Happy Birthday to the fool enamoured with fossil fuels whose policy concepts merit not “McSame” but McWorse ….

Older than modern wind turbines … older than ocean energy systems … Older than hybrid cars …

Even older than his romantic dalliance … nuclear power.

McCain picks Palin as running mate

MSNBC

With The Democratic Convention Over

The Republican Whine Tasting Party

Can Begin    

Obama Takes Aim at Bush and McCain With a Forceful Call to Change America



By ADAM NAGOURNEY and JEFF ZELENY

Published: August 29, 2008

DENVER – Barack Obama accepted the Democratic Party presidential nomination on Thursday, declaring that the “American promise has been threatened” by eight years under President Bush and that John McCain represented a continuation of policies that undermined the nation’s economy and imperiled its standing around the world.

The speech by Senator Obama, in front of an audience of nearly 80,000 people on a warm night in a football stadium refashioned into a vast political stage for television viewers, left little doubt how he intended to press his campaign against Mr. McCain this fall.

Chalabi aide arrested on suspicion of Baghdad bombings

?

By Nicholas Spangler and Hussein Kadhim | McClatchy Newspapers  

BAGHDAD – U.S. forces have arrested a deputy of Ahmad Chalabi, who was once the Bush administration’s favorite Iraqi politician, and implicated him in bombings that killed Americans and Iraqis, Chalabi and Iraqi government officials said Thursday.

The U.S. military alleged that the arrested official was working with the “highest echelons” of the Iranian “special groups” criminals, referring to what the U.S. military says are Iranian-backed militias operating in Iraq.

Ali Faisal al Lami, a Shiite Muslim official and a member of the Sadrist Party who’s serving as an executive of the Justice and Accountability Committee, which Chalabi heads, was arrested Wednesday at Baghdad International Airport as he returned from a family vacation in Lebanon, Iraqi officials said. The Justice and Accountability Committee screens former members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party who are applying for jobs in the government.

USA

Pentagon Reports U.S. Airstrike Killed 5 Afghan Civilians, Not 90



 By Ann Scott Tyson

Washington Post Staff Writer

Friday, August 29, 2008; Page A04

A U.S. military review of an airstrike last week in western Afghanistan maintains that only five civilians were killed, Pentagon officials said yesterday, a finding that starkly contradicts reports by the United Nations and Afghan officials that the civilian death toll from the bombing was at least 90.

The completed review corroborates an initial assessment by the military of the operation Friday by U.S. and Afghan forces in a village in Herat province. The review determined that 25 militants, including a Taliban commander, and five civilians had been killed, the officials said.

There are people who don’t think that I’m a cold hearted killer of a partisan Democrat.  They are mistaken.

My motivation is my conviction that the radical, social democratic parts of my political agenda are more likely to come to pass under a party that at least espouses some claim to the principles this nation was founded on and can perhaps be shamed in to action on the most egregious offenses.

I believe that the most efficient way to create an atmosphere where that can happen is to permanently eradicate the Republican Party root and branch and make the “conservative” brand a mark of Cain.  Biblical destruction, sowing of salt in the fields, their lamentations music to our ears.

Dead as the Whigs.

It may be that we will have to suffer under 8 or 16 years of Democratic Party failure too, but at least it will be Democratic Party failure and not a frog march into the dustbin of history.

I expect massive disappointment at best.

The struggle will be to create a democratic wing that is strong enough to fly on it’s own, and it’s just not yet.  The environment needs to get better.

It is no secret that I think we need change in the Corporate Media Culture of Washington D.C..  Sally Quinn and Tim Russert deserve the judgement of history on their complicity, but nobody lives forever.  Things can change and they are changing.  People don’t buy the bullshit so much anymore, look at the ranking of “journalists” in any credibility poll.

Right there with Congress.

So better Democrats and Rachel Maddow, that all you got ek?

It’s a start.  We need to build on this success.

Most of all we need to keep our eye on the goal and it will be hard because we’re a long way away.  It’s certainly not going to end in November.

Source

Amnesty International conducted detailed research in three locations with different policing and judicial arrangements…: the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North and South Dakota, the State of Oklahoma and the State of Alaska.

– snip –

It (sexual violence) has been compounded by the federal government’s steady erosion of tribal government authority and its chronic under-resourcing of those law enforcement agencies and service providers…

– snip –

Some of the data…suggests that a high number of perpetrators of sexual violence against American Indian and Alaska Native women are non-Indian…It appears that Indigenous women in the USA may be targeted for acts of violence and denied access to justice on the basis of their gender and Indigenous identity.

Now why did“the South Dakota attorney general and researchers at the University of South Dakota challenge(d) that conclusion?”