WASHINGTON | Kansas City icon Buck O’Neil will be posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, the White House announced Thursday.

O’Neil, the longtime Kansas City Monarch who worked tirelessly to ensure the Negro Leagues never would be forgotten, will be among 10 awardees at a White House ceremony next week.

According to the press release, "John `Buck’ O’Neil represented excellence and determination both on and off the baseball field. He was a talented player and manager in the Negro Leagues, became Major League Baseball’s first African-American coach, and was a co-founder of and inspiration for the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Missouri."

On Monday, gathering in a conference room in Washington D.C., Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney and her advisors worked on a draft copy of the articles of impeachment against President Bush.

At the heart of the charges contained in McKinney’s articles of impeachment, is the allegation that President Bush has not upheld the oath of presidential office and is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors.

Private Saudi citizens are giving millions of dollars to Sunni insurgents in Iraq and much of the money is used to buy weapons, including shoulder fired anti-aircraft missiles, according to key Iraqi officials and others familiar with the flow of cash.

Saudi government officials deny that any money from their country is being sent to Iraqis fighting the government and the U.S.-led coalition.

But the U.S. Iraq Study Group report said Saudis are a source of funding for Sunni Arab insurgents. Several truck drivers interviewed by The Associated Press described carrying boxes of cash from Saudi Arabia into Iraq, money they said was headed for insurgents.

Two high-ranking Iraqi officials, speaking on condition of 96 because of the issue's sensitivity, told the AP most of the Saudi money comes from private donations, called zaqat, collected for Islamic causes and charities.

Some Saudis appear to know the money is headed to Iraq's insurgents, but others merely give it to clerics who channel it to anti-coalition forces, the officials said.

In one recent case, an Iraqi official said $25 million in Saudi money went to a top Iraqi Sunni cleric and was used to buy weapons, including Strela, a Russian shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile. The missiles were purchased from someone in Romania, apparently through the black market, he said.

Overall, the Iraqi officials said, money has been pouring into Iraq from oil-rich Saudi Arabia, a Sunni bastion, since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq toppled the Sunni-controlled regime of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

Saudi officials vehemently deny their country is a major source of financial support for the insurgents.

"There isn't any organized terror finance, and we will not permit any such unorganized acts," said Brig. Gen. Mansour al-Turki, a spokesman for the Saudi Interior Ministry. About a year ago the Saudi government set up a unit to track any "suspicious financial operations," he said.

But the Iraq Study Group said "funding for the Sunni insurgency comes from private individuals within Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states."

Saudi officials say they cracked down on zakat abuses, under pressure from the United States, after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington.

The Iraqi officials, however, said some funding goes to Iraq's Sunni Arab political leadership, who then disburse it. Other money, they said, is funneled directly to insurgents. The distribution network includes Iraqi truck and bus drivers.

Several drivers interviewed by the AP in Middle East capitals said Saudis have been using religious events, like the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca and a smaller pilgrimage, as cover for illicit money transfers. Some money, they said, is carried into Iraq on buses with returning pilgrims.

"They sent boxes full of dollars and asked me to deliver them to certain addresses in Iraq," said one driver, who gave his name only as Hussein, out of fear of reprisal. "I know it is being sent to the resistance, and if I don't take it with me, they will kill me."

He was told what was in the boxes, he said, to ensure he hid the money from authorities at the border.

The two Iraqi officials would not name specific Iraqi Sunnis who have received money from Saudi Arabia. But Iraq issued an arrest warrant for Harith al-Dhari, a Sunni opponent of the Iraqi government, shortly after he visited Saudi Arabia in October. He was accused of sectarian incitement.

Saudi Arabia is a key U.S. ally in the Middle East. The Iraq Study Group report noted that its government has assisted the U.S. military with intelligence on Iraq.

But Saudi citizens have close tribal ties with Sunni Arabs in Iraq, and sympathize with their brethren in what they see as a fight for political control — and survival — with Iraq's Shiites.

The Saudi government is determined to curb the growing influence of its chief rival in the region, Iran. Tehran is closely linked to Shiite parties that dominate the Iraqi government.

Saudi officials say the kingdom has worked with all sides to reconcile Iraq's warring factions. They have, they point out, held talks in Saudi Arabia with Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose militia is accused of killing Sunnis.

These officials say zakat donations are now channeled through supervised bank accounts. Cash donation boxes, once prevalent in supermarkets and shopping malls, have been eliminated.

