For Nerds only

What kind of nerd are you? These are my results below, followed by the link to test yourself.

What Be Your Nerd Type? Your Result: Drama Nerd   You sure do love the spotlight and probably have a very out-going and loud personality. Or not. That's just a stereotype, of course. Participation in the theatre is something to be very proud of. Whether you have a great voice for musicals, or astounding skills for dramas/comedies; keep up the good work. We need more entertainment these days that isn't television and video games (not that these things are bad, necessarily.)
Social Nerd
Literature Nerd
Musician
Artistic Nerd
Gamer/Computer Nerd
Science/Math Nerd
Anime Nerd
What Be Your Nerd Type? Quizzes for MySpace

US Attorney mess - from fired horse's mouth

How ironic that rather than one of the dozens of illegal acts performed by the Bushies, it is an unethical & incompetent but legal act that is getting them in so much trouble. Here's a GREAT op-ed by one of the 8 fired U.S. Attorneys - really helps to understand how appalling the acts were.

March 21, 2007

Op-Ed Contributor

Why I Was Fired

By DAVID C. IGLESIAS

Albuquerque

WITH this week’s release of more than 3,000 Justice Department e-mail messages about the dismissal of eight federal prosecutors, it seems clear that politics played a role in the ousters.

Of course, as one of the eight, I’ve felt this way for some time. But now that the record is out there in black and white for the rest of the country to see, the argument that we were fired for “performance related” reasons (in the words of Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty) is starting to look more than a little wobbly.

United States attorneys have a long history of being insulated from politics. Although we receive our appointments through the political process (I am a Republican who was recommended by Senator Pete Domenici), we are expected to be apolitical once we are in office. I will never forget John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, telling me during the summer of 2001 that politics should play no role during my tenure. I took that message to heart. Little did I know that I could be fired for not being political.

Politics entered my life with two phone calls that I received last fall, just before the November election. One came from Representative Heather Wilson and the other from Senator Domenici, both Republicans from my state, New Mexico.

Ms. Wilson asked me about sealed indictments pertaining to a politically charged corruption case widely reported in the news media involving local Democrats. Her question instantly put me on guard. Prosecutors may not legally talk about indictments, so I was evasive. Shortly after speaking to Ms. Wilson, I received a call from Senator Domenici at my home. The senator wanted to know whether I was going to file corruption charges — the cases Ms. Wilson had been asking about — before November. When I told him that I didn’t think so, he said, “I am very sorry to hear that,” and the line went dead.

A few weeks after those phone calls, my name was added to a list of United States attorneys who would be asked to resign — even though I had excellent office evaluations, the biggest political corruption prosecutions in New Mexico history, a record number of overall prosecutions and a 95 percent conviction rate. (In one of the documents released this week, I was deemed a “diverse up and comer” in 2004. Two years later I was asked to resign with no reasons given.)

When some of my fired colleagues — Daniel Bogden of Las Vegas; Paul Charlton of Phoenix; H. E. Cummins III of Little Rock, Ark.; Carol Lam of San Diego; and John McKay of Seattle — and I testified before Congress on March 6, a disturbing pattern began to emerge. Not only had we not been insulated from politics, we had apparently been singled out for political reasons. (Among the Justice Department’s released documents is one describing the office of Senator Domenici as being “happy as a clam” that I was fired.)

As this story has unfolded these last few weeks, much has been made of my decision to not prosecute alleged voter fraud in New Mexico. Without the benefit of reviewing evidence gleaned from F.B.I. investigative reports, party officials in my state have said that I should have begun a prosecution. What the critics, who don’t have any experience as prosecutors, have asserted is reprehensible — namely that I should have proceeded without having proof beyond a reasonable doubt. The public has a right to believe that prosecution decisions are made on legal, not political, grounds.

What’s more, their narrative has largely ignored that I was one of just two United States attorneys in the country to create a voter-fraud task force in 2004. Mine was bipartisan, and it included state and local law enforcement and election officials.

