Republican Senators To Pass START So They Can Go Home For Christmas…

Graham: GOP to blame for ‘capitulation … of dramatic proportions’ in lame-duck

“I can understand the Democrats being afraid of the new Republicans; I can’t understand Republicans being afraid of the new Republicans,” Graham lamented on WTMA radio. “They’re not opportunities to take everything you couldn’t do for two years and jam it. It’s literally what they’re doing, across the board. And after a while, I stop blaming them, and I blame us.”

Graham blamed outgoing Republican senators in particular.  “They have used the power of the Senate against the minority, and we have, quite frankly, a handful of us have been letting them do it. And a lot of the people who are doing this got beat. And that’s what makes me so upset,” he said. “It makes me disappointed that, with a new group of Republicans coming in, we could get a better deal on almost everything.”

New START Treaty: Text and Missile Defense

USNI – Posted by SteelJaw

… Overall, it is a modest effort at reduction — nothing on the order of the original START reductions.  It does re-establish an atmosphere of verification and compliance, though not as intrusive as the previous Treaty and includes use of “national technical means,” on-site visits and exchanges of telemetry data.

In the final months of negotiation there was a lot said on the Russian side about missile defense and linkages to the new Treaty – much more than reported in the Western press, by the way.  Of relevance to this part of the discussion is Article III 7(a) which states:

“A missile of a type developed and tested solely to intercept and counter objects not located on the surface of the Earth shall not be considered to be a ballistic missile to which the provisions of this Treaty apply.”

In other words,  ABM and ASAT missiles that have been exclusively developed and tested for those purposes (e.g., SM-3 family) are exempt from the Treaty.

Note also that there is a withdrawal clause for “extraordinary circumstances” (Article XIV Section 3) which is a common clause for treaties of this nature and is not extraordinary for this treaty. In light of the Russian’s unilateral statement on missile defense, it may be highlighted in subsequent discussions. The text of the declaration follow:

Statement by the Russian Federation on Missile Defence April 8, 2010

“The Treaty between the Russian Federation and the United States of America on the Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms signed in Prague on April 8, 2010, can operate and be viable only if the United States of America refrains from developing its missile defence capabilities quantitatively or qualitatively.

Consequently, the exceptional circumstances referred to in Article 14 of the Treaty include increasing the capabilities of the United States of America’s missile defence system in such a way that threatens the potential of the strategic nuclear forces of the Russian Federation.”

Worth keeping an eye on as we move down the pike on the European PAA is the “qualitatively” part of the first sentence. Earlier (March 18) statements by Foreign Minister Lavrov singled out improved capabilities of the EPAA “by 2020″ which coincides with introduction of the SM-3 BlkIIB.

Finally, at the signing ceremony, the President stated:

“President Medvedev and I have also agreed to expand our discussions on missile defense. This will include regular exchanges of information about our threat assessments, as well as the completion of a joint assessment of emerging ballistic missiles. And as these assessments are completed, I look forward to launching a serious dialogue about Russian-American cooperation on missile defense.”

How much this was intended to allay or soften the Russian unilateral statement and the substance of those future talks 9as well as the direction they will take the European PAA and other bi- and multi-lateral missile defense initiatives in various theaters and regions, remains to be seen.

 

Sarah Palin Urges ‘No’ Vote on START

33 Minutes

Former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin weighs in the START vote at National Review Online’s The Corner. An excerpt:

“The proposed New START agreement should be evaluated by the only criteria that matters for a treaty: Is it in America’s interest? I am convinced this treaty is not. It should not be rammed through in the lame duck session using behind the scenes deal-making reminiscent of the tactics used in the health care debate.

“New START actually requires the U.S. to reduce our nuclear weapons and allows the Russians to increase theirs. This is one-sided and makes no strategic sense. New START’s verification regime is weaker than the treaty it replaces, making it harder for us to detect Russian cheating. Since we now know Russia has not complied with many arms control agreements currently in force, this is a serious matter.

“New START recognizes a link between offensive and defensive weapons – a position the Russians have sought for years. Russia claims the treaty constrains U.S. missile defenses and that they will withdraw from the treaty if we pursue missile defenses. This linkage virtually guarantees that either we limit our missile defenses or the Russians will withdraw from the treaty. The Obama administration claims that this is not the case; but if that is true, why agree to linking offensive and defensive weapons in the treaty?

At the height of the Cold War, President Reagan pursued missile defense while also pursuing verifiable arms control with the then-Soviet Union. That position was right in the 1980’s, and it is still right today. We cannot and must not give up the right to missile defense to protect our population – whether the missiles that threaten us come from Russia, Iran, China, North Korea, or anywhere else. I fought the Obama administration’s plans to cut funds for missile defense in Alaska while I was Governor, and I will continue to speak out for missile defenses that will protect our people and our allies.”

Non-Stop START

NRO – By Andrew Stiles & Robert Costa

New START moved one step closer to ratification Tuesday, as the Senate voted 67–28 to end debate. A vote on final passage is expected Wednesday.

Eleven Republicans voted for cloture — Sens. Dick Lugar (Ind.), Bob Bennett (Utah), Scott Brown (Mass.), Thad Cochran (Miss.), Susan Collins (Maine), Olympia Snowe (Maine), Johnny Isakson (Ga.), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Bob Corker (Tenn.), Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), and George Voinovich (Ohio).

Sen. John Kerry (D., Mass.), the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, pointed out at a press conference following the vote that three additional senators — Judd Gregg (R., N.H.), Evan Bayh (D., Ind.), and Ron Wyden (D., Ore.) — were absent on Tuesday but will be present for ratification, meaning at least 70 members are likely to back the measure.

“In today’s Senate, 70 votes is yesterday’s 95,” Kerry joked. A beaming Lugar, the ranking member of the committee, joined the Bay State Democrat, and hailed Tuesday’s vote as a bipartisan success. Lugar expects even more Republicans to support final passage.

The vote came despite opposition from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) and other leading Republicans. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) remarked on Fox News radio earlier in the day that the increasingly inevitable ratification of New START in the lame-duck session amounted to a “capitulation . . . of dramatic proportions.”

“When it’s all going to be said and done, Harry Reid has eaten our lunch,” Graham said.

Kerry and Lugar dismissed the notion that McConnell’s opposition had been a political failure or strategically misguided. “Mitch McConnell is respected by [Democrats] as a very smart and capable leader [who has] held his caucus together on a number of difficult votes over the course of the year,” Kerry said. “I think he was just announcing his opposition to the treaty. So I wouldn’t read anything larger into it.”

Lugar was asked if McConnell had whipped the START vote. “Not to my knowledge,” he responded. “The vote today stands as it is.”

Sen. Bob Bennett, the retiring Utah Republican and a close friend of McConnell, told NRO that Republican leaders took a mostly hands-off approach to whipping START. “On a vote of this consequence, the leadership is very respectful of every senator’s individual position,” he said.

Other leading Republicans attempted to downplay the political aspects of the negotiations. Isakson, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, told NRO that many of his colleagues worked to avoid making the START vote a political football.

“Before I was up for reelection in November, I faced the vote in committee [to approve New START],” Isakson recalled. “From a political standpoint, it would have been easy to just say no. But [supporting START] was the right thing to do. And I got almost 60 percent of the vote after having voted for it in the committee. The worst decision would have been to go back on what we’ve already done.”

