent man.

White House press secretary Tony Snow, who has become the face of the Bush presidency over the last year, has cancer again.

Snow's deputy, Dana M. Perino, broke into tears at an off-camera briefing this morning as she announced that the cancer has spread to his liver. Doctors discovered it when they operated on Snow on Monday to remove a small growth that had developed in his lower abdomen.

Snow, 51, who underwent surgery and months of chemotherapy for colon cancer two years ago, plans once again to "go after it as aggressively" as he can, Perino said, but it was unclear when or whether he would be able to return to work.

"Of course, we're pulling for Tony," Perino said. "We certainly gain strength from his optimism. We know he's going to beat it again."

I'm curious what the reaction will be over on DU, Kos, and HuffPo to this news. Do we even need to look to know?

Looks like the Senate GOP may leave it to the President to kill this deadline plan.

Unwilling to do the White House's heavy lifting on Iraq, Senate Republicans are prepared to step aside to allow language requiring troop withdrawals to reach President Bush, forcing him to face down Democratic adversaries with his veto pen.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) announced the shift in strategy yesterday, as the chamber took up a $122 billion war spending package that includes a target date of March 31, 2008, for ending most U.S. combat operations in Iraq. The provision, along with a similar House effort, represents the Democrats' boldest challenge on the war, setting the stage for a dramatic showdown with Bush over an otherwise popular bill to keep vital military funds flowing.

Republicans will still attempt to remove the deadline in a Senate vote expected as soon as today, and GOP leaders were reasonably confident they would muster a majority. But the margin is expected to be thin, requiring the presence of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who had skipped several previous Iraq votes to attend presidential campaign events. McCain canceled a series of fundraisers and meetings in Florida to return to Washington, telling a conservative radio program that he wanted to "beat back this recipe for defeat that the Democrats are trying to foist off on the American people."

No matter the outcome of the Senate vote, McConnell is looking ahead, assuming House Democrats will insist that withdrawal conditions be included when a final bill is sent to Bush. If so, McConnell said, Republicans would forgo the parliamentary tactics they used to block antiwar legislation that had forced Democrats to amass an insurmountable 60 votes to prevail.

"We need to get the bill on down to the president and get the veto out of the way," McConnell said.

Regardless, there will be no deadline enacted into law by Congress. Not even this absurd notion.

In one of the more unusual proposals to emerge in the Senate debate on Iraq withdrawal, Sen. Mark Pryor wants to keep any plans for bringing troops home a secret.

The Arkansas Democrat is a key holdout on his party's proposal to approve $122 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan while setting a goal of March 31, 2008, for winding up military operations in Iraq. Unlike the plan's Republican opponents, Pryor wants a withdrawal deadline of some kind. He just doesn't want anyone outside the White House, Congress and the Iraqi government to know what it is.

"My strong preference would be to have a classified plan and a classified timetable that should be shared with Congress," Pryor said yesterday. A public deadline would tip off the enemy, "who might just bide their time and wait for us to leave," he said. "Then you'd have chaos and mayhem and instability."

Pryor said a classified plan would be provided by the president, shepherded by Senate committees and ultimately shared with Congress and Iraqi leaders. He is confident that the plan would remain secret, because Congress is entrusted with secrets "all the time."

And Congress leaks secrets all the time -- I imagine it would take about 20 minutes for some enterprising Democrat staffer to be dubbed "an anonymous Capitol Hill source" by the television networks, the NY Times and Washington Post. After all, when has the mere fact that something is classified -- and its disclosure harmful to national security -- ever stopped them from supplying information to the enemy? And since there is never any prosecution of leakers of classified info, what would be the reason to think it would not be let out to the public quickly?

Not a place where one expects to find dishonesty and corruption.

Smithsonian Secretary Lawrence M. Small, the banker who took over the world's largest museum complex seven years ago, has resigned under pressure following revelations regarding his housing allowance and office and travel expenditures.

Museum officials announced Small's departure yesterday and named Cristián Samper, a biologist who heads the National Museum of Natural History, as acting secretary.

In recent weeks questions about Small's leadership and his personal expenditures had created a crisis at the Smithsonian. Small, 65, had been sharply criticized by members of Congress and his pay and expense accounts have been subjected to scrutiny by the Smithsonian inspector general. Last week, two separate committees were appointed by the regents to look into management operations at the Smithsonian, which includes 18 museums and research facilities as well as the National Zoo.

