Bush and Aides Seek to Calm Public's Concerns About Iraq: The Bush administration pressed on today with high-profile efforts to reassure Americans that political progress is being made in Iraq despite the unrelenting violence there and that it has specific plans to ensure military victory.

But it is a different matter when officials prominently display the biblical Commandments so that all can see their religious message, he said.

"Context matters," Souter said.

That distinction pleased advocates of church-state separation. "Everyone interested in religious freedom should want the government to stay neutral when it comes to religion," said Ralph Neas, president of People for the American Way.

But leaders of several Christian groups attacked the Kentucky decision. Roberta Combs, president of the Christian Coalition of America, called it "tyrannical" and said it "showed once again the nation's top court is completely out of step with the American people."

The justices in the Kentucky case majority seemed determined to hold the line.

"The divisiveness of religion in current public life is inescapable," Souter said. "This is no time to deny the prudence of understanding the Establishment Clause (of the First Amendment) to require the government to stay neutral on religious belief, which is reserved for the conscience of the individual."

He and Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said they saw a danger in allowing the government to take sides on religious matters.

"Allowing the government to be a potential mouthpiece for competing religious ideas risks the sort of division" that the Constitution sought to avoid, O'Connor said. "Those who would renegotiate the boundaries between church and state must therefore answer a difficult question: Why would we trade a system that has served us so well for one that has served others so poorly?"

Justices John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Breyer joined them.

The ruling drew a powerful dissent in the courtroom from Justice Antonin Scalia, who accused his colleagues of ignoring religion's role in the nation's founding.

Darren Bogle staked out a spot at the Infineon Raceway heliport Friday, waiting patiently for NASCAR drivers Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson.

"This is the best place to get autographs," said Bogle, a Sonora resident who was waiting with his son, Kevin, both decked out in NASCAR jackets and caps. "But you never know when they will come in. We could be waiting here a while."

The heliport is set up every year for the NASCAR weekend at Infineon as the ultimate way to beat the traffic on surrounding highways, particularly on Sunday, race day.

For the drivers, it's necessary if they are going to fit a West Coast race into their predominantly Southern sport.

"Most of these drivers turn right around Sunday and will be on their way to the East Coast before dark," said Steve Page, Infineon Raceway president. "They have to be in Daytona for an event four days later."

"Obama leads Senate with 72% approval"
• Popular senators: Barack Obama, a first-term Democrat from Illinois, ranked No. 1, while Minnesota's Mark Dayton and Norm Coleman landed in the bottom third of a SurveyUSA poll ranking senators' approval ratings.
• Minnesota senators: Dayton, a Democrat, ranked No. 92, while Coleman, a Republican, was 71st. They had approval ratings of 46 and 52 percent, respectively.
"These are difficult times, among the most divisive the Senate has seen, and to do reasonably well in an environment where the issues can be so polarizing is encouraging," Coleman said.
Dayton, ranked higher than only one other Democrat, could not be reached for comment. His approval rating was a jump from 41 percent in May; Coleman's held steady. Forty-one percent disapproved of Dayton; 39 percent disapproved of Coleman.

But our conflicts present one great advantage: neither major political party offers much in the way of solutions. Consult the platform and mainstream positions of either the Republican Party or the Democratic Party and, on the issues that matter most to the West, you will find yourself contemplating the yawning interior of Mother Hubbard's cupboard.
This vacancy presents a fine opportunity to notice the mounting irrelevance of partisan squabbling. When it comes to the all-important environmental issues, most Westerners are actually political hybrids, mixtures and muddles no matter what their party registration. They want to be supplied with the necessary natural resources to support their current level of comfort and convenience, yet they want the production sites of those natural resources to be out of sight and out of mind. They want water coming out of the faucet without disruption of the river system; they want to build Western-style log houses without disturbing a single tree within their viewshed.

"As long as we can hit a high standard and have no risk of vandalism, then it is worth having a try at it again," said Rob Barrett, general manager of Los Angeles Times Interactive.

The feature introduced by the Los Angeles Times editorial page last week relied on the same "open source" software used by other "wikis" on the Internet. The technology allows multiple users to write and rewrite a single web page. The form's communal spirit has made the online encyclopedia "Wikipedia" tremendously popular and spawned imitators.

