The Theban Mapping Project is an interactive atlas of the archeological work that was and is being done in Egypt's Valley of Kings.

Since its inception in 1978, the Theban Mapping Project (TMP, now based at the American University in Cairo) has been working to prepare a comprehensive archaeological database of Thebes. With its thousands of tombs and temples, Thebes is one of the world's most important archaeological zones. Sadly, however, it has not fared well over the years. Treasure-hunters and curio-seekers plundered it in the past; pollution, rising ground water, and mass-tourism threaten it in the present. Even early archaeologists destroyed valuable information in their search for museum-quality pieces.

Israel is holding five members of the Palestinian Cabinet -- including the deputy prime minister -- and more than two dozen other lawmakers. Combined with the 14 lawmakers who were already in prison, 39 of the 132 elected council members are behind bars, Palestinian officials said.

"I think Israel wants to send a message that the authority means nothing to them," said Hasan Khreisheh, 51, who became acting speaker of the legislative council after the arrest in August of Aziz Dweik, the council speaker. "They can change the rules of the game. They want to humiliate us."

Israel's measures paralyze Palestinian rule
Nearly a third of lawmakers in Israeli jails
By John Murphy, Baltimore Sun | August 26, 2006

Emphasizing the need to show progress using the limited money and authority available to city government, the approach outlined in the memo is more business- and results-oriented than broader strategies used in the past, which relied on federal subsidies and entitlement programs to fight poverty at all levels.

“We must take what we have learned and fashion a realistic set of recommendations that will give more New Yorkers a chance to lift themselves out of poverty,” reads the memo, from Mr. Parsons, Mr. Canada and Deputy Mayor Linda I. Gibbs, who is overseeing the commission. “To have a more powerful impact, rather than spread efforts across the entire population,” the memo suggests focusing on children younger than 6, people 16 to 24, and the working poor.

To Cut Poverty, Panel Advises a Narrow Focus
By DIANE CARDWELL

Leaders of a mayoral commission charged with working to eradicate poverty in New York City are scaling back wider ambitions to instead focus on helping three distinct populations: young children, young adults and the working poor.

Star Warrior
If Reagan had his way on SDI, threats form North Korea and Iran would loom smaller today.
BY MELANIE KIRKPATRICK
Saturday, August 26, 2006 12:01 a.m.

ARLINGTON, Va.--In his 1983 "Star Wars" speech, Ronald Reagan famously asked, "What if free people could live secure in the knowledge . . . that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil?

Fast forward to this summer. On July 4 North Korea test-fired a long-range ballistic missile believed capable of reaching the continental U.S. The launch was a flop--the Taepodong 2 fizzled before it got off the ground--but to echo Reagan's question, what if? What would have happened if Pyongyang's missile had been heading toward Los Angeles? Could we have shot it down? "I'm confident that we could have," states Lt. Gen. Henry "Trey" Obering III, director of the Missile Defense Agency. "If that missile had proceeded to threaten Hawaii or the continental United States, then we would have had the ability to shoot it down. I'm confident the system would have worked."

Prosecutors have said that Bloom stood at the center of a conspiracy in which he paid more than $2 million in bribes to officials who managed Iraq reconstruction in exchange for contracts for his companies. Hopfengardner, 46, of Fredericksburg, was responsible for managing various reconstruction projects in south-central Iraq starting in November 2003.

In return for contracts related to the building of a police academy and training center, Bloom sent Hopfengardner about $175,000 in laundered money and bought him a GMC Yukon Denali sport-utility vehicle, prosecutors say. Hopfengardner also received the motorcycle, a $5,700 watch and a computer as part of the deal.

Reservist Pleads Guilty in Iraq Bribery Scheme
By Griff Witte
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 26, 2006; D01

A lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve yesterday became the first military officer to plead guilty in a wide-ranging bribery scheme involving funds intended for Iraq's reconstruction, the Justice Department said.

The Pentagon has five geographic Unified Combatant Commands around the world and responsibility for Africa is awkwardly divided among three of those: European Command, Pacific Command and Central Command — which is also responsible for running the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Exclusive: The Pentagon Plans for an African Command
The Pentagon is close to approving a command for Africa, where poverty and corruption make it a vulnerable area for extremists and terrorists
By SALLY B. DONNELLY

In what may be the most glaring admission that the U.S. military needs to dramatically readjust how it will fight what it calls 'the long war,' the Pentagon is expected to announce soon that it will create an entirely new military command to focus on the globe's most neglected region: Africa.

Roskam sneers at the street products in the United States, which he considers overpriced and badly blended. But he acknowledges there’s one feature in the American market he can’t compete with.

