History! Destiny!

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Obama declares victory on Republican Turf

by Marc Perkel

I've seen a lot of brilliant political moves in my time but what Barrack Obama did last night was incredibly impressive. Not only did he give a visionary and inspirational speech but he did it in the very same hall where the Republican convention is going to be held.

Now when the Republicans have their  at the same location the news media is going to compare and contrast it with Obama's speech tonight. Obama has stolen McCain's thunder at his future convention. As a Hillary supporter I have to say that Obama is off to a great start. Maybe he does have what it takes to win.

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Not in Minneapolis? Join Us Online

 

Dear Friend, Not in Minneapolis? Join Us Online Dan Rather, Bill Moyers, Arianna Huffington, Amy Goodman and more than 3,000 people from across the country are now on their way to Minneapolis to attend the National Conference for Media Reform. We're sorry you can't be here. But you can still take part in this amazing event at www.freepress.net/conference. Here's what you'll find online: Video streams of the main events and keynote speakers, including Moyers, Goodman, Huffington, Rather, Larry Lessig, Naomi Klein, Van Jones, FCC Commissioners, members of Congress and many more; Full audio clips from nearly 70 panels and workshops; Live blogging and updates throughout the conference; Flickr photos. We're also excited that Free Speech TV will be providing live coverage from throughout the conference. Tune in to Dish Network Channel 9415 or go online to www.freespeech.org to see more than 20 hours of coverage from the Twin Cities. Better yet, invite your friends over. Host or attend a Media Reform House Party and watch live events with friends, family and other concerned people in your area. Take a moment and join us via the Web or your TV for an incredible weekend of action and organizing! Onward, Yolanda Hippensteele Outreach Director Free Press www.freepress.net/conference P.S. Want to help promote the conference? Become a Free Press Rapid Responder and spread the word about breaking news from the conference.

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Everything is okay

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Website Lets You Send a Post-Rapture E-Mail to Friends 'Left Behind'

By Kevin Poulsen

If millions of Christians suddenly disappear from the face of the Earth as the opening act for Armageddon, Threat Level thinks most nonbelievers will be too busy freaking the hell out to check their e-mail. But if they do log in, now they can be treated to some post-Rapture needling from their missing friends and loved ones, courtesy of web startup YouveBeenLeftBehind.com.

For just $40 a year, believers can arrange for up to 62 people to get a final message exactly six days after the Rapture, that day when -- according to Christian end times dogma -- Christians will be swept up to heaven, while doubters are left behind to suffer seven years of Tribulation under a global government headed by the Antichrist.

"You've Been Left Behind gives you one last opportunity to reach your lost family and friends for Christ," reads the website, which is purportedly run "by Christians, for Christians." The domain name is registered through an anonymous proxy service, presumably to protect the proprietors from the Forces of Darkness, and not because they're up to anything shady.

The e-mails will be triggered when three of the site's five Christian staffers "scattered around the U.S." fail to log in for six days in a row -- a system that incorporates a nice margin of safety, should two of the proprietors turn out to be unrepentant sinners or atheists.

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Gas prices haven't put Hummers in park...yet

The Hummer H2 gets about 10 mpg.

Fans aren't giving them up

By TARA DOOLEY 

The Hummer, it would seem, does not just have fair-weather fans.

Even as gasoline prices tick continuously upward, Matthew Lee's affection for his Hummer H2 has not headed south.

He does feel a little stuck with it, though.

"The market on them has basically dried up," said Lee, a law student.

Lee is not planning on getting rid of his Hummer. But GM might be.

The automobile manufacturer announced Tuesday that it is considering revamping the brand or selling it. The news came out of an annual meeting in which the company's CEO also announced that the company would close four truck and SUV plants because of low sales and high gasoline prices.

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Judge tosses Maine school official's lawsuit against Fox News for reporting joke story as fact

A federal judge has thrown out a school superintendent's lawsuit against Fox News, saying the cable news channel acted unprofessionally but without malice when anchors on "Fox and Friends" reported a parody story about ham as fact last year.

The case was an outgrowth of an April 2007 prank in which a middle school student tossed a slab of leftover Easter ham onto a table surrounded by Somali Muslim youngsters, knowing the Muslims would be offended. Muslims consider pork unclean.

