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steroid use by baseball players

!! Yeah, I was laughing too! Isn't that good news! Hold the propag... errr presses! "The State Department acknowledged Thursday it was wrong in reporting terrorism declined worldwide last year, a finding used to boost one of President Bush's chief foreign policy claims -- success in countering terror. Instead, both the number of incidents and the toll in victims increased sharply, the department said." Here's a more opinionated version of the latest news (Salon, need to watch movie to get in, but if you already did for my other recent link, here you go!). "the analysts who compiled the data on "significant terrorist events" had closed their books for 2003 on a curious date. Instead of including every incident up till Dec. 31, they had included none that occurred after Nov. 11." Doh! One more interesting tidbit. Memo from the Congressional Research Service tabulating the number of Al Qaeda attacks 30 months before and 30 months after 9/11 (4 versus 10, respectively).

Here's a good article on Salon.com (you gotta look at commercial first to gain access).

Gotta love that chalk!

No you're not. He clears the 1 pearl, then it's 5-4-0 YM 4-4-0 He's lost If you were correct, then you could win by starting out clearing the 3 row.

I might head to Smith Rock this weekend.

Should guidebooks be banned? Surely guidebooks are at least as responsible as the existence of bolts for the number of climbers visiting overused crags. They certainly make the climbing easier (i.e. "dumb it down"). The elimination of guidebooks would probably help mitigate the effect of climbers at Eldo, The Gunks, The Valley, RMNP, Indian Creek, J-Tree, Washington Pass, Index, Squamish. More?

I was letting my kid (4 year old) climb in a tree that was sideways. It had fallen down. Perfect rungs. His feet were about 4 feet above the ground. A branch broke and he fell, headfirst onto a concrete driveway. Fractured skull, bleeding in the brain. He almost died. You high and mighty smart guys seem pretty dumb sometimes.

Why don't you out those guys in the "other" state too? Could it be because it is closer to where you live and you'd rather only stir up trouble for climbers in Washington?

Cause every time they bring it up you knuckleheads just fall in line and defend Clinton and forget that the discussion was about Bush.

From: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/09/politics/09TTEX.html JANUARY 2002 A series of memorandums from the Justice Department, many of them written by John C. Yoo, a University of California law professor who was serving in the department, provided arguments to keep United States officials from being charged with war crimes for the way prisoners were detained and interrogated. The memorandums, principally one written on Jan. 9, provided legal arguments to support administration officials' assertions that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to detainees from the war in Afghanistan. JAN. 25 Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel, in a memorandum to President Bush, said that the Justice Department's advice in the Jan. 9 memorandum was sound and that Mr. Bush should declare the Taliban and Al Qaeda outside the coverage of the Geneva Conventions. That would keep American officials from being exposed to the federal War Crimes Act, a 1996 law that carries the death penalty. JAN. 26 In a memorandum to the White House, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said the advantages of applying the Geneva Conventions far outweighed their rejection. He said that declaring the conventions inapplicable would "reverse over a century of U.S. policy and practice in supporting the Geneva Conventions and undermine the protections of the laws of war for our troops." He also said it would "undermine public support among critical allies." FEB. 2 A memorandum from William H. Taft IV, the State Department's legal adviser, to Mr. Gonzales warned that the broad rejection of the Geneva Conventions posed several problems. "A decision that the conventions do not apply to the conflict in Afghanistan in which our armed forces are engaged deprives our troops there of any claim to the protection of the conventions in the event they are captured." An attachment to this memorandum, written by a State Department lawyer, showed that most of the administration's senior lawyers agreed that the Geneva Conventions were inapplicable. The attachment noted that C.I.A. lawyers asked for an explicit understanding that the administration's public pledge to abide by the spirit of the conventions did not apply to its operatives. AUGUST A memorandum from the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department provided a rationale for using torture to extract information from Qaeda operatives. It provided complex definitions of torture that seemed devised to allow interrogators to evade being charged with that offense. MARCH 2003 A memorandum prepared by a Defense Department legal task force drew on the January and August memorandums to declare that President Bush was not bound by either an international treaty prohibiting torture or by a federal anti-torture law because he had the authority as commander in chief to approve any technique needed to protect the nation's security. The memorandum also said that executive branch officials, including those in the military, could be immune from domestic and international prohibitions against torture for a variety of reasons, including a belief by interrogators that they were acting on orders from superiors "except where the conduct goes so far as to be patently unlawful.' APRIL A memorandum from Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld to Gen. James T. Hill outlined 24 permitted interrogation techniques, 4 of which were considered stressful enough to require Mr. Rumsfeld's explicit approval. Defense Department officials say it did not refer to the legal analysis of the month before. DEC. 24 A letter to the International Committee of the Red Cross over the signature of Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski was prepared by military lawyers. The letter, a response to the Red Cross's concern about conditions at Abu Ghraib, contended that isolating some inmates at the prison for interrogation because of their significant intelligence value was a "military necessity," and said prisoners held as security risks could legally be treated differently from prisoners of war or ordinary criminals. OTHER MEMORANDUMS Some have been described in reports in The Times and elsewhere, but their exact contents have not been disclosed. These include a memorandum that provided advice to interrogators to shield them from liability from the Convention Against Torture, an international treaty and the Anti-Torture Act, a federal law. This memorandum provided what has been described as a script in which officials were advised that they could avoid responsibility if they were able to plausibly contend that the prisoner was in the custody of another government and that the United States officials were just getting the information from the other country's interrogation. The memorandum advised that for this to work, the United States officials must be able to contend that the prisoner was always in the other country's custody and had not been transferred there. International law prohibits the "rendition" of prisoners to countries if the possibility of mistreatment can be anticipated. NEIL A. LEWIS

