DebateGate

The rival presidential campaigns of Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama (news, bio, voting record) traded accusations of nasty politics Wednesday over Hollywood donor David Geffen, who once backed Bill Clinton but now supports his wife's top rival.

The Clinton campaign demanded that Obama denounce comments made by the DreamWorks movie studio founder, who told New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd in Wednesday's editions that while "everybody in politics lies," the former president and his wife "do it with such ease, it's troubling."

The Clinton camp also called on Obama to give back Geffen's $2,300 contribution.

Campaigning in Iowa, Obama refused.

"It's not clear to me why I'd be apologizing for someone else's remark," the Illinois senator said.

For her part, New York Sen. Clinton sidestepped questions, leaving the issue to her aides to discuss.

"I'm just going to stay focused on my campaign and I'm going to run a positive campaign about the issues that affect the people in our country," she told The Associated Press in an interview in Nevada. She was participating a candidate forum in Carson City.

The Clinton team seemed eager to continue the attack. With Obama in Iowa, aides arranged for former Iowa attorney general Bonnie Campbell to criticize him in a conference call with reporters.

In the newspaper interview, Geffen also said Bill Clinton is "a reckless guy" and he does not think Hillary Clinton can bring the country together during a time of war, no matter how smart or ambitious she is.

Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs added another criticism of Clinton.

"It is also ironic that Senator Clinton lavished praise on Monday and is fully willing to accept today the support of South Carolina state Sen. Robert Ford, who said if Barack Obama were to win the nomination, he would drag down the rest of the Democratic Party because 'he's black,'" Gibbs' statement said.

Ford later apologized. The Clinton campaign said it disagreed with Ford, but the senator has embraced his support.

Another Democratic presidential candidate, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, said at the candidate forum that Obama should denounce Geffen's comments. "We Democrats should all sign a pledge that we all be positive," Richardson said.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070222/ap_on_el_pr/clinton_obama_13

Maybe I'm just cynical - especially in this day and age of computers and photoshop....but who in their right mind sits on this kind of evidence for 40-some years, knowing the significance and impact it would have?

DALLAS -- A recently discovered home movie showing President John F. Kennedy's motorcade shortly before his assassination was unveiled Monday on the Web site of a Dallas museum.

The silent, 8 mm color film is "the clearest, best film of Jackie in the motorcade," said Gary Mack, curator of the Sixth Floor Museum, which focuses on Kennedy's life and assassination.

The film shows a brief but clear glimpse of President Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline, a few blocks from Dealey Plaza and roughly 90 seconds before the killing. Also visible is Secret Service agent Clint Hill riding on the back of the car. After the shots were fired, Hill jumped onto the car as it drove to the hospital.

The film ends with some footage the next day outside the Texas School Book Depository, the building from which assassin Lee Harvey Oswald fired the fatal shots.

"Because the speed of the motorcade was known to be between 12 and 15 miles per hour, I was able to figure out how far back in time it was from the assassination," Mack said.

Amateur photographer George Jefferies took the footage and held onto it for more than 40 years, Mack said. Jefferies mentioned it in a casual conversation with his son-in-law, Wayne Graham, and the two agreed to donate it to the museum.

At least 150,000 people lined the motorcade route, and Mack said he believes there are more film and photographs out there.

"I know there are pictures out here that have not surfaced," Mack said. "The museum is always on the lookout for pictures. The bottom line is don't throw anything away."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/19/AR2007021900438.html

War - what it is good for

By Jonathan Turley

My wife and I recently watched as our three boys marched off to join Easy Company of the Army's 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division. Their stoic faces belied their youth — ages 8, 6 and 4 — as they faced the horrors of dropping into Normandy 1944 as part of their best friend's birthday party. There was plenty of action, of course, but nothing like what the parents would experience a few days later.

It appears that, as casualties and opposition rise with the Iraq war, even Liam Bowman's 8th birthday party can become fodder in our national debate. Outraged parents complained that we were perverting the minds of children by glorifying war. Yet, there is something to learn from war — as we found out later with a visit to a small Veterans of Foreign Wars hall in rural Maryland.

It began as a birthday party for Liam, who has watched the HBO series Band of Brothers so many times that he can name all the men of Easy Company as easily as his third-grade class roster. Liam's mom, Brigid Schulte, threw an authentic Easy Company party with World War II music, jump wings, Normandy maps, ammo boxes and root beer in the mess hall. With Liam's dad, Tom Bowman, in Iraq covering a real war for National Public Radio, I agreed to play the role of Col. Robert Sink (head of the Airborne Regiment) while Liam served as Lt. Richard Winters, the central figure and commander of Easy Company in the series.

The outrage

As soon as the invitations went out, a couple of parents politely declined to let their children come to a war-themed party. Afterward, Brigid — a Washington Post reporter — wrote a short piece about the party, and the response from outraged readers was fast and furious. Describing the whole affair as deeply disturbing, one reader chastised Brigid for giving into the base, violent inclinations of her son: "Here's a novel idea: Say no. Tell him that war is sad and horrible and should never be a cause for celebration."

