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http://www.nypost.com/php/pfriendly/print.php?url=http://www.nypost.com/seven/10152006/postopinion/opedcolumnists/right_vs__right_opedcolumnists_ryan_sager.htm
RIGHT VS. RIGHT
By RYAN SAGER
October 15, 2006 -- WITH less than a month to go before Election Day, thelast thing the Republican Party needs is major. But as the GOP's supportsags, especially among churchgoers, that's just what's breaking out.
The gap between the Bible-thumpers and the tax-cutters is nothing new. Eversince the Religious Right hit the polls in the late 1970s and early 1980s,there's been a tension built into the Republican coalition. The party needsreligious voters to win elections, but many in its establishment areembarrassed to be associated with, and annoyed to have to put up with, whatthey see as a bunch of fundamentalist rubes. In turn, those votersperpetually feel shortchanged and disrespected.
A quick look at the polls shows that religious voters are feeling especiallyleft in the cold by the GOP this fall: Whereas weekly churchgoers favoredPresident Bush over Democrat John Kerry by 58 percent to 41 percent in 2004,they're splitting dead-even right now as to which party they favor to winCongress.
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http://www.palmbeachpost.com/opinion/content/opinion/epaper/2006/10/15/a2e_playtime_edit_1015.html
Time to let kids be kids
Palm Beach Post Editorial
Sunday, October 15, 2006
The American Academy of Pediatrics has been giving Americans advice onraising their children since 1930, so it seems a little late in the game toendorse play.
The AAP could have told parents 76 years ago what it told them this month:Do your kids a favor and leave them alone now and then.
The academy's researchers found too many teens are being treated forstress-related illnesses - headaches, chest pains, eating disorders andpsychological problems - that owe their origins to pushy parents who turnchildhood into early adulthood. Children today suffer from too much structure. There's too much homework, organized activities, high-pressuresports, high-stakes testing and over-supervised social events. What'smissing, the AAP says, is free time when kids can play and just be kids.
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http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/nationworld/sfl-airaqawol15oct15,0,7282934.story
Soldier who went AWOL is sentenced
Conscience drove him to leave, he says
By Laurie Goodstein
The New York Times
October 15, 2006
FORT BRAGG, N.C. · Sgt. Ricky Clousing went to war in Iraq because, he said,he believed he would simultaneously be serving his nation and serving God.
But after more than four months on the streets of Baghdad and Mosulinterrogating Iraqis rounded up by American troops, Clousing said he beganto believe that he was serving neither.
He said he saw American soldiers shoot and kill an unarmed Iraqi teenager,and rode in an Army Humvee that sideswiped Iraqi cars and shot an old man'ssheep for fun -- both incidents Clousing reported to superiors. He said hiswork as an interrogator led him to conclude that the occupation was creatinga cycle of anti-American resentment and violence. After months ofsoul-searching on his return to Fort Bragg, Clousing, 24, failed to reportfor duty one day.
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The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/13/AR2006101301393_pf.html
A Conversation With John Kerry
Interview by Bob Woodward
Sunday, October 15, 2006; B04
In the months before the 2004 presidential election, The Washington Post's Bob Woodward sought to interview Sen. John F. Kerry, the Democratic nominee, about how he might have conducted foreign policy in the 18 months between Sept. 11, 2001, and the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. For his book "Plan of Attack," Woodward had interviewed President Bush on how and why he made decisions during that same period.
Woodward gave the Kerry campaign a list of 22 questions based on Bush's actions, asking how Kerry would have responded at each key decision point if he had been president. Kerry declined the interview at the time. More than a year later, on March 7, Kerry agreed to be interviewed by Woodward and answer the 22 questions. Below is an edited version of their two-hour conversation .
ON PLANNING FOR WAR
John Kerry: Let me start at the beginning, because if I were president and we had been attacked as we were attacked on 9/11, I would have, first of all, created a kind of war cabinet similar to what other presidents have done historically, going back to Roosevelt and others. . . .
