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Lieberman confirms he’s still speaking to Hagee’s group

Last week, presumptive Republican nominee John McCain rejected the endorsement he’d received from Pastor John Hagee months before. But Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, a self-styled “Independent Democrat” who’s one of McCain’s staunchest supporters, isn’t cutting his ties to Hagee so quickly.

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Before the ultimate rejection, McCain had sought, and embraced, Hagee’s support. Moreover, he’d attempted to weather the ensuing storm of controversy that developed because of statements Hagee has made, including some that were anti-Catholic and one in which he said Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment against New Orleans. But McCain had no choice in the matter once an old sermon of Hagee’s surfaced, showing that the pastor had basically said Adolf Hitler and the Nazis were sent by God to fulfill God’s plan and drive the Jews from Europe to Israel. Speaking of the Holocaust, Hagee had said, “How did it happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said my top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel.”

But, as Max Blumenthal reported on Tuesday, Lieberman — a strong supporter of Israel — is the scheduled headliner for a July summit organized by Christians United for Israel, which Hagee founded and still chairs. On Wednesday, Lieberman confirmed that he will appear at the summit. In a statement, the senator said:

i believe that pastor hagee has made comments that are intensely unacceptable and hurtful. i also believe that a myself should be judged on the entire span of his or her life’s works. pastor hagee has devoted much of his life to fighting anti-semitism and building bridges between christians and jews. the organization that he has helped build, christians united for israel, is a vital force in supporting the battling against terrorism and defending our ally, israel. i will go to the cufi summit in july and speak to the people who bear secure to washington from all over our country to express their support of america and israel, based on our shared eternal values and our shared contemporary challenges in the war against terrorism. at that conference, i liking also make it clear that it is imperative that our terminology is each cordial and dispassionate of all of our individual citizens.

Hagee has indeed been a supporter of Israel, but that’s largely because he believes the country will be the site of Armageddon, which he thinks is imminent.

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Sources: Dems could meet Florida, Michigan half way

WASHINGTON (CNN) — The Democratic Party is likely to meet rule-breaking Florida and Michigan halfway when it comes to seating their delegates at the national convention, two members of the rules committee said Wednesday.

Such a move may help Sen. Hillary Clinton close the delegate gap with front-runner Sen. Barack Obama but not overtake him, said sources familiar with party deliberations.

The sources did not want to be identified because the full committee has not discussed the problem or ruled on it.

The Democratic National Committee’s Rules and Bylaws Committee meets Saturday in Washington to consider what to do with Florida and Michigan, which broke ranks to hold primaries earlier than party rules allowed.

As punishment, both state parties were told that they would not be represented at all when the party officially nominates a presidential candidate at the August convention in Denver, Colorado, and they are challenging those sanctions.

Clinton and her supporters have been pressing for a compromise that seats as many delegates from the two states as possible. Clinton’s Web site encourages people to write to the Rules and Bylaws Committee.

There is one number that we are going to be satisfied with, and that is 2.3 million people having their votes counted, Clinton supporter Tina Flournoy said. About 600,000 people voted in Michigan and about 1.7 million in Florida.

The party needs to recognize the January primary votes in both of those states, Clinton campaign co-chairman Harold Ickes said Wednesday.

Pledged delegates fairly reflect the will of the voters, Ickes said, referring to delegates chosen in primaries and caucuses.

Ickes and Flournoy are both members of the Rules and Bylaws Committee. Watch more on the Democrats’ dilemma

Clinton, the New York senator and former first lady, won decisively in both states. But all candidates initially agreed not to campaign in either state after they broke party rules.

Obama and some other candidates had their names taken off the Michigan ballot, but he was on Florida’s ballot.

In addition to deciding how many, if any, Florida and Michigan delegates to seat at the convention, the rules committee must determine how the delegates would be allocated between Clinton and Obama.

Various formulas have been suggested, most of which would give Clinton more delegates than Obama, but not enough to overtake his lead, which CNN currently estimates at about 200.

Ickes said Wednesday that he expected Obama’s lead over Clinton to be over 100 pledged delegates when primary season ends June 3.

