Bush Lengthens Tours of Duty

Political

"Bush Lengthens Tours of Duty In Combat Zones --- Step May Further Strain Military, Vex Congress; Political Timing in Play?

Source: The Wall Street Journal 04/12/2007
WASHINGTON -- In a move sure to increase the strain on the Army and aggravate tensions with Congress over an already unpopular war, the Bush administration announced that all active-duty soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan will spend 15 months in the combat zones instead of 12 months.

The military's need for the step is straightforward: It will allow the Bush administration to maintain the president's recently implemented "surge" of 30,000 troops in Iraq for at least another 12 months, if President Bush decides that is necessary.
But the announcement comes at an awkward time for the administration in its struggles to maintain both public and congressional support for the Iraq war. The White House is trying to resist growing public calls to set a timetable for an American withdrawal from Iraq. The longer tours are also certain to ratchet up tensions with lawmakers as Congress and the White House move closer to open confrontation over an emergency war-spending bill, which Mr. Bush has promised to veto unless Democrats remove provisions calling for a pullout from Iraq next year.
Republicans acknowledged deep concern about a recent drumbeat of politically unpopular news about Iraq. On Monday, the Pentagon disclosed that 13,000 National Guard troops would soon be sent to Iraq, many for the second time, an announcement that sparked fierce criticism from governors and lawmakers from both parties.
From a long-term political standpoint, though, announcing those steps actually may help the White House manage the fallout. Some Republican congressional staffers argued that it may be better for the administration, already locked in a power struggle with Capitol Hill, to be sure all the difficult Iraq news emerges at once rather than in a steady stream of leaks and announcements to extend tours of troops as the 2008 election cycle grows closer. "It may be easier to take one big hit now than to suffer a death by a thousand cuts," said one senior Republican foreign-relations staffer.
Indeed, the Pentagon made no effort to downplay its decision, but rather had Defense Secretary Robert Gates announce it at a news conference. "This policy is a difficult but necessary interim step," Mr. Gates told reporters.
Democrats and a few Republicans were quick to criticize the move, arguing that the longer deployments would push the military closer to a breaking point. "The decision to extend the tours of U.S. service members by three months is an urgent warning that the administration's Iraq policy cannot be sustained without doing terrible long-term damage to our military," said Democratic Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "Instead of escalating the war with no end in sight, we have to start bringing it to a responsible conclusion."
The Pentagon said the extension of tours in Iraq and Afghanistan to 15 months would have one beneficial effect for troops: Mr. Gates said the step would help guarantee that military personnel will have at least 12 months at home to get equipment, see their families and train for any future redeployments. "Instead of dribbling out these notifications to units, what we're trying to do here is provide some long-term predictability for the soldiers and their families about how long their deployments will be and how long they will be at home," Mr. Gates said.
Senior military officials say troops should ideally get about two years at home between 12-month deployments to both rest up and prepare for the next round of fighting. In recent months the Army has struggled to field critical pieces of gear, such as the latest armored Humvees and some advanced surveillance equipment, to soldiers in time for their deployments. Because of the relatively short period of time between deployments, troops often are able to get only a rudimentary education in the culture and tribes of the areas to which they are being sent.
The heavy demand for soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan also means there are few, if any, Army units back in the U.S. that are trained, equipped and ready to deal with other crises that might pop up around the world.
As a result, critics yesterday charged that extended tours in Iraq are breaking the Army. "The secretary's announcement extending the deployments of active-duty Army units is a stark admission that the administration's policies in Iraq are doing permanent damage to our military," said Sen. Chuck Hagel, (R., Neb.), who has been an outspoken critic of the war.
Mr. Gates rejected such suggestions, and pointed to the Army's ability to hit retention and recruiting goals as a sign that the service, while badly strained, isn't on the verge of breaking. "If the Army were broken, you would not see these kinds of retention rates and our ability to recruit," he said.
Still, the Army, which is currently in the process of adding 65,000 troops over the next five years to expand to an active-duty force of 547,000 soldiers, has had to pay a steep price to reach its recruiting goals in 2006, lowering standards to take a larger number of recruits who scored in the lower percentiles on aptitude tests or needed waivers of past criminal activity. The service has been able to meet retention goals for the enlisted ranks, but only by paying out about $735 million in retention bonuses in 2006 up from $85 million in 2003. Today, it is short about 3,000 active-duty officers, a deficiency that it says will grow to about 3,700 in 2008. It is down more than 7,500 reserve and National Guard officers, according to internal Army documents.
Yesterday's announcement doesn't necessarily indicate the administration will extend the surge of 30,000 troops into next year. Pentagon officials say they will re-evaluate their strategy in early fall. At the core of surge strategy is the belief that the extra troops can improve security and increase the chances that the current Iraqi government can win over an increasingly frustrated population.
"What we are doing . . . is buying time for the Iraqi government to provide the good governance and the economic activity that's required," said Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Mr. Gates hinted at some frustration with the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, which is dominated by Shiite Muslim parties and has been slow to reach out to Sunni Muslim groups, an essential step to ending the war. Asked if he was happy with the pace of reconciliation, Mr. Gates replied, "I'd like to see it be moving faster." "

