The War Criminal President

From Andrew Sullivan
I posted about Philip Gourevitch's and Erroll Morris's superb and disturbing recent piece on Abu Ghraib here. What it shows once again is how Abu Ghraib was never, ever an exception. It was permitted, enabled, authorized and pre-meditated by Bush, Cheney, Yoo, Rumsfeld, Miller, and Addington, among many others. The techniques testified to correspond with chilling accuracy to techniques authorized by the president, for which we now have overwhelming evidence. Scott Horton reminds us what exactly some of the techniques were:
Enforced nudity. This technique is adopted for purposes of degrading and humiliating the prisoner, heightening his senses of vulnerability, weakness and shame. Enforced nudity also enhances other techniques, particularly hypothermia.
Starvation. As Davis notes, when the prisoner is entitled to an MRE, he would be given one component only of the MRE. The entire MRE constitutes a reasonable food ration which is properly balanced. Giving only one part of it reflects a decision to starve the prisoner.
Stress Positions. Perhaps the oldest and best established torture technique, widely used by the Inquisition in Europe, was the strapado. Hands would be fastened behind the back and the victim would be hoisted, causing severe stress to joints, frequent dislocation, and severe and sustained pain. The strapado would invariably get its victim to confess to anything, very quickly. During World War II, this same technique was widely adopted and used by the Germans, who called it Pfahlbinden. In the English of the Bush Administration, this technique is called a “stress position,” and it was widely used at Abu Ghraib.
Hypothermia.
Shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution, the Soviet secret police pioneered a very simple technique that had the advantage of leaving the victim’s body unbruised or bloodied, but whose physiological effects were equally if not more effective than direct beatings. In its mildest form, the victim was left with thin clothing in a cell with temperatures hovering just above freezing. A day of such treatment was generally enough to produce physical collapse. The Bush Administration, of course, not having the benefits of a Siberian winter, turns to far cruder and more brutal techniques, which Davis describes. The prisoner is stripped naked, dunked in a bath of ice water, and a window is left open to insure exposure.
For President Bush, these techniques are a part of the “Program.” More generally in the American media, you’ll hear these things referred to as “highly coercive techniques.” But they have a proper name, which is “torture.” Their use is a serious crime under international law, and under U.S. law. And that stubborn fact has driven much of the Bush Administration’s bizarre machinations relating to the Convention.
One day this president and vice-president will be prosecuted for war crimes.

That Curious Idea of Resurrection
How early Christians grappled to accept the idea that Jesus returned from the dead.By Larry Hurtado (SLATE)
Easter Sunday represents the foundational claim of Christian faith, the highest day of the Christian year as celebration of Jesus' resurrection. But many Christians are unsure what the claim that Jesus had been raised to new life after being crucified actually means—while non-Christians often find the whole idea of resurrection bemusing and even ridiculous.
These differences over what Jesus' resurrection represents and discomfort with the whole idea are nothing new, however: Christians in the first few centuries also had difficulty embracing the idea of a real, bodily resurrection. Then, as now, resurrection was not the favored post-death existence—people much preferred to think that after dying, souls headed to some ethereal realm of light and tranquillity. During the Roman period, many regarded the body as a pitiful thing at best and at worst a real drag upon the soul, even a kind of prison from which the soul was liberated at death. So, it's not surprising that there were Christians who simply found bodily resurrection stupid and repugnant. To make the idea palatable, they instead interpreted all references to Jesus' resurrection in strictly spiritual terms. Some thought of Jesus as having shed his earthly body in his death, assuming a purely spiritual state, and returning to his original status in the divine realm. In other cases, Jesus' earthly body and his death were even seen as illusory, the divine Christ merely appearing to have a normal body (rather like Clark Kent!).
The idea of a real, personal resurrection—meaning a new bodily existence of individuals after death, in one way or another—did not originate with Christianity or with claims about Jesus. Instead, it seems to be first clearly reflected in Jewish texts dated to sometime in the second century B.C., such as the biblical book of Daniel 12:2. At the time, it was a genuinely innovative idea. (Alan Segal's book Life After Death gives an expansive discussion of the origins of the idea of resurrection.) Many peoples of the ancient world hoped for one or another sort of eternal life, but it was usually thought of as a kind of bodiless existence of soul or spirit set in realms of the dead that might or might not be happy, pleasant places. In still other expectations, death might bring a merging of individuals with some ocean of being, like a drop of water falling into the sea.
The ancient Jewish and early Christian idea of personal resurrection represented a new emphasis on individuals and the importance of embodied existence beyond the mere survival or enhancement of the soul, although there was debate about the precise nature of the post-resurrection body. Some seem to have supposed it would be a new body of flesh and bones, closely linked to the corpse in the grave but not liable to decay or death. Others imagined a body more like that of an angel. But whatever its precise nature, the hope of resurrection reflected a strongly holistic view of the person as requiring some sort of body to be complete. With ancient Jews, early Christians saw resurrection as an act of God, a divine gift of radically new life, not an expression of some inherent immortality of the soul. That is, the dead don't rise by themselves; they are raised by God and will experience resurrection collectively as one of the events that comprise God's future redemption of the world and vindication of the righteous.
In the ancient Judaism of Jesus' time, however, resurrection was not universally affirmed. Some devout Jews (particularly the religious party called Sadducees) apparently considered the whole idea ridiculous, as evidenced by the New Testament, which gives us some of the most direct references to disputes among ancient Jews about the matter. In Mark 12:18-27, Sadducees taunt Jesus with a question about a woman married several times, asking him whose wife she will be following the resurrection. Jesus strongly affirms resurrection, but he insists that those resurrected will not marry and portrays the Sadducees' question as reflecting a foolish ignorance of God's power.
In the earliest expressions of their faith that we have, Christians claimed that Jesus' resurrection showed that God singled out Jesus ahead of the future resurrection of the dead to show him uniquely worthy to be lord of all the elect. However, the paradigmatic significance of Jesus' resurrection was also very important for early Christians.
In Christianity's first few centuries, when believers often suffered severe persecution and even the threat of death, those who believed in Jesus' bodily resurrection found it particularly meaningful for their own circumstances. Jesus had been put to death in grisly fashion, but God had overturned Jesus' execution and, indeed, had given him a new and glorious body. So, they believed that they could face their own deaths as well as those of their loved ones in the firm hope that God would be faithful to them as well. They thought that they would share the same sort of immortal reaffirmation of their personal and bodily selves that Jesus had experienced. Elaine Pagels, a scholar of early Christianity, has argued that those Christians who regarded the body as unimportant, perhaps including "Gnostics," were less willing to face martyrdom for their faith and more willing to make gestures of acquiescence to the Romans—for example, by offering sacrifices to Roman gods—because they regarded actions done with their bodies as insignificant so long as in their hearts they held to their beliefs.
By contrast, Christians who believed in bodily resurrection seem to have regarded their own mortal coils as the crucial venues in which they were to live out their devotion to Christ. When these Christians were arraigned for their faith, they considered it genuine apostasy to give in to the gestures demanded by the Roman authorities. For them, inner devotion to Jesus had to be expressed in an outward faithfulness in their bodies—and they were ready to face martyrdom for their faith, encouraged by the prospect of bodily resurrection. Indeed, Christian martyrs are pictured as engaged in a battle with the Roman authorities (and the Devil, whom Christians saw as behind Roman malevolence toward them), with the martyrs' bodies as battlegrounds in which the integrity of their person and their personal salvation could be lost or retained.
Historically, then, how Christians have understood Jesus' "resurrection" says a lot about how they have understood themselves, whether they have a holistic view of the human person, whether they see bodily existence as trivial or crucial, and how they imagine full salvation to be manifested. Does salvation comprise a deliverance from the body into some sort of immediate and permanent postmortem bliss (which is actually much closer to popular Christian piety down the centuries), or does salvation require a new embodiment of some sort, a more robust reaffirmation of persons? This sort of question originally was integral to early Jewish and Christian belief in the resurrection. In all the varieties of early Christianity, and in all the various understandings of what his "resurrection" meant, Jesus was typically the model, the crucial paradigm for believers, what had happened to him seen as prototypical of what believers were to hope for themselves.Larry W. Hurtado is head of the School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh. His recent books are The Earliest Christian Artifacts: Manuscripts and Christian Origins How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God?and Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity

