In his new book, The Assault on Reason, Al Gore pleads, "We must stop tolerating the rejection and distortion of science. We must insist on an end to the cynical use of pseudo-studies known to be false for the purpose of intentionally clouding the public's ability to discern the truth." Gore repeatedly asks that science and reason displace cynical political posturing as the central focus of public discourse.
If Gore really means what he writes, he has an opportunity to make a difference by leading by example on the issue of global warming.
A cooperative and productive discussion of global warming must be open and honest regarding the science. Global warming threats ought to be studied and mitigated, and they should not be deliberately exaggerated as a means of building support for a desired political position.
Many of the assertions Gore makes in his movie, ''An Inconvenient Truth,'' have been refuted by science, both before and after he made them. Gore can show sincerity in his plea for scientific honesty by publicly acknowledging where science has rebutted his claims.
Gore has made a fortune off the gullibility of the American people. He can never go back and admit he's a charlatan and a fraud, and after his silly climate change concerts next week, he cannot possibly admit he's one of the masterminds behind one of the greatest hoaxes of all time.
WE — the human species — have arrived at a moment of decision. It is unprecedented and even laughable for us to imagine that we could actually make a conscious choice as a species, but that is nevertheless the challenge that is before us.
Our home — Earth — is in danger. What is at risk of being destroyed is not the planet itself, but the conditions that have made it hospitable for human beings.
We figure many more will be rolled up in the next couple of days, but at least it's a start. Still no identification, but two suspects have been bagged. My suspicions are they may have originated somewhere in the map above. Hint: Look toward the upper left.
British police said on Sunday they had arrested two people in northern England in connection with an attempted car bombing in London and an incident at Glasgow airport in which a car was rammed into the building.
"Police have this evening arrested two people in connection with events in London and Scotland on the 29th and 30th of June," London's Metropolitan Police said in a statement.
The arrests were made in the county of Cheshire by counter-terrorism officers, the statement said.
Two men rammed a petrol-filled, four-wheel-drive vehicle into Glasgow airport on Saturday in what police called a terrorist attack. The men were arrested and one was taken to a hospital in critical condition with burns.
The attack came barely 36 hours after police thwarted a possible al Qaeda plot in London in which two cars loaded with fuel, gas canisters and nails were left in the centre of the capital poised to detonate.
A caller to BBC television said he had been in a car on a motorway in Cheshire when traffic had been brought to a halt by unmarked police cars in all three lanes.
The man, named as Peter Whitehead, said he saw a woman in what he called Muslim dress and two men in suits step out of a car which had pulled to the side of the motorway.
Six Palestinians were killed Saturday evening in two separate airstrikes in the Gaza Strip. At around 8:30 pm, an Israel Air Force fired a missile which killed three members of the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades. One of the casualties was identified as Salah Kopah, a senior group member in the Strip.
The Palestinians reported that the three casualties were members of the Shahid Ayman Jouda cells, which took part in a terror attack carried out recently by the Islamic Jihad in Kissufim. The three were hit near a welding workshop, where they were apparently manufacturing ammunition.
Earlier, three members of the al-Quds Brigades, the Islamic Jihad's military wing, were killed as an IAF aircraft fired at least one missile at a car in the southern Gaza Strip town of Khan Younis. The airstrike took place at around 5:30 pm.
A spokesman for the al-Quds Brigades told Ynet that all three casualties were members of the organization, contradicting the Palestinians' initial report, according to which the three were members of the Salah al-Din Brigades, the Popular Resistance Committees military wing.
Among the casualties were Muhammad al-Raei, a prominent member of the organization who fired an RPG missile at an IDF armored personnel carrier at the Philadelphi route on May 2004. An IDF officer and four troops were killed in the incident.
Ask any Czech who is old enough to remember the Communist years what comes to mind when they hear the name Cerne Jezero, or the Black Lake. They will tell you that it is in Bohemia's Sumava region and the place where several chests containing Nazi secret police documents were found. The fact that the chests were actually placed there by Czechoslovakia's own secret police, the StB, only came to light after one of their agents defected and wrote a book about the operation. But now, the original StB documents with detailed information about the plan can be found on the web.
Back in 1964, four chests believed to contain secret Nazi intelligence documents were found at the bottom of the Black Lake. They were retrieved by a group of divers during the making of a Czechoslovak TV documentary. Since it was believed that the Nazis had sunk a number of chests with stolen treasure and secret documents in the lake, the Czechoslovak intelligence was called to the scene. The chests were taken to Prague and the interior minister at the time proudly declared that a list of all Gestapo collaborators was amongst other secret documents in the chest.
At the time, nobody even suspected that the chests had been put there just a few weeks earlier - naturally not by the Nazis but by Czechoslovakia's own intelligence service. Together with the KGB, they had been in possession of documents on Nazi collaborators since the end of the war but were waiting for an opportunity to make them useful. The time was ripe in the 1960s as the documents proved that West Germany's secret service was still using a network of agents that also served the Nazis and that influential government officials had already served under Adolf Hitler. Interior ministry historian Petr Cajthaml: "It was the Cold War and the goal was to re-awaken interest and discredit West German politicians. Another goal was to have the statute of limitations for war criminals, which would have expired in 1965, extended. Following the extensive media coverage, the countries that suffered during WWII demanded that the statute be prolonged. Germany eventually extended it and then agreed that there be no limited time in which their war criminals could be tried."
The divers that retrieved the chests were actually led to them by a man named Ladislav Bittman, who in reality was an StB agent specialising in misinformation campaigns. To make the chests look authentic, the corrosion process was studied carefully so that the rust on the metal parts looked like the chests had been in the water for twenty years.
"The chests that were put there contained normal white paper as the real documents that were later shown at the press conference got to Czechoslovakia from the Soviet Union weeks after the chests were retrieved. The first time that the disinformation campaign came to light was in 1972. Ladislav Bittman, who himself ran the operation emigrated in 1968 and made the operation public a few years later in a book called 'The Deception Game' that came out in the United States."
Details of the operation can now be found on the internet. The Czech civilian intelligence has posted the original StB files on the operation dubbed "Neptune" on its website.
Of course, much of the media is trying to downplay the story, and you'll just love the Reuters account.
A four-wheel-drive vehicle crashed into the main terminal at Glasgow airport on Saturday and exploded in flames, a day after police foiled a possible al Qaeda plot to detonate two car bombs in central London.
A Glasgow police spokeswoman said there were no immediate reports of any injuries and said the blaze was under control.