It is all rather sordid -- and seems based upon the attempt by a businessman to operate a museum/not-for-profit entity like the business he had left.

I don't know what happened, but a number of comments have disappeared from my site after a recent rebuild.

I apologize for any inconvenience, and will attempt to restore them if possible. Please feel free to repost.

It seems to be working in parts of Thailand.

THERE will be no children on the playground at Yaha primary school today, even though school should run for another week. The Government halted classes in southern Thailand two weeks ago to shield teachers from a brutal campaign.

Since the Muslim insurgency reignited in January 2004, 67 teachers have been murdered: shot in front of their class, beaten to death or set alight in a savage protest against the Thai education system. Another 80 have been injured.

The situation has deteriorated to such a level that the military provides escorts for teachers to and from school in hundreds of towns across the three southern provinces of Yala, Pattani and Narathiwat.

Islam may, at one time, have placed great value on learning – but its most forceful proponents today seem intent on promoting ignorance instead.

It can’t even pay its debts.

A private developer shuttered Texas Southern University's two newly constructed parking garages and shuttle service today after the financially troubled school stopped paying its bills.

The move left thousands of students, faculty and staff members scrambling at the commuter campus, while the roughly $35 million project is at risk of default.
The Integrity Group made the decision less than three years into a 30-year lease with the university, which hired the Cleveland, Ohio-based company to construct and manage the parking garages and six-shuttle service.

The two garages, totaling 2,000 parking spaces, opened last year. But the university did not collect adequate fees or occupancy rates to pay the debt service on the project, and students recently voted down a proposed fee to pay for the shuttle service.

Campus leaders have asked the state Legislature for an emergency appropriation of $1.7 million to cover the shortfall. But lawmakers have balked because the expense is not directly related to education.

Time to merge the scandal-plagued, failing, third-rate educational institution with the University of Houston – only a few blocks away – and put an end to this embarrassing remnant of the Jim Crow era.

Well, “Slick Nick” Lampson is back in the hospital, only days after selling-out the troops and misrepresenting his district by voting in favor of the pork-laden cut-and-run appropriations bill.

U.S. Rep. Nick Lampson, D-Stafford, underwent a quadruple coronary artery bypass at St. Luke's Episcopal Hospital in Houston Sunday morning.

The procedure was recommended after a checkup at the National Naval Medical Center in Washington Friday detected irregularities, his office said.

"The physicians have indicated that the surgery proceeded well and that Congressman Lampson will make a full recovery,'' Lampson spokesman Bobby Zafarnia said in a press release. "Though this was a serious procedure, Congressman Lampson has his family with him, his spirits are high, and he looks forward to returning to his office and serving his constituents as quickly as possible.''

Zafarnia said Lampson will remain under observation in the hospital for the next several days and should be released within the week. His recovery period will keep him in Houston for 3 to 4 weeks.

Heart bypass surgery involves surgeons creating a new channel when an artery that carries blood from the heart to the rest of the body is blocked. In a quadruple bypass, four arteries are bypassed in the procedure.

Lampson, who replaced former Majority Leader Tom DeLay in the House, was hospitalized briefly in December, soon after he won that election. He underwent an angioplasty procedure at the time to open up a partially-blocked vessel.

I wish the Congressman a speedy and complete recovery -- because I want to be a part of the campaign that removes him from office in 2008.

Who knows – maybe he beat Tiger Woods to be the first Cablinasian.

Ward Churchill's claims of Indian ancestry were questioned in an extensive genealogy by the Rocky Mountain News in 2005, which identified 142 direct forebears of Churchill and found no evidence that any of them were American Indians. Now the controversial University of Colorado ethnic studies professor says he has black ancestry as well.

Churchill made that claim while answering questions at the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair in San Francisco on March 17. In a video clip available at tinyurl.com/yvlr9b, Churchill criticized as racist the vote this month by the Cherokee Nation to oust freedmen - descendants of slaves once owned by Cherokees - from tribal rolls. After repeating the debunked claims of his Indian ancestry and membership in an established Indian tribe, Churchill said: "Actually, I do have black ancestry."

Contacted by the Rocky, Churchill declined to elaborate on his claim.

Ward Churchill – the truth is not in him.

Education, jihadi-style meets anti-terrorism, Pakistani-style.