Disproving Herrnstein and Murray's Bell Curve

Uploaded by Ressurection on Jul 25, 2005
Disproving Herrnstein and Murray's Bell CurveHerrnstien and Murray raises the point that the division between the well-paid elite and the lower class Americans are becoming widely divided. Upon raising this point they came up with the Bell Curve. The Bell Curve has two main components that correlate with income, the AFQT test (which measures intelligence), and parental SES (social economic Status). To Herrnstein and Murray, intelligence heavily correlates with income. They argue that that IQ is real and it does matter; in other words the smart people (or people with higher IQ) will get high-quality jobs, hence making their incomes higher. They feel that inequality is, “natural and fated.” To prove their point that IQ does matter and the smart people just keep getting smarter and dumb keep getting dumber they analyzed the National Longitudinal Survey Of Youth (NLSY). Herrnstein and Murray show that the NLSY subjects who scored high on the Armed Forces Qualifying Test (AFQT, which Herrnstein and Murray treated as an IQ test) were doing well versus those who had scored on the low end ended up doing poorly. But the AFQT does not measure natural intelligence. Another component of the bell curve is a person’s SES (social economic status) social factors like race, age, gender, community, environment, and parent’s social economic status contributes to how well a person is able to succeed. To Herrnstein and Murray SES is not a stronger predictive validity than the AFQT, but it goes hand in hand with each other. They are basically trying to say that riches are usually inherited from one generation to another. For example, a well-endowed family has the money to send their child to a prestigious school, where a highly stressed learning atmosphere surrounds their child. Also coming from a well-endowed family, one can network with other elite people who may own big corporations. On the other hand, a child coming from a low-income household may not be able to attend a prestigious school then they loose out on the learning atmosphere and they do not get the opportunity to network with other elite people. Hence that is why the children of elite parents are less likely to end up poor. Herrnstein and Murray’s Bell Curve is completely inaccurate and it is false. First of all, you cannot base a person’s intelligence income on just a test. But the book states that, “IQ like test were only of modest importance compared with social context in explaining individual attainment,” and that, “Herrnstein and Murray exaggerated the role of the AFQT test relative to social factors.” The AFQT test is more of a school achievement test rather than a natural intelligence test. It measures how well test takers learned and retained their knowledge of what they learned in school; and it measures their test taking skills. You cannot base a person’s intelligence or achievement level on just a test. In some cases people may not be good test takers, but they still can have a great amount of intelligence. Secondly, SES is a stronger predictive validity than the AFQT. In chapter four in Inequality by Design, research shows that if everyone had the same AFQT scores, but still differed from one another in social background, inequality in income would be unchanged. But if people were all equal in SES and differed from AFQT scores, income inequality would be reduced greatly. It is true that the probability of being in the bottom quintile of the income distribution is higher for African-Americans, Hawaiians, than for Caucasians, but the bell curve’s explanation of this fact is wrong, Herrnstein and Murray return to the NLSY and show that blacks and whites with similar AFQT scores earn the same income. They say that the AFQT scores explain the black and white gap in earnings. It is wrong because in reality they are not judged the same. Why is it that an African-American with the same AFQT score as a white person has to work twice as hard to get a high-quality job? In America we believe that there is such a thing as equality of opportunity, which is everyone, has a chance to get a good education and work hard to achieve these high quality jobs. We also believe that people get the jobs and incomes that they deserve. But what we don’t consider when we talk about how everyone has an equality of opportunity are social factors like race/ethnicity, sex, class, history, and government. In the United States the ideology of all men are created equal, but some men are created more equal than others. People are born with different capacities, which they will seek to find out or not, but the question is does each individual have an equal chance at finding this out. Give people an equal chance is called the equality of opportunity, but class, gender, race, and government makes a difference and alters this opportunity. When Herrnstein and Murray constructed what they call, “parental SES,” they had a lot of key variables missing, which can affect who is at risk of being poor regardless if they are intelligent or not. One key varaiable they failed to incorporate while constructing the parental SES was parental home enviornent. Parental home environment meaning that they did not include the number of siblings each respondent had, the community in which they lived in, and what class they came from. Many studies have shown that the more siblings that people have, the chances of them getting ahead, and their families effective wealth are less than those of people with less siblings. Class, there are three types of class types. First you have the elite class or the rich and smart class; then you have the middle class; and lastly you have the class that is in poverty. Class really does matter for example, say you were born into the poverty automatically you are stereotyped as dumb or of lower intelligence. Now if you were born into the elite class you are automatically stereotyped as prestigious and smart. In a scenario where someone from the poverty class and someone from the elite class are applying for the same job whom do you think is going to get it? Even though these two candidates might have the same credentials more than likely the candidate from the elite class will get the job. As regards who gets jobs, although estimates of likely performance surely play a role (an estimate often governed by the employers estimation of the credentials of the prospective employee and the value of his or her "work experience,") one's capacity to secure the job depends very much on social resources, including the candidates personal presentation of potential for the employer and on interpersonal networks. Indeed, "contact networks are usually the largest channels of job matching," especially for jobs associated with higher incomes (Jobs, Wages, and Government Website).” Another factor that they fail to consider is Gender. Gender contributes to inequality, and it can affect your income regardless if you are of high intelligence. Women were not considered physiologically equal to men. Male authority came from a belief that males were genetically prone to be aggressive. Women’s low wages and high family responsibilities play important independent roles. Women are seen as weak, we are seen as staying home and tending to family responsibilities. Today’s society still thinks that women are not as strong as men are that they can’t do manual labor like men can. For example if a women were to apply for a stevedore position many people would think that the women is crazy, and they would think that she is not capable of unloading all those heavy crates. Another example is till this day you haven’t seen a corporate CEO, which is a lady. That’s because females do not hold as much power as men do. But physical appearance cannot measure your real strength, what if the woman looks fragile, but really is strong? “Women are more likely to be poorer than men because low wages, and for those who are mothers, few hours of work account for most of women’s poverty”(Inequality by Design, pg 91). Statistics show that full time individual workers greatly differ in men and women. There are about 36,476 full time male workers versus the 26,324 full time female workers, which is a difference of 10,152 workers. Therefore if women are not occupied with family duties, the jobs that best fit them are the jobs that do not require too much labor, or in other words the lower quality jobs. Lastly Herrnstein and Murray fail to consider race. Race is another important factor of inequality. It continues to play a great role in deciding the success of Americans from jobs to housing to even education. The statistics show that: Race #of workers in thousands Median weekly earnings White 81,758 610 Hispanic 11,627 407 Black 12,527 477 (weaklyearnings.htm) As you can see the number of white workers greatly outnumber the number of workers in the Hispanic and the Black section. You can also see that the weekly earnings have a great gap between the whites and the other races. There are strong stereotypes especially against Blacks. According to a study conducted in four major cities, the studies showed that race often manifested itself in the highly segregated market and housing section (the elite section), where employers preferred some racial groups to others (raceandsucess.htm). It is a typical stereotype that any other race besides the whites are likely to have a better chance to be on welfare and to commit crimes. I think this stereotype makes other races have to work harder for a position even if they have the same credentials as a white person. In conclusion Herrnstein and Murray’s Bell Curve is not accurate and is false because they seem to confuse correlation with cause. They fail to consider too many factors.

