The military is reporting

a five day trend toward diminished violence

    But I was really troubled by your suggestion that democrats are wrong to question the role of religion in the public square. You are right that many democrats are uncomfortable with mixing religion and politics.  But that's not because they are intolerant or hostile to religion.  It's because injecting religion in politics has a great potential for causing harm, fueling divisions and reducing the quality of democratic life and discourse.  That makes many people, including many people of faith, uncomfortable. If you want to discuss the future of religion in the public square you have to be willing to discuss the dangers of mixing politics and religion.  Otherwise, this issue will only divide us.

After watching you on C-Span Friday, I am prepared to start the North Idaho Chapter of your fan club.  You were so good!  You made me proud to be Irish, and proud to be a trial lawyer.

You did not mention Karl Rove yesterday, and you said your investigation was still open.  But Rove's champions have been all over the news insinuating that you are thinking twice about charging him with perjury.  

Now, I respect your judgment a lot, and I know you have to take a lot of things into account in making these decisions, but I just can't believe that you feel the evidence shows that Rove innocently forgot his conversation with Cooper.  You are way too smart for that!

See, I am a trial lawyer too (though not as skilled a one as you, I am sure).  And I know that you have to take a common sense look at the facts you have, and to consider how you will present them to a jury.And you have to think about whether defendant has a plausible story, and what inferences can reasonably be drawn from the evidence.  

What does Dobson say now when he goes on the radio?

Does he talk about executive privilege?  That's my best guess, because he is a republican operative.  

The article kept me up last night.  I figure it might be cathartic for me to try to explain why.  

First a disclaimer.  I went back to work as a partner in a law firm when my son was 4 months old.  I had no choice.  My ex-husband had problems with substance abuse and I was the steady income.  But even so, the decision to combine work and mothering was right for me and for my son, and if you ever met us and sat down to hear about those early years you would agree.

I grew up in Hawaii so I have a real soft spot for Hawaii teams.  But this team was special.

These boys are from Ewa (pronounced "Eva") Beach, a dusty red dirt rural community on Oahu miles and lifesyles  away from the glitz of downtown Honolulu. Most of the people who live there children and grandchildren of sugar workers or more recent immigrants from Asia and the South Pacific.  

The report offers mixed reviews of Sims' performance.  But something which does not appear to be in dispute is that she paid herself $5.4 million for nine months of work.  She also gave herself a six figure pension.  

This is the part of the story that got my goat:

[below]

Here at the Bureau, we are reclaiming Independence Day from those who would turn this national day of unity into feast of divisiveness.  We know that love of country can and must takes many different forms and that no one party can claim a monopoly.

We are reclaiming the symbols of America's heritage.  The flag.  The Statue of Liberty.  We know that these images once stood as beacons of hope for the poor and displaced people everywhere and that they inspired a vision of freedom and individual rights that captured the imaginations of the entire world.  

Today Noam Chomsky spoke at Washington State University.  The arena sat 3500 and it was packed.  There were people of all ages, including many students, many buying chomsky's books at the tables outside.
The air was full of excitement.  It felt like a rock concert.

I joined Move-on in the months before the Iraq war.  I was full of anxiety and foreboding as I watched my government head blindly into the conflict.  Few or none in the mainstream media or in the democratic party seemed willing to raise the obvious questions or the inconvenient facts.  Move-on provided information and community and opportunities to raise my voice with others to speak what we all now know was the truth about that terrible misadventure.

The conference has an ambitious and delicious agenda:

For those of you still willing to think about the Schiavo matter, I wanted to offer my response to the radical right wing pundits' claim that they occupy the moral high ground on this issue, and that the response from the rest of us has been murderous (noonan) or coldly pragmatic (brooks).

My answer is that the radical right hasn't taken a moral position at all.

The radical right has not argued for reinsertion based on a moral position.  Instead they are disputing the facts and claiming that Schiavo is not in a persistent vegetative state.

Todays story:  "Teacher Claims Shroud of Turin is a Fake," reports on an English Teacher, Nathan Wilson, who made news in some Christian Intellectual Journal for claiming he knows the mechanism used to fake the shroud of turin.  He also claims that he's going to write a novel on the subject, a la Da Vinci Code.  

It was near closing time on a Saturday at the Triangle Waist Company.  The factory had 600 workers, mostly young woman and girls, recent Italian and Jewish Immigrants who spoke little or no English.  These girls, Annies and Idas and Vincenzas and Esthers, might have been looking forward to the end of their long work week when the fire broke out.

The fire spread rapidly, igniting the scraps of fabric and other waste scattered around the workplace. Survivors reported that the flames leapt out from under the tables where they were sewing.  

Many of the workers discovered they had no way out.  The building's internal fire escape quickly filled with smoke.  The freight elevator broke, and many girls, in their fear and confusion, fell down the empty shaft.  

Workers on the ninth floor tried to open the door to the fire escape but could not do so.  Their employers admitted they often locked the doors to prevent pilferage.