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http://www.latimes.com/news/la-me-helms5-2008jul05,0,2715625,full.story From the Los Angeles Times Former U.S. senator Jesse Helms dies; unyielding Southerner relied on race-baiting campaign tactics The five-term senator from North Carolina dies of natural causes at 86. He abandoned the Democratic Party as it embraced civil rights and used senatorial privilege to champion his conservative causes. By Johanna Neuman Los Angeles Times Staff Writer 9:11 AM PDT, July 4, 2008 WASHINGTON -- Jesse Helms, the former U.S. senator from North Carolina who for half a century infuriated liberals with his race-baiting campaign tactics and presidents of both parties with his use of senatorial privilege, died today. He was 86. Helms, who won election to the Senate five times before retiring in 2003, died in Raleigh, N.C., of natural causes, his former chief of staff, Jimmy Broughton, told the Associated Press. A registered Democrat in the years before he ran for the Senate in 1972, Helms was not the only Southerner of his generation to defect to the GOP after his party championed the cause of civil rights and, as he put it, "veered so far to the left nationally." Nor was he, at his death, the only politician defending the traditional values of a rural South that had long since been suburbanized. But Helms will be remembered as different from his contemporaries in that he was unyielding on issues that were important to him. Unlike other conservatives, such as Mississippi's Sen. Trent Lott or Georgia's former Rep. Newt Gingrich, who fought for their causes then found ways to reach accord with Democrats, Helms never compromised. And unlike other symbols of segregation -- such as Alabama's Gov. George C. Wallace and South Carolina's longtime Sen. Strom Thurmond, who recanted their opposition to racial integration -- Helms held firm. He rarely reached out to black voters, who in the 2000 census comprised nearly 25% of North Carolina's population. The key to Helms' longevity was a political strategy that allowed him to win election without appealing to the mainstream. The use of direct mail to solicit campaign funds nationally was pioneered in the 1960s, but Helms perfected the approach. He sought campaign contributions from conservatives nationally, then used their money to air inflammatory advertisements that energized the passions of his conservative base at home. "He needed the white vote to win," said Merle Black, a professor of political science at Emory University. "To get that, he had to use explicit racial themes. His was a kind of primitive conservatism." Helms never won with more than 56% of the vote but he maintained a devoted core constituency. "He was a loud and clear voice for muscular, principled conservatism," said Whit Ayres, a pollster for many Southern candidates. "He was ideologically consistent, and he didn't bend with the wind. Often he was the lone voice of dissent in a Senate of 100 often like-minded members. He fought his Republican colleagues as often as his Democratic counterparts. He was the only senator to vote against confirming Henry A. Kissinger as secretary of State during the Nixon administration and Frank C. Carlucci as secretary of Defense during the Reagan presidency. And he was the only senator to vote against making the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a national holiday. His lone dissent came only after he conducted a 16-day filibuster against the King holiday, during which Helms took to the Senate floor to decry the assassinated King, a pacifist and beloved civil rights leader, for his "action-oriented Marxism." Helms often prevailed by sheer stubbornness, wearing down opponents. As chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee in the 1980s, he protected tobacco's federal subsidy against growing pressure from anti-smoking groups. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the 1990s, he held up U.S. dues to the United Nations -- some $926 million -- until the bureaucratically overgrown agency slimmed down. And on any number of issues he pushed his conservative agenda in the Senate. Sending colleagues the controversial artwork of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, he asked in 1989 if the government should be funding it -- and threatened cuts in the National Endowment for the Arts budget. Introducing a constitutional amendment to ban abortions, he likened the procedure to the murderous rages of the Holocaust. He filibustered a bill setting national standards for education to try to force inclusion of an amendment encouraging prayer in the schools. He pushed for an amendment to the Americans with Disabilities Act, a bill approved in 1990 with vigorous bipartisan support, that would have barred employees with AIDS from handling food at restaurants. His obstinacy in foreign policy, where pragmatism often guides policy, was remarkable. Few administrations escaped his wrath. He condemned President Nixon's historic 1972 trip to Beijing as "appeasing Red China." He castigated President Carter, saying he "gave away the Panama Canal." And after the newly elected President Clinton proposed that gays be allowed to serve openly in the military, Helms said Clinton "better have a bodyguard" if he visited North Carolina. Colored by a passion against communism, Helms never relinquished his animus toward Cuba's Fidel Castro (he co-authored the 1996 Helms-Burton Act, which penalized companies doing business with Cuba), and he backed the contra rebels in Nicaragua who were seeking to overthrow the Marxist-led regime of Daniel Ortega. He backed right-wing authoritarians, who ran death squads in El Salvador, and the military in Guatemala. To the annoyance of both Democratic and Republican presidents, he used the Senate's confirmation power to block nominations he didn't like. Robert Pastor, a former Carter administration Latin American expert, never became ambassador to Panama. Massachusetts Gov. William F. Weld never became President Reagan's ambassador to Mexico -- despite the intervention of such stalwart Republicans as Sen. Richard G. Lugar of Indiana. James Hormel, a philanthropist and gay activist from San Francisco, did become ambassador to Luxembourg, but only after Helms' objections forced Clinton to wait until after Congress left town, dooming Hormel to a shortened tenure. Because of Helms, several major treaties never became law: the Kyoto Protocol against global warming, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the proposed land mine treaty -- all were stopped at his insistence. Helms' demagoguery was a lightning rod for liberals. He called homosexuals "weak, morally sick wretches." During debate on a 1988 AIDS bill sponsored by Sens. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), Helms said, "There is not one single case of AIDS in this country that cannot be traced in origin to sodomy." When Helms announced his retirement in 2001, Kevin Siers, the cartoonist for the Charlotte (N.C.) Observer, depicted the news with a drawing of a Confederate flag at half-staff. Just as striking was the comment from Skip Alston, president of the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP: "Jim Crow Sr. is about to retire after spreading his venom of racism and hate for almost 30 years. Jesse Helms' only lasting legacy will be one of prejudice and mean-spiritedness." Helms was born in Monroe, Union County, N.C., on Oct. 18, 1921. His father served as police chief of Monroe. Helms attended Wingate Junior College and Wake Forest University but did not graduate. One of his first jobs after leaving college was as a sports writer for the Raleigh News & Observer. There he met Dorothy Coble, the paper's society reporter. The couple married in 1942. During the war, Helms served stateside in the Navy as a recruiter. After the war, he became city editor of the Raleigh Times before going into radio and television, which would be a boon to his political career. From the beginning, Helms was schooled in the political trick of using race to scare white conservatives to the polls. As news director for WRAL radio, Helms supported Willis Smith in his 1950 Senate campaign against Frank Porter Graham, the former president of the University of North Carolina. The campaign theme was that Graham favored interracial marriages. "White people, wake up before it is too late," said one ad. "Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories? Frank Graham favors mingling of the races." The campaign's further contribution to political infamy was a handbill that showed Graham's wife dancing with a black man. When Smith won, Helms went to Washington as his administrative assistant. Upon Smith's death in 1953, Helms returned home to work for the North Carolina Bankers Assn., turning the group's monthly magazine into a platform for his political views. He was persuaded to run for a City Council seat