The truth about toy boys
One website taught this correspondent about the pleasures of younger flesh. But first she had to learn the ropes
Jane Macdonnell
A 28-year-old employee of mine introduced me to the joys of younger men on a work trip last summer. At 42, I was fresh out of a 10-year marriage and most likely to spend my evenings at home reading the BBC Good Food magazine. It had never even crossed my mind that anyone, let alone a younger man, might find me attractive.
When I split up with my husband, one of his parting shots was that nobody would ever find me attractive again, and that he was the only chance I had left. At the time, I believed him – so much so that even before I succumbed to this new fling, I had to get the fling to repeat himself four times before I believed that he wanted to go to bed with me. But, as it turns out, there are plenty of young men out there who are keen to date older women. Now, I date them exclusively.
And I’m not alone. There are 6,000 members of www.toyboywarehouse.com, an internet dating service created specifically to introduce younger men to older women. So far, I have been out with several men in their twenties, including a nuclear physicist who was quite geeky, and one who lied about his age and turned out to be just 20. At the moment, I’m seeing a 26-year-old. I receive about 10 e-mails a day – far more than your average dating website – and all of them are totally over the top. And when you have come out of a marriage to a man who didn’t pay you any compliments, it is pretty strong stuff.
For women like me – single, successful and of a certain age – the ideal dating partners aren’t the divorced-dad brigade, as everyone assumes. Who wants another embittered divorcé looking for a second mum for his kids? If you already have children (I have two) and your own money (I run a company with more than 100 employees), and you’re finally finding the time to enjoy yourself, you want someone who is looking for the same no-strings-attached fun as you. So boys in their twenties are perfect.
A lot of it is about energy. When men reach my age, they slow down. Their idea of a fun night is one spent watching the telly. Women, however, speed up, so there is a huge mismatch. Getting my husband just to agree to go on holiday used to be like pulling teeth. Younger men also have a huge appetite for romance, and like to indulge it with a woman who isn’t trying to settle down.
It’s not just about sex – which can be pretty average – it’s also about attention. I get endless messages from them, asking me how my day went. When you’re a boss or a mum, nobody asks you how you’re doing.
Another appealing factor is the lack of competition. With my ex, I was caught in a terrible cycle of constantly playing down what I earned and achieved in order to make him feel better. I made sure I drove the small car and he drove the big car, and I always used to let him pay for things in restaurants, even though it was pretty much my money. With young men, I don’t have any of this. Because I’m so much older, they don’t find my success threatening, they just accept it.
Which is not to say that the whole toy-boy dating game is free of problems – the main one being that they’re so young. They always come on strong, then back off when you suggest meeting up. They can be incredibly flaky and constantly seek your approval. And they’re often unsure of what they want, hedging their bets in such a way that, if you’re not careful, can hurt.
I met my nemesis in the form of a 23-year-old estate agent called Charlie. He was gorgeous, and his attention was hugely flattering. He would text obsessively and constantly send e-mails. So when a few months into the relationship he started cancelling at the last minute and going Awol for several days at a time, I suspected that I might not be the only woman he was dating.
I set up a fake profile – not to entrap him, but just to see – and, sure enough, after a mere two days he made an approach. Then I noticed a post from another woman on the website’s forum, saying that she’d had a bad experience with one of the boys, and some of the details sounded familiar. I contacted her and discovered that, yes, it was Charlie. She had even confronted him, and he had gone demented, saying that lots of people were in touch with other people on the website. Which is fine, but he hadn’t been honest about it. I remember he had even said to me at dinner once: “Why would I need to be on that website now I’ve met you?”
In the end, I didn’t confront him myself, I just broke off contact. I simply sent him an e-mail saying he had been found out and then never heard from him again. I’m not naive, I do expect some fast and loose behaviour: at 23, you don’t really know what you want, and I’m sure I did the same at his age.
But they’re not all like that. Some of them are looking for mother figures: dependable women who aren’t flaky or airheaded like women of their own age. Boys in their twenties are, well, boys in their twenties. I don’t regret it, but I did give him one expensive present, which was foolish, and I wouldn’t do again. I’m more cautious now – but it hasn’t put me off.
Probably for all these reasons, my friends were sceptical at first. They presumed these boys would only be after money and/or sex and consequently mess me around. A lot of them also don’t understand what I see in a younger man. The other day, one of my friends asked me why I didn’t want a man to look up to. They can’t grasp the fact that I genuinely don’t need a male role model, and I don’t need anyone to provide for me, either.
As I explained to a friend who asked me when I was going to ditch this “whole silly game”: imagine you get to work on a Monday morning, and you have two e-mails in your inbox. One says: “Wow, you’re so hot, I can’t stop looking at your photo. I’ve never seen such a combination of sophistication and sex, blah, blah, blah.” And the other says: “Hi, I’m Jim. Divorced dad, three boys. Don’t see a lot of them, because my cow of an ex-wife refuses to let me have access, but, hey, I’m not bitter. Trying to rebuild my life and looking for someone to do it with.”
Which one would you go for?
Some names have been changed

Russia redefines democracy
By Allan Little BBC News, Moscow
On the banks of the Moscow River, facing the Kremlin, there is a long squat grey-faced apartment block known as the House on the Embankment. It has a special place in Russia's history.
It was built by the early Bolsheviks when they moved the Russian capital back to Moscow from St Petersburg.
It housed the families - more than 500 of them - of high-ranking Kremlin officials. They were the bureaucratic elite of the world's first attempt at a socialist state. It was, in its day, the only house in all Russia to have hot running water.
A decade ago, when I lived here as the BBC's Moscow correspondent, I went to visit one of its residents. She'd lived there since 1931. More than anything she remembered the Red Terror of 1937.
President Yeltsin was, for many, a westernising tsar and it is a truism of Russian history that westernising tsars come to grief
Four-fifths of the families in the house lost at least one member to Stalin's infamous purges, victims of the paranoia that seized the Kremlin that winter.
She told me she remembered listening at her door to the nightly raids by Stalin's feared secret police, hearing the boots on the wooden stairs, the tramp along the corridors and the knock at the door, trying to guess from the sound which of her neighbours was being taken in the night.
Hostile world
Everywhere you look in Moscow there is a physical reminder of the grandeur and cruelty of this country's history.
The Bolsheviks despised the tsarist capital St Petersburg - Russia's elegant bay window on the Baltic, its gateway to the western world.
They saw its construction in the 18th Century as a flawed and doomed attempt to westernise Russia.
Moscow better suited their temperament - the impenetrable, defensive walls of the Kremlin sealed them off, isolated and defended them from the hostile world which they believed surrounded them.
It is foolish and unfair to push the analogy too far, because Vladimir Putin is not Stalin and Russia is a far happier place today, and far more free.
But Moscow - with its architecture of defensive seclusion from the world, its remoteness from the European mainstream - makes it better suited to today's Russia, too.
Putin circle
Mr Putin's hand-picked successor, Dmitry Medvedev, is a direct beneficiary of Mr Putin's own astounding popularity. What is it that he has articulated that has connected so successfully with so many Russians?
The Putin circle calls the new Russia a sovereign democracy - a democracy defended against hostile foreign meddling
Many Russians have come to regret the 1990s. President Boris Yeltsin was, for many, a westernising tsar, and it is a truism of Russian history that westernising tsars come to grief.
Mr Putin has been the corrective - Russia reverting to type.
The Putin circle who now govern here regret the years of weakness, not just because they plunged Russian society into chaos and criminality but because, during Russia's temporary absence on the international stage, the United States made huge strides forward.
The Putin circle believes the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the Rose Revolution in Georgia, and countless other popular revolts on its borders, were not the result of popular uprisings at all but orchestrated by America and its allies to subvert real democracy among Russia's former allies.
If there has been, under Mr Putin, a retreat from the democratic changes of the 1990s in Russia it reflects, in part at least, a determination not to allow - as one Putin ally put it - "orange events" sponsored by forces hostile to Russia.
Very Russian paradox
The Putin circle calls the new Russia a sovereign democracy - a democracy defended against hostile foreign meddling.
But the odd - and very Russian - paradox is this: that this retreat from the democratic experiment in the 1990s seems genuinely popular.
Russians have voted to endorse it, and so it carries a democratic - or at least a popular - legitimacy of its own. And so the big question "Is Russia a democracy?" remains open.
More than half a century ago, America's greatest Soviet analyst, George Kennan, wrote a letter to the US state department from Moscow.
In it, he said that ever since the Bolshevik revolution, American diplomats had been trying to answer the question: "How has Bolshevism changed Russia?"
It was, he had concluded, the wrong question. It was more important to consider how Russia had changed Bolshevism.
Perhaps we should similarly invert today's question and ask not how democracy has changed Russia, but how Russia - eternal, enduring, long-suffering - is changing democracy.
Story from BBC NEWS:

