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Wednesday, January 5, 2005 |
"This twelfth night of the twelve days of Christmas is the official end of the winter holiday season and one of the traditional days for taking down the Christmas decorations."
Shakespeare's Twelfth Night is not really about this date.
"The play is first mentioned in 1601, in a letter written by an Italian named Don Virginio Orsino, duke of Bracciano. He saw Shakespeare's people perform a play at Whitehall court on Twelfth Night, January 6. (The Duke's name really doesn't matter in the play, which wasn't published until the folio of 1623, and perhaps Shakespeare simply named the duke and the play in memory of the event.)"
How Shakespeare prepared his manuscripts ... and what happened next.
12:35:06 PM 
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USAToday: "Congress expects the White House to request as much as $100 billion this year for war and related costs in Iraq and Afghanistan, congressional officials say.
It would be the third and largest Iraq-related budget request from the White House yet, and it could push the war's costs over $200 billion - far above initial White House estimates of $50 billion-$60 billion. So far, the Iraq war has cost about $130 billion, according to the White House's Office of Management and Budget.
War costs complicate President Bush's plans for initiatives such as overhauling Social Security. They also threaten his pledge to halve the record $413 billion federal budget deficit."
BuffaloNews: "The Bush administration has signaled that it will propose changing the formula that sets initial Social Security benefit levels, cutting promised benefits by nearly a third in the coming decades, according to several Republicans close to the White House."
11:33:40 AM
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By creating an Office of Faith-Based Initiatives in the White House Bush damaged the division between church and state that is essential to preserve and promote religious rights and liberties in an increasingly pluralistic society. It endangers the protections that the First Amendment affords to religion in general and to religious minorities in particular.
But Bush goes further than that. He is now trying to break down the Separation of Powers. He tries to unite the legislative, executive and judicial powers under one party, the GOP. That is a breach of the American Constitution. The Separation of Powers devised by the framers of the Constitution was designed to do one primary thing: to prevent the majority from ruling with an iron fist. Each of these branches has certain powers, and each of these powers is limited, or checked, by another branch. Bush wants complete GOP control.
NY Times: "Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel, intervened directly with Justice Department lawyers in 2002 to obtain a legal ruling on the extent of the president's authority to permit extreme interrogation practices in the name of national security, current and former administration officials said Tuesday."
CenterForConstitutionalRights: "President Bush has nominated the architect of his Administration's unlawful torture policy to be the next Attorney General.
We hope you will join us in declaring that this man and his policies do not represent our American values!"
Sign the declaration against torture.
TheNation: "At stake is whether Congress wants to conveniently absolve Gonzales of his clear attempt to have the President subvert US law in order to whitewash barbaric practices performed by US interrogators in the name of national security.
Gonzales ignored the objections of State Department and military lawyers to strongly endorse the determination of Justice Department lawyers that neither the Geneva Convention nor corresponding US laws on prisoner protections should be applied in the 'war on terror'.
'In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions,' Gonzales wrote in a legal memo to President Bush on Jan. 25, 2002. Declaring the war-on-terror prisoners exempt from the Geneva Convention, he argued, 'substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act'.
Another positive step would be the withdrawal or rejection of the Gonzales nomination. To make a man with so little respect for both the spirit and the letter of the law the nation's top law enforcement official would be a terrible advertisement for American democracy."
Backing Gonzalez is backing torture, and would put Bush and the American regime on the same level as Saddam Hussein.
Telegraph: "One of President George W Bush's former cabinet officials has criticised his record and his electoral strategy, accusing him of running a short-term policy which will damage the Republicans in the future.
In a new book, It's My Party Too: the battle for the heart of the GOP and the Future of America, [Christine Todd Whitman] describes regular battles with 'extreme anti-government ideologues'."
11:14:02 AM
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