Forget the ID's for voting. Let's use fingerprinting.

Forget the ID's for voting. Let's use fingerprinting.

Finger printing is being used in Germany in supermarkets. Why not use it to clean up voter fraud?

A friends brother designed a finger print system for a Las Vegas Hotel that was losing money when co-workers let family and friends swipe their work cards for free meals. The finger print scan nuked that scam entirely.

Unfortunately, it isn't fool proof especially when you will see a lot of liberals walking around with nine fingers.

Paying by Fingerprint at the Supermarket

Mon Mar 14,10:31 AM ET

Oddly Enough - Reuters

BERLIN (Reuters) - Customers of a German supermarket chain will soon be able to pay for their shopping by placing their finger on a scanner at the check-out, saving the time spent scrabbling for coins or cards.

An Edeka store in the southwest German town of Ruelzheim has piloted the technology since November and now the company plans to equip its stores across the region.

"All customers need do is register once with their identity card and bank details, then they can shop straight away," said store manager Roland Fitterer.

The scanner compares the shopper's fingerprint with those stored in its database along with account details.

Edeka bosses said they were confident the system could not be abused.

Time for a Kofi Break II

Kofi's Accountability ( From the WSJ)
If he were a CEO, he'd be out on his ear.

Wednesday, March 30, 2005 12:01 a.m.

Following yesterday's publication of Paul Volcker's second interim report on the U.N.'s Oil for Food program, Kofi Annan issued a statement saying "the inquiry has cleared me of any wrongdoing." Later, asked if had any plans to resign, he answered, "Hell no!" Question for the Secretary General: How do you define "wrongdoing"?

In the narrowest sense, Mr. Volcker's Committee found "no evidence" that the Secretary General influenced the U.N.'s 1998 selection of Swiss inspections company Cotecna for an Oil for Food contract. It also found that "the evidence is not reasonably sufficient to show that the Secretary-General knew that Cotecna had submitted a bid on the humanitarian inspection contract in 1998."

In a broader sense, however, what Mr. Volcker's report reveals is an "adverse finding" against the Secretary General: That is, patterns of willful neglect, conflict of interest and incompetence that would have any business CEO out on his ear.

Consider just a few salient details that emerge from the 90-page report. In November 2004, Mr. Volcker's Committee asked Mr. Annan if he had ever met Cotecna's owner Elie Massey prior to the U.N.'s awarding the inspection contract in December 1998. Mr. Annan said he had met Mr. Massey only once, and briefly, in Geneva in late 1999.

In fact, Mr. Annan had met Mr. Massey twice before the contract was awarded. The first time, in February 1997, he and Mrs. Annan met privately with Mr. Massey and his wife for evening cocktails in Davos, Switzerland, on the sidelines of a meeting of the World Economic Forum. The second time, Mr. Annan met with Mr. Massey privately in his office in New York, apparently to discuss a lottery scheme to raise money for the U.N.

In a subsequent interview with the Committee, Mr. Annan remembered "brief encounters" with Mr. Massey, the purposes of which he could not precisely recall. But given that Mr. Annan's schedule in Davos was otherwise cluttered with meetings with world leaders, why would he choose to spend his dinner hour in the company of a relatively obscure businessman, save for the fact that Mr. Annan's son Kojo was employed by him?

Or consider Mr. Annan's September 1998 luncheon in Durban with Kojo and French businessman Pierre Mouselli. As we reported yesterday--and as the Volcker report confirms--Mr. Mouselli had sought and obtained the meeting with the senior Annan as a prerequisite for going into business with Kojo. In Mr. Mouselli's recollection, he and Kojo discussed Cotecna with the Secretary General, along with their other business plans.

In his meeting with the Committee, the Secretary General initially acknowledged only a brief encounter with his son and Mr. Mouselli. According to the report, "when shown his appointment schedule indicating lunch with 'Kojo & his friend,' the Secretary General stated he did not 'recollect having lunch with Kojo and a friend' and that it was a 'hectic time for me.' The Secretary-General denied that he was present with Kojo Annan and any business associates at any time that Cotecna's business was discussed."