Abducted, abused... survived
(From Times of London)
Lisa Hoodless and Charlene Lunnon were 10 years old when they were snatched from the street by a convicted paedophile. For four days they were held prisoner in his flat and repeatedly sexually violated while the nation held its breath, willing them to be found safe. Alan Hopkinson was found by police with the girls huddled together in his front room. He pleaded guilty to the crime and was given nine life sentences.
And that, for the public at least, is where stories like this usually end. Children don't often survive adbuction by men such as Hopkinson, a truth that weighs heavily on the mind as we await news of nine-year-old Shannon Matthews, missing now for more than a week. If they do survive, we rarely hear from them again. There is a bleak assumption that they are sentenced to a lifetime of therapy, hopelessly damaged victims with the spectre of sexual abuse forever hanging over them.
Lisa and Charlene resent that assumption. Today they are young women of 19 and want it to be known that they are fine, actually. They don't underplay the grotesque ordeal to which they were subjected, but they do not agree that they have been ruined by it. Not at all. Sometimes they feel almost guilty about this, as if the very suggestion that you can “come to terms with” or “get over” rape, especially as a child victim, somehow trivialises the act and disrespects other victims. Let's be clear: they do not. What they are saying is that there is a choice about you deal with a catastrophic event. This is how they dealt with it.
It was on January 19, 1999 when the girls were walking to school together in their home town of St Leonards, near Hastings, East Sussex, that Hopkinson, prowling the neighbourhood in his car, struck. In a narrow street, he had almost hit Lisa when she stumbled on to the road and he got out to apologise. Seizing his moment, he started to bundle Lisa into the boot of his car. She screamed but no one came. Charlene, frozen with fear and not wanting to leave her best friend alone, simply allowed herself to be bundled in with her.
Lying in the darkness as Hopkinson drove towards Eastbourne, Charlene tried to comfort Lisa by singing to her. As the more streetwise of the two, she says that, even at 10, she realised from the outset that their kidnapper had a sexual motive. Both were convinced that they were about to be killed, but the presence of the other girl stopped either from becoming hysterical.
Hopkinson, then 45, whom the girls remember smelling “old and manky”, stopped first in a quiet, country layby, pulled Charlene out and, perhaps in some warped attempt to bond with her, made her sit on his knee and answer questions such as her name, favourite colour, favourite food and the names of her parents. He then called in at the house of his elderly parents, who were away on holiday, took Lisa inside, stripped her, tied her wrists behind her neck with a pair of tights and made her answer similar questions, writing down her responses. At no point did anyone hear Charlene, who was screaming loudly in the boot. When Charlene screamed that she needed the toilet, he produced a bucket. But this was merely Hopkinson's preamble. He drove the girls to his flat above a shopping centre in Eastbourne and smuggled them inside, where he began his systematic abuse, repeatedly taking them in turn into his filthy bedroom over the next few days.
It is highly uncomfortable to talk about the subject of child sexual abuse, more problematic still to write about it. Morally, should we leave what actually happened unsaid? Might it provide titillation for another paedophile? Or is it our duty to confront what happened, grotesque as it may be?
Neither Lisa or Charlene become distressed when they talk about it. In fact, they say it sometimes feels like they are recounting a story and it never really happened. “It's weird - when I see old news clips and cuttings [about when they were missing] I think: ‘Oh, I feel really sorry for those girls' but I don't see it as us,” says Charlene, who has perhaps learnt the benefits of dissociation. We conduct this interview at Charlene's house, which is only a minute's walk from Cornfield Terrace, the road where they were kidnapped. Neither has ever felt a need to move away from the area, although they say this is probably only because they know that Hopkinson will never be released.
Lisa remembers the first time that Hopkinson took Charlene into his bedroom while she was again left tied up in another room, her hands and feet turning purple with the pressure of the ligatures. She could hear her friend crying and pleading for Hopkinson to stop, terrified and bewildered about was going on. “That first time, Charlene came back and said: ‘He raped me,'” she says. “I said: ‘What's that?' I had no idea. She had to explain it to me. That's when I knew what was going on.”
Certainly Hopkinson had no mercy for the girls when they were weeping and pleading. Lisa says: “It used to go on for hours. I remember looking at the clock going round from 9 till 11 in the morning.” Charlene could hear her screams through the wall. Lisa learnt to separate herself from the moment, thinking of happier times with her parents to get her through the ordeal. Charlene says that sometimes Hopkinson just ordered her to lie on top of him naked. Cruelly, he had told them that he had asked their parents for ransom money but that they weren't prepared to pay. Yet he let them watch the TV news about the huge police search for them and the agonised faces of their parents at press conferences begging for their return, which clearly contradicted this. The Spice Girls made an appeal for information. Charlene says she could tell from her father's face on TV that he thought she was dead.
But, at the same time, Hopkinson seemed to want to bond with the children, to have a “meaningful” relationship with them. Each time he abused the girls, he claimed to be overcome with remorse. “After he'd done whatever he'd done, he said: ‘Right, I won't do that no more. I'm a bad man,'” Charlene says. “But he always did.” He would tell them stories about other children he claimed to be friendly with and warned them that if they tried to escape there was a madman living next door with a dog who would kill them. Being children, they believed him. “He'd say: ‘At least I'm being gentle with you, not like other men would be,'” Lisa says. Meanwhile, he had removed all the door handles in the flat so that they couldn't escape.
Once, when he was asleep, they plotted to kill him and searched the flat for a knife, but Hopkinson had hidden them all. “We honestly thought that this was it for the rest of our lives,” Lisa says. “I thought that this was going to be our home.” Incredibly, Hopkinson once left the girls alone in the flat while he went to collect his parents from the airport. But all the windows were bolted, the doors were locked and the girls in any case were frightened of the “madman” next door. They raised each other's spirits by cuddling each other and talking about school and things they might do if they were ever released.
Then there seemed to be a breakthrough. On their third day of captivity, they as usual begged Hopkinson to let them go, promising that they wouldn't tell, and he suddenly agreed. He let them have their first bath since abducting them and gave them back their school uniforms (he had forced them to wear his own, stinking T-shirts) promising he would drive them somewhere and let them out. The children were euphoric.
What he actually had in mind was killing them. He drove to Beachy Head with them in the boot, then pulled them out to push them to their deaths. Charlene's memory of this is more vivid than Lisa's. She recalls him dangling her close to the edge. “He was laughing, looking right into my face,” Charlene says. “Then he just said: ‘No, I want you for one more day.'” Bizarrely, Hopkinson then put them back in the car and drove them to a fish and chip shop. He told them to wait in the back seat while he went in and bought them sausage and chips. Again they were too frightened to try to escape, not knowing where they were and having been a whisker away from being murdered.
But their rescue was near. The next day police, following up a separate complaint from parents living near by who claimed that Hopkinson had indecently assaulted their daughters, knocked on his door. After panicking for a few minutes, effing and blinding, he simply opened it and told the officers: “I've got the two missing girls in my front room.” They remember being carried out into the sunshine and later, incredibly, gave a photocall on the beach for the press, posing with two huge teddy bears. The public did not know at that point the horror that they had endured.
Hopkinson, a former Bank of England worker and a member of Mensa, had been jailed for seven years in 1991 for kidnapping and assaulting an 11-year-old girl. He had been offered psychiatric treatment as a condition of a two-month parole period before the end but declined it. Having grown up in Zimbabwe and served in the armed forces of the former Rhodesian regime, he apparently suffered a nervous breakdown in the 1980s, which triggered a personality change. His marriage failed and he lost his job. In a book he wrote as therapy while in prison he noted: “I found the only company I enjoyed was that of children.”
With Hopkinson in prison, the girls' task was to get on with their lives. They returned to school almost immediately, the teachers having ordered the other pupils never to mention the kidnap, but things were not easy. Both went into counselling, which they loathed. To this day, Charlene seems almost as distressed by the memory of “therapy” as she is by the abduction. “It was about the worst thing they could have put me through,” she says, with a visible shudder. “No one understands how horrible that was.” When all she wanted to do was play with her friends, the therapy made her relive an experience that she wanted to forget. Lisa hated it too, so her father let her stop the sessions after four months. Charlene's father, however, wanted her to carry on and she attended for 18 months.
This was the catalyst for the girls' friendship breaking down. “In my head it felt like Lisa had got over it and I hadn't,” Charlene says. “That whole year and a half counselling ... my head was messed up and I just ended up hating her.” Charlene had already suffered turbulent years before the abduction. Her mother had died when she was young and she was placed in foster care for a time. Her father had brought her to Hastings from London to start a new life together. Her way of coping after the abduction was to put on an act of confidence, while Lisa's was to withdraw.
“When I was younger, I couldn't bear to be around Lisa,” Charlene says. “I put on an act and then I'd look at her and remember what really had happened. I hate the fact I used to hate her.” She admits that in a way she bullied Lisa, trying to get people not to like her. Then, when they were 16 and had left school, a mutual friend was killed in a car crash. Charlene telephoned Lisa to talk about the tragedy and apologised for everything she had done. Since then they have been inseparable again and say the only therapy they need is talking to each other. Not that they do this very often these days. They have, they say, moved on. Lisa has a partner and an 18-month-old son; Charlene, who trained in childcare, was in a relationship until recently. Their ordeal, they say, has not made them unable to have relationships with boys, though they cannot, understandably, imagine being with an older man.
And then they say something that may astonish many people. They say that in some ways what happened has had a positive effect on their lives. Both seem vaguely surprised that anyone would want to interview them about it because it is “not that amazing” but, in a climate in which missing girls such as Madeleine McCann dominate the news, they want to urge people never to give up searching because “children can come back”.
Do they not think that it robbed them of much of their childhood? Charlene says no. “What happened - it's not half my life; it's not even that,” she says, clicking her fingers. “It's not the worst thing that has happened to me.” Then she says that a part of her doesn't even regret it happening. “If someone said you can take it back, I wouldn't take it back. It has made me so much stronger. It hasn't brought bad out, it has brought out good. It has made me appreciate things.”
Does Lisa think the incident has devastated her life? “No, not really. I dunno,” she says. “I just feel normal, like nothing's happened really. I don't think I'd be who I am today [without it]. Sometimes I feel selfish; people expect us to be crying in an interview like this because it's getting to us. Sometimes I feel people are thinking: ‘Why aren't you more emotional about this? Why didn't it affect you so badly?'” Both say their parents have been more affected by it than them. But their philosophy, says Lisa, is: “You can either go one way and [think] everything's ruined or you can go the other and put it behind you. That's what we did.”
They know that there has been damage. Charlene cannot walk on the streets on her own and hates being alone in the house (she lives with her father). Lisa suffered nightmares for many months. Neither claims to feel anything for Hopkinson, except that he is a sad, dirty old man who failed to destroy them. Hating him would empower him and make them victims who are defined by his crime.
But their quite breathtaking lack of self-pity and belief that such terrible experiences do not have to be catastrophic is remarkable. Of course, we do not know whether they will still feel like this in future and whether their courage is partly teenage buoyancy. But for parents horrified by the crimes that paedophiles commit, for now it is comforting to see it as an example of the incredible resilience of children.
The Girls That Survived Channal 4 BBC 2/27/08

