TACHOPHOBIA
tac·ho·pho·bi·a — n.
1. The irrational fear of speed.

Mark Rask should be running for President, especially now that those wimps at drive55.org are starting to make headlines. We shouldn't return to failed policies.

American Autobahn

The 720-page report compiled by the Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, details the effects of having too few coalition troops on the ground when the reality after the fall of Baghdad was "severely out of line" with the anticipated conditions.

"We had the wrong assumptions, and therefore, we had the wrong plan to put into play," Gen. William Wallace, who commanded the Army's V Corps during the invasion, told the authors.

But some of the most critical decisions were made between May and August 2003, which some participants called a "window of opportunity that could have been exploited to produce the conditions for the quick creation of a new Iraq."

Army criticizes itself in Iraq invasion report

WASHINGTON — The Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender civil rights organization, today participated in the first-ever Congressional hearing exclusively on the issue of workplace discrimination against transgender Americans. The hearing, held by the House Education and Labor’s Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor and Pensions, was titled "An Examination of Discrimination Against Transgender Americans." Coordinated by Congressional allies, including Subcommittee Chairman Rob Andrews (D-NJ), Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) and Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), as well as a coalition of GLBT groups, the hearing was intended to send a strong message to Congress about the need for fully-inclusive federal workplace protections.

Frank hasn't exactly proven himself to be an ally, but I'll let that go.

HRC Business Council Member Diego Sanchez:

"It’s an injustice that we are ever evaluated for employment based on other people’s comfort with our existence… I am before you today to affirm that transgender and transsexual people, including me, are equally human and deserve to be treated like other people."

Human Rights Campaign President Joe Solmonese:

The transgender community, too long marginalized in American society and even within the gay, lesbian and bisexual community, has made enormous strides in recent years. There are many reasons to hope that the future holds even greater acceptance and understanding, including full equality under the law. But hope alone will not protect the transgender woman in Topeka, Kansas who loses her job and health insurance when co-workers learn that she is transitioning or the transgender man in Shreveport, Louisiana who, despite an advanced engineering degree, must work in a fast food restaurant. It is critical that Congress act to protect these, our transgender friends and family, colleagues and neighbors."

Historic Congressional Hearing on Workplace Protections for Transgender Americans

Good for the ISRA! Hopefully, there will be more such lawsuits to follow.

Mayor Richard M. Daley is a staunch supporter of gun control, and said he does not know if the Supreme Court decision striking down Washington's handgun ban will affect the Chicago ban.

But the mayor called the ruling "a very frightening decision."

Speaking during a morning event at Navy Pier, Daley said any effort to strike down Chicago's handgun ban would likely increase taxes because of the increased need for police presence. He also says violence sparked by the end of the ban would also increase hospitalizations.

"It is frightening that America loves guns," the mayor said, "and to me, I think this decision really places those who are rich and those are in power, they'll always feel safe. Those who do not have the power do not feel safe, and that's what they're saying. If you're elected officials, you feel safe. You cannot carry a gun into a federal building. You cannot carry a gun into a federal court. So they're setting themselves aside, and really, they're saying to the rest of America that the answer to all the constitutional issues is that we can carry guns. And I just don't understand how they came to this thinking."

My initial thoughts regarding Daley's comments were not safe for work, or home, or most dark alleys, but even he can't ruin my good mood after today's Supreme Court ruling. It's time to pour a tall, cold glass of Weihenstephaner and celebrate.

The Illinois State Rifle Association files a lawsuit to overturn the Chicago handgun ban.

A true Republican, or a true Democrat, is someone who puts their party above their principles and their candidate above their conscience.

But most of us (or at least those of us who live outside the Beltway) aren't like that. We're more like the mad scientist Frankenstein: We'd like to take a piece of this candidate, a touch of that one and a little slice of the one over there, mash it all together and create someone who's lines up perfectly with our values and beliefs.

Which brings me back to John McCain. Like Obama, McCain and I have fundamental differences on a host of important issues. Sure, I disagree with him less than I do with Obama, but is that really the standard we should use in choosing their candidate? Our country isn't a reality show where we simply elect whoever's left after all the backstabbing and lying is finished.

Is it?

Much of the time, it does seem that way.

...keep in mind that just because a party says they stand for something doesn't mean it's true.

After all, the Republicans said they stood for smaller government, but the size of our government grew enormously under a Republican president and a Republican majority in Congress. Democrats said they stood for an end to the war in Iraq, but for better or worse, nearly two years after taking over Congress, they don't even have a timetable for withdrawal.

My point is that actions speak louder than words. The "R" and the "D" don't matter if the people we elect don't follow through on their promises.

Beck: Obama no, McCain maybe

Court: A constitutional right to a gun

Answering a 127-year old constitutional question, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to have a gun, at least in one’s home. The Court, splitting 5-4, struck down a District of Columbia ban on handgun possession.