Greg, I think you may be confusing what came out Monday with what MrE is writing about. Monday's note was an internal Pentagon policy paper discussing the issue. Today's deal is a memo from the Bush administration (Justice Department) saying it's OK to torture terrorist suspects.

Hope the FBI does something about this!

The Tooth is primo

Looking at Murray's posting it looks like those closures may not pertain to stuff above Bellygood? Is this the case; i.e., are the portions of the Millenium Falcon and Black Dike that are above Bellygood closed?

IS THERE GONNA BE ENOUGH SNOW ON SOME HI ALTITUDE ROCK CLIMBS THIS WEEKEND TOO MAKE THEM NOT AS MUCH FUN AS SQUAMISH WILL BE? THIMKING WASHINGTON PASS AREA OR MAYUBE ALPINE LAKES, STEWART AREA.

A bit of a tangent, but check out this crazy article I found: the lengthy demise of president Garfield

Could be I'm not understanding Eric8's muddled syntax ( ), but I read it as implying that the 5.9 var will bypass the bear-hug. It won't. In fact, doesn't the 5.9 var just get you to the base of the "nervous 5.6" (#4 won't help you there!). You could bypass the bear hug by doing the Boving Roofs pitch, I think .

I got a feeling we'll be hearing from you again when you try to get your security deposit back! Oh, and what Will said. Try to be reasonable, maybe they'll abide. You've been a good cash cow for a whole year. I'm sure they'd like to keep you happy. This does assume that you haven't been calling them every other month to fix shit. This works well with credit cards by the way. If you're late on your payment and you get charged, most CC companies give you one free take-back, if you ask. Usually the first person you get on the phone is authorized to do this, so it must be pretty easy.

but it does look like he's trying to say something interesting! He probably just didn't have time to actually proofread what he typed since he's studying very hard for finals.

Something tells me that American soldiers will be dying in Iraq for a longer time than Bush will be occupying the White House.

You guys continually seem to want to equate the war on terror with the invasion of Iraq. "Liberals" as well as more and more rank and file Americans recognize these as two distinct agendas, with the former getting less attention than it deserves due to preoccupation with the latter.

Yeah, or unless you're 90% sure that someone's gonna get hurt. And that's HURT, not: get their ropes stuck, get benighted, have a sucky time, or get their pants dirty. Doesn't sound like that was the case above since those guys ended up getting on the same climb .

Good thing you were wearing that helmet!