Sophistry on the march!

On the Madness of Modern Liberalism:

Excerpt from "On The Madness of Modern Liberalism"

Dr. Lyle Rossiter M.D Chicago Ill. Copyright 2008

The egalitarianism and welfarism of modern liberal government are incompatible with the facts of human nature and the human condition. But the rise to power of the liberal agenda has resulted from the fact that the people of western societies have irrationally demanded that governments take care of them and manage their lives instead of protecting their property rights. This misconception results in massive violations of those rights while permitting government officials to act out their own and their constituents’ psychopathology. The liberal agenda gratifies various types of pathological dependency; augments primitive feelings of envy and inferiority; reinforces paranoid perceptions of victimization; implements manic delusions of grandeur; exploits government authority for power, domination and revenge; and satisfies infantile claims to entitlement, indulgence and compensation.Modern liberalism rejects, to one degree or another, the competence and sovereignty of the common man and subordinates him to the will of governments run by liberal elites. The western world’s twentieth century capitulation to this philosophy is obvious--and the implications for liberty are ominous. But the history of the world also documents the heroic struggles of human beings to escape from tyrannies of all types, whether imposed by the brute force and declared entitlement of a dictator, or falsely justified by economic, religious or political sophistries. The science fiction of Marxian economic evolution, the grandiose fantasy of a New World Order, the utopian dreams of The Great Society, the myth of the divine emperor, have all had their turns on center stage in irrational man’s attempts to legitimize government control and deny individual liberty. The realities of the human condition, especially the inherent sovereignty of individuals and their inevitable differences in choice and preference, render all collectivist doctrines absurd. A rational biologist will not transport a mountain goat to a prairie and declare a match between organism and environment. A rational social policy theorist will not create an environment of rules for human action that dismisses individual differences, ignores the critical roles of free choice, morality and cooperation, and otherwise distorts and violates the nature of man, and then announce that utopia has arrived in a workers’ paradise.Like all other human beings, the modern liberal reveals his true character, including his madness, in what he values and devalues, in what he articulates with passion. Of special interest, however, are the many values about which the modern liberal mind is not passionate: his agenda does not insist that the individual is the ultimate economic, social and political unit; it does not idealize individual liberty and the structure of law and order essential to it; it does not defend the basic rights of property and contract; it does not aspire to ideals of authentic autonomy and mutuality; it does not preach an ethic of self-reliance and self-determination; it does not praise courage, forbearance or resilience; it does not celebrate the ethics of consent or the blessings of voluntary cooperation. It does not advocate moral rectitude or understand the critical role of morality in human relating. The liberal agenda does not comprehend an identity of competence, appreciate its importance, or analyze the developmental conditions and social institutions that promote its achievement. The liberal agenda does not understand or recognize personal sovereignty or impose strict limits on coercion by the state. It does not celebrate the genuine altruism of private charity. It does not learn history’s lessons on the evils of collectivism. What the liberal mind is passionate about is a world filled with pity, sorrow, neediness, misfortune, poverty, suspicion, mistrust, anger, exploitation, discrimination, victimization, alienation and injustice. Those who occupy this world are “workers,” “minorities,” “the little guy,” “women,” and the “unemployed.” They are poor, weak, sick, wronged, cheated, oppressed, disenfranchised, exploited and victimized. They bear no responsibility for their problems. None of their agonies are attributable to faults or failings of their own: not to poor choices, bad habits, faulty judgment, wishful thinking, lack of ambition, low frustration tolerance, mental illness or defects in character. None of the victims’ plight is caused by failure to plan for the future or learn from experience. Instead, the “root causes” of all this pain lie in faulty social conditions: poverty, disease, war, ignorance, unemployment, racial prejudice, ethnic and gender discrimination, modern technology, capitalism, globalization and imperialism. In the radical liberal mind, this suffering is inflicted on the innocent by various predators and persecutors: “Big Business,” “Big Corporations,” “greedy capitalists,” U.S. Imperialists,” “the oppressors,” “the rich,” “the wealthy,” “the powerful” and “the selfish.” The liberal cure for this endless malaise is a very large authoritarian government that regulates and manages society through a cradle to grave agenda of redistributive caretaking. It is a government everywhere doing everything for everyone. The liberal motto is “In Government We Trust.” To rescue the people from their troubled lives, the agenda recommends denial of personal responsibility, encourages self-pity and other-pity, fosters government dependency, promotes sexual indulgence, rationalizes violence, excuses financial obligation, justifies theft, ignores rudeness, prescribes complaining and blaming, denigrates marriage and the family, legalizes all abortion, defies religious and social tradition, declares inequality unjust, and rebels against the duties of citizenship. Through multiple entitlements to unearned goods, services and social status, the liberal politician promises to ensure everyone’s material welfare, provide for everyone’s healthcare, protect everyone’s self-esteem, correct everyone’s social and political disadvantage, educate every citizen, and eliminate all class distinctions. With liberal intellectuals sharing the glory, the liberal politician is the hero in this melodrama. He takes credit for providing his constituents with whatever they want or need even though he has not produced by his own effort any of the goods, services or status transferred to them but has instead taken them from others by force. Radical liberalism thus assaults the foundations of civilized freedom, and for that reason it is a genuine evil. Further, given its irrational goals, coercive methods and historical failures, and given its perverse effects on human development, there can be no question of the radical agenda's madness. Only an irrational agenda would advocate a systematic destruction of the foundations on which ordered liberty depends. Only an irrational man would want the state to run his life for him rather than create secure conditions in which he can run his own life. Only an irrational agenda would deliberately undermine the citizen’s growth to competence by having the state adopt him. Only irrational thinking would trade individual liberty for government coercion, then sacrifice the pride of self-reliance for welfare dependency. Only an irrational man would look at a community of free people cooperating by choice and see a society of victims exploited by villains. The liberal agenda urges the citizen to place his basic trust in government, to see it as the mother of all providers, and to mistrust those with whom he would have to trade voluntarily in order to get what he wants. In doing this, the politician seeks to redirect to government offices the trust which can and should empower the individual to run his own life through voluntary cooperation with others. Government programs appeal to the citizen’s passivity by implying that he need not provide for his own health care, housing or retirement. And he need not cooperate with his fellows for these purposes either. Instead, he is told, he need only trust the government to make available to him whatever he needs and to implement that trust by ceding to its officials the power to tax the people and regulate them for his benefit. In short, the government invites the citizen to vote for the candidate who promises what a parent gives a child. It invites him to assume the dependent role of the child, to surrender his personal sovereignty to the state, to ignore his existential obligation to take full responsibility for his material and social welfare, and to empower government officials as his guardians. His neurosis is evident in his ideals and fantasies; in his self-righteousness, arrogance and grandiosity; in his self-pity; in his demands for indulgence and exemption from accountability; in his claims to entitlements; in what he gives and withholds; and in his protests that nothing done voluntarily is enough to satisfy him. Most notably, the radical liberal’s neurosis is evident in his extravagant political demands, in his furious protests against economic freedom, in his arrogant contempt for morality, in his angry defiance of civility, in his bitter attacks on freedom of association, in his aggressive assault on individual liberty. And in the final analysis, the irrationality of the radical liberal is most apparent in his ruthless use of force to control the lives of others. In a competent society the principles of ordered liberty guide the citizen throughout the life cycle. They inform him and his children and the community of the rules by which human beings make good lives for themselves. Because the rights, laws and duties of the competent society are all of a piece and reflect the bipolar nature of man, the entire ensemble of individual citizen, family, community, society and institutions forms a coherent whole in support of life, liberty, social cooperation and the pursuit of happiness. Under the rules that govern ordered liberty, the human organism and its physical and social environment are in harmony to the maximum extent possible given the turbulent nature of man. By contrast, a society organized under radical liberalism comes into immediate conflict with the bipolar nature of man and with the rights, laws and duties needed for human beings to live in peace and freedom. Rather than coordinating the life of the individual citizen with the institutions of his society, radical liberalism sets individuals and institutions into perpetual conflict with each other through its rhetoric of class warfare and victimization, its violations of personal freedom through confiscatory taxation and invasive regulation, its attacks on family integrity, and the endless bungling of government bureaucracy. With an incomparable record of flawed analysis, faulty solutions and destructive consequences, liberal government grandly proclaims itself indispensable and presumes to regulate and administer our lives from the business office to the bedroom. The inherent potential for madness in all human beings--our tendencies toward grandiosity, overestimation and extravagance; our impaired judgment, distortions of fact, misunderstanding of cause and effect and resistance to learning from experience; our lack of perspective and obsession with irrelevant details; our foolish goals, paranoid fears and irrational counter-aggression; our power-grabbing and criminality--all are writ large in the madness of liberal government. Its policies and operations are a study in the psychopathology and sociopathology of human nature.

