Saturday, February 21, 2004

The e-mail has since been posted on the Web and forwarded around the country. Randi Reitan of Eden Prairie, Minn., received it from her sister on Wednesday, forwarded it to 100 more people and quickly got on the phone to a San Francisco florist.

"We got to be at somebody's wedding out there even if we were just the flowers," she said. "I just hope whoever received them just has this lovely, long life together ... . It doesn't bother me that I don't know them -- it's kind of fun in a way. You're connected to two souls."

The mother of four was particularly moved by the idea because her youngest child, Jake, 22, a senior at Northwestern University in Illinois, came out as gay when he was 16. People in the town where they used to live threw eggs at their mailbox, scrawled anti-gay epithets on their driveway, bashed their car's windshield and wrote anonymous letters saying Jake was "sick and sinful." Their minister told the family Jake could change.

"You just can't imagine what a message it is way back here in Minnesota. You turn on your TV, and there are more and more couples getting married," Reitan said Friday through tears. "I'm hoping whoever got the flowers realizes how special it was for them to do that. They're doing it not only for themselves, they're doing it for a young man back here in Minnesota who looks forward to finding someone to love, to cherish and to celebrate that love in a wedding and call it marriage."

1:22 PM |

9:38 AM |

Friday, February 20, 2004

According to a recent Gallup poll, 82 percent of Americans rank health care among their top issues. People are happy with the quality of health care, if they can afford it, but they're afraid that they might not be able to afford it. Unlike other wealthy countries, America doesn't have universal health insurance, and it's all too easy to fall through the cracks in our system. When I saw that the president's economic report devoted a whole chapter to health care, I assumed that it would make some attempt to address these public concerns.

Instead, the report pooh-poohs the problem. Although more than 40 million people lack health insurance, this doesn't matter too much because "the uninsured are a diverse and perpetually changing group." This is good news? At any given time about one in seven Americans is uninsured, which is bad enough. Because the uninsured are a "perpetually changing group," however, a much larger fraction of the population suffers periodic, terrifying spells of being uninsured, and an even larger fraction lives with the fear of losing insurance if anything goes wrong at work or at home.

11:39 PM |

Bush has asserted in speeches that he inherited the recession, and the report adopts that view. The charts and analyses in the 412-page "Economic Report of the President," issued last week, put the "start of the recession" in the fourth quarter of 2000 -- under President Bill Clinton.

But the National Bureau of Economic Research, which dates business cycles, has said the recession lasted eight months beginning in March 2001 -- two months after Bush's inauguration. Members of the group that determines the date have discussed moving it into 2000, but no meeting has been scheduled to consider the question.

6:30 PM |

Not long after Bishop Thomas L. Dupre stood in a Greenfield church last month, denouncing gay marriage, a young man who says Dupre had sex with him when he was a 12-year-old sat 3,000 miles away, in California, reading a newspaper account of Dupre's sermon, speechless over what he considered unspeakable arrogance and hypocrisy.

According to the man's lawyer, it was Dupre's outspoken opposition to gay marriage that triggered the resolve to hold Dupre accountable for the alleged abuse.

Dupre, who abruptly resigned last week as bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Springfield, may have unwittingly unleashed the forces that led the California man and a Massachusetts man to come forward with allegations against him and could lead to him becoming the first American bishop to be prosecuted on charges of sexually abusing minors.

2:37 PM |

Thursday, February 19, 2004

Ahmad Chalabi and his London-based exile group, the Iraqi National Congress, for years provided a conduit for Iraqi defectors who were debriefed by US intelligence agents. But many American officials now blame Mr Chalabi for providing intelligence that turned out to be false or wild exaggerations about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

Mr Chalabi, by far the most effective anti-Saddam lobbyist in Washington, shrugged off charges that he had deliberately misled US intelligence. "We are heroes in error," he told the Telegraph in Baghdad.

"As far as we're concerned we've been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important. The Bush administration is looking for a scapegoat. We're ready to fall on our swords if he wants."

