Gore brings inconvenient message to Congress

Submitted on March 21, 2007 - 5:20pm.

Kayla Webley
Scripps Howard Foundation Wire

WASHINGTON - Movie stars often champion favorite causes on Capitol hill. But it’s the rare movie star who was once a member of the very committees holding the hearing.

And when the star is former vice president Al Gore, Congress listens.

Gore spoke before House and Senate committee hearings Wednesday, urging Congress to find a bipartisan solution to the climate crisis.

“Our world faces a true planetary emergency,” Gore said. “What we’re facing now is a crisis that is by far the most serious we’ve ever faced. The way we’re going to solve it is by asking you on both sides of the aisle to do what some people have, as you know, begun to fear we don’t have the capacity to do anymore. I know they’re wrong.”

Gore’s lecture about the environment became a movie and won an Academy Award last month.
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Women can’t catch enough ZZZs

Submitted on March 6, 2007 - 5:42pm.

Kayla Webley
Scripps Howard Foundation Wire

WASHINGTON - College student Crystal Broadwater can’t fall asleep until 3 or 4 in the morning. It isn’t that she doesn’t want to go to bed earlier, she just can’t.

“Sometimes I wish I could go to sleep before then, but my body says no,” she said.

Broadwater, 23, has to wake up for class or her job as a pharmacy tech at CVS by 8 or 9 a.m., giving her just four or five hours in bed a night.

Broadwater isn’t alone. According to a study by the National Sleep Foundation, more than half of American women say they get a good night’s sleep only a few days a week or less.

“American women are not sleeping well, and that is affecting all aspects of their life,” said Kathryn Lee, a professor of family health care nursing at the University of California, San Francisco, who worked on the study.
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Washington state’s federal-state officials disagree on impeachment

Submitted on March 1, 2007 - 5:18pm.

Kayla Webley
Scripps Howard Foundation Wire

WASHINGTON - While the Washington state Senate is set to discuss whether Congress should impeach the president, four of the state’s representatives in Congress say the answer is already a no.

The Washington state Senate’s Government Operations and Elections Committee plans to hear the Senate Joint Memorial 8016, sponsored by Sen. Eric Oemig, D-Kirkland, on Thursday.

The memorial would call on Congress to investigate the activities of President Bush and Vice President Cheney, specifically their justification for the invasion of Iraq.

Washington Democrats U.S. Sen. Patty Murray and Rep. Jay Inslee have said that, while they are not in favor of Congress taking up impeachment, they are not strongly lobbying against the state’s hearing.

Inslee told a state legislator Feb. 22 that he did not think the impeachment hearing was a “productive thing to do,” said Christine Hanson, Inslee’s press secretary.
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Bush presents Medal of Honor to Vietnam hero

Submitted on March 1, 2007 - 5:11pm.

Kayla Webley
Scripps Howard Foundation Wire

WASHINGTON - Retired Army Lt. Col. Bruce P. Crandall smiled proudly Monday as President Bush fastened the Medal of Honor around his neck.

The Manchester, Wash., man was given the nation’s highest military honor for his bravery on a South Vietnam mission that took place 41 years ago.

“In men like Bruce Crandall, we really see the best of America,” Bush said. “For the soldiers rescued, for the men who came home, for the children they had and the lives they made, America is in debt to Bruce Crandall. It’s a debt our nation can never really fully repay, but today we recognize it as best as we’re able, and we bestow upon this good and gallant man the Medal of Honor.”

Crandall, 74, was joined at the White House East Room ceremony by his wife, Arlene, three sons and three of his grandchildren. Military comrades were also there, including other Medal of Honor recipients.

Unable to attend the ceremony was Ed W. Freeman, Crandall’s partner on the mission. Bush said the Idaho resident was stranded in Iowa by a snowstorm. Freeman was awarded the Medal of Honor in 2001.
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Where there’s smoke, there’s humor in museum show

A cartoon by Gary Markstein, of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, criticizes the tobacco industry for targeting women and children. It is one of 60 on display at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington.
Collection of Dr. Alan Blum

Submitted on February 23, 2007 - 12:16pm.

Kayla Webley
Scripps Howard Foundation Wire

WASHINGTON - A man in a pinstriped suit sits behind his desk, a large smile encompassing his face. His nameplate reads “Big Tobacco.”

Another man tells him that women’s smoking deaths have doubled.

Good news?

It is for him.

“Finally, the focus is off is targeting kids!” he announces triumphantly.

The 2001 cartoon by Gary Markstein of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is one of 60 editorial cartoons in the National Museum of Health and Medicine exhibit “Cartoonists Take Up Smoking.”
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Supreme Court to interpret sentencing guidelines ruling

Submitted on February 20, 2007 - 5:49pm.