Police challenged a group of suspected militants Monday at a high school in northwestern Pakistan after hearing that they wanted to "motivate" students for holy war, sparking a gunbattle that left six people dead, police said. Five militants and one police officer were killed in the shooting at the privately run Oxford Public School in Tank, a town about 60 miles from the Afghan border, said Javed Khan, a local police officer. It was unclear whether any students were hurt.

Khan said the militants told the administrators of the boys' school to assemble the students so the militants could address them.

"They wanted to speak with the boys and motivate them for jihad," Khan said by telephone from Tank.

Looks like the Taliban want to turn every school into a terrorist-spawning madrassa.

Explain this.

A joint operation by Greek and US secret service officers in March 2003 led to the seizure of a large cache of explosives from the basement of the Iraqi Embassy in Athens, Kathimerini has learned.

“Operation Net” was launched just before the American invasion of Iraq after US authorities claimed to have been tipped off about the presence of a weapons cache in the embassy in Neo Psychico, sources have revealed. The informer is believed to be an Iraqi with links to the embassy.

Sources said a raid on the embassy unearthed explosive materials, car bombs, detonators, several guns and dozens of rounds of ammunition. Much of the material was “ready to use” while some was too old to be of any value, according to sources who said all the material was destroyed within a few weeks of discovery.

US secret services could not determine why the weapons cache had been kept at the embassy, although the possibility that it had been destined for use in a terrorist attack during the Athens 2004 Olympic Games has been ruled out.

‘Nuff said.

I’ll lay it on the line – I hate the University of North Carolina. I always have, to the degree that I would support the University of Teheran Jumpin’ Jihadis before cheering for the Tarheels. That said, my heart goes out to the UNC community and the family of their mascot, Jason Ray, who is in critical condition after being struck by a car.

More than two dozen family members and friends held a bedside vigil Sunday for Jason Ray, the North Carolina student who suits up as the school's mascot who was in extremely critical condition after being hit by a car.

The 21-year-old senior remained on life support Sunday, two days after he was struck near his hotel in Fort Lee. Ray, who portrays UNC's ram mascot, Rameses, was in New Jersey for the NCAA men's tournament game between the Tar Heels and Southern California at the Continental Airlines Arena.

Ray's father, Emmitt, who flew to New Jersey in a friend's private plane after getting word of his son's life-threatening head injuries, said doctors hold out little hope for his son's recovery "short of the intervention of the Lord."

Ray left his hotel to go to a nearby convenience store Friday afternoon, and was walking back along Route 4 when he was struck from behind by an SUV. The driver stopped immediately to call 911. No charges have been filed.

No one should have to deal with such a devastating situation.

If you are so inclined, offer a prayer for Jason, his family, and the rest of the UNC community. I know I have, because likes and dislikes in college sports are truly insignificant next to matters of life and death.

He just has a whole different idea about the nature of property.

President Hugo Chavez announced Sunday that his government's sweeping reforms toward socialism will include the creation of "collective property."

Vowing to undermine capitalism's continued influence in Venezuela during his television and radio program "Hello President," Chavez said state-financed cooperatives would operate under a new concept in which workers would share profits.

"It's property that belongs to everyone and it's going to benefit everyone," said Chavez, a close ally of Cuban leader Fidel Castro whom opponents accuse of leading Venezuela toward Cuba-style communism.

Chavez — a leftist former paratrooper popularly known as "El Comandante" — said his government fully respects private property, but pledged to replace capitalist ideals with socialist principles on cooperatives such as cattle ranches and farms.

"It cannot be production to generate profits for one person or a small group of people that become rich exploiting peons who end up becoming slaves, living in poverty and misery their entire lives," he said.

And we all know how successful “collective farms” were in the Soviet Union, don’t we?

Where I grew up, such folks would be known as “scum”. Using kids -- including mentally handicapped ones -- as decoys and bombs is below sub-human.

Al Qaeda in Iraq is using kidnapped children to pick up weapons dropped in battle zones, get past checkpoints and die in car bombs, according to U.S. officials and Iraqis in Baghdad.

"Al Qaeda is using children to pick up weapons and ammunition knowing that U.S. troops will not shoot against children," said one U.S. military official, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

There has also been a reported incident in which children were used to drive safely past a checkpoint in order to detonate a car closer to a target.