A few days later, a parody story spoofing the ham controversy was posted online. The story attributed numerous made-up quotes to Superintendent Leon Levesque, including the need to teach kids that "ham is not a toy" and references to developing an "anti-ham response plan." The joke story, written by freelancer Nicholas Plagman, falsely listed the Associated Press as the source of the information.

The spoof was reported as fact on "Fox and Friends" on April 23. After Levesque contacted Fox, the network aired a retraction.

Among other things, the anchors had quoted Levesque as saying, "All our students should feel welcome in our schools, knowing that they are safe from attacks with ham, bacon, pork chops or any other delicious meat that comes from pigs."

The anchors also told viewers several times, "We are not making this up."

In his slander suit, Levesque who sought $75,000 in damages, said he was ridiculed and overwhelmed for days with phone calls and hate mail, including threatening calls to his home.

U.S. District Judge D. Brock Hornby, who sits in Portland, concluded Tuesday that Fox News was unprofessional in reporting false and "outrageous quotations" without confirming their accuracy, but did not act out of malice.

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Saudi king opens conference on interfaith dialogue

By DONNA ABU-NASR

AP Photo

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (AP) -- Saudi Arabia's king urged a gathering of Muslim scholars Wednesday to open religious dialogue with Christians and Jews. But politics intruded as a senior Iranian figure said the Islamic world should stand up to the U.S. and its "international arrogance."

King Abdullah spoke at the start of a three-day conference of Islamic scholars, clerics and other figures in the holy city of Mecca called to get Muslims on the same page before the kingdom launches a landmark initiative for talks with adherents of other monotheistic faiths.

The tone was one of reconciliation between Islam's two main branches, Sunni and Shiite. Abdullah, one of Sunni Islam's most prominent figures, entered the hall with Shiite Iranian politician Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who later sat at the king's left in a gesture of unity.

But while Rafsanjani spoke warmly of his host, he also highlighted the political divide between their nations by delivering pointed criticism of America, a Saudi ally. He accused the U.S. of greedily trying to control the region's oil and said Muslims should resist it.

Saudi Arabia has presented its dialogue proposal as a strictly religious initiative - an opportunity to ease tensions within Islam and between it and Christianity and Judaism.

Still, the initiative has political implications, coming from a Mideast heavyweight that does not have diplomatic ties with Israel. Jewish leaders have generally praised Abdullah's proposal, though it is not clear if Israeli Jewish leaders will be invited to take part.

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Strategy Was Based On Winning Delegates, Not Battlegrounds

SLOGGING TO VICTORY

By Jonathan Weisman, Shailagh Murray and Peter Slevin

Almost from the beginning, Hillary Rodham Clinton's superior name recognition and her sway with state party organizations convinced Barack Obama's brain trust that a junior senator from Illinois was not going to be able to challenge the Clinton political machine head-on.

The insurgent strategy the group devised instead was to virtually cede the most important battlegrounds of the Democratic nomination fight to Clinton, using precision targeting to minimize her delegate hauls, while going all out to crush her in states where Democratic candidates rarely ventured.

The result may have lacked the glamour of a sweep, but last night, with the delegates he picked up in Montana and South Dakota and a flood of superdelegate endorsements, Obama sealed one of the biggest upsets in U.S. political history and became the first Democrat since Jimmy Carter to wrest his party's nomination from the candidate of the party establishment. The surprise was how well his strategy held up -- and how little resistance it met.

We kept waiting for the Clinton people to send people into the caucus states," marveled Jon Carson, one of Obama's top ground-game strategists.

"It's the big mystery of the campaign," said campaign manager David Plouffe, "because every delegate counts."

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Katrina Revisited

By David Kurtz

Still in Louisiana today, following his epic speech in Kenner last night, John McCain was asked by a local reporter why he had voted against creating a federal commission to investigate the Katrina disaster.

McCain's response? "I've supported every investigation and ways of finding out what caused the tragedy. . . ."

The problem is that's just not true. He voted against such a commission -- twice.

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Clinton's dilemma: Awash in both cash and debt

By Greg Gordon

WASHINGTON — The climactic end of the Democratic presidential race left loser Hillary Clinton in an odd position: Her campaign is both awash in cash and buried in debt.

The decisions she makes in how to handle that predicament could affect her future political prospects. Similarly, Barack Obama might seize an opportunity to make peace with his vanquished rival by helping her pay off some of her $21 million in loans.

