AMSTERDAM, Netherlands (AP) -Lance Armstrong called it a “witch hunt” from the very beginning, saying a French newspaper used dubious evidence to accuse him of doping - even charging that lab officials mishandled his samples and broke the rules.
According to a Dutch investigator’s findings released Wednesday, he may have been right.
[...]
It said tests on urine samples were conducted improperly and fell so short of scientific standards that it was “completely irresponsible” to suggest they “constitute evidence of anything.”
Other than using Soap, deodorant, and toothpaste — Lance was found not to be using any banned substances in France (old joke).
The article goes on to mention possible legal and ethical violations by the organization that was falsely accusing Lance.
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The green expanse of the Mall evokes many emotions, but wariness has never been one of them. Over the years, the lack of crime has created an aura of safety that allows joggers and tourists, children and couples to drop their guard and stroll in the day and even at night. That changed in recent days, when a band of robbers used the elm tree shadows to surprise and attack six tourists walking along Washington’s grassy sanctuary under the spell of the stars. It was as if an unspoken agreement had been broken between the underworld and the nation’s icons.
“There’s no question that the Mall has been off-limits to thugs, and it’s no surprise that they found it,” said Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.). “But it should only be for a split second.” Norton, a race walker who strides across the Mall when the sun goes down, was angry that the U.S. Park Police did not double up patrols on the Mall after what happened Thursday. Twice that night, bandits brandishing a semiautomatic handgun robbed a man and a woman, assaulted the woman and fled. A similar attack happened early Sunday. “You might give them a pass on Thursday night,” Norton said of police. “But it was inexcusable to have a third attack on a holiday weekend.”
Of course, turning the Mall into an armed police camp doesn’t exactly promote the sense of sanctuary, either. Still, Norton is likely right in that the muggings may well all be the same gang.
The Park Police clearly have nothing better to do, as they are out in full force every time our Congressional Softball League team is playing, standing guard against the possibility that someone might consume a beer in public.
Roger Clemens is coming out of retirement for the third time, agreeing to a contract to pitch for the Houston Astros for the rest of 2006. The 43-year-old Clemens, who will be entering his 23rd major league season, is agreeing first to a minor league contract that pays $322,000 over the five-month minor league season, and his first start is likely to be June 6 at Lexington, Ky., the Class A team where his oldest son, Koby, plays. If all goes well, his second minor league start would be June 11 at Double-A Corpus Christi, Texas, followed by a start June 16 at Triple-A Round Rock, Texas.
Clemens announced his return Wednesday at a news conference. “The ball’s in my court now,” he said. “This was a difficult decision on my part in a number of situations. I have to now take the next step and get my body ready to come back, get effective, win games.”
When he is added to the major league roster, he’ll get a one-year, $22 million contract — actually, the contract would be worth $22,000,022 (Clemens’ uniform number is 22). But because he won’t be playing the full season, he’ll receive a prorated percentage of that, which would come to about $12.25 million if he rejoins Houston in late June. The tentative goal is to have him start against the Minnesota Twins on June 22; if he’s put on the big league roster that day, he would earn $12,632,307.
[...]
Clemens won his seventh Cy Young Award in 2004, going 18-4 with a 2.98 ERA. He went 13-8 with a 1.87 ERA last year, winning the major league ERA title for the first time since 1990.
Clemens is already the greatest pitcher of his generation–and I say that as a Braves/Greg Maddux fan and has all the accolades and championships anyone could ask for. Still, there’s no reason for him to hang it up while he’s still a truly dominant pitcher, even if he is geriatric by Major League standards.
Many federal managers give highly inflated evaluations to bad employees in hopes they will get promoted to another assignment, a practice dubbed “Export Packing,” reports Government Executive magazine’s William Rudman.
Hiring a federal employee might seem like a sure bet with the recommendation of a former boss. But think again. A common complaint among federal managers is that they were duped by fellow bosses who said an employee was a competent and terrific person when in truth the supervisor was trying to get rid of a performance or behavior problem. Needless to say, managers are more likely to say they’re on the receiving end of the ancient art of “packing for exportation” than to confess to foisting bad apples on others with bogus evaluations. How does one guard against export packing and what, if any, are the legal implications?
[...]
Many managers are afraid of being sued by current or former employees, but this fear is ill-founded. The Supreme Court ruled in 1983 in Bush v. Lucas that federal employees cannot sue federal managers for anything arising from a personnel action or the employer-employee relationship. If trouble does arise, then it most likely would come from the other side. Agencies that tolerate the export packing of violent employees, sexual harassers or those whose negligence has endangered lives risk, at the minimum, excoriation by the press and Congress.
