Sen. Bill Finkbeiner, R-Kirkland, reversed his previous position to turn the tide this year.

"This has been a terribly difficult issue for me," said Finkbeiner as he explained his change of heart.

"What we are really talking about here is...whether or not it's OK to be gay or homosexual in this state. On whether or not it's appropriate to be discriminating against or to discriminate against someone because of that."

He said being gay or lesbian isn't a choice.

"People don't choose this. We don't choose who we love, the heart chooses who we love," Finkbeiner said.

"I don't believe that it is right ... to say that it's acceptable to discriminate against people because of that , because of who their heart chooses to love. I can not stand with that argument."

"A permanent police force, to be known as the 'United States Secret Service Uniformed Division,'" empowered to "make arrests without warrant for any offense against the United States committed in their presence" (what is "an offense against the United States?), "or for any felony cognizable under the laws of the United States if they have reasonable grounds to believe that the person to be arrested has committed or is committing such felony"

The Secret Service, Uniformed Division will not operate solely in DC, but anywhere former Presidents travel, or foreign dignitaries, or even "as the President, on a case-by-case basis, may direct." #8

Sharon's Neurotransmitters Reach Cease-Fire Agreement

January 25, 2006 | Issue 42•04

JERUSALEM—After more than 77 years under constant fire, the neurotransmitters of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's brain could be nearing a truce. "These endless, often senseless patterns of never-ending discharge must come to an end," a spokesman for Sharon's neurostructure told reporters. "Activity has already slowed considerably since the violent blood-clot explosion in his brain earlier this month. We expect a total cessation of cranial nerve firings within two weeks." Observers are unsure whether the cease-fire will bring peace to Sharon's war-torn cranial region, but they remain guardedly optimistic.

Gov. Ernie Fletcher wrote the "Stacked" actress to say a bust of the KFC founder will stay in the Kentucky Capitol, despite Anderson's claim that Sanders is a symbol of cruelty to chickens.

"Colonel Sanders remains a Kentucky icon," Fletcher wrote last week. "His success story has been an inspiration to many. The industry he began has employed hundreds of thousands of workers over the years. His business and his legacy have been good for Kentucky."

WASHINGTON - Ohio Republican Chairman Bob Bennett said Thursday that he'd ask Rep. Bob Ney to resign from Congress if he were indicted on felony charges.

Bennett stressed that Ney, R-Heath, has not been charged with any crime and that the party backs him for re-election.

However, if the Justice Department investigation of former Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff leads to a Ney indictment, that would change.

"If he's indicted for a felony, we would ask him to step aside until the matter is cleared up," Bennett said in a phone interview with The Enquirer.

Ney, who was traveling in Ohio this week, called The Enquirer to repudiate Bennett's comments.

"No party boss tells my constituents what to do," Ney said. "They will decide this thing."

"In the case that is before us ... the lower courts need not have invalidated the law wholesale," O'Connor wrote. "Only a few applications of New Hampshire's parental notification statute would prevent a constitutional problem. So long as they are faithful to legislative intent, then, in this case, the lower courts can issue a declaratory judgment and an injunction prohibiting the statute's unconstitutional application."

An appeals court must now reconsider the law, which requires that a parent be informed 48 hours before a minor child has an abortion but makes no exception for a medical emergency that threatens the youth's health.

Our hope is that some of these European countries will sit Iran down and say "Look, you're about to get half Iraq for your very own. Why rock the boat? Stop this nuclear program for a year or two and we'll give you our oil contracts - and we will help you keep this goddamn American cowboy from invading you in order to crock his country's November elections."

However, the Euro countries have a very long career - 60 years now? - of saying "Yes, yes. Hear, hear!" and then waiting for the idiot U.S. to spend blood and treasury to do the job for them. So, the chances of them doing nothing are quite good.

And, as Bushco desperately, desperately needs some propping up of the wartime excuse, and never objests to any chance for some no-bid cost-plus contracts, it's a lock that unrestrained Bushco will do something military.