Justice Antonin Scalia’s opinion for the majority stressed that the Court was not casting doubt on long-standing bans on gun possession by felons or the mentally retarded, or laws barring guns from schools or government buildings, or laws putting conditions on gun sales.

Supreme Court strikes down a District of Columbia ban on handgun possession

Rupert Murdoch's Fox News television station has been forced to apologise to Barack Obama for the third time in a fortnight after screening a racially tinged caption referring to his wife Michelle as his "baby mama".

The apology comes just over a week after one of Fox's anchormen expressed regret for a comment on the night that Obama won the Democratic nomination. Obama, in a show of affection, lightly touched his fist against Michelle's and the anchorwoman referred to it as a "terrorist fist jab". Previously, a Fox contributor Liz Trotta had to apologise after making a joke about Obama being assassinated.

The trio of apologies is embarrassing for Fox. Murdoch last month praised Obama but stopped short of endorsing him, though his New York Post came out for Obama in January.

Fox forced to apologise to Obama for third time in two weeks

by John Coleman

You may want to give credit where credit is due to Al Gore and his global warming campaign the next time you fill your car with gasoline, because there is a direct connection between Global Warming and four dollar a gallon gas. It is shocking, but true, to learn that the entire Global Warming frenzy is based on the environmentalist’s attack on fossil fuels, particularly gasoline. All this big time science, international meetings, thick research papers, dire threats for the future; all of it, comes down to their claim that the carbon dioxide in the exhaust from your car and in the smoke stacks from our power plants is destroying the climate of planet Earth. What an amazing fraud; what a scam.

My mission, in what is left of a long and exciting lifetime, is to stamp out this Global Warming silliness and let all of us get on with enjoying our lives and loving our planet, Earth.

Global Warming and the Price of a Gallon of Gas

The print ad, which takes up most of a newspaper page, shouts, "The Ocean Is Evaporating!" TV and Internet spots warn that the world's oceans will disappear - in about a billion years. But what appear to be public service announcements this week, delivered with a fake sternness by Mayor Richard W. Meehan, are actually an ad campaign to encourage visits to the resort town.

"We're advising citizens to book their Ocean City getaway now, before the ocean evaporates," Meehan says in the commercials; the image blurs and jumps like an old newsreel. The ads ran Sunday and Monday in TV markets from Richmond to New York. The Internet version is at http://www.morefunhere.com. The print version ran Monday in The Washington Post. The ads are part of a $1 million campaign designed for the Ocean City Department of Tourism by MGH of Owings Mills.

Earlier this year, while searching for ideas, one staffer read about a study in the Monthly Notices of the British Royal Astronomical Society. The study described how, over hundreds of millions of years, the heat of the sun will steadily increase. After about a billion years, the oceans will boil themselves dry, for reasons separate from climate change. A light went on inside creative director John Patterson's head - an enormous, scorching light. If the oceans boil, he figured, that "probably pretty much ruins things" for Ocean City. It was the start of a joke. Meehan said he felt a little funny making such frightening pronouncements in jest. "Was it kind of Orson-Welles-ish? Yeah," he said, adding that the ads have generated mostly positive responses.

Unfortunately, Ocean City's problems are likely to begin long before the oceans disappear. One of the study's authors, Klaus-Peter Schrder of the University of Guanajuato in Mexico, said in an e-mail to The Post that the earth's warming will make the oceans to expand before they boil. That will turn Ocean City into just Ocean, he says "That beach in the advert will disappear long before the 1 billion years are up," he said.

Maryland resort's mock ads warn of ocean evaporation

By Jeremy Laurance
Sunday, 8 June 2008
The Independent

In the first official admission that the universal prevention strategy promoted by the major Aids organisations may have been misdirected, Kevin de Cock, the head of the WHO's department of HIV/Aids said there will be no generalised epidemic of Aids in the heterosexual population outside Africa.

Dr De Cock, an epidemiologist who has spent much of his career leading the battle against the disease, said understanding of the threat posed by the virus had changed. Whereas once it was seen as a risk to populations everywhere, it was now recognised that, outside sub-Saharan Africa, it was confined to high-risk groups including men who have sex with men, injecting drug users, and sex workers and their clients.

Forget the doctor's strangely coincidental name for a moment. Do we really need phrases such as "men who have sex with men" and "sex workers and their clients"? Would "homosexual males" and "prostitutes" have been considered inaccurate or offensive? These phrases are brought to you by the same people who replaced "personnel" with "human resources," and this type of language makes it difficult to take the article seriously. Political correctness is far from new, but I'll never get used to it.

But the factors driving HIV were still not fully understood, he said.

"The impact of HIV is so heterogeneous. In the US , the rate of infection among men in Washington DC is well over 100 times higher than in North Dakota, the region with the lowest rate. That is in one country. How do you explain such differences?"

Behavior, maybe?

Threat of world Aids pandemic among heterosexuals is over, report admits