Indeed, Sen. John Cornyn (R., Texas), the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, told NRO last week that the START vote will not be a “litmus test” for candidates in coming years. But high-profile conservatives like Sen. Jim DeMint (R., S.C.) and Sarah Palin are opposed. What does Isakson think of those voices? “I’m not taking that bait,” he chuckled.

Collins, the ranking Republican on the Senate Homeland Security Committee, told NRO that many on-the-fence GOP senators “just naturally came to a conclusion.”

“To me, as Brent Scowcroft told me, [New START] is a modest and useful step in the right direction,” Collins said. “It’s refreshing to see serious, bipartisan consideration of a very important issue. Dick Lugar gets a lot of credit for that, as does Jon Kyl on the other side.”

The clock was another factor. Sen. Richard Burr (R., N.C.) notes that many senators are itching to catch a flight home for the holidays. The move toward START, he said in an NRO interview, “has more than a bit to do with jet fumes.”

“[Senators] want to go home,” Burr said. “When you got a process that has a definitive end, you use slippage backward. That’s why all of these things were orchestrated to come up at this time of year.” Burr would have preferred to see the debate continue next session, since “there is no compelling reason that this needs to be done right now.”

Regardless, it will be done.

Russia to develop new heavy ICBM by 2020

RIA Novosti

Russia’s state arms procurement program through 2020 provides for the development of a new heavy ballistic missile, a leading missile designer said on Monday.

The final decision should be made in 2012-13 by the expert community, not solely the Defense Ministry, said Yury Solomonov of the Moscow Institute of Thermal Technology (MITT), the developer of the troubled Bulava submarine-launched ballistic missile.

“This matter is beyond the Defense Ministry’s competence. It is a matter of state importance,” he said.

“Heavy ICBM” refers to a class of missiles with a heavy throw weight between five and nine metric tons and a length of over 35 meters, capable of delivering a large number of warheads in a single MIRV missile.

Russia’s Strategic Missile Forces are still armed with Soviet-era SS-18 Satan and SS-20 Saber ICBMs with an extended service life and are expected to remain in service until 2026.

The SS-18 Satan is deployed with up to 10 warheads with a yield of 550 to 750 kilotons each and an operational range of up to 11,000 km (6,800 miles).

Reagan Aide Perle: START ‘Seriously Flawed’

Newsmax – By Dan Weil and Ashley Martella

Instead of pressuring reluctant Republican senators for rapid ratification of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with Russia, the Obama administration should just drop it, says Richard Perle, a key architect of President Ronald Reagan’s strategy to end the Cold War.

“It’s a seriously flawed treaty,” Perle, now a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, says during an exclusive interview with Newsmax.TV. “It’s certainly not the kind of treaty Ronald Reagan fought for and accomplished.”

The pact is very weak on verification, he says. “For example, our right to inspections is limited to sites the Russians declare . . . which makes a mockery of the whole idea of on-site inspections,” Perle explains. “Imagine when Iran asserts a similar right to limit inspections, or the North Koreans or others. For that reason alone, it’s a very doubtful agreement.”

Plenty of time is needed to examine the treaty. “That won’t be done if they vote immediately,” he notes. “The Senate has never seen the full negotiating record on the treaty.”

That’s because the Obama administration doesn’t want a serious examination of the dispute between the United States and Russia over ballistic missile defense, Perle says.

“Russia claims that, if we build future ballistic missile defenses that impinge on what they believe to be their national security, then all bets are off, and the treaty no longer applies,” he says. “That would inhibit our ballistic missile defense program, even though it’s not aimed at Russia — it’s aimed at Iran, North Korea, and others.”

The Obama administration essentially has handed Russia a veto over our missile defense program, Perle says. “At any point they can say we don’t like what you’re doing, you’re putting us in a position where we’ll walk away from this treaty. I think this president would back down under those circumstances.”

A close examination of all this is vital, but the White House refuses to turn over the negotiating records, says Perle, who was President Ronald Reagan’s assistant defense secretary.

“This treaty doesn’t need to be signed now, and I don’t believe it needs to be signed at all. There is no reason after the Cold War why we can’t build what we think is necessary and let the Russians build what they want. We don’t need a treaty to regulate relations between us.”…]

Liston To interview

Top 10 Reasons Not to Trust Russia

The Heritage Foundation

The current regime in Russia has a terrible record as a reliable partner, yet President Obama wants the nuclear treaty he negotiated with the Kremlin fast-tracked for Senate approval. That makes no sense. Here are 10 reasons why.

1. A Long History of Arms Control Violations: Russia repeatedly violated the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) all the way to its expiration in December 2009, as clearly stated in 2005 and 2010 State Department compliance reports. Specifically, Russia tested an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile with Multiple Individually Targeted Re-entry Vehicles (warheads) while START was in force. Such activities, however, were explicitly banned.

2. The West Is Still Their #1 Threat: Russia regards the U.S. and NATO as its principal adversaries and configures its forces for large-scale conventional theater operations with them. The recent discovery of the Russian spy network inside the U.S. and their celebration upon return to Russia, courtesy of President Obama, indicates that Russia is set in a Cold War mentality.

3. Helping Iran and North Korea: According to U.S. intelligence, Russia violated nonproliferation agreements by providing ballistic missile technology to Iran and North Korea, which have continually threatened America and its allies.

4. Still Building a Nuclear Arsenal: Nearly 20 years after the end of the Cold War, Russia still designs, builds, and modernizes nuclear weapons and their delivery systems. Russia’s new military doctrine maintains a low threshold for nuclear first strikes. In fact, Moscow plans to use tactical nuclear weapons in Europe if ever confronted with a conventional threat. In 2009, Russia conducted a military exercise that simulated a nuclear attack on Poland.

5. Not in Compliance on Other Treaties: The U.S. believes Russia to be in non-compliance with the Chemical Weapons Convention and the Biological Weapons Convention. In 2009, the Strategic Posture Commission told Congress: “Russia is no longer in compliance with its PNI [Presidential Nuclear Initiatives] commitments.” Moscow’s tactical nuclear weapons arsenal may be 10 times larger than that of the U.S.

6. No Regard for Georgia Independence: Russia has repeatedly broken its promises to withdraw military forces from Georgia and Moldova. When Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, it rewrote the rules of post–World War II European security. It repudiated the Helsinki Pact of 1975, which recognized the security of European borders, and violated the sovereignty of a NATO aspirant and member of the Council of Europe.

7. Responds Offensively to Defensive Measures: In response to U.S. plans for a defensive missile shield in Europe to protect against Iranian missile threats, Moscow has repeatedly threatened to deploy Iskander short-range and nuclear-capable missiles to target U.S. allies in Eastern Europe. Reports show that the Baltic Fleet is armed with nuclear weapons that can be used against Europe.

8. Ties to Terrorist Organizations: Russia cultivates ties with terrorist organizations Hamas and Hezbollah and provides military and diplomatic support for anti-American “rogue states” such as Syria, Iran, and Venezuela. Russia voted with the U.S. at the U.N. Security Council to pass sanctions on Iran—but only after working hard to water them down to practically nothing.

9. Natural Gas as a Political Weapon: The Kremlin uses its neighbors and Europe’s dependence on Russian natural gas as a foreign policy tool to pressure states. In 2009, Russia cut off gas supplies to Ukraine and to Europe by extension, causing the International Energy Agency to deem them an unreliable supplier.

