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Disappointing airplay for the first two singles from the new album by the Dixie Chicks exposes a deep -- and seemingly growing -- rift between the trio and the country radio market that helped turn the group into superstars. "Taking the Long Way," due out May 23, is the band's first album since singer Natalie Maines sparked a major controversy in 2003 by declaring that she was ashamed to hail from the same state as fellow Texan President George W. Bush. Radio boycotts ensued, and many fans abandoned the band. The first single, "Not Ready to Make Nice," peaked at...

China admits 'green' failures By Richard Spencer in Beijing (Filed: 20/04/2006) The Chinese government admitted yesterday that it had failed to meet almost half of the environmental targets it set itself six years ago. Wen Jiabao, the prime minister, owned up after a fortnight in which Beijing has experienced some of its worst pollution for years. He told a national conference on environmental protection that "lack of awareness, insufficient planning, illogical industrial structure and a weak legal framework" were all reasons why the country was falling behind on eight of 20 measures set out in 2000. These included the release...

State water officials on Friday warned of the potential for flooding and levee breaks throughout the San Joaquin Valley as California braced for another wave of storms, with a major system predicted to slam the state by early next week. "We are extremely worried there is a potential for levee failure in the San Joaquin system," said Jay Punia, chief of flood operations for the state Department of Water Resources. "We can't tell you where it will happen. If somebody is living behind a levee in the San Joaquin, they should be extremely cautious." The warning comes as California's rivers...

WASHINGTON, Feb. 1, 2006 – Terrorists have failed repeatedly to meet their objectives in Iraq, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said here today. "They failed to stop the January elections, they failed to stop the drafting of the constitution, they failed to stop the referendum on the constitution, they failed to stop the most recent election, they failed to stop the seating of the parliament, they're going to fail to stop the seating of a new government," Rumsfeld said at a Pentagon news briefing. "They are on the run. ... They have failed in almost everything they have tried to...

After the 2004 election Schwarzenegger met with political advisers to discuss how he could regain momentum. Schwarzenegger had denounced Democratic legislators as "girlie men", vetoed bills pushed by Democrats and tried to unseat Democratic legislators. Despite his failure in legislative elections, Schwarzenegger had emerged with high popularity and had personally intervened to defeat a ballot measure that would have weakened the state's "three strikes" law. How could Schwarzenegger leverage his popularity to move an agenda through a Capitol dominated by Democrats, immune to punishment at the polls, thanks to a 2001 bipartisan gerrymander of legislative districts? The strategy that emerged...

A gross of $11,000 per screen is quite good. If you're an autumn Wide Release, opening on 3500 screens across the country. When a movie opens on only 69 of the nation's largest theaters in a few dozen of the largest cities, with almost all of your target audience within range of those theaters, it's pretty bad. Brokeback Mountain played in fourteen times more theaters this Friday than last Friday, and made less than four times as much money, only $760,000. It looks like the movie will make considerably less than its $15 million budget before the Academy Awards come...

Cindy Sheehan Claims Photos Falsely Implied Her Book Signing was a Flop AP The widely-used book signing picture. By E&P Staff Published: November 29, 2005 12:30 PM ET NEW YORK Antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan and her book publisher are upset about Associated Press and Reuters photos that allegedly presented a misleading impression of her book signing last weekend in Texas. Sheehan, whose soldier son was killed in Iraq, gained wide fame last summer in an antiwar protest near President Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, and then in a march in Washington, D.C. She returned to Crawford last week for a...

BOSTON -- It has become known as one of the most effective TV presidential campaign commercials ever: President Bush consoling a 9-year-old Ohio girl named Ashley whose mother died in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Mr. Bush hugged Ashley at an appearance in Ohio in 2003, holding her close and telling her, "I know that's hard. Are you all right?" The story of Mr. Bush's hug ran in the Cincinnati Enquirer. In June 2004, a group called Progress For America, a conservative pro-Bush group known as a 527 organization, so named for the part of the federal tax code...

WASHINGTON, Sept. 30, 2005 – Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld pointed to this week's open congressional hearings involving the two top generals in Iraq as an opportunity for the world to watch democracy in action. Had the tides been turned, he said, terrorists would have had some "awkward" explanations to make. Army Gen. John Abizaid, chief of U.S. Central Command, and Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr., commander of Multinational Force Iraq, were here this week to brief President Bush, the National Security Council and Pentagon leaders about operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the president's request, Abizaid and Casey...

Which kind of intelligence failure is better — the kind that badly understates a threat, such as the one in London, or the kind that overstates a threat, such as the insistent warnings before the invasion of Iraq that Saddam Hussein was armed with weapons of mass destruction? Even in the best intelligence services, failures are sometimes inevitable. Foresight will never be as sharp as hindsight. Only after the fact — after the Underground blows up, after 9/11, after the stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons are nowhere to be found — is it clear what the picture looks like...

2008 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said Friday she was "outraged" that President Bush hasn't spent more money to beef up security on New York City's mass transit system in the wake of Thursday's train bombings in London. "I'm absolutely outraged by the failure of the administration to release the [rail security] funding that Congress approved last year," the top Democrat complained. "We are woefully behind where London and other subway systems are because London does have the video surveillance," she fumed. "I just don't understand what the holdup is." Even before the smoke cleared in London, Clinton was on the...

