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You can now invite anyone to meet at your favorite Starbucks.
Limited-time feature
33 year old man | Hoboken, NJ, USA | Seeking women 18-45 within 50 miles
I try to live without regrets, enjoy life to...
I try to live without regrets, enjoy life to the fullest and seize every opportunity presented. I travel a lot for both work and fun and am a firm believer that life is about the experience... I like to scuba dive, fly and cook. When not traveling for the weekend you'll find me riding my Harley, playing golf, being a science nerd or at the gun range. I'm opinionated and assertive but always respectful. I'm caring and loyal to those I surround myself with, family and friends are a very important part of my life. Weird things I own: a moon rock, a dinosaur tooth and a piece of the space shuttle. I'm looking for someone who knows what they want in a man and in a relationship. For me, honesty, a sense of humor and communication are a must. If you're ready to take a chance, send me an email - let's travel the world and experience life together.
Business networking , Cooking , Dining out , Hobbies and crafts , Museums and art , Exploring new areas , Nightclubs/Dancing , Playing cards , Playing sports , Shopping/Antiques , Travel/Sightseeing , Watching sports , Wine tasting
Baseball, Football, Hockey, Other types of exercise, Skiing, Walking / Hiking, Weights / Machines, Yoga
I exercise 1-2 times per week.
I like Cats, Dogs, Fish
Some other viewpoint
Coopers Union, Maxwells, Amanda's, Chart House, Teak, Elysian, Beer Garden
I love French food, sushi, martini's, red wine and good beer.
The Hunt for Red October, I enjoy reading Clancy
Z{{Cta}} {{#if HasMoreInfo}} ?{{CtaSecondary}} {{/if}}
|What he is looking for
|5'10" (177cms)
|4'5" (134cms) to 6'5" (195cms)
|Body type:
|About average
|Slender, About average, Curvy, Athletic and toned, A few extra pounds
|No preference
|Dark brown
|No preference
|No Way
|No Way, Occasionally, Cigar aficionado
|Social Drinker
|Social Drinker, Regularly, Moderately
|Executive / Management
|No preference
|No preference
|No preference
|Have kids:
|No preference
|Wants kids:
|No preference
|White / Caucasian
|White / Caucasian
|Christian / Other
|Buddhist / Taoist, Christian / Catholic, Christian / LDS, Christian / Protestant, Jewish, Spiritual but not religious, Christian / Other
|Bachelors degree
|No preference

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Topic Page
Nation Topics - Media Analysis
News and Features
Memo to editors of campus papers: When the next right-wing ideologue shows up with an ad full of nonsense, just take the money and print it. That way, they will not be able to pose as the victim of "political correctness," they will not get millions of dollars' worth of free publicity and their ideas will not acquire the glamour of the forbidden. By the same token, you will not look afraid of debate and controversy, nor will you have to explain why you rejected their ad while printing something equally false, offensive or stupid on some previous occasion.
Never mind that the people accusing you of censorship practice it themselves: In an amusing riposte to David Horowitz's flamethrower ad opposing reparations for slavery, Salon's David Mazel proved unable to place an enthusiastically pro-abortion ad in papers on conservative campuses; and as Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting points out, the Boston Globe, which editorialized against students who rejected the Horowitz ad, itself rejected an ad criticizing Staples, a major advertiser, for using old-growth forest pulp in its typing paper. So there, and so there! But you're in a better place to make such arguments stick if you can stand--however cynically and self-servingly--on the high ground of free speech yourself.
Just as Horowitz faded, having shot himself in the foot by refusing to pay the Daily Princetonian after it printed his ad but editorialized against it, up comes the soi-disant Independent Women's Forum--you know, that intrepid band of far-right free spirits funded by the ultraconservative Sarah Scaife Foundation--with an ad in the UCLA Daily Bruin and Yale Daily News urging students to "Take Back the Campus!" and "Combat the radical feminist assault on Truth." The IWF charges "campus feminism" with being "a kind of cult" in which "students are inculcated with bizarre conspiracy theories about the 'capitalist patriarchal hegemony,'" a fount of "Ms./Information," "male-bashing and victimology." Brainwashing isn't exactly what comes to mind when I think of the revolution in scholarship that has produced such celebrated historians as Linda Gordon, Ellen DuBois, Joan Scott, Rickie Solinger, Leslie Reagan and Kathy Peiss. The sweeping, paranoiac language gives it away--this is IWF member Christina Hoff Sommers speaking from her perch at that noted institution of higher learning, the American Enterprise Institute.
The bulk of the ad consists of a list of "the ten most common feminist myths" and the "facts" that supposedly prove them false. Much of this is lifted from Sommers's Who Stole Feminism?, a book that attempted to deploy a few gotchas against hyperbolic statistics and questionable studies to deny the significance of violence, sexism and discrimination in women's lives. I mean, how important is it that "rule of thumb" may not derive, as some feminist activists believe and some newspapers have printed, from an old legal rule permitting husbands to beat their wives with a stick no thicker than their thumb (Myth #4)? Feminists did not make this folk etymology up out of nothing--actually, according to Sharon Fenick of the University of Chicago, writing on the Urban Legends website, it probably goes back to the eighteenth century, when the respected English judge, Francis Buller, earned the nickname "Judge Thumb," for declaring such "correction" permissible. That it was legal for premodern English husbands to beat their wives within limits is not in dispute (in her book, Sommers obscures this fact by omitting the Latin phrases from a passage in Blackstone's Commentaries); nor is the fact that wife-beating, regardless of the law, was, and sometimes still is, treated lightly by the legal system under the rubric of marital privacy. Thus, in 1910 the Supreme Court, in Thompson v. Thompson, barred wives from suing husbands for "injuries to person or property as though they were strangers." (I learned this, and much else relating to the history of American marriage, from Yale feminist historian Nancy Cott's fascinating Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation.)
And what about Myth #2, "Women earn 75 cents for every dollar a man earns." That doesn't come from some man-bashing fabulator squirreled away in a women's studies department. It comes from the US government! The IWF argues that the disparity disappears when you take education, training, occupation, continuity of employment, motherhood and other factors into account--but even if that were true, which it isn't, to overlook all those things is itself advocacy, a politicized way of defining sex discrimination in order to minimize it.
And then there's #1, the mother of all myths: "One in four women in college has been the victim of rape or attempted rape." The IWF debunks this number, which comes from the research of Mary Koss, by citing the low numbers of reported rapes on college campuses, but the one-in-four figure includes off-campus and pre-college rapes and rape attempts. Are Koss's numbers the last word? Of course not. In 1998 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that among all women, one in five had experienced a rape or attempted rape at some point in her life. In January the Justice Department released a report claiming that 3 percent of college women experience rape or attempted rape per school year, which does add up over four years.
Does irresponsible, lax or even slanted use of facts and figures exist in "campus feminism"? Sure--and out of it, too. (Try economics.) But what does that have to do with women's studies, a very large, very lively interdisciplinary field of intellectual inquiry, in which many of the supposed verities of contemporary feminism are hotly contested? The real debate isn't over the merits of this study or that--in social science "results" are always provisional. Now that the IWF has thrown down the gauntlet, feminist scholars should call for that real debate--Resolved: Women's lives were more seriously studied and accurately understood when almost no tenured professors were female. Or, Resolved: Violence against women is not a major social problem. Or, Resolved: If women aren't equal, it's their own darn fault.
Wonder why it took ex-Republican Jim Jeffords to alert the national media to the fact that the Bush Administration is run out of the extremist end of the GOP? Writing from inside the belly of the beast not long ago, the Washington Post's White House correspondent John Harris helped crystallize an increasingly unavoidable proposition: "The truth is, this new president has done things with relative impunity that would have been huge uproars if they had occurred under Clinton."
The argument over whether reporters are "liberal" is tired and stale. It's also irrelevant. You'd have to be deaf, dumb and blind to believe that liberals get more generous coverage. Harris focuses on the structural part. "There is no well-coordinated corps of aggrieved and methodical people who start each day looking for ways to expose and undermine a new president.... the liberal equivalent of this conservative coterie does not exist." What he does not say is that in the press itself there is no liberal equivalent to nakedly biased news sources like Fox News, the Wall Street Journal editorial pages, the Washington Times, the New York Post, Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge and The McLaughlin Group, which dictate punditocracy discourse and cable schmoozathons.
