Not Housebroken

San Jose Mercury News columnist Jon Ann Steinmetz describes it this way: “The segment that aired last November [on ABC’s Monday Night Football] showed [‘Desperate Housewives’ actress Nicollette] Sheridan in a locker room wearing only a towel and provocatively asking the Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver to skip the game for her. She then dropped the towel and leaped into Owens’ arms.” It created quite a fuss, and further spurred moves to increase fines for indecency to bizarre proportions.

Steinmetz reports that “U.S. regulators ruled today the racy clip didn’t violate federal indecency standards. In a unanimous decision, the five-member Federal Communications Commission said the segment ‘simply is not graphic or explicit enough to be indecent under our standard.'”

From the ANSWER Coalition:

The House of Representatives is preparing to vote on the Bush Administration’s request for an additional $82 billion to fund the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, perhaps as early as Tuesday, March 15, 2005. Every day the U.S. spends over $200 million of working peoples’ money to fund war and occupation in Iraq. 100,000 Iraqis have died. More than 1,500 U.S. soldiers have been killed and thousands more wounded. There should not be one more dime spent on Bush’s criminal wars, occupations and torture programs.

The A.N.S.W.E.R. coalition has set-up an easy to use way to send Congress a message of opposition. Use the link below to tell Congress to Vote No on the Supplemental Request.

$82 billion would:

1. Restore Bush’s proposed budget cuts for 150 federal social programs more than four times over.
2. Restore 48 education programs Bush proposes cutting, plus hire about 1.5 million teachers in our elementary schools.
3. Provide health care for than 14 million uninsured workers.
4. More than cover $60 billion in Medicaid spending that Bush wants to cut.
5. Provide housing vouchers for 14 million low income families.

The U.S. government has destroyed the lives of the people of Iraq. Opposing the $82 billion Supplemental Request is a way of speaking out against the continued occupation of Iraq. The people of Iraq deserve reparations – not more money used against them for death and conquest.

By clicking here you can send a message to the Congressional representative in your District. Feel free to edit your own message.

The Associated Press reported that the Florida legislature is considering measures which would “prevent the removal of Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube on Friday.” Schiavo, diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state, has been the subject of a long-running court and legislative battle between her husband who wants to let her die, and her parents who cling to the hope that she can recover. Her husband refused a reported $1 million offer to relinquish guardianship to her parents. Right-wing Christians have taken up the parents’ cause, giving “each Florida legislator a rose and a DVD on Terri Schiavo’s condition.”

The Associated Press is reporting that a state judge has ruled California’s ban on same-sex marriages unconstitutional. “‘The state’s protracted denial of equal protection cannot be justified simply because such constitutional violation has become traditional,’ [San Francisco County Superior Court Judge Richard] Kramer wrote.”

The Benfell Blog can now be accessed at http://blog.parts-unknown.org/. Advertising is available at no charge to Progressive organizations in the top banner. Commercial advertising may be accepted for the bottom banner.

At a well-attended meeting of the Lupin Camera Club yesterday, Lupin Naturist Club CEO and General Manager Ed Dennis announced he was shutting down the Camera Club due to complaints.

It was not possible to independently verify the complaints. Dennis has previously been heard threatening to shut down the Camera Club following election of the present president and secretary-treasurer, but said yesterday that the problems at the Camera Club ran deeper than the personnel at the top. Dennis promised to create a new camera club with new bylaws.

Reuters has reported that Swedish police raided “the Stockholm offices of Bahnhof, Sweden’s oldest and largest ISP…. ‘This was a very big raid,’ said John Malcolm, worldwide anti-piracy operations director at the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), which represents Hollywood’s major studios. ‘The material that was seized contained not only evidence of a piracy organization operating in Sweden but of online piracy organizations operating throughout all of Europe,’ he told Reuters.”

I’ll have more on this soon, but for now, from Salon.com’s War Room, there’s this: “In a new essay, the leaders of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council argue that Democrats must show voters that ‘any American who believes in security, opportunity, and responsibility has a home in the Democratic Party.'”

According to an Associated Press story, people are finding it a lot harder to obtain records under the Freedom of Information Act. “Shifting from the Clinton administration’s standard that experts say emphasized ‘maximum responsible disclosure,’ Ashcroft encouraged staff to consider ‘institutional, commercial, and personal privacy interests’ and said the Justice Department would defend any rejections unless they lacked a ‘sound legal basis.'” The interest that isn’t considered here is the public interest.

It seems the CIA hasn’t just been flying people from the United States. According to a story in the Washington Post, European investigators have implicated the CIA in a number of kidnappings from their own countries.

Meanwhile, “a US judge has blocked the government from transferring 13 Yemeni prisoners from the US base in Guantanamo, Cuba, until a hearing can be held on whether they face torture in another country,” and the United Nations Commission on Human Rights faces a choice between losing credibility and condemning “Washington for mistreatment of prisoners detained abroad,” placing “the United States … in a similar position to Cuba, Iran and Sudan, countries that Washington and others are likely to seek to pillory…. ‘If the commission is going to be taken seriously, it needs to be looking at the United States as well as Cuba, China and other serious human rights situations,’ Loubna Freih, Geneva representative of Human Rights Watch, said.”