Since Kojo refuses to cooperate with the Volcker Committee (he calls it "part of a broader Republican political agenda"), the question of what was discussed at the Durban lunch is a matter of Mr. Mouselli's word against Mr. Annan's. But we have interviewed Mr. Mouselli and find his testimony convincing--more so than a Secretary General whose memory seems repeatedly to have been "refreshed" by Committee investigators.

Still, the matter of Mr. Annan's credibility as a witness is almost trivial next to what the report reveals about the U.N.'s mismanagement of the Cotecna bid, which is merely symptomatic of its larger management and conflict-of-interest failures.

Throughout Mr. Volcker's investigation, the U.N. has steadfastly maintained that it hired Cotecna because it put in the lowest bid--$499 per man-day rate against $600 for the next-lowest bidder. But as we have previously reported, Cotecna upped its asking price within days of winning the contract without triggering a competitive rebid. Then too, at the time the U.N. awarded the contract to Cotecna Mr. Massey was under criminal investigation by a Swiss magistrate on money laundering charges.

U.N. procurement officials claim to have been ignorant of Cotecna's legal troubles, despite their having been the subject of a front page story in the New York Times. Yet according to the report, Mr. Annan himself had known of the allegations against Cotecna since 1998, but had been reassured by his son that "there was not much to it." And it finds that had there been more than a "one day inquiry" into 1999 news reports that Kojo worked for Cotecna, it is "unlikely that Cotecna would have been rewarded renewals" of its U.N. contracts. The man who ordered that perfunctory probe, Mr. Annan's then-chief of staff Iqbal Riza, shredded potentially relevant documents last year.

What we have summarized here provides merely a taste of the full report, which can be found at http://www.iic-offp.org/documents/InterimReportMar2005.pdf. Anyone who still thinks Mr. Annan has been acquitted of "wrongdoing" would do well to read it, as would anyone who still believes Mr. Annan is fit to lead the United Nations.

Liberals cheered when Janet Reno defied the courts to seize Elian Gonzalez.

JOHN FUND ON THE TRAIL

Selective Restraint
Liberals cheered when Janet Reno defied the courts to seize Elian Gonzalez.

Monday, March 28, 2005 12:01 a.m.

The sad case of Terri Schiavo has raised passions not seen since five years ago. Then another bitterly divided family argued in Florida courts over someone who couldn't speak on his own behalf: Elian Gonzalez.

In both cases, those who were unhappy with the courts' decisions strained to assert the federal government's power to produce a different outcome. The difference is that in Mrs. Schiavo's case, Congress backed off after passing a bill that merely asked a federal court to hear the case from scratch, something that U.S. District Judge James Whittemore declined to do. By contrast, those who wanted the federal government to intervene in Elian Gonzalez's case went all the way, supporting a predawn armed federal raid on the morning before Easter to seize the 6-year-old boy despite a federal appeals court's refusal to order his surrender.

Both cases were marked with hypocrisy and political posturing galore. Both times some conservative Republicans talked about issuing subpoenas to compel the person at the center of the case to appear before Congress; they swiftly backed down when public opinion failed to support their stunt. Rep. Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat, argued that by opposing Elian's return to his father in communist Cuba, conservatives were abandoning the principle that "the state should not supersede the parents' wishes." In the case of Terri Schiavo, many conservatives who normally support spousal rights decided that Michael Schiavo's decision to abandon his marital vows while at the same time refusing to divorce his wife rendered him unfit to override the wishes of his wife's parents to have her cared for.

But liberals have gotten off easy for some of the somersaulting arguments they have made on behalf of judicial independence and states' rights to justify their position that Terri Schiavo should not be saved. Many made the opposite arguments in the Elian Gonzalez case.