Witnesses told the BBC that the vehicle, a Land Rover or a Jeep Cherokee, had exploded shortly after crashing into the glass front doors of the terminal, and said there was a heavy stench of petrol.
"It raced across the central reservation and went straight into the building," said taxi driver Ian Crosby outside the terminal.
So reading the first four paragraphs of the story, one key detail is missing. Who was driving the vehicle?
Crosby said a stocky Asian man had got out of the car and was quickly wrestled to the ground by bystanders.
"It would appear to me to have been a deliberate attack. I think this was a terrorist attack," Crosby said.
Oh, so it wasn't the vehicle that carried out the attack.
Two men — one of them engulfed in flames — were in the SUV, witnesses told BBC News executive Helen Boaden, who was at the airport at time. She described the men as South Asian.
Clarkson described one of the men as a large South Asian man.
"His whole body was on fire.... He was just talking gibberish," he told the BBC.
Grey described a struggle between police and one of the men in the car.
"An Asian guy had been pulled out of the car by two police officers he was trying to fight off and they'd got him on the floor," he told the BBC.
Boaden said police "wrestled him to the ground — the fire was burning through his clothes — and finally put him out with a fire extinguisher."
Why did they waste a perfectly good fire extinguisher? Should have let him burn.
The idea of federal prosecutors putting someone in jail for partisan gain is shocking. But the United States attorneys scandal has made clear that the Bush Justice Department acts in shocking ways. We hope that the appeals court that hears Mr. Siegelman’s case will give it the same hard look that another appeals court recently gave the case of Georgia Thompson. Ms. Thompson, a low-level employee in a Democratic administration in Wisconsin, was found to have been wrongly convicted of corruption by another United States attorney.
Strangely, the Times never seemed to have any problem going after Tom Delay. I guess "partisan witchhunts" are fine so long as it's a Republican brought up on frivolous charges.
Former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman and former HealthSouth Chief Executive Officer Richard Scrushy were sentenced to prison terms today for their roles in a bribery, conspiracy and fraud scheme, Assistant Attorney General Alice S. Fisher of the Criminal Division and Acting U.S. Attorney Louis V. Franklin Sr. of the Middle District of Alabama announced today.
At a hearing today in Montgomery, Ala., U.S. District Judge Mark Fuller sentenced Siegelman to 88 months in prison, and ordered him to pay $50,000 in fines. Siegelman was convicted by a federal jury in June 2006 of seven counts -- bribery, conspiracy to commit honest services wire fraud, four counts of honest services mail fraud, and obstruction of justice.
Scrushy was sentenced to 82 months in prison and fined $150,000. Scrushy was convicted of six counts -- bribery, conspiracy to commit honest services mail fraud, and four counts of honest services mail fraud.
No, none of these charges seem to merit prosecution according to the Times.
Former astronaut Lisa Marie Nowak didn't wear diapers during her 950-mile road trip to confront a romantic rival, her lawyer said Friday, disputing one of the more bizarre details to emerge from the case.
"The biggest lie in this preposterous tale that has been told is that my client drove from Houston, Texas, to Orlando, Fla., nonstop, wearing a diaper," Donald Lykkebak said after filing motions to suppress evidence in Nowak's criminal case.
The tidbit about diapers was in the police report filed after Nowak's arrest in February.
Nowak was asked "why she had baby diapers," according to the charging affidavit by Officer William "Chris" Becton. "Mrs. Nowak said that she didn't want to stop and use the restroom."
There were diapers in her car when she was arrested, but they were toddler-size, Lykkebak said. They were leftover from 2005 when Nowak, a mother of three, and her family evacuated during Hurricane Rita, he said.
The diaper detail became fodder for late-night TV comics and talk radio. "It jeopardizes our ability to have a fair trial when the accused is the butt of jokes," Lykkebak said.
No doubt the left will dismiss this as a result of our "occupation" of Iraq, after conveniently overlooking Saddam Hussein's mass graves over the years.
The U.S. military said on Saturday it had uncovered 35 to 40 bodies in a mass grave south of Falluja, in Iraq's Sunni dominated Anbar province.
A Falluja hospital source said 35 bodies had been retrieved and were being finger-printed to establish their identity.
The military said the killings were relatively recent and the bodies had been bound and bore gunshot wounds.
The mass grave was found late on Friday near a place called Ferris, roughly 35 km (22 miles) south of the city of Falluja, after a tip-off from a local, it said.
Meanwhile, a fierce shootout in Sadr City reduced the terrorist supply by over two dozen, though since we're creating more terrorists, surely there will be more where they came from.
U.S. troops killed about 26 suspected militants in Baghdad's Sadr City on Saturday in one of the fiercest clashes in the Shi'ite stronghold since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
Residents of the east Baghdad slum district, a bastion of fiery Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mehdi Army militia, said the fighting lasted six hours and involved helicopter-fired missile strikes.
The U.S. military said American forces staged two separate raids into Sadr City targeting militants suspected of close ties to "Iranian terror networks" and who were responsible for bringing Iranian weapons into Iraq.
"Coalition Forces killed an estimated 26 terrorists and detained 17 suspected secret cell terrorists during the two operations," a U.S. military statement said. There were no civilian casualties, the U.S. military said separately.
On June 24, hundreds gathered at the former site of Ležáky village, east Bohemia, to commemorate the 65th anniversary of its destruction at the hands of the Nazis.
A week prior, on June 18, a similar group gathered at a church on New Town’s Resslová street to remember the seven Czechoslovak Resistance fighters who died there 65 years ago during a shootout with the Gestapo.
Though separated by time and place, both tragedies were the fallout from one morning in May 1942 when resistance fighters attacked a Nazi convoy in Prague 8. As a result of that day’s events, one Nazi despot died, thousands of civilians were murdered and the future of the nation was cemented.
“We are talking about the assassination of the most important officer of the Third Reich,” says military historian Michal Burian of the killing of Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich. “The Czech nation paid a bloody tax for this deed, but it had declared its resistance to the occupation clearly in front of all the world.”
But undercutting both remembrance ceremonies this month was a growing swell of protest that the government has failed to properly commemorate this episode of history.
Speaking at the memorial ceremony in Ležáky, Senate Chairman Petr Pithart told the Czech News Agency that a planned memorial chapel at the site of the razed village has yet to be built.
And years of stalling mean there’s still no proper memorial in Prague 8 to the two men who assassinated Heydrich. Plans for one have snagged on disagreements over the nature of the memorial and its location.