[...]
All managers can do is question the candidate closely, try to find supervisors and co-workers willing to speak candidly, and look for the warning signs: short tenure, willingness to accept a seemingly lesser position, a history of hopping from agency to agency, and failure to list current or former supervisors and colleagues as references.
Following these steps, managers can reduce — but, unfortunately, not eliminate — the chances of being scammed by an exporter.
Integrity on the part of tenured public employees in supervisory positions, alas, is too much to hope for.
The Dixie Chicks’ new album, “Taking The Long Way” has debuted at #1 on the Billboard charts, breaking their own record.
As Taking The Long Way debuts at #1 on the Billboard Top 200 best-selling albums chart this week, with first week’s sales of 525,829, the Dixie Chicks have become the first female group in chart history to have three albums debut at #1, breaking the record the Chicks established in 2002 when the group’s last studio album, Home, debuted at #1 and made them the first female group ever to have two albums debut at #1.
[...]
Taking The Long Way arrives in the midst of an incredible media blitz surrounding the Dixie Chicks, who were honored with a profile on CBS’s “60 Minutes” and appeared on the cover of Time magazine an unprecedented two times in May. The group was featured in a five-part series of interviews, culminating with an SRO live concert at New York’s Bryant Park on Friday, May 26, on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” The Dixie Chicks will sit down for an in-depth interview on “Larry King Live” tonight, Wednesday, May 31.
Now records for “female group” are somewhat dubious, much like Brooks & Dunn’s numerous achievements as “vocal duo.” Those are very small categories and there’s not much competition currently or historically in either.
Still, having three consecutive albums debut at #1 is an impressive enough achievement. Even more so considering how much the Chicks alienated their fan base three years ago with a series of derogatory comments about a then-wildly popular President Bush.
________
Jonah Goldberg echoes Barry Goldwater’s famous dictum, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue” in his latest column.
Consider the current immigration debate. The Senate version of the immigration bill calls for a three-tier system for illegal immigrants. If you’ve been here for fewer than two years, you’ve got to go. If you’ve been here for two to five years, you’d have to leave briefly at a convenient time and sign up for the guest-worker program. Those here for more than five years could get citizenship. It’s a perfectly centrist, middle-of-the-road solution. Everybody gets something. And, quite simply, it’s idiotic.
“You can see how it has the earmarks of a political compromise,” former Immigration and Naturalization Service Director Doris Meissner told NPR, “but from an implementation standpoint, it’s essentially unworkable.” Almost by definition, illegal immigrants don’t create a paper trail when they come into the country. Hence, proving how long they’ve resided here presents a real challenge. It also creates massive opportunities for fraud and opens the door to a truly extreme bureaucratic expansion where immigration officials will have to study everything from ATM receipts to soccer team photos to figure out how long each immigrant has been here. The extreme liberal position of blanket amnesty and the extreme conservative position of blanket enforcement both make a lot more sense intellectually and practically.
This sort of thing is typical across the political landscape. Personally, I believe the radical remedy of privatizing health care in this country makes a lot of sense. But, I’m also inclined to believe that the Left’s extreme solution of government-run health care—or “single-payer”—has a lot more going for it intellectually than the crazy quilt of regulations and grotesquely distorted markets we have today.
Goldberg’s argument is sound as far as it goes. Often, compromise solutions are indeed both unworkable and intellectually baffling.
Still, true extremism is often even worse. The “extremes” Goldberg cites on illegal immigration reform are not particularly extreme; their logical extensions–a shoot to kill policy at border crossings or true open borders–are.
And, while I tend to agree a pure market or a pure socialist system of health care both might be more efficient than the current patchwork solution, it’s not clear that either would be preferable. A pure market approach would leave the poor and the mentally incompetent unprotected; while that may have good effects from a Darwinian standpoint, that would be horrible morally. A pure government system might well be cheaper in the aggregate and would certainly be more uniform. It would also undoubtedly provide less choice and lower quality care for the vast majority who are now well insured or able to self-finance.
Compromise solutions also have the virtue of being socially acceptable. We live in a gigantic, diverse society. Even if it were politically possible for one side or the other to get 100 percent of what they want on each issue, such a winner-take-all outcome would polarize politics to a level that would make the current acrimony seem like a tea party.
Indeed, it could quite literally lead to civil war. Jonah Goldberg would doubtless have hated the Missouri Compromise of 1820. It was essentially arbitrary, morally bankrupt, and unconstitutional. Yet, when the Supreme Court overturned it with the 1856 Dred Scot case, the result was disastrous.
