Labels: orchids

While the President's position on illegal immigration is clearly resonating with many voters, it hasn't helped his sagging approval ratings. They sank to 37% in the poll, a new low.

John W. Dean, Richard Nixon's White House lawyer, told senators Friday that President Bush's domestic spying exceeds the wrongdoing that toppled his former boss.

Bush, Dean told the Senate Judiciary Committee, should be censured and possibly impeached.

"Had the Senate or House, or both, censured or somehow warned Richard Nixon, the tragedy of Watergate might have been prevented," Dean said. "Hopefully the Senate will not sit by while even more serious abuses unfold before it."

Chief executive Dennis R. Wraase's salary and bonus last year was $1.43 million, compared with $1.17 million in 2004. Also, Wraase's base salary of $825,000 is up more than 47 percent since 2003 and will go up to $950,000 this year, according to company documents filed yesterday with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Pepco standard service rates for District customers will go up 12 percent this summer, and for the company's 500,000 Maryland customers, the average increase will be $468 a year, or 38.5 percent.

Not even the senior parents of Washington's top health official are immune from headaches caused by the new Medicare drug plan.

Dixie and Anne Leavitt - parents of Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt - recently were forced to change Medicare plans after learning that the one they chose imperiled their retiree medical coverage.

The elder Leavitts joined the program last fall with some fanfare and help from their son. Anne Leavitt, 73, was quoted in The Salt Lake Tribune touting the online enrollment as "smooth," and a guaranteed money-saver.

"I know we've made tactical errors, thousands of them I'm sure," Rice told an audience gathered by the British foreign policy think tank Chatham House.

Rudy, who served as deputy chief of staff while DeLay was House Majority leader, resigned in 2001 to become a lobbyist. He would be the first person to plead guilty to charges in the case since Jack Abramoff, once a leading GOP lobbyist, pleaded guilty to fraud charges in January.

Rudy was referred to in court papers released in connection with Abramoff's plea. The documents referred to Rudy as Staffer A, and said that Abramoff, on behalf of clients who wanted to stop Internet gambling and postal rate legislation, paid $50,000 in 10 equal monthly payments beginning in June 2000 to Rudy's wife while Rudy was a top aide to DeLay.

For example, a Fortune 500 refinery received a port security grant in round five totaling almost $1 million for fencing and surveillance upgrades at a refinery located in a major port. It did put up the same amount in matching funds. This company recently reported 3rd quarter net income in excess of $1.2 billion. We remained concerned about the absence of more specific guidance on security measures proposed by private companies that are capable of paying for them, and what measures they should pay for.

A freelance photographer has been fired by the Archdiocese of Boston’s newspaper for releasing a picture of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia making a controversial gesture in the Cathedral of the Holy Cross on Sunday.

Peter Smith, who had freelanced for The Pilot newspaper for a decade, lost the job yesterday after the Herald ran his photo on its front page. Smith said he has no regrets about releasing it.

“I did the right thing. I did the ethical thing,” said Smith, 51, an assistant photojournalism professor at Boston University.

While news outlets from across the country sought Smith’s photo yesterday, the archdiocese said there’s no proof that Scalia uttered an obsenity in the church. Smith said Scalia said, “To my critics, I say, ‘Vaffanculo,’ ” while making the gesture. That’s Italian for (expletive) you.

"People do regard it as a desirable goal," Public Agenda Chairman Daniel Yankelovich said. "But from a common sense point of view, both Democrats and Republicans have concluded that democracy is something that countries come to on their own."

But poll directors noted Americans are also alarmed increasingly by U.S. energy dependence. Ninety percent in the survey Â? conducted in January, before President Bush's declaration in his State of the Union address that the country is "addicted to oil" Â? said it was important to find alternatives to foreign energy supplies to strengthen national security.

She controversially uses the phrase 'the banality of evil' to characterize Eichmann's actions as a member of the Nazi regime, in particular his role as chief architect and executioner of Hitler's genocidal 'final solution' (Endlosung) for the 'Jewish problem'. Her characterization of these actions, so obscene in their nature and consequences, as 'banal' is not meant to position them as workaday. Rather it is meant to contest the prevalent depictions of the Nazi's inexplicable atrocities as having emanated from a malevolent will to do evil, a delight in murder. As far as Arendt could discern, Eichmann came to his willing involvement with the program of genocide through a failure or absence of the faculties of sound thinking and judgement. From Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem (where he had been brought after Israeli agents found him in hiding in Argentina), Arendt concluded that far from exhibiting a malevolent hatred of Jews which could have accounted psychologically for his participation in the Holocaust, Eichmann was an utterly innocuous individual. He operated unthinkingly, following orders, efficiently carrying them out, with no consideration of their effects upon those he targeted. The human dimension of these activities were not entertained, so the extermination of the Jews became indistinguishable from any other bureaucratically assigned and discharged responsibility for Eichmann and his cohorts.

Arendt concluded that Eichmann was constitutively incapable of exercising the kind of judgement that would have made his victims' suffering real or apparent for him. It was not the presence of hatred that enabled Eichmann to perpetrate the genocide, but the absence of the imaginative capacities that would have made the human and moral dimensions of his activities tangible for him. Eichmann failed to exercise his capacity of thinking, of having an internal dialogue with himself, which would have permitted self-awareness of the evil nature of his deeds. This amounted to a failure to use self-reflection as a basis for judgement, the faculty that would have required Eichmann to exercise his imagination so as to contemplate the nature of his deeds from the experiential standpoint of his victims. This connection between the complicity with political evil and the failure of thinking and judgement inspired the last phase of Arendt's work, which sought to explicate the nature of these faculties and their constitutive role for politically and morally responsible choices.