After reviewing more than 100 complaints of voter fraud, I felt there was one possible case that should be prosecuted federally. I worked with the F.B.I. and the Justice Department’s public integrity section. As much as I wanted to prosecute the case, I could not overcome evidentiary problems. The Justice Department and the F.B.I. did not disagree with my decision in the end not to prosecute.

Good has already come from this scandal. Yesterday, the Senate voted to overturn a 2006 provision in the Patriot Act that allows the attorney general to appoint indefinite interim United States attorneys. The attorney general’s chief of staff has resigned and been replaced by a respected career federal prosecutor, Chuck Rosenberg. The president and attorney general have admitted that “mistakes were made,” and Mr. Domenici and Ms. Wilson have publicly acknowledged calling me.

President Bush addressed this scandal yesterday. I appreciate his gratitude for my service — this marks the first time I have been thanked. But only a written retraction by the Justice Department setting the record straight regarding my performance would settle the issue for me.

David C. Iglesias was United States attorney for the District of New Mexico from October 2001 through last month.

Should Have Known

SO, it turns out that Matt (chip of the crooked block of his father, close friend of Tom Delay) Blunt may have been involved in the U.S. Attorney debacle.

The following is from a Washington Post blog from today link above:

Now Richard A. Serrano writes in the Los Angeles Times: "Still uncertain exactly why he was fired, former U.S. Atty. H.E. 'Bud' Cummins III wonders whether it had something to do with the probe he opened into alleged corruption by Republican officials in Missouri amid a Senate race there that was promising to be a nail-biter.

"Cummins, a federal prosecutor in Arkansas, was removed from his job along with seven other U.S. attorneys last year.

"In January 2006, he had begun looking into allegations that Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt had rewarded GOP supporters with lucrative contracts to run the state's driver's license offices. Cummins handled the case because U.S. attorneys in Missouri had recused themselves over potential conflicts of interest.

"But in June, Cummins said, he was told by the Justice Department that he would be fired at year's end to make room for Timothy Griffin -- an operative tied to White House political guru Karl Rove."

Shocker, that Blunt would have used any means necessary to try to get Talent re-elected, he learned how to reward money - givers from some of the best crooks in the Republican Party.

Those Crazy people at the American Enterprise Institute:

Good reading below a description by a rational person of the recent gala annual dinner at the American Enterprise Institute - the "think tank" that dreamed up the brilliant idea of invading Iraq to bring peace to the Middle East. I particularly liked the view of the Crusades - yes those crusades!


AEI's weird celebration.
By Jacob Weisberg
Posted Wednesday, March 14, 2007, at 4:09 PM ET

The term neoconservative has many meanings, including 'former liberal' and 'Jewish conservative.' In recent years, however, it has taken on clearer definition as a philosophy of aggressive unilateralism and the effort to impose democratic ideas, especially in the Arab world. The neoconservatives are also a distinct group in and around the Bush administration, which includes Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy secretary of defense, and Scooter Libby, the former aide to the vice president who was convicted last week on multiple counts of perjury. These men pushed for the invasion of Iraq and remain identified with hard-line positions on Iran, Syria, and North Korea.

Outside of the administration, the chief fulcrum of neoconservatism is the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank. The day after the Libby verdict, AEI held its annual black-tie gala at the Washington Hilton, and for some reason, they invited me. I did not go expecting contrition, but under the circumstances, it seemed possible that self-examination might be featured on the menu. Once a lazy pasture for moderate Republicans hurtled into the private sector by Gerald Ford's 1976 defeat, AEI took a right turn during the Reagan years and emerged under George W. Bush as a kind of Cheney-family think tank.

It had not been a good week, year, or second term for any of these people, and I thought a few cocktails might provoke them to consider their predicament. This was fantasy on my part. Richard Perle and John Bolton might have looked slightly more saturnine than usual, but the overall mood of self-celebration was unabated. From the stage, one caught no hint that matters were not working out as anticipated. All rose to salute the arrival of Dick and Lynne Cheney, herself a longtime fellow at the institute. The vice president looked on from the head table as his friend Bernard Lewis, perhaps the most significant intellectual influence behind the invasion of Iraq, came up to accept the Irving Kristol Award.