Add to this the rapid decline of what constitutes verifiable "news" among our most high-minded journalistic institutions. Harris gingerly notes that his colleagues "may have fallen a bit out of shape at the hard work of examining, exposing, and critiquing public officials as they go about making the decisions that affect national life." Oh yeah, that. Now throw in the natural tendency of Beltway reporters to write for sources rather than for their readers. At least before the Jeffords switch, those sources were almost exclusively Republican and conservative.
Consider the news coverage of the China "crisis," as has an intelligent examination in the Columbia Journalism Review. The media wanted inside "ticktock" coverage, and the White House complied. Harris's Washington Post presented readers with a twenty-six-paragraph, front-page analysis replete with inside anecdotes designed to make the President appear somehow simultaneously in charge and comfortable with delegating details. He "peppered" his advisers with questions about Bibles and exercise. Bush "grilled" Condoleezza Rice. He set "redlines" for negotiators regarding possible concessions. Never mind that no Post reporters were there during the events they so breathlessly reported as fact. To question the official version handed out by the President's propaganda machine is no longer part of the job description. (And let's not even go into why these aides wanted to portray their boss, as the Guardian's Jonathan Freedland observed, as "a know-nothing, fundamentalist fitness freak.")
An equally egregious example can be found in the media coverage of the alleged vandalism perpetrated by Clinton aides before their departure from the White House. Washington Post gossip Lloyd Grove originally broke the nonstory, as Bush officials pretended to pooh-pooh it while privately stoking it. What began as a few missing W's on keyboards soon mushroomed into--according to a page-one Post report by Mike Allen--"sliced phone and computer lines, obscene messages left in copy machines and champagne flutes missing from an Air Force jet." Lurid reports were aired by Tom DeFrank in the New York Daily News, Andrea Mitchell on NBC News, Matt Drudge, Tony Snow, Fred Barnes, Paula Zahn, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, William Kristol, Tom Schatz, Oliver North and Brit Hume on Fox.
Apparently, no one thought to ask the Bush White House if there was any evidence for these claims. When GSA investigators looked into the matter, they found, "The condition of the real property was consistent with what we would expect to encounter when tenants vacate office space after an extended occupancy." The GAO also looked into it and found "no record of damage that may have been deliberately caused by the employees of the Clinton administration." Not surprisingly, this news went buried or unreported. Mitchell's employer, NBC, ignored it; the Post ran a wire service report on page 13.
Mike Allen and Andrea Mitchell did not return my call seeking their reaction to the news. Tom DeFrank told me he is "deeply puzzled" and plans to do more reporting on it. The respective reputations of Matt Drudge and Fox News speak for themselves. But you get the point. At least until Jim Jeffords upset its applecart, the Bush Administration, and the conservative movement supporting it, controlled its press coverage so effectively, it owned just about all the marbles in the game. And as every kid knows, it's the guy with the marbles who gets to decide the rules.
* * *
Did former New York Times executive editor and anti-Communist hysteric Abe Rosenthal squash an article that shed light on the guilt of the Rosenbergs for fear of offending the judge who sent them to their deaths? Ronald Radosh makes this shocking claim in his memoir, Commies, citing as his source Ed Klein, then editor of the Times magazine. Radosh's article, commissioned by the magazine and written with Sol Stern, concurred with the judgment that Irving Kaufman had illegal ex parte communications with the likes of Roy Cohn during the trial. But Kaufman had been promoted to the US Court of Appeals, which heard many First Amendment cases, so Rosenthal killed the piece, insisting that the Times "could not afford to run a piece that might inflame Kaufman to vote against the paper in an important press case."
Rosenthal did not (surprise, surprise) return my call, but Klein informs me that the Radosh version is "flat-out false." There was no "shocking late-night call" from Klein to Radosh and no admittance that "Abe killed it." (Indeed, even if true, what editor would be stupid enough to admit such an order to a writer?) Unfortunately, much of Radosh's memoir appears to exist only in his imagination. Conspiracies abound, wild charges are tossed about and the public record is contradicted sans evidence. A great many of Radosh's failures in life are blamed on a large and powerful pro-communist conspiracy controlling virtually every important cultural institution in America. Who knew?
The leftists organizing in Vermont since the 1970s prepared the ground for James Jeffords's jump, and he never would have done it without them. In the 1970s and 1980s Democrats howled with fury when Vermont's Progressive Party said that no matter what the short-term consequences, the important political task was to build a radical, third-force movement in the state.
In 1988 this progressive coalition backed Bernard Sanders, then the mayor of Burlington, in a run for Vermont's single Congressional seat. Democratic liberals raised the "wrecker" charge, saying the Sanders intervention would cost the Democrats votes and put in a Republican. It did. Then, two years later, Sanders ran again against the incumbent Republican and won. Creative destruction worked.
Without decades of work by radicals, nourishing the propriety of independent politics in Vermont, would Jeffords ever have jumped the Republican ship and handed control of the Senate back to the Democrats? I don't think so.
A couple of weeks ago someone sent me an article by Todd Gitlin and Sean Wilentz, published in an obscure journal called Dissent. Since Gitlin's prime political function for years has been to fortify respectable opinion about the impropriety of independent thinking, I knew what to expect, particularly since he was in harness with Wilentz, a truly hysterical proprietarian.
Sure enough, it was an attack on those who voted for Ralph Nader, tumid with a full-inventory parade of every cliché from the past forty years about the folly of radical hopes. Want a taste?
Numbers aside, there is a deeper force at work, behind the delusion that the masses hanker for radical change that Gore would not give them--a purist approach to politics. This all-or-nothing approach, allergic to democratic contest and compromise, is rooted equally in American self-righteousness and traditional left-wing utopianism. It is as if by venting one's anger, one were free to remake the world by willing it so...
Yup, this pompous cant translates into the single, finger-wagging admonition, "You should have voted for Al Gore," the latest variant on Gitlin's one-note career sermon about voting for Hubert Humphrey in 1968. (What is it about these Humphrey lovers? Vermonter Marty Jezer, another sermonizer about main-chance political propriety, recently lashed out at CBS in his column in the Brattleboro Reformer for what he denounced as excessively hostile and prejudicial interviewing of baby-killer Bob Kerrey! The lust to be respectably "fair," whether to HHH or Kerrey, leads to some astonishingly ridiculous postures.)
In Vermont the Republican Party is pretty much dead. Jeffords should sign up right now as a member of the Progressive Party, with whose political positions he has some things in common. Of course Jeffords, at least in his latest incarnation, is truly an independent, whereas Sanders is effectively a Democrat.
Now let's see how much fortitude the Democrats on the Hill have in contesting Bush and Cheney. They no longer have the alibi of the Republicans' controlling the White House and both chambers. Footnote: The Nation's editor, Katrina vanden Heuvel, wishes it to be on record that she takes exception to the description of Dissent as "obscure." I suggest a poll of the American people.
More on the Gandoo Man
In a recent column I described how the Chicago police have declined the request of a gay Pakistani poet to hit his supposed assailant, Salman Aftab, with a hate-crimes charge. Ifti Nasim claims Aftab called him a faggot bottom and lunged at him with a knife. For some of Chicago's gays it's become a very big issue. The Chicago Anti-Bashing Network prompted the ACLU's Pamela Sumner to write a three-page letter to State's Attorney Dick Devine detailing why she felt he should pursue hate-crimes charges in Nasim's case. Devine has refused to do so.
The cops and Devine are quite right. It turns out that the initial quarrel between Nasim and Aftab wasn't about the former's sexual orientation but about an article he'd written. Aftab never attacked Nasim with a knife (though Nasim insists he'd gone to the kitchen to get one). And Nasim put up Aftab's bail money, though he still wants him hit with a hate-crimes charge for calling him an insulting sexual term. The Chicago Anti-Bashing Network supports this position, which only goes to show how dementedly wrongheaded progressives are on the hate-crimes issue.
The Bush Menu
Poor Jenna Bush's travails with the absurd liquor laws of Texas take me back to my gilded youth at Oxford, when even the appearance of sobriety, at least at Keble, was an object of scandal and reproof from the better element. As it admits elsewhere in this issue, The Nation was a tad unfair relaying the claim that the Bush White House has ordered its chef to prepare genetically modified foods on some state occasions. The source of this claim was a piece by Jennifer Berkshire posted on Alternet. The Nation earnestly commented that "the demonstration smells like a paid political announcement for the agribusiness lobby."