Dark Victory at the Oscars
By Hank StueverWashington Post
"No Country for Old Men" won four awards: Brothers Joel and Ethan Coen also took the Best Director prize, the first time a duo has won the award since 1962 (when Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins won for "West Side Story"), and the only time siblings have shared the honor. It also won Best Adapted Screenplay for the Coens and Best Supporting Actor for Javier Bardem.
"We're very thankful to all of you out there for continuing to let us play in our corner of the sandbox," Joel Coen said, referring to the brothers' two-decade penchant for an alternately comic and disturbing oeuvre.
Daniel Day-Lewis won Best Actor for his portrayal of a cruelly driven oilman in the early 20th century in "There Will Be Blood." It was the second Oscar for four-time British nominee Day-Lewis, who previously won in 1990 for "My Left Foot." He was favored heavily to win this year.
Marion Cotillard won Best Actress for playing Edith Piaf in "La Vie en Rose," which chronicles the French singer's manic highs and lows before she died in 1963 at age 47. ("La Vie en Rose" also won the Best Makeup award for Didier Lavergne and Jan Archibald, who transformed Cotillard-as-Piaf from teen Parisian street waif to morphine-addicted celebrity train wreck.) "Thank you, life; thank you, love," Cotillard said in her acceptance speech, providing some sunshine.
But these were dark movies -- the feel-bad films of the year -- conjured up in what movie people seem to collectively sense as grave times, hatched in producers' offices and on writers' laptops not long after the 2004 election and amid increasing setbacks in the Iraq war and gloomy environmental warnings. Some of the filmmakers and actors wore orange ribbons or rubber bracelets to protest alleged incidents of torture by the United States at its prison in Guantanamo Bay, and in Afghanistan and Iraq -- the subject of "Taxi to the Dark Side," which won Best Documentary Feature.
When not offering a surfeit of death and gloom, Academy nominees this year focused, in at least some metaphorical way, on all the looming issues:
Lovers died in a time of war; the thirst for oil took precedence over humanity; greedy corporate types stooped lower than low; a killer roamed the desolate U.S.-Mexican borderland.
The only cheerful one in the bunch was "Juno," about a pregnant teenager, which won Best Original Screenplay for writer Diablo Cody.
Even many of the actresses showed up, coincidentally, in black: Nicole Kidman, Laura Linney, Jennifer Garner, Ellen Page, Hilary Swank, Tilda Swinton -- as if wearing the metaphor made it more true. (It seemed as if all the others wore red.)
Spanish actor Bardem won Best Supporting Actor for his role as the ruthless killer named Anton Chigurh in "No Country" -- the second time he's been up for the award. He thanked his mother, Pilar Bardem, the grande dame of Spanish cinema, in Spanish. "I believe he told his mother where the library was," host Jon Stewart quipped afterward.
British performer Swinton won Best Supporting Actress for playing a corporate executive trying to cover up an environmental scandal in "Michael Clayton." Asked backstage about the European domination of the acting prizes, Swinton replied: "Dude, Hollywood is built on Europeans. Don't tell everybody, but we're everywhere."
In other awards, Robert Elswit won Best Cinematography for "There Will Be Blood." "The Counterfeiters," an Austrian thriller about forgery and the Nazis, won Best Foreign Language Film. Glen Hansard and Mark¿ta Irglov¿ won Best Original Song for "Falling Slowly," from the Irish romance "Once."
And as for big Hollywood movies that megaplex audiences saw? "The Bourne Ultimatum" won three awards -- one for Best Film Editing and two for sound. "Ratatouille" won Best Animated Feature.

Look who's posing as Marilyn Monroe!