The Wall Street Journal editors are worried that Michael Hayden will go too far in his efforts to soothe over the tensions created by Porter Goss’ sometimes reckless attempt to shake up the CIA.
A top intelligence service is vital to national security. So we’ve been looking for signs that incoming CIA Director Michael Hayden would lead the agency in the right direction. But so far the Air Force General, who won confirmation Friday in an unexpectedly lopsided 78-to-15 Senate vote, has sent more signals that would soothe the souls of Langley’s uncounted career bureaucrats than push the cause of reform.
We’re reminded of Colin Powell’s inaugural promise on taking over the State Department to “put our Foreign Service officers in charge of the work of the department.” Is his unhappy result what the general now in charge of the CIA has in mind?
[...]
We understand the General’s desire not to undermine morale at the agency he’s about to lead. But neither did he have to validate a good deal of the political left’s current, if amusingly ironic, defense of the CIA’s career spooks: the idea that policy makers should only rarely question the careerists’ judgment, and that the careerists’ assumptions shouldn’t be challenged by new blood from the outside.
The irony of using Colin Powell here as an example of how not to treat career bureaucrats is that Powell’s spooks, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), have arguably done the best job of analysis in recent years.
Still, balancing the natural tension between defering too much to the bureaucratic experts on the one hand and throwing out the proverbial baby with the bathwater on the other is incredibly difficult. Career employees at professional agencies like State, Defense, and the Intelligence Community (which overlaps the first two) both know more about their subject matter than virtually all political appointees and yet are often mired in an organizational culture mindset that creates flawed analysis.
There is, for example, legitimate concern that Don Rumsfeld has gone too far in shaking up the Defense Department culture and ignoring the sound advice of generals who are brilliant and have devoted thirty years or more to their trade. It is also true that these same experts have allowed fifteen years to go by without fixing the military’s obvious inadequacy in transporation infrastructure, Active-Reserve mix problems, and undersupply of linguists, civil affairs, and military police personnel. We will likely never truly know whether Rumsfeld has overcorrected or perhaps been too ginger in his reform efforts.
Britain’s largest university teacher’s union voted for a boycott of Israeli academics who do not denounce their government’s Palestine policy.
Britain’s largest lecturers’ union yesterday voted in favour of a boycott of Israeli lecturers and academic institutions who do not publicly dissociate themselves from Israel’s “apartheid policies”.
[...]
Presented on the final day of the Natfhe conference, the motion criticised “Israeli apartheid policies, including construction of the exclusion wall, and discriminatory educational practices” and invited members to “consider the appropriateness of a boycott of those that do not publicly dissociate themselves from such policies”.
After failed efforts to prevent the debate, speakers outlined the litany of difficulties experienced by Palestinian students and lecturers living under occupation, including the number of Palestinian schools shelled by the Israeli army. “The majority of Israeli academics are either complicit or acquiescent in their government’s policies in the occupied territories,” said Tom Hickey, a philosophy lecturer from the University of Brighton, member of the union’s national executive committee and proposer of the motion. “Turning a blind eye to what an Israeli colleague thinks about the actions of their government is a culpable blindness.” Delegate John Morgan, who seconded the motion, said there was no academic freedom for Palestinians.
[...]
The first rumblings of an academic boycott surfaced in 2002 when Stephen Rose, professor of biology at the Open University, wrote to the Guardian arguing for a moratorium on European funding of Israeli research. The campaign gathered pace at last year’s AUT conference in Eastbourne where delegates voted to boycott Bar-Ilan and Haifa universities because of their alleged complicity in the Israeli government’s policies. The move provoked a storm of international protest and a month later the boycott was overturned at a special conference.
The article goes on to note that the move is only symbolic, as Natfhe is about to merge with another union. Still, the imposition of a political litmus test for scholars is antithetical to the notion of higher education. Quite bizarre, indeed.
A man who apparently severed his penis in an attempt to convince his wife that he was faithful to her was recovering after surgery to reattach the organ at a northern Malaysian hospital, a news report said Tuesday. The 41-year-old man, who was not identified, got into an argument last Friday with his wife, who found a text message on his mobile phone from another woman. The man was heard by his son shouting that he wanted to prove he was not having an affair, the New Straits Times reported. The assertion was followed by loud screams and the man emerged from his room bleeding profusely, his 14-year-old son quoted as saying. His wife rushed him to hospital.
Michelle Rodriguez, who was sentenced to 60 days in jail for violating probabation, served only a few hours before being released due to overcrowding.