10. An Authoritarian Regime: The current model of leadership under President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has become increasingly authoritarian. Despite numerous commitments under international law, the government has tightened controls on political life, civil society, and the media. Disruption of political opposition’s activities, restricting access to state-controlled TV, human right violations (such as the beating of demonstrators who “support” the Russian constitution), murder of journalists and anti-corruption activists, disappearance and torture, abuse of the legal system for monetary and political gain—all illustrate this negative trend.

© 2010, The Heritage Foundation

Related (Global Security): Russia Fields More Topol-M ICBMs

Russia’s missile forces to replace Topol-M with multiple-warhead RS-24

“Verification is better than no verification at all; that inspections and transparency are what prohibit things like what happened on 9/11 from ever happening again…

— U.S. Senator Johnny Isakson, R-Ga.

Treaty (17 pages)

Protocols (165 pages)

end – ;(

Richardson Delivers “Present” To Leader Kim Jong-il: Autographed Pardon Certificate For “Billy The Kid”?

N. Korea says Richardson delivered ‘present’ for leader Kim Jong-il

SEOUL, Dec. 20 (Yonhap) — North Korea said New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson met Monday with a ranking official of the communist country to deliver “a present” for leader Kim Jong-il.

A two-paragraph dispatch by the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) suggested Richardson has failed to meet with the 68-year-old leader amid festering regional tensions.

Left-handed or right-handed? It was widely assumed throughout much of the 20th century that Billy the Kid was left-handed. This perception was encouraged by the only documented photograph of McCarty (an undated ferrotype), in which he appears to be wearing a gun belt with a holster on his left side. (All Winchester Model 1873 rifles were made with the loading gate on the right side of the receiver: the “left-handed” photograph is a mirror image.) Indeed, the notion of a left-handed Billy became so entrenched that, in 1958, a film biography of “the Kid” (starring Paul Newman) was titled The Left Handed Gun.

In 1954, however, western historians James D. Horan and Paul Sann wrote that McCarty was “right-handed and carried his pistol on his right hip”. More recently, in response to a story from The Guardian that used an uncorrected McCarty ferrotype, Clyde Jeavons, a former curator of the National Film and Television Archive, cited their work and added:

This particular reproduction error has occurred so often in books and other publications over the years that it has led to the myth that Billy the Kid was left-handed, for which there is no evidence. On the contrary, the evidence (from viewing his photo correctly) is that he was right-handed: he wears his pistol on his right hip with the butt pointing backwards in a conventional right-handed draw position.

Wallis wrote in 2007 that McCarty was ambidextrous.  Source:  Wiki

“Billy the Kid”

Over the past eight years Governor Bill Richardson has received dozens of communiqués regarding a pardon of Henry McCarty, a/k/a Henry Antrim, a/k/a William H. Bonney, a/k/a “Billy the Kid.” These reference the widespread belief that in return for damning testimony which The Kid provided at a later murder trial, a pardon was promised – but never granted – by then-New Mexico Territorial Governor Lew Wallace for earlier actions committed by The Kid during the Lincoln County Wars in New Mexico in the latter half of the 19th century. Specifically this issue revolves around The Kid’s alleged role in the killing of one Sheriff William Brady, a suspected operative of a rival faction during the Wars.

Received communications include several petitions in various stages of completion urging a posthumous pardon of The Kid.

In an effort to clarify the issue, the administration has been reviewing the historical record surrounding these events through various documents, accounts, personal interviews and other materials. Independently, nationally prominent trial attorney Randi McGinn was designated to review both the history and prior petitions to ascertain whether there was sufficient basis for the matter to be seriously considered. Ms. McGinn – a New Mexico resident and western history enthusiast – agreed to undertake this voluntarily and at no cost to taxpayers.

After concluding her review, and upon finding sufficient merit to warrant consideration, Ms. McGinn submitted a formal petition on December 14, 2010 requesting that Governor Richardson honor the pledge of a pardon for Billy the Kid as initially offered by Governor Wallace.

Governor Richardson will assess this petition and decide a course of action sometime after Christmas but before the end of this year. Any decision will be made in light of the explicit concern as to whether one of his predecessors as governor committed the state of New Mexico to a specific act, and whether that pledge was upheld. This is important not only in the context of keeping one’s word, but also as it relates to the rich historical record of the American Old West and New Mexico’s unique place in it.

It must be emphasized that Governor Richardson has made no predetermination regarding this petition. His review will be an earnest exercise based on fact and the historical record.

As part of his deliberations Governor Richardson is seeking comments from the general public, as well as history buffs, experts in the field, and family members of the affected parties . If you wish to comment on the petition or recommend an outcome please do so by submitting comments via email to: btk.comments@state.nm.us

Comments may also be submitted via regular mail to:

Office of the Governor
State Capitol
490 Old Santa Fe Trail
Santa Fe , NM 87501
USA

ATTN: Eric Witt / BTK

Please limit your comments to the contents, events and pleas contained in the petition. They are narrow in scope and do NOT argue for a blanket pardon of all The Kid’s activities including his subsequent killing of two deputies at the Lincoln County jail, nor the role of Sheriff Pat Garrett in the resulting manhunt for, and killing of, The Kid — which matters are not here disputed.

The deadline for receipt of comments is December 26, 2010.

Related Previous Post:

Korea: Where There Are No Tigers, A Wildcat Is Very Self-important…

end –

Another Late Night Senate Surprise: S. 510, FDA Food Safety Modernization Act

 

Food Safety Bill Lives

AJC – By Jamie Dupree

A major food safety bill that had almost been given up for dead was suddenly revived in the Senate late on Sunday evening, and may be ready for House approval as early as Tuesday.

In a parliamentary move laid out on the Senate floor by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid just after 7pm, the Senate took the food safety language that was passed as part of a stop-gap budget plan by the House, attached it to another House-passed bill and approved that by unanimous consent.

A Democratic Senate aide told me that Republicans did not object to the plan, even though the bill has garnered fierce opposition in some GOP quarters.

The move was a surprise, as it seemed like the Food Safety bill was going to die in the waning days of this year, despite strong support in both the House and Senate.

The bill almost went down the drain originally because of an elementary mistake by Senate Democrats, who added revenue provisions to a measure that originated in the Senate, despite the Constitutional requirement that all spending and revenue bills start in the House.

The House refused to act directly on that legislation, because of what’s known as a “blue slip” problem.

That problem was solved when the House approved its long-term Continuing Resolution last week, which included the language of the Senate-passed food safety bill.

As reported above, the Senate on Sunday night simply took the revised food safety language that was approved by the House in the CR, substitued it to the language of HR 2751, one of the original “Cash for Clunkers” bills from last year, and approved it by unanimous consent.

That move will fix any Constitutional issues, because the plan originated in the House as part of the CR, and by using a bill that was already approved by the House, the Cash for Clunkers bill.

Before you start screaming about that – the food safety language replaces the Cash for Clunkers language in the amended version of HR 2751.

I was told that the food safety bill should be up for a vote as soon as Tuesday in the House.

In Sunday-evening surprise, Senate unanimously passes food safety bill

The Hill – By Alexander Bolton

The Senate unexpectedly approved food safety legislation by unanimous consent Sunday evening, rescuing a bill that floated in limbo for weeks because of a clerical error.

The Senate passed the Food Safety and Modernization Act on Nov. 30 by a vote of 73-25. But the bill was later invalidated by a technical objection because it was a revenue-raising measure that did not originate in the House — Senate staff had failed to substitute the food safety language into a House-originated bill.

A coalition of groups supporting the bill sent a letter Sunday to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) calling for action on food safety.