Still, Iraq's foreign minister expressed concern about the influence of neighboring Sunni states at a recent Arab foreign ministers meeting in Cairo.

"We hope that Saudi Arabia will keep the same distance from each and all Iraqi parties," Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari later told the AP.

Last month, the New York Times reported that a classified U.S. government report said Iraq's Sunni Arab insurgency had become self-sufficient financially, raising millions from oil smuggling, kidnapping and Islamic charities. The report did not say whether any money came from Saudi Arabia.

Allegations the insurgents have purchased shoulder-fired Strela missiles raise concerns that they are obtaining increasingly sophisticated weapons.

On Nov. 27, a U.S. Air Force F-16 jet crashed while flying in support of American soldiers fighting Anbar province, a Sunni insurgent hotbed. The U.S. military said it had no information about the cause of the crash. Gen. William Caldwell, a U.S. military spokesman, said he would be surprised if the jet was shot down because F-16's have not encountered weapons capable of taking them down in Iraq.

But last week, a spokesman for Saddam's ousted Baath party claimed that fighters armed with a Strela missile had shot down the jet.

"We have stockpiles of Strelas and we are going to surprise them (the Americans)," Khudair al-Murshidi, the spokesman told the AP in Damascus, Syria. He would not say how the Strelas were obtained.

Saddam's army had Strelas; it is not known how many survived the 2003 war. The Strela is a shoulder-fired, low-altitude system with a passive infrared guidance system.

The issue of Saudi funding for the insurgency could gain new prominence as the Bush administration reviews its Iraq policy, especially if it seeks to engage Iran and Syria in peace efforts.

Bush's national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, wrote in a recent leaked memo that Washington should "step up efforts to get Saudi Arabia to take a leadership role in supporting Iraq, by using its influence to move Sunni populations out of violence into politics."

Carrie Gordon Earll, a policy analyst for the conservative Christian ministry Focus on the Family, expressed empathy for the Cheney family but depicted the newly announced pregnancy as unwise.

"Just because you can conceive a child outside a one-woman, one-man marriage doesn't mean it's a good idea," said. "Love can't replace a mother and a father."

The Bush administration is considering doing away with health standards that cut lead from gasoline, widely regarded as one of the nation's biggest clean-air accomplishments.

Battery makers, lead smelters, refiners all have lobbied the administration to do away with the Clean Air Act limits.

A preliminary staff review released by the Environmental Protection Agency this week acknowledged the possibility of dropping the health standards for lead air pollution. The agency says revoking those standards might be justified "given the significantly changed circumstances since lead was listed in 1976" as an air pollutant.

The EPA says concentrations of lead in the air have dropped more than 90 percent in the past 2 1/2 decades.

“New York City has set a national standard,” said Harold Goldstein, executive director of the California Center for Public Health Advocacy, who predicted that other communities would follow suit.

Trans fats are the chemically modified food ingredients that raise levels of a particularly unhealthy form of cholesterol and have been squarely linked to heart disease. Long used as a substitute for saturated fats in baked goods, fried foods, salad dressings, margarine and other foods, trans fats also have a longer shelf life than other alternatives.

While the trans fat regulation captured the most attention, the Board of Health approved a separate measure — also the first of its kind in the country — requiring some restaurants, mostly fast food outlets, to prominently display the caloric content of each menu item on menu boards or near cash registers.

Health officials said displaying calorie counts was meant to address what is widely regarded as a nationwide epidemic of obesity.

First, cornstarch is treated with alpha-amylase to produce shorter chains of sugars called polysaccharides. Alpha-amylase is industrially produced by a bacterium, usually Bacillus sp. It is purified and then shipped to HFCS manufacturers.

Next, an enzyme called glucoamylase breaks the sugar chains down even further to yield the simple sugar glucose. Unlike alpha-amylase, glucoamylase is produced by Aspergillus, a fungus, in a fermentation vat where one would likely see little balls of Aspergillus floating on the top.

The third enzyme, glucose-isomerase, is very expensive. It converts glucose to a mixture of about 42 percent fructose and 50-52 percent glucose with some other sugars mixed in. While alpha-amylase and glucoamylase are added directly to the slurry, pricey glucose-isomerase is packed into columns and the sugar mixture is then passed over it. Inexpensive alpha-amylase and glucoamylase are used only once, glucose-isomerase is reused until it loses most of its activity.

There are two more steps involved. First is a liquid chromatography step that takes the mixture to 90 percent fructose. Finally, this is back-blended with the original mixture to yield a final concentration of about 55 percent fructose--what the industry calls high fructose corn syrup.

