THE FULCRUM

A pharmacist refused to fill a North Richland Hills woman's prescription for birth-control pills this week, but the woman hopes her experience will provoke an examination of pharmacists' power over patient care.

Julee Lacey, 32, a first-grade teacher and mother of two, ran out of birth-control pills Sunday night and went to her local CVS pharmacy for a last-minute refill. The new pharmacist at the branch told her, "I'm sorry, but I personally do not believe in birth control, so I will not fill your prescription," Mrs. Lacey recalled.

Her husband and the assistant manager could not persuade the pharmacist to change her mind.

When pressed, the pharmacist added that birth-control pills "cause cancer."

"I think my doctor should make these decisions," Mrs. Lacey said. "If they're going to decide not to do birth-control pills, where are they going to draw the line?"

The Treasury tapped civil servants to calculate the cost of Sen. John Kerry's tax plan and then posted the analysis on the Treasury Web site. A federal law bars career government officials from working on political campaigns.

House Majority Leader Tom Delay of Texas requested the estimates, said Stuart Roi, a DeLay spokesman, because several Democratic budget proposals had provisions similar to the Kerry tax plan. Mr. DeLay then distributed the analysis widely, including to the Republican National Committee. "The Democrats are all one and the same" on tax repeal, Mr. Roi said. "They don't attempt to make a distinction."

The U.S. search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq will continue, but the focus now includes whether
Saddam Hussein intended to develop such weapons, the chief U.S. arms hunter says.

"Ultimately what we want is a comprehensive picture, not just simply answering questions -- were there weapons, were there not
weapons?" Charles Duelfer told reporters after a closed-door briefing to the Senate Armed Services Committee.

"The hunt will go on until we're able to draw a firm and confident picture of what the programs were and where the regime was headed with
respect to them. But we're looking at it from soup to nuts -- from the weapons end to the planning end and to the intentions end," he said.

"...we're looking for the decisions by the regime to sustain a capability..."

If you're ever thinking about going down to Crawford, Texas, to protest against Bush, beware.


The police do not take kindly to demonstrators there--or legal observers, for that matter.


And even if you're just wearing an anti-Bush button, you could get arrested.


That's the message a local jury sent last month.

NTodd, over at Dohiyi Mir, has a great new digital SLR! Go see the first of what is likely to be plenty of beautiful photos. And while you're there, scroll up one entry and read Rummy's latest work of poetry!

The Fantastic Four who write Corrente have written so many posts lately that it's hard to keep up, even with an RSS feed! It also makes it hard to pick just one post to send you to read... Take your pick of any of the (literally) hundreds written in the past week. These guys are on fire!

Although I've considered myself to be an atheist for quite a while, I'm always interested to see how other peoples' faith - or faithlessness - develops over time and what events transpire to change it. Amy, at BlogAmY explores her faith and that of some of her family in a couple of great posts.

Bark Bark Woof Woof may be one of the oddest blog titles you'll run across, but don't let that put you off. Mustang Bobby writes some of the best social commentary you'll find. So good, in fact, that he just passed 10,000 total hits since he started blogging just five short months ago. Drop by and help him on his way to the next 10,000!

Steve Gilliard takes on angry, fat guys who think that American Women Suck. Steve's right on with his analysis, I think. You'll find yourself shaking your head and then laughing - and then you'll be thinking about it all day.

Protecting Karl Rove may seem an odd concern for a Liberal blogger, but rest assured, Andante has her reasons! Go check out Collective Sigh and see why Uncle Karl should get Secret Service protection (or not!).

Snakes, as far as I know, and Snake Goddesses, in particular, don't do polls. Or so I thought. Echidne of the Snakes, however has taken a liking to dissecting polls. Check out her take on a CNN/USA Today poll of likely voters; seems that there might be some very interesting people in those polls. Go see what I mean.