“Our organizations are writing to support attaching S. 510, the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act, to the Senate’s proposed short-term continuing resolution,” the groups wrote. “Strong food-safety legislation will reduce the risk of contamination and provide FDA with the resources and authorities the agency needs to help make prevention the focus of our food safety strategies.”

The American Public Health Association, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, Consumer Federation of America, Consumers Union and other groups signed the letter.

Democrats first attempted to attach the food safety bill to the two-and-a-half-month spending measure but Republicans balked because they wanted to keep that measure clean, according to Senate aides.

Republicans, however, later agreed to pass it by unanimous consent.

Reid announced he would send the legislation — this time properly attached to a House-originated measure — back to the lower chamber for final approval.

“Our food safety system has not been updated in almost a century. Families in Nevada and across America should never have to worry about whether the food they put on their table is safe,” Reid said in a statement. “This is a common-sense issue with broad bipartisan support.

“Tonight we unanimously passed a measure to improve on our current food safety system by giving the FDA the resources it needs to keep up with advances in food production and marketing, without unduly burdening farmers and food producers,” he said.

The legislation is a high priority for Reid and Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee Chairman Tom Harkin (D-Iowa).

Reid’s staff earlier in the day had told a coalition of groups supporting the legislation that it had a chance of passing but the prospects appeared to dim as Sunday wore on. The swift approval by unanimous consent caught some aides and lobbyists working on it by surprise.

Sen. Tom Coburn, the outspoken conservative Republican from Oklahoma, had been blocking the legislation. He lifted his objection at the final moment.

Top ten lies about Senate Bill 510

Natural News – By Mike Adams

The Food Safety Modernization Act looks like it’s headed to become law. It’s being hailed as a “breakthrough” achievement in food safety, and it would hand vast new powers and funding to the FDA so that it can clean up the food supply and protect all Americans from food-borne pathogens.

There’s just one problem with all this: It’s all a big lie.

Here are the ten biggest lies that have been promoted about S.510 by the U.S. Congress, the food industry giants and the mainstream media:

Lie #1 – Most deaths from food poisoning are caused by fresh produce

Here’s a whopper the mainstream media won’t dare report: Out of the 1,809 people who die in America every year from food-borne pathogens (CDC estimate), only a fraction die from the manufacturer’s contamination of fresh produce. By far the majority of food poisoning is caused by the consumption of spoiled processed foods, dead foods and animal-human transmission of pathogens.

For example, one of the largest food-borne killers according to the CDC is Toxoplasma gondii, a disease that people acquire from cat feces coming into contact with their food, which can happen right in their own homes (http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/Vol5n…). Salmonella poisoning accounts for 553 deaths a year. As a reference for relative risk, over 42,000 people die each year from road accidents in the USA, meaning driving a car has a roughly 7600% higher chance of killing you than eating fresh produce. (http://www.driveandstayalive.com/in…)

In terms of food-borne illness, many of the deaths come from things like spoiled tomato sauce, spoiled canned foods and spoiled pasteurized milk. S 510, of course, does absolutely nothing to address these food contamination deaths, since those foods are considered “sterilized” at the time of sale.

Lie #2 – Under S.510, the FDA would only recall products it knows to be contaminated

Not true. S.510 merely requires the FDA to have “reason to believe” a food is contaminated. So right there, that means all raw milk will be targeted by the FDA because even without conducting any scientific tests at all, the FDA can say it has “reason to believe” the milk is contaminated merely because it is raw.

In other words, the FDA no longer needs science to outlaw a food product. It merely needs an opinion.

Is this “reason to believe” section really true? Yep, and here’s how it was amended:

SEC. 208. ADMINISTRATIVE DETENTION OF FOOD.
23 (a) IN GENERAL. – Section 304(h)(1)(A) (21 U.S.C.24 334(h)(1)(A)) is amended by
(1) striking ”credible evidence or information indicating” and inserting ”reason to believe”;
(http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi…)

In other words, in negotiating this bill, the U.S. Senate removed the requirement that the FDA needed “credible evidence” in order to recall a product and, instead, replaced that with the FDA only needing “reason to believe.”

It is utterly amazing that the U.S. Congress would give the FDA to conduct large-scale product recalls and even imprison people based entirely on what the agency “has reason to believe.”

Last time I checked, the FDA held some pretty bizarre (if not downright moronic) beliefs, including this jaw-dropping whopper: The FDA literally believes that there is no food, no herb, no vitamin or supplement that has any ability to prevent disease of any kind. They don’t even believe limes can prevent scurvy, and you’d have to nutritionally illiterate to believe that.

The FDA believes foods are inert and that all the amazing phytonutrients in those foods (carotenoids, antioxidants, therapeutic fats like omega-3 and so on) are utterly useless for human biology.

This belief, held by the FDA that has now been put in charge of the food supply, is the belief system of an insane government agency that has completely lost touch with reality while abandoning nutritional science.

Lie #3 – They didn’t tell you that nearly 70% of grocery store chickens are contaminated with salmonella every day

Yep, it’s true: Amid all the fear-mongering over salmonella, everybody forgot to notice that the vast majority of fresh chickens sold at grocery stores every single day are widely contaminated with salmonella (http://www.naturalnews.com/028661_c…). Yet S 510 does absolutely nothing to address this. It’s not even mentioned in the bill.

In fact, it is these contaminated chickens that end up cross-contaminating the fresh produce in many kitchens across America. So the so-called “food poisoning” that’s often blamed on spinach or onions often originates with the contaminated chicken meat people bring home and slice on their kitchen cutting boards.

Lie #4 – S.510 will exclude and protect small farmers

The Tester Amendment, which was finally included in S.510, excludes farmers who sell less than $500,000 worth of food each year from the more onerous paperwork and compliance burdens described in the bill. But this dollar amount is not indexed to inflation, meaning that as the U.S. dollar continues to lose value due to the Federal Reserve counterfeiting machine running at full speed (more “quantitative easing,” anyone?), food prices will continue to skyrocket — and this will shift even small family farms into the $500,000 sales range within just a few years.

In fact, a single-family farm with just four people could easily sell $500,000 worth of fresh produce a year right now, even before inflation. Remember, $500,000 is not their profit, but rather the gross sales amount. The profits on that might be only $50,000 or even less.

Furthermore, this $500,000 threshold means that small, successful farms that are doing well and would like to expand will refuse to hire more people or expand their operations. To avoid the tyranny of S 510, small farms will try to stay small, and that means avoiding the kind of business expansion that would create new jobs.

Lie #5 – The FDA needs more power to enforce food safety

The FDA already has the power to effectively recall foods by publicly announcing a product has been found to be contaminated. The FDA already has the power to confiscate “misbranded” products, too, and it could easily use this power to halt the sale of contaminated food items.

But the FDA simply refuses to enforce the laws already on the books and, instead, has sought to expand its power by hyping up the e.coli food scares. The ploy apparently worked: Now in a reaction to the food scare-mongering, the FDA is being handed not just new powers, but more funding, too! And you can bet it will find creative new ways to put this power to work suppressing the health freedoms and food freedoms of the American people.

Lie #6 – Fresh produce is contaminated because of a lack of paperwork

There is no evidence that requiring farms to fill out more paperwork will make their food safer. The real cause of produce contamination is the existence of factory animal farms whose effluent output (huge rivers of cow feces, basically), end up in the water supply, soils and equipment that comes into contact with fresh produce.