"Men traveling with children in the back of their cars rarely get searched because they look like a family," said Hassan, a middle-aged Shi'ite living in one of the capital's older mixed neighborhoods.

"Then they leave the car and blow it up by remote control with the children in it," he said. Hassan, who did not want his full name used out of fear of retaliation, said at one point last year children with Down syndrome had been used to carry bombs.

And in the past they’ve used animals to deliver deadly cargo.

Insurgents in Iraq attached explosives to a dog and tried to blow up a military convoy near the northern oil centre of Kirkuk.

The canine bomb went off but the only casualty was the unfortunate animal, said police. The militants wrapped an explosive belt around the dog and detonated it as the convoy passed through Dakuk, 25 miles south of Kirkuk, said the town's police chief, Col Mohammed Barzaji.

"The dog was torn apart by the explosion which caused neither injury among the soldiers nor any damage."

I guess the terrorists don’t have the courage to put themselves at risk, so they use kids and puppies instead. And yet they are the ones that Michael Moore, Sean Penn, and other moral midgets claim are freedom fighters and the equivalent of the Founding Fathers.

H/T Jawa Report

Well, we’ll see.

The leaders of Northern Ireland’s dominant political and religious parties, Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams and the Protestant leader Rev. Ian Paisley, held face-to-face negotiations today and agreed to work towards a resumption of the province’s power-sharing authority by May 8.

The agreement, announced by the two men sitting close together at a diamond-shaped table in the Stormont Parliament building, meant that the province will not meet a March 26 deadline set by Britain and Ireland to end a four-year suspension of the local government and assembly.

But it was welcomed in London as a “moment that we will remember,” a spokesman for Prime Minister Tony Blair said, speaking in return for customary anonymity.

“Let us be clear — if there’s a consensus about the way forward, the British government isn’t going to stand in the way of that consensus,” the spokesman said.

After reading statements in front of a live television camera, Mr. Adams and Mr. Paisley shuffled their papers but did not shake hands. Nonetheless, the notion of the two men, who have been bitter rivals and adversaries over the long period of Northern Ireland’s sectarian strife, sitting almost side by side was seen by many analysts as historic.

Hey, if these two terrorist leaders can set aside their differences and negotiate a true peace and a modus viviendi for their peoples, then maybe there is hope for other regions of the world.

One of my colleagues told the most outrageous story over lunch today. The frightening thing is that it was true.

It isn’t unusual to have pregnant girls in class at our school. One girl in my colleague’s class is getting very close to giving birth, and so has begun reading up on how to care for her baby. Today she said the following to this colleague.

“Mr. C., I keep reading that breast milk is better for babies than regular milk, but I can’t find out where to get it or how much it costs.”

I understand that my colleague handled the question with much more tact than I would have been able to.

Or is it a turn-off?

Scientists have created the world's first human-sheep chimera - which has the body of a sheep and half-human organs.

The sheep have 15 per cent human cells and 85 per cent animal cells - and their evolution brings the prospect of animal organs being transplanted into humans one step closer.

Professor Esmail Zanjani, of the University of Nevada, has spent seven years and £5million perfecting the technique, which involves injecting adult human cells into a sheep's foetus.

Researchers at Texas A&M have reportedly been trying different methods to create human/sheep hybrids -- methods said to involve flowers, chocolates, and slinky negligees.

It certainly will if Rep. Lynn Westmoreland has her way about the matter.

When Valerie Plame Wilson testified recently before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, just two Republicans — out of 17 on the committee — bothered to show up. Ranking Republican Rep. Tom Davis asked few questions and seemed largely uninterested in the matter. The only other Republican to appear, Rep. Lynn Westmoreland of Georgia, showed more interest but appeared not to have mastered the details of the case.

Now, however, Westmoreland wants to know more. In a letter to committee chairman Rep. Henry Waxman Friday, he submitted more questions for Mrs. Wilson and requested that Waxman ask the Senate Intelligence Committee for information that could shed light on issues left unresolved after her testimony.

As part of its investigation into pre-war intelligence, the Senate committee interviewed Mrs. Wilson, as well as some of her colleagues at the CIA. The committee also reviewed CIA documents about the Niger uranium affair. In his letter, Westmoreland asked Waxman to ask the Senate committee for the full text of Mrs. Wilson’s interview with Senate investigators. Westmoreland also asked for the “full text of Ms. Plame’s February 12, 2002 email/memo to her boss regarding sending her husband, Joseph Wilson, to Niger.”