Student Loan Changes: Sallie Mae

Political

Sallie Mae changes its student loan ways ; Deal aims to make process more openSource: USA Today 04/12/2007

"An expanding investigation of the student-loan industry is ensnaring more lenders and stoking fears that a chummy relationship between the lending industry and financial aid administrators has inflated the cost of borrowing for college.

Sallie Mae, the nation's largest private student-loan provider, agreed Wednesday to pay $2 million and to stop compensating financial aid officials with trips and other perks for serving on its student lending advisory boards. The lender -- which works with 5,600 schools and has nearly 10 million borrowers -- also agreed to stop running university call centers where its staffers often identified themselves as part of the university, rather than as part of Sallie Mae.
Its settlement with New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo comes a week after Citibank, the second-largest private lender, also agreed to a $2 million settlement. Settlement money collected from lenders will be used to educate students and their parents about loans, Cuomo said.
"The lending industry works when consumer confidence is high, and people have to trust the product they're buying," Cuomo says of his inquiry into the student loan industry.
"Our position is very simple: Loan decisions should be made in the best interests of the students, and not in the best interest of the school."
Sallie Mae acknowledges that it operated call centers for universities and paid for trips for financial aid officials to visit its loan-servicing center and to attend advisory board meetings.
The exact financial cost to students isn't clear. But Cuomo says financial arrangements between lenders and schools could add hundreds of dollars to a student's loan costs.
Preferred lender lists
At the center of the investigation are "preferred lender" lists - - recommendations made by colleges and universities to student borrowers. For a lender, the list is a powerful marketing tool. More than 90% of borrowers select a lender from their school's preferred lender list, Cuomo says.
Financial aid administrators say that in compiling the preferred lender lists, they look at a lender's customer service record, how it handles complaints and borrower discounts. But Cuomo's office has alleged that other factors have influenced their choices, including:
*Stock options. Six universities are the subject of investigations into whether their financial aid officials owned stock options in Student Loan Xpress, a lender that was on their preferred lists. CIT Group, the parent of Student Loan Xpress, has placed three top executives with the division on paid leave.
*Revenue sharing. In these arrangements, a lender offers payments to a school based on the number of students referred to the lender. Some schools have defended these deals because the money usually goes into the school's financial aid program. Cuomo has argued that they're illegal kickbacks that inflate the price that students pay for loans. Six schools have agreed to reimburse $3.27 million to students who took out loans when revenue sharing agreements were in effect.
*Inducements. Cuomo and other critics have alleged that lenders cultivate financial aid administrators with sports tickets, trips to exotic locations and other perks.
*Call centers. Some lenders also operate call centers for universities, identifying themselves as part of the university financial aid office rather than as a student-loan company. Tom Joyce, a spokesman for Sallie Mae, which operated call centers for 19 universities, says company employees identified themselves as part of the university only when college officials asked them to do so.
(Sallie Mae was created as a government-sponsored entity in 1972 but is now a private company.)
Critics worry that such arrangements inappropriately steer students to certain lenders. "How can (financial aid personnel) be providing objective information when they are actually working for the lender?" Cuomo asks.
Dallas Martin, president of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, says he doesn't believe the practices Cuomo has criticized are widespread but acknowledges that "some of the things that have come to light over the last couple of weeks have given me pause." The investigation points to the need for more disclosure, Martin says.