Fed up with waiting, two citizens’ groups secretly erected their own illegal memorials June 10 and 18. The two plaques were placed near the site of the assassination.
One of the groups, an amateur historians’ organization calling itself AMEC, has been considering the move since 2005, said spokesman Filip Barták. “I am not sure if there is the political will to build a memorial,” he says. “We didn’t want to celebrate or criticize the assassination, we just wanted to commemorate this act.”
While local officials aren’t pleased with the illegal memorials, they don’t plan to take action either, says Prague 8 spokeswoman Helena Šmídová. The decision to remove them is up to the owners of the property.
Shortly after 10 a.m. May 27, 1942, British-trained resistance fighters Jan Kubiš, a Czech, and Jozef Gabcík, a Slovak, hid near a tight curve in the road in Prague 8.
In their sights: Reinhard Heydrich, acting head of the Nazi-controlled Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Renowned for his brutality, Heydrich was close to Adolf Hitler and was one of the primary architects of the Holocaust. The plan for his assassination, dubbed Operation Anthropoid, had been hatched in the United Kingdom under the supervision of exiled President Edvard Beneš.
As Heydrich’s car slowed to navigate the bend in the road, Gabcík leaped out and attempted to shoot Heydrich, but his submachine gun jammed, says military historian Burian. Kubiš threw a grenade, which exploded near the car’s fender. The assassins made their getaway and Heydrich died a week later from an infection caused by the shrapnel.
Furious, Hitler ordered the killing of thousands of civilians, resistance fighters and their collaborators. The villages of Lidice and Ležáky were razed and nearly all inhabitants killed. Kubiš and Gabcík were betrayed by a comrade and died inside the Church of Sts. Cyril and Methodius on Resslová street, where they were hiding. Some of the men, including Kubiš, died from Gestapo bullets, while others, like Gabcík, committed suicide, Burian says.
Despite the bloody reprisals, the killing of Heydrich was symbolically important for a nation downtrodden after the 1938 Munich Agreement, in which the United Kingdom, France and Italy handed parts of Bohemia and Moravia over to Hitler in an attempt to slake his thirst for war.
“The assassination and the following reprisals … led to one of the most important moments of World War II from the point of view of Czechoslovakia: the renouncement of the Munich Agreement by Britain and France,” Burian says.
In the district where the assassination took place, Kubiš and Gabcík each have a street named in their memory. At the church where they died, a memorial stands. In the town of Leamington Spa in central England, where the men were trained, there’s a memorial fountain.While in Prague 8, the bureaucrats sit with their thumbs up their brains.Still, some local residents and historians have for years been calling for a memorial at the site of the assassination.
It’s a work in progress, says Prague 8 spokeswoman Šmídová. “We have been negotiating with military experts and historians” for nearly a year, she says. “We have to agree on the text, location and the appearance of the memorial. You can’t rush these things.”Hell no, lady, let's not rush into any damn thing. It's been sixteen years since liberation from the damn Russians and sixty-five since the Nazi bastard Heydrich was sent to his just reward. Yet, proof that Absurdistan still exists comes from your very words.
The two illegal plaques have created more problems than they’ve solved, she says.
“The experts already argue about the text of one of them. … Also, one text contains a grammatical mistake,” she says.My, my, my! And what does your proposed text say, sweetheart? Give me a friggin' break!
What’s more, the AMEC memorial has since disappeared, less than two weeks after it went up.
Barták is unfazed by this setback. “I think it was brought down by opponents of the assassination or by the town hall. … [But] we think that our plaque has met our expectations and completed its mission — it started a discussion,” he says. “We hope the authorities will finally install an official one.”Agreed, but let's not hold our breath waiting for damnable nitwits like Helena Šmídová to act. At its current pace, Prague 8's division of Absurdistan may have a decision by May 27, 2042.
Maybe.
Jean-Pierre was unavailable to demonstrate his superior level of ignorance.
Quick! To the Congressional Investigation Mobile!.....
A Congressional committee is preparing to investigate Vice President Dick Cheney's role in water-management decisions that killed more than 70,000 salmon in Oregon. Three dozen West Coast Democrats requested the Resources Committee investigation after the Washington Post reported of Cheney's involvement in managing flows from the Klamath River in 2002.
The Post reported that Cheney personally contacted the Interior Department official in charge of the program to push for more irrigation water be delivered from the river to drought-striken farmers and ranchers.
Environmentalists and officials in California and Washington blame the federal policy, which critics say violated the Endangered Species Act, was responsible for the deaths of 70,000 salmon, whose corpses lined the banks of the river. The Post said the plan was enacted "because of Cheney's intervention."
Judge Richard Posner, a possible future Supreme Court nominee, also wants more surveillance of Muslim populations across North America and an end to counter-terrorism efforts being "hog-tied" by the US constitution. A liberal judge seeing the light, maybe there is hope for this country....
A TOP-RANKING US judge has stunned a conference of Australian judges and barristers in Chicago by advocating secret trials for terrorists, more surveillance of Muslim populations across North America and an end to counter-terrorism efforts being "hog-tied" by the US constitution.
Judge Richard Posner, a supposedly liberal-leaning jurist regarded by many as a future US Supreme Court candidate, said traditional concepts of criminal justice were inadequate to deal with the terrorist threat and the US had "over-invested" in them.
"We have to fight terrorism with our strengths, and our strengths evolve around technology, including the technology of surveillance," said Justice Posner, a prolific legal scholar who sits on the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.
"Are there terrorist plots that are at a formative stage among the large US Muslim community of two to three million people? In the 600,000 Canadian Muslim population, are there people planning attacks on the US?
"What we have to do is discover the extent of the terrorist threat to the US. There is a danger, and it demands a rethinking of some of our conventional views on the limits of national security measures.
"We should think of surveillance as preventative, not punitive. We should think of controls that have nothing to do with warrants or traditional criminal justice to prevent abuses."
Judge Posner said the US temper and culture could not sustain repeated terrorist attacks
Here is just a small part of the lastest update from Bill Roggio over at the Fourth Rail.
Marines.com reported the operation in the Thar Thar region is called China Shop, and the 3/1 found three large caches on June 25 and 26. "The first cache reportedly contained more than 121 IEDs, more than half of which were already armed. The devices included “speed bump” IEDs, often placed or buried in roads ... The second find was the largest of the three. A house search uncovered a room containing a high-explosive stack nearly three feet high draped in a United Nations flag. Battalion personnel estimate the material could have been used to construct more than 80 large IEDs ... The third cache ... [contained] various small arms munitions, a rocket-propelled grenade, 10 pressure plate IEDs and other bomb making material."