Editors said they believed the Times was the first major U.S. newspaper to invite readers "to wiki" on its Web site. An essay introducing the feature Friday acknowledged that some believed the experiment could prove an embarrassment.

Nearly 1,000 users registered to participate in the rewriting of Friday's lead editorial. Called "War and Consequences," the piece argued for the U.S. to set goals for training Iraqis to replace U.S. troops in Iraq and for the firing of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld if those goals were not met.

Although marred by some profanity by contributors, the experiment got off to a fairly high-minded start, said Michael Newman, deputy editor of the editorial page, who proposed the wikitorial idea.

Voluntarily overseeing part of the discussion was Wikipedia founder Jim Wales, who soon encouraged "forking" the editorial into two pieces -- one taking a pointed anti-war stance and the other arguing for the ongoing U.S presence in Iraq.

Smell that? It's fields slathered in manure
Sonoma County's farmers enrich their soil - and remind us of our agricultural roots

By Tim Tesconi

A rank odor reminiscent of manure-crusted cowboy boots has settled over Santa Rosa, reminding residents that this is still a farming county with cows and chickens.

The pervasive smell, which can hit from Rohnert Park to Windsor, has residents wrinkling their noses and inspecting the soles of their shoes to find the source of the stench. Those eating lunch Wednesday at Santa Rosa's Old Courthouse Square described the smell as barnyard, rotting trash, sweaty socks or rotten eggs. One caller to The Press Democrat said the air over Santa Rosa was like the smell of dirty diapers.

Open sunroof brings unwelcome passenger
CALIFON -- Longtime borough resident Joanne Korba was driving through town just minutes after dropping her 13-year-old daughter at school.
And then it happened.
"I was turning onto Main Street and I heard this big crash," she said.
The mother of three initially surmised that a neighborhood youth had selected her car to test his throwing arm.
"I turned around to see who threw it," she recalled. The time was 9:15 a.m. Monday, June 6. There were no vandals in sight and the borough street was quiet.
Korba's gaze shifted downward to her back seat, where the source of the mysterious "crash" lay temporarily stunned from a fall from great heights.
It was a squirrel.
"My sunroof was open," she said. "It must have fallen from a wire."
Then Korba thought for a moment.
"What do you do when a squirrel falls in your car," she recalled saying to herself since this was her first encounter with a wild animal in her vehicle.
Her thoughts quickly led to an idea.
"I pulled the car over and got out," she said.
Borough police Chief Jeff Ollerenshaw said Korba was screaming as she stood on the Main Street sidewalk.
Korba denied that characterization and said she was merely wringing her hands and wondering what to do next.
As luck would have it, a friend drove by and saw Korba standing outside her car.
"I told her there was a squirrel in my car," Korba recalled. "Then I remembered seeing Officer Jeff in town."
The friend drove down Main Street and found the chief.
Meanwhile, the stunned squirrel had regained consciousness.
Ollerenshaw arrived at the scene and went to work.
"He asked me if the squirrel was belted in," Korba said. The police chief then donned a pair of gloves and grabbed a pole he uses for situations like this. The chief opened the door and, after some gentle prodding, the squirrel stepped outside and ran into some nearby woods. Ollerenshaw said he was happy to report the squirrel did not sustain any apparent injuries during its escape.
The police chief later reflected on the chances of a squirrel falling through the sunroof of a moving car.
"The speed limit there is 25 mph," he said. "So (Korba) must have been driving about that speed."
He said the squirrel likely fell from an overhead wire or tree branch. The chief conceded the impossibility of taking any meaningful measurements to illustrate the incident. He said there's just no way to know how far the squirrel fell.
"But think about it," he said. "A half-second either way and it wouldn't have happened."
Korba said she's just glad the chief convinced the squirrel to get out of her car.
She said she's got some kind of squirrel phobia going on right now.
Korba encountered one on her friend's porch a few days after the incident.
"I told it to get away," she said.
And then there's the sunroof.
"I've been keeping that closed," she said.
( Reporter Tom Quigley can be reached at 908-475-8184 or by e-mail at tquigley@express-times.com. )

McCain May Be Bush's Ticket
McCain-Bush in 2008?
That would be John and Jeb, the most logical Republican ticket if the party remains in the polling doldrums. If President Bush and his political maestro, Karl Rove, decide that the only way to create a political legacy is to nod toward the Arizona senator with whom they have battled and feuded, they will go for the guy who can win.