2:58 PM |

Mayor Richard Daley said he would have "no problem" with Cook County issuing marriage licenses to gay couples in Chicago, the nation's third largest city.

Entering a national debate over gay marriage, Daley urged sympathy for same-sex couples because "they love each other just as much as anyone else."

Daley also dismissed a suggestion Wednesday that marriage between gay couples would undermine the institution.

"Marriage has been undermined by divorce, so don't tell me about marriage," he said. "Don't blame the gay and lesbian, transgender and transsexual community."

1:14 PM |

Wednesday, February 18, 2004

The White House backed away Wednesday from its own prediction that the economy will add 2.6 million new jobs before the end of this year, saying the forecast was the work of number-crunchers and that President Bush was not a statistician.

9:17 PM |

As the premiere looms closer it seems increasingly clear that Gibson genuinely believes he has been targeted by shadowy forces aligned to subvert his message of salvation. The strongest evidence of this notion is the film itself, a rough cut of which I saw last week. "The Passion of the Christ" is indeed as bloody, grueling and ultimately difficult as Gibson promised it would be. (I clocked a climactic flagellation scene at just over 10 minutes.) Leaving aside the portrayal of Jewish clerics as vengeful villains and of Pontius Pilate as a sympathetic stooge who was essentially bullied into crucifying Christ - that matter is better debated by Bible scholars - the film is obviously the work of a man who believes he possesses the truth and that the truth has enemies.

I got a brief but intense tutorial in that perspective from Gibson's father, Hutton, the 84-year-old author and activist who has criticized the Vatican for more than 30 years, writing books titled "Is the Pope Catholic" and a newsletter, "The War Is Now!" which rails against a pope he calls "Garrulous Karolus, the Koran Kisser." Last November, Hutton Gibson invited me for a weekend at his home near Houston to share his revisionist takes on the pope's declining health ("I think he's playacting"), the scandals facing the Catholic Church ("The Vatican bred it all"), and historical accounts that 6 million Jews died in the holocaust ("I don't believe that for a minute").

4:44 PM |

11:56 AM |

9:20 AM |

Tuesday, February 17, 2004

1:59 PM |

Monday, February 16, 2004

9:12 PM |

A vulnerability was reported in Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) version 5. A remote user can execute arbitrary code on the target system.

It is reported that a remote user can create a specially crafted bitmap file that, when loaded by IE, will trigger an integer overflow and execute arbitrary code.

The author states that this flaw was found by reviewing the recently leaked Microsoft Windows source code. The flaw reportedly resides in 'win2k/private/inet/mshtml/src/site/download/imgbmp.cxx'.

The report indicates that IE 5 is affected but that IE 6 is not affected.

1:09 PM |

Yesterday, though, there was a new development when one of the president's fellow Guardsmen, John B. Calhoun, came forward to say that he clearly remembered him showing up for his required drills in Alabama through the summer and fall of 1972.

"We didn't have the planes that he could fly," Calhoun told the Associated Press. "But he studied his manuals, he read flying safety regulations, accident reports -- things pilots do quite often when they are not getting ready to fly or if they don't have other duties."

Interestingly, though, as the Houston Chronicle notes this morning, the documents released Friday night show "Bush's transfer to the Alabama squadron wasn't approved until September 1972, months after Bush's presence as recalled by Calhoun."

10:25 AM |

Scott McClellan finally lost it Friday, according to White House reporters. He doesn't see it that way.

The White House press secretary had kept his cool all week as reporters pounced on him about President George Bush's 1970s service in the National Guard. Facing perhaps his toughest week as press secretary, McClellan got testy Tuesday under questioning by CBS correspondent John Roberts during the televised briefing. He then blew up at old pro Helen Thomas during the private "gaggle" for reporters on Friday.

Thomas had gotten a tip that Bush might have been absent from duty in Alabama because he was performing court-ordered community service in Texas in 1972. She asked McClellan if that was accurate.

According to reporters in the press room, McClellan got red-faced and became so angry, it looked to some as if he were ready to pounce. He characterized the question as coming from "gutter politics."

10:17 AM |