The food contamination problem is an UPSTREAM problem where you’ve got to reform the factory animal operations that now dominate the American meat industry. S.510, however, does absolutely nothing to address this. Factory animal farms aren’t even addressed in the bill!

Lie #7 – The American people are dying in droves from unsafe fresh food

The truth is that Americans are dying from processed food laced with toxic chemical additives, not from fresh, raw produce. Partially-hydrogenated oils, white sugar, aspartame, MSG and artificial food colors almost certainly kill far more people than bacterial contaminations.

The American public is also dying from pharmaceuticals — anywhere from 100,000 to 240,000 people a year are killed by FDA-approved drugs (http://www.naturalnews.com/001894.html), most of which have been approved under the guise of blatantly fraudulent science and drug company trickery. The FDA doesn’t seem to mind. In fact, it has been a willful co-conspirator in the scientific fraud carried out by Big Pharma in the name of “medicine.” (http://www.naturalnews.com/027851_h…)

To think that the FDA — the very same agency responsible for the Big Pharma death machine — is now going to “save us” by controlling food safety is highly irrational.

Lie #8 – The FDA just wants to make food “safer”

Actually, the FDA wants to make the food more DEAD. Both the FDA and the USDA are vocal opponents of live food. They think that the only safe food is sterilized food, which is why they’ve supported the fumigation, pasteurization and irradiation efforts that have been pushed over the last few years.

California almond growers, for example, must now either chemically fumigate or pasteurize their almonds before selling them (http://www.naturalnews.com/021776.html). This has destroyed the incomes of U.S. almond farmers and forced U.S. food companies to buy raw almonds from Spain and other countries.

Lie #9 – Food smuggling is a huge problem in America

One of the main sections of S.510 addresses “food smuggling.” Yep — people smuggling food across the country. If you’ve never heard of this problem that’s because it’s not actually a problem.

Not yet anyway.

But there’s a reason why they put this into the bill: Because they’re probably planning on criminalizing fresh produce and then arresting people for transporting broccoli with the “intent to distribute.”

Yep, farmers bringing fresh produce to sell at the weekend farmer’s market could soon be arrested and imprisoned as if they were drug smugglers. Hence the need for the “food smuggling” provisions of S.510.

Soon, we will all have to meet in secret locations just to trade carrots for cash.

Lie #10 – S.510 will make America’s food supply the safest in the world

Actually, even with S.510 in place, America’s food supply is among the most chemically contaminated in the world, second only to China. You can find mercury in the seafood, BPA in the canned soup, yeast extract (MSG) in the “natural” potato chips, and artificial petrochemical coloring agents in children’s foods.

Eating the “Standard American Diet” is probably the single most harmful thing a person can do for their health. It’s the fastest way to get cancer, diabetes and heart disease. Every nation in the world that begins to consume the American diet starts to show record rates of degenerative disease within one generation. This is the “safe food” that the U.S. Senate is now pushing on everyone.

Remember, with S.510, SAFE = DEAD. And the FDA says it wants to keep everybody safe.

Permission granted to reproduce and post this list with credit

Feel free to share this list! Please give the courtesy of credit to this author and a clickable link back to NaturalNews.com. We are working hard to fight for freedom and educate the public about why we need to resist these “Big Government solutions” that trample over our Constitutional rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (which, in my mind, includes buying fresh produce at the farmer’s market). Thank you for your support.

Related Previous Posts:

Let’s Be Clear: We Can’t Just Leave it Up to The Parents…

Related Links:

S. 510: FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (Full Text)

Food Freedom: S 510 is hissing in the grass

S. 510: A Clear and Present Danger

end – ;(

Cultural Sunday: Conscience Ahead Of Friendship

Poem of the Week

The Swing

The swing was picked up for the boys,
for the here-and-here-to-stay
and only she knew why it was
I dug so solemnly

I spread the feet two yards apart
and hammered down the pegs
filled up the holes and stamped the dirt
around its skinny legs

I hung the rope up in the air
and fixed the yellow seat
then stood back that I might admire
my handiwork complete

and saw within its frail trapeze
the child that would not come
of what we knew had two more days
before we sent it home

I know that there is nothing here
no venue and no host
but the honest fulcrum of the hour
that engineers our ghost

the bright sweep of its radar-arc
is all the human dream
handing us from dark to dark
like a rope over a stream

But for all the coldness of my creed
and for all those I denied
for all the others she had freed
like arrows from her side

for all the child was barely here
and for all that we were over
I could not square the ghosts we are
with those that we deliver

I gave the empty seat a push
and nothing made a sound
and swung between two skies to brush
her feet upon the ground

– Don Paterson

Source:  Granta Magazine (Welcome to the magazine of new writing)

Solstice-eclipse overlap first in 456 years

Montreal Gazette – By Rebecca Lindell

This year’s winter solstice — an event that will occur next Tuesday — will coincide with a full lunar eclipse in a union that hasn’t been seen in 456 years. The celestial eccentricity holds special significance for spiritualities that tap into the energy of the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year and a time that is associated with the rebirth of the sun.

“It’s a ritual of transformation from darkness into light,” says Nicole Cooper, a high priestess at Toronto’s Wiccan Church of Canada. “It’s the idea that when things seem really bleak, (it) is often our biggest opportunity for personal transformation. “The idea that the sun and the moon are almost at their darkest at this point in time really only further goes to hammer that home.”

Cooper said Wiccans also see great significance in the unique coupling of the masculine energy of the sun and the feminine energy of the moon — transformative energies that she plans to incorporate into the church’s winter-solstice rituals. Since the last time an eclipse and the winter solstice happened simultaneously was just under five centuries years ago, Cooper said she wasn’t familiar with any superstitions or mythologies associated with it.

Instead, she said, they can only be interpreted personally. “Wiccans don’t think of things as being good or evil — they just are. Our experience of them makes them positive or negative for us.” The winter solstice also played an important role in Greco-Roman rituals.

“It’s seen as a time of rebirth or renewal because, astrologically, it’s a time where the light comes back,” said Shane Hawkins, a professor of Greek and Roman studies at Carleton University in Ottawa. For the ancient Romans, it was also a time of great feasting and debauchery.

“If (the eclipse) happened on the 21st, they might well have been drunk,” he said. A lunar eclipse taking place during the solstice is not an event Hawkins has seen in research, but he said it would have been viewed as something special. “Eclipses could be taken either way,” he said. “Certainly it would have been an omen, but it would have been up to the interpretation of specialists of whether it was good or bad.”

And that interpretation would likely be based on whatever was happening at the time. The last time the two celestial events happened at the same time was in AD 1554, according to NASA. An otherwise seemingly unexceptionable year in recorded history, the darkened moon happened during a bleak year for Tudor England.

Lady Jane Grey was beheaded for treason that year, while Princess Elizabeth was imprisoned in the Tower of London. Mary of Guise — the mother of Mary, Queen of Scots — became regent of Scotland. Scientifically, however, it’s just a coincidence of natural cycles.

“It’s quite rare, but there’s no profound significance. It’s luck of the draw; you got dealt four aces,” said Robert Dick, an astronomy instructor at Carleton. The eclipse will start just after midnight Eastern Time on Tuesday, with the main event starting at 1:30 a.m. ET and lasting until 5:30 a.m., when the moon reappears.