I failed to note when New World Blogger joined the ranks of the Liberal Coalition. It was a serious oversight on my part. HLVictoria brings a new perspective to blogging and to Liberal politics. I highly recommend NWB - in fact, if you have the time, check out the archives and the photoblog as well. The latest NWB post concerns education funding and the IMF. As you can imagine, those usually hurt most by IMF requirements are those who most need additional educational funding, but... Go check it out, please.

I ran across Points of Information via the TTLB Ecosystem. This Canadian blog is run in a manner of a Parliament, with ten members on both sides - or may be all sides is more like it - of the political spectrum. It's an interesting idea, with posts generally being in the form of parliamentary discourse. Check it out.

Preposterous Universe is a wonderful mix of politics and science, specifically physics. It seems an odd mix - and it is - but Sean makes it work. Discussion ranges from the latest BushCo. gaffe to string theory to the role of ego in science. Go read it, your mind needs expanding!

I have to admit that the name drew me in: Kamikaze Kumquat. How could you not follow a link to a blog with that name? Lisa had commented on some of my posts so I followed the link to her blog - as I do with all new commenters here. What I found was lots of fun. Lisa's tag line? "Sometimes a blog is just random insanity and a squirrel." Exactly!

"Nothing would be better, from my point of view, than to be able to testify," Ms. Rice said yesterday in an interview on CBS's "60 Minutes." "But there's an important principle involved." She added that her private comments to the commission would be the same as what she would say in public. In response to Mr. Clarke's public apology to Sept. 11 victims' families last week, she said that she would like to meet with the families to answer questions.

Mr. Clarke said he "would welcome" the declassification of his testimony before a congressional committee looking into events around Sept. 11, and hopes the White House will release even more documents that he claims will bolster his credibility and his charges.

In addition to his testimony, Mr. Clarke called on the administration to release Ms. Rice's testimony; all pre-Sept. 11 e-mails between Mr. Clarke and Ms. Rice; a Jan. 25, 2001 antiterrorism memo sent by him to Ms. Rice; and a Sept. 4 national-security directive that he says embraces his memo's recommendations. The two latter documents, he said, show the administration "wasted months when we could have had some action" in ratcheting up the war on terrorism.

bushwa (BUSH-wa) n., (also bushwah)

Nonsense; bull.

"We need to lean forward in making as much information available to the public as possible,'' Hastert, a Republican who represents Chicago-area suburbs and farms, said in a written statement."

"We need to lean forward in making as much information available to the public as possible,''

All three [actors and director] appeared at a screening of the trailer for "Spider-Man 2" as well as a lengthy action scene in which Spider-Man has a showdown on a train with the film's villain, Dr. Octopus.

Theater owners cheered wildly after seeing the clip and several said later that the film will be the biggest hit of the year.

China, in its strongest statement yet on the political crisis convulsing Taiwan since its controversial election, warned on Friday it would not stand idly by if the situation on the island spirals out of control.

"We will not sit by watching should the post-election situation in Taiwan get out of control, leading to social turmoil, endangering the lives and property of our flesh-and-blood brothers and affecting stability across the Taiwan strait," Beijing's policy-making Taiwan Affairs Office said in a statement.

Shortly after the vote, Beijing condemned Chen for holding the island's first referendum in tandem with the presidential vote, but said only that it was closely monitoring post-election developments. On Tuesday, the Foreign Ministry stressed that no matter who won, Taiwan belonged to China.

The year-old Department of Homeland Security is declaring a hiring freeze at two of its front-line units because of a potential $1.2 billion budget shortfall.

[snip]

The Homeland Security department, headed by former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge, was created last March by shifting personnel from 22 agencies. However, the budgets from the agencies' 15 pay systems weren't moved until last October, the start of the 2004 fiscal year. The 15 pay systems have been cut down to three that speak different languages, use different budgeting principles and budget codes, a senior department official said.

[snip]

Although other Homeland Security officials said the discussions have also included the possibility of furloughs, Mr. Murphy said Mr. Hutchinson didn't talk about furloughs at all.