In his address, the 90-year-old Lewis did not revisit his argument that regime change in Iraq would provide the jolt needed to modernize the Middle East. Instead, he spoke at length about the millennial struggle between Christianity and Islam. Lewis argues that Muslims have adopted migration, along with terror, as the latest strategy in their "cosmic struggle for world domination." This is a familiar framework from the original author of the phrase "the clash of civilizations"—made more famous by Harvard scholar Samuel Huntington. What did surprise me was Lewis' denunciation of Pope John Paul II's 2000 apology for the Crusades as political correctness run amok. This drew applause. Lewis' view is that the Muslims started it by invading Europe in the eighth century. The Crusades were merely a failed imitation of Muslim jihad in an endless see-saw of conquest and re-conquest.

Were you to start counting the ironies here, where would you stop? Here was a Jewish scholar criticizing the pope for apologizing to Muslims for a holy war against Muslims, which was also a massacre of the Jews. Here were the theorists of the invasion of Iraq, many of them also Jewish, applauding the notion that the Crusades were not so terrible and embracing a time horizon that makes it impossible to judge them wrong. And here was the clubhouse of the neocons throwing itself a lavish 'do, when the biggest question in American politics is how to escape the hole they've dug. Reality seemed to have taken up residence elsewhere for the evening.

But whether or not the neocons are ready to face it, their moment has passed. At the Defense Department, their apostles and allies are largely gone. Donald Rumsfeld has been replaced by Robert M. Gates, a member of the Iraq Study Group and of the realist school associated with the previous President Bush. Paul Wolfowitz, the architect who tried to raise a new Middle East on Saddam's rubble, has moved to the World Bank, where he observes a McNamara-like silence on the failure of his war. Another formerly key official, Douglas Feith, is under investigation from Sen. Carl Levin's armed services committee for misrepresenting intelligence data to make the case for the invasion.

Over at the State Department, where the neocons never were (other than a few moles like Bolton), Condi Rice is returning to her realist roots and taking charge of foreign policy. She has adopted gingerly some of the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, which the Bush team spurned last fall, embracing shuttle diplomacy in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and even raising the possibility of conversation with Syria and Iran. She has empowered career diplomats blackballed previously by Cheney and Rumsfeld and even made a nuclear deal with North Korea. These steps signify a broader shift away from what the neocon defector Francis Fukuyama calls "hard Wilsonian" ideas, and back toward the less principled, more effective pragmatism associated with Bush 41, Brent Scowcroft, and James Baker.

The most important change may be the fading influence of Cheney, who for six years dominated foreign policy in a way no previous vice president ever has. Those dining on fat steaks and sipping California wine with him at the AEI dinner cannot have failed to notice that Cheney is now discredited, unwell, and facing various congressional inquisitions. He was damaged by the Libby trial, first by seeming to let his flunky take the fall, and second by the exposure of his ruthless mania to justify a war gone wrong.

But the largest factor in Cheney's demise is that his neoconservative hypotheses have been falsified by events. Invading Iraq did not catalyze a new Middle East. Isolating North Korea did not retard but advance its nuclear program. High-handed unilateralism reduced American power and prestige. At the outset of his presidency, Bush thought himself lucky to have a No. 2 who did not aspire to his job. He may now grasp the hazard of lending so much power to someone with no incentive to test his views in the political marketplace.

As disciples of Bernard Lewis, it is unlikely that Cheney and the neocon crusaders will offer apologies for what they've wrought. Like Bush, they are looking to the long span of history for vindication. It will indeed be eons before anyone trusts them again.
Jacob Weisberg is editor of Slate and co-author, with Robert E. Rubin, of In an Uncertain World.

PROGRESS!

