April 19, 2008 archive

Obama shows how he really feels about HRC

During Barack Obama’s Comments on the April 16 ABC Debates, when he first mentions Hillary Clinton, he scratches his face with—That Finger!

Obama Finger

Stolen from ABC News.com

This may already be all over the “news” today, but I don’t watch, so I though I’d share this with you.

 

“35-million people in America went hungry last year.”

A sad truth and a harsh reality in the richest nation in the world. And the global situation regarding food, hunger, and nutrition is much worse, as even the Bush administration has reluctantly admitted:

President George W. Bush on Monday ordered the release of $200 million in U.S. emergency food aid to help alleviate food shortages in developing countries in Africa and elsewhere, the White House said.

Bush took action a day after top finance and development officials from around the world called for urgent steps to stem rising food prices, warning that social unrest would spread unless the cost of basic staples was contained.

A drop in a very big bucket, but every drop helps and is needed.

Since bowing out of the presidential race, John Edwards has continued to speak out on a number of important issues affecting the US and the world. And one issue Edwards has always been impassioned about – is poverty and the importance of a progressive sustained comprehensive set of solutions to alleviate poverty at home and abroad.

Yesterday, Edwards continued this focus and spoke at the opening ceremony for the Millennium Campus Conference, a three-day event sponsored by MIT’s Global Poverty Initiative. Read on for more.

EENR Blog

Crazy Sorrow

I once started a novel titled Crazy Pussy, but abandoned it later as an exercise in bad judgment.  It was based on a woman I once knew.  Unspeakable things had been done to her.  She was a strange mix of beauty and darkness, tenderness and rage, passion and loathing.  She captured me without my having fired a shot in my own defense.  Our’s was a raging roller coaster of earthly delights and bone deep horror.

Dylan – Tambourine Man

Weekend News Digest

Weekend News Digest is an Open Thread

From Yahoo News Top Stories

1 Iranian ambassador denounces US operation in Baghdad

By SAMEER N. YACOUB, Associated Press Writer

2 hours, 23 minutes ago

BAGHDAD – Iran’s ambassador to Iraq on Saturday denounced U.S. military operations in Baghdad’s Shiite militia stronghold of Sadr City, saying they had led to the deaths of innocent people and threatened to aggravate an already tense situation.

The comments by Ambassador Hassan Kazemi Qomi came after police and hospital officials reported that 12 people had died in overnight clashes in Sadr City.

U.S. and Iraqi troops backed by air power have largely blocked off the southern section of the sprawling district in a bid to prevent Shiite militia fighters led by the Mahdi Army of anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr from firing rockets at the U.S.-protected Green Zone.

NOLA, corruption, and a second chance

This was my second NOLA/Gulf Blogathon post. Thank you for allowing me to post it here!

The US Attorney’s office in New Orleans has been one busy place, particularly since Katrina and the US Attorney purge scandal (coincidence?).

Although Congressman William Jefferson’s indictment came out of Virginia, other New Orleans politicians (including Jefferson’s brother) have been targets of corruption probes emanating from that office. Because of the nature of the political power structure in New Orleans, the vast majority of those indicted have been African American.

The Katrina diaspora has significantly altered the demographics (PDF) of the city. Post-Katrina elections in the city have reflected that shift.

In some ways, New Orleans today resembles the city in the late 50s and early 60s, before white flight to the suburbs kicked into high gear.

Passing Over

Tonight we do service, taking the day as a convocation to that which led us out of bondage.  We are meant to know and to understand that it is a service that we do, and not a celebration, although in the common meaning that is what we are told it is.  We know this because it is written:

Exodus 12:25

And it shall come to pass, when ye be come to the land which the LORD will give you, according as He hath promised, that ye shall keep this service.

Pony Party: Your Morning Art

Hope you are all waking up to a fine morning.

Turns out Joe Jackson just made a new CD in January….

Bonus animation I just thought was cool.

Not much to say in this early pony party. Chances are I am surfing for coffee.

Please don’t rec the pony party, hang out and chit chat and then go read some of the excellent offerings on our recent and rec’d list.

Sitting Bull Was Right (Update)

Photobucket

http://digilander.libero.it/Bo…

Historical revisionists of American Indian history portray indigenous people being as violent as white Europeans were before they arrived on this continent and after settlement. Consequently, HBO’s “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” was no exception in the scene with Sitting Bull and Col Nelson Miles on the Buffalo Robe, as Miles justified the genocide he was committing as “You were as violent as we are, we’re doing the same thing to you that you did to them (paraphrasing).”