Once again slapping The Goracle and his psychophants, President Vaclav Klaus discussed the status of the current 'debate' about 'global warming'. He did so Thursday, prior to the Prague screening of the UK's The Great Global Warming Swindle.
Czech President Vaclav Klaus again warned against the hysteria that he said surrounds the global warming issue at the presentation of the controversial British documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle in a Prague cinema today.
Klaus said the unilateral campaign accompanying the issue reminds him of similar [propaganda] "massages" under the communist regime.
"This is no belittling of communism that some permanently try to reproach me for. It is only a warning that the methods, practices and withholding of counter-arguments were applied here in the past already," Klaus said.
The hysteria threatens freedom and democracy, he continued. "Much is at stake," he added.
Klaus said he welcomes the film by Martin Durkin as an attempt to bring the debate on climate changes "back to the ground" and towards reasonable thinking.
"It would be wonderful if the film were bought by our cinemas and some of our TV stations [for screening]," Klaus said at the film presentation organised by the Centre for Economics and Politics (CEP), an association he is close to.
Klaus is known as a fierce challenger of both the human factor in and the widely forecast effects of global warming.
Vojtech Kotecky from the Czech environmental organisation Friends of the Earth told CTK that many criticise Durkin's film for alleged manipulation of the interviewed experts, some of whom have reportedly accused Durkin of distorting information and their statements.
No names, no credibiity, asshat.
Klaus, nevertheless, said he welcomes the documentary as a desirable alternative to the Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth in which former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore warns against the threats of global warming and calls for measures to be taken to prevent it.
Funny how Vojtech Kotecky doesn't mention the increasing numbers of scientific experts that have truthed the Goracle's propaganda film -- debunking it and the junk science it cites.
Durkin's film, on its part, describes developments around climate changes as propaganda motivated by economic profit and political interests.
Previously: Klaus at the CATO Institute March 2007
Barbra Streisand performed her first-ever concert in France this week — and was rewarded with a medal of the Legion of Honor.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy awarded the medal to Streisand in a ceremony Thursday, the first time he has bestowed the honor since taking over from Jacques Chirac last month.
"You are the America that we love," said Sarkozy, who is seen as more U.S.-friendly than Chirac. "Women like you ... do a lot to bring our two peoples together."
Onlookers included French crooner Charles Aznavour and actor Alain Delon.
Sarkozy's wife, Cecilia, went to Streisand's sole concert in France, at Paris' Bercy stadium Tuesday.
Convenienetly timed close to the anniversary of the Muslim terror attacks of two years ago.
Did I say Muslim? Yes, I did.
LONDON, June 29 -- British police said they discovered an explosive device in a car abandoned outside a nightclub in the West End theater and entertainment district of central London early today and began a terrorism investigation.
The police said they had found significant quantities of gasoline, propane cylinders and nails in the car, a silver-green Mercedes, which had now been made safe.
Parts of central London were cordoned off after the incident, near the landmark Piccadilly Circus area, the police said.
In a press briefing, Peter Clarke, head of Britain?s counterterrorism command, said the explosive materials had had the potential to cause 'significant injury or loss of life.'
I'll go further out on a limb and predict we'll be seeing massive raids shortly, with many "South Asian" immigrants taken into custody, and we'll be told they all love footy and fish and chips.
Convenienetly timed close to the anniversary of the Muslim terror attacks of two years ago.
Did I say Muslim? Yes, I did.
LONDON, June 29 ? British police said they discovered an explosive device in a car abandoned outside a nightclub in the West End theater and entertainment district of central London early today and began a terrorism investigation.
The police said they had found significant quantities of gasoline, propane cylinders and nails in the car, a silver-green Mercedes, which had now been made safe.
Parts of central London were cordoned off after the incident, near the landmark Piccadilly Circus area, the police said.
In a press briefing, Peter Clarke, head of Britain?s counterterrorism command, said the explosive materials had had the potential to cause ?significant injury or loss of life.?
I'll go further out on a limb and predict we'll be seeing massive raids shortly, with many "South Asian" immigrants taken into custody, and we'll be told they all love footy and fish and chips.
Gordon Brown will find his hands tied as it becomes clearer and clearer that Tony Blair's European Union treaty deal resurrects the constitution rejected by French and Dutch voters two years ago.
The incoming Portuguese EU presidency, which takes over the six-month rotating job from Germany this weekend, has made it clear that the new British Prime Minister is bound by the mandate agreed by Mr Blair last week.
Portugal wants a quick treaty finish and will hold Mr Brown to the 15-page text, backed up by as yet unpublished legal documents signed by Mr Blair and regarded as binding for his successor.
"We do have a clear, precise and detailed mandate handed down to us. We believe that the conditions and guidelines are set out to us in that mandate," said Portugal's Europe Minister, Manuel Lobo Antunes, yesterday. "We will be sticking strictly to the terms we have been given."
Mr Brown is stuck with a deal that he must defend against opposition calls - and a Telegraph campaign, now signed by more than 1,300 people - for a referendum.
The Prime Minister has not been helped by EU leaders, such as Germany's Angela Merkel, lining up to boast that the new "amending treaty" is the old constitution in a new form. "The substance of the constitution is preserved," Mrs Merkel told MEPs on Wednesday. "That is a fact."
Labour MEPs have pleaded, on behalf of Downing Street, with EU institutions to downplay elements of the constitution to help the Government domestically "undersell" the deal to avoid a referendum.
But the pleas have fallen on deaf ears and the drip, drip of opinions, especially those rubbishing the legal force of Britain's opt-outs, will continue throughout the summer.
Formal treaty negotiations begin on July 23 and will mainly be conducted in secret, an arrangement primarily put in place to help Mr Brown. Foreign ministers will discuss a 150-page "draft treaty text" in the Viana do Castelo, Portugal, on Sept 7.Cowardly bastards.
Paying attention, Jerusalem? This is the asshat being sent to secure peace in our time, just as another British asshat claimed after delivering then-Czechoslovakia to the Austrian corporal.
Only the Democrats and an idiotic AP "reporter" could twist today's Supreme Court ruling striking down race-based preferences as having "turned the clock back" and claiming it has reversed 50 years of desegregation.
Does anyone bother to factcheck these people?