Will Howard Waxman act on the information request? Will Plame respond to it? Or will they, by their inaction and silence, implicitly confirm that there is a cover-up going on, one orchestrated by the enemies of the Bush Administration for purely partisan purposes?

Here's a great profile of Rep. Adm Putnam, who is the number three Republican in the House of Representatives.

Amid the sea of square jaws and swept-back gray hair in Congress, Representative Adam H. Putnam, a tousled redhead whose cherubic appearance still causes Capitol police to stop him occasionally, appears a bit out of place.

But Mr. Putnam, 32, a Florida Republican, has become the unlikely mouthpiece for the beleaguered minority in the House, taking over as chairman of the Republican Conference, the third-ranking post behind the minority leader and whip, as his party struggles to right itself.

Mr. Putnam, something of a political wunderkind who at 26 was one of the youngest members of Congress in decades when he was elected in 2000, has taken on the role of attack dog over the last three months.

Combining agility on the issues and controlled partisan outrage, he has helped lead Republicans in the debate over the war in Iraq, lambasted Speaker Nancy Pelosi for her use of a military jet to fly across country to her home district, and generally tried to eke out political points at every opportunity.

Putnam is a guy to keep an eye on -- he should be in the public eye for many years, and seems like he may, in time, be a likely contender for the White House.

As I said the other day, I understand and respect the decision of John and Elizabeth Edwards to continue John's presidential campaign.

Or at least I did until last night.

Elizabeth Edwards, the wife of the presidential candidate John Edwards, elaborated on her cancer diagnosis in an interview broadcast last night, saying that the disease had spread to one of her hips.

Mrs. Edwards and her husband said they would continue campaigning.

The interview, on “60 Minutes” on CBS, appeared three days after Mr. Edwards announced that his wife’s cancer, first diagnosed late in his 2004 campaign for the White House, had come back in an incurable form that had spread to her ribs.

When asked if the cancer had spread to any other part of her body, Mrs. Edwards said, “There are a couple of hot spots, on the bone scan, in my right hip, for example.” She did not mention any other areas having been affected.

It sounds to me like the cancer may have spread much more aggressively than I had originally believed, which leads me to reassess my earlier position on his continuing the campaign.

Senator Edwards, with all due respect, I think you are wrong to continue with your campaign. Your wife is ill, sir, and her condition will likely be terminal in the next five years. This campaign, and the obligations of the presidency, will increasingly take you away from her side as Elizabeth's condition deteriorates. Where is it more important that you be during the time she has left -- on the campaign trail and in the Oval Office, or with her? When she is gone, which are you most likely to have regrets about -- time with Elizabeth, or time pursuing the presidency? Fully believing that the love you two display in public is real, I believe we all know the answer.

And besides, Senator, you are still a young man. In four years, or eight years, you will still be of an age to seek the Presidency -- especially if you have served in the Cabinet of a Democratic President.

The full 60 Minutes transcript can be found here.

Well, yeah, it does -- but not as much as other factors.

A much-anticipated report from the largest and longest-running study of American child care has found that keeping a preschooler in a day care center for a year or more increased the likelihood that the child would become disruptive in class — and that the effect persisted through the sixth grade.

The effect was slight, and well within the normal range for healthy children, the researchers found. And as expected, parents’ guidance and their genes had by far the strongest influence on how children behaved.

But the finding held up regardless of the child’s sex or family income, and regardless of the quality of the day care center. With more than two million American preschoolers attending day care, the increased disruptiveness very likely contributes to the load on teachers who must manage large classrooms, the authors argue.

On the positive side, they also found that time spent in high-quality day care centers was correlated with higher vocabulary scores through elementary school.

Now there are already lots of folks out there trying to shoot down this study, to lay the effect off on high turn-over at day care centers or some other factor, but the reality is that the effect does exist. Indeed, it has a lot to do with the lack of clear, consistent supervision and discipline experienced by these young kids, in my opinion.

And here I thought that money -- especially money from lobbyists -- was the source of all evil in politics.

he U.S. presidential candidates have friends in corporate America fanning out across the country raising millions of dollars for their 2008 bids, ranging from Washington lobbyists to Wall Street financiers.