Helen Nunn, director of financial aid at Susquehanna University in Selinsgrove, Pa., says lenders occasionally bring food and office supplies when they visit but that doesn't influence which lenders make the school's preferred list.
Still, "I don't think it's a bad thing that lending practices are being investigated," Nunn says. "It makes people walk a little straighter."
My Rich Uncle, an aggressive new lender, argues that arrangements between schools and lenders make it difficult for it and other entrepreneurial companies to offer borrowers a better deal.
The federal government sets the maximum interest rate for federal student loans, now 6.8%. But lenders are allowed to offer a lower rate. So last year, My Rich Uncle announced that it would reduce the rate on its Stafford loan to 5.8% once a borrower started making payments.
My Rich Uncle also took out ads urging students to ask financial aid officials about inducements from other lenders. The company says no school has put it on its preferred lender list.
Worries on campus
The investigation comes as high school seniors have received financial aid offers and are in the process of deciding which school they'll attend this fall. Steven Roy Goodman, a college counselor in Washington, D.C., says two families have told him they're more closely scrutinizing communications from schools, "because in their minds, if the financial aid office can't be truthful, then how is the rest of the university to be trusted?"
Students who have already taken out loans are also wondering whether they got the best deal available. Padmini Iyer, a Columbia University senior from New Delhi, says there "is a lot of awareness" at Columbia about the allegations.
Iyer didn't use one of Columbia's preferred lenders. But she says that if she needed to borrow more, "I'd be 10 times more careful."
James Boyle, president of College Parents of America, says he's received a handful of e-mails from parents about the investigation. He says he believes the probe will lead to a "more consumer approach to student loans, with the student and their family driving the process, as opposed to schools and their preferred lenders."
The investigation could also strengthen support for the federal "direct lending" program, which has been championed by Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. Kennedy argues that the direct lending program is less costly for the federal government and free of conflicts of interest.
Direct lending schools don't have preferred lender lists. Students who attend those schools have only one option: borrowing directly from the federal government.
Critics of the direct lending program say that it's anti- competitive and that private lenders provide better service and benefits than the government. But Craig Munier, director of financial aid for the University of Nebraska, a direct-lending school, says the program allows his office to provide loans "ethically and without conflicts of interest."
Munier, who's chairman of the National Direct Student Loan Coalition, says his office still receives an occasional tin of cookies from a private lender. He says he removes the lender's name and puts the cookies out for students, or ships them to a homeless shelter.
"My colleagues will tell you that these little perks don't influence their decisions," Munier says. "My experience with banks is that they are pretty serious when it comes to money. If it's ineffective, why would they continue to do it?" "

The Price of Gas: Part V

This is my 5th post entitled "The Price of Gas"

Today I paid $2.91 per gallon to put gas in my car. I decided to only put in $14 bucks that put my tank at the half waypoint.

Pardon my French, but the current price of gas is bull shit. Everyone of these rich ass folk whom believe the general public is not affected are mistaken. There is no justified reason for the continued increases in gas prices.

There is an economic imbalance in the Oil industry and I’m speaking to you rich ass mother fuckers this imbalance will affect your business as the general public can no longer afford to purchase your products and services. Then I wonder if you will continue to sit back and say nothing about the greed found within the Oil industry. The economy is only a concept, it is Corporate Boards who set prices. This worsening situation is the fault of these irresponsible corporations.