An historically diverse field of Democratic presidential candidates — a woman, a black, an Hispanic and five whites — denounced an hours-old Supreme Court desegregation ruling Thursday night and said the nation's slow march to racial unity is far from over.
"We have made enormous progress, but the progress we have made is not good enough," said Sen. Barack Obama, the son of a man from Kenya and a woman from Kansas.
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, the first female candidate with a serious shot at the presidency, challenged those who would suggest otherwise. "There is so much left to be done and for anyone to assert that race is not a problem in America today is to deny the reality in front of our very eyes."
In their third primary debate, the two leading candidates and their fellow Democrats played to the emotions of a predominantly black audience, fighting for a voting bloc that is crucial in the party's nomination process. They stood united against the Supreme Court and its historic ruling rolling back a half-century of school desegregation laws.
Clinton said the decision "turned the clock back" on history.
Questions about AIDS, criminal justice, education, taxes, outsourcing jobs, poverty and the Bush administration's response to Hurricane Katrina all led to the same point: The racial divide still exists.
A number of IDF troops were wounded during an operation in Nablus Thursday which exposed a large explosives laboratory.
Three prepared explosive devices, each weighing roughly five kilograms, were found in the laboratory, along with numerous weapons, magazines and materials used to manufacture bombs.
Israeli army forces entered Nablus Wednesday to operate against terrorist infrastructure and locate illegal weapons caches. The large-scale operation was launched after intelligence information indicated that terrorists in the city were planning a number of attacks in Israeli territory.
Wednesday afternoon soldiers discovered another weapons cache containing a pipe bomb, a Kalashnikov rifle, a hand gun and two grenades. At another location in Nablus troops found an M-16 rifle and a telescopic sight. The weapons were confiscated and the grenades were detonated in controlled explosions.
Thus far eight Fatah-affiliated suspects have been arrested in the frame of the operation.
It won't be long until we hear of hungry children who somehow aren't being fed with the free billions flowing into the West Bank. The idiots will wonder where the money went.
· Clinton would be big loser if ex-vice president ran · Republicans also unhappy with current candidates A presidential election poll suggesting Democratic voters would prefer former vice-president Al Gore to any of the declared contenders, including frontrunner Hillary Clinton, has highlighted continuing dissatisfaction among supporters of both main parties with the choice of candidates to succeed George Bush.
The poll, conducted in New Hampshire by 7News and Suffolk University, confirmed Ms Clinton's nationwide double-digit lead over her main rival, Illinois senator Barack Obama. The former first lady and New York senator attracted 37% support, against Mr Obama's 19%.Where's the outrage from the poverty pimps? Doesn't this prove that Democrats are racists?
John Edwards, a former North Carolina senator, was on 9%.
But if Mr Gore were to seek the Democratic nomination, 29% of Ms Clinton's backers would switch their support to him, the poll found. When defections from other candidates are factored in, the man who controversially lost to Mr Bush in the 2000 election takes command of the field, with 32% support.
Run like hell, Bill, the wife's life's gonna be a bitch for a few days.
Leading presidential candidate Ron Paul was unavailable for comment.
Spry and fleet of foot at a deceptively young 89, West Virginia Senator and former Klansman Robert C. Byrd plans on sticking it out until his corpse is dragged off the Senate floor.
His hands shaking and voice muffled by a cough, Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.), 89, defiantly declared today that he would continue to serve in the chamber indefinitely, possibly until his death, despite suffering from a tremor common to the elderly.
"I will continue to do this work until this old body just gives out and drops," he declared in a prepared floor speech. "Don't expect that to be any time soon."
There used to be something known as a dignfied retirement.
The Democrats are having yet another childish hissyfit now that President Bush has invoked executive privilege over the nonscandal involving the firings of U.S. attorneys, which they still don't seem to realize nobody cares about. The usual suspects on the left are apoplectic and my favorite rant comes from none othert than the kooky old man from Vermont.
Apparently, Senator Leaky Leahy (D-Moonbat) said this with a straight face.
"This is a further shift by the Bush Administration into Nixonian stonewalling and more evidence of their disdain for our system of checks and balances. This White House cannot have it both ways. They cannot stonewall congressional investigations by refusing to provide documents and witnesses, while claiming nothing improper occurred.
"Increasingly, the President and Vice President feel they are above the law --- in America no one is above law."
It's beginning to look like a banner day for sanity in America. First, Shamnesty goes down to defeat, then the Supreme Court blocks race-based preferences in school, and now it appears Indiana's Mike Pence has successfully introduced an amendment to help scuttle the possibility of the absurd Fairness Doctrine returning (keep your fingers crossed).
A stunningly silent Chuckie Schumer and soon-to-be former U.S. Senator Lindsey Grahamnesty discuss wrecking America through importing an illegal horde in this AP photo.
May this nonsense die a quick death today, never to be heard from again.
Senate immigration bill lost supporters yesterday and hangs on by a thread heading into this morning's showdown vote, after lawmakers voted down amendments making illegal aliens show roots to get legal status and cutting off their path to citizenship.
This morning's vote is on a parliamentary question about limiting debate, but it boils down to a vote to block the bill.
Just two days ago, 64 senators voted to revive the bill, with many saying they wanted to give the Senate a chance to improve the bill through amendments. But after a messy day in the chamber yesterday, with dozens of objections, arguments on the floor and five amendments defeated, at least a half-dozen senators said publicly or privately that their patience has run out.
"The way this has been handled, I'm not going to take a leap of faith," said Sen. Richard M. Burr, North Carolina Republican, who voted to advance the bill on Tuesday but said the way Democratic leaders ran the floor yesterday left no room to "take a bad bill and make it better."
Sen. Ben Nelson, Nebraska Democrat, said he has voted to keep the bill moving a half-dozen times already on "cloture" votes, but yesterday's debate showed him the bill is probably unsalvageable.
"I've given them six or seven cloture votes," he said. "I think this clay pigeon is becoming a dead duck."
Nothing more underscored the utter cluelessness of the Senate than this Sean Hannity interview with Ohio's Sen. Voinovich, who should be drummed out of office for sheer stupidity.
The most dramatic overhaul of the nation's immigration laws in a generation was trounced this morning by a bipartisan filibuster, with the political right and left overwhelming a coalition of Republicans and Democrats who had been seeking compromise on one of the most difficult social and economic issues facing the country.
The 46-53 tally fell dramatically short of the 60 votes needed to overcome opponents' dilatory tactics and parliamentary maneuvers that have dogged the bill for weeks.