Republican contender Sen. John McCain has set up an extensive fund-raising operation that includes friends and former employees who now are lobbyists at major companies like AT&T Inc. and Walt Disney Co.

* * *

McCain has friends and former staff at major communications companies helping him, including AT&T senior congressional lobbyist and longtime friend Tim McKone.

He also has support from chief executives at companies like Cisco Systems Inc. and former staff who now work for Verizon Communications and Disney.

Seems mighty hypocritical to me -- and certainly in violation of the spirit of campaign finance reform.

Sounds like Mahmoud is suffering from delusions of grandeur -- or threatening to unleash the nuclear weapons he says he is not developing upon anyone who backs sanctions.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is rejecting new United Nations sanctions as illegal, according to IRNA, the state-run Iranian news agency.

Ahmadinejad, in an interview with France's Channel 2 TV network, warned nations "seeking to impose sanctions against Iran will suffer a greater damage themselves," IRNA reported.

The 15-member Security Council unanimously passed a resolution Saturday imposing new sanctions on Iran because of its refusal to suspend its uranium-enrichment program.

I t5hink the time has come for us to impose "greater damage" upon the Iranian president and his country.

After all, they are not the United States or Israel, so their actions pass with relatively little comment -- even though their actions do, in fact, violate Geneva, something that is not the case with the criticized actions of the US and Israel.

FIFTEEN British sailors and marines arrested by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards off the coast of Iraq may be charged with spying.

A website run by associates of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, reported last night that the Britons would be put before a court and indicted.

Referring to them as “insurgents”, the site concluded: “If it is proven that they deliberately entered Iranian territory, they will be charged with espionage. If that is proven, they can expect a very serious penalty since according to Iranian law, espionage is one of the most serious offences.”

The warning followed claims by Iranian officials that the British navy personnel had been taken to Tehran, the capital, to explain their “aggressive action” in entering Iranian waters. British officials insist the servicemen were in Iraqi waters when they were held.

However, as Captain Ed points out, this announcement is a clear statement of intent to violate international law as found in the Geneva Conventions.

The Iranians cannot try the men for espionage if they captured the sailors in uniform. Article 46 of the Geneva Convention states this clearly:

2. A member of the armed forces of a Party to the conflict who, on behalf of that Party and in territory controlled by an adverse Party, gathers or attempts to gather information shall not be considered as engaging in espionage if, while so acting, he is in the uniform of his armed forces.

The indictment of British sailors in uniform as spies will violate the GC. Can we expect the same level of outrage over this explicit violation as the supposed violations of the US government?

Now since the status of those captured in uniform, as opposed to those captured out of uniform (like, for example, al-Qaeda jihadis), they cannot face criminal charges but must instead be treated as POWs. On the other hand, those captured out of uniform can be so tried, according to whatever for their captors see fit. If this situation does not make the matter clear to even the most dense of observers (including BDS-suffering American leftists), then nothing will.

Oh, and by the way -- the Iranians attacked US and Iraqi forces INSIDE IRAQ recently. Sounds like an act of war to me. Too bad Congress won't let us respond appropriately.

Personally, I like the suggestion at the Jawa Report for dealing with this act of naked aggression by the Iranians. So what if we have to print maps that read "Sea of Glass" where "Iran" used to be.

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Sorry, but over the years the content of AP classes has become watered-down as too many districts encouraged too-many students to enroll in AP classes -- and then gave in when parents demanded that the grades (and the failure rates) be the same as regular level classes.

Now the College Board is striking back.

While her students at Blake High School prepare for an Advanced Placement exam that measures whether they know college-level world history, Saroja Ringo is being asked to prove she knows how to teach it.

The College Board, publisher of college-preparatory exams, is auditing every Advanced Placement course in the nation, asking teachers of an estimated 130,000 AP courses to furnish written proof by June 1 that the courses they teach are worthy of the brand.

An explosion in AP study -- participation in the program has nearly doubled this decade -- has bred worry, particularly among college leaders, of a decline in the rigor for which the courses are known. Once the exclusive province of elite students at select high schools, AP study or its equivalent is now more or less expected of any student who aspires to attend even a marginally selective college.

In the haste to remain competitive in the AP arms race, schools sometimes award the designation to courses that barely resemble the college curriculum the program is meant to deliver, according to College Board officials and educators. Until now, there has been no large-scale effort to weed out such abuse.