Will Israel participate? Hard to say. Sharon is not at the helm. The great point to the Way of the Neocon for Israel was that it was the US carrying out Israel's interests at US expense. Why stop that now? The other hand is that Iran is the loudest of the sabre-rattlers vs Israel right now.

In the end, it's this : A gambler on a streak thinks it will last forever. As long as it does last, he looks brilliant. Bushco has been on a long streak, making big bilk profit and corporate-written legislation, not being held accountable for screwups, limping along through a bad war on the cheap, not being hit again with terror incidents despite doing the cube root of squat to prevent same.

All streaks end. Right now the problem is trying to get the Big Hat - No Cattle gambler away from the table while America still has its pants.

There are reasons for concern this time around that conditions may be changing and that the cycle [of presidential overreach during wartime] may not repeat itself. For one thing, we have for decades been witnessing the slow and steady accumulation of presidential power. In a global environment of nuclear weapons and cold war tensions, Congress and the American people accepted ever enlarging spheres of presidential initiative to conduct intelligence and counter intelligence activities and to allocate our military forces on the global stage. When military force has been used as an instrument of foreign policy or in response to humanitarian demands, it has almost always been as the result of presidential initiative and leadership. As Justice Frankfurter wrote in the Steel Seizure Case, "The accretion of dangerous power does not come in a day. It does come, however slowly, from the generative force of unchecked disregard of the restrictions that fence in even the most disinterested assertion of authority."

A second reason to believe we may be experiencing something new is that we are told by the Administration that the war footing upon which he has tried to place the country is going to "last for the rest of our lives." So we are told that the conditions of national threat that have been used by other Presidents to justify arrogations of power will persist in near perpetuity.

Third, we need to be aware of the advances in eavesdropping and surveillance technologies with their capacity to sweep up and analyze enormous quantities of information and to mine it for intelligence. This adds significant vulnerability to the privacy and freedom of enormous numbers of innocent people at the same time as the potential power of those technologies. These techologies have the potential for shifting the balance of power between the apparatus of the state and the freedom of the individual in ways both subtle and profound.

Don't misunderstand me: the threat of additional terror strikes is all too real and their concerted efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction does create a real imperative to exercise the powers of the Executive Branch with swiftness and agility. Moreover, there is in fact an inherent power that is conferred by the Constitution to the President to take unilateral action to protect the nation from a sudden and immediate threat, but it is simply not possible to precisely define in legalistic terms exactly when that power is appropriate and when it is not.

But the existence of that inherent power cannot be used to justify a gross and excessive power grab lasting for years that produces a serious imbalance in the relationship between the executive and the other two branches of government.

There is a final reason to worry that we may be experiencing something more than just another cycle of overreach and regret. This Administration has come to power in the thrall of a legal theory that aims to convince us that this excessive concentration of presidential authority is exactly what our Constitution intended.

This legal theory, which its proponents call the theory of the unitary executive but which is more accurately described as the unilateral executive, threatens to expand the president's powers until the contours of the constitution that the Framers actually gave us become obliterated beyond all recognition. Under this theory, the President's authority when acting as Commander-in-Chief or when making foreign policy cannot be reviewed by the judiciary or checked by Congress. President Bush has pushed the implications of this idea to its maximum by continually stressing his role as Commander-in-Chief, invoking it has frequently as he can, conflating it with his other roles, domestic and foreign. When added to the idea that we have entered a perpetual state of war, the implications of this theory stretch quite literally as far into the future as we can imagine.

This effort to rework America's carefully balanced constitutional design into a lopsided structure dominated by an all powerful Executive Branch with a subservient Congress and judiciary is-ironically-accompanied by an effort by the same administration to rework America's foreign policy from one that is based primarily on U.S. moral authority into one that is based on a misguided and self-defeating effort to establish dominance in the world.