I remember reading Berkshire's Alternet piece as an excellent little satire, and Jennifer confirms that this was indeed the case. Satire is always an uncertain weapon. My father once wrote an update of Swift's "A Modest Proposal," this time about inoculating people with the same sort of lethal strain that wiped out rabbits with myxomatosis. When it appeared in Punch furious letters poured in, denouncing him as an advocate of mass murder. Back in my days at the Village Voice I wrote a parody of conspiracy mongering and awoke to hear it being read out as serious news on WBAI by the late Samori Marksman. Since then I've stayed with the unvarnished truth, which is usually far more incredible than anything a satirist could dream up. For evidence see Marty Jezer's onslaught on CBS, noted above.
Over the past two years, it has become commonplace to read that the casualties among Kosovo Albanians were not sufficiently high to warrant the NATO intervention that put an end--at some remove--to the rule of Slobodan Milosevic. Without saying so explicitly, many liberal and "left" types, and many conservatives and isolationists, have implied that the Kosovars did not suffer quite enough to deserve their deliverance. The dispute revolves around two things; the alleged massacre at Racak (which may or may not have been a firefight provoked by the Kosovo Liberation Army) and the relative emptiness of certain identifiable "mass grave" sites.
As to Racak, it might be argued that Western policy-makers seized too fast on the evidence of a Bosnian-style bloodbath, but--in view of what had been overlooked or tolerated for so long in Bosnia--it would be tough to argue that a "wait and see" policy would have been morally or politically superior. Wait for what? Wait to see what? And, since most of those who cast doubt on Racak were opposed on principle in any case to any intervention, as they had been in Bosnia, the force of their objection does not really depend on the body count, or on the issue of who shot first. For those of us who supported the intervention, with whatever misgivings, it was plain enough that Milosevic wanted the territory of Kosovo without the native population, and that a plan of mass expulsion, preceded by some exemplary killings, was in train. The level of casualties would depend on the extent of resistance that the execution of the plan would encounter.
The bulk of the European and American right had announced in advance that the cleansing of Kosovo by Milosevic was not a big enough deal to justify military action; this seems to remain their view. It was also, according to former NATO commander Gen. Wesley Clark in his new memoir, the institutional view of the Pentagon. It would therefore have been the right's view, whatever happened or did not happen at Racak. It would presumably also have been their view even if the United Nations had passed a resolution authorizing the operation, over the entrenched objections of Boris Yeltsin and Jiang Zemin. (The Genocide Convention, which mandates action by signatory powers whenever the destruction of a people in whole or in part is being committed, takes precedence in the view of some.)
So we'll never know if another Rwanda was prevented or not, since another Rwanda did not in fact take place. However, on the issue of the mass graves there is now, as a result of the implosion of the Milosevic regime, more forensic evidence to go on.
At the time of the war itself I received a letter from a Serbian student of mine, a political foe of Milosevic but by no means a NATO fan. He told me that his family in Serbia had a friend, a long-distance truck driver whom they trusted. This man had told them of entering Kosovo with his refrigerated vehicle, picking up Albanian corpses under military orders and driving them across the "Yugoslav" border as far as the formerly autonomous province of Voivodina, where they were hastily unloaded. He'd made several such runs. At the time, I decided not to publish this letter because although it appeared to be offered in good faith it also seemed somewhat weird and fanciful, and because rumors of exactly this sort do tend to circulate in times of war and censorship.
In early May of this year, the Belgrade daily newspaper Blic, now freed from the constraints of censorship, published a report about a freezer truck, loaded with Albanian cadavers and bearing Kosovo license plates, that had been pulled from the river Danube in April 1999. The location was the town of Kladovo, about 150 miles east of Belgrade. Local gravediggers told of being hastily mobilized to load the bodies onto another truck, and to keep their mouths shut. The man who found the truck, Zivojin Djordjevic, was interviewed on Belgrade Radio B92. "It was a Mercedes lorry--the name of the meat-processing company from Pec was written in Albanian on the cabin. The license plates were from Pec.... When the lorry was pulled out and the doors of the freezer opened, corpses started sliding out. There were many bodies of women, children and old people. Some women had Turkish trousers, some children and old people were naked."
To this macabre tale, identifiable people have put their names. The director of the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade, Natasha Kandic, has been collecting information about comparable incidents in the period between late March and mid-June 1999, with piles of corpses removed from cemeteries or graves in Kosovo and either reburied secretly or incinerated. This is not improvised wartime atrocity propaganda; it is the careful finding of patient human rights investigators after the fact.
One cannot yet say the same about another story, which concerns the mass burning of bodies in the blast furnaces of the Trepca steel plant. The eyewitnesses here are, so far, only a driver named "Branko" and a Serbian "special forces" officer named "Dusko." They suggest that, in that terrible spring, as many as 1,500 murdered Albanian civilians were fed into the mills and furnaces of the steel complex. It would be premature to credit such unconfirmed and lurid reports, even though investigators from the Hague tribunal have already spoken about evidence being destroyed at the nearby Trepca mines. And at first, I didn't quite believe the freezer-truck tale either.
In the relatively new atmosphere of post-Milosevic Serbia, the armed forces have charged some 183 soldiers for crimes committed in Kosovo. This might be part of an "isolated incident" strategy, or it might be the beginning of a real investigation. If the reports now in circulation prove to be true, it would mean (given the complicity of border guards, steelworks managers, traffic cops and cemetery authorities) there was a state design both to the original murders and the secret interments. Such a discovery would help constitute the emancipation of Serbia as well as of Kosovo. But it would owe very little to those who described the belated Western intervention as an exercise in imperialism based upon false reporting. We shall see.
This magazine has been inundated of late with missives from irate Naderites demanding that the editors immediately exile me to The New Republic, the DLC or worse. My last column on Nader, which merely pointed out that he and his campaign should be held morally responsible for the awful acts of the Bush Administration--since without Nader's candidacy there would be no Bush Administration--inspired 122 such responses, a high percentage of which were personally abusive. Yet when the man himself appeared in these pages to denounce the President whose election he abetted, only twenty-seven readers were so moved. These numbers point to a perennial problem for liberals: Such zeal and enthusiasm that exists for politics at all anymore appears to rest exclusively with the extremes of left and right. Too bad that instead of learning from the far right's march to power through a grassroots takeover of the Republican Party, the Naderite left seems intent on destroying the fragile gains of seven decades of social progress.
True, it's not easy to support a party with standard-bearers like Clinton and Gore, temperamentally conservative career politicians whose lifetimes of compromise have made them untrustworthy except as weathervanes telling the direction of the political winds. Many (though not all) Democrats are no different. Yet virtually every day the Bush Administration reminds the non-Naderites among us that the only alternative is far worse. And so long as leftists are too weak to create a movement to rival the Republican right, the fight against Bush, DeLay & Co. will require whatever imperfect weapons we have at our disposal. The problem is how to excite people about such unexciting prospects.
Fortunately, the landscape is not entirely barren. Beyond the useful-but-wonkish American Prospect and the well-written but frequently neocon New Republic, the niche economics of Net publishing has spawned a number of sites that manage to combine sensible politics with humor and enthusiasm. Most are tiny operations run on love and charity, largely dependent on their communities of readers for information and support. As such, they have remained pretty much invisible to the mainstream media. Here are a few of my favorites.
§ Despite its criticism of this magazine and some of its columnists--an argument I think I'll stay out of--www.mediawhoresonline.com has a wonderful joie de vivre and some great punchlines. They view the mainstream media as being the captive of the right wing, whether for reasons of ideology or, as the site would put it, "whorishness." Most of the site's material and commentary is designed to insure that the media's "credibility in the public mind be brought in line with its genuine lack of credibility." To do this, they're willing to "mimic the tactics of the wingnuts," referring to all with whom they disagree as "whores" or occasionally "fascists" and refusing, on principle, to criticize any writer whose work they deem to be that of a "non-whore." Hypocritical, you say? "We don't believe it is hypocrisy at all to follow their standard, but fairness," responds Jennifer Kelly, the site's guiding spirit. "And what's more, it's really easy and doesn't require anything in the way of conscience or diligence." I don't follow this philosophy myself, but take my word for it: These people are as funny as they are fearless. Unfortunately, they are a bit unfair to actual whores...