Elian was plucked from the ocean off the coast of Florida on Thanksgiving Day 1999. after his mother died in an ill-fated attempt to bring him to freedom. Before he became a political football and Fidel Castro demanded his return, the Immigration and Naturalization Service granted him immigration "parole," which gave him the right to live in the U.S. for one year until his status was determined. Because Elian was underage, his fate would therefore be decided by local family courts. On Dec. 1, the INS issued a statement saying, "Although the INS has no role in the family custody decision process, we have discussed the case with the State of Florida officials who have confirmed that the issue of legal custody must be decided by its state court."

Then the Clinton administration reversed course after protests from the Castro regime reached a fever pitch. On Dec. 9, the INS declared its previous position "a mistake" and said that state courts would not have jurisdiction in Elian's case. They claimed that because Elain was taken directly to a hospital he was therefore never formally paroled into the U.S.--even though he was then turned over to his Miami relatives rather than the INS. "Technically, he was not paroled in the usual sense," said a Justice Department spokesman. But she could come up with no previous case in which a Cuban refugee had had his parole revoked and then had the INS move to return him to Cuba.

But it quickly became clear that was the INS's intent. Over the Christmas holidays the agency dispatched agents to Cuba to interview Elian's father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez. After the interview, Mr. Gonzalez told reporters the agents and an accompanying U.S. diplomat had assured him Elian would be returned. The Clinton administration disputed those statements, although one of the government officials later privately acknowledged they had been made. Nonetheless, INS bureaucrats in Washington quickly determined that a man who had abandoned Elian and his mom for another woman was a "fit parent" who could "properly care for the child in Cuba." No public consideration was given to the fact that his father, a member of the Communist Party, might have been coerced.

If a state court had been allowed to hear the custody case, INS officials would not have been able to testify as to what Mr. Gonzalez told them to support his claim because it would have been hearsay. He would have had to come to the U.S. to testify on his own, subject to cross-examination. Even if the state court had granted him custody, it would have had to decide whether it was in the child's best interest to be returned to Cuba.

That's what Judge Rosa Rodriguez of Florida Family Court, complying with the original INS ruling, tried to do when she ruled in early January 2000 that her court had jurisdiction over the boy and gave Elian's great-uncle legal authority to represent him. Her order contravened an INS ruling that only Elian's father could speak for the boy and that he should be immediately returned to Cuba. Attorney General Janet Reno than promptly declared that Judge Rodriguez's ruling had "no force or effect." At the same time, INS officials assured reporters that under no circumstances did they intend to seize Elian by force.

The stalemate continued for another three months. On Thursday, April 20, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals--the same court that rejected the pleas of Terri Schiavo's parents last week--turned down the Justice Department's request to order Elian removed from the home of his Miami relatives. Moreover, the court expressed serious doubts about the Justice Department's reading of both the law and its own regulations, adding that Elian had made a "substantial case on the merits" of his claim. It further established a record that Elain, "although a young child, has expressed a wish that he not be returned to Cuba."

The Reno Justice Department acted the next day to short-circuit a legal process that was clearly going against it. On Good Friday evening, after all courts had closed for the day, the department obtained a "search" warrant from a night-duty magistrate who was not familiar with the case, submitting a supporting affidavit that seriously distorted the facts. Armed with that dubious warrant, the INS's helmeted officers, assault rifles at the ready, burst into the home of Elian's relatives and snatched the screaming boy from a bedroom closet. Many local bystanders were tear-gassed even though they did nothing to block the raid. Elian was quickly returned to Cuba; because he was never able to meet with his lawyers a scheduled May 11 asylum hearing on his case in Atlanta became moot.

