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Columns - Commentary
 Dave
Kiffer: Citius,
Altius, Fortius, Ketchikanius! - Well, the Winter Olympics
are finally over.
At least I think they are.
My wife - who normally loves
the Olympics and is the only person in North America with a complete
set of Olympic Figure Skating Trading Cards - hijacked the TV
to watch "American Idol" the past two weeks.
So I never actually saw the
Olympic flame get doused in Turin, but I have to think that since
it was been six days since I have seen a "Bode Miller off
course" headline in the Daily Fish Wrap that the games have
finally run their course.
Now it is time to think about
Ketchikan's bid to host the 2014 Winter Olympics.
What, you say? We have no facilities?
Like that stopped Athens from bidding on the 2004 summer games!
As far as I could tell, its 2004 Olympic facilities were finally
completed sometime in the fall of 2005. - More...
Thursday - March 02, 2006
 Clifford
May:
Persuading the new Palestinian leaders to forgo terrorism
- The problem is not that Hamas will not recognize Israel. The
problem is that Hamas cannot recognize Israel.
Hamas is a terrorist group
that has become a political party. More significantly, however,
it is a religious organization and part of a global movement.
That movement goes by various
names: Militant Islamism, Islamic Fascism, Radical Jihadism and
Salifism among them. Rivals for the movement's leadership include
Osama bin Laden and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
A distinguished and moderate
Muslim religious scholar with whom I spoke recently observed
that in Islam it is not only people and communities that have
rights. God has rights too. For Hamas, it is an article of faith
- in the most literal sense - that any lands conquered by Islamic
warriors belong to Allah. If those lands are then taken (or re-taken)
by infidels, it is the duty of Muslims to wage jihad, holy war,
to win them back. - More...
Thursday PM - March 02, 2006
 Dan
Thomasson: Crossing
a fine line in wiretapping -
A friend who is a former
member of the intelligence community speculated the other day
that what really concerns the Bush administration is that the
National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping has not been
confined to overseas calls despite claims to the contrary.
He said that although Attorney
General Albert Gonzales testified before Congress that President
Bush put purely domestic calls and e-mails off limits to NSA
eavesdropping and surveillance without court approval, that ban
makes little sense in keeping tabs on the chain of communications
that might link those suspected of having contact with terrorists.
Breaking that chain, he said, would be unthinkable if there was
the least bit of suspicion of illicit activity.
He gave this scenario: A person
makes a call from Los Angeles to Pakistan that is picked up by
NSA. Finishing that conversation, the caller then immediately
places another call to New York reporting on his previous call.
Does anyone really believe for a second that NSA immediately
halts the eavesdropping after the Pakistan call, either permanently
or to rush to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act judge
to seek a warrant? -
More...
Thursday PM - March 02, 2006
 Ann
McFeatters: A
changing nation - We're not the same nation we were just
a decade ago.
While a lot of what the federal
government does drives a lot of people bananas, the statistics
it compiles about demographic trends are insightful.
We know that Latinos, the fastest-growing
segment of the U.S. population, are now the largest minority
group. By mid-century, one out of every four people in America
will be Hispanic. But a new study by the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention has found that coming to America has a
downside for many. In the past decade, the rates of obesity,
high blood pressure, heart disease and diabetes have risen significantly
for Latinos. The longer they are here, the higher the rates of
all those diseases are among them. Not a good trend in a country
with 47 million uninsured people. - More...
Thursday PM - March 02, 2006
Eric Newton: Why
we need journalists - Perhaps surprisingly in this day of
write-it-yourself Web sites, there dwell in America some 125,000
human beings known as "general news journalists."
Hardly anyone likes them. The
bloggers call them "mainstream media." Liberals call
them "corporate media." Conservatives call them "liberal
media." Everyone else just dismisses them as "THE MEDIA."
Truth is, it's easy to bash
journalists. Hollywood paints them as a yammering, amoral horde.
That's entertaining, but wrong. The boring reality is that most
professional journalists actually have ethics. They're good people.
They try to dig out facts and stick to them. They hope to keep
their corner of the world a little more honest. We watch or read
or listen to their work because we need news - especially bad
news - to properly run our countries and our lives. - More...
Thursday PM - March 02, 2006
 Jay
Ambrose: So
long, Europe; hello, India - It's hello, India, and goodbye,
Europe, as the United States seeks out a strong new partner in
world affairs, one that is growing, bold and confident instead
of one that is hiding from the future and in steep decline.
If that assessment of President
Bush's meeting with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh puts
too sharp an edge on something that will take years for history
to chisel into something so definite, it is nevertheless the
case that a lot more was going on than a deal on nuclear energy
and closer bilateral trade ties.
If Congress approves the treaty,
the United States is embracing an India that, during the Cold
War, frequently sided with the Soviet Union's evil ambitions.
For decades, some observers note, India was a haphazardly governed
bureaucratic nightmare and an impoverished economic flop that
got that way because of the socialist stupidities furthered by
long-term leader Jawaharlal Nehru. - More...
Thursday PM - March 02, 2006
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