THE TENSION: The Decline and Fall of Western Civ for 15 May

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
It's the end of the world as we know it...

A new Gallup Poll finds continued low levels of public support for both Congress and President George W. Bush. Americans approval of Congress is 29%, down more from last month's reading and even lower that Bush's approval rating at 33%.

Left to speculate, I can only assume Americans are disappointed that Democrats, who now control Congress, are still acting like the minority party.

Along with the dismal failure to pass promised legislation during the "first 100 hours," many Americans feel Democrats simply have no intention of fulfilling their promise to stop earmarks and end the so-called culture of corruption.

Reporters for the Associated Press, The Washington Post, and other news outfits, show their foolish ignorance when they write that the Defense Department's decision to block a dozen bandwidth sucking video and file sharing sites will somehow limit soldiers' access to news and cause troops undue hardship.

With the block in place, soldiers will still have access to just about everything else found on the Internet. They can send e-mail; they can surf the Web. The blocked video sharing and networking sites are relatively recent innovations; their presence and effect unknown in past military conflicts. In the final analysis, however, it's highly unlikely soldiers are going to post personal video messages to their loved ones for all the world to see on You Tube.

The Associated Press, The Washington Post, and others report the Rev. Jerry Falwell, the television evangelist who founded the Moral Majority and used it to mold the religious right into a political force, died Tuesday shortly after being found unconscious in his office at Liberty University. He was 73.

In an upside down turn of events, unregulated XM Radio announced today that the company, for their bad on-air behavior, has suspended Gregg "Opie" Hughes and Anthony Cumia, hosts of "The Opie & Anthony Show" and ceased broadcast of the show for 30 days, effective immediately. However, CBS Radio, a unit of CBS Corp., said the pair will be on air as usual tomorrow.

XM officials may not have believed the two had taken the incident seriously.

"Comments made by Opie and Anthony on yesterday's broadcast put into question whether they appreciate the seriousness of the matter. The management of XM Radio decided to suspend Opie and Anthony to make clear that our on-air talent must take seriously the responsibility that creative freedom requires of them," the company wrote in a release issued Tuesday.

Reuters reports a U.S. troop pullout from Iraq would leave the country as a potent launchpad for international terrorism and Washington would be forced to go back in within a couple of years, a leading al Qaeda expert said on Tuesday.

Rohan Gunaratna told a security conference at Lloyd's of London insurance market that Iraq, like Afghanistan in the 1990s, would become a "terrorist Disneyland" where al Qaeda could build up its strength unchallenged.

A new gang war is raging on the Internet, according to CNET.

It's like something out of the Sopranos. Antivirus researchers at Moscow-based Kaspersky Labs have identified criminal gangs engaged in a turf battle online. The primary groups are responsible for the Warezov and Zhelatin worms, and these worms then download Trojans that are in turn responsible for a majority of the spam and malware circulating on the Web. Basically, new spam and new phishing attacks are designed to switch your remotely controlled PC from belonging to the Warezov gang or the Zhelatin gang. The resulting botnets--collections of remotely controlled PCs--have proved profitable, luring unsuspecting Internet users to purchase porn or other services attributed to organized crime activity.

CNET also reports a new U.S. Senate proposal would allow limitless H-1B visas and green cards for foreigners with master's degrees or higher in any field from an American university--or anyone with such credentials in the science, technology, engineering or math fields from abroad.