And if middle-class income growth is sluggish, bread-and-butter discontent will benefit any Democrat running on a throw-the-bums-out platform. McCain could promise just enough change to win the election. He voted against Bush's tax policies, yet he is also among the most fiscally conservative members of the Senate.

For all these reasons, Bush and McCain could end up as each other's best friends. Bush has been battling, with Rove's help, for a long-term political realignment in favor of the Republicans. The president could well come to see McCain as the only Republican with a chance to push a Republican era forward. McCain, in turn, knows that his only way around the Republican right is to run with Bush's open blessing, if not his outright endorsement.
. . . George W. Bush and John McCain may prefer not to need each other. But by 2008, they could well become codependent. American politics has produced stranger alliances.

Schwarzenegger, 57, is staking his political career on initiatives that would increase his power over the state's $100 billion budget and inject more competition into legislative races now dominated by Democrats. His decision comes after his popularity plunged this year over conflicts with state unions, sapping the sway over lawmakers that last year helped him win an overhaul to the state insurance system.
``His personal political gravitas is on the line,'' said John Nienstedt, a San Diego pollster for Competitive Edge Research & Communication, a political consulting firm. ``If he doesn't bring home the bacon on these things he is going to be wounded for his last year in office.''
The governor's decision sets the stage for a five-month election campaign in the most populous U.S. state over eight initiatives that may appear before voters, ranging from a requirement that unions get members' consent for political contributions to one that would prevent women under 18 years old from getting abortions before their parents are notified.

Declaration of f'ing independence:
Esquire rips a web-page out of the Parents Television Council's play book with a declaration of independence you can sign and send to the FCC with a click. Howard Stern is our founding father.
The history of the present Federal Communications Commission is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over the airwaves, bringing with it a tyrant's notion of "decency."
To prove this, let the Facts be submitted to a candid world....
The FCC should be reminded that all radios and televisions have a button. This is called an "off" button, and it can be used when citizens find broadcast content to be disagreeable. It strikes us as tiresome to have to repeat this old remonstrance, but whatever. Furthermore, there now exists all manner of filters and blocks that can be used by parents and guardians to protect children from content that is not suitable for them. We, however, are not children, and we will not be treated as such by our government....
...the radio host Howard Stern does not lack for literary merit. Rather, he is part and parcel of a long, ribald tradition of gloriously undignified art that includes Rabelais, Henry Miller, and James Joyce, all of whom discussed "fingerbanging" in one way or another.
The radio host Howard Stern does not lack for educational merit. Rather, he is charting the sexual mores of our great nation, much like noted anthropologist Margaret Mead did....
In every stage of his oppressions, Howard Stern has petitioned for redress. He has railed against the FCC on his radio show, urging the citizenry to vote against one George W. Bush. He engaged in a tense discourse with former FCC chairman Michael Powell on the air, pointing out that television talk-show host Oprah Winfrey also discusses anal and oral sex in detail but is not equally oppressed because she is beloved by the media aristocracy and gives away motorized carriages to her audience....
For when faced with the termination of his astonishingly high-paying job, when faced with censure from his very own employer, Howard Stern refused to do what most of us would do: He refused to make accommodations. Rather, he declared revolution. And this is a great and good thing. This is the very act that defines a hero. This is the very act that defines an American man.
And now as a free and independent radio host, he will be able to discuss masturbating to Aunt Jemima at his discretion. It's possible that he will be discussing masturbating to Aunt Jemima to a total of four listeners. But this makes him no less a patriot. God bless Howard Stern, and God bless America, land of the free, home of lesbian porn stars and angry drunken dwarves.