Of course, there are differences between the Gonzalez and Schiavo cases. But clearly many of the people who approved of dramatic federal intervention to return Elian to Cuba took a completely different tack when it came to the argument over saving Terri Schiavo. Rep. Frank makes a compelling argument that Congress took an extraordinary step when it met in special session to create a procedure whereby the federal courts could decide whether Ms. Schiavo's rights were being violated. He may have a point when he accuses Republicans of "trying to command judicial activism and dictate outcomes when they don't like" rulings. But where were Mr. Frank and other liberals when the Clinton administration decided to sidestep a federal appeals court and order an armed raid against Elian Gonzalez? While Mr. Frank allowed that the use of assault rifles in the Elian raid was "excessive" and "frightening," he also defended the Justice Department's view that "of course [agents] had to use force." According to some reports, Gov. Jeb Bush considered seizing Mrs. Schiavo, à la Elian, and taking her to a hospital so she could be fed. But he did not do so. "I've consistently said that I can't go beyond what my powers are, and I'm not going to do it," the governor says. Janet Reno and the Clinton administration showed no such restraint when it came to Elian Gonzalez.

"Johnny Knoxville". Coach Pearl takes Tennesse job.

He had a great 4 years at UWM. His biggest knock was that he ratted out notorious cheat Lou "Mel Brooks" Henson and equally notorious cheat Jimmy Collins some 16 years ago.

The biggest rat is his former mentor, Tom Davis, who never came to Pearl's rescue.

I wish coach Pearl well and how he turns Knoxville into Loxville.

The "Juice-ters" crowed 3 times....

Isn't it ironic that former baseball players were called to testify before Congress regarding substance abuse in baseball on a "National Day" of subtance abuse, St Patrick's Day.

On this Palm Sunday, I was reminded of the story of the rooster crowing 3 times. So did former players and their commissioner when it came to the subject of steriod use in baseball.

I think their silence answers the question.

What ever happened to sportsmanship? by James Bowman of the WSJ

TASTE COMMENTARY

Honor Among Thieves
What ever happened to sportsmanship?

BY JAMES BOWMAN
Friday, March 18, 2005 12:01 a.m.

This week's hearings by the House Committee on Government Reform into steroid use in baseball are only the latest sign of the extent to which the win-at-any-cost ethos dominates Washington. Oh, and professional sports, too.

The official reason for the hearings is to call attention to the fact that younger athletes are learning from their professional-sports heroes how to use steroids and in some cases wrecking their lives as a result. The real reason, of course, is to allow politicians to grandstand and show their "concern"--very late into this long-simmering scandal, even after Major League Baseball itself has changed its look-the-other-way policies. So yesterday the committee's members began lecturing and bullying celebrity athletes, as if the drug-addled pros were to blame only for setting a bad example.

But the blame is bigger than bad "role models," and it has less to do with drugs than with honor.

There is a reason why all the major team sports enjoyed by Americans--as well as the modern Olympics--date from the 19th century. During that century, especially in Britain and America, traditional ideas of honor were undergoing a process of evolution that culminated in the distinctly Western, distinctly Victorian, idea of gentlemanly sportsmanship.

Soccer, known to the rest of the world as "football," goes much further back in time than the other sports--so far, indeed, that in some legends of its origins the ball is said to have been a human head. In medieval and Renaissance times, village football matches were often indistinguishable from riots. When Kent in Shakespeare's "King Lear" calls the loathsome Oswald a "base foot-ball player," he means to say that he is a low-life and an unscrupulous thug, someone who could not be expected to act with decency or decorum.

But in Victorian times, even soccer underwent a process of gentrification, and under Dr. Thomas Arnold, at Rugby School, the modern game of rugby football evolved out of it. (American football evolved out of rugby.) At Dr. Arnold's and other British public--i.e., private--schools, sports were seen as a way of teaching boys the ways of manliness and sportsmanship. Catering to upwardly mobile middle-class boys, these schools--which were imitated in America--were both cause and consequence of honor's democratization. The formerly aristocratic standard of honor was adapting itself to new social realities, with the help of Romantic ideas of chivalry learned from Sir Walter Scott.