Counting the two states’ votes could bring Clinton close enough to Obama’s total among pledged delegates which in turn could help persuade the party’s superdelegates that she is the more electable general election candidate.

Superdelegates are party officials who can cast their ballots for the candidate of their choice. They hold the balance of power in the party at the moment.

The Obama campaign says it is willing to compromise on how Michigan and Florida delegates are seated, portraying its position as a gesture to party unity.

Any compromise is going to benefit Sen. Clinton, Obama strategist David Plouffe said Wednesday. We’re hoping there can be some reasonable resolution on Saturday that can allow us to move to the general election.

The Obama campaign was dismissive of efforts by the Clinton campaign to have supporters demonstrate outside the rules meeting.

We’re not going to turn this thing into a circus, former Democratic Party Chairman David Wilhelm said.

A memo prepared for Rule and Bylaws Committee members says the party was within its rights to strip both states of all their delegates. CNN obtained a copy of the confidential memo, which committee members received Tuesday.

Party rules require that states lose at least 50 percent of all their delegates for the violations Michigan and Florida committed.

The documents are intentionally neutral, according to a senior Democratic Party official with knowledge of the rules and bylaws discussions and who is not aligned with either Clinton or Obama.

They do not make specific recommendations. The analysis seeks to provide a rules framework for each argument and the issues raised within each challenge.

Separately, a federal judge in Tampa on Wednesday threw out a lawsuit challenging the party’s decision not to seat delegates from Florida.

Political consultant Victor DiMaio and his attorney, Michael Steinberg, had compared the decision to prohibitions against allowing African-Americans to vote. And they invoked the trauma of the Florida recount in the 2000 contest between Al Gore and George W. Bush.

This is nuts. This is not right. How can they remove Florida after all the things that Florida has suffered through? Hanging chads, through Bush v. Gore, and they’re sticking it to us again, DiMaio said before the hearing.

But DNC Chairman Howard Dean said the situations are not comparable.

You cannot violate the rules of the process and then expect to get forgiven for it, Dean said.

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Truman

Paul In The Family

washington post reports that ron paul has been … …putting relatives in a slew of key positions and paying them a total of $169,063, according to the latest campaign finance reports. paul’s granddaughter valori pyeatt helps arrange fundraising receptions and has been paid $17,157. another granddaughter, laura paul ($2,724), handles orders for ron paul staples. grandson matthew …

Lost Haida Art

Vodafone caller tunes

Many of Bill Ried’s works were stolen over the weekend from the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. The gold box features a three-dimensional sculpture of an eagle on the top, with the head of a bear on the front.

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2008 could set records for tornado deaths

(CNN) — Parkersburg, Iowa, is mourning its dead and cleaning up the colossal mess left by a powerful tornado that tore through the town on Sunday night.

The tornado killed four people in Parkersburg and two in nearby New Hartford that night; another victim died Monday from tornado-related injuries, according to local media.

The victims are among at least 110 people killed in the United States by tornadoes this year, putting 2008 on track to be one of the deadliest years in recent history.

The average for recent years is 62 tornado fatalities for an entire year.

This year’s death toll is already the highest since 1998, with seven months left in the year.

It does look like it’s going to be a pretty remarkable year, said Greg Carbin, a meteorologist with the Storm Prediction Center of the National Weather Service.

Among the victims: a mother who died huddled over her 4-year-old son, protecting him from a tornado in Picher, Oklahoma, the night before Mother’s Day; a teenage girl killed when a tree fell on her home in Siloam, Arkansas, as she slept on May 2; and a 2-year-old in Hugo, Minnesota who died Sunday after a tornado hit his home. Watch devastation in Parkersburg, Iowa

The figures for tornado deaths have skyrocketed over the past four years. In 2005, there were 38; in 2006, 67; and last year, 81. But experts caution against reading too much into those statistics.

What makes a trend? Carbin asked. Is it four years, or five, or 10? We’ve had years with many more fatalities in the past.

And in fact, since the Weather Service began organized record-keeping in 1950, the deadliest year was 1953, with 519 deaths.