Peter and Ben

Director: Pinny Grylls

When a video becomes an online hit, racking up views in the hundreds of thousands, it usually ticks a number of boxes – short, snappy, attention-grabbing. If it contains comedy, sex or violence, that’s a bonus. What you don’t expect an online hit to involve is a reclusive, grey-bearded man in the Welsh mountains and his friendship with a nonconformist sheep. “It’s a gentle, lyrical film,” says Pinny Grylls, the director of Peter and Ben, which has attracted more than 300,000 views since it was uploaded two years ago. “I don’t know who these viewers are.”

Grylls, 32, cut her teeth making short documentaries for the Arts Council’s Creative Partnerships programme. Peter and Ben was a project she nurtured over several years and completed with funding from the UK Film Council. “Peter is an old friend of the family who became a recluse 30 years ago,” says Grylls. “I’ve always thought he was extraordinary.” Out of all the footage she shot of Peter, Grylls picked out the story of his relationship with Ben. “This sheep is more like his friend than a pet. The story is really simple, but universal in a quirky way: the son not wanting to join the flock, but eventually joining and the father not wanting him to.”

The film has won prizes and numerous accolades, not least from German director Werner Herzog, who awarded it first prize in a competition run by British film community Shooting People, remarking: “The soul of the sheep is inside the man and soul of the man is inside the sheep.” That, says Grylls, a huge Herzog fan, “was the greatest day of my life”.

She has mixed feelings, however, about the current state of short films. “There has been a lot of excitement about them recently, and it’s certainly growing, but short films haven’t become mainstream yet.” It all comes down to economics, she suggests. “You can’t really make a living out of them. It took an awful lot of effort to make Peter and Ben, but what money it made went straight back to the UK Film Council.”

Grylls now works primarily in television, although she sees the value of the internet as a platform. “You have a direct interface with your audience. They leave comments, which is amazing for a film-maker. I’ve had people email me from Korea, Afghanistan, saying how much they were touched by this film. You really get things back from people if you put work online.”

h/t UK Guardian: The best short films on the web

Tony Judt’s memory

EL PAÍS – ANTONIO MUÑOZ MOLINA

Tony Judt was a passionate skeptic who never just kept his mouth shut. He passionately believed in the freedom of the individual, and at the same time in the solidity of a democratic state capable of providing fundamental services and ensuring the rule of law. He denounced the sectarian blindness in that part of the European left that refused to break with communism; but just as bluntly refused to have anything to do with the new fundamentalism of the market and newfound enthusiasm for imperial war.

Some people pass with ease from the dogmatism of the left to that of the right. Tony Judt was always a defender of European social democracy. He was always aware of the particularity of his origin: British, the son of Jewish immigrant parents, each from a different corner of Europe; Jewish but devoid of religious convictions. In his youth, he embraced leftist Zionism and went to Israel to work in a kibbutz, but emerged vaccinated against beliefs in ideology and racial identity. At Cambridge he was an outsider.

His origin, tastes in food, the languages spoken at home, marked him as a Continental. He went to Paris to study at the revered École Normale Superieure, and the French intellectuals he saw close up — Sartre, Althusser, Foucault, Kristeva, Lacan, Beauvoir — left him less than awed.

He belonged to the great British historical school that sets store by rigor, clarity of exposition and narrative drive. But these values fell under a shadow, in the academic fashion for Theory, Discourse and unreadable jargon. As he never shut up, he won new enemies every day. He was expelled from magazines, boycotted at conferences. He distrusted the seductive power of ideas, and was fond of a quote from Camus: “every wrong idea ends in a bloodbath — always the blood of others.”

In the early 1980s he took an interest in Czechoslovakia, a part of Europe known to the West mainly as a backdrop to spy novels, and began studying Czech. On this foundation he built the greatest of his books, Postwar, about the history of the continent since 1945.

He never shut up even when illness took hold of his body, paralyzing it little by little, muscle by muscle, limb by limb. He said it was like living in a cell that shrank by centimeters every day. Doomed to nights of immobile insomnia, he found consolation in meticulous reconstruction of his memories. He had once spent vast amounts of time in archives. Now the only archive within his reach was his own memory.

He knew that he had not much time, and that before he lost his lucidity he would lose the power of speech, and be reduced to a silent monologue with his own phantoms. He husbanded his forces: vividly remembering an episode, an epoch, a place, throughout the night, and then in the morning dictating, with ever more difficulty, what he had imagined.

These could not be long texts. The intensity, the precision, the inevitable fatigue, imposed a limit of a few pages. He liked to concentrate on a single experience and relive it in every detail. Trapped in bed, with a permanent feeling of cold, a plastic tube in his nose, he returned to a small hotel in Switzerland where he his parents had taken him on vacations as a child. Again he climbed the stairs, moved through the corridor, imagined the sound of steps; through an open window saw a landscape of showy slopes; breathed the cold, clean air. Hence the title of the posthumous book that has just come out: The Memory Chalet.

Dictating this book in the last months of his life, Tony Judt achieved a virtual escape from the cell of his body. Again he traveled on a freighter, at the age of 15, on the North Sea, and walked the streets of London, and crossed the United States. At the end he was in a small railway station in Switzerland, quietly waiting for the train.

Tony Robert Judt FBA (2 January 1948 – 6 August 2010) was a British historian, essayist, and university professor. He specialized in European history and was the Erich Maria Remarque Professor in European Studies at New York University and Director of NYU’s Erich Maria Remarque Institute. He was a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books.

In 1996 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2007 a corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. A Marxist Zionist as a young man, he dropped his faith in Zionism after youthful experience in Israel in the 1960s and came to see a Jewish state as an anachronism, and moved away from Marxism in the 1970s and 1980s. In later life, he described himself as “a universalist social democrat”.

Judt’s works include the highly acclaimed Postwar, a history of Europe after the Second World War. He was also well known for his views on Israel, which generated significant debate after he advocated a one-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. According to journalist David Herman, Judt’s directorship of the Remarque Institute, his book Postwar and his articles on Israel made him “one of the best-known public intellectuals in America”, having previously been “a fairly obscure British historian, specialising in modern French history”.

In an interview a few weeks before his death Judt said: “I see myself as first and above all a teacher of history; next a writer of European history; next a commentator on European affairs; next a public intellectual voice within the American Left; and only then an occasional, opportunistic participant in the pained American discussion of the Jewish matter…”

Judt was born in 1948 in London, England to secular Jewish parents. He was raised by his mother, whose parents had emigrated from Russia and Romania, and his father, who was born in Belgium and had emigrated as a boy to Ireland and then subsequently to England. Judt’s parents lived in North London, but due to the closure of the local hospitals in response to an outbreak of infant dysentry, Judt was born in a Salvation Army maternity unit in Bethnal Green, in the East End of London.

When he was a small boy, the family moved from Tottenham to a flat above his mother’s business in Putney, South London. When Judt was nine years of age, following the birth of his sister, the family moved to a house in Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey. The family’s main language was English, although Judt often spoke in French to his father and to his father’s family.

Judt won a place at Emanuel School in Wandsworth, and was one of very few Jewish boys accepted at that institution at that time. Following his education at Emanuel, he went on to study as a scholarship student at King’s College, Cambridge. Judt was the first member of his family to finish secondary school and to go to university. He obtained a BA degree in history in 1969 and, after spending a year at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, completed a PhD in 1972. As a high school and university student he was a left-wing Zionist, and worked summers on kibbutzim.