It is impossible that the Bush tax cuts of June 2003 contributed to relatively lower tax payments by the very richest Americans in 2002. But New York Times writer David Cay Johnston conveniently avoids this fact in his Sunday front-page article, “Richest Leaving Even the Rich Far Behind,” which used tax-payment data that ended in 2002 to extend the class-warfare argument. Is this just more garden-variety Bush-bashing from the newspaper of record? I’d also like to know why Johnston never mentions the fact that the wealthiest Americans suffered the most in the stock market plunge and asset deflation of 2000-02....

It is time again to write our Congresscritters, www.senate.gov & www.house.gov . It is time again to write and call the WhiteHouse, www.whitehouse.gov . It's time to contact the Department of Homeland Security, http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/contactus on the failures and shenianigans of border security. Please encourage your congresscritters to reject Mccain's and Kennedy's new immigration bill that would get the ball rolling on the guest worker program which was tried in 1986 and only worsened the problem. Call the Department of Homeland Security at Operator Number: 202-282-8000 Comment Line: 202-282-8495. What's the latest news on the MinuteMen? I heard they will go...

The Democrats made huge errors in tactics and judgment during the last presidential campaign. But they thought that the patronizing contempt they held – and continue to hold – for the electorate would go unnoticed. Heady with the multimillions pouring into their coffers, with a monopoly on an old media that historically and unfailingly back leftists, and by mistaking their candidate's verbal contortions for substantive policy, they deluded themselves into thinking that the Oval office – as well as the Congress, Senate and a good many governorships – were theirs for the taking. What they failed to grasp was that...

Nationally syndicated talkshow host Dennis Prager interviewed Nancy Soderberg on his show today. She was No. 3 at the NSC in the Clinton administration and is the author of THE SUPERPOWER MYTH: THE USE AND MISUSE OF AMERICAN MIGHT. Where do I begin? She was so misguided, disingenuous, arrogant, and foolish, that I almost had to pull over the DFU mobile to vomit. Among the highlights: - she is proud of the agreement they made with North Korea - she claims that the Iraq war was wrong because Saddam Hussein was not an imminent threat (I was screaming at that...

"SEE NO EVIL " -By Robert Baer- Billed as "The true story of a ground soldier in the CIA's war on terrorism", Robert Baer's very interesting book sheds a great deal of light on the CIA's "culture of failure" : a culture,according to Baer,that led directly to the 9/11 disaster. The CIA,according to Baer,not only abdicated its intelligence-gathering responsibility,it reduced itself -notably during the Clinton administration-to a highly politicized fund-raising group: dedicated to sweeping unpleasant truths under the rug,and punishing anyone unwilling to "get with the program". Sandy Berger (who later pled guilty to theft of documents from the National...

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - California's public schools, once among the best in the nation, now lag behind almost every other state in student achievement, funding, teacher quality and facilities. The state's urban high schools have become "dropout factories," saddled with some of the lowest graduation rates in the United States. And the pay disparity among California teachers means that the best-paid teachers in 42 of the 50 largest districts work in schools that serve the fewest number of black and Hispanic students. Those are just a few of the findings outlined in several recent reports which together paint a grim...

The gridlock in Sacramento has become so bad that the people's business has been turned over to the big money fund-raisers and the manipulators of public opinion. Last week, a Superior Court judge ruled that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger can raise unlimited amounts of cash so he can put directly to voters reform measures that the Democrat-controlled Legislature won't even consider seriously. It essentially sanctions both sides to engage in an unfettered cash-fest from special interests and to spend these fortunes on what almost certainly will be false and misleading advertisements. California is giving up the pretense of a representative democracy....

WHAT? NO JUANITA WING? (librarius infectusannotated) virtualclintonlibrary.blogspot.com by Mia T, 11.15.04 s former President Bill Clinton's libraryis unveiled at a gala opening this week, one thing is certain: His messy legacy will be on full display. hillary talks:ON TERROR (viewing movie requires Flash Player 6, available HERE)  THE DEMOCRATS ARE GONNA GET US KILLED(kerry, clinton + sandy berger's pants) SERlES (viewing movie requires Flash Player 6, available HERE) The Parallel Universe of Jamie GorelickWHY THE LEFT IS DANGEROUS FOR AMERICA   (viewing movie requires Flash Player 7, available HERE)thanx to Fixit for the audio play tape hillary talks:ON CHINA (viewing...

CONSERVATIVE TRUTH 09/06/04 Flip-Flops or Work Boots By Tom Barrett Publisher@ConservativeTruth.org I enjoyed the Republican Convention this week. I endured the Democrat Convention several weeks ago. Those two experiences convinced me of two things: 1) This election may well decide whether or not America survives as a free nation; and 2) Never has there been such stark contrast between two presidential candidates. As to the first, I am really not worried. After Kerry’s ridiculous Convention in which he pathetically tried to make this election about Viet Nam, and Bush’s magnificent Convention in which he and the other speakers laid out...