'The Merry Old Land of Oz'
They defy gravity in the Emerald City!
The brilliant Scarecrow (Kevin Caravalho) gets refurbished.
Nobody expects to get a letter from a member of Congress that ends with an expletive.
But that's what happened when Rep. Jo Ann Emerson, R-Mo., recently corresponded with a resident of her southeast Missouri district.
The letter ended with a profane, seven-letter insult beginning with the letter a — "i think you're an. ..."
... "We cannot determine whether the addition to the letter was made by someone within the office or by someone with access to the office, but it is on my letterhead and the responsibility for it lies with me. A valuable lesson has been learned and new procedures will be adopted as a result."
... Connor said that Emerson personally signed the letter, dated Feb. 15. She included a handwritten personal message at the bottom: "PS - please forgive the delay in responding."
Their letter was prompted by recent articles in the Washington Post, New Yorker and other publications that one of the options being considered by Pentagon planners and the White House in a military confrontation with Iran includes the use of nuclear bunker busters against underground facilities. These reports were neither confirmed nor denied by White House and Pentagon officials.
... “We are members of the profession that brought nuclear weapons into existence, and we feel strongly that it is our professional duty to contribute our efforts to prevent their misuse,” says Hirsch. "Physicists know best about the devastating effects of the weapons they created, and these eminent physicists speak for thousands of our colleagues.”
“The fact that the existence of this plan has not been denied by the Administration should be a cause of great alarm, even if it is only one of several plans being considered,” he adds. “The public should join these eminent scientists in demanding that the Administration publicly renounces such a misbegotten option against a non-nuclear country like Iran.”
The letter, which is available at http://physics.ucsd.edu/petition/physicistsletter.html, points out that “nuclear weapons are unique among weapons of mass destruction,” and that nuclear weapons in today's arsenals have a total power of more than 200,000 times the explosive energy of the bomb that leveled Hiroshima, which caused the deaths of more than 100,000 people.
It notes that there are no sharp lines between small and large nuclear weapons, nor between nuclear weapons targeting facilities and those targeting armies or cities, and that the use by the United States of nuclear weapons after 60 years of non-use will make the use of nuclear weapons by others more likely.
“Once the U.S. uses a nuclear weapon again, it will heighten the probability that others will too,” the physicists write. “In a world with many more nuclear nations and no longer a ‘taboo’ against the use of nuclear weapons, there will be a greatly enhanced risk that regional conflicts could expand into global nuclear war, with the potential to destroy our civilization.
”The letter echoes the main objection of last fall’s physicists’ petition, stressing that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty will be irreversibly damaged by the use or even the threat of use of nuclear weapons by a nuclear nation against a non-nuclear one, with disastrous consequences for the security of the United States and the world.
“It is gravely irresponsible for the U.S. as the greatest superpower to consider courses of action that could eventually lead to the widespread destruction of life on the planet. We urge the administration to announce publicly that it is taking the nuclear option off the table in the case of all non-nuclear adversaries, present or future, and we urge the American people to make their voices heard on this matter.”
The planet formed about 4.6 billion years ago. During the first era, clay materials, which need abundant water and moderate temperatures, formed, the researchers said.
Then, starting about 4 billion years ago a second era began, marked by volcanic activity spewing sulfur into the environment. That was the start of a drying out of the planet.
Between 3.2 billion years ago and 3.5 billion years ago the third era began. It was marked by minerals dominated by ferric oxides, which have not been formed or altered by water, the researchers said.
Father Bede insisted that the time from age 40 on is what life is all about; all the rest was preparation for the flowering of the whole personality. For him, here the spiritual powers begin to develop and transcend the capacities of mind and body. These are not left behind but are integrated into what opens us to the Eternal, the discovery of the Absolute, the Transcendent, the deep Source of all Reality. This is the breakthrough to the mystical and this, Fr. Bede believed, is the great hope for everyone.
George W. Bush's presidency appears headed for colossal historical disgrace. ... Many historians are now wondering whether Bush, in fact, will be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history.