He moved away from Zionism after the Six-Day War of 1967, later stating that “I went with this idealistic fantasy of creating a socialist, communitarian country”, but that he came to realise that left-wing Zionists were “remarkably unconscious of the people who had been kicked out of the country…to make this fantasy possible”. He came to describe his Zionism as his particular “ideological overinvestment”. Judt wrote in February 2010 that: “Before even turning twenty I had become, been, and ceased to be a Zionist, a Marxist, and a communitarian settler: no mean achievement for a south London teenager”.

After completing his Cambridge doctorate, he was elected a junior fellow of King’s College in 1972, where he taught modern French history until 1978. Following a brief period teaching social history at the University of California, he returned to Great Britain in 1980 to teach politics at St. Anne’s College, Oxford. He moved to New York University in 1987.

Judt was married three times, his first two marriages ending in divorce. His third marriage was to Jennifer Homans, The New Republic’s dance critic, with whom he had two children. In June 2010, Judt and his son Daniel wrote a dialogue about Barack Obama, politics and corporate behaviour for the New York Times.

In a review of Judt’s Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century, Jonathan Freedland writes that Judt has put conscience ahead of friendship during his life, and has demanded the same courage in others.

In 2008, Judt was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. From October 2009, he was paralyzed from the neck down. He was nevertheless able to give a two-hour public lecture. In January 2010 Judt wrote a short article about his condition, the first of a series of memoirs published in the New York Review of Books. In March 2010, Judt was interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air, and in June he was interviewed by the BBC’s disability affairs correspondent Peter White for the Radio 4 programme No Triumph, No Tragedy.

Judt died of ALS at his home in Manhattan on 6 August 2010. This was two weeks after a major interview and retrospective of his work in Prospect magazine and the day before an article about his illness was published in the Irish Independent indicating that he “won’t surrender any time soon” and comparing his suffering to that of author Terry Pratchett, who was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease in 2007.

Shortly before his death, according to The Guardian, he was said to have possessed the “liveliest mind in New York.” He continued his work as a public intellectual right up until his death, writing essays for the New York Review of Books and composing and completing a synthetic intellectual history under the title Thinking The Twentieth Century with fellow historian Timothy Snyder.

He also wrote a memoir entitled The Memory Chalet, which was published posthumously in November 2010. During his illness, Judt made use of the memory palace technique to remember paragraphs of text during the night, which he placed mentally in rooms of a Swiss chalet and then dictated to his assistant the next day.

Following his death TIME said he was “a historian of the very first order, a public intellectual of an old-fashioned kind and — in more ways than one — a very brave man”. He was also praised for carrying out what he himself described as the historian’s task “to tell what is almost always an uncomfortable story and explain why the discomfort is part of the truth we need to live well and live properly. A well-organised society is one in which we know the truth about ourselves collectively, not one in which we tell pleasant lies about ourselves”.

Mark LeVine, a professor of history at the University of California at Irvine, said that Judt’s “writings on European history and the need for a new social contract between rulers and ruled can inspire a new generation of scholars and activists in other cultures”. Timothy Garton Ash, in his obituary in the New York Review of Books, placed Judt in “the great tradition of the spectateur engagé, the politically engaged but independent and critical intellectual.”

Source:  Wiki

The day Niagara Falls ran dry: Newly-discovered photos show the moment the iconic waterfall came to a standstill

Daily Mail – By Graham Smith

It’s taken 41 years, but a previously unseen set of photos of the mighty Niagara Falls reduced to nothing more than a barren cliff-top have finally surfaced. The stark images reveal North America’s iconic – and most powerful – waterfall to be almost as dry as a desert.

In June 1969, U.S. engineers diverted the flow of the Niagara River away from the American side of the falls for several months. Their plan was to remove the large amount of loose rock from the base of the waterfall, an idea which they eventually abandoned due to expense in November of that year.

During the interim, they studied the riverbed and mechanically bolted and strengthened a number of faults to delay the gradual erosion of the American Falls. The team, made up of U.S. Army Corp of Engineers, blew up their temporary dam in November 1969 and six million cubic feet of water once again thundered over the falls’ sides every minute.

Now, after lying unseen for more than four decades, a set of images showing the eerie calm at the American Falls that year have been unearthed by a man from Connecticut. Russ Glasson recently stumbled across the pictures, which were taken by his in-laws, and had been left in an old shoebox in their garage for over four decades.

Mr Glasson said: ‘My in-laws took these pictures during the six months through June to November that the Army was working to improve the health of the American Falls.’ Two rockslides from the plate of the falls in 1931 and 1954 had caused a large amount of rock to be collected at the base.

In 1965, reporters at local newspaper Niagara Falls Gazette revealed that the America Falls would eventually cease to flow and stop altogether if the rocks were not removed. Four years later, the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers were charged with de-watering the falls to clean the river bed and to remove any loose rock at the bottom of the falls.

To achieve this the army had to build a 600ft dam across the Niagara River, which meant that 60,000 gallons of water that flowed ever second was diverted over the larger Horseshoe Falls which flow entirely on the Canadian side of the border.

The dam itself consisted of 27,800 tons of rock, and on June 12, 1969, after flowing continuously for over 12,000 years, the American Falls stopped. Over the course of the next six months thousands of visitors flocked to the falls to witness the historic occasion.

Once the engineers had removed the collected rocks from the falls base and made geological testing to make safe the rest, the falls were re-watered on November 25 in front of 2,650 onlookers.

The month in photography

The Observer New Review’s monthly guide video to the 20 best photographic exhibitions and books, with images by William Eggleston, Gerda Taro, Bill Brandt,  W Eugene Smith, Richard Avedon and many more.

end –

Senate Passes DADT…

After two failed attempts this year to repeal the policy, the third time proved to be the charm for Congress. The bill passed the House this week in a 250-175 vote, and cleared a final Senate hurdle earlier Saturday in a 63-33 vote, clearing the way for final passage.

R’s voting in favor

Biggert — Bono Mack — Campbell — Cao — Castle — Dent — Diaz-Balart, L — Djou — Dreier — Ehlers — Flake — Paul — Platts — Reichert — Ros-Lehtinen

The eight Republicans Senators who joined Democrats in passing the repeal were: Sens. Scott Brown of Massachusetts, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mark Kirk of Illinois, George Voinovich of Ohio, Richard Burr of North Carolina, John Ensign of Nevada and Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine.

Gay troops unleash emotions at end of long fight

WaPo – By Ernesto Londono

KABUL – The gay Army lieutenant’s heart had been racing all night.

Shuffling between meetings at his outpost in eastern Afghanistan on Saturday night, the 27-year-old officer kept popping his head into the main office to catch a glimpse of Fox News’s coverage of the Senate debate that led to a vote lifting the ban on gay men and lesbians serving in the military openly.

“Don’t cry,” a 21-year-old specialist, one of the lieutenant’s confidants, told his boss jokingly when news broke that 65 senators had voted to repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell.” “I’m completely numb,” was all the lieutenant could mutter.

Across the world, other gay troops whose lives, careers and relationships have been indelibly, if sometimes quietly, shaped by the ban reacted to the news with a mixture of rapture and disbelief. Many had seethed for weeks as the political debate over the repeal became laden with sexual innuendo and suggestions that openly gay soldiers on the front lines might become life-threatening distractions.

“I was flipping out,” the lieutenant said Saturday night, speaking by phone. “This turned into a [expletive] political fight. We were caught in the middle of it. But the people who it affects the most couldn’t do anything about it. We felt used.”

The stakes were also high for the specialist. His brother is gay and had vowed to join the Air Force if the policy were repealed this year. Their father is also gay, which made attending military events somewhat awkward for the family. “It just made for a weird situation,” he said.