“Drugs are just less interesting here,” he said. “One of my best friends here never smoked cannabis, never wanted to even try my products. Then when she was 32 she went to America on holiday and smoked for the first time. I asked her why, and she said: ‘It was more fun over there. It was illegal.’ ”

[TS] The Czars’ Reefer Madness
By JOHN TIERNEY

AMSTERDAM

Arjan Roskam, the creator of the award-winning marijuana blend named “Arjan’s Haze,” has dozens of pictures of celebrity visitors on the wall of his coffee shop in Amsterdam. He’s got Eminem, Lenny Kravitz, Alicia Keys, Mike Tyson — but so far, unfortunately, not a single White House drug czar.

Yeah, I'm impressed.

That a Black person is one one side and a white person is on the other does not automatically give an issue a racial aspect.

“This is really not about race,” Ms. Todd said in a telephone interview as she traveled to Montgomery for the hearing. “This is about Joe Reed controlling the party and trying to get his way, and he’s just a bully.”

Issues of Race and Sex Stir Up Alabama Election
By SHAILA DEWAN

MONTGOMERY, Ala., Aug. 24 — When Patricia Todd won the Democratic primary runoff for a seat in the Alabama Legislature last month, the big news might have been her sexual orientation. With no Republican opponent, Ms. Todd seemed poised to become what political observers said would be the first openly gay officeholder in state history.

Several current and former officials said that they doubted the investigation would lead to sanctions against Israel but that the decision to proceed with it might be intended to help the Bush administration ease criticism from Arab governments and commentators over its support of Israel’s military operations. The investigation has not been publicly announced; the State Department confirmed it in response to questions.

Look at this map and tell me an investigation with no sanctions is really going to help public opinion of the USofA in the Middle East.

Inquiry Opened Into Israeli Use of U.S. Bombs
By DAVID S. CLOUD

Yesterday on Washington Journal I say the most amazingly paranoid statement ever made in public. Watch this clip and understand what is being advised.

Russell Simmons Sells Out?

Why is hip hop entrepreneur and emerging progressive leader Russell Simmons supporting Michael Steele over Josh Rales to represent Maryland in the U.S. Senate. Rales has a clear and strong progressive platform. Steele's recent TV commercial shows off his immense charisma and manages to say nothing about his actual positions. Apparently he is going to "talk straight" in Washington about the things people really care about. That sounds great -- and very open to interpretation.

Because I can't legally drop the whole op-ed on you and am less pleased with Mr. Zinsmeister than even Mr. Frank here, the Quote of Note is every link in the editorial. I'm sureyou can find the full text out there somewhere.

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/MonaCharen/2006/05/26/
a_great_pick_by_bush
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0312.wallace-wells.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/
2006/06/12/AR2006061201479_pf.html
http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleid.16200/article_detail.asp
http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleid.16057/article_detail.asp
http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleid.17122/article_detail.asp
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=American_Enterprise_Institute
#Personnel
http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.6073/pub_detail.asp
http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleid.17148/article_detail.asp
http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleid.16192/article_detail.asp
http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleid.16307/article_detail.asp
http://www.taemag.com/issues/issueID.153/toc.asp
http://www.pinballrebel.com/game/cola/ads/coke/coke4.htm

[TS] Thus Spake Zinsmeister
By THOMAS FRANK

In their more grandiloquent moments, conservative publicists will say that the decades-long Republican ascendancy in American government has been an intellectual achievement, that the G.O.P. prevails because it is the “party of ideas.” And, indeed, during the last three decades a cottage industry of conservative institutes and foundations has grown into a powerful quasi-academy with seven-figure budgets and phalanxes of “senior fellows” and “distinguished chairs.”

While real academics dither and fret over bugbears like certainty and balance, the scholars of the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute act boldly in the knowledge, to quote a seminal conservative text, that ideas have consequences. Luckily, the consequences are for other people.

Now upon the national stage steps one Karl Zinsmeister, formerly the editor of the American Enterprise Institute’s flagship magazine and now the president’s chief domestic policy adviser. In right-wing circles he is regarded as an intellectual heavyweight. What his career really shows us, though, is the looming exhaustion of the conservative intellectual system; its hopeless addiction to dusty, crumbling clichés; and a blindness to the reality of conservative power so persistent and so bizarre that it amounts to self-deception or, in Zinsmeister’s case, delusion.

Though it is a natural development give the rhetoric of the Bushistas and their supporters, you gotta worry about the title.

The Perils Of Using 'The Allies'
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, August 25, 2006; Page A17

The cowboy has been retired. Multilateralism is back. Diplomacy is king. That's the conventional wisdom about George W. Bush's second term: Under the influence of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the administration has finally embraced "the allies."