Wow, when even Wyoming Republicans realize that ending the ban on gay's in the military makes sense - we could be making serious progress.

Bigotry That Hurts Our Military

By Alan K. Simpson
Wednesday, March 14, 2007; A15

As a lifelong Republican who served in the Army in Germany, I believe it is critical that we review -- and overturn -- the ban on gay service in the military. I voted for "don't ask, don't tell." But much has changed since 1993.

My thinking shifted when I read that the military was firing translators because they are gay. According to the Government Accountability Office, more than 300 language experts have been fired under "don't ask, don't tell," including more than 50 who are fluent in Arabic. This when even Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently acknowledged the nation's "foreign language deficit" and how much our government needs Farsi and Arabic speakers. Is there a "straight" way to translate Arabic? Is there a "gay" Farsi? My God, we'd better start talking sense before it is too late. We need every able-bodied, smart patriot to help us win this war.

In today's perilous global security situation, the real question is whether allowing homosexuals to serve openly would enhance or degrade our readiness. The best way to answer this is to reconsider the original points of opposition to open service.

First, America's views on homosexuals serving openly in the military have changed dramatically. The percentage of Americans in favor has grown from 57 percent in 1993 to a whopping 91 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds surveyed in a Gallup poll in 2003.

Military attitudes have also shifted. Fully three-quarters of 500 vets returning from Iraq and Afghanistan said in a December Zogby poll that they were comfortable interacting with gay people. Also last year, a Zogby poll showed that a majority of service members who knew a gay member in their unit said the person's presence had no negative impact on the unit or personal morale. Senior leaders such as retired Gen. John Shalikashvili and Lt. Gen. Daniel Christman, a former West Point superintendent, are calling for a second look.

Second, 24 nations, including 12 in Operation Enduring Freedom and nine in Operation Iraqi Freedom, permit open service. Despite controversy surrounding the policy change, it has had no negative impact on morale, cohesion, readiness or recruitment. Our allies did not display such acceptance back when we voted on "don't ask, don't tell," but we should consider their common-sense example.

Third, there are not enough troops to perform the required mission. The Army is "about broken," in the words of Colin Powell. The Army's chief of staff, Gen. Peter Schoomaker, told the House Armed Services Committee in December that "the active-duty Army of 507,000 will break unless the force is expanded by 7,000 more soldiers a year." To fill its needs, the Army is granting a record number of "moral waivers," allowing even felons to enlist. Yet we turn away patriotic gay and lesbian citizens.

The Urban Institute estimates that 65,000 gays are serving and that there are 1 million gay veterans. These gay vets include Capt. Cholene Espinoza, a former U-2 pilot who logged more than 200 combat hours over Iraq, and Marine Staff Sgt. Eric Alva, who lost his right leg to an Iraqi land mine. Since 2005, more than 800 personnel have been discharged from "critical fields" -- jobs considered essential but difficult in terms of training or retraining, such as linguists, medical personnel and combat engineers. Aside from allowing us to recruit and retain more personnel, permitting gays to serve openly would enhance the quality of the armed forces.

In World War II, a British mathematician named Alan Turing led the effort to crack the Nazis' communication code. He mastered the complex German enciphering machine, helping to save the world, and his work laid the basis for modern computer science. Does it matter that Turing was gay? This week, Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said that homosexuality is "immoral" and that the ban on open service should therefore not be changed. Would Pace call Turing "immoral"?

Since 1993, I have had the rich satisfaction of knowing and working with many openly gay and lesbian Americans, and I have come to realize that "gay" is an artificial category when it comes to measuring a man or woman's on-the-job performance or commitment to shared goals. It says little about the person. Our differences and prejudices pale next to our historic challenge. Gen. Pace is entitled, like anyone, to his personal opinion, even if it is completely out of the mainstream of American thinking. But he should know better than to assert this opinion as the basis for policy of a military that represents and serves an entire nation. Let us end "don't ask, don't tell." This policy has become a serious detriment to the readiness of America's forces as they attempt to accomplish what is arguably the most challenging mission in our long and cherished history.