in Raleigh. But before long, Helms found his real calling as a nightly television commentator for WRAL in North Carolina, a post he had from 1960 to 1972. He blasted the "pinkos" and "Yankees" in Washington, and criticized King's inner circle of civil rights leaders for "proven records of communism, socialism and sex perversion." He railed against Social Security, calling it "nothing more than doles and handouts." Convinced by conservative voters to run for the Senate, Helms continually showcased the campaign tactics that would mark his career. In the 1972 race, pitted against a Democratic congressman from Durham, Helms used code words that enraged liberals. The congressman's name was Nick Galifianakis. Helms' slogan: "Elect Jesse Helms -- He's One of Us." His next big challenge was in 1984, from moderate Democrat Jim Hunt, a two-term governor who was points ahead in the polls a year before the election. Then Helms launched his filibuster of the King holiday, which proved so popular in North Carolina that Hunt's lead was cut in half. On election day, Helms won 63% of the white vote, according to the Voters Education Project, a nonprofit advocacy group in Atlanta. Hunt got nearly 99% of the black vote, but the turnout -- 61% of those blacks registered -- was not enough to overcome Helms' appeal in the hard crust of rural eastern North Carolina. It helped too that President Reagan was at the top of the GOP ticket. Perhaps the most infamous Helms race was in 1990, when he ran against Harvey Gantt, a black architect and former mayor of Charlotte. The campaign became notorious among strategists for a television ad showing a white man's hands crumpling a rejected job application as a voice intoned: "You needed that job. And you were the best qualified. But they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota. Is that really fair? Harvey Gantt said it is." The so-called "white hands ad" had an immediate effect. "Gantt was leading until that ad," recalled Emory University's Merle Black. "His people were really brokenhearted." Gantt lost that election as well as a rematch six years later. Ferrel Guillory, a longtime Helms watcher who directed the liberal editorial page at the Raleigh News & Observer when Helms was at the peak of his senatorial power, called him "a man of the small-town rural traditionalist South." Helms never forgot, he never changed. "It was part of his political appeal too," said Guillory, who now runs a program on Southern politics and media at the University of North Carolina. "They always said, 'You know where Jesse stands.' " Helms had suffered from ill health in recent years. He had open-heart surgery in 2002 to replace a worn-out pig valve installed in his heart 10 years earlier. He had knee replacement surgery in 1998 and was diagnosed in 2000 with "peripheral neuropathy," a condition that numbed his feet and impaired his balance, forcing him to ride through the halls of Congress in a motorized scooter. johanna.neuman@latimes.com

http://www.latimes.com/news/la-me-helms5-2008jul05,0,2715625,full.story From the Los Angeles Times Former U.S. senator Jesse Helms dies; unyielding Southerner relied on race-baiting campaign tactics The five-term senator from North Carolina dies of natural causes at 86. He abandoned the Democratic Party as it embraced civil rights and used senatorial privilege to champion his conservative causes. By Johanna Neuman Los Angeles Times Staff Writer 9:11 AM PDT, July 4, 2008 WASHINGTON -- Jesse Helms, the former U.S. senator from North Carolina who for half a century infuriated liberals with his race-baiting campaign tactics and presidents of both parties with his use of senatorial privilege, died today. He was 86. Helms, who won election to the Senate five times before retiring in 2003, died in Raleigh, N.C., of natural causes, his former chief of staff, Jimmy Broughton, told the Associated Press. A registered Democrat in the years before he ran for the Senate in 1972, Helms was not the only Southerner of his generation to defect to the GOP after his party championed the cause of civil rights and, as he put it, "veered so far to the left nationally." Nor was he, at his death, the only politician defending the traditional values of a rural South that had long since been suburbanized. But Helms will be remembered as different from his contemporaries in that he was unyielding on issues that were important to him. Unlike other conservatives, such as Mississippi's Sen. Trent Lott or Georgia's former Rep. Newt Gingrich, who fought for their causes then found ways to reach accord with Democrats, Helms never compromised. And unlike other symbols of segregation -- such as Alabama's Gov. George C. Wallace and South Carolina's longtime Sen. Strom Thurmond, who recanted their opposition to racial integration -- Helms held firm. He rarely reached out to black voters, who in the 2000 census comprised nearly 25% of North Carolina's population. The key to Helms' longevity was a political strategy that allowed him to win election without appealing to the mainstream. The use of direct mail to solicit campaign funds nationally was pioneered in the 1960s, but Helms perfected the approach. He sought campaign contributions from conservatives nationally, then used their money to air inflammatory advertisements that energized the passions of his conservative base at home. "He needed the white vote to win," said Merle Black, a professor of political science at Emory University. "To get that, he had to use explicit racial themes. His was a kind of primitive conservatism." Helms never won with more than 56% of the vote but he maintained a devoted core constituency. "He was a loud and clear voice for muscular, principled conservatism," said Whit Ayres, a pollster for many Southern candidates. "He was ideologically consistent, and he didn't bend with the wind. Often he was the lone voice of dissent in a Senate of 100 often like-minded members. He fought his Republican colleagues as often as his Democratic counterparts. He was the only senator to vote against confirming Henry A. Kissinger as secretary of State during the Nixon administration and Frank C. Carlucci as secretary of Defense during the Reagan presidency. And he was the only senator to vote against making the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a national holiday. His lone dissent came only after he conducted a 16-day filibuster against the King holiday, during which Helms took to the Senate floor to decry the assassinated King, a pacifist and beloved civil rights leader, for his "action-oriented Marxism." Helms often prevailed by sheer stubbornness, wearing down opponents. As chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee in the 1980s, he protected tobacco's federal subsidy against growing pressure from anti-smoking groups. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the 1990s, he held up U.S. dues to the United Nations -- some $926 million -- until the bureaucratically overgrown agency slimmed down. And on any number of issues he pushed his conservative agenda in the Senate. Sending colleagues the controversial artwork of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, he asked in 1989 if the government should be funding it -- and threatened cuts in the National Endowment for the Arts budget. Introducing a constitutional amendment to ban abortions, he likened the procedure to the murderous rages of the Holocaust. He filibustered a bill setting national standards for education to try to force inclusion of an amendment encouraging prayer in the schools. He pushed for an amendment to the Americans with Disabilities Act, a bill approved in 1990 with vigorous bipartisan support, that would have barred employees with AIDS from handling food at restaurants. His obstinacy in foreign policy, where pragmatism often guides policy, was remarkable. Few administrations escaped his wrath. He condemned President Nixon's historic 1972 trip to Beijing as "appeasing Red China." He castigated President Carter, saying he "gave away the Panama Canal." And after the newly elected President Clinton proposed that gays be allowed to serve openly in the military, Helms said Clinton "better have a bodyguard" if he visited North Carolina. Colored by a passion against communism, Helms never relinquished his animus toward Cuba's Fidel Castro (he co-authored the 1996 Helms-Burton Act, which penalized companies doing business with Cuba), and he backed the contra rebels in Nicaragua who were seeking to overthrow the Marxist-led regime of Daniel Ortega. He backed right-wing authoritarians, who ran death squads in El Salvador, and the military in Guatemala. To the annoyance of both Democratic and Republican presidents, he used the Senate's confirmation power to block nominations he didn't like. Robert Pastor, a former Carter administration Latin American expert, never became ambassador to Panama. Massachusetts Gov. William F. Weld never became President Reagan's ambassador to Mexico -- despite the intervention of such stalwart Republicans as Sen. Richard G. Lugar of Indiana. James Hormel, a philanthropist and gay activist from San Francisco, did become ambassador to Luxembourg, but only after Helms' objections forced Clinton to wait until after Congress left town, dooming Hormel to a shortened tenure. Because of Helms, several major treaties never became law: the Kyoto Protocol against global warming, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the proposed land mine treaty -- all were stopped at his insistence. Helms' demagoguery was a lightning rod for liberals. He called homosexuals "weak, morally sick wretches." During debate on a 1988 AIDS bill sponsored by Sens. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), Helms said, "There is not one single case of AIDS in this country that cannot be traced in origin to sodomy." When Helms announced his retirement in 2001, Kevin Siers, the cartoonist for the Charlotte (N.C.) Observer, depicted the news with a drawing of a Confederate flag at half-staff. Just as striking was the comment from Skip Alston, president of the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP: "Jim Crow Sr. is about to retire after spreading his venom of racism and hate for almost 30 years. Jesse Helms' only lasting legacy will be one of prejudice and mean-spiritedness." Helms was born in Monroe, Union County, N.C., on Oct. 18, 1921. His father served as police chief of Monroe. Helms attended Wingate Junior College and Wake Forest University but did not graduate. One of his first jobs after leaving college was as a sports writer for the Raleigh News & Observer. There he met Dorothy Coble, the paper's society reporter. The couple married in 1942. During the war, Helms served stateside in the Navy as a recruiter. After the war, he became city editor of the Raleigh Times before going into radio and television, which would be a boon to his political career. From the beginning, Helms was schooled in the political trick of using race to scare white conservatives to the polls. As news director for WRAL radio, Helms supported Willis Smith in his 1950 Senate campaign against Frank Porter Graham, the former president of the University of North Carolina. The campaign theme was that Graham favored interracial marriages. "White people, wake up before it is too late," said one ad. "Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories? Frank Graham favors mingling of the races." The campaign's further contribution to political infamy was a handbill that showed Graham's wife dancing with a black man. When Smith won, Helms went to Washington as his administrative assistant. Upon Smith's death in 1953, Helms returned home to work for the North Carolina Bankers Assn., turning the group's monthly magazine into a platform for his political views. He was persuaded to run for a City Council seat in Raleigh. But before long, Helms found his real calling as a nightly television commentator for WRAL in North Carolina, a post he had from 1960 to 1972. He blasted the "pinkos" and "Yankees" in Washington, and criticized King's inner circle of civil rights leaders for "proven records of communism, socialism and sex perversion." He railed against Social Security, calling it "nothing more than doles and handouts." Convinced by conservative voters to run for the Senate, Helms continually showcased the campaign tactics that would mark his career. In the 1972 race, pitted against a Democratic congressman from Durham, Helms used code words that enraged liberals. The congressman's name was Nick Galifianakis. Helms' slogan: "Elect Jesse Helms -- He's One of Us." His next big challenge was in 1984, from moderate Democrat Jim Hunt, a two-term governor who was points ahead in the polls a year before the election. Then Helms launched his filibuster of the King holiday, which proved so popular in North Carolina that Hunt's lead was cut in half. On election day, Helms won 63% of the white vote, according to the Voters Education Project, a nonprofit advocacy group in Atlanta. Hunt got nearly 99% of the black vote, but the turnout -- 61% of those blacks registered -- was not enough to overcome Helms' appeal in the hard crust of rural eastern North Carolina. It helped too that President Reagan was at the top of the GOP ticket. Perhaps the most infamous Helms race was in 1990, when he ran against Harvey Gantt, a black architect and former mayor of Charlotte. The campaign became notorious among strategists for a television ad showing a white man's hands crumpling a rejected job application as a voice intoned: "You needed that job. And you were the best qualified. But they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota. Is that really fair? Harvey Gantt said it is." The so-called "white hands ad" had an immediate effect. "Gantt was leading until that ad," recalled Emory University's Merle Black. "His people were really brokenhearted." Gantt lost that election as well as a rematch six years later. Ferrel Guillory, a longtime Helms watcher who directed the liberal editorial page at the Raleigh News & Observer when Helms was at the peak of his senatorial power, called him "a man of the small-town rural traditionalist South." Helms never forgot, he never changed. "It was part of his political appeal too," said Guillory, who now runs a program on Southern politics and media at the University of North Carolina. "They always said, 'You know where Jesse stands.' " Helms had suffered from ill health in recent years. He had open-heart surgery in 2002 to replace a worn-out pig valve installed in his heart 10 years earlier. He had knee replacement surgery in 1998 and was diagnosed in 2000 with "peripheral neuropathy," a condition that numbed his feet and impaired his balance, forcing him to ride through the halls of Congress in a motorized scooter. johanna.neuman@latimes.com

Adding hidden items in Web sites is what separates good developers from great ones. Below I've compiled a list of 10 of my personal favorites from the past few years. If you have any of your own feel free to share them in the comments.

Iran complains to U.N. about Clinton comment Wed Apr 30, 2008 7:26pm EDT By Claudia Parsons UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Iran complained to the United Nations on Wednesday about U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's comment the United States could "totally obliterate" Iran in retaliation for a nuclear strike against Israel. Iran's deputy ambassador to the United Nations sent a letter to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and the president of the Security Council expressing Iran's condemnation of "such a provocative, unwarranted and irresponsible statement." Clinton made the remarks last week while campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination. The New York senator said she wanted to make clear to Tehran what she was prepared to do if she becomes president in the hope that this warning would deter any Iranian nuclear attack against the Jewish state. "I want the Iranians to know that if I'm the president, we will attack Iran (if it attacks Israel)," Clinton said in an interview on ABC's "Good Morning America." "In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them," she said. "That's a terrible thing to say but those people who run Iran need to understand that because that perhaps will deter them from doing something that would be reckless, foolish and tragic," Clinton said. Iran, which Washington and its allies charge is seeking nuclear arms, has voiced war-like rhetoric in recent years amid speculation its nuclear facilities could face U.S. or Israeli military action. Tehran denies it is trying to acquire nuclear weapons and says it needs nuclear technology to generate electricity. Israel is widely believed to have nuclear weapons but, as part of a policy of "strategic ambiguity," has not confirmed or denied the nature of its arsenal. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad outraged the international community in 2005 by saying "Israel should be wiped off the map." In the letter dated April 30, Deputy Ambassador Mehdi Danesh-Yazdi said he wanted to reiterate Iran's rejection of all weapons of mass destruction including nuclear weapons. "Moreover, I wish to reiterate my government's position that the Islamic Republic of Iran has no intention to attack any other nations," he said. "Nonetheless .... Iran would not hesitate to act in self-defense to respond to any attack against the Iranian nation and to take appropriate defensive measures to protect itself." (Editing by Chris Wilson)