The former star of ABC’s “Lost” still must serve 30 days of community service and remain on probation until June 2009, a spokeswoman for the city attorney’s office said. “Our prosecutors are not happy about it, but that is the sad reality of our overcrowded jails,” said spokeswoman Contessa Mankiewicz.
Calls to Rodriguez’s attorney and publicist were not immediately returned Tuesday. “Michelle’s happy with the way things turned out,” Rodriguez’s friend, designer Anand John, told People magazine in a story posted Tuesday on its Web site. “She knows this wasn’t a literal get-out-of-jail-free card. Michelle’s taken responsibility for the past, and now she’s ready to focus on her career.”
The 27-year-old actress served five days in jail in Hawaii last month after pleading guilty to drunken driving. The Dec. 1 arrest in Honolulu violated the three-year probation term she was given in Los Angeles County in 2004 after pleading no contest to charges of hit-and-run, driving on a suspended license and drunken driving.
Didn’t they know the jails were crowded before she reported in? And, really, who cares how much room criminals have?
With immigration perhaps America’s most volatile issue, a troubling backlash has erupted among its most fervent foes. There are, of course, the Minutemen, the self-appointed border vigilantes who operate in several states. And now groups of militiamen, white supremacists and neo-Nazis are using resentment over the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. as a potent rallying cry. “The immigration furor has been critical to the growth we’ve seen” in hate groups, says Mark Potok, head of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center. The center counts some 800 racist groups operating in the U.S. today, a 5% spurt in the past year and a 33% jump from 2000. “They think they’ve found an issue with racial overtones and a real resonance with the American public,” says Potok, “and they are exploiting it as effectively as they can.”
Both Potok’s group and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) are worried that extremists are burrowing their way into the anti-immigration mainstream. Mark Martin, 43, of Covington, Ohio, is a chef at a French restaurant and tends his backyard organic garden. But he also dons the black and brown uniform of western Ohio’s National Socialist (read: Nazi) Movement. “There’s nothing neo about us,” he says. Martin admits he frequently harasses day laborers and threatens them with deportation. “As Americans, we have the right to make a citizen’s arrest and detain them,” he insists. “And if they try to get away, we have the right to get physical with them.” Martin gleefully boasts about leading eight fellow storm troopers in disrupting a May 1 pro-immigrant rally in Dayton by taunting protesters. Although police ultimately restrained him, Martin believes his agitation was worthwhile because it attracted new recruits. “After the rally, the Klan called us,” he says. “Now we’ve started working together more often.”
In addition to white supremacists, the immigration debate seems to have reinvigorated members of the antigovernment militias of the 1990s. Those groups largely disbanded after the Oklahoma City bombing orchestrated by militia groupie Timothy McVeigh and, later, the failure of a Y2K bug to trigger the mass chaos some militia members expected. “We’ve seen people from Missouri and Kentucky militias involved in border-vigilante activity, especially with the gung-ho Arizona group Ranch Rescue that used face paint, military uniforms and weapons,” says Mark Pitcavage, fact-finding director of the ADL. “It’s a natural shift. Militias fell on hard times, and this anti-immigration movement is new and fresh.”
This isn’t really surprising. While the vast majority of the people sending bricks to their Congressman and otherwise agitated over the potential granting of amnesty to those who crossed the border illegally are genuinely motivated by something other than racial animus, there is undeniably a racial-ethnic-cultural element to the controversy. Further, most activist groups will try to use the polarizing issues of the day to their advantage.
The breathlessness of this story, though, is of some concern. While I agree with author Jeffrey Ressner that the Minutemen are essentially vigilantes, it is a rather loaded term for straight news reportage.
I was pointed to this post by Michelle Malkin by TLB of the Lone Wacko Blog. What I found interesting was the basic premise and conclusion of Malkin’s post. It goes like this,
There is an underground economy.
Immigrants make up the bulk of this part of our economy.
There are few if any taxes collected on this economic activity.
If the IRS could collect taxes on that economic activity we’d have budget surpluses forever.
Neat story. Only one problem. Malkin et. al. are always ready to tell us how poor these immigrants are and how in terms of taxes and consumption of government services they are a net drain, not a net plus. In other words, since these illegal immigrants are so poor there would be little to no tax revenues there. In fact, many of them might qualify for things like the Earned Income Tax Credit and actually get money from the federal government.
I also become quite skeptical of these utopian views of the world. If we just do X, then problem Y will disappear forever. Gee, then why aren’t we doing X?