There is a palpable sense among such playground objectors that boys harbor some deep dormant monster that, once awakened, inevitably ends with the invasion of Poland or a massacre at My Lai. Of course, millions of men played war games as kids without becoming war criminals. To the contrary, playing war was for most men an early type of morality play, defining values of sacrifice and selflessness. George Orwell once observed that a war-weary parent "who sees his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won't do."

To teach that all war is immoral is to deny the absolute values that frame a truly moral life. Arguably, the view of all war as immoral is itself amoral. Whether it is World War II or the first Gulf War, there are wars worth fighting and causes worth dying — and yes, killing — for. The failure of the world to fight in Rwanda and Darfur are, in my view, amoral acts of omission.

Moral clarity is what we found in a small Veterans of Foreign Wars hall in a tiny town in Maryland. Not long after Brigid's column ran, she was contacted by a former Airborne division veteran, Frank Maio, who offered to arrange for the kids to meet with one of the last survivors of Easy Company.

This is how four of the boys — Liam, Ben, Jack and their friend Colby — recently found themselves sitting nervously across a table from four combat veterans at VFW Post 2632. (My 4-year-old son Aidan, wisely, preferred to play with Tessa Bowman, the fetching 5-year-old USO tap dancer from the party.) The commander of the post is Pat McGonigle, a Navy veteran of Grenada. Maio is a former decorated paratrooper from the 82nd Airborne and "tunnel rat" in Vietnam who would crawl into small dark tunnels to flush out enemy soldiers. Tom Warren is another Airborne veteran from Vietnam.

Yet, the boy's eyes were all fixed on the 82-year-old Clarence "Clancy" Lyall, a highly decorated paratrooper (with 25 decorations and citations) and a veteran of World II, Korea and Vietnam. Lyall jumped into Normandy with the 101st and fought in most of the battles portrayed in the HBO series, including the Battle of the Bulge. He was wounded four times in combat, including a still-visible shrapnel scar on his head, which the boys couldn't stop staring at. (To the relief of the parents, Lyall declined to show them the bayonet scar on his stomach.)

Lyall has hundreds of jumps to his credit, including a rare record of four combat jumps. He told them how he had lied at 16 to enlist and had his 18th birthday in combat in Holland. (He was wounded the next day.) After World War II, he also served in Vietnam as an American adviser with the 8th French Parachute Assault Battalion at Dien Bien Phu, and narrowly escaped when the garrison surrendered.

Yet rather than asking about the gore of war, the boys seemed most interested in matters more relevant and important to the adolescent mind: how Lyall overcame fear. "When you did your jump into Normandy," Liam asked, "was it scary?"

"You bet it was scary," Lyall said, and described how bullets ripped through his jump pants as he descended toward the town of St. Marie-Eglise. "There was so much flak coming at us, you could walk on it."

"Did you ever throw up?" my 6-year-old son Jack shyly asked.

"No, but I felt like it many times," came the reply.

"What was the scariest part of the war?" my 8-year-old son Ben asked. "Every day!" Lyall responded, "but the very worst was leaving that plane."

The real face of war

Lyall explained that war is not like the movies. When he landed, he told them how he was "shaking all over" in fear and how a Catholic priest had to get him to his feet. All of the veterans explained that men who suffer "hysterical blindness" or "shell shock" are not cowards and that everyone can reach a breaking point in combat.

"All that John Wayne stuff is a lot of bull," Lyall said. "I don't like war. I hate it. No combat soldier likes war." The boys all nodded knowingly.

Lyall described how he had broken down after his division liberated a concentration camp and how he was haunted for years by what he had seen. The boys again nodded knowingly.

"What makes someone a good soldier?" 8-year-old Colby Gustafson asked. All four vets responded at the same time with "patriotism." When they said it, it did not seem like the cheap shtick that we hear in Washington from politicians cloaking themselves in the bravery of others. It meant something coming from these guys.

Lyall now drives a bus for the Department of Aging and brings meals to the elderly. Lyall, who is part Cherokee, explained that "Currahee" — the cry of Easy Company — was a Cherokee word for "stand alone" but really meant "stand alone; fight as one."

After almost two hours, the four boys and the four vets said goodbye. As the adults stopped to chat outside, the boys immediately ran to a nearby mound of dirt. Grabbing sticks to use as guns, they set up a defensive perimeter and started firing at some phantom enemy. They were a band of brothers in every sense of the word. The four graying vets watched critically from a distance. "Now, that's a tight 360," Maio said, and the rest nodded their approval.

In the end, I was less confident about the boys' war-making ability than I was about their ability to make sense of war. Now if only we could take the rest of America to VFW Post 2632.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University and a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors.


http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2007-02-14-oplede_x.htm?csp=15

Awww.....those are great pics! 

Happy Day to all......

Salvia Divinorum: A legal herb, powerful like LSD, and available in Utah

Methamphetamine. Cocaine. LSD. We've all heard how dangerous, even deadly, these drugs can be. But have you heard of salvia divinorum? It's an herb, but some call it the world's most potent natural hallucinogen.

