I'm Gina Smith

Should Bush boycott the games?

My money says he's won't, but Hillary Clinton is calling for him to do so.

gs

A short test to see which candidate best reflects your opinions. (EXCELLENT)

Thanks to IGS reader Don Allen, here's a 20 question quiz you can take to see which presidential candidate best matches your views.

I was blown away to see the non-withdrawn Dennis Kucinich (my favorite) was matched to me exactly.

Take the test. Fast and easy and extremely interesting.

Watching America

Great article from the French press (Le Monde) on San Francisco's own Nancy Pelosi, now speaker of the House. There is an English and French version on this site.

Find it here.

Proposition 75

I have to admit I didn't vote for cute SF mayor Gavin Newsom when he ran for election here this last time around. I chose the most liberal candidate, as usual. Gonzales.

This morning, though, I heard Gavin on KFOG speaking so eloquently I had to pull the car over. (The last time I heard a politician speak so off-the-cuff, eloquently and intelligently was at a fund-raiser for Clinton. I attended that with Larry Ellison, which is another long story.)

Anyway, among other things, Gavin made a passionate plea to vote NO on Proposition 75. I did some research. You should, too. Just IMO, but that's what blogs are all about, eh?.

Read News and Blog Posts about Proposition 75

gs

Omigod. Could Bush be gunning for ...

a third term?

John C. Dvorak scopes out the possibility at his blog.

Why the New York Times chooses Kerry.

Today's NYT Op Ed piece blasting Bush and this groundless war.

A War Without Reason By BOB HERBERT

Published: October 18, 2004

"Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." - President Bush, Oct. 7, 2002

There should no longer be any doubt that the war in Iraq is an exercise in lunacy. It was launched with a spurious rationale, the weapons of mass destruction, which turned out to be a fantasy relentlessly stoked by obsessively hawkish middle-aged men who ran and hid when they were of fighting age and the nation was at war.

Now we find that we can't win this war we started. Soldiers and civilians alike are trapped in the proverbial briar patch, unable to move around safely in a country that the warmongers thought would be easy to conquer and then rebuild.

There is no way to overstate how profoundly wrong they were.

Our troops continue to die but we can't even identify the enemy, which is why so many innocent Iraqi civilians - including women and children - are being blown away. The civilians are being killed by the thousands, even as the dreaded Saddam Hussein is receiving first-class health care (most recently a successful hernia operation) from his captors.

Last week, in a story that read like a chapter from an antiwar novel, we learned that members of an Army Reserve platoon were taken into custody and held for two days after they refused to deliver a shipment of fuel to Taji, a town 15 miles north of Baghdad. They complained that the trip was too dangerous to make without an escort of armored vehicles. Several of the reservists described the trip as a "suicide mission."

The military said that was an isolated incident, but there is evidence of growing dissatisfaction among the troops, many of whom feel they are targets surrounded by hostile Iraqis -insurgents and ordinary civilians alike - in a war that lacks a clearly defined mission.

Even the heavily fortified Green Zone, which contains the U.S. embassy and the headquarters of the interim Iraqi government, was penetrated by suicide bombers last Thursday. At least five people, including three Americans who had been providing security for diplomats, were killed in the attack.

As the pointlessness of this war grows ever clearer, the president's grand alliance, like some of the soldiers on the ground, is losing its resolve. When John Kerry, in the first presidential debate, mentioned only Britain and Australia as he mocked Mr. Bush's "coalition" in Iraq, the president famously replied, "You forgot Poland."

Poland has 2,400 troops in Iraq. But on Friday the prime minister, Marek Belka, announced that he will cut that number early next year, and then "will engage in talks on a further reduction."

Mr. Belka has a political problem. He can't explain the war to his constituents. And that's because there is no rational explanation.

As for the rebuilding of Iraq, forget about it. Hundreds of schools were damaged by U.S. bombing and thousands were looted by Iraqis. It's hard to believe that an administration that won't rebuild schools here in America will really go to bat for schoolkids in Iraq. Millions of Iraqi kids now attend schools that are decrepit and, in many cases, all but falling down-lacking such essentials as desks, chairs and even toilets, according to the United Nations Children's Fund.

