September 20, 2009 archive

Cat — Meet Nip … Press, Meet President!

Since pulling random Definitions, out of the air, during Presidential Interviews, seem to be topic de jour …

Here’s another Definition we might want to get up to speed on …

catnip definition

* cat-nip (-nip’)

noun

an herb (Nepeta cataria) of the mint family, with downy leaves and spikes of white or bluish flowers that are used in flavorings and tea: cats like its odor

http://www.yourdictionary.com/…

Interesting, cats like the odor of catnip ???

Well what happens if we give the People what they want?

Weekend News Digest

Weekend News Digest is an Open Thread

Now with World ans U.S. News.

45 Story Final.

From Yahoo News Top Stories

1 Obama warns of ‘serious issues’ in Afghan election

by Stephen Collinson, AFP

2 hrs 39 mins ago

WASHINGTON (AFP) – President Barack Obama warned Sunday of “serious issues” in the disputed Afghan elections and vowed politics would not dictate whether he sends more troops to the unpopular war, ahead of a week of international summitry.

Obama also denied that “paranoid” Russian objections had dictated his decision to abandon a US missile shield in Eastern Europe and said North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il seemed “healthy” and in “control” of his impoverished, isolated nation.

The president’s media offensive came a day before he is due to head to New York for his debut United Nations general assembly as president, and the G20 economic crisis summit of developed and developing nations later in the week in Pittsburgh.

An interesting visit to my blog!

So, I posted a story to my blog: Australian adviser to US military provides chilling insight into neo-colonial mentality.  It wasn’t heavy on analysis, as the original article did that.  BTW: It’s well worth the read.

Sunday Train: Growing Green Transport

See Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence for crosspost links

On Thursday, djrekluse at the Daily Kos said:

Despite considerable tension and even aversion in green communities to the subject, we cannot talk about “going green” without making it a discussion about growth through various hierarchies of human development.  Really, the subject of growth should come as second nature to “green” thinkers and communities-after all, a blade of grass must grow to two inches before it can grow to six; a tree must grow from acorn to sapling before it can someday become a mighty oak.  In much the same way, our consciousness, our values, and our cultures must also move through several distinct stages of growth before we can even begin to even see the problem, let alone care enough to do anything about it.

In other words, “going green” really means “growing green,” and represents the crux of almost all the global issues we presently face: it’s not a problem of human imagination, technological innovation, or even political will-it’s a problem of human growth

Consciousness, Culture, and Climate: Growing Green

This provides a frame for thinking about growing an energy independent transport system, and about the multiple ways that local, regional, and inter-regional rail systems can help in that growth.

Sunday Op-Ed: Stop Playing Defense

Photobucket

One of the most bizarre notions to come out of the struggle for health care reform was being told over and over again, “Oh single payer never had a CHANCE!  It was never on the table!” said in tones by my fellow Democrats that implied one would be truly insane to suggest single payer be the starting point for any negotiations.

Well we’ve seen how that worked out.

If we’re lucky, we’ll get a weak and watered down public option that will take several years to get up and running, and we’ll be spending those years fighting tooth and nail with vested interests who will do everything they can to make it even more watered down and weak.   And the same will hold true for all the other regulations proposed in the health care bills, with insurance and pharmaceutical companies spending millions to create loopholes that will benefit them and make the rest of us suffer.

We’ve been playing defense far too long.

Yes I know, we have the Conservadems to deal with, we have those nasty Blue Dogs, we have a media who likes nothing better than to pursue inanities for ratings rather than inform the citizens of this country, we have many and dire obstacles in our path.

So why play defense, given that?  What is the advantage?

Open Ended Thread

Ecopsychology for capitalism’s spell: Andy Fisher

Book review: Fisher, Andy.  Radical Ecopsychology: Psychology in the Service of Life.  Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2002.

This is a book review, really some ruminations, upon Andy Fisher’s Radical Ecopsychology.  Here I wish to explore the subtext of capitalism’s spell in Fisher’s book.  Our separation from the world-ecosystem in equilibrium and our joining with the machines of industrial development under the spell of capitalism is what is at stake; Fisher speculates upon the possibility of “making sense of suffering in a technological world” so we can “hear our own inner voice” (183) in a naturalistic sense.  In short, Fisher wishes to break the spell.  Fisher intends ecopsychology as a therapeutic support to an ecology movement which must win something for our “human nature” if any of us are to survive.