The worst border problems in the country at the moment are in Arizona. Robert C. Bonner, the Commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, last month described the border security situation in Arizona, as a "complete mess."

But when leaders of some of this country's Islamic fundamentalist groups hear about her tactics, they react with outrage. By urging people to protect themselves with condoms, they say, Ms. Arifin is promoting sinful behavior.

"This is not how to solve the root of this problem," says Neno Warisman, a popular singer of Muslim songs and former television star. A candidate for Parliament from the Prosperous Justice Party, which campaigns for Islamic causes, she says efforts to stop the disease's spread should focus instead on improving people's morality.

For two years Family Health International, a U.S. group that runs health-care projects in developing countries, has struggled to get a hard-hitting AIDS campaign onto Indonesian national TV. When a commercial depicting men patronizing prostitutes was broadcast briefly in 2002, the Indonesian Mujahiddin Council, an organization of fundamentalist Muslin clerics, sent a letter to TV stations claiming the advertisement could provoke the wrath of Allah. The stations immediately pulled the ad, even though Indonesian censors and the Health Ministry earlier had cleared it.

The resistance the Indonesian activists now face comes amid similar clashes elsewhere in the world. Over the past 20 years, blunt messages from AIDS-prevention campaigns have drawn fire from religious and socially conservative groups. In the U.S., some AIDS activists have complained of problems getting public-service announcements broadcast, because TV-station managers feared upsetting their audience.

The widow of Martin Luther King Jr. called gay marriage a civil rights issue, denouncing a proposed constitutional amendment that would ban it.

Constitutional amendments should be used to expand freedom, not restrict it, Coretta Scott King said Tuesday.

[A] report, issued Tuesday by the trustees who monitor the fiscal health of Medicare and Social Security, concluded that the fund that pays hospital bills in the health insurance program will run out of money by 2019, seven years sooner than they predicted a year ago.

The report says that the new law is a significant factor, because it will steer more money to private health plans and increase payments for health care in rural areas.

One of the GOP authors of the Medicare law swiftly defended it Tuesday. House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas, R-Calif., said the trustees' report "validates the reasons Republicans had in reforming Medicare and enacting a prescription drug benefit last year. The overall future health of Medicare depends on these reforms and our future action."

As a legal matter, the required outcome is plain: A principled application of constitutional law calls for the words to be stricken. As a political matter, however, the case is more complex: It pairs patriotism with religious faith, matters that inflame passions when they arise in isolation and are downright incendiary when they coalesce. But it is precisely because the pledge pairs religion and politics that the phrase must be removed.

In Washington, Wal-Mart has five lobbyists on its payroll, and a bench of hired guns led by Thomas Hale Boggs Jr., one of Capitol Hill's best-known lawyer-lobbyists. The company's political action committee was the biggest corporate donor to federal parties and candidates in 2003, with more than $1 million in contributions -- up from $182,000 during the 1997-98 election cycle, according to Federal Election Commission disclosure reports. Wal-Mart's PAC ranks as the second-largest in Washington, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan organization that tracks political giving.

Unlike most corporations, which contribute to both parties in rough proportion to Congress's partisan split, about 85% of Wal-Mart's checks go to Republicans. And recently Mr. Allen was named a "Pioneer" by the Bush campaign, meaning he has raised at least $100,000 by getting friends and colleagues to make contributions of up to $2,000 each.

The partisan giving is a nod to Wal-Mart's hostile relationship with organized labor and its dependence on free-trade agreements. Wal-Mart defends its lopsided support, saying it's supporting pro-business candidates.

"Congressional allies rushed to offer advice, including Trent Lott, then Senate majority leader. Mr. Lott arrived in Bentonville in late 1999 with a simple message, according to a congressman who attended the meeting: Increase your profile and open your wallet.