§ www.bartcop.com began as a critique of Rush run by a fellow who wishes to remain anonymous but describes himself as "your average Okie liberal with too much time on my hands." It's developed into a very smart, funny critique of the right and is financed to the tune of $600 a month by Marc Perkel of San Francisco, who simply liked it and offered to pay the freight.
§ www.buzzflash.com, run by Mark Karlin, provides a liberal antidote to Matt Drudge, offering a bit less in the obnoxious self-promotion department and a bit more in the way of accuracy. Turn to it for up-to-the-second reports on, and links to, the Bush Administration's outrage du jour, frequently with smile-inducing headlines ("Yes We Have to Post It Twice: Doobie Brothers Guitarist Is Helping Design Bush's Missile Defense Shield").
§ Despite its unpromising name, www.democrats.com has no relationship to the somnolent party it seeks to revive. Its sponsors tell me, "We think the progressive Democratic message is the winning message, but the party needs to live up to its message by fighting for its principles." Bob Fertik, Dave Lytel and some 200 local chapters do this by highlighting news of interest to progressives, connecting a community of progressive Democrats, publicizing demonstrations to "Irk the Smirk," as Mediawhoresonline puts it, to protest the "stolen election of 2000." They try to fill "an enormous void left by the Democratic Party, which keeps Democratic activists at arm's length."
§ www.americanpolitics.com is a terrific place for links, satires and cartoons. It's also a great place to find incriminating quotes by the bad guys. Oh, and check out the shapely "email@example.com" before someone makes them take her down. Similarly comprehensive, www.onlinejournal.com contains original reporting from a sensibly leftish perspective.
§ www.bear-left.com offers first-rate in-depth analysis of whatever topic strikes the fancy of its authors, Paul Corrigan and Tim Francis-Wright, including an insanely detailed recent analysis of Skull and Bones's tax filings. See also its fantastic links page at www.bear-left.com/links.html.
§ www.mediatransparency.org does not really belong on this list, since it's more of an intellectual and political resource for journalists and scholars doing research on the connections between right-wing foundations and public policy. But it does deserve recognition for its public service and the widest possible audience for the tireless research on this neglected topic undertaken by its founder, Rob Levine.
§ And if you need cheering up, try www.bushorchimp.com, but remember it's a joke. The left got rolled for years by Ronald Reagan's dumb act, and I fear "W" is no dummy either--appearances, quite obviously, to the contrary.
I scanned all the cheap effusions that followed the Bob Kerrey disclosures, looking for just one mention of just one name. Ron Ridenhour. Ron was the GI who got wind of the My Lai massacre, followed up on what he'd heard, complained to the higher-ups and, when that didn't work, blew the whistle to the press (which took about a year to print anything). He was a friend of mine and by any known test an American hero. Except that there is a strong tendency in all cultures and all societies to hate people like Ron. By his simple and principled action, he destroyed all the excuses of those who say that war is hell and "whaddayagonnado." He was from Texas whiteboy stock and an uneducated draftee; call him a grunt--he wouldn't have minded. His example demolishes both those who say that only combat-hardened men can judge other veterans, and those who shiftily maintain that those who weren't actually there have no business making judgments. Ron wasn't at My Lai, but he'd seen quite enough to know that the rumors of what had happened were probably true, and he felt obliged to check them out, and to risk his own skin to do so.
Things evidently happened rather fast in the village of Thanh Phong on February 24, 1969. Calley's platoon in March 1968 had taken much of a day in which to really work on the villagers of My Lai. Nonetheless, even given more leisure, Bob Kerrey would not I think have raped any of the women, cut off any ears, disemboweled any babies or tortured any of the prisoners. He never went around referring to the Vietnamese as "gooks" or "slopes" or "slants." Whenever the subject of war came up in Washington during his tenure as a senator, he was a sane and lucid voice. And I should add that I know him somewhat and that, since I'm a lowly adjunct prof at the New School, he is actually my president.
By the end of his week before the cameras, however, I began to wish that he wasn't. If you have had more than three decades to reflect, and some weeks of advance notice on top of that, you don't have to rise to the Ron Ridenhour standard. But you must not disgrace it. It is, I suppose, arguable that both Gerhard Klann (a man in possession of a somehow unfortunate name) and the Vietnamese witnesses are all under a misapprehension. But neither the New York Times Magazine nor 60 Minutes II gave them any chance to compare notes or concert their story. And then Kerrey, confronted by the contradictions of his own account, said the following: "The Vietnam government likes to routinely say how terrible Americans were. The Times and CBS are now collaborating in that effort." This was a sad improvisation of paltry lies, adding up to a lie on the Spiro Agnew scale. (As this was going to press, Kerrey told me that he's written to the Times to withdraw at least the "collaborating" part.)
Nobody troubled to report an even worse moment at Kerrey's press conference, which occurred when the invaluable Amy Goodman asked him about the command responsibility for war crimes borne by the Nixon-Kissinger architects of the aggression. (He was, after all, under orders in a "free-fire zone" to treat all civilians as potential cadavers and all cadavers as part of the enemy "body count"; he did accept a citation for carrying out this standing policy.) I can appreciate that Kerrey might not have wanted to seem to shift responsibility; the Ridenhour standard makes it plain that you can't be ordered to commit crimes against humanity. However, such a standard must not be twisted for the purposes of moral relativism. Kerrey answered Goodman's inescapable question by focusing entirely on his own need to "get well." He thus excused himself--and his political "superiors."
The date of the "firefight" is almost unbearable to contemplate. February 24, 1969, is about a month after Nixon took the oath of office. It's about two months after he asked Henry Kissinger to be his National Security Adviser. It's about three months after the South Vietnamese military junta withdrew precipitately from the Paris peace negotiations. And it's about four months after the Nixon campaign made a covert approach to that same junta in order to incite it to do so, and to take out an illegal and treasonous mortgage on another four years of war, as well as to subvert an American election. (For still more evidence of this historic crime, see most recently Robert Mann's A Grand Delusion: America's Descent Into Vietnam, published by Basic Books.) One must of course sympathize with Kerrey's pain. Only a few weeks after Thanh Phong, Kerrey lost a healthy limb to Nixon's sick design. But even the most tentative judgment requires that we give moral priority to the more than 20,000 US servicemen who died after the sabotage of the Paris talks, and to the uncountable number of Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians who were immolated as a result of the same despicable policy.
We should also abandon easy nonjudgmental relativism and give moral priority to men like Hugh Thompson, Lawrence Colburn and Glenn Andreotta. These three were flying over My Lai in their helicopter on March 16, 1968, and saw Charlie Company butchering the inhabitants with no "enemy" in sight. Thompson not only grounded his chopper between the remaining civilians and his fellow Americans, he drew his weapon and told the murderers to back off. This was no impulsive gesture; he took some civilians away with him and then returned. Andreotta (who was killed three weeks later) found a small child in one of the corpse-choked ditches and managed to save him. Exactly thirty years after the atrocity, Thompson, Colburn and--posthumously--Andreotta were awarded the Soldier's Medal in a ceremony at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. It's the highest award you can get for an action that doesn't involve engaging "the enemy." There was no mention of their awkward bravery in the recent coverage, either, though as far as was possible, these three men lived up to one of our current dopey mantras, which is to "leave no child behind."
If Kerrey wishes he could say the same, rather than have left a pile of children behind him, then he has missed several opportunities to do so. His official statement was entirely about himself. It did not in fact come clean about what happened. And it did not contain one word of contrition for the action, or of sympathy for the victims. It was also internally inconsistent in other ways. The war, he said, hadn't become unpopular until 1969. Whatever this was supposed to mean, it didn't explain his accepting a Medal of Honor from Richard Nixon on May 14, 1970, in a ceremony that he now claims he knew was a tawdry and stagy bid for public opinion, and in the immediate aftermath of the assault on Cambodia and the killings of lawful protesters at Kent State and Jackson State.