100% stone ground whole wheat flour, water, barley malt, wheat gluten, yest, gold pressed corn oil, sea salt, cultured wheat flour, soy lecithin, sesame seeds when used

Whole wheat flour, water, honey, vital wheat gluten, yeast. Contains 2% of less of the following: oat fiber, salt, calcium sulfate, distilled vinegar, soybean oil, wheat bran, cultured wheat flour, ascorbic acid, enzymes.

Mulder underwent shoulder surgery to repair his rotator cuff in September and it's not clear whether he'll be in game shape in time for opening day. What *is* clear is that Mulder doesn't turn 30 until August and that he has consistently been an innings-eating groundball machine throughout his career. He was 4th in the National League in groundball-to-flyball ratio last season at 2.36; he was 3rd in 2005 at 2.74. He isn't a big strikeout guy, but his talents have value and the recent surgery likely means a shorter-term deal with more incentives.

Oh, man, is this gonna be fun. Just watching the religious right try to bite their tongues and not slam the vice president's family. I'm very happy for Mary and Heather, and in their own way they're breaking new ground and making a difference for gay people in this country, finally. But still, this is gonna be priceless just to watch the collective heads of the religious right explode.

Mary Cheney, the vice president's openly gay daughter, is pregnant. She and her partner of 15 years, Heather Poe, are "ecstatic" about the baby, due in late spring, said a source close to the couple.

It's a baby boom for grandparents Dick and Lynne Cheney: Their older daughter, Elizabeth, went on leave as deputy assistant secretary of state before having her fifth child in July. "The vice president and Mrs. Cheney are looking forward with eager anticipation to the arrival of their sixth grandchild," spokesman Lea Anne McBride said last night.

And get this. They live in Virginia, where a new state constitutional amendment pretty much guarantees that Mary's baby is screwed.

In November, Virginia voters passed a state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage and civil unions; state law is unclear on whether Poe could have full legal rights as a parent of Cheney's child. The circumstances of the pregnancy will remain private, said the source close to the couple. This is the first child for both.

Oh, but Virginia law was already far worse than that. Virginia had already set up new Jim Crow laws targeting gays two years ago. Those laws may vitiate any legal agreement between the two, period, about anything. The law ensures that Mary's partner has no legal rights whatsoever in their child, or in what happens to Mary (or vice versa), such as if one partner has to go the hospital, the other can't visit. The law may even nullify any wills that Mary and Heather write regarding each other, and it may make it impossible for gay people to go to court to resolve any difference about anything - the courts can't recognize gay unions, so they can't make any decisions that would imply recognition (custody, hospital visitation, wills, etc.) It's beyond ironic that Virginia's new law, one of the most hateful, bigoted laws on the books, is now targeting the vice president's own daughter and soon-to-be new grandchild.

A federal advisory panel on Monday rejected a recommendation that states use only voting machines that produced results that could be independently verified.

The panel drafting voting guidelines for the U.S. Election Assistance Commission voted 6-6 not to adopt a proposal that would have required electronic machines used by millions of voters to produce a paper record or other independent means of checking election results. Eight votes were needed to pass it.

The failed resolution, proposed by Ronald Rivest, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer scientist and panel member, closely mirrored a report released last week warning that paperless electronic voting machines are vulnerable to errors and fraud and cannot be made secure.

Some panel members who voted against the proposal said they support paper records but don't think the risk of widespread voting machine meltdowns is great enough to rush the requirement into place and overwhelm state election boards.

"They should be longer-range goals," said Britain Williams of the National Association of Election Directors. "You are talking about basically a reinstallation of the entire voting system hardware."

While inflicting destruction on the Iraqis, Bush multiplied America’s enemies and endangered this nation’s military, economic health and international stature. Courting risk without managing it, Bush repeatedly and remorselessly failed to accurately evaluate the consequences of his actions.

The embroilment in Iraq is not an aberration. It stems from core party principles equally evident on the domestic front. For a quarter-century, the Republican temper — its reckless drive to jettison the social safety net; its support of violence in law enforcement and in national defense; its advocacy of regressive taxation, environmental hazard and pro-business deregulation; its ‘remoralizing’ of the pursuit of wealth — has been judged by many voters as essential to America’s position in the world, producing more benefit than cost.

While some Republican long shots have paid off handsomely (the Reagan administration’s accelerated arms race arguably drove the former Soviet Union into bankruptcy), now the dice are turning up snake eyes. In November, voters concluded that the Bush administration had run one risk too many.