And to you working people that buy the balcony you hear from talking heads like Rush Limbaugh and yes even our beloved President G.W. Bush, the fact of the matter is the oil industry is making profits they ARE NOT reinvesting into technology nor considering a responsibility to the cost incurred by their customers

I know this. It does not take any bit of intelligence to observe on the news that when the price of crude oil is constant or as it goes down the price at the pump continues to rise. The real reasons are black and white. It is the drive for corporate profits.

Checks & Balances Blog will join other organizations in exposing this swindle stealing Americans of our hard earned pay checks. I encourage you to not sit back and simply continue to pay these prices. This is not supply and demand at work. The profit made in the Oil industry is set at the highest of margins. No, let me emphasize NO NO NO NO other industry roll in the profits the oil industry does. So the Hell to proponents of capitalism! Don’t attempt to explain to me that these prices at the pump is simply the market at play.

Do you remember Hurricane Katrina? Gas prices were going up before and after. Seasonal mixes. Scares in Iran. What the hell? There’s always an excuse and the first person you’ll hear it from is the President. What the Hell? Impeach, he no longer is looking out for the public.

My choosing to buy a cheaper bar of soap is free capitalism. But when it comes to gas the consumer has no power. Capitalism fails in this situation. Yes I said, quote me 50 years from now. When it comes to the Oil Industry, CAPITALISM HAS FAILED!

I’m not some crazy left wing ideologue sponsored by some liberal organization. I’m a hard working American citizen that just made a financial choice not to fill my tank while I read headlines of Oil CEO’s retiring literally with a $$Billion bucks in their wallet.

What I believe to be solution; cut the fucking price of gas at the pump. Period (sorry kids).

"Nappy Headed Hoes"

Nappy describes hair texture "tightly coiled and or kinky hair. Some believe it was a term created by white people to bring African Americans down like the "n" word '******'.

A Hoe is a derogatory term for a woman, taken to mean that she is malicious, spiteful, domineering, intrusive, unpleasant or sexually promiscuous.

I just had to comment on these remarks by Don Imus. The critics are right Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson can go a little over board but this person called hard working female college athletes "nappy headed hoes". Ha Ha, what was he drinking? A reasonable comment for some singers whom I will not mention whom market themselves as such, but these respectable young women didn't deserve this label.

The coach called these racist and sexist remarks. I agree. Go Rutgers!

Update: 04/12/07
Statement from Steve Capus, President, NBC News

MSNBCSource: 11 April 2007

NBC News President Steve Capus released the following statement regarding comments made last week by Don Imus on his radio show regarding the Rutgers University women's basketball team.

Effective immediately, MSNBC will no longer simulcast the "Imus in the Morning" radio program. This decision comes as a result of an ongoing review process, which initially included the announcement of a suspension. It also takes into account many conversations with our own employees. What matters to us most is that the men and women of NBC Universal have confidence in the values we have set for this company. This is the only decision that makes that possible. Once again, we apologize to the women of the Rutgers basketball team and to our viewers. We deeply regret the pain this incident has caused.

WHO'S BEHIND CRIMINAL BOT NETWORKS?

Interesting Tech article. I don't know much about this stuff but why don't anti-spam, virus and spy ware companies assemble teams to target these internet criminals? Also once these hackers demand money to be transfered via bank accounts can't law enforcement cooperate internationally to track down these dudes? It is in the best interest of the online community and e-commerce for government and business to work together and give due attention to this issue.

"Posted: Tuesday, April 10 at 07:00 am CT by Bob Sullivan
They have infected perhaps 100 million computers with viruses, turning the PCs around the world into an army of willing criminal assistants known as “bots.” They are using those PCs to send out billions of spam e-mails and make millions of dollars by attacking Web sites and extorting their owners. They have even attacked the core computers that keep the Internet running smoothly. Who are they?

The answer to that question is elusive, but there are a few clues.
In part one of this series, we described the epidemic of hijacked computers that’s swept the Internet. Controlled by malicious programs, the computers are turned into robots, or bots, that are directed by criminals known as bot herders.