Talking of universities, I was ashamed and disgusted to read the statement put out by the authorities at the New School. Here it is in full: "The Board of Trustees of New School University gives its unqualified support to Bob Kerrey. It is hard for most of us to imagine the horrors of war. War is hell. Traumatic events take place and their terrible effects may last a lifetime. We should all recognize the agony that Bob has gone through and must continue to deal with. We should also recognize that Bob's heroism and integrity have been demonstrated on many occasions. The Board of Trustees stands solidly behind him."
I try to teach English to humorous and intelligent graduates at this place. I could and will use this pathetic text--signed by John Tishman and Philip Scaturro, respectively chairman of the board and chancellor--as a case study in subliterate euphemism. ("What about Bob?" Leave no cliché behind!) But it is worse than it looks. Notice the insistence that only Kerrey's feelings count. And notice the insinuation that wartime actions are above moral distinction or discrimination. The New School, founded by some antimilitarist defectors from the then-conformist Columbia University at the end of the First World War, became the host campus for dozens of anti-Nazi refugee scholars in the succeeding decades. It gave podiums to Erich Fromm and Hannah Arendt, in lecture rooms where the nature of political evil was thoroughly discussed. It still runs democracy programs from Kosovo to South Africa. Its student body is multinational and always has been. A word or two about the slaughtered Vietnamese might not have been out of place. But this graceless little handout didn't even refer to them. Unrepudiated, the statement is a direct insult to everybody at the school and a surreptitious invitation to a creepy kind of secondhand complicity in murder.
I've no wish to hurt Kerrey's feelings unduly, but it ill becomes him to act as if he's facing a firing squad while he's being made the object of apparently limitless empathy. The truth of the matter is that I can't guess what these "many occasions" of "heroism and integrity" have been. (I'm assuming, perhaps incorrectly, that the New School authorities aren't counting the Thanh Phong massacre.) He was a fairly decent senator, as I've already said. But he showed then, as he shows now, a pronounced tendency to have things both ways. Like the Moynihans and the Gores, he was fond of privately denouncing Clinton as a crook and a liar and a thug, and then casting the ultimate vote in his favor. He told me in the week of the impeachment trial that he was determined to vote to convict Clinton for obstruction of justice, adding rather irrelevantly that it "wouldn't do him any harm" in his home state of Nebraska. And then, maybe when he remembered that he'd steered the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee through one of the greatest fundraising bonanzas in history, he thought better of it. "They all do it," of course, but then they needn't expect moist tributes for their bravery.
And yet--they don't all do it. Think again of Ridenhour, Thompson, Colburn, Andreotta--names that are barely known, names of men who would have been ashamed to leave a ditchful of women and children behind them, or to watch such a ditch being filled and say and do nothing. And think of what a great wall we'd have to build if we intended to inscribe all the Indochinese names. There's no possible repair or apology that could measure up to such a vast crime. But this must not mean a culture of stupid lenience and self-pity, in which the only wounds to be healed are those of the perpetrators, or of their obedient servants. How wonderful that at last we are forgiving the people of Vietnam for what we did to them.
There are war crimes and there is the crime of war, and it's ethically null to say that only veterans can pronounce on either. (There could be no human rights tribunals or Truth and Justice Commissions if this were so.) Kerrey was not caught in an ambush or suddenly placed in a hopeless situation. He led a stealthy, deliberate incursion into other people's homes, and the first act of those under his command was to slit the throats of an elderly couple and three children to keep them from making a sound. Kerrey now says that he didn't enter that particular "hooch" before, during or after--something of an oversight for the team leader, whose job it was to ascertain the nature of the opposition. He says it was a moonless night; the US Naval Observatory says there was a 60 percent disk until an hour after the squad had finished up....
This horror occurred in the context of two others: the Phoenix program and Operation Speedy Express. The first has been acknowledged even by its architects as a death-squad campaign, and the second was exposed at the time, by Kevin Buckley of Newsweek, as a mass slaughter of the civilians of the Mekong Delta. In other words, it's a bit late for armchair supporters of the war, or armchair excuse-makers, to discover indecipherable subjective mysteries where none in fact exist. Kerrey's after-action report on Thanh Phong, for which he received a Bronze Star citation, reads, in a vile code compounded of cruelty and falsification: "21 VC KIA (BC)." That stands for twenty-one Vietcong, killed in action according to body count. Did he accept that medal as part of coming to terms with how haunting it all was?
The humanoid who came up with the shady term "Vietnam syndrome" was of course Henry Kissinger, who had every reason to try to change the subject from his own hideous responsibility. But even now, the president of a humanist academy takes up that same pseudo-neutral tone of therapy-babble and quasi-confessional healing, instead of demanding the Truth and Justice Commission that might establish what we owe to the people he killed, as well as what we could and should do about the still unpunished and still untroubled people who directed him to slay them in their sleep.
A parody of Gone With the Wind has run into legal trouble: too revealing of the real nature of slavery?
The New York Times could benefit from having an in-house arbitrator.
Perhaps I underestimate the joy of being given a silly nickname by the Leader of the Free World, but I'm having a hard time understanding why media big feet are so taken by the nation's new Charmer in Chief. Leave aside the extreme right-wing agenda he's pursuing when by any fair measure of voting he lost the election. Forget that he began his term by breaking his key campaign promises. And ignore his frequent and unapologetic lies about his commitment to bipartisan governance. What about the fact that, perhaps more than any President since Nixon, Bush holds the media and its denizens in utter contempt?
Take for example Bush's decision to appoint Otto Reich to head the Latin American office in the State Department. As Peter Kornbluh discusses elsewhere in this issue [see "Bush's Contra Buddies," page 6], Reich's job in the Reagan Administration was simply to lie to (and about) the media. He did it very well. According to Walter Raymond--the CIA propaganda specialist whom William Casey transferred to the National Security Council in order to circumvent the 1947 National Security Act, which restricted CIA involvement in domestic propaganda operations--the purpose of Reich's Office of Public Diplomacy was to "concentrate on gluing black hats on the sandinistas and white hats on the UNO [contras]." Staffed by senior CIA officials with backgrounds in covert operations, military intelligence and psychological warfare, the OPD offered privileges to favored journalists, placed ghostwritten articles over the signatures of contra leaders in leading opinion magazines and on Op-Ed pages, and publicized nasty stories about the Sandinistas, true or not. In its first year, it sent attacks on the Sandinistas to 1,600 college libraries, 520 political science faculties, 122 editorial writers, 107 religious organizations and countless reporters, right-wing lobbyists and members of Congress. It booked advocates for 1,570 lecture and talk-show engagements. In just one week of March 1985, the OPD officers bragged in a memo of having fooled the editors of the Wall Street Journal into publishing an Op-Ed about Nicaragua penned by an unknown professor, having guided an NBC news story on the contras and having written and edited Op-Ed articles to be signed by contra spokesmen, as well as having planted false stories in the media about a visiting Congressman's experiences in Nicaragua.
Among the OPD's lies were stories that portrayed the Sandinistas as virulent anti-Semites, that reported a Soviet shipment of MIG jets to Managua and that purported to reveal that US reporters in Nicaragua were receiving sexual favors--hetero- and homosexual--from Sandinista agents in exchange for pro-Communist reporting. That last lie, published in the July 29, 1985, New York magazine, came directly from Reich.
Perhaps OPD's most important effort was to convince Congress and the media of the contras' democratic bona fides. They did this by pretending that the men handpicked by North as front men were operationally in charge of contra political and military operations. In addition to signing the names of these men to fake Op-Ed articles, Reich and company coached them on how to lie whenever they were asked about being on the US government payroll, as well as about their aims for their US-funded armies. Together with top officials of the State Department, the CIA and the National Security Council, the OPD spent millions to paint civilians as the true leaders of the contras. The United Nicaraguan Opposition (UNO), founded in San José, Costa Rica, in June 1985, thanks in large part to the efforts of Oliver North, was designed to manufacture an acceptably "democratic" face for the contra leadership. According to a private 1985 memo by Robert Owen, North's liaison with the contras, the UNO was entirely "a creation of the USG[overnment] to garner support from Congress." Its leaders were "liars" and "greed and power motivated."