Kayla Webley
Scripps Howard Foundation Wire

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court heard two cases Tuesday about how to interpret an earlier decision that made criminal sentencing guidelines advisory.

The arguments questioned how the decision - made two years ago - should be applied. The court ruled in United States v. Booker in 2005 that mandatory federal sentencing guidelines violated the defendant’s Sixth Amendment right to trial by jury by giving judges, rather than juries, the job of determining the length of sentence.

To avoid invalidating the guidelines completely, the court then made the guidelines “advisory,” and directed judges to review sentences for their “reasonableness.”

One of the cases argued Tuesday, Rita v. United States, questioned the reasonableness of Victor Rita’s sentence. A retired Marine and former criminal investigator for the immigration service, Rita, 57, is in poor health due to injuries he sustained while fighting in Vietnam and the Persian Gulf War.

He was convicted of obstructing justice and making false statements in a federal grand jury investigation about the sale of kits for making machine guns. At his trial, his lawyer argued for a sentence below the 33- to 41-month range recommended by the sentence guidelines because of his background. The trial judge imposed a 33-month sentence, a decision later upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Va.
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Rep. Dicks leading trip to Middle East

Submitted on February 20, 2007 - 5:45pm.

Kayla Webley
Scripps Howard Foundation Wire

WASHINGTON - With Congress in recesses for the Presidents Day holiday this week, Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash., is spending his break meeting with leaders and Washington state soldiers in Iraq and four other countries.

In the nine-day trip, Dicks and a team of representatives from both parties will also visit Pakistan, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Germany.

In addition to meeting with foreign leaders, Dicks will meet with soldiers from western Washington. He hopes to meet with members of the Fort Lewis striker brigade, who are deployed in Iraq, and members of the Washington National Guard.

Dicks said he wants to talk to the Washington troops about whether they are getting the training and equipment they need and whether a lack of either is affecting their ability to do their job.

Joining Dicks for his third trip to the Middle East are three members of the defense appropriations subcommittee and two freshman representatives, one of whom served in Afghanistan and one in Iraq.
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Bush praises black leaders at history month celebration

Submitted on February 12, 2007 - 6:54pm.

Kayla Webley
Scripps Howard Foundation Wire

WASHINGTON - President Bush celebrated an audience filled with black leaders Monday - astronauts, sports stars and his own cabinet member Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice - to mark African American History Month.

Bush said he couldn’t think of any better way to celebrate black history than by highlighting the achievements of “ordinary citizens who do unbelievably fine things.”

“Their stories speak a lot louder and a lot clearer than I could have,” Bush said at an East Room speech. “The strength of the African-American community has always lied in the hearts and souls of our citizens, people who refuse to allow adversity to diminish the spirit and extinguish the drive to make America live up to its promise.”

Noting the theme of this year’s African American History Month, “From Slavery to Freedom: Africans in the Americas,” Bush told of the suffering blacks endured and how they overcame adversity.

“Yet despite these assaults on culture and humanity, the children of Africa persevered,” he said.
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Climate debate grows heated during House hearing

Submitted on February 9, 2007 - 4:30pm.

Kayla Webley
Scripps Howard Foundation Wire

WASHINGTON - Boulder researcher Susan Solomon defended her stance on human-caused climate change amid challenges - including a question about her scientific credibility - from House Republicans at a hearing Thursday.

Solomon is co-chair of an international scientific team that released a landmark climate- change study last week in Paris.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report said there is a greater than 90 percent likelihood that human-caused emissions of heat-trapping “greenhouse” gases are to blame for most of the planet’s warming over the past 50 years.

But Republicans on the House Committee on Science and Technology have a different idea.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., submitted a list he said contains the names of “hundreds of scientists who disagree with this concept that climate change is caused by human activity.”
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Washington’s Bainbridge memorial one step closer to reality

Submitted on February 7, 2007 - 4:01pm.

Kayla Webley
Scripps Howard Foundation Wire

WASHINGTON - Rep. Jay Inslee, D-Wash., uttered the Japanese words “nidoto nai yoni,” which mean never let it happen again, as he spoke to House members Tuesday.

Inslee was urging representatives to pass a bill that would give national park status to a site on Bainbridge Island, Wash., from which Japanese Americans were sent to internment camps during World War II.

The measure passed 419-0.

“We will be making a strong American statement … that the power of fear will never again be allowed to overcome the promise of liberty,” said Inslee, who represents Bainbridge Island. “America is a country that makes mistakes, but learns and improves.”

The memorial will commemorate the 227 Bainbridge Island residents who were the first Japanese Americans taken on March 30, 1942, after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 and Civilian Exclusion Order No. 1. More than 100,000 Japanese Americans were held in camps during the war.
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