The writer was a Republican senator from Wyoming from 1979 to 1997.

Don't Ask - Don't Tell Colbert style - "The Word"

Enjoy "The Colbert Report's" hilarious take on a possible repeal of "Don't ask-Don't tell"

Support the Troops? - Not in the Bush White House

I recently got some first-hand knowledge of how badly our troops are being equipped by this miserable excuse for an administration. My cousin's son has just finished his training as an army medic and is being deployed to Kandahar - where the Talaban is resurging since we chose NOT to finish the job --! Before he goes he's asked his Grandparents (my Aunt & Uncle) to get him a blood pressure cuff as a going away present. He's a medic and they are not supplying him with a blood pressure cuff!!!!!!!!!!!! NO wonder wounded soldiers at Walter Reed were not being properly taken care of by an administration that has never taken proper care of the soldiers in the FIELD!

Below is Bob Herbert's column from today's times. He also wonders how the Walter Reed debacle can surprise anyone when the Bushies have never cared for people - particularly "the Troops."

March 8, 2007

Op-Ed Columnist

Lift the Curtain

By BOB HERBERT

Neglect, incompetence, indifference, lies.

Why in the world is anyone surprised that the Bush administration has not been taking good care of wounded and disabled American troops?

Real-life human needs have never been a priority of this administration. The evidence is everywhere — from the mind-bending encounter with the apocalypse in Baghdad, to the ruined residential neighborhoods in New Orleans, to the anxious families in homes across America who are offering tearful goodbyes to loved ones heading off to yet another pointless tour in Iraq.

The trial and conviction of Scooter Libby opened the window wide on the twisted values and priorities of the hawkish operation in the vice president’s office. No worry about the troops there.

And President Bush has always given the impression that he is more interested in riding his bicycle at the ranch in Texas than in taking care of his life and death responsibilities around the world.

That whistling sound you hear is the wind blowing across the emptiness of the administration’s moral landscape.

U.S. troops have been treated like trash since the beginning of Mr. Bush’s catastrophic adventure in Iraq. Have we already forgotten that soldier from the Tennessee National Guard who dared to ask Donald Rumsfeld why the troops had to go scrounging in landfills for “hillbilly armor” — scrap metal — to protect their vehicles from roadside bombs?

Fellow soldiers cheered when the question was raised, and others asked why they were being sent into combat with antiquated equipment. The defense secretary was not amused. “You go to war with the Army you have,” he callously replied, “not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”

Have we forgotten that while most Americans have sacrificed zilch for this war, the mostly uncomplaining soldiers and marines are being sent into the combat zones for two, three and four tours? Multiple combat tours are an unconscionable form of Russian roulette that heightens the chances of a warrior being killed or maimed.

In the old days, these troops would have been referred to as cannon fodder. However you want to characterize them now, their casually unfair treatment is an expression of the belief that they are expendable.

The Washington Post has performed an important public service by shining a spotlight on the contemptible treatment that some soldiers received as outpatients at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

The series has already prompted Congressional hearings, and the president climbed off his bicycle long enough to appoint the requisite commission. The question is whether Congress and the public can be roused to take action on behalf of the troops.

It’s not just the indifference and incompetence of the administration that are causing the troops so much unnecessary suffering. The simple truth is that the Bush crowd, busy trying to hide the costs of the president’s $2 trillion tragedy in Iraq, can’t find the money to pay for all the care that’s needed by the legions of wounded and mentally disabled troops who are coming home. The outpatient fiasco at Walter Reed is just one aspect of a vast superstructure of suffering.

The military is overextended and falling apart. Equipment worn out or destroyed by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has to be replaced. The perennial, all-consuming appetite of the military-industrial complex has to be satisfied. And now, here comes that endless line of wounded men and women, some of them disabled for life.

How is all of this to be paid for?