Kathy and Dennis Chidester of Delaware say it took their son's life. They know their son Brett used salvia. But when they confronted him about it, he pointed out that it was legal and insisted it was not dangerous. But they say it caused him to commit suicide in their garage earlier this year.

Dennis said, "he was lying in the fetal position on his jacket. And right away, I felt his body was cold. And so I called 911 and said, my son -- you know, my son's committed suicide."

Kathy said, "there was no way that he would ever do anything like that. Not the son that I knew. Not the boy that we raised."

The suicide note Brett left behind talked about how he had learned the secret of life. And although medical officials dispute whether he died directly because of salvia, it has prompted legislation that has now banned the herb in four states.

But salvia is still legal in most states, including Utah. And it's something most parents have never even heard of. So ABC 4 wanted to find out how easy it is to buy it right in our own backyard.

Many wonder what could really be wrong with a natural herb that is actually a cousin of the sage plant. But some who smoke it say it can cause extreme visualization and hallucination, even intense laughter and meditational epiphanies.

That's why it's so important for parents to know what can happen when salvia falls into inexperienced or irresponsible hands.

A clerk in one Salt Lake City store that sells salvia said, "Salvia is based all on your threshold, so if you smoke too much of it, you have a bad trip. You either get a weird feeling or you get giggly and bubbly kinda like you would off of pot."

And here's how easy it is for anybody to get salvia right here in Utah. We sent an undercover buyer into the Wizards and Dreams store in Sugarhouse. The store clerk said, "I got some new salvia."

We found Purple Sticky Salvia, sold for $84.99. It's cleverly marketed as aromatic incense, even though the seller told us all about how to smoke it. He suggests having someone watch you when you do, that it's not safe to do alone. "Just make sure you have one person sober. Some people say the first time, oh, it didn't work so I took a second pull and it f---ed me up. So I've just been told to say it's a spiritual journey."

Around the corner, at Elemental Inspirations, we were also able to buy salvia, although the owner did ask to see an ID. Salvia is not supposed to be sold to anyone under the age of 18. This time, we heard about another person's wild hallucinations. "She took one hit of the 10x salvia and she was gone. She was like, oh it's a bad trip, oh my gosh."

A distant relative to the sage mint plant, salvia's primarily grown in Mexico. But today its sold at stores in the US. And more and more teens are finding they can buy it online.

Although technically an herb, the US Drug Enforcement Agency lists salvia as a "Drug of Concern."

Jason Mazuran, a narcotics expert with DrugTALK said, "I think it could be compared to LSD, some have compared it to peyote."

And while store owners told our undercover buyer numerous stories about salvia's mind altering effects, when ABC 4's Erika Edberg went in she got quite a different story. ABC 4 asks, "do you guys sell salvia here? Wizards and Dreams store owner responds, I don't. I used to and I discontinued it. I've actually discontinued it twice."

But when our reporter noticed it on display, the owner's story changed. "I didn't even know we had any left." He refused to talk about salvia on camera.

And while the woman at Elemental Inspirations told our undercover buyer exactly how to use it. You would take your one hit. You wouldn't pass it. You'd hold it. Exhale. Take your next hit. You'd take all of your three hits at once. It should be roughly three to five minutes by the time you get the pipe back, if you haven't automatically started hitting into the hallucination part you take your next one to two hits one right after the other without passing the pipe. When I asked I didn't get any helpful tips. "We don't want people playing with it or buying it as something to play around with. We want serious people who are looking to use it for its qualities."

And while answers like that and marketing ploys may fool some. Mazuran says, "the aromatic incense thing is, it's ridiculous. Come on. Everybody knows what's going on."

Drug experts say parents need to be more aware of salvia's potentially dangerous effects. Mazuran said, "the greater risk of salvia is not really the health effects but what people may or may not do or the choices they make while they're under the influence of that drug."

Because of Brett Chidester's death, the Delaware Legislature outlawed salvia divinorums use. Louisiana, Missouri, and Tennessee also have laws against salvia in their states. New York, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Illinois, and Alaska are currently considering proposals to ban it.

So what about Utah? ABC 4 called the state attorney general's office to see if any efforts were underway to make it illegal here. But the people we spoke with say they had never heard of salvia divinorum before. And it was only our inquiries that brought this dangerous herb to their attention.

So far, the Food and Drug Administration has not done any studies to determine the long-term health effects of salvia.

For more information about salvia divinorum:

The US Drug Enforcement Administrations site lists the current classification of salvia divinorum: http://www.deadiversion.usdoj.gov/drugs_concern/salvia_d/salvia_d.htm.

Wikipedia has a history of salvia divinorum, how its used, its effects and more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvia_divinorum.

Erowid lists frequently asked questions, laws about salvia, the chemistry that makes up the plant and much more: http://www.erowid.org/plants/salvia/salvia.shtml.

DrugTALK educates parents about the latest drug trends and dangers to their children. It also offers advice on how to talk with your child about drug use and some steps you can take if you think your child might be in trouble. http://www.drugtalk.org/.

Link: http://www.abc4.com/local_news/featured_websites/story.aspx?content_id=3815A268-56DE-4356-85D5-C4A9F07A3FA5