Reporting on Reich's appointment has been decidedly unsensational. The LA Times has ignored it. The New York Times and the Washington Post assigned to the story knowledgeable reporters who covered Central America, but the results reflected the strictures of journalistic objectivity as much as the outrageousness of Reich's activities. Raymond Bonner and Christopher Marquis wrote in the Times that "a government investigation concluded that Mr. Reich's office engaged in prohibited acts of domestic propaganda." (In a backhanded tribute to Bonner's brilliant Central American reporting of the 1980s, Reich called the Times editors with a vicious personal attack on the journalist hoping to get him taken off the story.) Karen DeYoung noted in the Post that the OPD "used what critics called legally questionable means to promote favorable publicity and political support for the U.S.-backed contras in Nicaragua in their war against the Cuba-backed Sandinista government." The Economist was even more generous, insisting that Reich "got marginally caught up in the Iran/contra scandal when his office was accused of engaging in covert propaganda activities to get Americans' support for the Nicaraguan contras." No major paper has yet addressed the issue in an editorial.
Most reports on the appointment have focused on it as payback to extremist Miami Cubans and brother Jeb for their instrumental role in helping Bush hijack Florida and hence the election. (Reich regularly likens Cuba to Auschwitz and to an antebellum slave plantation.) Perhaps it is. But Reich's appointment ought to be recognized as an intentional kick in the teeth to the media, as well as a testament to its lack of institutional memory.
When Kornbluh and Robert Parry first revealed the activities of the OPD in Foreign Policy magazine in 1988, Reich, according to a Boston Globe report, compared the fully accurate article to Hitler's "big lie" technique regarding the Final Solution. It's hard to imagine a more offensive manipulation of the murder of millions than using it to slander journalists and lie to the country about an illegal war--but hell, the Bush people are just getting started.
Attorney General John Ashcroft says he does not want Timothy McVeigh to "inject more poison into our culture"--a striking statement, given the method of McVeigh's execution. Accordingly, he intends to deny permission for television interviews during the Oklahoma City bomber's final weeks on federal death row. (The Oklahoma legislature had a similar purpose in mind when it passed a resolution condemning a new book about McVeigh--thus bringing it more publicity, as a dissenting legislator pointed out.) At the same time, Ashcroft has made a dramatic cultural intervention of his own, authorizing the closed-circuit telecast of McVeigh's execution to perhaps 200 family members of his victims.
Both of Ashcroft's announcements show clearly how capital punishment is coarsening American institutions. Although most of the press coverage did not mention it, the Attorney General's diktat banning broadcast interviews applies not only to McVeigh but to all federal death-row inmates. However repellent the thought of a McVeigh TV interview, the ban is one more step in a repressive, systematic national clampdown on press coverage of prisons, which in some states, like Virginia, has led to a virtual blackout of inmate interviews. In the future, Ashcroft's interview ban could deny broadcast access to a federal inmate far different from McVeigh, someone with a legitimate claim of innocence or discrimination--a real likelihood given the nearly 100 death-row inmates in state prisons exonerated by new evidence and the large percentage of capital convictions overturned for grave constitutional error in the original trial.
The question of a public telecast of McVeigh's lethal injection is now moot with Ashcroft's closed-circuit plan, though the drumbeat for public executions continues--with some support among notable death-penalty abolitionists and civil libertarians like Sister Helen Prejean and Nat Hentoff. Televising executions, their argument goes, would either sicken the public or at least make Americans more accountable for what goes on in their name. We disagree. We see telecasts of executions as a fundamentally different matter from death-row interviews. Today's executions by lethal injection are exercises in the engineering of death, the institutionalizing of death, the bureaucratizing of death. Far from shocking America, viewing lethal injections through the distancing glow of a TV screen will further normalize state killing--as television ultimately normalizes the forms of violence it depicts.
Ashcroft did not invent closed-circuit telecasts of an execution--it has been tried at the state level--but it raises disturbing questions. For one thing, as several technological experts have pointed out, the phone-line transmission may not be immune to hacking or decryption--raising the prospect of a McVeigh snuff film in the near or distant future. More important, it makes this first federal execution, one moving forward even as Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg joins the call for a death-penalty moratorium, a spectacle of individual vengeance for McVeigh's victims--a dangerous turn toward privatizing justice.
Far from shifting the spotlight to the survivors of Oklahoma City, Ashcroft's decision heightens the perverse amplification of McVeigh's voice initiated by his death sentence. The press spent the early weeks of spring speculating about how large a crowd would watch McVeigh take the needle. Instead of fading into anonymity, McVeigh has kept himself on the front page until his final moments and turned the chronicle of his last months into a testament for the militia fringe, who will make him a martyr. This is justice neither for McVeigh's victims nor for the country--and that is the real poison seeping into our culture from the federal death chamber in Terre Haute.


text: In the coming months, parents, citizens, and politicians are going to be asked to discuss local control in schools and what that should look like - a conversation that, in my view, is long overdue.Corky O'Callaghan, a consultant who helped the community come together to pass a school levy last year, talked to the Vandalia-Butler Board of Education last week about a book he is writing on the topic. He says schools are at a turning point - and I believe he is right."Kids are being over tested, teachers are being overwhelmed, and money is going to places we don't even know," said O'Callaghan. "It's not just in Ohio - the story is pretty much the same everywhere I go."Vandalia-Butler Superintendent Bradley Neavin shares that sentiment, and never fails to bring the topic up when we speak. He believes that a high performing district, like Vandalia-Butler, should have more leeway to make decisions locally about how to educate its kids."The legislature can't pass enough legislation requiring Vandalia-Butler to do things that will help schools in Dayton, Cincinnati, Columbus, or Cleveland," says Neavin. "I think the state should back off and help the districts that need help and leave districts like ours alone. Vandalia-Butler has been providing excellent education to its students for generations and will continue to do so."He is right. Cookie cutter approaches to education reform make no sense because the problems in one district aren't the same problems others face.There is an inherent tension between the state and federal governments and local schools, a tension that will likely never change. Since a certain amount of funding comes from federal and state sources, it only makes sense that there will be some input from these sources in the education of our children.However, over the past 40 years that "input" has become more of a dictatorship instead of a cooperative relationship. There is a growing notion in many areas of the country that parents and educators are fed up with the never ending - and always changing - standards coming from Washington and statehouses.Some are upset about the school lunch initiative by Michelle Obama. Unfunded mandates, programs that districts must carry out, yet receive no funding for, grow by the year. Others oppose the new Common Core standards being implemented this fall, so much so that some states have repealed them, including Indiana and Oklahoma.Two weeks ago, Ohio Speaker Pro Tempore Matt Huffman introduced legislation in the Ohio House of Representatives to repeal the standards - with House leadership's blessing. It's unlikely a repeal will occur - a similar measure wasn't even considered a year ago thanks in large part to Senate Education Committee President Peggy Lehner. Lehner is your senator, and she's the same senator who dismissed concerns about over-testing in an education forum at Butler High School a few months ago.The question is very simple. Who knows better to make decisions about schools - local educators and school board members or state and federal lawmakers? One only has to look to the disaster that is Washington, DC to answer that question.Do school districts such as Vandalia-Butler need to have its hand held by the state and federal bureaucracy? Is there evidence that Vandalia-Butler isn't educating its kids adequately? Of course not! The district is regularly one of the top districts in the area, and it excels in almost every area of performance ratings assessed each year by the Ohio Department of Education.For any change to happen, parents and interested citizens will have to make their voices heard. If legislators don't want to listen, then they should be voted out of office.If given a choice, who do you trust more with decisions about education? Your neighbor? Your child's teacher, principal, superintendent, and board of education? Or do you trust a politician you barely know in Columbus or Washington?That answer is simple for me.