In the early years of American football, deaths on the field were also not unusual--it was common to regard the endurance of pain and injury without flinching as character-building. The "injuries incurred on the playing field," said Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge in a speech at Harvard, "are part of the price which the English-speaking race has paid for being world conquerors." President Theodore Roosevelt didn't like the idea of "college men who shrink from physical effort or from a little physical pain," but he urged colleges to get together in 1906 to change the rules of football and outlaw punching, kicking, elbowing and kneeing, among other standard features of the game at the time.

As for baseball, its origins are murkier. A form of it was a popular pastime for Union soldiers during the Civil War, but less so among Confederates. The honor-obsessed South clung to an older standard that thought it shameful to play a game that involved running away from the ball.

As the first and, for a long time, only professional sport in America, baseball had more in common with British soccer than with the gentlemanly game of (college) football. Both were mainly working-class pastimes that did not place a particularly high valuation on gentlemanly behavior. Nevertheless, they too were influenced by the standards of sportsmanship that rubbed off on them from the dominant culture. Without up-to-date notions of Victorian honor, they probably would not have survived.

Central to the New Honor was the never-quite-successful attempt to take away the stigma from losing. Old Honor, with its emphasis on avenging any insult, could never allow a game to end, since the losers would always be bound in honor to strike back at the winners. New Honor invented the notion of losing graciously. Also winning graciously. The way to honorable manhood, wrote Kipling, was clear: "if you can meet with Triumph and Disaster / And treat those two impostors just the same." This attitude marked an epoch in human consciousness and was what made modern amateur and professional sports possible.

Well, the New Honor has taken a beating of late, losing so graciously that almost no one seems to have noticed or cared. Vince Lombardi's famous dictum that "winning isn't everything; it's the only thing" has become the primary ethical standard of all sports. The desire to make money is now the raison d'etre--not only of professional but increasingly of college sports as well.

The steroid scandal captures this quality perfectly. Steroid use, although illegal for such purposes, became rampant in the 1990s because it conferred an unfair advantage on those who were prepared to flout the rules of fair play. And it persisted in a state of collusion and secrecy. A primitive standard of honor took hold: baseball's own version of the code of omertà, according to which players kept their secret and owners allowed them to, all the while reaping profits from the juiced-up game.

Now it's all come undone, but only because of public exposure--mainly in Jose Canseco's recent book, "Juiced," in which he ratted on some of his former teammates while admitting to steroid-use himself--not because of any sense of what is owed to fair play. Canseco now stands to enrich himself as a whistle-blower, as he once did as a steroid-user, and can hardly be counted an honorable example.

Why has the New Honor lost the day? The reasons are complicated--if you say the word "chivalry" to a feminist you'll get an idea. Yet somewhere out of sight New Honor remains the foundation of the big-money spectator sports, and its lingering memory is the reason for the hypocrisy that has produced this week's congressional hearings. Officially, baseball has had to continue to pretend to be founded on the principles of sportsmanship and fair play even though for years it has abandoned them.

Oddly, in the pretense lies a hope: that the ghost of New Honor--the honor of Dr. Arnold and Rudyard Kipling and Teddy Roosevelt--might still retain just enough power to make some of our new-old sports heroes feel ashamed.

Mr. Bowman is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington.

Copyright © 2005 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Bush Announces Iraq Exit Strategy: 'We'll Go Through Iran'

http://www.theonion.com/news/index.php?issue=4110

Thank you "onion"!

"Nostra-Don Mus Driver wrong. Favre to Return!

http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=2009750

Brett Favre is returning to Green Bay for the 2005 season, Packers coach Mike Sherman told The Associated Press.

Sexual Predators deserve a place to live..How about a 10 year trial with Judge Franke?

http://www.jsonline.com/news/metro/mar05/307513.asp

Why don't we have the sexual predators live with the judges and the members of the panels that want to place these predators anywhere but their neighborhoods? Isn't the Jessica Lunsford tragedy evidence enough that these creatures can not be cured?