December 28, 2008 archive

The year in smorgasbord I

The Beatles:  She Loves You

Uh Oh! I’m going to have to deal harshly with the King of Mud Sling, Karl Rove himself.

You see, these simple little discussions that Rove and Cheney and Bush and (enter your favorite Neo-Con here) are holding, while on their “Bush Legacy Tour:  He Was Really Good At Keeping America Safe” really need to be refuted.  Immediately.  Harshly.

So, BushCo kept the USA safe?  Well, except for that 9/11 thingy.  Oh and that anthrax thingy.  Oh, the disruption of cash flow into the average American citizens bank account.  Um, there was also that spying on Americans thing.  With a topping of torturing people.

I could go on, but you get the picture, right?  RIGHT?

Right!

As 2008 Draws To A Close The

Wars Continue

Israelis Say Strikes Against Hamas Will Continue



By TAGHREED EL-KHODARY and ETHAN BRONNER

Published: December 28, 2008

GAZA – Waves of Israeli airstrikes destroyed Hamas security facilities in Gaza on Saturday in a crushing response to the group’s rocket fire, killing more than 225 – the highest one-day toll in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in decades.

Israeli military officials said the airstrikes, which went on into the night, were the start of what could be days or even months of an effort to force Hamas to end its rocket barrages into southern Israel. The operation could include ground forces, a senior Israeli security official said.

Palestinian officials said that most of the dead were security officers for Hamas, including two senior commanders, and that at least 600 people had been wounded in the attacks.

Rupert Cornwell: Never have hopes been higher – and never has the job been tougher

On 20 January, Barack Obama will become President of the United States. His preparation has been faultless. Soon, we will learn if all the optimism is justified

Sunday, 28 December 2008

Barack Obama had it right. Postpone the first candidates’ debate, John McCain was urging last September at the height of the presidential campaign, as the White House convened an urgent summit on its bank bailout plan, a day or two before the two White House rivals were to lock horns at the University of Mississippi.

The financial collapse, McCain argued, rendered everything else superfluous. But the Democrat was unmoved: “It’s going to be part of the president’s job to deal with more than one thing at a time.” Those words of Obama are contender for 2008’s understatement of the year. Never has an incoming President been confronted by as daunting an array of problems as the untried former Senator from Illinois.

USA

Silver Lining of Subprime Slips Away in Calif. Suburb



By Karl Vick

Washington Post Staff Writer

Sunday, December 28, 2008; Page A02

STOCKTON, Calif. — Venice Circle is a loop lined with taupe homes and green lawns, a clear sign that drivers have left the freeway south of town and entered Weston Ranch, a 21st-century Levittown. The subdivision sprang up in asparagus fields 80 miles east and a world away from the urban settings buyers were delighted to escape: gritty, violent east Oakland, and grittier, deadlier Richmond nearby.

This bedroom community is populated overwhelmingly by minority families, who were lifted by a wave of easy credit over the Altamont Pass and into dream homes.

I was born into self-actualization, I knew exactly who I was, but I never got my chance to be young,

so when you lay me inside of a coffin, bury me on the side of the hill. That’s a good place to get some thinking done.

It didn’t work out the way that I planned it. They all seem to want to take it away, everything that I thought to be true,

so it’s obvious to me somebody, somewhere must have really done a number on you and I know because the fuckers got me too.

All the pretty horses, all flowers and trees, they will all mean less than nothing when it all has come to be.

God sent me a vision of the future in a dream on a Saturday night and I see no reason to celebrate,

for when I saw it I wept like a child. It came to me like a knife in the chest. You and me and everyone, forever, to ache and ache and ache.

So Father, if it’s possible, let this cup pass me by,

but if it can’t without my drinking it, then thy will be done.

-Titus Andronicus, “Upon Viewing Bruguel’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus”

Disco For Ever

KC & The Sunshine Band – That’s the way I like it