...often insufficiently authoritative and bold, manage risk better? Democrats arguably suffer from their own impaired judgment: utopian faith in the power of negotiation and compromise — naïve, perhaps, in a world where the threat of bloodshed is endemic.

Although given little public credit at the time, or since, many of the 126 House Democrats who spoke out and voted against the October 2002 resolution that gave President Bush authority to wage war against Iraq have turned out to be correct in their warnings about the problems a war would create.

With the Democrats taking over control of the House next January, the views that some voiced during two days of debate four years ago are worth recalling, since many of those lawmakers will move into positions of power. They include not only members of the new House leadership but also the incoming chairmen of the Appropriations, Armed Services, Budget and Judiciary committees and the Select Committee on Intelligence.

Rep. John M. Spratt Jr. (S.C.), a senior member of the Armed Services Committee, was one of several Democrats who predicted during the House floor debate that "the outcome after the conflict is actually going to be the hardest part, and it is far less certain." He credited his views in part to what he heard over breakfasts with retired generals Anthony C. Zinni and Joseph P. Hoar, both of whom had led the U.S. Army's Central Command -- a part of which is in Spratt's district.

"They made the point: We do not want to win this war, only to lose the peace and swell the ranks of terrorists who hate us," Spratt said.

Spratt recently looked back at his resolution, which would have required Bush to come back to Congress before launching an attack. It was defeated 270 to 158. He recalled that extended hearings were held before the Persian Gulf War but that nothing similar preceded the vote on the 2002 resolution. "I remember we talked this time about how we got to get answers before this train leaves the station," Spratt said.

The incoming Armed Services chairman, Rep. Ike Skelton (D-Mo.), spoke in support of Spratt's amendment, stressing the need for "a plan for rebuilding of the Iraqi government and society, if the worst comes to pass and armed conflict is necessary."

Skelton had written Bush a month earlier, after a White House meeting, to say that "I have no doubt that our military would decisively defeat Iraq's forces and remove Saddam. But like the proverbial dog chasing the car down the road, we must consider what we would do after we caught it."

Skelton went on to note the "extreme difficulty of occupying Iraq with its history of autocratic rule, its balkanized ethnic tensions and its isolated economic system." He also warned that Bush's postwar strategy must "take seriously" the possibility that a replacement regime "might be rejected by the Iraqi people, leading to civil unrest and even anarchy."

Rep. David R. Obey (Wis.), who will chair the Appropriations Committee, was among the group that organized the Democrats. He spoke then about poor preparation for postwar Iraq, a concern he developed after listening to State Department officials.

[snip]

Rep. Tammy Baldwin (Wis.), who did not belong to a committee with national security jurisdiction, was among the lawmakers who talked on the House floor about what turned out to be the real issues in Iraq. She spoke of the "postwar challenges," saying that "there is no history of democratic government in Iraq," that its "economy and infrastructure is in ruins after years of war and sanctions" and that rebuilding would take "a great deal of money."

Baldwin four years ago asked questions that are being widely considered today: "Are we prepared to keep 100,000 or more troops in Iraq to maintain stability there? If we don't, will a new regime emerge? If we don't, will Iran become the dominant power in the Middle East? . . . If we don't, will Islamic fundamentalists take over Iraq?"

...here’s a question for those who might be tempted, yet again, to shy away from a confrontation with Mr. Bush over Iraq: How do you ask a man to be the last to die for a bully’s ego?

Lawmakers from both parties seem to agree that Gates' speedy accession is owed to a key qualification -- that Gates is not Donald Rumsfeld. When he announced his support for Gates recently, incoming Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said that fact is "the one thing he has going for him."

But in the rush to discharge Rumsfeld, the Senate may not fully explore a blemish in Gates' dossier that seems particularly relevant now. A close examination of Gates' record, including little-known documents obtained by Salon from the National Security Archive, shows that as Gates was rising through the echelons of the CIA in the late 1980s to be CIA director in 1991, he was involved in the trafficking of intelligence reports that relied on compromised sources to show an exaggerated foreign threat. With the U.S. struggling for an exit strategy from Iraq and eyeing adversaries like Iran, President Bush has selected a man to head the Pentagon who was once in charge during an intelligence fiasco not unlike the one that unleashed the Iraq war.

In September 1995, CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz recommended that Gates be held accountable for his role in hyperbolic intelligence reporting on the danger posed by the Soviet Union. In those reports, the CIA relied on sources the agency knew or should have known had been under Moscow's influence, Hitz found. At that time, though, a robust Soviet threat was music to the ears of some hard-liners in Washington, and the trumped-up intelligence made it into the hands of the president and Pentagon leaders.