Part two looked at how profitable the bot business has become, leading hackers to engage in gang warfare in cyberspace for control of these hijacked computers -- a digital battle that has spilled out onto the Internet’s Main Street.

Today, we examine who is behind these networks of infected computers.
For years, computer hackers typically were precocious, anti-social teen-agers who committed digital violence just to get attention. But computer crime has grown up, and grown into a big business. Now it is used by highly organized gangs to steal millions of dollars.

The top gangs, most agree, are in Russia, Eastern Europe and Brazil, although there also are a few up-and-coming cybercrime syndicates in Asia.

Cybercriminals tend to be talented computer programmers who can make much more money stealing than working, the experts agree. There is so much money to be made in cybercrime that some observers speculate that terrorists are using it to raise money and support their organizations.
Computer security experts disagree on whether terrorists are involved in cybercrime, but there is one sure sign that computer crime has become a much more sober affair: Many experts interviewed for this story shied away from talking about the topic of who’s behind botnets, pointing to concerns for family safety.

"When I got into this, it was kind of a game," said one expert who spoke on condition of anonymity. "Now, it's very serious. I wouldn't want my name attached (to comments about the topic)."
That's a new sentiment in an industry that has often been criticized for using hyperbole to generate publicity.
Recruited by professionals
Bot herders are still typically young – perhaps 18 to 25 -- often only a little bit older than a teenage hacker, says David Marcus, security research and communications manager with McAfee. They are nearly always men. And they often live in an area where traditional, big-money computing jobs are difficult to find.
"There are limited ways to make money," he said. "This is the way for them to make a lot." Marcus said he thinks organized crime is behind a lot of bot activity, but Mafiosi aren’t coding Trojan horse programs. Instead, their money funds hacker operations and is used to recruit computer savvy youngsters, he believes.

CLICK FOR RELATED CONTENT
THE LOWDOWN ON 'BOTS'IS YOUR COMPUTER A CRIMINAL?FIVE TIPS TO BOLSTER VISTA SECURITY"They watch for bright kids and they start them on small tasks, like ‘Find me 100 passwords and I'll give you 1,000 rubles,’” he said.
In more aggressive recruitment programs, organized crime will actually pay for a computer geek to get through college, essentially a hacker scholarship, said Marcus.
Some say there are as many as 45,000 different botnets sending out spam and being used for other cybercrimes, but Professor Randy Vaughn of Baylor University said he believes there are as few as six or seven major bot gangs and as few as 1,000 criminals controlling all the infected computers.

“And the number of genuine genius bot programmers is probably much smaller than that,” he said. “In each group there are a few geniuses and there are a bunch of groupies who hang around on the botnet and attempt to gain credibility with the botnet operators.”
The groupies hope to learn enough that they can control their own vast botnets, but in the meantime they act as money handlers or perform other menial tasks for the “genius” programmers, Vaughn said.

E-commerce nightmare. Bot herders aren't necessarily spammers, but the two are often linked, as virtually all spam is now sent from hijacked computers, experts say.
The Spamhaus top 10 list of worst spammers is now populated by Russians, Ukrainians and a Chinese ring.