Of course, the WaPo (naturally) spins it as a major defeat for President Bush, but did he write the legislation? Did he fail as Senate Majority Leader to get his own party in line?
Major props go out to Michelle Malkin, who, among many others, deserves major credit for helping kill this travesty.
The PC Police have made a bust overseas, England to be precise, where the term "prostitute" will be removed due to the "stigma attached to it". It's being replaced with "persons who sell sex persistently." No, this is not a joke..
Britain is proposing to remove the term "prostitute" from the criminal statutes because it carries too much stigma.
Instead, a new bill that the Justice Ministry has drafted refers simply to persons who sell sex persistently - defined as twice or more in three months.
"We just wanted to remove the stigma of the label 'common prostitute'," said a spokeswoman for the Justice Ministry.
"It's been around since 1824, so it was a bit outdated. It just wasn't really helpful to label people."
At least he may be, according to several Arab judicial services, he is hiding with members of Fatah al-Islam in the Palestinian refugee camp, Nahr al-Bared...
Beirut, 28 June (AKI) - The brother of the former leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Jordanian-born militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, may be hiding in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon which has been at the centre of bloody clashes between the Lebanese army and Islamist fighters, a Lebanese newspaper said on Thursday. The daily al-Safir said "judicial sources from several Arab countries" believe that the man, Muhammad Khalayla is in the Nahr al-Bared campaign hiding with the Islamists of the Fatah al-Islam group.
According to the sources which the newspaper did not identify by name, Khayala sought refuge in the camp along with a militant from Yemen Hamza al-Qubti, who is wanted on terrorism charges by the Saudi authorities.
The leader of Fatah al-Islam, Shaker al-Absi, who is also believed to be hiding in Nahr al-Bared, was sentenced to death in absentia together with al-Zarqawi after the two were convicted in the 2002 assassination of an American diplomat in Amman.
Al-Qaeda and Salafists in general aim to live as their false prophet did, Mohammed, while commanding his armies, beheaded captured soldiers. According to politicians and the media, Islam is a religion of peace. My ass it is....
Twenty beheaded bodies were discovered Thursday on the banks of the Tigris River southeast of Baghdad, while a parked car bomb killed another 20 people in one of the capital's busy outdoor bus stations, police said.
The beheaded remains were found in the Sunni Muslim village of Um al-Abeed, near the city of Salman Pak, which lies 14 miles southeast of Baghdad.
The bodies all men aged 20 to 40 years old had their hands and legs bound, and some of the heads were found next to the bodies, two officers said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information.
· Former PM to help build Palestinian institutions · No formal role in finding permanent solution
Tony Blair is to make his first working visit to Ramallah in the West Bank next month as envoy of the quartet of Middle East peacemakers, it emerged yesterday, after his job was confirmed amid scepticism about any chance of his success.
The French Poodle effect?
His role of quartet representative was announced jointly in New York by the US, EU, UN and Russia. Mr Blair will work on building government institutions and the rule of law, mobilising international help, and promoting the economy.
"He will spend significant time in the region working with the parties and others to help create viable and lasting government institutions representing all Palestinians, a robust economy, and a climate of law and order for the Palestinian people," the quartet said in a statement.
They stopped short of giving Mr Blair an explicit role as mediator between the Israelis and Palestinians in the peace process, but did give a broad remit to "liaise with other countries as appropriate in support of the agreed quartet objectives". Sources close to Mr Blair said he expected his role to be bigger than that assigned to his predecessor, James Wolfensohn, a former World Bank president who resigned in frustration in April 2006 after focusing just on the economy, on preparation for Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.
Mr Blair sees his role as preparing ground for eventual talks on a final, comprehensive settlement by Palestinians and Israelis, with his immediate task to help to halt the violence between Fatah and Hamas and heal the divide.
Can we spell d-e-l-u-s-i-o-n-a-l?
His appointment left some egos battered and generated controversy. Russia demanded last minute changes to the terms of reference, clarifying his precise status. Mr Blair also spoke to Vladimir Putin, Russia's president.
Gordon Brown was described as angry at being presented with a fait accompli, making it difficult for him to formulate his own Middle East policy.
"This keeps Blair interminably in the limelight," said a top diplomat, noting the former PM will report to the UN general assembly in September, just as Mr Brown makes his maiden appearance.
Javier Solana, EU foreign policy chief, with a long track-record in the region, is also unhappy, Brussels sources say. The Foreign Office, where top officials knew nothing until last Thursday, is said to be in an "institutional sulk".
Could be nothing ... or it could be another mystery hit in Britain.
An Egyptian billionaire financier who feared for his life after being accused of being a Mossad spy was found dead outside his Mayfair flat yesterday in suspicious circumstances.
Ashraf Marwan, the son-in-law of the late President Gamel Abdel Nasser, was found beneath his fourth-floor flat in Carlton House Terrace.
Police were treating his death as suspicious. Friends of Mr Marwan, a former shareholder in Chelsea Football Club, said that he had feared assassination after being named three years ago as an agent during the Yom Kippur war.
Rumours of his death circulated in London’s Arab community last night. Some believe that he may have taken his life after a serious illness was diagnosed.
Mr Marwan’s death will send shockwaves across the Middle East and among some of Britain’s wealthiest people. His associates included Adnan Khashoggi, the arms dealer, Ken Bates, the football club chairman, the Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and the late Tiny Rowland.
If found to be murder, his death will carry echoes of last year’s assassination of Alexander Litvinenko, the former KGB agent.
Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi said on Wednesday his plan for a United States of Africa should include creating a two million strong army to staunch recurrent conflicts which have ravaged many of the continent's nations.
Gaddafi was addressing hundreds of youths in Ivory Coast's economic capital Abidjan, the final leg of a tour of several West African states before he attends an African Union summit beginning on July 1 in neighbouring Ghana's capital Accra.
"One sole African government, one sole African army to defend Africa with a force of two million soldiers. One currency, one passport. Accra must hear this message," he told the gathering which included Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo.
Flush with cash from an oil boom, the leader of the North African Arab state has won backing from Senegal, Zimbabwe and other countries for a continent-wide government, but diplomatic heavyweights like South Africa and Uganda are opposed.
Africans say integration would give them a stronger voice on the world stage as globalisation advances, but many doubt the continent of about nearly one billion people with vast economic disparities and many tribes and religions can unite.
Maybe this crew will be part of the Amazon Battalion.
If his wacky idea seems a little bit dated, it is.
