v.grate04

* "The Fox network will air a special next month, "Who's Your Daddy?," where a daughter given up for adoption as an infant attempts to guess the identity of her birth father for a $100,000 prize." http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/features/20041216-9999-lz1c16broad.html

* "Peterson joins 641 condemned men and women — more than in any other state — who are still on this glacial conveyor belt to the death chamber. It's a ride that, according to one estimate, costs taxpayers $90 million annually more than incarcerating them for life would. Now why, exactly, did California reinstate capital punishment?" http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-peterson15dec15,1,4899429.story?coll=la-news-comment-editorials

* "Somebody at the White House had better turn the color-coded security alert system some other color than green when it comes to vetting Cabinet members, at least for the post of secretary of homeland security." http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/203893_keriked.html

* " Start with the fact that in the internal Administration debates over how to try terrorists--which as White House counsel he coordinated--Gonzales makes Ashcroft look like a voice of reason. According to a detailed behind-the-scenes account by Tim Golden for the New York Times, Ashcroft advocated trying terrorists in the criminal justice system and warned that the procedures for military tribunals would be seen as "draconian." Gonzales sided with the extremists." dvl ya know. http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041206&s=cole

* "Senior Republicans sounded out Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, about taking over from John Snow as US Treasury secretary, the Financial Times has learnt." http://news.ft.com/cms/s/352e01f2-4f01-11d9-9488-00000e2511c8.html

* "And people who are more religious, according to these surveys, tend to be stronger supporters of actions that limit the civil rights of Muslims. Forty-two percent who identified themselves as highly religious said they believed Muslims should be required to register their whereabouts with the government. (Of those who said they have a "low level of religiosity,"... A vast majority of Republicans support indefinite detentions of terrorism suspects: 76 percent. Still, 54 percent of the Democrats also favor the lock-'em-up-without-due-process approach. Half of Republicans want the government to prohibit the media from reporting criticisms of the president or covering antiwar protests." http://www.davidcorn.com/2004/12/locki_up_muslim.php

* " I believe that that the voting system has serious flaws that call into question the integrity of the system. But I have argued that those who definitively claim the election was stolen from John Kerry--due to vote-count fraud, massive voter suppression efforts, or rigged voting machines--have overstated the available and known facts. The recent news from Ohio, though, does support the most conspiratorial suspicions." http://www.davidcorn.com/2004/12/the_latest_oddi.php