Clinton's latest report to the Federal Election Commission showed an April 30 cash balance of nearly $29.7 million, but that was deceiving. FEC spokesman George Smaragdis said the figure included $6 million in primary-season cash and $23.7 million in donations designated for the fall general election campaign. None of the general election donations can be used to retire debts accrued during the primary season.

Clinton's biggest problem, of course, is the $21 million in IOUs, which include $11,425,000 she is known to have lent her campaign through the first week of May and possibly millions of dollars more in yet-to-be-disclosed loans during her last-ditch primary campaign efforts.

With Clinton refusing to concede defeat on Wednesday, there was little talk about financial help from Obama.

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Wise Up: Activism

By David Bruce

Not so long ago, gays were regarded as mentally ill; psychiatrists, including Charles Socarides, forced some gays to undergo aversion therapy in which they were shown photographs of nude men, then were electrically shocked or forced to vomit. Some gays were even given legally given electroshock treatments. Gay activists fought back, and in 1970 they infiltrated a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association. A film shown at the meeting depicted gays being forced to vomit whenever they saw photographs of nude men. When the film was shown, the gay men infiltrating the meeting waited until photographs of nude men appeared on screen, then they cheered. A few years later, the APA decided that being homosexual was NOT a mental disease. (One wonders if Dr. Socarides  ever apologized to the gays he tortured.)

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Woodie Guthrie

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Robot teddy bear car navigation system

On June 3, engineers at iXs Research Corporation unveiled a robotic teddy bear designed to work as a talking car navigation system. The prototype robot stands 30 centimeters (1 ft) tall and has 6 joints in its arms and neck, which it uses to make gestures while providing spoken directions.

The robot bear is also equipped with functions to improve auto safety, such as an alcohol detection sensor embedded in its neck. If it smells booze, the robot confronts the driver, saying, "You haven't been drinking, have you?" Other sensors detect reckless driving, so if the driver suddenly accelerates or slams on the brakes, the robot says, "Watch out!"

As a bonus feature, the robot bear provides information about nearby landmarks when you stroke its head.

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Police to Seal Off D.C. Neighborhoods

By Sommer Mathis

Can you say Police State? The Examiner has the scoop on a controversial new program announced today that would create so-called "Neighborhood Safety Zones" which would serve to partially seal off certain parts of the city. D.C. Police would set-up checkpoints in targeted areas, demand to see ID and refuse admittance to people who don't live there, work there or have a "legitimate reason" to be there. Wow. Just, wow.

Some of the words used to describe such a plan by those quoted in the Examiner story include "breathtaking" and "cockamamie," but that hardly begins to scratch the surface. Interim Attorney General Peter Nickles actually said that measures of this sort have "been used in other cities." Which cities are those, Mr. Nickles? Warsaw?

Today's proposal appears to be a desperate attempt by the city to tamp down recent violence that has ravaged the city, especially in Ward 5. The "Neighborhood Safety Zones" would last up to 10 days. It's a struggle to think of words to describe such a plan other than authoritarian or ghettoization.

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An Oral History of the Internet

How the Web Was Won

Fifty years ago, in response to the surprise Soviet launch of Sputnik, the U.S. military set up the Advanced Research Projects Agency. It would become the cradle of connectivity, spawning the era of Google and YouTube, of Amazon and Facebook, of the Drudge Report and the Obama campaign. Each breakthrough—network protocols, hypertext, the World Wide Web, the browser—inspired another as narrow-tied engineers, long-haired hackers, and other visionaries built the foundations for a world-changing technology. Keenan Mayo and Peter Newcomb let the people who made it happen tell the story.

by Keenan Mayo and Peter Newcomb

This year marks the 50th anniversary of an extraordinary moment. In 1958 the United States government set up a special unit, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (arpa), to help jump-start new efforts in science and technology. This was the agency that would nurture the Internet. 

This year also marks the 15th anniversary of the launch of Mosaic, the first widely used browser, which brought the Internet into the hands of ordinary people.

Millions of words—multiplied and sent forth by the technology itself—have been written on the world-changing significance of the Internet, for good or ill, and the point hardly needs belaboring. Surprisingly, few books have been written that cover the full history of the Internet, from progenitors such as Vannevar Bush and J. C. R. Licklider up through the entrepreneurial age of our own times. Not many people recall that the first impetus for what became the technology of the Internet had its origins in Cold War theorizing about nuclear warfare.