Craig Schiller, a professor at Portland State University and author of “Botnets: The Killer Web Applications,” said those who designed the Internet wanted a system that would allow buyers and sellers to connect from around the globe. They had no idea that the network would become a platform for global crime, he said.
“This is the e-commerce that people dreamed about but didn't realize it was a nightmare,” said Schiller.
The arrest of three Russian bot herders last year offers a rare glimpse into the world where such nightmares are born.
Three men -- Alexander Petrov, Denis Stepanov and Ivan Maksakov – spent a year terrorizing e-commerce sites as part of a ring of 16 criminals. The ring used armies of computers to overwhelm gambling Web sites and other firms that could ill-afford Internet down time, then extorted money from the operators to halt the traffic flood.
Mikko Hypponen, a security expert at F-Secure, acted as a consultant to one victim, an online CD and DVD retailer. The store eventually paid a ransom of $40,000 to get its site back, he said.
In all, the hackers took in about $3.9 million in payments, according to evidence presented at their trial.
“And many companies invested much, much more paying to build a defense against these attacks,” Hypponen said. Russian media estimated the total damages caused by the group at $79 million.
The ransom money was wired in small amounts to 10 different bank accounts in Riga, Latvia, Hypponen said. So-called “money mules” – middle men who simply help move stolen money from one account to another, usually crossing borders along the way – picked it up from these accounts and wired the money to accounts in St. Petersburg or Moscow.
Another set of mules eventually brought the money to the small city of Balakov in western Russia. It was in Balakov that Maksakov, a 22-year-old student at the Balakov Institute of Engineering, Technology and Management, issued orders for the botnet attacks, according to Russian media reports. But while the orders were given in Balakov, the main computer server that controlled the attack was in Houston.
Russian police nabbed the threesome with the help of Scotland Yard by following the money trail, Hypponen said.
The three Russians were sentenced to eight years apiece in jail by a Balakov court last fall. But Hypponen said most of the gang remains at large, including several suspects in Kazakhstan.
Their exploits don’t rival those of Brazilian gangs, experts say. In 2005, more than 50 Brazilians were arrested after allegedly stealing $33 million with targeted, Trojan horse program that stole online banking passwords.
Domingo Montanaro, a computer forensics expert and banking consultant in Sao Paolo, Brazil, said Internet crime gangs there operate almost with impunity. In a recent case, he said, he helped nab a ring of 100 criminals that had gained access to 10,000 Brazilian bank accounts.
“Criminals in Brazil do some incredible stuff because police cannot fight them anymore,” he said. “They are not even using techniques to hide themselves. We only arrest maybe 3 or 4 percent of them.”
Driven by revenge
Some attacks are driven by revenge as well as financial gain.
Last year, a noted Russian spammer nicknamed PharmaMaster – he usually advertises pharmaceuticals – felt his business was endangered by a Silicon Valley anti-spam startup named Blue Security.
PharmaMaster initiated an attack that crippled Blue Security’s Web site. The firm countered by placing information about the attack on its corporate blog, hosted by popular blog site TypePad, owned by Six Apart Ltd. PharmaMaster then hired a bot herder to conduct a denial-of-service attack that shut down all of Six Apart’s blogs, including those hosted on its Typepad.com service.
Eventually, Blue Security surrendered and got out of the business of anti-spam software.
“PharmaMaster paid $1 million to take out Blue Security,” or about $2,000 an hour for the attack, said Schiller, the Portland State professor. “But (PharmaMaster) was making $3 million a month, so it was worth it.”
At the time, security experts said the Blue Security attack was so severe that only a few of the world’s largest corporations would have been able to withstand it.
Given the power that the bot herders wield, questions inevitably arise about whether terrorists are behind such crimes. There is no clear answer, and security experts are divided on the issue.
Terrorism link?
The discussion was energized by Gartner security analyst Avivah Litan last month, when she issued a report describing the recent arrest of about 50 hackers in Egypt and Lebanon.
“My hypothesis is that the computer brains are still in Russia and Eastern Europe, but some of their operations are being financed by terror organizations. I am hearing that,” she said. “If you were terrorists, wouldn’t you get in touch with these guys?”
Hypponen disagrees, saying there isn’t any evidence that terrorists are playing with bot networks.
“Sure it could happen some day. But I don’t have any information, or even any hearsay, that links this to terrorism,” he said.
There is plenty of evidence that organizations like al-Qaida are willing to use the Internet to get attention or to communicate, counters Schiller.
“I’d be surprised if (terrorists) weren’t using these (botnets),” he said. “In their charters they talk about using terrorism to further their aims. They are inclined to use technology against us; it is a huge force multiplier for them.”
Botnets are indeed a textbook example of a “force multiplier” -- one computer, telling 100 other computers, telling 10,000 others computers to attack someone or something.
That makes it inevitable that terrorists bent on disrupting communications and financial systems will at least attempt to harness their power.
But while terrorism’s link to botnets is tenuous at best, there is no doubt that real-world criminals already are using them to make big money. And given the alarm bells being rung in almost all corners of the computer security world, it seems likely that the botnet problem is going to get worse before it gets better. "

comments welcome

Will Bush Compromise on Iraq?