This is considered a radical change of course. It is not. Even the most ardent unilateralist always prefers multilateral support under one of two conditions: (1) There is something the allies will actually help accomplish or (2) there is nothing to be done anyway, so multilateralism gives you the cover of appearing to do something.

I write stuff like this.

Mr. Sowell lines up the standard dominoes...if Iran develops its own nuclear technology, they will create nuclear bombs for terrorists to attack us with. I'm not going to dispute that...logic for the moment. I'm saying the real problem is it gets easier and easier to manipulate some pretty destructive forces.

The USofA will have to learn how to operate in a world where powers it really wants to consider insignificant have the ability to inflict significant damage. The real problem will come to those who refuse to accept and adapt to that change.

The Nation writes stuff like this.

Anyone who wants to write about the constitutional crisis unfolding in the United States today faces a peculiar problem at the outset. There is a large body of observations that at one and the same time have been made too often and yet not often enough--too often because they have been repeated to the point of tedium for a minority ready to listen but not often enough because the general public has yet to consider them seriously enough. The problem for a self-respecting writer is that the act of writing almost in its nature promises something new. Repetition is not really writing but propaganda--not illumination for the mind but a mental beating. Here are some examples of the sort of observations I have in mind, at once over-familiar and unheard:

Blackwater argued in its appeal that the four men "were performing a classic military function...with authorization from the Office of the Secretary of Defense that classified their missions as 'official duties' in support of the Coalition Provisional Authority" and therefore any court, federal or state, "may not impose liability for casualties sustained in the battlefield in the performance of these duties." In other words, because Blackwater was supporting the occupation with its forces, the company is immune from damages or lawsuits. The court said this argument "proves too much" to permit, saying Blackwater's "constitutional interpretations" were "too extravagantly recursive for us to accept."

Blackwater Shot Down in Federal Court
by JEREMY SCAHILL

He also noticed The National Review is equally, if subordinately, insane.

It is tempting to dismiss insanity like that spewing forth from Williams because, well, because it's so insane, patently so. Some ideas are so self-evidently outrageous that even analyzing them rationally is impossible. If there is any such "idea" which clearly qualifies, it would be using nuclear weapons to offensively eradicate a country which has not attacked us. Even suggesting that is monstrous and dangerous (isn't that supposedly what makes the Iranian president so evil, so Hitlerian -- that he openly speaks of eradicating Israel from the map?).

The Swash 800 doesn't have every bell and whistle of the top-of-the-line Toto models. For instance, it doesn't automatically raise and lower the toilet seat. But, like its rivals, it has three main features. The first are retractable, automated wands that spray water to cleanse the relevant body areas. The second is a warm air blower that dries those same spots. The third is a heated seat.

We test a digital commode that washes, dries
By WALTER S. MOSSBERG Wall Street Journal
2006-08-23

(AP) - The bathroom has been one of the few places people frequent where digital technology hasn't taken over. Most people use toilets more often than iPods, yet the humble American commode has remained as low tech as things get, essentially a combination of pipes, levers and flaps.

Problems with touchscreen machines slow vote count
By MATT VOLZ
The Associated Press
Published: August 23, 2006
Last Modified: August 23, 2006 at 12:35 PM

Problems with Alaska’s new touchscreen voting machines slowed election returns Tuesday and caused elections officials to hand count and manually upload vote totals from several precincts across the state.

Election coordinator Lauri Wilson said several Diebold touchscreen machines in Southeast Alaska, the Interior and near Nome did not upload their votes into the Division of Elections’ central computing system. The machines’ modems either did not get a dial tone or had other problems, Wilson said.

It's really that simple.

WILL THE WEST DEFEND ITSELF?

Does the United States have the power to eliminate terrorists and the states that support them? In terms of capacity, as opposed to will, the answer is a clear yes.

Think about it. Currently, the U.S. has an arsenal of 18 Ohio class submarines. Just one submarine is loaded with 24 Trident nuclear missiles. Each Trident missile has eight nuclear warheads capable of being independently targeted. That means the U.S. alone has the capacity to wipe out Iran, Syria or any other state that supports terrorist groups or engages in terrorism -- without risking the life of a single soldier...

God's Country?
Walter Russell Mead
Religion has always been a major force in U.S. politics, but the recent surge in the number and the power of evangelicals is recasting the country's political scene -- with dramatic implications for foreign policy. This should not be cause for panic: evangelicals are passionately devoted to justice and improving the world, and eager to reach out across sectarian lines.