As the debate intensified in recent months, several service members became emboldened. Many began voicing their positions bluntly and openly through outlets such as Facebook and Twitter.

This summer, active-duty gay troops started an underground lobbying group called Out Serve. Members joined by word of mouth, forming chapters across the country, in war zones and in other countries with large U.S. military contingents. They called key senators thought to be on the fence, telling them of the toll the policy had taken on their careers and personal lives.

“We are hoping to get this issue taken care of ASAP,” the chapter president of troops stationed in Germany, a 26-year-old Air Force staff sergeant, said in an interview the night before the vote. “We do not want to run out of time with this Congress. We believe this will be a very hard issue to sell to the next Congress.”

Some had become all but hopeless. “I honestly have closed myself off to relationships, because they were either closeted relationships or there was just too much to hide,” said a 26-year-old helicopter mechanic who recently completed a tour in Afghanistan. A 31-year-old Army medic deployed in western Iraq said the policy has hurt his career.

“DADT has made me afraid to report discrimination,” the specialist said in an interview over instant messaging. “I feel that I’m passed over [for promotion] because I am gay.” Cautiously optimistic, the Air Force staff sergeant and a dozen of his gay comrades headed out Saturday night to the Yours Australian Bar, a pub in Frankfurt.

Struggling to hear over the din of bar chatter, rock music and a soccer match, they monitored the hearing on C-SPAN and CNN using iPhones. When the news broke, they roared.

“We cheered like the Germans do for a win during a soccer match,” the staff sergeant said from the bar, using instant messaging to communicate from his cellphone. The other patrons looked bemused as the soldiers toasted the news while they ate burgers and drank Foster’s beer.

Gay service members interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity because the “don’t ask” policy will remain in effect until President Obama signs the bill.

For some, the news was bittersweet. That was the case for a 28-year-old West Point Army captain who resigned from active duty this spring after wrestling for years with deprivation, loneliness and half-truths. His boyfriend was sitting next to him.

“Oh God, oh God,” the decorated captain, who served two tours in Iraq, said by phone from Dallas as the vote neared. “My heart was thumping.” Text messages began pouring in as soon as the tally was announced. “So when are you back on active duty?” wrote a straight intelligence officer who served with him in Iraq in 2009.

“LOL. I dunno,” the captain responded. “Let me know so I can get stationed there,” the intelligence officer wrote back. “I work with a lot of morons. It’d be nice to have a battle [buddy] with some common sense and discipline again.”

Some service members wondered how the military will implement the repeal and how straight troops will react to the change, particularly in combat units, which tend to be more conservative.

“The majority of younger, rank-and-file guys will be fine with it,” said Marine Capt. Tom Garnett, who is straight and a reservist at a Virginia law school. “But we are a conservative service, and one angry Marine makes a lot more noise than 30 ambivalent Marines.”

At the outpost in eastern Afghanistan, the lieutenant appeared undisturbed about not having all the answers right away as he and the specialist sat in the outpost’s tactical operations center.

“I have no idea how the process is going to be,” he said. “But we know what the end state is. There’s not a whole lot of ambiguity.”

Why Gays Should Dial Down with ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’

Townhall – By Doug Giles

I can understand why homosexual men would want to join the military. Number one: It’s Dude Central. Number two: The military lends itself to the gays’ fastidiousness over everything being orderly because everyone, from top to bottom, is required to keep their clothes, boots, room and gear nice, neat and shiny.

But, the third—and probably most important reason why I’m guessing that homosexuals would want to join our armed forces—is that they get to kill al-Qaeda and their murderous Muslim ilk.

I get that. And I appreciate it because if Muslims had it their way you cats would be extinct. As in the first to go. As in Sharia don’t like you. Geez Louise, you think Christians are a problem? Heck, we’re plain peachy compared to Achmed and his mob. If you think I’m wrong, please note that Adam Lambert’s GlamNation Tour didn’t have any stops in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Mauritania, northern Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia or Yemen. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

In regard to why lesbians join the military, this is also an easy one: no heels, no makeup, no chatty chicks on cell phones, you can cart a few extra pounds without being shamed into looking like Lindsay Lohan by Michelle Obama, and … you get to blow crap up and wear camo. I can empathize.

No doubt patriotism is a major reason why some homosexuals would want to serve because they’re shrewd and they get that America, with all its foibles, is still the place to be. Yes, you don’t hear much about the Mexican Dream, or the French Dream, or the Slovakian Dream, but we still hear the American Dream touted, and I’m sure that protecting this status is the reason why most gays want to .50cal the idiots who hate us all to an early hell.

But here’s my beef with homosexuals: Do you really have to be flamboyant about your gayness every place you go? Can’t there be one sector of our society where you dial down with your sexual bent, say, for the greater good? Huh? We get it. You’re here. You’re queer. You’re loud, and you’re proud. Yippee. Now, we have a war to win.

FYI to the G-A-Ys, the vast majority of men and women in our sacred military, however, are not gay, and they’ve got a deadly serious mission to carry out that doesn’t need the added distraction of your desire to strut that you’re gay. Matter of fact, I’m a guessin’ that if you don’t chill out on this issue there will be a mass exodus of straight troops from our armed forces.

Yep, if I were gay and in the service, I wouldn’t be distracting the multitudinous heterosexual troops who are kicking ass abroad or at home because, as stated, with this perennial enemy named Islam, you guys will be the first to be purged from the earth if they ever have it Mohamed’s way.

Report of the Comprehensive Review of the Issues Associated with a Repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (PDF)(266 PAGES)

Related Reference Link (Air University):  Military Law – Military Justice

End of DADT: The Final Blow Against Cultural Conservatism

American Thinker – By Michael Filozof

…What will be the effect of the end of DADT? The short-term effects will probably be minimal. The military won’t be overrun by homosexuals anytime soon. It’s unlikely that very many gays, who constitute a tiny fraction of the population, want to serve in the military anyway. But the cultural shift in the military will be dramatic.

The military will be forced to deal with issues like anti-gay discrimination (real or imagined), how to deal with transsexuals, gay marriage, and benefits for gay partners. There will be gay affirmative-action quotas, gay cliques and subcultures, and you can be sure that in the future, there’ll be some gay equivalent of the “Tailhook” scandal. A military that is in the process of losing it’s second decade-long war in Asia to ragtag insurgents needs none of this. But the military, with its “can-do” ethos, will deal with it.

The consequences for cultural conservatism are much more acute, though. Repeal of DADT means that homosexuality will officially no longer constitute “conduct unbecoming” of a professional soldier. This amounts to a de facto sanction of homosexuality as normal and acceptable.

With the repeal of DADT, cultural conservatives will no longer control any institutions in American society. The military, the last bastion of cultural conservatism to which Americans rallied en masse after 9/11, has now been conscripted by the Left. The military is the final institution to fall in what Roger Kimball described as the “Long March” of cultural Leftism through America’s institutions that began in the Sixties. The academy, the churches, the courts and the government have long since fallen.

In the 30 years since the election of Reagan, cultural conservatives have failed to overturn Roe v. Wade, suppress pornography, stop gay marriage, or make a serious dent in the use of illegal drugs. Conservative activist Paul Weyrich noted that Clinton’s high public approval rating in the wake of the Lewinsky sex scandal meant that a “Moral Majority” no longer existed in the U.S.

Polls indicating overwhelming public support for ending DADT reaffirm that Weyrich’s observation was surely correct.

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