NY MAGAZINE
If you want to see Lindsay Lohan tastefully nude (for a change), pick up this week's New York magazine. The thrice-rehabbed starlet shed her clothes, donned a wig and channeled Marilyn Monroe for a themed shoot by renowned lensman Bert Stern.
Stern famously shot Monroe in 1962, six weeks before her death, for what's now known as "The Last Sitting." Forty-six years later, he called upon Lohan to re-create the iconic photographs, pose for pose. Lohan was comfortable with the nudity, though she admitted she did 250 crunches the night before the session.
On-set was Lohan's little sister, Ali, but mom Dina was absent. Perhaps it's because she's too busy working on her new E! reality show, aptly entitled "Momager," which chronicles her managing Ali's career as an aspiring singer.
Sources tell us Dina's been approaching stores and restaurants on Long Island "trying to get them to pay HER for filming there. It's ridiculous."
"Absolutely not true!" Dina countered to us. "We'll be shooting around and about Long Island. It is a little premature to talk about where, though, yet. We do love Long Island. I know a lot of the owners on Miracle Mile [the famous strip of posh shops and eateries in Manhasset].
"This show is more about our family, and Ali's music, and what we do. [It's also about] setting the record straight about what's been written about our family," Dina continued.
And Lindsay? "Lindsay will be in and out [of the show]. She's my daughter!" Momma Lohan said with a laugh.
But a source close to the family says Dina is "almost desperate, trying to get Lindsay involved with the show. Dina needs Lindsay if this show is going to be a big hit. The difference between just Ali and Dina, versus with Lindsay, is huge. Unfortunately, if Lindsay participates, it will only hinder her growth and stunt her career. She's a gifted actress and not a reality-TV star," the source tells us.
Michael Lohan was more direct. "Lindsay told me 'Absolutely not' when I asked if she was going to be involved [with 'Momager']," Lohan's father told us.
And Poppa Lohan wants nothing do with the "family" show. "I don't have any interest in that. I'm working for the church and I'm working on a mission for a crisis center," he told us.
Copyright 2007 NYDailyNews.com. All rights reserved.

Texas Ban on Sex Toy Sales Is Overturned
By ANGELA K. BROWN Associated Press Writer
FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) -- A federal appeals court has overturned a statute outlawing sex toy sales in Texas, one of the last states - all in the South - to retain such a ban.
The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Texas law making it illegal to sell or promote obscene devices, punishable by as many as two years in jail, violated the right to privacy guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.
Companies that own Dreamer's and Le Rouge Boutique, which sell the devices in its Austin stores, and the retail distributor Adam & Eve sued in federal court in Austin in 2004 over the constitutionality of the law. They appealed after a federal judge dismissed the suit and said the Constitution did not protect their right to publicly promote such devices.
In its decision Tuesday, the appeals court cited Lawrence and Garner v. Texas, the U.S. Supreme Court's 2003 opinion that struck down bans on consensual sex between same-sex couples.
"Just as in Lawrence, the state here wants to use its laws to enforce a public moral code by restricting private intimate conduct," the appeals judges wrote. "The case is not about public sex. It is not about controlling commerce in sex. It is about controlling what people do in the privacy of their own homes because the state is morally opposed to a certain type of consensual private intimate conduct. This is an insufficient justification after Lawrence."
The Texas attorney general's office, which represented the Travis County district attorney in the case, has not decided whether to appeal, said agency spokesman Tom Kelley.
Phil Harvey, president of Adam & Eve Inc., said the 5th Circuit Court's decision was a big step forward. He said his business plans to expand to sell in stores and at home parties, something company consultants had been fearful of doing because of the Texas law.
"I think it's wonderful, but it does seem to me that since Texas was one of three states in the country - along with Mississippi and Alabama - that continued to outlaw the sale of sex toys and vibrators, that it was probably past time," Harvey said Wednesday.
Alabama is in the 11th Circuit. But now it's unlikely that the law in Mississippi, which also is in the 5th Circuit, will be prosecuted, some legal experts said.
Virginia's law barring obscene items is a bit different from other state laws and does not appear to apply to sex toy sales, said Harvey, whose company distributes nationwide.
Louisiana, Kansas, Colorado and Georgia had laws barring obscene devices, but courts have since struck them down. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a Georgia law banning the advertising of sex toys, which can be sold under some approved circumstances.
The 5th Circuit Court's decision is encouraging for Sherri Williams, who has been fighting the issue in Alabama for a decade. Williams, who owns Pleasures stores in Alabama, sued in 1998 after state lawmakers banned the sale of sex toys there. A year ago, she lost her fight again when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to consider a lower court decision upholding the Alabama law as constitutional.
Williams hopes that lawmakers will take notice of the recent Texas case and support a newly filed bill in the Alabama Legislature to overturn the ban on adult toy sales.
"I think the courts are finally listening to the people," Williams said Wednesday. "You have 'Sex and the City,' 'Desperate Housewives' and other shows promoting what society is doing. I think the courts have finally opened their eyes and looked around, which is a miracle in the South."
© 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Hezbollah Legand Killed!
Imad Mughnieh, the senior Hezbollah commander accused of master-minding the terrorist spectaculars of war-torn Lebanon in the 1980s, met his end in a car-bomb explosion in a smart suburb of Damascus on Tuesday night.
Mughnieh, 45, ranked second only to Osama bin Laden on Washingon’s most-wanted list, was accused of killing more Americans than any other militant before the attacks of September 11, 2001, earning him a $25 million (£13 million) bounty for his capture and the undying enmity of the US and Israel.
Mughnieh died at 10.45pm in Kfar Soussa, when a bomb exploded inside his Mitsubishi Pajero. He was the only victim of the blast. His body lay on the side of the road covered in a white sheet before being carried away along with the remains of his vehicle.
Hezbollah confirmed Mughnieh’s death early yesterday morning.
“With all due pride, we declare a great jihadist leader of the Islamic Resistance in Lebanon joining the martyrs . . . The brother commander Haji Imad Mughnieh became a martyr at the hands of the Zionist Israelis,” said a statement carried by the Hezbollah al-Manar television channel. The station broke off normal program-ming to broadcast verses from the Koran interspersed with commentary and propaganda footage of Hezbollah fighters in action.
As the news spread, gunfire broke out in the Ain Dilb quarter of the Shia-dominated southern suburbs of Beirut, a ramshackle district beside the airport that was home to Mughnieh in the 1980s. By yesterday afternoon Mughnieh’s coffin had been transported to the southern suburbs of the city, where it lay in state draped in yellow Hezbollah flags, flanked by uniformed fighters, as mourners filed past.
“This is as big a blow as it gets for Hezbollah security. It’s even bigger than killing [the Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan] Nasrallah,” said Magnus Ranstorp, a Hezbollah specialist at the Swedish National Defence College in Stockholm.
Israel denied responsibility for Mughnieh’s death, although Israeli officials greeted the demise of their arch enemy with joy. Danny Yatom, former director of the Mossad intelligence agency, called the assassination “a great achievement for the free world in its fight against terror”.
A retaliation from Hezbollah is almost certain. When Israel assassinated Sheikh Abbas Mussawi, then the Hezbollah leader, in February 1992, the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires was blown up a month later, killing 29 people in a revenge operation alleged to have been planned by Mughnieh himself.
“This is something that Hezbollah cannot let pass. Mughnieh was too much of a symbol,” said Timur Goksel, a lecturer on international relations in Beirut and a former United Nations official in south Lebanon. “I don’t think Hezbollah will go for a big bombing, probably an assassination of a high-profile target.” Sheikh Afif Naboulsi, a prominent Hezbollah cleric in south Lebanon, told al-Manar television “Any attack against Hezbollah will be met with a response . . . an eye for an eye, a man for a man, a leader for a leader”.
Mughnieh’s death comes amid high tensions in Lebanon as the country prepares to mark the third anniversary of the assassination of Rafik Hariri, the former Prime Minister, in a Valentine’s Day lorry bomb blast in 2005.
Hezbollah is organising a large funeral for Mughnieh this afternoon, even as a huge turnout is expected in central Beirut to commemorate Hariri’s death. While Israel and the US top the list of suspects behind Mughnieh’s death, some Lebanese – especially those that oppose the Syrian regime – were quick to point a finger of blame at Damascus.
“It could have been the Syrians,” Walid Jumblatt, an outspoken member of the antiSyrian March 14 parliamentary coalition, told The Times. “Damascus is well protected and I don’t think somebody else could do it.” Israel’s assassins have penetrated Damascus before, however. In September 2004 a senior commander of the Palestinian Hamas movement was killed in a similar car-bomb explosion, an act pinned on Israel.
In 1985 Mughnieh led the hijacking of a TWA airliner in Beirut in which a US navy diver was killed. He is also alleged to have run the networks of kidnappers who snatched dozens of foreigners in Beirut in the mid to late 1980s, including Terry Waite, the former envoy to the Archbishop of Canterbury, and John McCarthy, the British journalist.
Mughnieh was born in 1962 in the southern Lebanese village of Teir Dibba. He grew up in the southern suburbs of Beirut, where, as a teenager, he joined Force 17, the elite unit of the Fatah faction led by Yassir Arafat, the Palestinian leader.
After Israeli forces expelled the Palestinians from Beirut during the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Mughnieh joined a group of Shia Islamists then coalescing under Iranian guidance in the Bekaa Valley. The group became Hezbollah, and Mughnieh, despite his youth, was considered one of its most capable figures. He is believed to have overseen the April 1983 suicide bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut and, six months later, the twin suicide lorry-bomb attacks against the US Marine barracks and the French paratroop headquarters in Beirut – acts that killed nearly 400 people.
Unlike Osama bin Laden, Mughnieh rarely gave interviews or released statements to the public. He lived in the shadows, aware that he was a target for assassination by the Americans and Israelis. In the mid1990s, the Israelis recruited a former pro-Syrian Sunni militiaman to kill Mughnieh in Beirut with a bomb. But the assassin killed his brother, Fuad, instead. Mughnieh’s other brother, Jihad, died in car-bomb assassination attempt in March 1985 against a senior Shia cleric that was later found to have been carried out by CIA-trained Lebanese agents.
Mughnieh was rumoured to have had facial surgery twice to disguise his features. He moved his family to Tehran at the end of the Lebanese civil war in 1990 and travelled between the Iranian capital, Beirut and Damascus, allegedly using an Iranian diplomatic passport and travelling on unscheduled flights.
After Hezbollah drove Israeli forces out of south Lebanon in 2000, Mughnieh is thought to have overseen the development of the group’s military wing, turning it into the formidable machine that battled Israeli forces to a standstill in the summer war of 2006.
Hezbollah, officially, has always distanced itself from Mughnieh and his alleged exploits. However, in an interview with The Times in July 2003, Nasrallah, a long-time friend of Mughnieh, said: “Haji Imad is among the best freedom fighters in the Lebanese arena. He had a very important role during the occupation [of Lebanon by Israel]. But as for his relationship with Hezbollah, we maintain the tradition of not discussing names.” The few photographs of Mughnieh in the public domain date back to the 1980s and show a serious-looking, narrow-faced young man with a sharply pointed black beard. But, with his death, al-Manar television broadcast a recent picture of him. It showed a chubby man with full beard streaked with grey, wearing wire-rimmed spectacles and dressed in a camouflage uniform.
“The man was a murderer and murdered people who had nothing to do with Lebanon,” Robert Baer, a former CIA officer who tracked Mughnieh in 1980s Beirut, told The Times. “But, at the same time, he believed he was fighting an anti-colonial war.”