text: OverviewBack to top of page Naturade - NRG Protein Booster Vanilla Flavor - 15 oz. Item# :76978UPC# :079911024016 Brand:Naturade Size/Form:15 oz. Ship Weight:0.94 Servings:15 Dosage:0.33 Cup(s) Flavor:Vanilla Flavor Naturade NRG Protein Booster Vanilla Flavor (426 g)Naturade N-R-G Protein Booster is a time-tested combination of soy, milk and egg protein that supplies the complete amino acid profile your body needs to support the growth of bones and muscles. Naturade NRG Protein Booster all-natural protein blend assures that you get all the essential amino acids your body can not produce on its own, in just the right combination. You need Naturade NRG Protein Booster if you're not getting enough dairy and egg products in your regular diet, especially if you're also avoiding cholesterol and fat. 21g Protein3g Carbohydrate1g FatIn 1950, Naturade pioneered in promoting the health benefits of soy protein, with its NRG formula. Now, the Food and Drug Administration has agreed that 25 grams of soy protein daily may reduce the risk of heart disease when used in a diet low in saturated fat and cholesterol. Over 40 clinical studies have shown that soy protein helps lower total and LDL cholesterol. One serving of Naturade NRG Protein Booster supplies almost two thirds of the soy protein you need daily to fight America's number 1 killer of both men and women. Naturade's Identity Preservation (IP) process assures you that the genetic integrity of our soybeans has been maintained throughout planting, harvesting and processing—just as nature intended. And Naturade NRG Protein Booster is formulated with high grade soy protein isolate without the extra fat or aftertaste of whole soybeans so you can confidently add protein to the foods and drinks you prepare with no carbohydrates and no added sugar. About Naturade A Natural Commitment Since 1926. Naturade's commitment to quality is long known and well regarded, not only as a good example in the health industry - but as a standard of excellence that reflects Naturade's sense of dedication to their profession. Naturade's priority and standard of excellence demands effective, nutritional quality controls. This quality control is integrated through every phase of product development and production. Naturade's commitment inspires us to pursue more and more advanced technology to ensure the highest quality possible.Naturade's Working Relationship With NatureNaturade looks to our world for their source of nourishment on every level imaginable. From nature's own medicinal cornucopia of herbs, roots and wildflowers, to important natural enzymes extracted from vegetables and a multitude of other natural sources. For seven decades now, the Naturade company has developed a range of beneficial products that improve health and beauty by restoring the natural balance between nutrients and foodstuffs. Naturade offers a healthier way of life naturally.


text:
Special Correspondent
Says for administrative convenience, Railways has chosen to form a compact division "Line control equipment will be acquired in the next four months and civil works taken up soon"
VRIDDHACHALAM: It will take two to three years for the formation of a full-fledged Salem railway division, Minister of State for Railways R. Velu said on Saturday.
Line control equipment would be acquired in the next four months and soon civil works taken up.
Mr. Velu was addressing a press conference at Ilangiyanur, 20 km from here, where he inspected gauge conversion works.
When his attention was drawn to the Kerala Assembly resolution against the formation of the division, Mr. Velu said neither the Kerala Government nor the Tamil Nadu Government should be linked to it.
Contentious issue
It was for administrative and operational convenience that Railways had chosen to form a compact division. The difference seemed to be over the territorial jurisdiction. The Palakkad division would have control over 509 route km and the Salem division, over 623 km.
Mr. Velu allayed the fears that creation of the division would result in major shuffling of employees.
Barring 200-300 officials, who would be given the option to shift, all gangmen and security related staff would remain undisturbed.
Palakkad would have a workforce of 8,600 and Salem 7,900. The operating ratio of Southern Railway remained at 108 per cent (for investment of every Rs. 108 the returns would be Rs. 100) as against the national average of 79 per cent. By redesigning passenger and freight marketing and cutting down expenditure, the ratio would be improved.
Gauge conversion
He said the Rs. 300-crore gauge conversion work on the 196-km long Cuddalore-Salem line would be completed by May. An 18-km branch line from Chinna Salem to Kallakurichi would be laid at a cost of Rs. 38 crore.
He did not agree that laying of four-lane highways would divert freight traffic to the road sector.
For environmental considerations, the Railways would continue to be the mainstay for hauling heavy goods for long distance.


text:
Adam Bender writes speculative fiction that explores modern-day political fears with a balance of action and romance.
A journalist by day, Adam has reported extensively on technology and the international debate between personal privacy and national security.
Adam is a senior journalist for Computerworld, Techworld and CIO in Sydney, Australia. He previously covered US politics on Capitol Hill for the esteemed Washington trade journal, Communications Daily.
For more info, visit Adam's home page: AdamBenderWrites.com.
Review by:
Susanne Collier
on Feb. 15, 2013 :
I read this book yesterday, and slept on it before writing this review. For me a good story stays with you for sometime after finishing it, and yes...this book did it for me. The characters are still fresh in my mind and I can remember the storyline vividly.
This book is ideal if you want a good read in a limited time slot, but with the quality you would expect from a good novel. The characters are likeable and believable, there is a plot, (so many short stories are just a series of events!)and I finished the book feeling satisfied.
Would definitely read other titles from this author.
(review of free book)


text:
Bats' games postponed - in an iceout
By Darren Desaulniers
Special to The Courier-Journal
OTTAWA -- There wasn't a cloud in the sky here yesterday, but a scheduled doubleheader between the Louisville Bats and the Ottawa Lynx was pushed back to 1:05 p.m. today because the tarp was frozen to the field at Lynx Stadium.
A steady, sometimes heavy rain fell Friday -- causing the postponement of that day's game -- and then freezing temperatures overnight turned the baseball field into a skating rink. Nobody thought about strapping on skates and playing hockey instead, though.
"A lot of these Americans can't skate, so I'd hate to see that," Bats manager Rick Sweet said with a chuckle. "It might be a lot more dangerous than playing ball in those conditions."
This was not the first time the Lynx had to postpone games despite beautiful weather.
In 2003 a game was postponed because of a blackout that affected the United States and Canada. In 2000 the Lynx were grounded during a heavy rainstorm in Philadelphia while the Buffalo Bisons awaited them in Ottawa under sunny skies and temperatures in the mid-80's. Sweet was Ottawa's manager at the time.
It was very sunny here yesterday but just 37 degrees.
"In my years in the game, this is the first time I've had this happen," Sweet said. "I'm surprised it hasn't happened before.
"You don't want to play ball when you've had the circumstances we had. They've got ice all over the field and no way to get it off. We made the right call (to postpone the game). You worry about the things you have control of, and right now we don't have control of the weather."
Sweet is not concerned about his team's lack of playing time this season. The Bats' only game was Thursday's 4-1 opening-day loss to the Lynx.
"It would be tougher, but spring training was so good this year weather-wise, we got so much work in that a couple of days off isn't going to hurt anything," he said.
"We got to hit the cage, so the batters got their swings. The pitchers were out there and got to throw, so the players don't mind."
The forecast for today is sunny and 50. Louisville's Mike Gosling will start the first game, with Elizardo Ramirez starting the second. They will oppose Cory Morris and Brian Burres, respectively.
The Bats will start a four-game series in Syracuse tomorrow, then head to Louisville for Friday's home opener against the Lynx. The scheduled four-game series will be a five-game set to compensate for the one lost game in Ottawa.
Note: The Cincinnati Reds optioned outfielder Chris Denorfia to the Bats yesterday. He went 2 for 3 in three appearances with the Reds.
Saturday night suspended
04/08/06 - Southern League (SL) Jacksonville Suns
Jacksonville, Fla. - After four innings of two-thirds of Saturday night baseball at the Baseball Grounds of Jacksonville, Mother Nature took over.
With a delay of over an hour, Saturday night's affair between the Jacksonville Suns and Chattanooga Lookouts was suspended to be picked up at the same point Sunday at 3:05. The game will begin at the same point left off, at the score of 3-3 and a 1-2 count on the Suns' Craig Brazell with two out in the fifth inning. At the conclusion of the normal nine inning game there will be a thirty minute break. The regularly scheduled Sunday game will then be played and is now scheduled for seven innings.
Tickets from Saturday are good for Sunday's games, but will need to be exchanged at the Suns box office for a comparable seat.
Sunday will feature a Sunny the Bunny Wobblehead giveaway to the first 1,500 kids in attendance, sponsored by Dixie Egg, Eggland's Best and Lite 96.1 FM.