I'm going to recommend this article without venturing an opinion on what it says. And I really do recommend it.

Yes I will. But I'll admit Cobb found it first.

At the time Nasrallah was taken, Israeli officials would say only that they had been seeking top-level Hezbollah officials when they sent a 100-member commando force to this city not far from the Syrian border. It was the deepest ground incursion into Lebanon by Israeli forces during the conflict.

Militant leader seized? Nope, it's just a grocer
A Lebanese grocer with the same name as Hezbollah's leader told of his seizure by Israelis, raising questions about Israel's knowledge of the group.
BY LEILA FADEL
McClatchy News Service

BAALBEK, Lebanon - Hassan Dib Nasrallah, a Lebanese grocer, is a slight man with short gray whiskers. He's 54, bald and looks nothing like Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who, at 46, is full-faced with a dark beard.

File this one under "not knowing when to quit."

Unasked Questions
Does Japan have a right to exist as a Japanese state?
BY DAVID E. BERNSTEIN
Thursday, August 24, 2006 12:01 a.m.

A reader, sympathetic to Israel but troubled by its existence as "Jewish state," asks: "Can you point me to any case in any example where you would say '[Country A] has the right to exist as a [Race B] or [Religion C] state?' I can think of numerous claims like this by societies in the past, which are now widely condemned." Actually, many, many countries have an official religion, including not only "backward" countries such as Iran and Saudi Arabia that enforce religious law, but "progressive" liberal bastions such as Norway, Denmark, and Iceland (all Lutheran).

Eugene Volokh:

I'm often a formalist in the sense that I generally think that formal legal characterizations are often worth using. That something is called "speech" should influence the way we treat it, and even if we call other things than speech (e.g., waving a flag, wearing a cross, using sign language) "speech," once this characterization is accepted it may make sense to use it in a broad range of cases. But we should never forget that these labels are metaphorical, otherwise figurative, or just generally imprecise. We should never forget that in law, "X = Y" is often just a shorthand for "X is like Y in certain important ways" or "X should be treated like Y in certain important way," that in certain other ways X and Y can remain quite different, and that therefore treating them as genuinely equal is a recipe for massive error.

It was not clear why Perez's status wasn't discovered when he first faced deportation. Messages left over three days seeking comment on the case from Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Washington were not returned.

Deported man was actually U.S. citizen
Posted 8/23/2006 8:26 AM ET

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — Duarnis Perez became an American citizen when he was 15, but he didn't find out until after he had been deported and then jailed for trying to get back into the country.

He was facing his second deportation hearing when he learned he was already a U.S. citizen. Still, federal prosecutors fought to keep him in custody.

We've long known you can split the embryo in half when it's like four cells and normal development can continue.

WHat gets me is the difference between the stem cell debate in the USofA and that which took place in Europe. Europe's concern wasn't where the cells came from, it was about how much of a human (and which parts) can you swap out without changing the person into a different one. Now THAT'S a worthy debate.

New Method Makes Embryo-Safe Stem Cells
By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 24, 2006; Page A03

Scientists have for the first time grown colonies of prized human embryonic stem cells using a technique that does not require the destruction of embryos, an advance that could significantly reshape the ethical and political debates that have long entangled the research.

Throw their asses in jail...three strikes, all the way!

States list meth offenders on Web
Posted 8/23/2006 12:15 AM ET
By Donna Leinwand, USA TODAY

States frustrated with the growth of toxic methamphetamine labs are creating Internet registries to publicize the names of people convicted of making or selling meth, the cheap and highly addictive stimulant plaguing communities across the nation.

The registries — similar to the sex-offender registries operated by every state — have been approved within the past 18 months in Tennessee, Minnesota and Illinois. Montana has listed those convicted of running illegal drug labs on its Internet registry of sexual and violent offenders since 2003. Meth-offender registries are being considered in Georgia, Maine, Oklahoma, Oregon, Washington state and West Virginia.

This isn't going to be as bad as "Black White," which was designed to be vomitous. and as "social experiments" go I much prefer Beauty and the Geek.

‘Survivor’ to Divide Teams Along Racial Lines
By BILL CARTER

For the first time since it went on the air in 2000, the hit CBS reality television program “Survivor” will divide its teams — or tribes, as they are known on the show — along racial lines.

For the first half of the series this fall, four teams of five members will be made up of blacks, Asian-Americans, Hispanics and whites. They will compete in weekly challenges against each other, and the losing group will have to vote out a member of its own team.

I repeat: Every judge that was a member of an organization that held an "affirmative action bake sale" has to tell us all about how that affects their ability to be impartial.

A Matter of Appearances