... How does any president's reputation sink so low? The reasons are best understood as the reverse of those that produce presidential greatness. In almost every survey of historians dating back to the 1940s, three presidents have emerged as supreme successes: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
... Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties -- Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Hoover and now Bush -- have divided the nation, governed erratically and left the nation worse off. In each case, different factors contributed to the failure: disastrous domestic policies, foreign-policy blunders and military setbacks, executive misconduct, crises of credibility and public trust. Bush, however, is one of the rarities in presidential history: He has not only stumbled badly in every one of these key areas, he has also displayed a weakness common among the greatest presidential failures -- an unswerving adherence to a simplistic ideology that abjures deviation from dogma as heresy, thus preventing any pragmatic adjustment to changing realities.
... Bush has more in common with post-1945 Democratic presidents Truman and Johnson, who both became bogged down in overseas military conflicts with no end, let alone victory, in sight. But Bush has become bogged down in a singularly crippling way. On September 10th, 2001, he held among the lowest ratings of any modern president for that point in a first term. (Only Gerald Ford, his popularity reeling after his pardon of Nixon, had comparable numbers.) The attacks the following day transformed Bush's presidency, giving him an extraordinary opportunity to achieve greatness. Some of the early signs were encouraging. Bush's simple, unflinching eloquence and his quick toppling of the Taliban government in Afghanistan rallied the nation. Yet even then, Bush wasted his chance by quickly choosing partisanship over leadership.
No other president -- Lincoln in the Civil War, FDR in World War II, John F. Kennedy at critical moments of the Cold War -- faced with such a monumental set of military and political circumstances failed to embrace the opposing political party to help wage a truly national struggle. But Bush shut out and even demonized the Democrats. Top military advisers and even members of the president's own Cabinet who expressed any reservations or criticisms of his policies -- including retired Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni and former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill -- suffered either dismissal, smear attacks from the president's supporters or investigations into their alleged breaches of national security.
... All the while, Bush and the most powerful figures in the administration, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, were planting the seeds for the crises to come by diverting the struggle against Al Qaeda toward an all-out effort to topple their pre-existing target, Saddam Hussein. In a deliberate political decision, the administration stampeded the Congress and a traumatized citizenry into the Iraq invasion on the basis of what has now been demonstrated to be tendentious and perhaps fabricated evidence of an imminent Iraqi threat to American security, one that the White House suggested included nuclear weapons. Instead of emphasizing any political, diplomatic or humanitarian aspects of a war on Iraq -- an appeal that would have sounded too "sensitive," as Cheney once sneered -- the administration built a "Bush Doctrine" of unprovoked, preventive warfare, based on speculative threats and embracing principles previously abjured by every previous generation of U.S. foreign policy-makers, even at the height of the Cold War. The president did so with premises founded, in the case of Iraq, on wishful thinking.
...When William F. Buckley, the man whom many credit as the founder of the modern conservative movement, writes categorically, as he did in February, that "one can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed," then something terrible has happened.
... According to the Treasury Department, the forty-two presidents who held office between 1789 and 2000 borrowed a combined total of $1.01 trillion from foreign governments and financial institutions. But between 2001 and 2005 alone, the Bush White House borrowed $1.05 trillion, more than all of the previous presidencies combined. Having inherited the largest federal surplus in American history in 2001, he has turned it into the largest deficit ever -- with an even higher deficit, $423 billion, forecast for fiscal year 2006. Yet Bush -- sounding much like Herbert Hoover in 1930 predicting that "prosperity is just around the corner" -- insists that he will cut federal deficits in half by 2009, and that the best way to guarantee this would be to make permanent his tax cuts, which helped cause the deficit in the first place!
... But no president before Bush has allowed the press to disclose, through a close friend, his startling belief that he was ordained by God to lead the country. The White House's sectarian positions ... have led some to conclude that Bush has promoted the transformation of the GOP into what former Republican strategist Kevin Phillips calls "the first religious party in U.S. history."
