Jurors in the Zacarias Moussaoui trial heardlast week the tape from the cockpit voice recorder of United Airlines Flight 93. The transcript is chilling. Here are some excerpts from the final minutes before the airplane crashed in a Pennsylvania field, killing everyone on board.
09:58:57 (Terrorist) They want to get in there. Hold, hold from the inside. Hold from the inside. Hold.
10:00:25 (A passenger) In the cockpit. If we don’t, we’ll die.
10:01:08 (Terrorist) Is that it? I mean, shall we pull it down?
10:01:09 Yes, put it in it, and pull it down.
10:01:16 Cut off the oxygen.
10:02:18 Down, down.
10:03:09 Allah is the Greatest. Allah is the Greatest.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
More and more retired generals are calling for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to go. But because it seems like President Bush doesn’t want to fire Rumsfeld and Congress doesn’t want to censure Bush, a Los Angeles Times commentary suggests a third way: Congress could censure Rumsfeld. The commentary makes this suggestion and others to frustrated Democrats, noting that the U.S. House censured President Lincoln’s secretary of war, Simon Cameron, in 1862 on corruption grounds.
It’s more likely that Bush will give Rummy a Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Unfortunately, it often takes events such as the recent shooting at QuikTrip and the Kaufman case to bring to light the flaws in our mental health care system. Pete Earley — who watched his bipolar son travel through the system in Florida and elsewhere — addresses the problems he saw in the new book “Crazy: A Father’s Search Through America’s Mental Health Madness.”
I have not yet read Earley’s book, but he concludes that this country needs to return to some form of the state hospital system — providing something other than jails that can house people with severe mental illnesses. I’m not yet sure if that is the right approach, but he is right that the system needs changing. He spoke to Salon.com about our system:
“What we’re really doing is we’re re-creating old state asylums in jails. You follow me?
“What makes me angry is that we decided the old asylums were horrible places, so we shut them down in favor of community treatment centers. And, unfortunately, even though that sounds good, community-based treatment centers are not equipped to take care of people with severe mental illnesses. So what’s happened? Well, we’re dumping people in nursing homes, we’ve dumped them in rest homes, we’ve dumped them in awful assisted living facilities. . . .
“I’m not saying that the old asylums were good, because they weren’t, but the point is, have we really helped or changed these people’s lives? We haven’t. We’ve simply hidden them better.”
Posted by Melissa Cooley
I’ve become readdicted to NBC’s “The West Wing” this season, just in time to see a new president elected and the series come to an end next month. The Democratic Texas congressman played by Jimmy Smits beat Alan Alda’s Republican California senator to narrowly win the election in last Sunday’s episode, in part, according to a New York Times article, because producers thought it would be overkill for Smits to lose both the election and his running mate (series veteran John Spencer, who died in December and whose character died on election night). I was rooting for Alda, who has been amazingly persuasive playing a moderate Republican buffeted by the conservative forces in his party. When he lost, I thought what many viewers no doubt did — that Hollywood could not bring itself to give a Republican a break.
Something else in the Times story was worthy of praise: why Martin Sheen, the series’ Democratic president for the past seven years and Iraq war critic in real life, recently declined an invitation to run as a Democrat for U.S. Senate in his native Ohio: “I’m just not qualified,” he told Ohioans. “You’re mistaking celebrity for credibility.” Too bad more celebs don’t see it that way.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Rep. Dale Swenson (in photo), R-Wichita, stopped by the other day to show us what he did with some of the $3,175 in campaign contributions he received from gambling interests — sent out a questionnaire to 5,000 constituents on a range of issues. The responses on the 500 he got back were pretty much what he expected from his working-class southwest Wichita district, with one exception: 68 percent said they would support expanded gambling. When Swenson last polled his district, upon his election 12 years ago, more than 60 percent of those who responded wanted no more gambling, and some added a note advocating that the lottery be abolished.
Of course, the needle may be moving on this issue among the public, as more people gamble at tribal and out-of-state casinos, but most of those in the Legislature still couldn’t care less.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
IMMIGRANT GROUPS WAVE CANADIAN FLAGS AT RALLIES; ‘We’re Still Trying to Get This Right,’ Admits Marcher
SCIENTISTS: FRED PHELPS MISSING LINK IN EVOLUTIONARY CHAIN; Cold-Blooded Preacher Related to Prehistoric Species of Reptile Once Thought Extinct
WSU OFFERS TURGEON $1 BILLION SALARY; As Long as He Agrees to Do No More Spangles Commercials
Posted by Randy Scholfield