Military commanders are warning that delays in the overall reconstruction are increasing the danger for American troops. A senior American military officer told The Times, "We can either put Iraqis back to work, or we can have them shoot [rocket-propelled grenades] at us."

The president and his apologists never understood what they were getting into in Iraq. What is unmistakable now is that Americans will never be willing to commit the overwhelming numbers of troops and spend the hundreds of billions of additional dollars necessary to have even a hope of bringing long-term stability to Iraq.

This is a war that never made sense and now we are seeing - from the troops on the ground, from our allies overseas and increasingly from the population here at home - the inevitable reluctance to forge ahead with the madness.

The president likes to say he made exactly the right decision on Iraq. Each new death of a soldier or a civilian, each child who loses a parent to the carnage, each healthy body that is broken or burned in this war that didn't have to happen, is a reminder of how horribly wrong he was.

Use your car headlights to show whom you support in the election.

If you support the policies and character of John Kerry,
please drive with your headlights on during the day on Wednesday.

If you support George W. Bush,
please drive with your headlights off that night.

Thank you.

Bikes Against Bush guy arrested.

Can you believe this? The cops arrested the bikesagainstbush guy. If this isn't a case for the ACLU, I don't know what is.

Excerpt from a news report:

Bikesagainstbush creator Joshua Kinberg was arrested while taping an interview with MSNBC's Ron Reagan in Manhattan Saturday afternoon.

Kinberg was stopped by police while demonstrating the bicycle for the television interview. His bicycle is a high-tech graffiti writer, using chalk to print anti-Bush political messages sent by people via the internet. Apparently there was a question of whether or not the sprayed messages were a defacement of property.

When Kinberg showed the police sergeant how the bicycle used a non-permanent spray chalk, the sergeant seemed to agree that it wasn't defacement, at which point Kinberg asked, "am I free to go?" After conferring about it, officers decided to call superiors, then came back moments later to place Kinberg under arrest and confiscate the bicycle.

Kinberg cooperated fully with the officers as he was being handcuffed, only asking, "can I ask what I'm being arrested for?" to which no one provided an answer. As of 11:00 PM Saturday evening, he was still in custody without being charged with anything.

Bush fires two members of his Council on Bioethics, and appoints three who are closer to his beliefs.

Unbelievable. From the SF Chronicle.

Washington -- President Bush dismissed two members of his handpicked Council on Bioethics Friday -- a renowned UCSF scientist and a moral philosopher who had been among the more outspoken advocates for research on human embryo cells.

In their places he appointed three new members: a doctor who has called for more religion in public life; a political scientist who has spoken out precisely against the research that the dismissed members supported; and another who has written about the immorality of abortion and the "threats of biotechnology."

The new council members are all respected in their fields, but the turnover immediately renewed a recent string of accusations by scientists and others that Bush is increasingly allowing politics to trump science as he seeks advice on ethically contentious issues.

Last week, the Union of Concerned Scientists, a Washington interest group, released a report detailing what it called many examples of the administration's distorting the scientific process to achieve desired policy answers relating to pollution, embryo research and other topics. Sixty-two of the nation's top scientists, including a dozen Nobel laureates, endorsed the report in an accompanying statement.

Some in Congress, led by Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Los Angeles, also have been getting vocal on the topic, as have academics, scientific organizations and science journal editors.

One of the dismissed members, UCSF biologist Elizabeth Blackburn, said someone in the White House personnel office had phoned her Friday morning with the news.

"He said the White House had decided to make some changes on the council, " Blackburn said. "He wanted to express his gratitude and said I'd no longer be on the council."

She said she had had no warning and had not heard from the council's director, University of Chicago ethicist Leon Kass. She said she believed she had been let go because her political views do not match those of the president and of Kass, with whom she has often been at odds at council meetings.

"I think this is Bush stacking the council with the compliant," Blackburn said.

The other dismissed member, William May, a professor of ethics emeritus at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, is a highly respected scholar whose views on embryo research and other topics had also run counter to those of conservative council members. Efforts to reach him Friday night were unsuccessful.