... Reorganized under the Department of Homeland Security, the once efficient Federal Emergency Management Agency turned out, under Bush, to have become a nest of cronyism and incompetence. During the months immediately after the storm, Bush traveled to New Orleans eight times to promise massive rebuilding aid from the federal government. On March 30th, however, Bush's Gulf Coast recovery coordinator admitted that it could take as long as twenty-five years for the city to recover.
... The full report, of course, has yet to come on the Bush administration. Because Bush, unlike Reagan or Clinton, enjoys a fiercely partisan and loyal majority in Congress, his administration has been spared scrutiny. Yet that mighty advantage has not prevented the indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, on charges stemming from an alleged major security breach in the Valerie Plame matter. (The last White House official of comparable standing to be indicted while still in office was Grant's personal secretary, in 1875.) It has not headed off the unprecedented scandal involving Larry Franklin, a high-ranking Defense Department official, who has pleaded guilty to divulging classified information to a foreign power while working at the Pentagon -- a crime against national security. It has not forestalled the arrest and indictment of Bush's top federal procurement official, David Safavian, and the continuing investigations into Safavian's intrigues with the disgraced Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, recently sentenced to nearly six years in prison -- investigations in which some prominent Republicans, including former Christian Coalition executive director Ralph Reed (and current GOP aspirant for lieutenant governor of Georgia) have already been implicated, and could well produce the largest congressional corruption scandal in American history.
... By contrast, the Bush administration -- in seeking to restore what Cheney, a Nixon administration veteran, has called "the legitimate authority of the presidency" -- threatens to overturn the Framers' healthy tension in favor of presidential absolutism. Armed with legal findings by his attorney general (and personal lawyer) Alberto Gonzales, the Bush White House has declared that the president's powers as commander in chief in wartime are limitless. No previous wartime president has come close to making so grandiose a claim.
The president's defenders stoutly contend that war-time conditions fully justify Bush's actions. ... But Lincoln, under pressure of daily combat on American soil against fellow Americans, did not operate in secret, as Bush has. He did not claim, as Bush has, that his emergency actions were wholly regular and constitutional as well as necessary; Lincoln sought and received Congressional authorization for his suspension of habeas corpus in 1863. Nor did Lincoln act under the amorphous cover of a "war on terror" -- a war against a tactic, not a specific nation or political entity, which could last as long as any president deems the tactic a threat to national security. Lincoln's exceptional measures were intended to survive only as long as the Confederacy was in rebellion. Bush's could be extended indefinitely, as the president sees fit, permanently endangering rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution to the citizenry.
The life's work of a onetime aircraft engineer, the bizarre 38-foot wooden structure ... will be put to a more modest use — host to the first Retro UFO convention April 29.
The all-day affair offers a kitschy modern homage to the 1950s- and '60s-era reports of flying saucers that became the stuff of legend in this San Bernardino County outpost, organizer Barbara Harris said.
"It's a new chapter in ufology," said Harris, a graphic artist by trade. "When you go on that property ... there is something that touches your heart, that touches your soul."
Harris hopes to preserve and propagate this most mysterious slice of the desert's history, sharing the stories of those who once flocked to Landers, necks craned skyward.
To that end, next weekend's extravaganza will include talks by old-timers of strange encounters; tours of Giant Rock, now grimy with graffiti and missing a giant chunk that fell off in 2000; a contest for the best aluminum foil deflector beanie; old movies; classic cars; fire spinners; and a live poetic opera by a group called UFOetry titled "Did We Really Go to the Moon?"
Harris hopes the event will draw about 500 people to the 10-acre site; some proceeds will benefit the Morongo Basin Historical Society and help renovate the dome.
It's a fitting place to gather, considering the closest thing to a Retro UFO celebrity may be the Integratron's patron saint, engineer George Van Tassel. He built the dome for $150,000 over 18 years starting in 1957, claiming that he was inspired by a predawn meeting with a visitor from Venus named Solgonda.