(Crossposted at Orange)

Dick Armey and “His” Tax-Supported Healthcare

If you missed this on friday, The Bill Moyers Journal you may want to at least catch his essay for this week. The rest of the show would do well to watch as well, on the Death of Conservatism, the State of Unions and a read of ‘Young Workers: a Lost Decade’.

September 18, 2009

A Bill Moyers essay on the protests in Washington, D.C. and whose funding opposition to health care reform.

Bill Moyers Essay Sept 18th

7 CIA Chiefs ask Obama to Cover up War Crimes, fear expanded investigation

Crossposted at Daily Kos

Dear Mr. President:

    We have served as Directors of Central Intelligence or Directors of the CIA for Presidents reaching back over 35 years. We respectfully urge you to exercise your authority to reverse Attorney General Holder’s August 24 decision to re-open the criminal investigation of CIA interrogations that took place following the attacks of September 11.

~snip~

    Attorney General Holder’s decision to re-open the criminal investigation creates an atmosphere of continuous jeopardy for those whose cases the Department of Justice had previously declined to prosecute. Moreover, there is no reason to expect that the re-opened criminal investigation will remain narrowly focused.

bold and italic added by diarist

     The last line is especially important in my opinion, as it proves Special Prosecutor John Durham and Attorney General Eric Holder may be taking this investigation all the way to the top, as they are required to do under the Constitution and International Law.

    Thankfully, long gone are the days when the CIA could lie with impunity and the DoJ was not independant, but a political tool of the Executive branch. I guess the CIA misses the good ole days of Bush/Cheney.

     Good thing those days are not coming back any time soon.  

    The letter was signed by former CIA directors Michael Hayden and Porter Goss, who worked for President George W. Bush; John Deutch and James Woolsey, who served during the Clinton administration; George Tenet, who worked for both President George W. Bush and President Clinton; William Webster, who served under President George H.W. Bush; and James Schlesinger, who headed the agency during the Nixon administration.

   CBSnews.com

     The only names of living CIA heads who have not signed are Ex President George H.W. Bush and current Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.

     I’d say that it’s safe to say that when Clinton and George W. Bush appointees oppose this investigation it can’t be considered a witch hunt. I’d also say that it is safe to say that when the head of the CIA under Nixon opposes something, you are doing the right thing.

     The full letter to the President plus analysis below the fold.

Docudharma Times Sunday September 20




Sunday’s Headlines:

Father, son arrested in terrorism investigation

Teachers find Obama not the friend they had expected

German election: east continues to feel left out 20 years after Berlin Wall fell

The people’s planet: On the road to Copenhagen

Opposition protest cut out of Iran TV’s football coverage

Yemen: The land with more guns than people

Investigation: Nuclear scandal – Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan

Briefing: Why Thai protesters are taking to the streets again

Cuba

Obama’s Worldwide Star Power Finds Limits

Skepticism Abroad Echoes Doubt at Home

By Michael D. Shear and Howard Schneider

Washington Post Staff Writers

Sunday, September 20, 2009


Eight months into his presidency, Barack Obama has become a global celebrity, far more popular abroad than he is at home and sometimes eclipsing foreign leaders among their own people.

He has sought to use his renown to repair America’s image in the world, extending an “open hand” in major speeches on trips to more than a dozen countries. Obama has restarted talks to limit nuclear weapons, begun engaging adversaries, helped orchestrate the world’s response to economic collapse and reversed Bush-era policies that had angered allies and distanced the United States from the world community.

Happy birthday Guinness! The Black Stuff at 250

The famous stout made its debut in 1759, and has left its mark in the worlds of advertising, the arts and the gossip columns. Andrew Johnson drinks it all in

Sunday, 20 September 2009

Arthur Guinness

God-fearing Arthur would be aghast at the drink- and drug-fuelled high-octane lifestyle of some of his descendants. The founder of the Guinness dynasty was keen on the Methodist teachings of John Wesley and started the first Sunday schools in Ireland.