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From the Publisher
"Paulina Bren uses Jaroslav Dietl's Communist-era television serials to get at the inner life of post-1968 communist Czechoslovakia, the era of normalization, and deconstruct old Cold War binaries concerning power and resistance in the East Bloc. . . . This innovative, lively study of mass media encourages rethinking about commonalities across East and West in the postwar world. Bren's book will shape research questions about the 1970s and 1980s in Eastern Europe and inspire new uses of non-traditional sources, making it a standard setter for scholars of successor states of the Habsburg Monarchy during the late twentieth century."—Citation of the 2012 Center for Austrian Studies Book Prize Committee
"Paulina Bren has delved into the letters written to Czechoslovak TV in the communist era to paint a fascinating picture of reactions to the regime's attempt to produce programs that were both entertaining and ideologically correct."—"Eastern Approaches" blog, The Economist, 16 August 2010
"Doing the history of passivity and accommodation is not easy, and Bren proceeds ingeniously by exploring the subtle buying into the system by the vast viewing audience that embraced the lives of the characters on popular television serials, lives redolent of what 'normalization' meant. Then, in a particularly revealing step, she examines the awkward response to reruns of some of the most popular of these serials in the aftermath of what she calls Czechoslovakia's 'late communism.'"—Robert Legvold, Foreign Affairs, September/October 2010
"Paulina Bren has written an engaging, highly informative book on a period characterized by the conscious attempts of a regime to prevent anything from happening. The leaders of post-1968 Czechoslovakia were obsessed by 'normalization': their ambition was to freeze up time, to escape from the past, not to face the future,not to let histoire événementielle (a history of events, like the heroic but naïve attempt of introducing socialism with a human face in 1968) return. Paulina Bren has succeeded in overcoming the impossible: this is a serious but entertaining and readable study of a Kafkaesque rule by dullness, by boredom, the life under gray skies, reflected on the television screen. The Greengrocer and His TV helps in understanding why the extraordinary events of 1989 were so much underdetermined, but the book reminds us that careful historical research succeeds in uncovering under the seemingly uneventful surface the process that might lead to completely surprising outcomes."—István Rév, Central European University, Director of Open Society Archives
"With its subtle grasp of complexity and contradiction, Paulina Bren's book is a very smart and occasionally tart analysis of Czechoslovakia's late communist culture through the prism of television. Spurning the binaries of repression and dissidence, living in the lie and living in truth, and other mainstays of Cold War-era rhetoric, Bren surveys and brilliantly brings to light the vast gray area that comprised 'normalized' life in the aftermath of the Prague Spring. Based on her pitch-perfect renderings of the TV-serials of the 1970s and 1980s, she argues that normalization entailed the depoliticization of public life and the politicization of the private by offering a 'quiet life' of 'self-realization' in contrast to both the Prague Spring's political hysteria and Western capitalism's rabid consumerism. She also points out that the television serials placed women at the forefront of rebuilding communism after 1968 by entrusting them with key roles as retailers and consumers. Living within the lie thus became not only palatable but even appealing. Written with wit and verve, The Greengrocer and His TV is as much fun to read as it must have been to research. It is one of the very few books on late communism that truly can be described as eye-opening and paradigm-changing; it is sure to be discussed avidly for years to come."—Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Michigan State University, author of Cars for Comrades
"Communism survived in Eastern Europe for nearly a generation after Soviet tanks ended the Prague Spring. Few scholars have yet tackled the dynamics of what Václav Havel called 'post-totalitarianism,' with its myriad enticements to conformity. In this engaging, entertaining book, Paulina Bren shows us that the relationship between the communist state and Czechoslovak society was mediated by television. To understand the regime's longevity, therefore, we would really have to sit down in the greengrocer's living room and watch what his family is watching. And now we can."—Padraic Kenney, Indiana University
"Paulina Bren has written an innovative, fascinating, and readable book that both cultural and political historians should read. In The Greengrocer and His TV, she refuses to stop at the screen or even just to peer beyond it. Her arguments are supported by a rich documentary base drawing from Communist Party records, state and television archives, and contemporary samizdat, as well as memoir literature."—Benjamin Frommer, Northwestern University


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Sprouted Whole Wheat Bread
|Lukewarm water
|3 Cup (48 tbs)
|Active dry yeast
|2 Tablespoon
|1 Tablespoon
|1⁄4 Cup (4 tbs)
|Vegetable oil
|3 Tablespoon
|Unbleached white flour/Bread flour
|3 1⁄2 Cup (56 tbs)
|Wheat sprouts
|2 Cup (32 tbs), ground in a meat grinder
|Whole wheat flour
|2 Cup (32 tbs) (Approximately)
1. Pour 1 cup water into a large mixing bowl. Sprinkle the yeast over the water and set aside for 5 minutes.
2. Stir to dissolve the yeast. Add the remaining water, the salt, honey, and oil and mix well.
3. Stir in the unbleached white flour and beat the dough until it is smooth and elastic. Cover and let rise in a warm place until doubled in bulk, about 45 minutes.
4. Stir in the ground sprouts and enough of the whole wheat flour to make a medium-soft dough. It will be slightly sticky.
5. Turn the dough out onto a floured board and knead until very smooth and elastic, about 10 minutes. Put in a clean oiled bowl and turn to oil the top of the dough. Cover and let rise in a warm place until doubled in bulk, about 1 hour.
6. Turn onto the floured board and knead briefly. Divide the dough in half and shape into two loaves. Put in well-oiled 9- by 5- by 3-inch loaf pans, cover, and let rise until doubled in bulk, about 45 minutes.
7. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.
8. Bake for 25 minutes, lower the oven temperature to 300 degrees, and bake for 35 minutes longer, or until the loaves sound hollow when tapped on the bottom. Cool on wire racks.


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Thanks to this forum and all the helpful info i read, I picked up my XD 9mm Saturday (1/3) and have put close to 500 rounds through it. The gun is flawless.. Your gonna love it!!!
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Mosner Family Brands
Kurobuta Berkshire Bone-In Ham
- Set:
- One 15 lb ham
Please select an available size.
Please select a size.
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Description: Kurobota Berkshire pork is renowned for its lean meat, small, fine streaks of marbling, and its dark, rich hue. The Wall Street Journal has gone so far as to call it "the other red meat." Juicy and succulent, this Berkshire bone-in ham is a wonderful treat and a beautiful centerpiece at a traditional holiday dinner.
Here's what you get:
- One approximately 15-lb bone-in, uncooked Kurobuta ham
Brand: Mosner Family Brands


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Registration Ends Soon For Family Fantasy Weekend
July 14, 2014
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. - There are just a couple days remaining to sign up for the 2014 Tom Crean Basketball Camps Family Fantasy Weekend. Registration will close Thursday, July 17 at 5:00 p.m. ET.
The camp itself runs Aug. 22-24 in Bloomington and each family attending will receive custom gear packages, a personalized DVD of the weekend, play on the historic Branch McCracken Court in Assembly Hall and spend the weekend with the entire 2014-2015 Indiana Hoosiers team and coaching staff. Space is limited, and this is the last chance to reserve your family's spot on the roster!
More Information on the Family Fantasy Weekend
For 2014 we are happy to continue with our fourth annual IU Basketball Family Fantasy Weekend. This weekend offers the chance for the whole family, moms and daughters included, to get a behind-the-scenes look at Hoosier Basketball. Why should the guys have all the fun, right? Whether you are a dad wanting a get-away with your kids, the Family Fantasy Weekend is just the opportunity.
The experience will be comprised of the training, evaluation, competition, and instruction that our players receive every day. You will eat, play, and learn from Coach Crean, his staff, current, and former players. The weekend will unfold in the storied Assembly Hall and Cook Hall, the new player development center. Additionally, you will analyze film in the Team Meeting Room, dress in the Team Locker Room, exercise in the team's Strength and Conditioning Center, and be interviewed in the Assembly Hall Press Room. Each participant will receive a set of gear as part of their Fantasy Weekend package (included items will be detailed at a later date).
Lodging will be at the Bloomington Comfort Inn (adjacent to the Indiana University campus) and meals will be served at both the hotel and team's facilities.
The Fantasy Weekend is open to all ages and skill levels with the focus being experiencing Indiana Basketball in the manner that a Hoosier player does while also exploring the history of IU Basketball and developing quality family time together.
*If your spouse only wishes to come and watch and not participate in the Family Fantasy Weekend, there will be no cost unless additional rooms are needed.
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James Michael Pouncey
Position: OL
Height: 6-5 Weight: 311 lbs.
Born: July 24, 1989 in Bartow, FL
High School: Lakeland
College: Florida (school history) (Pouncey college stats)
Drafted by the Miami Dolphins in the 1st round (15th overall) of the 2011 NFL Draft.
Weighted Career AV (100-95-...): 30 (3263rd overall since 1950)
Relatives: Brother of Maurkice Pouncey
2-time Pro Bowler (fine print)
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