Chuck Baldwin Chuck Baldwin
Many conservatives (including Christian conservatives) seem to be jumping on the Fred Thompson bandwagon. As far as Republican presidential contenders go, the biggest loser of the Thompson surge is Mitt Romney. Many conservatives were supporting Romney only because they perceived him as being the best chance to beat Rudy Giuliani. A Hillary Clinton vs. Rudy Giuliani presidential election is a conservative's worst nightmare. Romney has the charm and money and is now saying the "right" things. Hence, he has enjoyed moderate support in the early goings of this campaign season. However, Romney's liberal track record is very disconcerting to conservatives. In their hearts, conservatives cannot trust Romney.
The entrance of Fred Thompson in the presidential race immediately took a toll on the Romney campaign. Romney's support is dropping like the temperature in northern Idaho in the wintertime. That trend will probably continue, as more conservatives catch the Thompson wave.
The problem is, Thompson is not a conservative. Worse still (for the GOP), Thompson cannot beat Hillary in a general election. Mark my words, if Fred Thompson is the Republican nominee next November, Hillary Clinton is your next president.
For that matter, I see only one Republican ...   more »

By Humphrey Hawksley
The US and UK governments are developing increasingly sophisticated gadgets to keep individuals under their surveillance. When it comes to technology, the US is determined to stay ahead of the game.
"Five nine, five ten," said the research student, pushing down a laptop button to seal the measurement. "That's your height."
"Spot on," I said.
"OK, we're freezing you now," interjected another student, studying his computer screen. "So we have height and tracking and your gait DNA".
"Gait DNA?" I interrupted, raising my head, so inadvertently my full face was caught on a video camera.
"Have we got that?" asked their teacher Professor Rama Challapa. "We rely on just 30 frames - about one second - to get a picture we can work with," he explained.
Tracking individuals
I was at Maryland University just outside Washington DC, where Professor Challapa and his team are inventing the next generation of citizen surveillance. They had pushed back furniture in the conference room for me to walk back and forth and set up cameras to feed my individual data back to their laptops.
Gait DNA, for example, is creating an individual code for the way I walk. Their goal is ...   more »

Group's takeover plot emerges in Holy Land case
By JASON TRAHAN / The Dallas Morning News
jtrahan@dallasnews.com
Amid the mountain of evidence released in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing trial, the most provocative has turned out to be a handful of previously classified evidence detailing Islamist extremists' ambitious plans for a U.S. takeover.
Also Online
Link: See the documents presented as evidence in the case
Archive: Read previous DMN stories about the Holy Land Foundation case
A knot of terrorism researchers say the memos and audiotapes, many translated from Arabic and containing detailed strategies by the international Islamist group the Muslim Brotherhood, are proof that extremists have long sought to replace the Constitution with Shariah, or Islamic law.
But some academics and Muslim leaders say that the ideals contained in the documents were written by disgruntled foreign dissidents representing a tiny radical fringe. The documents also pre-date the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and the 80-year-old Muslim Brotherhood is now either inactive or largely underground in America.
The documents – introduced in recent weeks as part of the prosecution's case in the trial of the now defunct Holy Land Foundation and five of its organizers – lay out the Brotherhood's ...   more »

By Richard Wolf, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — An obscure provision slipped into a $120 billion Iraq spending bill in May threatens to leave some poor and disabled Medicaid recipients without prescription drugs in October.
In a case of unintended consequences, Congress inserted a rule cracking down on Medicaid fraud that requires that all non-electronic prescriptions for Medicaid patients be written on tamper-resistant paper.
The rule was devised as a way to raise nearly $150 million over five years for public hospitals, the amount that Medicaid fraud costs the federal government.
It has been criticized as too much, too soon by pharmacists, doctors, patient advocacy groups and state Medicaid officials. They say doctors could leave Medicaid, pharmacists could lose money and patients could be denied drugs.
"Nobody really knew where this came from," says Jamila Edwards of the California Primary Care Association. "The patient's going to be in the middle thinking, 'How come I didn't get my medication?' "
Today, the state Medicaid directors and more than 100 organizations will send a letter to congressional leaders asking for a one-year delay to the rule, according to Martha Roherty, director of the National Association of State Medicaid Directors.
Under the rule, if ...   more »

 By BETH FOUHY
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton is unveiling a sweeping health care proposal Monday that would require everyone to carry health insurance and offer federal subsidies to help reduce the cost of coverage.
Fulfilling a pledge to bring health care to all, Clinton's "American Health Choices Plan" has a price tag of about $110 billion per year. It represents her first major effort to achieve universal health coverage since 1994, when the plan she authored during her husband's first term collapsed.
"It is long past time that Americans and the richest of all countries realize that health care is a right and not a privilege," Clinton said at a labor forum in Chicago. "And that goes especially for people who work hard every single day."
The former first lady says she has learned from the 1990s experience, which almost derailed Bill Clinton's presidency and helped put Republicans in control of Congress for years to come. Aides say she has jettisoned the complexity and uncertainty of the last effort in favor of a plan that stresses simplicity, cost control and consumer choice.
The centerpiece of Clinton's plan is the so-called "individual mandate," requiring everyone to have health insurance ...   more »

by Heshy Friedman, Ph.D
There can be no peace without apology.
In 2005, teenager Ryan Cushing threw a 20-pound frozen turkey from a speeding car, as part of a prank. The ice-hard poultry crashed through the windshield of a bypassing car, crushing the face of Victoria Ruvolo, a woman from Long Island. It took numerous painful surgeries to rebuild her face. In the courtroom, Cushing cried uncontrollably as he apologized to Ruvolo. He kept repeating "I'm so sorry," to his victim.
Ruvolo, instead of seeking retribution, actually comforted Cushing in the courtroom; the prosecutor said that he had never seen such a forgiving victim. Cushing's sentence was six months in jail; it could very well have been 25 years had Ruvolo not shown compassion and forgiveness, asking the judge to exercise leniency.
Judaism emphasizes the importance of teshuva (repentance), from the Hebrew root meaning "return." But what is perhaps often overlooked is that the return it envisions is a two-way street. An apology does not count as repentance unless it is sincere, heartfelt, and has the ability to lead to genuine forgiveness. Teshuva is about renewing a relationship that has been sundered, not simply curing one party's guilt. It is ...   more »