When confronted with Hitz's findings in 1995, Gates, who had since left the agency, deflected responsibility by pointing to his former employees' errors. In an Oct. 30, 1995, letter from Gates to then-CIA director John Deutch, Gates responded to the findings by blasting subordinates, while conceding that the flawed reports were "a serious breach of the integrity of the intelligence process." In that letter, Gates expressed his "unhappiness" with lower-level CIA officials who, in Gates' view, failed to "characterize accurately these source problems both to the CIA senior officials and to those in the policy agencies who received the intelligence reports." The letter was cosigned by two other former CIA directors also fingered by the inspector general: William Webster and James Woolsey. Deutch, who now supports Gates for secretary of defense, ultimately sided with Gates over the inspector general.

The CIA has never released the 1995 inspector general report. But in an interview, Hitz said that Gates should have been held accountable, because he was in charge. "The top guys at that period of time, in my opinion, were not held accountable for what happened on their watch," said Hitz, now a lecturer at the University of Virginia law school. "My theory is that if you are going to make sure everyone operates with integrity, you have to hold the heads of the organization responsible," he explained. "We can't have reports going forward to the president of the United States that were being fed to us by our chief enemy."

GERGEN: There was a sense, in the lead-up to the war, in which the press, I think, was guilty of cheerleading. We were waving the flags and it was almost unpatriotic to question the possibility of war with Iraq. And then during the time of the invasion itself, when the reporters were embedded, you know, many of them fell in love with the military and I think they reported very accurately.

But there was no question that they were swayed by what they had seen. But since they have been there, I do think the press has been on the cutting edge, been the leading indicator of saying it's not going as well as the administration says. And for those that think that the press is being too harsh, we now have the leak of the Hadley memo this week, which shows, within the administration itself, there's a real difference between what they're telling each other internally and what they're saying publicly.

The internal reporting inside the administration is much grimmer and much more similar to what the press says than what the administration has officially been saying.

KURTZ: So are we in the last throes, Nick Kristof, if I can use that phrase, of kind of a great struggle between the dire portrait being painted by journalists who were in Iraq, speaking the language, risking their lives, seeing the suicide bombers day after day, and this more upbeat progress is being made picture painted by the administration?

KRISTOF: Well, I wish I could say that I thought that the administration, you know, had recognized that the problem was the message rather than the messenger. But I think that, in fact, you know, if you look at the Pentagon, in particular, has really made a very major effort to manage the news. And you see that in terms of the new Pentagon channel, the incredible press reaction system that always manages to generate a comment in any language anywhere, and in the early bird news clipping service, which originally was just, you know, a clipping service to provide information to commanders and now has really become one more propaganda channel, you know, picking news articles that they will like and omitting some that they won't like. So I don't see any sign that that kind of effort to manage the news is diminishing at all.

KURTZ: David Gergen, let me pick up on your point about journalists having been cheerleaders for the war early on.

To the extent that that changed, rather dramatically, I should add, was that because of a sense of overcompensation, perhaps a sense of embarrassment at their earlier performance, or did things just get much worse in Iraq, so quickly that the reporting had to change?

GERGEN: I thought it was both, Howie. I thought that the -- you know, you and I have seen this pendulum swing before. Sometimes we in journalism, you know, can build someone up, and then we don't see -- they have feet of clay for a while, and then we do, and then we overcompensate by tearing them down. And I think that happened to a degree in this -- this war.

The journalists did feel -- you know, we were -- we were too easy on the claims of weapons of mass destruction and the mushroom clouds being a reason to go to war. And once we saw that there were no -- you know, no nuclear capacity there, I think we did -- a lot of people in the press felt had. And I think they beat up on the administration to a degree because of that.

So, I do think it is a combination. And Iraq had spiraled downward very rapidly, here in the last few weeks.

Let me just say one other thing, though. I do think if you talk to a lot of young officers who are coming out of Iraq -- and I happen to have some of them in my classroom -- they will tell you, look, there are parts of Iraq that are quiet. And what's this about a civil war? We don't see it. We think the press is -- it's not just the administration saying this, there are actually soldiers on the ground who believe this -- that the press is not accurately reporting it.

And your answer to -- my answer to that is, look, we had a civil war in this country, and just because there was no fighting in New York or in Iowa, does not mean there wasn't a civil war.