So Wal-Mart executives set out to beef up their political action committee -- an account made up of voluntary employee contributions that executives use to make political donations. (Federal law prohibits direct corporate contributions to party committees and candidates.) At an August 2000 meeting attended by thousands of Wal-Mart managers, buckets were passed around for donations, as well as forms authorizing automatic paycheck deductions for the PAC."

"...set out to transform itself from a company without a Washington presence to one that could bend public policy to suit its business needs."

We think Opportunity is now parked on what was once the shoreline of a salty sea on Mars," Cornell University's Steve Squyres, principal science investigator for the Mars rover mission, said in a statement provided to SPACE.com prior to a press conference today.

The rocks would be excellent preservers of biological signs, if life ever existed on Mars, Squyres said. That makes Meridiani Planum a prime target for future missions that would search for evidence of past biology.

The ten-member panel had invited National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to testify. She declined, with the White House citing concerns about separation of powers.

One panel member says that's not a good enough excuse.

Another mentioned the book written by former anti-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke, who accuses the Bush administration of downplaying the al-Qaida threat before 9/11.

Former Democratic Congressman Timothy Roemer also noted that Rice has been featured in the media disputing Clarke's claims. He suggests the debate shouldn't be played out in the media, but before the panel.

U-S officials say they're offering low-profile help to Pakistani forces hunting militants by the border with Afghanistan.

[snip]

National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice tells Fox News the offensive "is a Pakistani fight."

Citing national security concerns, the Army on Friday dropped all charges against a Muslim chaplain accused of mishandling classified documents at Guantanamo Bay (search), which houses suspected terrorists.

[snip]

In dismissing the charges, Mac. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller (search), commander of Joint Task Force Guantanamo, which operates the detention center, cited "national security concerns that would arise from the release of the evidence" if the case proceeded.

John ‘J.J.’ Jackson, who in the 1980s helped usher in the music video era as one of the first MTV on-air personalities, has died. He was 62.

Jackson, a longtime radio station disc jockey, died of an apparent heart attack Wednesday while driving home from dinner in Los Angeles, friends and radio industry colleagues said Thursday.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Mike Leavitt is trying to mitigate political damage from revelations that EPA scientists were muzzled as utility lobbyists and White House appointees wrote a new regulation for toxic mercury emitted by coal-fired power plants.

[snip]

Utility industry lobbyists wrote key portions of the rule that would regulate pollution created by their clients, according to EPA staffers who claimed they were ordered not to conduct the normal scientific review of the proposal.

Worried that mercury in fish poses a hazard to youngsters — while still trying to stress the health benefits of seafood — the government issued new guidelines Friday for eating fish.

Women who are pregnant, nursing or may become pregnant, and young children should not eat certain kinds of fish that tend to be high in mercury, said Lester Crawford, acting commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.

Eight days after the Madrid train bombings, European Union justice and interior ministers on Friday were set to approve an ``anti-terror czar'' to coordinate the EU's fight against terrorism.

At emergency talks, the ministers reviewed a lengthy ``action plan'' that calls for a pan-EU database of terrorist's criminal records and across-the-board closer cooperation against terrorism.

Poland (AP) Poland, which has about 2,400 troops in Iraq and was a strong supporter of the U.S.-led invasion, was ''misled'' about the threat from Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, its president said Thursday.

[snip]

''But naturally I also feel uncomfortable due to the fact that we were misled with the information on weapons of mass destruction,'' he said, according to a transcript released by the presidential press office.

The county that was the site of the Scopes "Monkey Trial" over the teaching of evolution is asking lawmakers to amend state law so the county can charge homosexuals with crimes against nature.

The Rhea County commissioners approved the request 8-0 Tuesday.

Commissioner J.C. Fugate, who introduced the measure, also asked the county attorney to find a way to enact an ordinance banning homosexuals from living in the county.

"We need to keep them out of here," Fugate said.