To observe this year's twin anniversaries, Vanity Fair set out to do something that has never been done: to compile an oral history, speaking with scores of people involved in every stage of the Internet's development, from the 1950s onward. From more than 100 hours of interviews we have distilled and edited their words into a concise narrative of the past half-century—a history of the Internet in the words of the people who made it.

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When Worlds Collide: The American past meets modern museum doctrine.

by P.J. O'Rourke

The Ancient Americas
The Field Museum
Permanent Exhibit

The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago has a new permanent exhibit of savagery and barbarism, "The Ancient Americas." The ancient Americans themselves are not portrayed as savage or barbarous. (How surprising. Knock me over with a feather.) The savages and barbarians are the museum's curators. They plunder history, ravage archaeology, do violence to intelligence, and lay waste to wisdom, faith, and common sense.

At the Field Museum, the bygone aboriginal inhabitants of our hemisphere are shown to be regular folks, the same as you and me, although usually more naked and always more noble. Ancient Americans have attained the honored, illustrious status of chumps and fall guys. Never mind that they were here for 12,000 or 13,000 years before the rest of us showed up with our pistols and pox, so most of their getting shafted was, perforce, a do-it-yourself thing.

And also never mind that "The Ancient Americas" exhibit tells you nothing that a fourth grader doesn't know. I am the parent of a fourth grader. I live in a house cluttered with twig and Play-Doh models of hogans, longhouses, and wickiups, hung with ill-made "dream-catchers" and strewn with poorly glued miniature birch bark canoes shedding birch bark on the rugs. My daughter's bedroom is heaped with the apparel, equipage, and chattel of Kaya, the Native American Girl doll. The fourth grade classroom's bookshelves overflow with culturally sensitive and ecologically aware retellings of Potawatomi, Paiute, and Kickapoo legends, colorfully illustrated by women who use birds or mammals for their last names.

When I was in the fourth grade, some 50 years ago, my grandmother would take me to the Field Museum. It was a solemn, quiet, awe-engendering place. All of creation's wonders were on display in orderly ranks. Dim corridors were lined with dioramas featuring important animals, shot, stuffed, and carefully labeled. Further corridors held wonders of a sterner kind: Sinister masks from Africa, demon deities of the heathen Raj, alarming Sung Dynasty figurines depicting the exquisite tortures of Chinese hell. Whatever steadiness of nerve I now possess I owe to steeling myself to walk past the display case containing an unwrapped Egyptian mummy.

The Field Museum was interesting even in its least interesting parts. The section devoted to Useful Varieties of Wood fascinated me in the exactitude of its tediousness. The world was full of things and--if I could summon the patience and concentration--those things could be organized, understood, and made to serve a purpose.

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The Top Ten Solutions to the World's Biggest Problems

The final dispatch from the 2008 Copenhagen Consensus Conference

by Ronald Bailey

Copenhagen, May 30—Where in the world can we do the most good? Supplying the micronutrients vitamin A and zinc to 80 percent of the 140 million children who lack them in developing countries is ranked as the highest priority by the expert panel at the Copenhagen Consensus 2008 Conference. The cost is $60 million per year, yielding benefits in health and cognitive development of over $1 billion.

Eight leading economists, including five Nobelists, were asked to prioritize 30 different proposed solutions to ten of the world's biggest problems. The proposed solutions were developed by more than 50 specialist scholars over the past two years and were presented as reports to the panel over the past week. Since we live in a world of scarce resources, not all good projects can be funded. So the experts were constrained in their decision making by allocating a budget of an "extra" $75 billion among the solutions over four years.

Number 2 on the list of Copenhagen Consensus 2008 priorities is to widen free trade by means of the Doha Development Agenda. The benefits from trade are enormous. Success at Doha trade negotiations could boost global income by $3 trillion per year, of which $2.5 trillion would go to the developing countries. At the Copenhagen Consensus Center press conference, University of Chicago economist Nancy Stokey explained, "Trade reform is not just for the long run, it would make people in developing countries better off right now. There are large benefits in the short run and the long run benefits are enormous."

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Young Hillary Clinton

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Buddies

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