Tomgram: Petraeus, Falling Upwards Selling the President's General The Petraeus Story By Tom Engelhardt You simply can't pile up enough adjectives when it comes to the general, who, at a relatively young age, was already a runner-up for Time Magazine's Person of the Year in 2007. His record is stellar. His tactical sense extraordinary. His strategic ability, when it comes to mounting a campaign, beyond compare. I'm speaking, of course, of General David Petraeus, the President's surge commander in Iraq and, as of last week, the newly nominated head of U.S. Central Command (Centcom) for all of the Middle East and beyond -- "King David" to those of his peers who haven't exactly taken a shine to his reportedly "high self-regard." And the campaign I have in mind has been his years' long wooing and winning of the American media, in the process of which he sold himself as a true American hero, a Caesar of celebrity. As far as can be told, there's never been a seat in his helicopter that couldn't be filled by a friendly (or adoring) reporter. This, after all, is the man who, in the summer of 2004, as a mere three-star general being sent back to Baghdad to train the Iraqi army, made Newsweek's cover under the caption, "Can This Man Save Iraq?" (The article's subtitle -- with the "yes" practically etched into it -- read: "Mission Impossible? David Petraeus Is Tasked with Rebuilding Iraq's Security Forces. An Up-close Look at the Only Real Exit Plan the United States Has -- the Man Himself"). And, oh yes, as for his actual generalship on the battlefield of Iraq… Well, the verdict may still officially be out, but the record, the tactics, and the strategic ability look like they will not stand the test of time. But by then, if all goes well, he'll once again be out of town and someone else will take the blame, while he continues to fall upwards. David Petraeus is the President's anointed general, Bush's commander of commanders, and (not surprisingly) he exhibits certain traits much admired by the Bush administration in its better days. Launching Brand Petraeus Recently, in an almost 8,000 word report in the New York Times, David Barstow offered an unparalleled look inside a sophisticated Pentagon campaign, spearheaded by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in which at least 75 retired generals and other high military officers, almost all closely tied to Pentagon contractors, were recruited as "surrogates." They were to take Pentagon "talking points" (aka "themes and messages") about the President's War on Terror and war in Iraq into every part of the media -- cable news, the television and radio networks, the major newspapers -- as their own expert "opinions." These "analysts" made "tens of thousands of media appearances" and also wrote copiously for op-ed pages (often with the aid of the Pentagon) as part of an unparalleled, five-plus year covert propaganda onslaught on the American people that lasted from 2002 until, essentially, late last night. Think of it, like a pod of whales or a gaggle of geese, as the Pentagon's equivalent of a surge of generals. In that impressive Times report, however, one sentence has so far passed unnoticed; yet, it speaks the world of General Petraeus, and of how this administration and its chosen sons have played their cards from the moment George W. Bush mounted a pile of rubble on September 14, 2001, at Ground Zero in New York City and began to sell his incipient War on Terror (and himself as commander-in-chief). From that day on, the propaganda campaign, the selling war, on the American "home front" has never stopped. Here, in that context, is Barstow's key sentence: "When David H. Petraeus was appointed the commanding general in Iraq in January 2007, one of his early acts was to meet with the [Pentagon's retired military] analysts." In other words, on becoming U.S. commander in Iraq, he automatically turned to the military propaganda machine the Pentagon had set up to launch his initial surge -- on the home front. Think of the train of events this way: In January 2007, pummeled in the opinion polls, his Iraq policy in shambles and the Republican Party in electoral disarray, George W. Bush and his advisors decided to launch a last-minute home-front campaign to buy time on Iraq. It was, the President declared in an address to the American people, his "new way forward in Iraq." In Vietnam-era terms, the plan itself involved a relatively modest "escalation" of 30,000 troops, largely into the Baghdad area -- that being all the troops the overstretched U.S. military then had available. It gained, however, the resounding nickname, "the surge." (That word, strangely enough, had essentially been pilfered from the heart of "insurgent," a term previously used to designate the enemy.) By then, of course, the President himself was a thoroughly tarnished brand, not exactly the sort of face with which to launch 1,000 ships or even 30,000 troops into a self-made hell against the urgent wishes of the American people. Instead, he pushed forward his all-American general -- the smart, bemedaled, well-spoken, Princeton PhD and counterinsurgency guru, beloved by reporters whom he had romanced for years, and already treated like a demi-god by members of both parties in both houses of Congress. He became the "face" of the administration (just as American military and civilian officials had long spoken of putting an "Iraqi face" on the American occupation of that country). In the ensuing months, as New York Times columnist Frank Rich pointed out, the surging Brand Petraeus campaign only gained traction as the President publicly cited the general more than 150 times, 53 times in May 2007 alone. Never has a President put on the "face" of a general more regularly. Now, let's return to that single sentence from Barstow. Having been put forward by Bush as his favorite general and the savior of his Iraq policies, Petraeus seems to have promptly turned to the Pentagon's favored military "analysts" for a hand. The general's initial surge, that is, was right here at home via those figures the Pentagon had embedded in the media and liked to refer to as its "message force multipliers." Let's keep in mind that one of those figures, retired Army general Jack Keane, a "patron" to Petraeus during his rise in the ranks, was, along with Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute, an "author" of, and key propagandist for, the surge strategy, as well as the head of his own consulting firm, on the board of General Dynamics, and a national security analyst for ABC News. So, in case you were wondering why the hosannas to Petraeus nearly reached the heavens and why the "success" of the surge was established so quickly in this country (despite four years of promises followed by disaster that might have called for media caution), look first to those surging retired generals and to the general who had already established himself as a military brand name. And let's keep in mind that the Times' Barstow has pulled back the curtain on but one administration program of deception. It is unlikely to have been the only one. We don't yet fully know the full range of sources the Pentagon and this administration mustered in the service of its surge. We don't know what sort of thought and planning, for instance, went into the transformation of any Sunni insurgent who didn't join the new Awakening Movement and become a "Son of Iraq" into a member of "al-Qaeda-in-Mesopotamia" -- or, more recently, every Shiite rebel into an Iranian agent. We don't know what sort of administration planning has gone into the drumbeat of well-orchestrated, ever more intense claims that Iran is the source of all our ills in Iraq, and directly responsible for a striking percentage of U.S. military deaths there. Recently, according to the New York Times, "senior officers in the American division that secures the capital said that 73 percent of fatal and other harmful attacks on American troops in the past year were caused by roadside bombs planted by so-called 'special groups'" (a euphemism for Iranian-trained groups of Shiite militiamen). We don't have a full accounting of the many carefully guided tours of Iraq given to inside-the-Beltway think-tank figures like Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, former military figures, journalists, pundits, and congressional representatives, all involving special meet-and-greet contacts with Petraeus and his top commanders, all leading to upbeat assessments of the surge. We don't have the logs of our surge commander's visitors these last months, but we know, anecdotally at least, that, during this period, no reporter, no matter how minor, seemed incapable of securing a little get-together time to experience the general's special charm. Put everything we do know, and enough that we suspect, together and you get our last surge year-plus in the U.S. as a selling/propaganda campaign par excellence. The result has been a mix of media good news about "surge success," especially in "lowering violence," and no news at all as the Iraq story grew boringly humdrum and simply fell off the front pages of our papers and out of the TV news (as