Political

Bush urges talks over war funding, warns clock is ticking
Source: Agence France Presse 04/10/2007
FAIRFAX, Virginia, April 10, 2007 (AFP) -

US President George W. Bush on Tuesday invited leading US lawmakers to talks to end a stalemate over funding the unpopular war in Iraq, warning there was no time to lose.

Leading Democrats, while not refusing the invitation outright, said they would reject any talks with preset conditions in the dispute over a war spending bill that includes a schedule for troop pullout from Iraq.

"When it comes to funding our troops, we have no time to waste," Bush said, inviting "leaders from ... both political parties, to meet with me at the White House next week."

"I know we have our differences over the best course. These differences should not prevent us from getting our troops the funding they need," he said during a visit to war veterans in Fairfax, Virginia, close to Washington.

Democrats, who control both houses of Congress, are trying to end the war in Iraq by tying military funding to a withdrawal of US troops in 2008.

The House and Senate, which have both passed bills with different deadlines, must iron out the differences between their bills and send one to the president for his signature to become law.
With Iraq this week marking the fourth anniversary of the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said he would reject any talks with preset conditions.

"The president is inviting us to the White House with preconditions. It's not the way we should operate. He must deal with Congress, we are an independent branch of government," Reid said.

The White House was careful to make clear that the invitation did not signal any readiness to compromise, and Bush repeated his vow to veto any legislation that ties release of war spending funds to a timetable for troop withdrawal.

"We can discuss the way forward on a bill that is a clean bill, a bill that funds our troops, without an artificial timetable for withdrawal and without handcuffing our generals on the ground," Bush said.

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino stressed that the president's invitation was "not a meeting in order to compromise."

"This is a meeting to discuss the way forward. Because the Democrats have to admit that they don't have the votes to override the president's veto. And at the same time they say that they want to fund the troops," she added.

"Maybe they need to hear again from the president about ... why he thinks that it is foolish to set arbitrary timetables for withdrawal."

In a joint statement Reid issued with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, they said "any discussion of an issue as critical as Iraq must be accomplished by conducting serious negotiations without any preconditions.

"The president is demanding we renew his blank check for war without end ... we renew our request to work with him to produce a bipartisan bill that provides our troops and our veterans with every penny they need, but in turn, demands accountability."

Perino called the Democrats' statement "a knee-jerk reaction that's unfortunate."
Bush has called on a skeptical public to give his new "surge" strategy time to work, saying the commanders on the ground in Iraq were already seeing "encouraging signs" that an extra 25,000 troops being deployed in the country were helping to secure Baghdad.

"The Democrats who pass these bills know that I'll veto them, and they know that this veto will be sustained. Yet they continue to pursue the legislation. And as they do, the clock is ticking for our troops in the field," Bush warned.

He said the military would soon notify Congress, which holds the power of the purse, that the army would need to transfer 1.6 billion dollars from other military accounts to cover the shortfall.

This was on top of 1.7 billion dollars already transferred in March, the president said.
If by May no bill on funding the war has been passed into law, the army could have to slow or freeze funding for depots where equipment is repaired and mull a delay to military training programs, Bush said.

"These actions are only the beginning. And the longer Congress delays, the worse the impact on the men and women of the armed forces will be," Bush said.

Obama's Hilary Youtube video

Barrack Obama's campaign produced a negative video opposing Hilary Clinton on youtube. If this is the "hopeful" tone his campaign expects to take along with his zero results as a Senator then I'd advise Mr. Obama today to drop out of the race for president.