And a Reno-based garbage company is betting that a long-term solution for disposing of trash from Northern California, where high rainfall makes it difficult to contain pollution at landfills, will be to put the refuse on freight trains and send it to the desert.
. . . The key question for the county is whether trains could make moving trash long distances more affordable. It would take 65 trucks each day to haul all of the county's garbage to landfills elsewhere.
. . . Mitch Stogner, executive director of the North Coast Rail Authority, thinks it can be done and he is pushing rail as a cost-effective, environmentally friendly trash-removal choice.The rail authority oversees 300 miles of publicly owned train tracks from Napa to Arcata. It has been struggling to revitalize freight service since El Niño storms in 1998 and associated land slides severely damaged a section of the tracks between Willits and Humboldt County.
. . . But the 140-mile stretch of tracks between Willits and Napa, which hugs Highway 101 through Sonoma County before heading east in Novato, needs only some bridge repairs and railroad crossing signal improvements, Stogner said."The south end of the rail line has few structural needs and the repairs are manageable, but there is not a lot of freight on the south end," Stogner said. "What hauling garbage would do is create an income source to make it financially viable to operate on the south end. It could be a real silver bullet for us, because all of a sudden we've got a financial incentive for an operator to use the south side of the railroad."
The rail authority would maintain the rail line and a freight train operator would pay rent to use the tracks.
Stogner envisions trash loaded onto freight trains in Windsor or Santa Rosa and hauled to a switching station near Napa, where it can access eastbound tracks toward Nevada.
"If the anchor tenant became garbage, there are also forest products to be hauled, rock and gravel and grains that come in from the Midwest," Stogner said. "The environmental benefits of taking trucks off Highway 101 are obvious."

"A horse stabled near the town of Sonoma has tested positive for West Nile virus, becoming the first equine case in Sonoma County this year, county health and vector control officials said Friday.

The Sonoma horse is the second horse in California this year to be infected with the mosquito-transmitted virus, which is often fatal. Health officials fear widespread West Nile infections this year in birds, horses and humans.

"The West Nile virus arrived in Sonoma County early this year and there is a high probability that we will see many infections, including in humans," Dr. Leigh Hall, Sonoma County's deputy public health officer, said Friday."

Porn star to attend President's Dinner
By JUAN-CARLOS RODRIGUEZ, Associated Press Writer
Thursday, June 9, 2005
WASHINGTON (AP) - The annual President's Dinner, a Republican Party fundraising event featuring President Bush, could get an extra dash of spice this year with porn actress and former California gubernatorial candidate Mary Carey planning to attend.

The porn industry and Republicans may seem like strange bedfellows, but Carey said she sees Tuesday night's dinner as a good opportunity to learn more about their policies and do some networking. She plans to run for lieutenant governor of California as an independent next year.

Carey acknowledges that some people just think of her as a busty blonde who does porn films.

"I also have a brain and political aspirations," said Carey, whose priorities include legalizing gay marriage.

Carl Forti, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, which is co-hosting the dinner, had no qualms about Carey and her boss, adult film executive Mark Kulkis, attending.

"Their money was donated to the NRCC. The NRCC's job is to elect Republicans. We'll take that money and use it to elect more Republicans," Forti said.

Carey was one of 135 candidates on the ballot to replace California Gov. Gray Davis in the 2003 recall election. Voters picked another actor - Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Kulkis, a self-described "Schwarzenegger Republican" who is fiscally conservative and socially liberal, was invited to the dinner by the NRCC and paid $5,000 for his and Carey's plates.

Carey and Kulkis said they want to prove stereotypes of porn workers wrong.
"We're not going to show up with coke spoons around our neck," Kulkis said.

. . . .Tuesday, the woman realized it was probably a federal agent doing surveillance in connection with a father and son from her neighborhood who were arrested and accused of terrorist activities tied to al-Qaida.

Authorities would say nothing Wednesday about any such surveillance and little about their investigation, but the arrests this week woke up this sleepy Central Valley town.

Another set of detentions -- of a prominent imam and an educator -- has reverberated through the community of an estimated 2,000 Muslims here. In fact, many in this agricultural center, 35 miles south of Sacramento, believe the arrests have re-ignited a deep, philosophical conflict between the two sets of Muslims.

Shujah Khan, 39, a Lodi ironworker who emigrated from Pakistan in 1986, said that for several years there has been a division between a group of moderate, open-minded Muslims and one not tolerant of other religions and of Muslims who hold ``American values.''