Finally, lets suppose that all of this is true. That if we could tax those immigrants the amounts they owe we’d raise enough revenue to seriously reduce or eliminate the budget deficit; what does this imply as a policy? How about amnesty for all those people in the underground economy? After all, many of them are probably avoiding taxes in large part out of fear of being found out and deported. Remove that fear and they might just surface into the legitimate economy and start paying more in taxes. In fact, if the plan for amnesty is to pay back taxes as well as future taxes, then the windfall would be gigantic.
On a side note, this is where that 20 million illegal immigrants number comes from as well. Further, this is a study that, as far as I know, isn’t available to check for methodology, data sources, etc. Usually, citing a single study in support of a position is not very reasonable, especially when there are different studies that come to dramatically different conclusions. The actual number is undoubtedly in the middle of the interval 7 million to 20 million. My guess is that the 12 million figure is probably not that bad a number.
The bill’s crazy provisions for allowing 66 million new legal immigrants into the United States by 2026 (twice the population of Canada) aside, the Senate bill grants citizenship rights to 10 million to 20 million mainly Mexican illegal aliens who have sneaked into the country since the last U.S. amnesty for illegal aliens in 1986.
The numbers I’ve seen in regards to the number of illegal immigrants in this country ranges between 8 million to as high as 12 million. We could split the difference and say 10 million. Where does this 10 to 20 million that West has come up with come from…besides her backside? Beats me, but is sure does make the immigration sound bad, in fact if we split the difference with West’s number we’d get 15 million, half again as many as most other sources indicate. And if we go with the larger numbers, 12 million vs 20 million, West has increased the number by 80%.
Oh well, what is a “white lie” when you cause is “just”?
Update:Steven Taylorraises a good point about the 66 million people as well. To get a number like that over the next 20 years Mexico would practically have to empty itself into the United States (the population of Mexico is about 107 million). With the kinds of numbers that Diane West is throwing around in 42 years there wont be a single person left in all of Mexico. Basically, Diane West is an innumerate…hmmm I wonder if that qualifies her as a low-skilled worker? At any rate the Washinton Times is paying her too much. They should probably outsource her position to India.
Update (James Joyner): Robert Samuelson is using the 40 million number today as well. Deep in the piece, we get a cite:
The doubling of legal immigration under the Senate bill that I cited at the outset comes from a previously unreported estimate made by White House economists. Because the president praised the Senate bill, the administration implicitly favors a big immigration expansion. The White House estimate could be low. Robert Rector of the conservative Heritage Foundation has a higher figure. The CBO has a projection that the White House describes as close to its own. But all the forecasts envision huge increases, diverging only because they make different assumptions of how the Senate bill would operate in practice.
Our immigration laws involve a bewildering array of categories by which people can get a “green card” — the right to stay permanently. The Senate bill dramatically expands many of these categories and creates a large new one: “guest workers.” The term is really a misnomer, because most guest workers would receive an automatic right to apply for a green card and remain. The Senate bill authorizes 200,000 guest workers annually, plus their spouses and minor children.
The methodology of these estimates is not clear. Since the metric is “immigrants,” however, it may well be that some significant part of the increase would be non-Mexican and non-poor.
The CBO report, though, gives a much lower number:
S. 2611 contains numerous provisions that would permit additional immigrants to enter the United States and allow certain undocumented immigrants (sometimes referred to as unauthorized or illegal aliens) now living in the United States to obtain legal immigration status. CBO estimates that enacting this legislation would increase the population in the United States by nearly 8 million residents by 2016 (see Table 2). [thumbnailed right]
Given that the nature of the report was cost estimates–which are themselves interesting–there is no real discussion of how the figures are obtained, other than the actual numbers in the bill for increased family migration and guest worker permits.
Dutch pedophiles are launching a political party to push for a cut in the legal age for sexual relations to 12 from 16 and the legalization of child pornography and sex with animals, sparking widespread outrage.
The Charity, Freedom and Diversity (NVD) party said on its Web site it would be officially registered Wednesday, proclaiming: “We are going to shake The Hague awake!” The party said it wanted to cut the legal age for sexual relations to 12 and eventually scrap the limit altogether. “A ban just makes children curious,” Ad van den Berg, one of the party’s founders, told the Algemeen Dagblad (AD) newspaper. “We want to make pedophilia the subject of discussion,” he said, adding the subject had been a taboo since the 1996 Marc Dutroux child abuse scandal in neighboring Belgium. “We want to get into parliament so we have a voice. Other politicians only talk about us in a negative sense, as if we were criminals,” Van den Berg told Reuters.
The Netherlands, which already has liberal policies on soft drugs, prostitution and gay marriage, was shocked by the plan.
Eeew.
And, surely, inspiring curiousity among children is preferable to buggering them? Surely.