The most lethal single tornado of all was even earlier, in the era when record-keeping was spotty: the Tri-State Tornado of 1925, which killed 695 people as it roared more than 200 miles across Missouri, Illinois and Indiana. See a list of the ten deadliest tornadoes ever

Annual death tolls in the triple digits were more common in the 1950s and earlier, but that doesn’t necessarily mean there were more, or stronger, tornadoes than there are now. Weather radar was in its infancy, the tornado warning system was far less sophisticated, and if a warning was issued, it was hard to get the word out.

One major reason for this year’s high death toll is a single night in February, when strong tornadoes tore through Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas, Alabama and Mississippi, killing 56 people.

College students and retirees were trapped in collapsed buildings in Jackson, Tennessee; Union University president David Dockery said the campus looked like a war zone. Homes were ripped apart, and cars and trucks were tossed on interstates and rural roads. In Sumner County, Tennessee, a mother was found dead in a creek bed about 50 yards from where her home had been. Her baby was found alive 250 yards away.

We know the large number of fatalities from the February 5-6 outbreak were due to a large number of fast-moving, violent tornadoes at night, Carbin said. As far as the year to date goes, it’s really one event with specific characteristics that favored a relatively large number of fatalities, and even that could have been much worse.

It almost was.

Nashville was just missed by a tornado, Carbin told CNN. One tornado tracked up to the outskirts on the southwest side of town, it diminished, the apparent thunderstorm crossed right over the middle of Nashville, said Carbin.

After the storm passed the city, another tornado dropped down and killed 22 people in relatively rural areas to northeast of Nashville. If you displaced that 10 or 15 miles, who knows what the toll would have been?

This year also ranks high in total number of tornadoes — but those numbers are harder to compare to past years.

January and February are the only months for which final numbers have been confirmed, with duplicate reports of the same tornado eliminated.

January had 84 tornadoes; the three-year average for the month is 34. February had 148, compared to a three-year average of just 25.

A look at the figures since 1950 shows the number of reported tornadoes increasing. See how deaths, tornado numbers stack up since 1950

But Carbin says that may have more to do with demographics than climatology, and the increase in reports may not mean an increase in actual events.

We’re almost entirely dependent on something being struck and damaged, or someone witnessing the event, in order for it to become recorded, he said. The farther back you go, the more likely it is that there were tornadoes that weren’t witnessed, didn’t cause any damage.

Scientists can’t predict exactly when tornadoes will form, although the twisters normally come out of thunderstorms, which are often the result of high, cold air bumping into warm, moist air. And they say there are no easy answers to why one year gets more tornadoes than another.

A partial answer could be the La Nina weather phenomenon. La Nina refers to cooling in the Pacific that occurs every three to five years — the flip side of El Nino, in which the Pacific gets warmer. The Earth has been in a La Nina period since last summer.

La Nina provides a good environment for the development of severe storms, Carbin said, but there’s no way to prove scientifically that that means more tornadoes — especially because even big tornadoes are so tiny in scale compared to warming of a massive section of ocean.

Global warming doesn’t provide an easy explanation either. Because of the enormous complexity of weather systems, scientists can’t decide with any certainty whether a warming planet will mean more tornadoes, or fewer.

Carbin says by late June, tornado activity will start to slow down, although violent tornadoes are still possible at any time of year.

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‘Cursed’ Bard tomb to be repaired

LONDON, England (AP) — Fix the gravesite. But don’t touch the bones.

That’s the work order, in a nutshell, for brave architects contemplating a fixup job for the deteriorating gravesite of William Shakespeare at the Holy Trinity Church in his hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon.

The illustrious bard is believed by many to have personally penned the threat on a stone marker above his grave: It promises to bless anyone who spares the stones but curse any intruder who moves his bones.

That’s all well and good, but the stones above his grave are starting to flake and fall apart. Clergymen have trod on the stones for nearly four centuries, and the foot traffic is taking its inevitable toll.

People who love the church and its place in British literary history want to fix it — provided they can do so without digging up Shakespeare’s remains and facing the mysterious threat.

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