"Anybody could just say, 'I'm teaching an AP course; I'm an AP teacher. There's no protocol,' " said Ringo, who teaches AP World History at the Silver Spring school and works as an official grader of the exams.

Beginning with the 2007-08 academic year, only teachers whose syllabuses have been approved by the College Board may call their courses AP. Each teacher must submit an audit form, along with a syllabus for the course he or she teaches. Depending on how well the teacher's syllabus -- assuming he or she has one -- reflects the rigor expected by the College Board, the process can be brief or time-consuming.

It is about time. And for all the grumbling that comes from the pseudo-AP teachers out there, let me suggest that they start to walk a mile in the shoes of regular education teachers who don't exclusively get "the best and the brightest" in our classes.

The sooner the better, as far as this teacher is concerned.

The story has been the same for years in this small, poor, mostly black school district in northeast Houston: Financial problems, shoddy recordkeeping and low test scores prompt sanctions from the state.

Employees get indicted on criminal charges. The school board fires the superintendent. The district might improve some but then falls again.

In the past decade, enrollment in the North Forest Independent School District has dropped 35 percent to fewer than 9,000 students. Today, eight of its 11 schools are rated academically unacceptable, and its average SAT score — 748 out of 1600 — is nearly the worst in Texas.

History repeated itself three weeks ago when the school board voted 4-3 to oust the superintendent, James Simpson, and the Texas Education Agency again has sent in a conservator to oversee the district's finances.

While some in the North Forest community are rallying behind the state's largest predominantly black school system, others, including some Texas lawmakers, are beginning to ask: When is enough enough? Would students be better off if the district were abolished and annexed by neighboring systems?

State Rep. Senfronia Thompson, a longtime defender of North Forest, recently told the Houston Chronicle, "I'm at the breaking point."

Thompson, a Democrat, said the school board deserves time to search for a top-notch superintendent. But if the district doesn't shape up quickly — she's not certain on a timeline — she'd be ready to support shutting down North Forest ISD. Closure could happen only if the state education commissioner ordered it or if the school board chose it.

And the school board won't choose it, as its members have been operating the district as their own personal fiefdom for years, to the detriment of the students and the teachers in the district. The neighboring districts, Houston, Aldine, Sheldon and Humble, would end up absorbing the students -- though I know we would have a lot of the students attempt to enroll in my district as well, as I suspect some already do.

I think that the state superintendent of education, Dr. Shirley Neeley, really dodged the question of whether or not the district should be closed.

Neeley said she always asks herself the same question before abolishing a district: "Would I want my children or grandchildren attending that school or that school district?"

Asked whether she would send her children to the schools in North Forest, Neeley skirted the question.

"I'm partial to Galena Park," she said of the nearby district where she once served as superintendent.

Come on, Shirley, I know you better than that. For all your love of GPISD (where you not only were superintendent, but where you, your daughter, and your grandson all attended school and where you taught and worked as an administrator most of your career), you KNOW North Forest ISD was not measuring up. You knew that when kids from NFISD were playing residency games to enroll at GPISD schools. The time has come for you to ACT, not to avoid closing down a majority minority district in your own backyard. After all, you would not have let either your daughter or grandson go to NFISD schools -- why should you continue to force anyone else's child to do so?

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He can't meet his fundraising goals -- and is being beaten by Mitt Romney in the amount raised.

Sen. John McCain said his presidential campaign would not meet its fundraising goals this quarter, and his campaign advisers acknowledged that ex-MA Gov. Mitt Romney may wind up raising more.

"We're going to pay a price for it because we got a late start," McCain told reporters in New Hampshire. "We're not going to meet the goals we had." He later said he did not know whether Romney would outpace him, but his advisers did not downplay that possibility. They also did not rule out finishing first.

McCain contends that his exploratory committee's opening in December and the rush of the busy holiday season did not allow his campaign to begin fundraising in earnest until January. But once that month began, owing in part to a busy Senate schedule, McCain attended only two fundraisers and only two in February. There are twenty scheduled for all of this month, and another twenty in April.

While the numbers that come out in July are a better indicator of the strength of a campaign, one would have to think that the failure of one of America's most visible and best known GOP politicians to meet his goal in this area constitutes a major failure.