The two people held Sunday on immigration charges and the two arrested on terrorist-related charges are on opposite sides of this divide, said Khan. And he said that among the majority of Muslims, there is a groundswell of support for the imam and educator, and a distancing from the father and son.

. . . . . Many parents didn't want to have to send their children overseas to madrasahs, or Islamic schools, said Shujah Khan, because sometimes those educations resulted in pupils becoming extremist in their beliefs.

Further, he explained that the majority of Lodi Muslims -- with a wide variety of backgrounds in Pakistan and other Muslim countries -- wanted to build a school with ``American values'' and had networked with a rainbow of interfaith groups to gain support for the new school.

For several years, the Lodi Muslims have reached out to Jews, Christians, Hindus and Sikhs to build relationships and support for their school.

The Screen Actors Guild issued a tersely worded scolding.

In a statement, a SAG spokesman said union leadership was "disturbed and disappointed" to learn the spot produced was non-union.

Schwarzenegger's appearance in the commercial in his capacity as Governor was not a technical violation of Guild rules because elected officials who appear as themselves in commercials are not required to be covered by SAG's Commercials Contract but SAG still vented its displeasure.

"His failure to cover professional performers and crews under industry-standard contracts definitely violates the spirit of what unions stand for," read the SAG statement, "As someone who has benefited from the hard-won protections of union contracts and will continue to reap those rewards as he collects residuals and, ultimately, his pension, it is inexcusable that the governor did not take all measures necessary to ensure that his fellow performers could enjoy those same protections."

"We hope that in the future he will follow the lead of many political leaders before him and produce ads under union contracts so that his fellow performers can enjoy the same protections that he has enjoyed throughout his career."

Oh, my. Arnold is a traitor to his own. I guess he's been "TERMINATED" and is unlikely to "BE BACK" - in Hollywood anyway.

I am (source). I am who I am? Why a question mark there? Because often I wonder can I be who I claim to be. I am a Business Democrat. I believe that people who work harder should be paid better than somebody that does nothing. I believe that in the workplace people should be paid for what they accomplish not what some union fat cat who comes to a job once year in his Caddie can negotiate. I believe that unions had their place, and may someday yet, but with today's laws and labor standards the unions have made themselves not only archaic but useless. I am a firm believer that a person that works all day should receive a fair day's pay.

I have seen people, that were just trying to make a living for their families, whose lives were threatened. I have seen the labor movement literally break their strongest supporters, honoring a picket without a job to go to and paying them $10 a day to protest. I have seen Boss Hogg looking pr!cks drive around in their cars smiling, and meeting their mistresses for a late lunch while their people went hungry.

I have worked my way from literally the lowest person on the totem pole to become a manager, without any help of any union. I got my degrees. I proved that, yes a person can make it.

I am sick and tired of Democrats being labor's party. I am not against what the labor movement accomplished early in the 20^th century, but I am against labor's bullying of my party. I wish that just once a Democrat would stand up and say "Yes, I am a Democrat... but I can not support labor's actions."

Some background. I have seen unions burn people's livelihoods to the ground. How does that advance the movement? Quite simply it does not. To help the worker, yet take their job? How fucking ignorant can you get? The term "cut off your nose to spite your face" comes to mind.

The unions are for the weakest link, they are for the person that can not make it any other way. Does the Democratic Party really want to be the weakest link? I for one do not.

I am sick and tired of people in academia that have never proven their merits in the real world praising the unions. They are great in a text book, but in real life they are worth their own weight in kangaroo shit.

I have found that in my life my investments in companies paid far more dividends than my investments in a bureaucracy. Unions are going to break not only the economy of this country but the workers.

How is that worth your $48.00 a month in dues?

The bottom line. If a company does not make money... How do you expect to keep your job? If Democrat's want to become the people's party again then they must prove that they hear other voices like my own out there. They must be the inclusive party that kept the majority in congress for 50 years. Right now I feel quite excluded and the Libertarian tent looks quite tempting.

A challenge to Democrats. Save me. Become our party. There are more of us out there. Welcome the business world back into the fold. We have been waiting patiently and politely for your invitation.