We have another absurd "global survey" from the America-haters at Pew, designed to make us look bad while propping up corrupt cesspools like the U.N. This one is so laden with anti-American sentiment, it's no surprise the Reuters story is written by someone named Andy Sullivan.
The United States' image is plummeting in many corners of the globe, but China and other large powers are falling from favor as well, according to a global survey released on Wednesday.
The 47-country survey also found global warming and other environmental problems are seen as the top threat in many places, ahead of nuclear proliferation, AIDS and other dangers.
The Pew Global Attitudes Project has documented wide anti-American sentiment since it was launched in 2002 but found those attitudes deepening this year.
The United States' favorable ratings declined in 26 of the 33 countries for which a comparison was available, with negative views particularly strong in the Middle East.
Gee, I wonder why? Could it be Islamofascists are ingraining their populace with propaganda, perhaps?
Only 9 percent of those surveyed in Turkey had a favorable view of the United States, while 13 percent did in the Palestinian territories. The United States fared better in Lebanon, where 47 percent responded positively.
So we have a 13% favorability with the Palestinians. All the more reason to keep throwing money at them.
Great policy.
Sadly for Pew, some of their icons fared badly.
Leaders like Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who challenge the existing order found few admirers. Osama bin Laden was viewed favorably only in one place, the Palestinian territories, where 57 percent said they had confidence in him.
I guess challenging the existing order via murder and mayhem isn't quite resonating.
(Reuters) - Texas' highest criminal court upheld on Wednesday the dismissal of a campaign finance conspiracy charge that contributed to the political fall of Republican Tom DeLay, but he still may face trial on two other felony counts.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals refused to reinstate a charge thrown out by a lower court that DeLay and two associates conspired to violate Texas election law by funneling corporate money to Republican state legislature candidates in 2002.
Corporate political donations are forbidden under Texas law, but the charge was dismissed on a legal technicality.
"We knew we were right from the start. The bottom line is (Travis County District Attorney) Ronnie Earle's office obtained an indictment that wasn't even on the books," DeLay attorney Dick DeGuerin told Reuters.
DeLay, the former U.S. House of Representative majority leader, still is charged with money laundering and conspiracy to launder money, but has appealed the indictments on grounds they were politically motivated.He has accused Earle, a Democrat, of pursuing him because his success as House Republican leader had made him a favorite target of Democrats.
Presiding Judge Pat Priest has said he will not set a trial date until the appeals are finished.
LONDON (Reuters) - Hybrid animal-human embryos created for medical research should be viewed as human and permitted to develop into children, Roman Catholic bishops have urged the British parliament.
Scientists want to use the hybrid embryos -- known as "chimeras" after the mythical half-man, half-animal creatures -- to understand better and find cures for illnesses such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and cystic fibrosis.
Under draft legislation to be debated in the British parliament this year, the chimeras would have to be destroyed within 14 days and it would be against the law to implant them in a woman's womb.
We have enough two-legged animals already roaming the planet.
A glossy magazine cover depicting a bare-breasted Angela Merkel suckling the nationalist twin rulers of Poland reignited tensions between Berlin and Warsaw days after a bad-tempered European summit nearly collapsed because of Polish resistance to a German blueprint on how to run the EU.
The last time Germany had a blueprint on how to run Europe . . . .
The right-wing Warsaw weekly magazine Wprost, which backs the conservative nationalist regime of the prime minister, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, and his twin brother, the president, Lech Kaczynski, has the cover of its latest issue as a montage showing "a beaming chancellor Merkel as "Europe's stepmother" baring her breasts to nourish the infant Polish twins.
In an article in the magazine, a Polish government official reacted to the weekend summit in Brussels, at which Poland stood alone threatening to wreck a deal and won big concessions from Mrs Merkel, by arguing that Germany was treating its eastern neighbour "neo-colonially" and refusing to accept it as a European partner. He accused Mrs Merkel of "humiliating" Poland at the summit because she was "full of complexes herself".
There's more. Enjoy.
Note: I am a Heinie and therefore not offended by use of the term in the post's title. If you're a Heinie and are offended, grow up and develop a sense of humor. Ja?
All you need to know about the absurd notion of reinstating the Fairness Doctrine is this disingenuous line from Little Dick Durbin (D-Caracas).
“It’s time to reinstitute the Fairness Doctrine,” said Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.). “I have this old-fashioned attitude that when Americans hear both sides of the story, they’re in a better position to make a decision.”
Well sorry, Dick, but I have an old-fashioned attitude that when Americans seek to silence other Americans, it's very un-American.
It's pretty clear that all they want to do is shut down talk radio because they don't control it. The left overwhelmingly controls television, newspapers, academia and has made inroads on the Internet, where virtually anything goes.
They are unable to compete in talk radio because their ideas have failed, they're boring, and have no sense of humor.
So because a whiny puke like Little Dick Durbin thinks we're not hearing "both sides" (really, what planet is he living on?), we're supposed to shut down an industry?
Of course, that would be the case if they get their "news" from the New York Times, CBS or MTV.
Of course, they couldn't identify with any Democrat presidential candidates outside of Obama and The Pantsuit, and we're supposed to believe this is an informed age group?
Perhaps some of them are, but for the most part, the come off as rather ignorant.
Now that the Iranian economy has been run into the ground, it appears the regime of Little Mahmoud is in some trouble.
Angry Iranians have torched petrol stations in protests against the sudden imposition of fuel rationing in one of the world’s most oil rich nations.
The rationing was announced on Tuesday only three hours before it was due to begin at midnight, leading to long queues at service stations as Iranians rushed out to fill up before the clampdown kicked in.
In the capital, youths set a car and petrol pumps ablaze at a station in the residential Pounak area of northwestern Tehran, throwing stones and shouting angry slogans denouncing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who came to power in an election based largely on his promises to improve the Islamic republic’s faltering economy.
He has been facing growing criticisms over his economic policies, which a group of economists claimed earlier this month were fuelling inflation and hurting the poor
Maybe their pal Jimmy Carter can pay a visit and remind them of the joys of odd-even days at the pump.
In a dramatic softening of the law on prostitution, only 'persistent' street offenders will face any police action.
The term 'common prostitute' will be banished from English law. Instead, sex workers must be referred to as 'persons'.
In the final act of the Blair Government, Ministers also announced that tens of thousands of convicts who re-offendwill receive softer punishments or escape jail altogether.