The common denominator seems to be based on an instinct to intimidate and control.

e Foreign Office said all five veto-wielding permanent members of the Security Council — the U.S., Britain, France, Russia and China — and Germany had shown "serious concern over Iranian moves to restart uranium enrichment activities."

They agreed on the need for Iran to "return to full suspension," according to a statement.

Pennsylvania alone estimated a hit of up to $85 million. Washington state projected at least $46 million annually in the first several years.

Separately, a December report to Virginia's governor pegged the potential price tag for that state as high as $169 million, with $63 million annually in successive years. Of the initial cost, $33 million would be just to redesign computing systems.

CLEANING MUD

By William F. Buckley Jr.Fri Jan 6, 8:13 PM ET

There was creeping dismay about Congress before the Abramoff indictment. Government spending was out of hand, the president's refusal to exercise the veto began to seem almost as if he were bound by a secret oath, supplementary spending bills began to sound as though written for "Saturday Night Live." There is national disgust, but it is never quite clear whether this can be transformed into effective action for reform. There are many ideas floating about on measures that might be taken.

It was back in the early '70s that national attention was given to reforms focusing on money in the area of campaign financing. Efforts were made to reason in terms of gross dollars spent. If the spending of money by individual candidates was an invitation to corruption, why -- regulate the amounts spent!

The money-quantity approach to reducing campaign spending ran into two problems, one of them constitutional. The Supreme Court ruled that federal election expense limits could be set, inasmuch as the government had a legitimate interest in protecting an appearance of integrity in electoral proceedings. But to limit what an individual could spend in promoting himself as a candidate, or in promoting his cause, would be an incursion on First Amendment rights and, as such, unconstitutional.

During the disputes of that period, two voices sounded weightily. Milton Friedman argued mostly on the question of personal rights. If individuals wished to make contributions to political candidates reflecting intense enthusiasm for them or for their causes, what to do? Answer: Follow the first rule of a libertarian society, and let them do what they want to do.

The columnist George Will argued with devastating effect that there was no purpose in electoral reform that sought to reduce moneys spent for the simple reason that contributors will find ways to contribute, and politicians will find ways to spend. All that can be done, argued Mr. Will, is to insist that money traffic be disclosed, so that the broader constituency can decide for itself whether the courtship of a candidate or a cause has become smelly.

Many pundits bowed before the pressure of these arguments. But what has now happened in the area of government spending is on the order of a structural breakdown, a flight from responsibility that doesn't get punished because everyone apparently is guilty. The executive has not been punished for failing to exercise a veto against inordinate spending. And legislators get de facto immunity on the grounds that problems are systemic, not individual.

Consider the device by which pork is engineered. The so-called "earmark," appended to a huge bill providing, say, for the common defense, brings on arrested motion if the earmarker's request for money for the famous bridge from nowhere to nowhere is not authorized.

One practical suggestion has been made, but would of course require filibuster-proof action. Namely, that all the earmarks attached to a particular bill may not constitute more than 1 percent of the money being authorized by that bill.

A second suggestion is made by former Speaker Newt Gingrich. It is that incumbents be prohibited from fund-raising in Washington, D.C. This would greatly reduce the influence of lobbyists on congressional action.

And so on. I remember as a student in Mexico City hearing the derisory suggestion on how to limit graft in the executive. President Manuel Avila Camacho stressed his personal incorruptibility in the matter of profiteering from the sale of beef -- he pointed out that he owned no cattle. Ah. But his brother Maximino, petitioned by starving American meat buyers for 100,000 head of cattle, famously replied, "What color?" A so-called reformer in the national assembly amused his colleagues by suggesting an amendment to the Mexican constitution forbidding a president to have a brother.

Well, we cannot change human nature. Accordingly, we can assume that corruption will continue, but the graver problem is the apparent indifference to corruption. Perhaps a nation that seems to have been persuaded by its legislature that medical care can be free suffers from permanently dulled senses, and has to learn from some dire future jolt that self-government cannot hope to work without effective public concern.