Snoop Dogg Says: ''F*ck Bill O'Reilly!'' TBOHipHop.net

Bill O'Reilly definately is a prick. Snoop Dog has a Constitutional right to own a gun.

Bill O'Reilly spends all this time critizing others while he is a sexual harraser. O'Reilly needs another job.

U.N. Climate Report on Global Warming

"There is a 90% of certainity behing global warming. " This finding was not produced by a meeting of tree huggers but it was reached through international consensus, including the United States.

After five days of debate and an all-night, down-to-the-wire battle, scientists and government officials from around the world agreed Friday to a new report outlining the effects of global warming on the planet.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations scientific group, released its findings Friday in Brussels, Belgium. Although haggling over the fine print diluted some of the original language, the final report is stark in its depiction of what's in store for the planet: flooding, droughts, extinctions of plants and animals, and high costs for everyone.

This is the fourth report from the U.N. climate panel in 17 years, and it has proved to be one of the hardest-hitting ones. The first chapter came out in February after tough negotiations. It said that scientists are more than 90 percent sure that humans are warming the planet.

In the latest report, the panel addressed the impacts of global warming, and what their assessment turned up is troubling: Many coastal communities will flood. Severe droughts will damage crops, and there will be stronger storms, hurricanes and heat waves. Many coral reefs will die, and many of the world's plants and animals will be at higher risk of extinction.

But scientists who wrote the report wanted to say they had "very high confidence" in their findings. That means they think they have a nine out of 10 chance of being right. That started a fight, according to Patricia Romero Lankao, one of the scientific authors, who works at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.

"Some countries, like China and Saudi Arabia, didn't want to accept our statement that it was very likely that global warming was causing those impacts on physical and biological systems," Lankao said.

China is expected to pass the United States as the leading emitter of greenhouse gases that warm the planet. Saudi Arabia owns the largest reserves of oil. Officials representing China and Saudi Arabia won that fight, striking the word "very" and reducing certainty to eight out of 10.

Lankao says European scientists also wanted to stress how seriously the economies of poor nations in particular would be damaged, and how little they actually contributed to warming compared to industrialized countries. Lankao says the U.S. delegation sought to tone down that language.
Despite the compromises, the final document makes it clear that big impacts are on the way, and that the world is already changing.

"Examples are earlier melting of lake ice in the Great Lakes and later freezing; plants, flowers blooming sooner; the migratory patterns of birds changing — mostly distinctly through the second half of the 20th century," says climate scientist Linda Mearns, also from the atmospheric center in Colorado, who contributed to the study.

Friday's report moves the climate debate into new territory, she added.
"The real heart of the climate change issue is now shifting more from the climate science, the physical science, and more into the impacts, and then also issues of mitigation, about how we reduce greenhouse gases," she said.

The IPCC report isn't all dire news. Some temperate regions, such as North America, will see longer growing seasons for crops, for example. But effects will differ regionally. In a study published this week in the journal Science, climate researcher Richard Seager at Columbia University says the southwestern United States could see the kind of long-term drought that caused the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

"The overall pattern, if you were going to distill it down to something very simple, is that the drier regions get drier and the wet regions get wetter," Seager said.
Many of the hardest-hit regions are where the poor live — in Africa and in many other parts of the tropics. But climate scientist Mearns says wealthy countries such as the United States shouldn't think they'll escape.

"Poor populations within a country will probably suffer more," Mearns said. "And of course, one can take the example of Katrina — and the people who suffered most there were the poorer residents."
There's more to come from the U.N. panel. They'll report in May on what kinds of things can be done to lessen the impacts of climate change.

NPR Reports: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9433825

Commentary: The G.W. Bush administration asserts that technology will solve problems with climate change. Such a policy is baseless with no sincere intention to address the issue. At the end of 8 years of Republican governance the United States has produced nor promoted any significant technology to combat glaobal warming. Policy must be change now, it is possible for government and business to lead such a change in far less than 8 years.

Wherever I Go - Ron Winans

Happy Easter America.