The administration has tried its best to keep the reality of the war away from the public at large, to keep as much of the carnage as possible behind the scenes. No pictures of the coffins coming home. Limited media access to Walter Reed.

That protective curtain needs to be stripped away, exposing the enormity of this catastrophe for all to see.

I remember walking the quiet, manicured grounds of Walter Reed on an unauthorized visit and seeing the young men and women moving about in wheelchairs or on crutches. Some were missing two and three limbs. All had suffered grievously.

There is something profoundly evil about a country encouraging young men and women to go off and fight its wars and then shortchanging them on medical care and other forms of assistance when they come back with wounds that will haunt them forever.

That’s something most Americans never thought their country would do.

Excellent point by Myerson in the Washington Post:

Check out this op-ed from today's post - turns out having no money and job security are harder on "traditional" families than the dreaded "free love" of the 60s. I particularly like the Rudy Gulliani slam at the end.


'Family Values' Chutzpah

By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, March 7, 2007; A17

As conservatives tell the tale, the decline of the American family, the rise in divorce rates, the number of children born out of wedlock all can be traced to the pernicious influence of one decade in American history: the '60s.

The conservatives are right that one decade, at least in its metaphoric significance, can encapsulate the causes for the family's decline. But they've misidentified the decade. It's not the permissive '60s. It's the Reagan '80s.

In Saturday's Post, reporter Blaine Harden took a hard look at the erosion of what we have long taken to be the model American family -- married couples with children -- and discovered that while this decline hasn't really afflicted college-educated professionals, it is the curse of the working class. The percentage of households that are married couples with children has hit an all-time low (at least, the lowest since the Census Bureau started measuring such things): 23.7 percent. That's about half the level that marrieds-with-children constituted at the end of the Ozzie-and-Harriet '50s.

Now, I'm not a scholar of the sitcom, but I did watch "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet" as a child, marveling that anything labeled "Adventures" could be so dull. And I don't recall a single episode in which the family had to do without because Ozzie had lost his job or missed taking David or Ricky to the doctor for fear he couldn't pay for it.

Which may explain why the Ozzie and Harriet family -- modified by feminism, since Harriet now holds down a job, too -- still rolls along within the upper-middle class but has become much harder to find in working-class America, where cohabitation without marriage has increasingly become the norm. Taking into account all households, married couples with children are twice as likely to be in the top 20 percent of incomes, Harden reported. Their incomes have increased 59 percent over the past 30 years, while households overall have experienced just a 44 percent increase.

To be sure, the '60s, with its assaults on traditional authority, played some role in weakening the traditional family.

But its message was sounded loudest and clearest on elite college campuses, whose graduates were nonetheless the group most likely to have stable marriages. Then again, they were also the group most likely to have stable careers.

They enjoyed financial stability; they could plan for the future.

Such was not the case for working-class Americans. Over the past 35 years, the massive changes in the U.S. economy have largely condemned American workers to lives of economic insecurity. No longer can the worker count on a steady job for a single employer who provides a paycheck and health and retirement benefits, too. Over the past three decades, workers' individual annual income fluctuations have consistently increased, while their aggregate income has stagnated. In the brave new economy of outsourced jobs and short-term gigs and on-again, off-again health coverage, American workers cannot rationally plan their economic futures. And with each passing year, as their level of economic security declines, so does their entry into marriage.

Yet the very conservatives who marvel at the efficiency of our new, more mobile economy and extol the "flexibility" of our workforce decry the flexibility of the personal lives of American workers. The right-wing ideologues who have championed outsourcing, offshoring and union-busting, who have celebrated the same changes that have condemned American workers to lives of financial instability, piously lament the decline of family stability that has followed these economic changes as the night the day.

American conservatism is a house divided against itself. It applauds the radicalism of the economic changes of the past four decades -- the dismantling, say, of the American steel industry (and the job and income security that it once provided) in the cause of greater efficiency. It decries the decline of social and familial stability over that time -- the traditional, married working-class families, say, that once filled all those churches in the hills and hollows in what is now the smaller, post-working-class Pittsburgh.