President Bush’s job approval rating slipped this week and stands at a new low of 33 percent approve, down from 36 percent two weeks ago and 39 percent in mid-March. A year ago this time, 47 percent approved and two years ago 50 percent approved (April 2004).No President has ever tried to function at levels like this, not even Richard Nixon during Watergate. Indeed, even after Nixon resigned, he still had about a 10% approval rating.
Shows Opening Soon At DMTC, Starting With "Wizard of Oz"DMTC's Opens Wizard of OZ on the Main Stage
Purchase Tickets for Wizard of OZ
The Davis Musical Theatre Company invites you to relive your childhood as you go over the rainbow with Dorothy and Toto to the merry old Land of Oz and meet the Scarecrow, Tin Woodsman and the Cowardly Lion. Jan Isaacson directs this stage adaptation of the 1939 MGM movie musical, with musical direction by Steve Isaacson and choreography by Dian Hoel. Songs by Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg include "Over the Rainbow," "Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead," "If I Only Had a Brain" and "We're Off to See the Wizard."
Performances for WIZARD OF OZ will be on Friday and Saturday nights at 8:15 p.m., and Sunday afternoons at 2:15 p.m., from April 21-May 14, 2006 at the Hoblit Performing Arts Center, 607 Peña Drive, Davis. Tickets are $15 for general admission, $12 for students/seniors (55 & over), and $10 each for groups of 10 or more. The cast features DMTC newcomer Alissa Steiner as Dorothy, Kevin Carvelho as the Scarecrow, Clocky McDowell as the Tin Man, Steve Isaacson as the Cowardly Lion, Buffee Ann Gilliham as the Wicked Witch, Jill Wright as Glinda and Adam Sartain as the Wizard.
DMTC's Young Performers Open Seussical at the Hoblit (Sponsored by Wells Fargo Bank)
Purchase Tickets for Seussical
DMTC's Young Performers Theater Division, which is now underwritten for the 2005-2006 season by a generous donation from Wells Fargo Bank, will open the musical “SEUSSICAL,” based on the works Dr. Seuss, at the Hoblit Performing Arts Center, 607 Peña Drive. Jeni Price is directing the production. This show features all of your favorite Seuss characters: The Cat in the Hat, played by Elliot Mende; Jojo, performed by Hudson Shivley; Horton the elephant, played by Andrew Lemons; the Sour Kangaroo, performed by Julie Soto; Gertrude McFuzz, played by Jocelyn Price; and Mayzie LaBird, the selfish and self-centered bird, played by Anna Miles, to name a few.
Alright, Baseball Fans! I'm singing "The National Anthem" for the Rivercats on May 4th, 7PM against Portland!!!Update: Andrea might have to shift dates - she will update as required. Here's what she says:
It is quite possible I may have to change dates for singing at the Rivercats game, as I am a finalist in the Flash 92.1 Jingle Singer Search, and Finals are May 4th... I am hoping I might switch dates for the game, otherwise I will either sing and dash to the competition, or forfeit my opportunity to sing for this month.
April 20, 1979 - President Jimmy Carter is attacked by a Killer Swamp Rabbit, while on vacation in Plains GA. The rabbit swam menacingly towards him, and he had to repel the ferocious creature with a paddle. There were no injuries. Press Secretary Jody Powell leaked the story to the press, and the White House had a lot of explaining to do.
Lance Nesta did what many people do when receiving a fruitcake - he set it aside, only to rediscover it more than 40 years later in his mother's attic. Nesta couldn't resist taking a peek at the cake, still in its original tin and wrapped in paper.
"I was amazed that it hadn't changed at all," he said.
Nesta's two aunts sent him the fruitcake in November 1962 while he was stationed in Alaska with the Army.
"I opened it up and didn't know what to do with it," Nesta said. "I sure wasn't going to eat it, and I liked my fellow soldiers too much to share it with them."
As best he can remember, he packed the cake with the rest of his belongings and shipped it home to Waukesha when he left the military a few years later. He recently rediscovered the boxed fruitcake in the attic of his mother's home in Waukesha.