Docudharma Times Saturday April 19



I used to be such a sweet, sweet thing

Until they got a hold of me

I opened doors for little old ladies

I helped the blind to see

I got no friends cause they read the papers

They cant be seen with me and Im getting shot down

And Im feeling mean

Saturday’s Headlines: McCain, Iraq War and the Threat of ‘Al Qaeda’: Groundings Prompt FAA Safety Overhaul: Our reign of terror, by the Israeli army: Chinese troops are on the streets of Zimbabwean city, witnesses say: Eight days of fear in Mugabe’s machine: Guantanamo Britons to sue MI5 over ‘illegal interrogation’: EU set to scrap biofuels target amid fears of food crisis: Tibetan protesters defy police crackdown in western China: Leftist former bishop set for victory in Paraguay election  

Top Bush aides pushed for Guantánamo torture

Senior officials bypassed army chief to introduce interrogation methods

America’s most senior general was “hoodwinked” by top Bush administration officials determined to push through aggressive interrogation techniques of terror suspects held at Guantánamo Bay, leading to the US military abandoning its age-old ban on the cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners, the Guardian reveals today.

General Richard Myers, chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff from 2001 to 2005, wrongly believed that inmates at Guantánamo and other prisons were protected by the Geneva conventions and from abuse tantamount to torture.

The way he was duped by senior officials in Washington, who believed the Geneva conventions and other traditional safeguards were out of date, is disclosed in a devastating account of their role, extracts of which appear in today’s Guardian.

Loose Change

Saw this in Thursday’s Boston Globe:

From Samuel Adams’s calls for revolution in the 1700s, to Frederick Douglass’s antislavery orations of the following century, to Senator John F. Kerry’s concession in the 2004 presidential race, Boston’s Faneuil Hall is one of America’s most storied public stages.

But Murphy’s most recent proposal, to substantially raise the fees for renting out Faneuil Hall’s meeting space, brought rebuke from some fellow councilors yesterday who see the brick building with its famous grasshopper watching over the city as all-but-hallowed space.

“I think it should be free,” Councilor John Tobin said. “It’s a public building. It’s the people’s building, really.”

Murphy insists he’s not looking to turn the cradle of liberty into a cash cow.

He said it costs the city much more to maintain the building than it collects in rental fees, currently capped at $150 per hour for a minimum of four hours. Murphy’s proposed ordinance, which yesterday was referred to committee, would increase the maximum charge for renting the iconic building’s Great Hall to $500 an hour.

RUThinking what IMThinking? One hundred fifty an hour? Let’s see, eight hours equals twelve hundred dollars. It was built to hold sheep. Maybe we could bring ponies.

Faneuil Hall

Faneuil Hall

Random Japan

Strange days

A 43-year-old Saitama man and his 14-year-old daughter were arrested for stealing 20 storm drain covers from a condominium complex in Setagaya.

A North Korean man who claimed that his mother is Japanese scaled a barbed-wire fence and sought refuge at the Japanese Embassy in Laos.

Officials in Chiba handed a 30-day suspension to a police superintendent who ordered his staff to make copies of porno DVDs seized as evidence so he could “take them home and watch them.”

Katrina, Rita and the GOP Crony Capitalism

This was the first of my two posts as part of the NOLA/Gulf Blogathon.

Hurricane season is about six weeks away. The Mississippi River is very high due to heavy rains in the MidWest. The Bonne Carre Spillway has been opened for the first time in 11 years to let some river water flow through Lake Pontchartrain into the Gulf of Mexico.

Things are tensing up down along the Gulf Coast. Less than three years after hurricanes Katrina and Rita struck and the levees failed in New Orleans, nature is reminding us of what a tenuous hold we have on the lives we’ve created and are still rebuilding for ourselves down here.

We don’t want to – and can’t – go through another disaster again. Especially with the current administration in place. Real help will not come.

The hard and, yes, bitter lessons learned along the coast over the past two-and-a-half years are going to come in handy for the rest of the country it focuses on the coming federal elections.

The core lesson is this: Republican crony capitalism doesn’t fix anything that’s broken. It’s all about them taking care of their own while the rest of us are left on our own. The proof is being lived out daily on the coasts of Louisiana and Mississippi.

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