Problem is, disperse a vibrant working-class community in America and you disperse the vibrant working-class family.

Which is how American conservatism became the primary author of the very social disorder that it routinely rails against, and that Republicans have the gall to run against.

The party of family values? Please. If that's the banner that Republicans continue to wave, then they should certainly make Rudy Giuliani, who couldn't bestir himself to attend his son's high school graduation or his daughter's high school plays, their presidential nominee. No candidate could better personify the sham that is Republicans' and conservatives' concern for the American family.

Alter: Wrong Time for an Urban Cowboy? - Newsweek Between the Lines - MSNBC.com

Excellent article by Jonathan Alter in this week's Newsweek (link below) about the downside of Rudy Gulliani. Democrats and independents who know him only from his post 9/11 days need to look closely at the big picture if he gets the Republican nomination.



Alter: Wrong Time for an Urban Cowboy? - Newsweek Between the Lines - MSNBC.com

Thomas Eagleton; Missouri Senator Ran With McGovern - washingtonpost.com

Thomas Eagleton died yesterday. My mother's "McGovern/Eagleton" buttons may go up in value now - or not. I still remember the "scandal" when his psychiatric history was revealed. Would it be better now? Certainly stars aren't hurt by admissions of depression, not even serious ones like Mike Wallace, but what about a politician? Hard to say what would and would not bother voters these days. Anyway, he was a great Democrat for Missouri.

Thomas Eagleton; Missouri Senator Ran With McGovern - washingtonpost.com: "Thomas Eagleton; Missouri Senator Ran With McGovern

By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 5, 2007; B06

Thomas F. Eagleton, 77, a Missouri Democrat and U.S. senator who spent two weeks as the vice presidential running mate of Sen. George S. McGovern in 1972 before leaving the ticket after revelations of his earlier psychiatric hospitalization for depression, died March 4 at St. Mary's Health Center in Richmond Heights, Mo. He had heart and respiratory ailments.

Mr. Eagleton made his name as a crusading young lawyer and politician in his home state before winning election to the U.S. Senate in 1968. He supported consumer protection laws and labor union rights, but it was his strong opposition to the Vietnam War that made him a natural political ally of McGovern, a South Dakota Democrat who had long denounced the war.

For Mr. Eagleton, being tapped as vice presidential nominee among a dozen potential candidates was a signal of his rise in the party leadership. Future Colorado senator Gary Hart, who was McGovern's campaign director, once wrote that Mr. Eagleton's appeal was 'primarily because he was Catholic, urban and an unknown from a border state.'

Although McGovern's staff knew that Mr. Eagleton had been hospitalized for fatigue, the cam"

Week-end movie: Zodiac

Really liked it. Excellent cast keeps tension up even though you know , kind of, how it ends. Jake Gyllenhall is really starting to look like a grown up.

clipped from www.imdb.com

2 March 2007 Movie Reviews: 'Zodiac' Zodiac, based on the still-unresolved case of the San Francisco serial killer who courted media attention, is opening to vastly contradictory reviews. "Rarely has a film with so much blood on its hands seemed so insistently alive," write Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "The movie holds you because of [director David Fincher's] unexpected sensitivity to the human factors that both propel and complicate the chase for an inhuman murderer," Michael Sragow writes in the Baltimore Sun. On the other hand, Bruce Westbrook in the Houston Chronicle calls the film "one of the dullest" movies about serial killings ever and concludes: "Earth calling Hollywood: The serial-killer flick has been done to death, so get over it." And Christy LeMire of the Associated Press warns: "Zodiac runs an astonishing two hours and 40 minutes, and it feels like it." Next Article Articles Copyright Studio Briefing All Rights Reserved.

Here's one of my favorite "Youtube" clips, which I'm including here primarily so that I can make sure it is possible to embed a YOUTUBE video. It's a "trailer" for Mary Poppins cut as a trailer for a horror movie.