Now, you may have an executive committee within that . . . like President Kennedy did. But your war cabinet itself needs to be especially plugged in . . . so the right questions are on the table and the right questions are asked and the right discussion takes place. I mean, if you go back and look at Eisenhower, Eisenhower is smart in that he played less than fully briefed, so to speak, and he would let the staff fight it out in front of him and not let on what he believed or where he wanted to go. I think it's particularly important presidentially not to indicate your policy right up front unless there's such a clarity to it. For instance, in response to 9/11, there's clarity. We've got to go kill al-Qaeda. . . . In fact, I would have thought about starting that war differently.
Bob Woodward: In what way?
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The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/15/world/europe/15schools.html?pagewanted=print
October 15, 2006
Islamic Schools Test Ideal of Integration in Britain
By ALAN COWELL
LEICESTER, England - The sports hall doubles as a prayer room and dininghall for male teenagers, at other times for young women, but never the twotogether. In the kindergarten, female teachers, warned of an impending visitby a man, draw full facial veils before receiving their guest. When theguest arrives, the children offer a chorus in Arabic: "As salaam aleikum" -peace be upon you.
"Here we can keep ourselves on the path of religion," said Nasir Nathalia, a15-year-old student at the Leicester Islamic Academy. His friend MohammedSeedat agrees. "There is less chance here of going off the track," he said.
This is the piety that Britain's expanding Islamic schools seek to project,casting themselves as typical of the thousands of faith schools, mainlyChristian, that make up roughly one-third of all publicly financed Britishschools.
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The New York Times
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/10/15/opinion/15brooks.html?pagewanted=print
October 15, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
A Moral Philosophy for Middle-Class America
By DAVID BROOKS
Some people are religious conservatives, who believe that policies shouldalign with the transcendent moral order of the universe. Other people aresocial libertarians, who believe government should be neutral on valuesissues, and individuals should be guaranteed their own private space to workout their own solutions to moral questions.
But others of us are social traditionalists. We differ from the religiousconservatives in that we're not sure about a transcendent moral order.Furthermore, we think it's both too sectarian and too lofty to try topattern government policies on God's law.
We also disagree with the social libertarians. We don't think government canbe neutral on values issues. Nations are held together by shared beliefs.People flourish because they have been encouraged by society to adoptcertain habits and behaviors. It's a chimera to believe individuals come upwith solutions to moral questions alone; human beings are social creatureswhose actions and views are profoundly shaped by the social fabric thatbinds them.
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The New York Times
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/10/15/opinion/15kristof.html?pagewanted=print
October 15, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Looking for Islam's Luthers
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Islam sometimes comes across the airwaves in the West as the faith ofmedieval fanatics wielding swords and wearing explosive vests. Westerndoubts are bolstered when the pope accuses Islam of violence andfundamentalists protest by killing a nun.
But the public images of Islam we sometimes see - the violence in the nameof God, the intolerance, the obsession with the past - represent only somestones in a complex mosaic. And those images can't explain why Islam appearsto be in percentage terms the fastest-growing major religion in the worldtoday.
Islam is on the rise for many of the same reasons evangelical Christianityis surging: they provide a firm moral code, spiritual reassurance andorderliness to people vexed by chaos and immorality around them, and theyoffer dignity to the poor.
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The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/15/opinion/15sun1.html?pagewanted=print
October 15, 2006
Editorial
Guilty Until Confirmed Guilty
When President Bush rammed the bill on military commissions throughCongress, the Republicans crowed about creating a process that would betough on terrorists but preserve essential principles of justice. "Americacan be proud," said Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the bill's architects.