The research aimed to get beyond the recognized geek population and gauge interest in science among the roughly 150 million Americans age 18-54. About 40 percent of them, or 60 million people, were found to be "intellectually curious" about politics, the arts and science, all spending significant time with newspapers, related television channels and online media.
... Further study of the intellectually curious segment revealed three distinct groups. If you are reading this, you likely fit into one of them:
Science with Passion (14 percent of the 18-54 group): This group contains the geeks and nerds. They don't need to be prompted to share their love of science. "They might switch a cocktail party from politics to science," said OMD researcher Mike Hess in a telephone interview. They watch the Discovery Channel, the Science Channel and PBS. Prime interests: nature, medicine and the environment. This group is 53 percent female.
Money, Success and Science (11 percent of the 18-54 group): These people are also very interested in science. But they're unlikely to discuss it. The study did not reveal why, but they were also very interested in privacy and their higher interest in careers and success suggests they do not want to be perceived as nerdy, Hess speculated. They are notably interested in the Sci-Fi channel as well as science programming. Prime interest: technology. This group is 64 percent male.
Style with Science (15 percent of the 18-54 group): This high-income group follows science but would rather be throwing a party or out on the town than watching TV or having a quiet evening. They do like "Desperate Housewives," however. "If an opportunity arises at a cocktail party [to discuss science] they'll engage," Hess said. Prime interests: technology, weather and nature. This group is 57 percent male.
Latino migration follows an economic logic. Immigrants are prominent in the construction sector; 40 percent of the workers who rebuilt the Pentagon after Sept. 11 were Latino. So, if you are looking to rebuild, you will hire Latinos, many of them illegal. New Orleans is a low-services, low-infrastructure, clean-up and construction-intensive city and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Most of the low-wage (often African-American) labor that served the city before Katrina struck left New Orleans afterward and did not return. Just as Chinese immigrants worked on the railroads out West, Irish immigrant laborers built much of the Erie Canal, and Italian immigrants put together much of the New York subway system, so will Latinos rebuild New Orleans.
Hispanics inclined to support the GOP now see them as a group of racists. All because the GOP framed the immigration problem as one with brown people and not with bad laws and ineffective enforcement.
Once it became a matter of talk about not loving the US and destroying the culture, especially when so many Hispanics are serving in combat, was destined to turn them against the GOP. The GOP had made serious inroads into the Hispanic community outside California, who had been radicalized by Prop 187 which passed and then died in courts, until this.
What you basically have is the revolt of the servant class. All those Republiklans calling for the Army on the border and walls think the people who serve them will remain mute. And it isn't just the immigrants, either, it's the small business owners, the civil servants, the panoply of people who make a community work. They're all supposed to bow before the anger of the white ruling class and arm the border.
God forbid that they take pride in their heritage and petition the government for a redress of grievances. They should be rounded up.
Only problem, most of the people marching are as American as the Republiklans, and plan on voting to show that.
THE creator of Max Headroom, a 1980s television cyber-presenter, has claimed he was one of the hoaxers behind the Roswell film, the grainy black and white footage supposedly showing a dead alien being dissected by American government scientists after a UFO crash.When I was a kid growing up in New Mexico, the flying saucer sighting that caught everyone's imagination was the Socorro incident. As I recall, two off-duty Socorro lawmen said they had seen an alien craft of some sort taking off, sometime in the mid-60's. The older Roswell incident was only a minor footnote.
Alien Autopsy, a movie about the footage, is currently on release across Britain. It stars real-life television presenters Ant and Dec.
John Humphreys, a sculptor and consultant on Alien Autopsy who has also worked on special effects for Doctor Who, said it was he who made the models for the alien dissected in the original fake footage.
His confession, 11 years after the Roswell footage was first shown, will raise questions about the role of Channel 4, which unleashed Max Headroom on the world in the 1980s and bought the UK rights to screen the Roswell footage in Britain.
The footage was first exposed as a fake by The Sunday Times, but an estimated billion people still watched it around the world.
Rather than being shot in 1947 near Roswell in the New Mexico desert as previously claimed, the film was actually made at a flat in Camden, north London, in 1995.