The seeds of the Guinness brewery were sewn in 1752 when a young Arthur was left £100 by his godfather, the Archbishop of Cashel, Dr Arthur Price. Guinness’s father was a land steward on the Archbishop’s estate and helped brew beer for the workers. Arthur and his brother ploughed the cash into a brewery in Leixlip, County Kildare in 1756. Three years later, in 1759, a 34-year-old Arthur upped sticks and took a 9,000-year lease on a dilapidated brewery in St James’s Gate, Dublin, in order to try his hand at porter, a brew involving roasted barley that turned the drink black and so called after the porters who drank it.

This should scare the crap out of you

There’s really nothing I can say to comment on this.   You just have to read it.  

It happened in America: Katrina’s secret jail


When the storm hit, Zeitoun stayed, to protect his house, help friends and clients, and watch over properties he and Kathy owned: their office building and houses bought as investments. Kathy and their four children evacuated to Baton Rouge.

Zeitoun weathered the storm’s harrowing landfall, and ended up in a tent on his house’s roof. He dug a secondhand canoe out of the garage and began paddling around, seeing how he could help. He spent the first days aiding neighbors and strangers, saving the life of at least one person trapped in her house, and even feeding stranded dogs.

Then the standing feet of water became toxic with organic material and spilled pollutants, his meetings with people became more fraught and weird, he saw his first body and his first criminal entrepreneurs, and decided it was time to go. And that’s when the unnatural disaster happened.

On Tuesday, Sept. 6, 2005, armed and badged black-uniformed men and a tall woman in a power boat appeared at the door of one of his properties that he, his tenant, and two others were using as a meeting place because it still had a working phone. Zeitoun was in the middle of a call with his brother Ahmad, a ship captain, calling from Spain to repeat his pleas to Zeitoun to leave town.

With no questions asked and no questions allowed, Zeitoun and the others were handcuffed and shackled at automatic weapon-point, dropped into the boat, and taken away; the officers didn’t secure the house or treat it as a crime scene and left it unlocked, which meant it was eventually completely stripped and looted.

Zeitoun documents a little-known fact: the existence of “Camp Greyhound,” an outdoor jail built in New Orleans’ central bus station within hours of the hurricane’s landfall at the behest of the federal Department of Homeland Security and FEMA. Similar to Guantanamo Bay, Camp Greyhound (the guards’ name for it) was a kennel, runs of wire fencing and concrete flooring; there was nothing to sit or sleep on, and toilet facilities were portables outside the enclosures. Power was provided by a running diesel locomotive parked within yards of the cages, providing a continuous deafening hum and diesel pall.

Zeitoun was not formally charged, was not read Miranda rights, was not allowed a phone call. He was physically and verbally abused, pepper sprayed, strip-and body-cavity searched; and was accused of being a “terrorist” during his processing at the “camp.” The details of his captivity only become increasingly outrageous.

Fellow prisoners he was able to talk to included a New Orleans firefighter ordered to stay in the city to work who was arrested in his own yard, and a Houston sanitation worker whose company contracted to help in the cleanup effort – arrested wearing his work uniform, possessing ID, and with the keys to his garbage truck in his hand.

Prisoners included Marlene Maten, 73-year-old diabetic deaconess at Resurrection Mission Baptist Church, arrested as she carried a package of sausages from a cooler in her car, parked beside the hotel to which she was returning.

Marlene, along with Zeitoun and hundreds of others from Camp Greyhound, ended up at maximum security Elayn Hunt Correctional Center, in St. Gabriel, La., 70 miles from New Orleans. They were FEMA prisoners: FEMA rented state prison space and Camp Greyhound transfers were, according to prison staff, “FEMA’s problem.” Again: transferred with no charges, no information, no opportunity to make a phone call or talk to a lawyer.

Thanks to a volunteer prison missionary who agreed to call Kathy, she found out Zeitoun was alive. (His family had assumed him dead once contact was broken for weeks.) She immediately hired a lawyer, who found out there would finally be a hearing on Zeitoun’s “case.” However, when Kathy contacted the Hunt center to find out where the hearing would be held, she was told that location, and whether Zeitoun was even at the prison, was “private information.”

Released from Hunt on Sept. 29, 2005 – after paying a $75,000 bail – Zeitoun was lucky, compared with the three men he was arrested with. Todd, Nasser and Ronnie spent, respectively, five months, six months and eight months in maximum security Hunt prison. All charges against all of them were dropped.

Late Night Karaoke

Open Thread

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