Obama, the Democratic Nominee? Yes He Can!
A Commentary By Dick Morris & Eileen McGann
I believe that Barack Obama will defeat Hillary and win the Democratic nomination. I think that this weekend's victories in states as diverse as Washington State, Louisiana, Nebraska, and Maine illustrates his national appeal and demonstrates Hillary's inability to win in states without large immigrant and Latino populations.Hillary's results on Super Tuesday, which amounted to a draw with Obama, will be her high water mark and will represent the closest she will ever come to the party nomination.
Right now, CBS has Obama ahead in elected delegates with 1134, while Hillary has only 1131.By the time Virginia, Maryland, DC, Wisconsin, and Hawaii vote during the next week, Obama will have a lead over Clinton of about 100 delegates, even counting the super delegates who have thus far committed themselves.March 4th will, at worst, be a wash for Obama with his probable wins in Ohio, Rhode Island and Vermont offsetting his probable defeat in Texas. (Although in Texas' open primary, Republicans and Independents may flock to the Dem primary to beat Hillary).And then come a list of states almost all of which should go for Obama, including likely victories in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Indiana. By the convention, he will have more than enough delegates to overcome the expected margins Hillary may rack up among super delegates.
And don't bet on all the super delegates staying hitched to Hillary. These folks are politicians, half of them public office holders who are really good at reading the handwriting on the wall and really bad at gratitude for past favors.
Since 2004, I have predicted that Hillary Clinton would be the nominee. But, given the consistently amazing performance of Obama, his superior organizational and fund-raising skills, his inspiration of young people, and the flat and completely uninspiring performance by Hillary, it looks to me like it will be Obama as the Democratic nominee.
Dick Morris, a Fox News Analyst and author of several books, is a former advisor to Senator Trent Lott (R-Miss) and President Bill Clinton.

Diabetes Health Goes Beyond Blood Sugar
By TARA PARKER-POPE NY TIMES

The startling findings of a major federal study on the effects of lowering blood sugar are unlikely to change the way most people with Type 2 diabetes manage their illness, doctors said Thursday.
The study, announced Wednesday, showed that an intensive program to lower blood sugar actually increased risk of death. The findings were so surprising that the study was stopped early, and they seemed to undercut the accepted wisdom that people with diabetes should do everything possible to get their blood sugar down to normal.
But the methods used in the study, called Accord (for Action to Control Cardiovascular Risk in Diabetes), bear little resemblance to the techniques most doctors and patients use to manage blood sugar levels. And the patients in the study were typically far sicker than many people with diabetes today.
“The intensity of what we did is done virtually nowhere on the planet,” said Dr. John Buse, vice chairman of the study’s steering committee and the president of medicine and science at the American Diabetes Association. “It’s far beyond what’s common in clinical practice.” Dr. Buse called the study’s regimen to lower blood sugar a “brutal program.”
Still, doctors are likely to reconsider their emphasis on lowering blood sugar at all costs, because it is becoming clear that other factors influence the overall health of patients with diabetes.
The New England Journal of Medicine published a study this week showing that a three-pronged approach of managing sugar, blood pressure and cholesterol — combined with low doses of aspirin — prolonged the lives of people with diabetes. The patients who did best in that study did not reach the nearly normal sugar levels that were the aim of the Accord study. Instead, their levels were just slightly higher than normal.
In the Accord study, the group of patients who were randomly assigned to lower their blood sugar levels to nearly normal had 54 more deaths than the group whose levels were less rigidly controlled. The patients were in the study for an average of four years when investigators stopped the intense regimen and put all of them on the less intense one.
“When we look at mortality in patients with Type 2 diabetes, it’s not only the blood sugar,” said Dr. Joel Zonszein, director of the Clinical Diabetes Center at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. “What the study shows is that just lowering blood sugar is not protecting you from dying sooner. Blood sugar is important, but so is blood pressure and cholesterol.”
Patients with newly diagnosed diabetes still appear to have much to gain by keeping their blood sugar levels as close to normal as possible through healthful eating and exercise. But patients who have had a heart attack and have other risk factors need not feel guilty if they cannot get their blood sugar to normal levels, Dr. Buse said.
“The most important thing is get your blood pressure controlled, cholesterol controlled, and do a reasonable job on your diabetes, but don’t go wild,” he said. “We are backing away from notion that we always have to push, push, push to get blood sugar lower.”
Today, many patients with diabetes take two or three drugs to manage their blood sugar levels. In the Accord study, many patients took multiple drugs and insulin shots, adhered to strict diets and regularly met with counselors and doctors who monitored them. No single drug treatment was prescribed; doctors used whatever combination of various treatments that appeared to work best in each patients.
The researchers still have to sift through the data on those who died to find out whether there was any pattern that might help explain why patients in the intense treatment group fared worse. It may be that they were simply sicker to begin with. It may have been the number of drugs they used or the pace at which their blood sugar dropped.
Dr. Buse said one little-discussed issue was the sheer stress of the treatment program itself. He noted that the program demanded a lot of effort from patients but that it was still exceedingly difficult for any of them to achieve the blood sugar levels that had been set for them. Many patients with diabetes feel stressed when they fail to meet blood sugar goals set by their doctors.
“At some level I just wonder if some of them were just overwhelmed by this psychologically,” Dr. Buse said. “Could it be the stress of ‘I’m trying so hard, but I can’t get it done’?”