It is yet another attempt to reduce prison overcrowding, only days after ministers ordered the early release of 25,500 burglars, thieves and drug dealers.
Great move for the legacy, Tony. You'll be remembered fondly by hookers, junkies, thieves and 'rent boys'.
Author, talkshow host and president of the Landmark Legal Foundation, Mark Levin, has been no shrinking violet during the entirety of whatever the RINO administration is calling the amnesty bill this week.
One would think in the face of overwhelming displeasure with this bill, the proponents would just pack it in.
I guess not.
The White House says it has the votes to resurrect the immigration bill on the Senate floor today, though enough senators said they may change their minds in other votes later this week to leave the bill's ultimate fate in doubt.
To pass the Senate, the bill must earn 60 votes today, survive a series of amendments, earn 60 votes in a follow-up vote likely to come Thursday, and then pass with majority support — all difficult tests on an issue that deeply divides both parties, and American voters.
"Our intelligence suggests that there will be the votes there to move on to the bill and to begin considering amendments," White House Deputy Chief of Staff Joel Kaplan told reporters yesterday as President Bush and his administration make a final push for the bill's passage.
Europe must start work now to protect power stations, transport systems and agriculture from flooding, droughts, forest fires and landslideslikely to be caused by global warming, according to the draft of a report due out this week.
All acts of God. ROTFLMAO
The draft analysis by the European Commission paints a disturbing picture of the impact of rising temperatures that will scorch the southern Mediterranean, melt Alpine and Scandinavian snows and flood low-lying coastal zones around the Continent.
Such is the scale of the potential problem that the report raises the possibility of "relocating ports, industry and entire cities and villages from low-lying coastal areas and flood plains."
Faced with mounting evidence of rising temperatures, European governments agreed earlier this year to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 20 percent of their 1990 levels by 2020.
The president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, highlighted the need for a new global pact to stem global warming after visiting a Greenland glacier that has become a symbol of climate change.
I wonder if this report will even mention sunspot activity and its effect on Earth's climate?
How about the the censorship of critics and the number of jobs now dependent upon this scare?
Jacques Chirac is to be questioned by judges investigating alleged corruption in the Paris city government while he was mayor.
Jean Veil, the lawyer for the former French president, confirmed Mr Chirac will "very probably" be questioned before September 15 as an "assisted witness", meaning it remains possible he will face criminal charges.
The 74-year-old faces a series of potential legal problems now that he no longer enjoys presidential immunity. He handed over the French presidency to Nicolas Sarkozy on May 16.
The case involves claims members of the conservative Rally for the Republic party, which Mr Chirac headed, were illegally on the payroll of the Paris government while he was mayor between 1977 and 1995.
"For the period up to 1995 when he was elected president he is a citizen like any other, and he will answer all questions in all the cases that may concern him," Mr Veil told Europe 1 radio.
Mr Chirac's ally Alain Juppe, a former prime minister, was convicted in the affair in 2004 and banned from politics for one year.
Mr Chirac's lawyer stressed he has given an "absolutely definitive" refusal to be questioned in two other cases, including the so-called Clearstream affair in which it is said senior politicians and business figures - including Mr Sarkozy - received illegal commissions on a major arms sale to Taiwan.
Judges have indicated they want to interview Mr Chirac over claims he ordered a secret intelligence probe in 2004 to see if the allegations against Mr Sarkozy were true. The two men have had strained relations for several years.
Mr Veil has also announced the former president will refuse to respond to allegations of a murder cover-up over the death of a French judge in Djibouti in 1995.
Mr Chirac's office said last week that because he had constitutionally guaranteed judicial immunity while he was president he cannot be ordered to provide testimony about incidents during his tenure.
In the Djibouti case, Mr Chirac prevented judges from making a rare search of the presidential Élysée palace last month while he was still in office.Congressman William Jefferson was unavailable for comment.
Although he's an avowed Eurosceptic, President Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic, the most trusted political leader, is often 'misunderestimated' by international media and the renowned foreign leaders Jean-Pierre had hallucinatory delusional conversations with.
Such misunderestimations continue to be made because Klaus will sometimes be rather forceful with his opinions; and at other times will somewhat understate his position.
(PRAGUE) - Czech President Vaclav Klaus cautiously welcomed the outcome of the EU's summit on Sunday, saying that a brake had been put on moves towards creating a European super state.
"This train that was before heading ever faster in one direction has to some extent braked and slowed down and we can try to get it moving somewhere else. This is a great victory for which we can all be thankful," Klaus said in an interview on the Czech commercial broadcaster Prima.
Klaus added that it was "a victory for reason" that moves towards the creation of a European super state enshrined in the former constitution had been blocked.
But he cautioned that some basic formulations from that treaty, derailed by French and Dutch referendum rebuffs in 2005, had still found their way into the text of the new agreement about the future functioning of the EU hammered out by European leaders on Saturday.
"Of course, I still have some fears that some of the (summit) changes might be more cosmetic than fundamental," he said, adding that German Foreign Minister Frank Walter Steinmeier had reportedly declared the summit a victory because the basis of the constitution had been saved.
Klaus, a former right-wing prime minister, founder of the Civic Democratic Party and admirer of former British premier Margaret Thatcher, said he had only had a chance to read the 66-page preliminary conclusions of the summit in English.
Because Klaus is a firm believer in the free-market economic model, he is branded a right-winger, [Nazi, wink, wink]. Someday, but obviously not today, the MSM will exercise some intellectual and journalistic integrity and admit that the Austrian corporal and his minions were avowed Socialists.
Klaus sidestepped a question of whether Czechs should vote in a referendum on the new agreement, cautioning that it would be difficult to boil down the summit's conclusion into one question to put to voters.
"I hope, however, that there will be a serious public discussion about this," he added.
Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek said on Saturday that he did not think a referendum should be held on the new EU agreement, adding though that parliament would have to decide.
The new EU constitution treaty must be ratified by all 27 member states. Given the statement by Irish Premier Bertie Ahern that Ireland would hold a referendum and the outrage in Britain over Tony Blair's transition to French Poodle, methinks ye olde pig will first take flight.
On June 24, hundreds gathered at the former site of 
A glossy magazine cover depicting a bare-breasted Angela Merkel suckling the nationalist twin rulers of Poland reignited tensions between Berlin and Warsaw days after a bad-tempered European summit nearly collapsed because of Polish resistance to a German blueprint on how to run the EU.
Heavy seas crash into the seawall at northeastern England on Monday. (Owen Humphreys/AP/PA)