well as out of the Democratic Congress). This was, of course, a public relations bonanza for an administration that might otherwise have appeared fatally wounded. Think, in the president's terminology, of victory -- not over Shiite or Sunni insurgents in Iraq, but, once again, over the media here at home. None of this should surprise anyone. The greatest skill of the Bush administration has always been its ability to market itself on "the home front." From September 14, 2001 on, through all those early "mission accomplished" years, it was on the home front, not in Afghanistan or Iraq, that administration officials worked hardest, pacifying the media, rolling out their own "products," and establishing the rep of their leader and "wartime" Commander-in-Chief. As White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card explained candidly enough to the New York Times, when it came to the launching, in September 2002, of a campaign to convince Congress and the public that an invasion of Iraq should be approved: "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." Falling Upwards As a general and a personality, Petraeus fit the particular marketing mentality of this administration perfectly. Graduating from West Point too late for Vietnam -- he wrote his doctoral thesis on that war -- he had, before the President's invasion, taken part only in "peacekeeping" operations in places like Haiti. In March 2003, a two-star general, he crossed the Kuwaiti border as commander of the 101st Airborne Division. After Baghdad fell, his troops occupied Mosul, a relative quiet city to the north, largely untouched by invasion or war. There, he gained a reputation (at least in the U.S.) for having a special affinity for Iraqis and for applying top-notch, outreach-oriented counterinsurgency tactics. In those early months, he always seemed to have a writer in tow. In 2004-2005, for his next tour of duty -- already with the ear of the President and of Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz -- he returned to Iraq as the Newsweek Can-He-Save-It guy. His giant task was to "stand up" Iraqi security forces. Again, he had writers in tow. The Washington Post's columnist David Ignatius, for instance, twice paid extended visits to the general during that tour, returning from helicoptering around the Iraqi countryside all aglow and writing glowingly of the job Petraeus was doing (as he would again over the years, as so many other journalists and commentators would, too). The general himself wasn't exactly shy on the subject of his accomplishments. He wrote, for instance, a strategically well-placed op-ed in the Washington Post in September 2004, just as the administration was rolling out another "product," the President's run for a second term. In it, with just enough caveats to cover himself professionally, he waxed positive about the glories of Iraqi soldiers standing up. It was a piece filled with words like "progress" and "optimism," just the sort of thing a President trying to outrun a bunch of Iraqi insurgents to the November 4th finish line might like to see in print in his hometown paper. The general picked up his third star on this tour of duty. Next came a stint at home where he oversaw the rewriting of the Army's counterinsurgency manual, while touting himself as the expert of experts on that subject, too. And then, of course, in February 2007, a fourth star in hand, he took charge of the U.S. command in Iraq for its surge moment. Last week, of course, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates appointed him head of the Pentagon's Central Command with responsibility for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and for our proxy war in Somalia. His duties will soon stretch from North Africa into Central Asia. The appointment, however, came after the fact. By then, as George W. Bush's personal general, he had already left the actual Centcom commander, Adm. William "Fox" Fallon in the dust. The President dealt with him directly, bypassing the Centcom commander; and, even before Fallon's ignominious resignation, Petraeus was already traveling the Middle East as, essentially, the President's personal representative, engaging in acts normally reserved for the head of Centcom. His appointment was seconded by Presidential candidate John McCain ("I think he is by far the best-qualified individual to take that job…"), signaling the degree to which the Bush administration is now preparing optimistically for McCain's war (or, alternatively, for Obama's hell). But here's the strange thing when you look more carefully at Petraeus's record (as others have indeed done over these last years), the actual results -- in Iraq, not Washington -- for each of his previous assignments proved dismal. What the record shows is a man who, after each tour of duty, seemed to manage to make it out of town just ahead of the posse, so that someone else always took the fall. On his time in Mosul, former ambassador Peter Galbraith offered this description: "As the American commander in Mosul in 2003 and 2004, he earned adulatory press coverage… for taming the Sunni-majority city. Petraeus ignored warnings from America's Kurdish allies that he was appointing the wrong people to key positions in Mosul's local government and police. A few months after he left the city, the Petraeus-appointed local police commander defected to the insurgency while the Sunni Arab police handed their weapons and uniforms over en masse to the insurgents." Mosul has remained a hotspot of insurgency ever since. On his next tour, when it came to all the "progress" training the Iraqi army, let Rod Nordland, the author of that "fawning" -- his retrospective adjective, not mine -- Newsweek cover piece of 2004, suggest an obituary, as he did in 2007: "[Petraeus] rose to fame not by his achievements but by his success in selling them as achievements. He's first of all a great communicator… Training the Iraqi military and shifting responsibility to them was the mantra Petraeus sold to hundreds of credulous reporters and hundreds of even more credulous visiting CODELs (congressional delegations)… By the time he left, the training program was clearly on its way to spectacular failure. By the end of last year that had become received wisdom; it became convenient for the brass to blame the fiasco on the politically less popular and media-friendless Gen. George Casey. Entire brigades of police had to be pulled off the street and retrained because they were evidently riddled with death squads and in some cases even with insurgents. The Iraqi Army was all but useless, a feeble patient kept on life support by the American military." Just recently, in hearings before Congress, Petraeus himself introduced two new words to describe the post-surge security situation in Iraq: "fragile and reversible." Take that as a tip for the future. Fragile indeed. The surge landscape the general helped create has, from the beginning, been flammable and unstable in the extreme. It has, in recent weeks, been threatening to break down in Shiite civil strife, even as, under an American aegis, the Sunnis have been rearming and reorganizing for the day when they can take back a Baghdad that was largely cleansed of their ethnic compatriots during the surge months. Americans are once again dying in increasing numbers (though little attention has yet been paid to this in the media), as are Iraqis. It will be a miracle if post-surge Iraq doesn't come apart before November 4, 2008, not to say the end of George Bush's term in January. The problem is: Putting a face -- that is, a mask -- on something has nothing to do with changing it in any essential way, no matter how you brand it and no matter who's listening to you elsewhere. This August or September, when the general takes over at Centcom, he will leave behind (as he has before) the equivalent of an IED-mined stretch of Iraqi roadside ready to explode, possibly under the coming U.S. presidential election. It remains to be seen whether he will once again have made it out of town in the nick of time and relatively unscathed. The miracle, of course, was that, so late in the game, the American media swallowed the President's (and the general's) propaganda on the surge campaign which, on the face of it, was ludicrous. Stranger still, they did so for almost a year before the situation started to fray visibly enough for our TV networks and major papers to take notice. For that year, most of them thought they saw a brass band playing fabulously when there was hardly a snare drum in sight. That result may be a public-relations man's dream, but it was thanks to a con man's art. The question is: Can the President make it back to Texas before the bottom falls out in Iraq? And will the general continue to fall ominously upward? Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), has been updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.