But then again, maybe lots of Republicans are simply practicing our own version of "campaing finance reform" -- by not giving money to a candidate with a record clearly hostile to the First Amendment of the US Constitution.

If this information is correct and cannot be squared with his previous statements on the matter, I would have to say that he does.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales approved plans to fire several U.S. attorneys in a November meeting, according to newly released documents that contradict earlier claims that he was not closely involved in the dismissals.

The Nov. 27 meeting, in which the attorney general and at least five top Justice Department officials participated, focused on a five-step plan for carrying out the firings of the prosecutors, Justice Department officials said late Friday.

There, Gonzales signed off on the plan, which was crafted by his chief of staff, Kyle Sampson. Sampson resigned last week amid a political firestorm surrounding the firings.

The five-step plan involved notifying Republican home-state senators of the impending dismissals, preparing for potential political upheaval, naming replacements and submitting them to the Senate for confirmation.

The documents released Friday indicated that the hour-long morning discussion, held in the attorney general's conference room, was the only time Gonzales met with top aides who decided which prosecutors to fire and how to do it.

Now this comes back to how you parse out the statements made. Gonzales seems not to have been involved in the selection process of those to be fired, but does seem to have given approval to the process used to implement the firings. Can that be reconciled with his earlier statement about his relative lack of involvement? After all, here is what he said a week and a half ago.

On March 13, in explaining the firings, Gonzales told reporters he was aware that some of the dismissals were being discussed but was not involved in them.

“I knew my chief of staff was involved in the process of determining who were the weak performers — where were the districts around the country where we could do better for the people in that district, and that’s what I knew,” Gonzales said last week. “But that is in essence what I knew about the process; was not involved in seeing any memos, was not involved in any discussions about what was going on. That’s basically what I knew as the attorney general.”

Interestingly enough, there do not appear to be any material released that indicates he received memos, took phone calls or participated in other meetings on the firings -- which were well-within the prerogative of the Executive Branch, because US Attorneys serve at the pleasure of the President -- so one can argue that he knew what was going on and was not otherwise involved in the decision-making process. But putting his final stamp of approval on the process can be seized upon by political opponents seeking to make a scandal where no improper activity occurred, and so the Administration needs to tread carefully here. After all, what he said was true, but can be presented as inaccurate.

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The three stars of the Harry Potter movies will remain a team through the final film, according to a new announcement on the matter.

Actors Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson will return as teen wizards Harry Potter, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger in the final Harry Potter films, Warner Bros. Pictures announced Friday.

The young stars will reprise their roles in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — the last two films in the franchise based on J.K. Rowling's best-selling novels, said Jeff Robinov, the studio's president of production.

"It would be inconceivable to imagine anyone else in the roles with which they have become so identified," Robinov said.

Radcliffe, who recently made news for his role in the London production of Equus, said playing Potter has been "an immense privilege."

"I feel a huge sense of loyalty to the character of Harry and the fans who have supported these films over the years," the 17-year-old said in a statement.

Watson, 16, said her character was her hero.

"I could never let Hermione go," she said. "I love her too much and love what playing her has meant to me. I'm excited and honored to be finishing what I started and playing her in all seven of the films."

Grint, 18, added: "I've been so proud to play (Ron) and loved every second of being part of this world."

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix will be released in July, and the final two movies should be filmed and released over the next couple of years. The final book in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, will also be released this summer.

Sounds to me like some folks need serious jail time.

W. L. Carter knew there was something fishy going on when he went to his lawyers’ office a few years ago to pick up his settlement check for the heart damage he had sustained from taking the diet drug combination fen-phen.

The check was, for starters, much smaller than he had expected. And his own lawyers threatened to retaliate against him if he ever told anyone, including his family, how much he had been paid. “You will be fined $100,000, you will go to jail and you will be sued,” Mr. Carter recalled them saying.

Mr. Carter was right to have been suspicious. The lawyers defrauded their clients, a state judge has ruled in a civil case, when they settled fen-phen lawsuits on behalf of 440 of them for $200 million but kept the bulk of the money for themselves. Legal experts said the fraud might be one of the biggest and most brazen in legal history.

This week, several clients testified before a federal grand jury that has begun to investigate potential criminal wrongdoing arising from the settlement.

“It enrages me,” said Sonja Pickett, a retail manager, who testified Thursday before the grand jury. “They robbed us.”

I won't trash trial