Persons of the Week 3/25/06

Cecelia Fire Thunder, President of the Ogala Sioux in South Dakota: “I will personally establish a Planned Parenthood clinic on my own land which is within the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation where the State of South Dakota has absolutely no jurisdiction.”

Want to help? Oglala Sioux Tribe ATTN: President Fire Thunder P. O. Box 2070Pine Ridge, SD 57770 or ATTN: PRESIDENT FIRE THUNDER PO BOX 990 Martin, SD 57751 For donations specifically for the Planned Parenthood clinic, make checks out to OST Planned Parenthood Cecelia Fire Thunder. General donations may be made out to the Oglala Sioux Tribe.

Helen Thomas: "Mr. President, your decision to invade Iraq has caused the deaths of thousands of Americans and Iraqis, wounds of Americans and Iraqis for a lifetime. Every reason given, publicly at least, has turned out not to be true. My question is, why did you really want to go to war? From the moment you stepped into the White House, from your Cabinet -- your Cabinet officers, intelligence people, and so forth -- what was your real reason? You have said it wasn't oil -- quest for oil, it hasn't been Israel, or anything else. What was it?"

As part of his meandering answer to the question above, Bush said (lied):
"...when [Saddam Hussein] chose to deny inspectors, when he chose not to disclose, then I had the difficult decision to make to remove him. And we did, and the world is safer for it."

Creekstone Farms Premium Beef: The Kansas meatpacker that wants to test every animal it slaughters for mad cow disease is suing the government for allegedly saying no and threatening criminal prosecution if the tests are done. The federal lawsuit says the Agriculture Department threatened criminal prosecution if Creekstone did the tests. U.S. testing for mad cow disease is controlled by the Agriculture Department, which tests about one percent of the 35 (m) million cattle that are slaughtered each year. The department is planning to scale back testing.

Bob Herbert: Bush's Trillion Dollar War - In an interview, Mr. Stiglitz [Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at Columbia University] said that about $560 billion, which is a little more than half of the study's conservative estimate of the cost of the war, would have been enough to "fix" Social Security for the next 75 years. If one were thinking in terms of promoting democracy in the Middle East, he said, the money being spent on the war would have been enough to finance a "mega-mega-mega-Marshall Plan," which would have been "so much more" effective than the invasion of Iraq.