THESE ARE COOL

Conservative bias alleged in textbook Publisher now says it will review the book, as will College Board The Associated Press updated 7:04 p.m. ET April 8, 2008 WASHINGTON - Talk about a civics lesson: A high-school senior has raised questions about political bias in a popular textbook on U.S. government, and legal scholars and top scientists say the teen's criticism is well-founded. They say "American Government" by conservatives James Wilson and John Dilulio presents a skewed view of topics from global warming to separation of church and state. The publisher now says it will review the book, as will the College Board, which oversees college-level Advanced Placement courses used in high schools. Matthew LaClair of Kearny, N.J., recently brought his concerns to the attention of the Center for Inquiry, an Amherst, N.Y., think tank that promotes science and has issued a scathing report about the textbook. "I just realized from my own knowledge that some of this stuff in the book is just plain wrong," said LaClair, who is using the book as part of an AP government class at Kearny High School. Textbook is widely used The textbook is designed for a college audience, but also is widely used in AP American government courses, said Richard Blake, a spokesman for the publisher, Houghton Mifflin Co. Blake said the company "will be working with the authors to evaluate in detail the criticisms of the Center for Inquiry." Blake said some disputed passages already have been excised from the newest edition of the book. Both authors are considered conservative. Dilulio, a University of Pennsylvania professor, formerly worked for the Bush administration as director of faith-based initiatives. Wilson is the Ronald Reagan Professor of Public Policy at Pepperdine University. Neither responded immediately to calls seeking comment. LaClair said he was particularly upset about the book's treatment of global warming. James Hansen, the director of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, recently heard about LaClair's concerns and has lent him some support. Hansen has sent Houghton Mifflin a letter stating that the book's discussion on global warming contained "a large number of clearly erroneous statements" that give students "the mistaken impression that the scientific evidence of global warming is doubtful and uncertain." The edition of the textbook published in 2005, which is in high school classrooms now, states that "science doesn't know whether we are experiencing a dangerous level of global warming or how bad the greenhouse effect is, if it exists at all." A newer edition published late last year was changed to say, "Science doesn't know how bad the greenhouse effect is." Controversy over climate change The authors kept a phrase stating that global warming is "enmeshed in scientific uncertainty." While there are still some scientists who downplay global warming and the role of burning fossil fuels, the overwhelming majority of climate scientists and peer-reviewed scientific research say human activity is causing climate change. Last year an international collection of hundreds of scientists and government officials unanimously approved wording that said the scientific community had "very high confidence," meaning more than 90 percent likelihood, that global warming is caused by humans. LaClair also was concerned about the textbook's treatment of U.S. Supreme Court decisions regarding prayer in school. The book shows a picture of kids praying in front of a Virginia high school and states, "The Supreme Court will not let this happen inside a public school." Blake said the photo was cut out of the most recent edition. The textbook goes on to state that the court has ruled as "unconstitutional every effort to have any form of prayer in public schools, even if it is nonsectarian, voluntary or limited to reading a passage of the Bible." Those examples are not correct, says Charles Haynes, a religious liberties expert at the First Amendment Center in Washington. "Students can pray inside a public school in many different ways," Haynes said, adding they can pray alone or in groups before lunch or in religious clubs, for example. Haynes said students can't disrupt the school or interfere with the rights of others. The court has said the prayer can't be state-sponsored, so a teacher can't lead a prayer and a school can't require it, Haynes said. Another part of the book that the report criticizes deals with a Supreme Court decision overturning a Texas law banning sexual contact between people of the same sex. The authors wrote that the Supreme Court decision had a "benefit" and a "cost." The benefit, it said, was to strike down a rarely enforced law that could probably not be passed today, while the cost was to "create the possibility that the court, and not Congress or state legislatures, might decide whether same-sex marriages were legal." Derek Araujo, the report's author, said that's a matter of opinion and that gay-rights activists, for example, see it differently. "The major problem with this is they describe the costs and benefits of the system in a very political way," he said. 'Trying to lead the reader' LaClair added that he perceived a bias in the book too. "All the statements for the most part were trying to lead the reader in one direction and not giving a fair account of everything," he said. It's not the first time LaClair has raised alarm bells over teaching at his school. A few years ago, he tape recorded a teacher making religious remarks to his students. Many people at the school were upset with LaClair for raising the issue. "I'm not looking to cause a huge controversy, but I want the students to be taught correct information," LaClair said. His mother, Debra, says she thinks her son is giving his peers another kind of civics lesson. "When he sees something that is incorrect, he wants to fix it," she said. "That's him. That's what he does." Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Raise your hands and step away from the hedgehog 5:00AM Sunday April 06, 2008 By Rebecca Milne A 27-year-old has been charged with assaulting a teenage boy - with a hedgehog. Police allege that Whakatane resident William Singalargh picked up the creature and threw it about 5m at a 15-year-old. "It hit the victim in the leg, causing a large, red welt and several puncture marks," said Senior Sergeant Bruce Jenkins, of Whakatane police. "He was arrested shortly afterwards for assault with a weapon, namely the hedgehog." The incident is alleged to have occurred around 8pm on Saturday, February 9. Police would not confirm if the pair knew each other, or if alcohol was a contributing factor in the incident. It is also unknown whether the hedgehog was dead or alive at the time but it was dead when it was collected as evidence. Singalargh's lawyer Rebecca Plunket would not comment on the case. Her client will appear in Whakatane District Court on April 17 for a defended hearing on a charge of assault with a weapon. The maximum penalty is five years' imprisonment.

If we were visited by aliens from a distant planet, would we fall on our knees and worship them as gods? The difficulty of getting here from even our nearest neighbor, the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri, constitutes a filter through which only beings with a technology so advanced as to be god-like (from our point of view) could pass. The capabilities and powers of our interstellar visitors would seem more magical to us than all the miracles of all the gods that have ever been imagined by priests or theologians, mullahs or rabbis, shamans or witch doctors. Arthur C. Clarke, who died last month, said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." If we could land a jumbo jet beside a medieval village, would we not be worshiped as gods? The technology of interstellar travel, and the scientific knowledge on which it would be based, are as far beyond us as our present-day knowledge surpasses that of Dark Age peasants. Parting the Red Sea -- or splitting the moon in two as Muhammad is alleged to have done -- would be child's play to those who command forces powerful enough to propel them from star to star. But now the question arises: In what sense would the god-like aliens not be gods? Answer: In a very important sense. To deserve the name of God, a being would have to have designed more than just a jumbo jet or even a starship. He would have to have designed the universe. And therein lies a fundamental contradiction. Entities capable of designing anything, whether they be human engineers or interstellar aliens, must be complex -- and therefore, statistically improbable. And statistically improbable things don't just happen spontaneously by chance without an explanation trail. That is what "improbable" means, as creationists never tire of assuring us (they wrongly think Darwinian natural selection is a matter of chance). In fact, natural selection is the very opposite of a chance process, and it is the only ultimate explanation we know for complex, improbable things. Even if our species was created by space alien designers, those designers themselves would have to have arisen from simpler antecedents -- so they can't be an ultimate explanation for anything. No matter how god-like our interstellar aliens may be, and no matter how vast and wonderful their starships, they cannot have designed the universe because, like human engineers and all complex things, they are late arrivals in it. Intelligent design "theorists" (a misnomer, for they have no theory) often use the alien scenario to distance themselves from old-style creationists: "For all we know, the designer might be an alien from outer space." This attempt to fend off accusations of unconstitutionally importing religion into science classes is lame and disingenuous. All the leading intelligent design spokesmen are devout, and, when talking to the faithful, they drop the science-fiction fig leaf and expose themselves as the fundamentalist creationists they truly are. Nevertheless, despite their notorious dishonesty, I sometimes hand an olive branch to these people by pretending to take their "space aliens" political ploy seriously. Unrealistic as the space alien theory is, it constitutes intelligent design's best shot. The distinguished molecular biologists Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel advanced a version of the notion, probably tongue in cheek, called "Directed Panspermia." Life, they argued, could have been "seeded" on the early Earth by a spacecraft packed with bacteria. Maybe little cellular machines like the bacterial flagellar motor were designed by ingenious nano-technologists from Betelgeuse. But you still have to explain the prior existence of the Betelgeusians and how they became so advanced and god-like. Even if Betelgeusian life was, in turn, seeded by another rocket from Aldebaran 4 billion years earlier, eventually we have to terminate the regress. We need a better explanation, such as evolution by natural selection or an equally workable account of the painstaking R&D that must underlie complex, statistically improbable things. Gods, if they are complex enough to be capable of designing anything, are, by virtue of their very complexity, not in a position to design themselves.Theologians attempt two (mutually incompatible and pathetically inadequate) answers to this unanswerable point. Some say their God is not complex but simple. This obviously won't wash. No simple god could design bacterial flagellar motors or universes, let alone forgive sins or impregnate virgins. Presumably recognizing the justice of that, other theologians go to the opposite extreme. They admit that their god is complex but assert that he had no beginning: He was always there and always complex. But if you are going to resort to that facile cop-out, you might as well say flagellar motors were always there. You cannot have it both ways. Visitations from distant star systems are improbable enough to attract ridicule, not least from the advocates of intelligent design themselves. A creator god who had always existed would be far more improbable still.This technique of arguing against a theory by setting up its most plausible version and dismissing it is commonly used in science and philosophy. The late, great evolutionist John Maynard Smith used it in his 1964 attack on the then-popular theory of "group selection." He set himself the task of devising the best possible argument for group selection. The details don't matter; he called it the Haystack Model. He then proceeded to show that the assumptions that the Haystack Model needed to make were highly unrealistic. Everybody understood that this was an argument against group selection. Nobody twisted it to trumpet to the world, "See? Maynard Smith believes in Group Selection after all, and he thinks it happens in Haystacks, ho ho ho!" Creationists, by contrast, never miss a trick. When I have raised the science-fiction olive branch to try to argue against them, they have twisted it -- most recently in a movie scheduled to open this week -- in order to proclaim loudly, "Dawkins believes in intelligent design after all." Or "Dawkins believes in little green men in flying saucers." Or "Dawkins is a Raelian." It's called "lying for Jesus," and they are completely shameless. Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist, is a professor at Oxford University. His most recent book is "The God Delusion."