Unfortunately, Mr. Graham was wrong. One of the many problems with the newlaw is that it will only make it harder than it already is to separate thereal terrorists from the far larger group of inmates at Guantánamo Bay whowere bit players in the Taliban or innocent bystanders. Mr. Graham and othersupporters of this dreadful legislation seem to have forgotten that Americanjustice does not merely deliver swift punishment to the guilty. It alsoprotects the innocent.
Mr. Bush ignored that fact after 9/11, when he tried to put the prisoners ofthe war on terror beyond the reach of American law and the GenevaConventions.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/15/us/15census.html?ei=5094&en=48d4d829974274d5&hp=&ex=1160884800&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print
The New York Times
October 15, 2006
It's Official: To Be Married Means to Be Outnumbered
By SAM ROBERTS
Married couples, whose numbers have been declining for decades as a proportion of American households, have finally slipped into a minority, according to an analysis of new census figures by The New York Times.The American Community Survey, released recently by the Census Bureau, found that 49.7 percent, or 55.2 million, of the nation's 111.1 million households in 2005 were made up of married couples - with and without children - just shy of a majority and down from more than 52 percent five years earlier.
The numbers by no means suggest marriage is dead or necessarily that a tipping point has been reached. The total number of married couples is higher than ever, and most Americans eventually marry. But marriage has been facing more competition. A growing number of adults are spending more of their lives single or living unmarried with partners, and the potential social and economic implications are profound.
"It just changes the social weight of marriage in the economy, in the work force, in sales of homes and rentals, and who manufacturers advertise to," said Stephanie Coontz, director of public education for the Council on Contemporary Families, a nonprofit research group. "It certainly challenges the way we set up our work policies."
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http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Obit-Studds-Quotes.html?pagewanted=print
The New York Times
October 14, 2006
Reaction to Death of Former Rep. Studds
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:45 p.m. ET
Reaction to the death of former Rep. Gerry Studds, D-Mass.:
''Gerry's leadership changed Massachusetts forever and we'll never forgethim. His work on behalf of our fishing industry and the protection of ourwaters has guided the fishing industry into the future and ensured thatgenerations to come will have the opportunity to love and learn from thesea. He was a steward of the oceans.''
-- U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass.
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''No one fought harder for human rights, particularly in Latin America; forour environment; and for the fishermen of New England and the entire nation. He was a true pioneer.''
-- U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., whose wife, Lisa, once worked as an aide
to Studds.
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''Gerry often said that it was the fight for gay and lesbian equality thatwas the last great civil rights chapter in modern American history. He didnot live to see its final sentences written, but all of us will forever beindebted to him for leading the way with compassion and wisdom. He gavepeople of his generation, of my generation, and of future generations thecourage to be who they are.''
-- Dean Hara, who married Studds in 2004.
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''Gerry was a stalwart champion of New England's fishing families as well asa committed environmentalist who worked hard to demonstrate that the causeof working people and the cause of the environment go hand in hand with theright leadership. When he retired from Congress, he did not retire from thecause, continuing to fight for the fishing industry and New England'senvironmental causes.''
-- U.S. Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass.
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http://www.local10.com/news/10077337/detail.html?treets=mia&tml=mia_natlbreak&ts=T&tmi=mia_natlbreak_1_12590110142006
UN Security Council Imposes Sanctions On North Korea
POSTED: 1:22 pm EDT October 14, 2006
UPDATED: 1:53 pm EDT October 14, 2006
UNITED NATIONS -- The United Nations Security Council has unanimouslyadopted a resolution imposing sanctions on North Korea for its claimednuclear test.
The vote took place early Saturday afternoon.
The resolution demands North Korea eliminate all its nuclear weapons butexpressly rules out military action against the country -- a demand by theRussians and Chinese. The Americans also eliminated a complete ban on thesale of conventional weapons; instead, the resolution limits the embargo tomajor hardware such as tanks, warships, combat aircraft and missiles.
U.S. Ambassador John Bolton said before the vote that it's important torespond as swiftly as possible to North Korea's claim that it has tested anuclear weapon.
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