Asked why Blackburn and May had been let go, White House spokeswoman Erin Healy said the two members' terms had expired in January, and they were on "holdover status." Asked whether, in fact, all the council members' terms had formally expired in January, she said they had.

Pressed as to why Blackburn and May had been singled out for dismissal, she said, "We've decided to go ahead and appoint other individuals with different expertise and experience." She would not elaborate.

Kass, who has written prolifically about biotechnology's toll on human dignity and was selected by Bush to head the council, was traveling Friday and could not be reached.

News of the dismissals surprised other scientists.

Michael Gazzaniga, a Dartmouth neuroscientist who sits on the council, said he was upset by Blackburn's ejection.

"She was one of the basic scientists who understood the biology of many of the issues we're talking about," Gazzaniga said. "It will be a loss for sure."

In San Francisco, Nobel laureate Harold Varmus, a former UCSF Medical Center researcher and National Institutes of Health director, now chief executive of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, said he was disappointed to see Blackburn off the panel.

"I can't imagine a more thoughtful person to participate on the council," said Varmus, who was in town as the featured speaker at a UCSF reception at the Asian Art Museum.

Varmus recalled that when Kass was forming the council, Kass had told him and others that he wanted a group that would represent the broad diversity of opinion on stem cell research and other controversial scientific issues.

But Varmus, who signed last week's statement accusing the administration of manipulating science for political purposes, declined to level similar accusations in this case, saying he didn't know the reasons for the dismissals.

"I want to be cautious," he said.

Bush created the council by executive order in 2001 to "advise the president on bioethical issues that may emerge as a consequence of advances in biomedical science and technology." He recently renewed its commission for another two years.

The group of scholars, scientists, theologians and others has produced several reports, including ones on human cloning, stem cell research and the use of biotechnology to enhance human beings. But the council has often found it difficult to reach consensus on issues.

The three new appointees are Dr. Benjamin Carson, the high-profile director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University; Diana Schaub, chairman of the department of political science at Loyola College in Maryland; and Peter Lawler, a professor of government at Berry College in Georgia.

Their writings suggest their tenures will be less contentious than those of their predecessors.

When not performing some of the most difficult surgeries in the world, Carson is a motivational speaker who often invokes religion and the Bible and has lamented that "we live in a nation where we can't talk about God in public. "

Schaub has effusively praised Kass and his work. In a 2002 public forum discussing the council's cloning report, she talked about research in which embryos are destroyed as "the evil of the willful destruction of innocent human life."

In a 2002 book review in the neoconservative Weekly Standard, Lawler warned that if the United States did not soon "become clear as a nation that abortion is wrong," then women would eventually be compelled to abort genetically defective babies.

Chronicle staff writer Carl T. Hall contributed to this report.

Hans' Blix new book: Bush probably knew he was hyping the case for war.

Excerpt from Reuters today:

LONDON (Reuters) - George W. Bush and Tony Blair probably knew they were exaggerating the threat from Iraq when they were making the case for war, according to former chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix.

The U.S. president and the British prime minister ignored the few caveats in reports from intelligence services on Iraq's nuclear, chemical or biological weapons programs, he writes in his account of the months leading up to the U.S.-led invasion.

Blix says it was "probable that the governments were conscious that they were exaggerating the risks they saw in order to get the political support they would not otherwise have had."

Blix was head of the International Atomic Energy Agency from 1981 to 1997 and later chief of UNMOVIC (the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission) until 2003.

At other points in his book "Disarming Iraq - The search for weapons of mass destruction," due to go on sale on Tuesday, the former Swedish diplomat appears to soften his criticism of the British and American leaders.

"I am not suggesting that Blair and Bush spoke in bad faith, but I am suggesting that it would not have taken much critical thinking on their own part or the part of their close advisers to prevent statements that misled the public," he writes.

"It is understood and accepted that governments must simplify complex international matters in explaining them to the public in democratic states.

"However they are not vendors of merchandise but leaders of whom some sincerity should be asked when they exercise their responsibility for war and peace in the world."