Reposted from: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/04/get_out_of_here_atheists.php The governor of Illinois has been playing some games with state money, shuffling a million dollars to benefit a Baptist church, and an atheist dared to testify to the legislature against this. The response from one legislator was unsurprising: she shrieked at the atheist to get out. Rep. Monique Davis (D-Chicago) interrupted atheist activist Rob Sherman during his testimony Wednesday afternoon before the House State Government Administration Committee in Springfield and told him, "What you have to spew and spread is extremely dangerous . . . it's dangerous for our children to even know that your philosophy exists! "This is the Land of Lincoln where people believe in God," Davis said. "Get out of that seat . . . You have no right to be here! We believe in something. You believe in destroying! You believe in destroying what this state was built upon." Disbelief in religion means you have "no right" to speak to members of government? Wow. And note the "D" after her name — she's a member of the party most (but definitely not all!) American atheists lean towards. There's more on this exchange: it looks like Sherman kept his cool, while Davis spewed her hate. Chicago atheists, you know what to do: next election, campaign against Monique Davis. Get someone who is not a raving nutbag to run. Right now, her district needs to flood her mailbox with letters of protest. You can find her contact information online; let her know that you do not appreciate her efforts to disenfranchise and discriminate against you. DO SOMETHING:Contact the Democratic PartyContact Rep. DavisRep Davis' email: mdavis2147@aol.comContact the Illinois State Democratic PartyDavis' Springfield Office: 241-E Stratton Office Building Springfield, IL 62706 (217) 782-0010 (217) 782-1795 FAX Davis' District Office: 1234 West 95th Street Chicago, IL 60643 (773) 445-9700 (773) 445-5755 FAX Emails of Rep. Davis' committee members:jack@jackfranks.org, lisadugan@sbcglobal.net, 70thdist@pritchardstaterep.com, repjohnbradley@mychoice.net, annazettec@aol.com, statereppaul@sbcglobal.net, staterepgordon@sbcglobal.net, repkrause@aol.com, repmyers@macomb.com, poer@housegopmail.state.il.us, statereprramey55@aol.com, jimwatson@localnetco.com

Slate Magazine medical examiner The Pill, a Rock Opera Its long-running health saga. By Amanda Schaffer Posted Tuesday, Jan. 29, 2008, at 4:59 PM ET Last week, British researchers published decisively good news about birth control pills: They lower the risk of ovarian cancer—substantially. The longer women take the pill, the lower their odds of getting this kind of cancer. And some of the benefits seem to persist, even decades after women go off the contraception. The new analysis pooled large amounts of data. It was elegantly done. And it's worth celebrating, partly because health claims about the pill are often much harder to parse. Consider the mental tightrope we've been asked to walk when it comes to the effect of oral contraception on sex drive, cardiovascular disease, and breast cancer: The pill may sap our libidos (say Scottish doctors)—but it may also be linked to more frequent orgasms (say Italian ones). It increases the risk of blood clots, and may slightly increase the risk of strokes (which remains very small). But it doesn't seem to up the odds of a heart attack, at least for nonsmokers, and might even offer some cardio protection. At the same time, in contrast to the new findings that it protects against ovarian cancer, the pill may slightly increase the risk of breast cancer. And, then again, it may not, especially when newer formulations with lower doses of estrogen are considered. In other words, oral contraception is a moving target for medical research, and its health history would make for a first-rate feminist rock opera. The grand finale? The pill gets better with age. When Margaret Sanger first dreamed of a "magic pill" to prevent unwanted pregnancy, and then its actual appearance came to symbolize sexual and personal freedom for women, few wanted to dwell on tough questions about potential health hazards. But in 1969, journalist Barbara Seaman forced the issue with her book The Doctor's Case Against the Pill. Congressional hearings followed, helping to galvanize a feminist backlash against the pill, and against doctors and medical paternalism in general (see: the 1970s). Today, though more than 100 million women around the world use oral contraception, suspicion lingers about possible risks like cancer and strokes. And pro-lifers gleefully fan the flames, claiming against all reason and medical evidence that the pill causes early abortions. All of which is to say that whether new findings about the pill weigh in for health benefits or for risks, they are always freighted. Take one evergreen headline: "Does the Pill Make Women Frigid?" In 1995, Scottish researchers found that women taking pills with estrogen and progestin in them reported decreased interest in sex (though women taking progestin-only pills did not). More recently, the idea that women's sex drive is linked to testosterone levels has gained ground. (That's the theory behind the testosterone skin patch, one candidate for Lady Viagra.) Some forms of the pill seem to indirectly reduce women's blood levels of testosterone—and that decline may persist even after they stop taking the pill, one study suggests. But the testosterone story has caveats. Women's sex drive clearly depends on a host of factors, many of them psychological. Surely, the freedom of sex without fear of pregnancy can be a turn-on. And recently, Italian researchers found that women who took birth control pills containing 30 micrograms of estrogen and 3 milligrams of a progestin called drospirenone reported greater sexual enjoyment and greater frequency of orgasm than they did before. Sounds almost like Lady Viagra. Claims about the pill and cardiovascular disease also go both ways. In 1961, the Lancet reported that a nurse using oral contraception had suffered a pulmonary embolism—the first such report to appear in the literature, according to this 2005 review. In the years that followed, several epidemiological studies found that the pill upped the odds of blood clots, pulmonary embolisms, strokes, and heart attacks (although the risks of these problems remained small). In 1988, for instance, data from the large and prospective Nurses Health Study showed that women taking oral contraception were two and a half times as likely to have heart attacks as women who were not. More recently, however, research has tried to tease out the impact of the pill on women who smoke, or have diabetes or hypertension, from its effect on women who don't. The Nurses Health Study concluded that for nonsmokers, the pill does not increase the risk of heart disease. Other studies back this up, as well. And in 2006, researchers at Cedars-Sinai Research Institute in Los Angeles found that past use of oral contraception may actually lower women's risk of heart problems. (Still, wild cards like this unpublished study, which turned up higher rates of atherosclerosis in women taking the pill for extended periods of time, keep everyone on edge.) And then there is breast cancer. In the mid-1990s, a large meta-analysis linked birth control pills to a small increase in women's odds of getting breast cancer. The increased risk began to decrease again when they stopped taking the pill, but took 10 years to disappear entirely. By contrast, in 2002, another major study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that use of the pill was not associated with breast cancer risk, even for women who took it for longer periods of time or used formulations with higher doses of estrogen. Since then, more dueling findings have appeared. In the end, the bottom line tends toward reassurance. Recent evidence suggests that newer pills pose less of a risk than older ones. And a helpful summary published this month argues that when all is said and done, today's birth control pills "do not play a clinically important role in the risk of breast cancer." (See here for a rundown of other health claims about the pill, good and bad.) Meanwhile, the news on ovarian cancer has long been consistently good. Friday's findings, published in the Lancet, seal the deal. Researchers pooled data from 45 epidemiological studies, including more than 23,000 women with ovarian cancer and more than 87,000 controls. They found that for every five years on the pill, women's relative risk of ovarian cancer was reduced by 20 percent. After 15 years on the pill, the risk was cut in half. The pill probably protects against this kind of cancer because it suppresses ovulation, in which the ovary releases an egg. The group estimates that 200,000 cases of ovarian cancer and 100,000 deaths from the disease have been prevented to date by oral contraception. Whatever else we don't know about the magic pill, here's to that. Amanda Schaffer is a science and medical columnist for Slate. Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2183035/