So, dressing gay marriage in a suit of civil rights has become the standard way of selling it to the broader public. Here is an extremely awkward issue having to do with the compatibility of homosexuality and the institution of marriage. But once this issue is buttoned into a suit of civil rights, neither homosexuality nor marriage need be discussed. Suddenly only equity and fairness matter. And this turns gay marriage into an ersatz civil rights struggle so that dissenters are seen as Neanderthals standing in the schoolhouse door, fighting off equality itself. Yet all this civil rights camouflage is, finally, a bait-and-switch: When you agree to support fairness, you end up supporting gay marriage.

But gay marriage is simply not a civil rights issue. It is not a struggle for freedom. It is a struggle of already free people for complete social acceptance and the sense of normalcy that follows thereof -- a struggle for the eradication of the homosexual stigma. Marriage is a goal because, once open to gays, it would establish the fundamental innocuousness of homosexuality itself. Marriage can say like nothing else that sexual orientation is an utterly neutral human characteristic, like eye-color. Thus, it can go far in diffusing the homosexual stigma.

The civil rights movement argued that it was precisely the utter innocuousness of racial difference that made segregation an injustice. Racism was evil because it projected a profound difference where there was none -- white supremacy, black inferiority -- for the sole purpose of exploiting blacks.

"We would call it using the sacred institution of marriage as a political tool," said Tim Nashif, spokesman for the Defense of Marriage Coalition, [homophobic bigots] which is suing Multnomah County and has submitted a proposed ballot initiative to ban gay marriage. "They're not making decisions just for Benton County, they are making it for the entire state."

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Mike Leavitt is trying to mitigate political damage from revelations that EPA scientists were muzzled as utility lobbyists and White House appointees wrote a new regulation for toxic mercury emitted by coal-fired power plants.

[snip]

Utility industry lobbyists wrote key portions of the rule that would regulate pollution created by their clients, according to EPA staffers who claimed they were ordered not to conduct the normal scientific review of the proposal.

"It's no wonder Gov. Leavitt is uncomfortable with this mercury rule because he's realized the agency didn't have any analysis to support what they proposed," said Hawkins, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council Air and Climate Center. "The question is whether he will be personally motivated to correct it and whether the administration will let him."

Polls suggest that a reputation for being tough on terror is just about the only remaining political strength George Bush has. Yet this reputation is based on image, not reality.

"Nipr.mil is not a single domain a but a hush-hush web proxy that acts as a gateway for hundreds of U.S. military domains in order to hide their identities. It was established by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) in response to a memorandum (CM-5 1099, INFOCOM) issued in March 1999 by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, calling for "actions to be taken to increase the readiness posture for Information Warfare." "Uncontrolled Internet connections," the document says, "pose a significant and unacceptable threat to all Department of Defense information systems and operations."

The former Iraqi exile group that gave the Bush administration exaggerated and fabricated intelligence on Iraq also fed much of the same information to newspapers, news agencies and magazines in the United States, Britain and Australia.

A June 26, 2002, letter from the Iraqi National Congress to the Senate Appropriations Committee listed 108 articles based on information provided by the Iraqi National Congress's Information Collection Program, a U.S.-funded effort to collect intelligence in Iraq.

The Information Collection Program was financed out of the at least $18 million that the U.S. Congress approved for the Iraqi National Congress, led by Ahmed Chalabi, now a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, from 1999 to 2003. The group remains on the Pentagon's payroll.

The assertions in the articles reinforced President Bush's claims that Saddam Hussein should be ousted because he was in league with Osama bin Laden, was developing nuclear weapons and was hiding biological and chemical weapons.

Feeding the information to the news media, as well as to selected administration officials and members of Congress, helped foster an impression that there were multiple sources of intelligence on Iraq's illicit weapons programs and links to bin Laden.

In fact, many of the allegations came from the same half-dozen defectors, were not confirmed by other intelligence and were hotly disputed by intelligence professionals at the CIA, the Defense Department and the State Department.