The other day, I admitted to a friend that I don't have health insurance."What?!" he gasped. "But you're married. Isn't that part of the deal?" He reacted as if I had just told him that I believed in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny or a flat tax -- something embarrassingly ridiculous. Because that's what being uninsured is these days -- a character flaw. It's how you can pay taxes, volunteer, donate to public radio and still be considered a drain on society. As my friend was, you may be wondering, "Seriously, how can you not have health insurance? Don't you work? Are you illiterate? Do you have no self-worth whatsoever?!" The short answer is, my husband and I are both freelancers so we have no workplace insurance. And the $500-plus monthly premium? You might as well say our health depended on our adding a new wing to our apartment. The uninsured are a puzzling group for California lawmakers. Telling the uninsured not to be uninsured, for example, is the solution they came up with. And taxing smokers (banking on their inability to quit but sufficient longevity to make it profitable) to pay for the poor is how lawmakers proposed to fund it. They called it ABX1 1. This wasn't good legislation. Good legislation has supporters; ABX1 1 had apologists. And it came to an ignoble end last week, killed by an 11-1 vote in a state Senate committee.Even though I'm not for radical change, I do favor radical improvement. ABX1 1 was neither. It came around on its face: It appeared that the cure was the same as the disease. Personally, I make above $47,000 a year, the cutoff for subsidized policies under the plan. I also live in a city where median home prices are still about half a million dollars. Now, while Countrywide Financial Corp. may have happily approved me for a loan a couple of months ago, that doesn't mean I have any money. So the mandate to buy insurance would have fallen on a lot of broke ears, not just mine.Healthcare costs in this country, according to the World Health Organization, are the highest in the Western world. And the chasm between medical care for those with money and those without is potentially deadly. I once had a plantar wart that was near-fatal. True story. Some people gamble at casinos for kicks; I eat uncooked fish. There isn't a moment that I don't know that I am one accident or diagnosis away from complete financial ruin. Where are the riots? Where's the outrage? Didn't Michael Moore do a documentary on this? The uninsured and the underinsured need true political advocates. There's only one way I see that happening. We should force all our elected officials in California to live uninsured for at least 2 1/2 months of the year. Believe me, healthcare will get reformed quicker if their lives and livelihoods depend on it. One in five Californians are uninsured -- so all our elected officials should be uninsured for one-fifth of the year until they fix the problem. What good would that do? In 1993, San Francisco passed a nonbinding measure encouraging public employees from the mayor on down to take public transit at least twice a week. How's that city's transit system now? Among the best in the country.People take vows of poverty to learn humility. People fast to learn gratitude for abundance. People live off the grid to teach themselves -- I don't know -- candle-making skills. Living uninsured can teach our elected officials to care for the healthcare system. (Lesson one -- negotiate drug prices. There are more Californians than Canadians. Hint. Hint.) Call it a fact-finding mission. Make it sound heroic. It's no more absurd than what they came up with.Tina Dupuy is a writer and comedian in Los Angeles.

The other day, I admitted to a friend that I don't have health insurance."What?!" he gasped. "But you're married. Isn't that part of the deal?" He reacted as if I had just told him that I believed in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny or a flat tax -- something embarrassingly ridiculous. Because that's what being uninsured is these days -- a character flaw. It's how you can pay taxes, volunteer, donate to public radio and still be considered a drain on society. As my friend was, you may be wondering, "Seriously, how can you not have health insurance? Don't you work? Are you illiterate? Do you have no self-worth whatsoever?!" The short answer is, my husband and I are both freelancers so we have no workplace insurance. And the $500-plus monthly premium? You might as well say our health depended on our adding a new wing to our apartment. The uninsured are a puzzling group for California lawmakers. Telling the uninsured not to be uninsured, for example, is the solution they came up with. And taxing smokers (banking on their inability to quit but sufficient longevity to make it profitable) to pay for the poor is how lawmakers proposed to fund it. They called it ABX1 1. This wasn't good legislation. Good legislation has supporters; ABX1 1 had apologists. And it came to an ignoble end last week, killed by an 11-1 vote in a state Senate committee.Even though I'm not for radical change, I do favor radical improvement. ABX1 1 was neither. It came around on its face: It appeared that the cure was the same as the disease. Personally, I make above $47,000 a year, the cutoff for subsidized policies under the plan. I also live in a city where median home prices are still about half a million dollars. Now, while Countrywide Financial Corp. may have happily approved me for a loan a couple of months ago, that doesn't mean I have any money. So the mandate to buy insurance would have fallen on a lot of broke ears, not just mine.Healthcare costs in this country, according to the World Health Organization, are the highest in the Western world. And the chasm between medical care for those with money and those without is potentially deadly. I once had a plantar wart that was near-fatal. True story. Some people gamble at casinos for kicks; I eat uncooked fish. There isn't a moment that I don't know that I am one accident or diagnosis away from complete financial ruin. Where are the riots? Where's the outrage? Didn't Michael Moore do a documentary on this? The uninsured and the underinsured need true political advocates. There's only one way I see that happening. We should force all our elected officials in California to live uninsured for at least 2 1/2 months of the year. Believe me, healthcare will get reformed quicker if their lives and livelihoods depend on it. One in five Californians are uninsured -- so all our elected officials should be uninsured for one-fifth of the year until they fix the problem. What good would that do? In 1993, San Francisco passed a nonbinding measure encouraging public employees from the mayor on down to take public transit at least twice a week. How's that city's transit system now? Among the best in the country.People take vows of poverty to learn humility. People fast to learn gratitude for abundance. People live off the grid to teach themselves -- I don't know -- candle-making skills. Living uninsured can teach our elected officials to care for the healthcare system. (Lesson one -- negotiate drug prices. There are more Californians than Canadians. Hint. Hint.) Call it a fact-finding mission. Make it sound heroic. It's no more absurd than what they came up with.Tina Dupuy is a writer and comedian in Los Angeles.