Nevertheless, U.S. officials and others who supported a pre-emptive invasion quoted the allegations in statements and interviews without running afoul of restrictions on classified information or doubts about the defectors' reliability.

The Iraqi National Congress letter said it fed information to Arab and Western news media and to two officials in the offices of Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the leading invasion advocates.

The articles made numerous assertions that so far have not been substantiated 11 months after Baghdad fell,...

According to the letter, publications in which the articles appeared included the New York Times, the Washington Post, Vanity Fair, the Atlantic Monthly, the Times of London, the Sunday Times of London, the Sunday Age of Melbourne, Australia, and two Knight Ridder newspapers, the Kansas City Star and the Philadelphia Daily News. The Associated Press and others news services also wrote stories.

Other U.S. and international news media picked up some of the articles. By mid-January 2002, polls showed that a solid majority of Americans favored military force to oust Saddam.

The war in Iraq and Afghanistan is about taking the battle to the terrorists so that we have fewer attacks on our airlines and railways at home. In Iraq especially, Spanish soldiers are helping drain the terror swamp by building a democracy at its Middle East source. To his own and his country's great credit, Mr. Aznar was far-sighted enough to see that if this effort succeeds the entire world will benefit. The emotional wave that elected Mr. Zapatero will soon fade, but the wisdom about terrorism that motivated Mr. Aznar will remain.

The temptation will be to over-interpret all of this as a sign of general anti-terror fatigue in the West. Certainly the terrorists will see it that way, helped along by Socialist leader Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero. In a radio interview yesterday, Mr. Zapatero declared that the 1,300 Spanish soldiers serving in Iraq will now "obviously" be called home. "The war in Iraq was a disaster, the occupation is a disaster," he said.

So the terrorists will conclude that, with an investment of only a dozen backpack bombs, they were able to rout a major power. They are sure to try the same thing elsewhere in Europe, and almost certainly between now and the November elections in the U.S. We doubt that an America that has already endured 9/11 would react as the Spanish have, but now is the time for President Bush to begin preparing the public for the worst.

Federal law prohibits the use of federal money for "publicity or propaganda purposes" not authorized by Congress. In the past, the General Accounting Office has found that federal agencies violated this restriction when they disseminated editorials and newspaper articles written by the government or its contractors without identifying the source.

"...about 600 demonstrators Sunday who marched to the gates of the base to protest the war and complain about restricted access to installations, like Dover, where the bodies of those killed in Iraq are returned.

The protest attracted various groups opposed to the war: veterans, pacifists and church groups that bused in from Philadelphia, Baltimore and other northeastern cities. But it was the military families - who traveled from around the country - who were the centerpiece of a 3.5-mile march from a local meeting house to the massive military base.

Forbidden from entering the complex, the marchers crammed themselves on a sliver of lawn at a busy intersection outside the base and listened as some members of Military Families Speak Out read the names of the more than 560 troops who have been killed since the war began last March.

"Bush lies and who dies?" said Fernando Suarez del Solar of San Diego. "My son, Jesus Suarez del Solar Navarro, March 27."

"I'm very disillusioned with the American government," del Solar said before the march. "For it to get involved in an illegal war and to play with the emotions of the American people with 9-11 (Sept. 11, 2001) for politics is wrong."

Several family members said it's also wrong for the Pentagon to prevent people from witnessing the return of the remains of soldiers killed in Iraq to American soil.

Kerry: "...the most crooked, you know, lying group I've ever seen...''

WhistleAss: "There's Adam Clymer, major-league assh--e from the New York Times."

Dear Mr. Racicot:

I received your letter and the enclosed picture of George W. Bush and his wife Laura today. I must tell you that I was very surprised. I don’t know how you could have gotten my address since I have never in my life sent a contribution to him. I’m guessing you got my name off the Miami-Dade County voter rolls, and if that’s the case, I’m even more surprised because I’m a registered Democrat.